Wendy Webb's Blog

Small Business Saturday — Shop at your local indie bookstore!

Small Business Saturday is just around the corner. I love this nationwide effort to urge people to patronize their local businesses, and I hope everyone gets a jump on their holiday shopping by spending some money in their hometown stores.

On Saturday afternoon, I'm going to be working as a bookseller at one of my favorite independent bookstores, Valley Bookseller on Main Street in Stillwater, MN. Local authors Peter Geye, Thomas Maltman and Lori Evert will be joining me — it's going to be a fun day. Authors are volunteering at indie bookstores nationwide on Small Business Saturday as part of the Indies First campaign, designed to encourage people to patronize their local bookstores.

I'm happy to lend my time to this effort — it's important to support independent bookstores, especially now. It's not easy to keep these businesses open in the face of competition from sites like Amazon. We just lost a great bookstore in Wayzata, MN, The Bookcase, and three others have closed in the Twin Cities in recent weeks.

I get that people like to shop online, it's easy, it's oftentimes cheaper, but I'm asking all of my readers to close their laptops and head to their local bookstores on Saturday. And I'll tell you why.

There's just something about the experience of browsing through the shelves that you simply can't get online. The feel of the books, the images on their covers, the smell of the paper.

But it's the booksellers that really make the difference. Booksellers love what they do. They're highly knowledgable and love to recommend books and to introduce their customers to new authors. They'll put a book into your hands that you hadn't heard of before, and you'll love it.

You can't meet the authors of your favorite books at online sites, but you can meet them at your local bookstore.

Independent bookstores have been very good to me. They got behind me when my first book came out, and put it into their customers' hands. They introduced me to readers who had never heard of an author named Wendy Webb. They asked me to come to their stores. And they continue to support me, book after book. I'm enormously grateful, and I'm going to do all I can to support them right back.

So, please. On Small Business Saturday, swing into your local bookstore, meet some authors, and buy books.

A ghost story for Halloween

Hello again! I'm so sorry I haven't been posting for awhile, but I've been busy touring for The Vanishing and writing my next novel. I've got it off to my agent now, just now, actually, and so I thought I'd entertain you with one of the best ghost stories I've heard on my tour.

One of the peculiarities of my life these days is that people come up to me and tell me their ghost stories. Here's one. I'll post some more tomorrow.

This happened to a lady who came to see me in Superior, WI. She and her husband were newlyweds, and just as they got married, his dad was diagnosed with cancer. Terminal. So they spent the next year taking care of him until he was sick enough to go into a hospice, where, after a few months, he passed away.

Her husband wasn't taking this very well. It was very a stressful time and their new marriage was on the rocks. She wasn't sure they'd make it, and was contemplating a divorce.

Until one day.

They got a phone call. They saw, on the caller ID, that it was from the hospice room where his father had died. She thought it was a nurse at the facility, calling to see how they were doing. It wasn't.

She picked up the phone and heard her father-in-law's voice. "I need to speak to my son," he said.

Stunned, she handed the phone to her husband. He listened for a minute, went white as a sheet and then put down the phone, after saying: "Thanks, dad."

"What did he say?" the woman wanted to know.

"He said I need to get my head back in this marriage or I'll lose the best thing that has ever happened to me," her husband told her.

End of the story? He did. They were still together, some 20 years later, when she told me the story.

A Sale on Nook! $2.99!

I see that I've been totally remiss in writing on my blog since The Vanishing came out! It has been a whirlwind, friends, and absolutely wonderful whirlwind. I've been all over the country visiting bookstores and libraries, meeting readers and booksellers. I promise to post photos and tell you all about it very soon, when the dust settles. But for now, I wanted to let you know that the Nook version The Fate of Mercy Alban has been selected to be part of a special promo at Barnes and Noble — 500 Under $5. For a very limited time (until this weekend) they're offering Mercy for $2.99. It's a great deal! Here's a link:  http://tinyurl.com/petfsmd

Greetings from snowy Atlanta!

Well, the first leg of my Southern book tour certainly started with a bang. Steve and I arrived in Atlanta yesterday in the middle of the worst storm to hit this area in years! We had to cancel our two events here at Foxtale Book Shop and the Dekalb County Library. I was so disappointed but I hope they'll have me back in the spring. I promise not to bring Minnesota's snow and cold with me next time!

Launch day for The Vanishing!

It's finally here! It's launch day for The Vanishing! The weeks leading up to a book release are so nerve-wracking for authors. Will people like it? Will my loyal readers enjoy this new book as much as my previous books? Will it sell? (Gulp!)

But today, I'm putting all of those worries aside and celebrating. The book I worked so hard on — plotting and crafting and writing and re-writing — has finally hit the shelves!

It has been an exciting few days for me. Lots going on. There was a great review of The Vanishing in my home-town newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, on Sunday, and across the river, the St. Paul Pioneer Press ran a feature article on yours truly in today's paper. It makes me so proud to be featured in the two newspapers I grew up reading. I'm truly grateful for their support.

Also, I've got an essay in today's online USA Today! It's a fun piece about an encounter I had with a grumpy palm reader, and its amazing aftermath.

Tonight, I've got my Minneapolis launch party at my neighborhood bookstore, Magers & Quinn at 7 pm. We'll have wine, local microbrews and chocolate — what could be better? I'm also excited to bring my Malamute, Molly, to the party. She's featured in The Vanishing, so I thought it would be fun to bring her along. She's getting a pretty new harness for the occasion.

Tomorrow, I've got my St. Paul launch at Common Good bookstore at 7 pm. This is a joint event with my pal, Ellen Hart, whose new book is out now, too. We're calling it a Night of Minnesota Mystery and it should be a great time. It's always fun to do events with other authors. There's a certain dynamic that isn't there when you're in front of the podium alone.

After all of this, I'm headed up to Duluth for a private party for friends and family at Glensheen to celebrate the book's release, and then Steve and I pack up and head south for my book tour. I'm so excited for that, too! I'll be blogging while I'm away, posting photos and other fun things. So please come back for updates!

Right out of the pages of THE VANISHING

Hi everyone!

I thought you might appreciate this. My new book, THE VANISHING, being released in January, features, among other things, three Alaskan Malamutes and a blizzard. The dogs are my three real-life dogs, Tundra, Tika and Molly. Molly is the only one still with us. And the blizzard — well, I live in Minnesota near the area where I set the book, so blizzards are nothing new to us. We're getting walloped right now with at least two feet of heavy, wet snow. Here are a couple of shots of Molly enjoying it, right out of the pages of THE VANISHING. I hope nothing else in the book comes true...

Goodreads Giveaway

Hey all! I've got a Goodreads Giveaway going on right now until Halloween for The Vanishing! Get a copy before you can buy it in stores.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

Goodreads Giveaway of The Vanishing!

Hey gothic suspense fans!

We just started a giveaway on Goodreads for The Vanishing! Just click on the link to sign up to win a copy of my new book before you can buy it in stores.

The Vanishing, out January 21, is the story of Julia Bishop, who receives an intriguing job offer just as her life is falling apart. A man appears on her doorstep asking her to be a companion to his elderly mother, who just happens to be a famous novelist the whole world thinks is dead. Julia sees this as a chance for a fresh start and accepts the position. But when she gets to Havenwood, the novelist's remote estate in the Minnesota wilderness, she begins to wonder whether this too-good-to-be-true job offer is exactly that.

A Dark and Stormy Night: 10 Tips for Writing a Paranormal Mystery

I was recently asked to teach a class at a mystery writers’ conference at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. The topic? The art of writing a paranormal mystery. Since I write these types of tales for a living, I readily accepted, thinking: “Hey, how hard can it be to teach others how to do this?” Turns out, it was more difficult than I imagined. I had never before sat down and thought about how to write these books.
Were there hard and fast rules I followed when writing? Not likely. I’m lazier than that. Was there a formula for a succesful novel? If there were, we’d all be bestselling authors. What was I going to tell this room full of people who had paid money to glean knowledge from me?
I do this for a living, I told myself. I have to know something. So I sat down came up with my top 10 tips for writing a paranormal mystery.
1. Real world or new world?The first thing you need to decide is, how paranormal do you want it to be? You can create a real-world type of story, like my books, or like The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters http://www.sarahwaters.comor Seduction by M. J. Rose http://www.mjrose.comor The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe http://www.katherinehowe.com. By “real world,” I mean your characters live in the real world and simply might have a hint of eeriness swirling around. Your hero or heroine might be psychic. Or a witch. Or she might remember past lives. Or he might see ghosts. But all of the action takes place in our real, flawed world in which something eerie and strange might be lurking around any ordinary corner.
Or you can create an entirely new world. Great examples of this are the Harry Potter series or even the Twilight series. Those are worlds in which wizards go to special boarding schools and Death Eaters are real dangers, and teenaged vampires drive cars in bright daylight and hunky werewolves carry torches for sullen humans.
Either choice works for your narrative, but if you create a new world, you’ll have to do a lot of legwork before you start writing. You need to create the rules, the mythology, the laws, everything about this world, before you put one letter on the page. You need to know your new world just as well as you know your own before you start writing, because one slip up, one instance in which your characters are caught doing something inconsistent with the laws in your new world, and you’ll lose your readers. Imagine if Captain Kirk all of a sudden started casting spells on his crewmen.
2. Once you’ve created your world, make your readers want to live there. And then pull the rug out from under them.The books I love the best are the ones in which I want to live where the characters are living, or where I’m enticed to go where the characters are going. One of my favorite books is The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman http://www.carolgoodman.com/Content/The_Ghost_Orchid.asp, in which a group of artists and writers travel to an artists’ retreat in upstate New York. I’d love to go to a retreat like that! But no, no, no. As it turns out, I wouldn’t. If you make your readers want to live there, they’ll put themselves in the middle of the action and it will be all the more terrifying when things start to go wrong.
3. Even implausible situations must be plausible.If your reader is questioning something about a character’s behavior in any given scene — Wait, why would she go down into the cellar when she heard the scream instead of just calling the police? — it pulls them out of the narrative. You need to answer those questions before they occur to your reader. She fished her cell phone out of her purse and tried to turn it on. Dead. She was on her own.
4.The “dark and stormy night” cliché isn’t a cliché for nothing. Not being able to see two feet in front of you while you’re hearing strange moaning on the other side of the room is scary. Not being able to leave because it’s storming outside is scary. If it’s eerie in broad daylight, it’s going to be downright terrifying in the middle of a dark and stormy night.
5. Adapt The Hero’s Journey.The Hero’s Journey is a concept put forth by the great Joseph Cambell in The Power of Myth, in which he talks about a common narrative in myths from around the world. The hero lives an ordinary life. Something happens that causes an upheaval from this life. He receives a call to adventure, which he initially does not wish to accept. But then he does, and his adventure begins. One classic example of this is Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars movie. Or Harry Potter in the first of those books. I adapt this concept into something happening in the beginning of my books to cause my heroine to enter a new life. A parent dies. A strange letter arrives in the mail and turns the world upside down. A job offer materializes just as one’s life is in ruins. My heroines must accept these calls to adventure, and when they do, their stories begin. They’re the reason my characters can’t simply walk away from the strange things happening around them.
6. Create vulnerability or danger that the lead character doesn’t see for awhile, but the reader does.One of the most engrossing, addicting and frightening books I’ve read recently is The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian http://www.chrisbohjalian.com/the-night-strangers. In it, a family moves to a new house, and the reader knows that the daughters are targeted by an odd group of women in the town. Are these women witches? Maybe. Are the girls in danger? Yup. We as readers suspect it, but the lead character doesn’t. When done right, this type of situation will have readers screaming warnings to the narrator. Or maybe that was just me, reading this book. Either way, it will keep your readers turning the pages.
7. Give your readers breaks in the suspense. Unless you’re writing a thriller, it’s always good to break up the suspense and tension with humor or a little romance. It gives the reader a breather, brings down their guard, and it takes your narrative back to the real world. Think of the Weasley brothers in Harry Potter, or the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indiana Jones has been chased through the streets by a saber-wielding assassin, and after a dramatic display of swordplay, Indie simply takes out a gun a shoots him. We all had a good laugh, caught our breath, and dove into the narrative again.
8. You’ve got to believe.I write ghost stories and I travel extensively for readings to promote my books. During almost every reading I’ve had, someone asks me if I believe in ghosts. Yes, is the short answer. But even if you don’t believe in your paranormal phenomenon in the real world — I highly doubt Anne Rice really believes vampires are prowling around New Orleans… or maybe she does — you must believe they exist in the world you’re creating. It has to be absolutely real, plausible and undeniable to you while you’re writing it, or your readers are going to have doubts, too.
9. Was it just my imagination?What if, right now, you looked up from this article and saw a headless specter floating in the room before you? And then, just as quickly as that, it faded from view. What would you think? Would you immediately conclude that your house or office was haunted, you were in danger and it was time to gather up your things and leave? Or might you think it was just your imagination, brought on by reading about this topic? Or maybe it was just an undigested bit of beef, as Scrooge thought. Here in the real world, we like real-world, sensible explanations for things. We look to explain away eerie or strange happenings as completely normal. So, don’t make your characters jump to otherworldly conclusions too quickly.
10. To outline, or not to outline?Some writers swear by their outlines. I don’t. I don’t want to know exactly where my story it going, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I don’t trust myself. If I know the answer to the mystery too early, I’m afraid I’d be giving it away too easily. Also, if I’m surprised while writing it, I know the reader will be surprised, too. And if I can’t wait to see what’s waiting on the next page, I hope the reader will feel the same way.
If any of these tips resonate with you, start writing! And if they don’t, throw them away and make up your own. My opinions are just that, my opinions. The great thing about writing fiction, folks, is that we get to make this stuff up.

Where do authors get their inspiration?

Here's an essay about where I find mine:

An Author’s Inspiration: On The Fate of Mercy Albanby Wendy WebbApr 02, 2013 in Guest Posts, Writing I’m lucky enough to spend my days writing novels of gothic suspense in which family secrets and scandals bubble to the surface in big, old, haunted mansions. Ever since my first book hit the shelves a few years back, I’ll oftentimes find myself on panels with other authors at various book festivals and conferences, and one question we’re always asked is: “What inspired you to write your story?” Believe me, when you’re asking mystery, crime, thriller or suspense novelists this question, you’re going to get some strange, eerie and, let’s be honest, borderline psychotic answers. Mine included.
Erin Hart’s imagination shifts into high gear when she reads news stories about ancient bodies being pulled out of the peat bogs in Ireland, perfectly preserved. In her four novels, the most recent of which is The Book of Killowen , her lead character investigates these archaeological sites and usually unearths a present-day murder in the bargain. David Housewright revealed that, while attending a crowded music festival, he looked around at the sea of faces and began to marvel at how easy it might be to kill someone and simply slip away unnoticed… and thus began his novel Highway 61 , in which an unfortunate fellow wakes up next to a dead body after attending a similar music festival, and thinks he has made a clean getaway until the blackmail threats start arriving.
Now that I’ve got two novels on the shelves, one in the pipeline set for release in January 2014 and a fourth rattling around in my brain, I think it’s safe for me to say that I’m most inspired by place. I need to create the setting where my characters are going to do whatever it is that they do, and then the story flows from there.
My current novel, The Fate of Mercy Alban (2013, Hyperion), bubbled to the surface during a tour I took of Glensheen Mansion, a stately, old home on the shores of Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota. Once a private home and now a museum, Glensheen has its own haunted history — matriarch Elizabeth Congdon and her maid were murdered in the house by Elizabeth’s daughter and her husband, no less, and reportedly both of the slain ladies remain — but I wasn’t interested in writing their story. I wasn’t looking for story inspiration at all. I was just taking the tour.
It was a gorgeous summer day on Lake Superior, and after wandering from room to glorious room inside, I walked out onto the patio that spans the whole length of the house. I stood there gazing at the meticulously-manicured lawn that flows out to the lake, which was glittering in the summer sun.
I thought: “What a great place to host a party!” And I started imagining it — men in their summer suits, women in long, cotton dresses, servers in black circulating with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I could almost see the ghostly images of the revelers there in the yard, talking, laughing, listening to music wafting through the air.
And then, being the type of writer I am, I thought: “Ooo. What if somebody wound up dead at that party?”
I could clearly imagine that, too. A gunshot, a scream piercing the night air, the confusion that would follow — stunned onlookers, too traumatized to move, others running for the door, a police siren, faint at first and then growing louder. The anguished cry of grief as a love is lost forever.
I don’t know how long I stood there, caught up in the scene playing out in my own mind. The thought of it just wouldn’t let me go. And so began The Fate of Mercy Alban , a novel centered around a long-ago summer party at a stately old mansion much like Glensheen, where one of the party guests, a world-famous writer, winds up dead, and the daughter of the host and hostess disappears without a trace.
Now I’m looking for inspiration for my fourth novel. Know of any haunted mansions to tour?
Wendy Webb is the author of the Heartland Indie bestselling novel, The Fate of Mercy Alban (2013, Hyperion), and The Tale of Halcyon Crane, (2010, Holt), which won the Minnesota Book Award for genre fiction. Her newest book, The Vanishing, will be released in January, 2014. Visit her online at www.wendykwebb.com.
Tagged as: haunted house, inspiration, The Fate of Mercy Alban, The Tale of Halcyon Crane, Wendy Webb, writing

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