Gerrie Ferris Finger's Blog, page 12

THE GHOST SHIP - Blending history and fiction

A famous tall ship and an adventurous woman...what they could do for the world

     What if you could go back to 1921 and climb aboard a great five-masted schooner on her maiden voyage?
You'd be a witness to history; you'd be on her decks when her keel smashed into an Outer Banks shoal. You'd get to know the villains who caused the tragedy. Was it pirates, Russians, rumrunners? Or something else?
Would you dare?
Ann Gavrion did and her life was never the same.

THE HISTORY:
One cold, foggy morning in January, 1921, a five-masted schooner in full sail plowed into Diamond Shoal in the infamous Graveyard of the Atlantic. Known to history as The Ghost Ship, her officers and crew were not on board and their bodies never washed ashore. The only living thing on board was a six-toed cat. Also, her anchors and lifeboats were missing. Six agencies investigated the mystery, but it was never solved.

THE NOVEL:
Ninety years later, Ann Gavrion travels to Cape Hatteras to get over the loss of her fiancé in an airplane crash. She meets the enigmatic, yet charming, Lawrence Curator on the beach.
Behind her she hears the cries of villagers. "Shipwreck!"
A surfman runs up and shouts that the missing schooner, her sails set, is aground on the shoal. Ann recognizes the enormous ship from a photograph she'd seen the night before.
So begins her journey back to 1921 with the man the Navy sent to investigate the grounding of the great ship.
When Lawrence and Ann solve the mystery, Ann must return to her world. On the very beach where she'd begun her voyage with Lawrence, she meets his great-grandson, Rod. Exhausted, wet, she spills an account of her fabulous sea adventure. He calls her a charlatan and accuses her of using his famous ancestor to write a first person account of the tragedy for her magazine.
How many times, how many ways, must she prove that her voyage was real to Rod and the unbelievers of the world?

Available at: http://tiny.cc/9hrsy

Gerrie Ferris Finger
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com

THE GHOST SHIP hits the - uh - Kindle

...and the Nook.

Used to be we could brag that our books hit the shelves. Not so much any longer. Oh I still have a hard cover publisher, but I've come over to the (used to be) "dark" side of the publishing world. I'm a self-publisher. I've called my new company, Crystal Skull Publishing, and our first edition is THE GHOST SHIP, a paranormal seafaring suspense based on a real ghost ship: The Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals.

I look forward to sharing more with you about this venture.

Best,
Gerrie

http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com
http://tiny.cc/aj8jt

DEBUT MYSTERY BY MARILYN LEVINSON

A MURDERER AMONG USWingsepress.com
[image error] Marilyn Levinson is a former Spanish teacher, and the author of several books for children, and young adults. RUFUS, and MAGIC RUN AMOK was selected by the International Reading Association, and the Children's Book Council for "Children's Choices for 2002." NO BOYS ALLOWED has been in print since 1993.
A MURDERER AMONG US is her first published adult mystery. MURDER A LA CHRISTIE was a finalist in the 2010 Malice Domestic contest. She is a member of The Authors Guild, RWA, The Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the Guppies, and is president, and co-founder the Long Island chapter of Sisters in Crime. She lives on Long Island with her husband, Bernie and their cat, Sammy.

Welcome Marilyn. Tell us about the book and how you promote it.
My mystery, A MURDERER AMONG US, made its debut on June first, and I've never been busier!  Years ago, when I wrote YAs and books for kids, I spoke in schools and libraries.  Even did the occasional book store signing.  But an author's life these days is something else entirely.
[image error] Keeping an updated website is essential.  So is blogging, commenting on fellow writers' blogs, tweeting on Twitter, and "liking" on Facebook.  I've learned to design a business card, I've struggled to create a bookmark, attend conferences and conventions, and do all I can to get my book in the public eye.  This is especially important because A MURDERER AMONG US is an ebook and available in print as a POD.
A bit about my novel:  Lydia Krause has moved to Twin Lakes, an upscale retirement community on Long Island, to start a new life.  Her neighbor introduces her to Marshall Weill, the community's financial advisor, whom Lydia recognizes as the convicted embezzler who drove her sister to suicide.  She exchanges heated words with Weill's wife. The woman's found dead the following morning, mowed down by Lydia's Lexus.  Now Suspect Number One, Lydia investigates.  Amid threats and more deaths, Lydia forges new friendships, helps resolve her grown daughters' problems, and finds romance.

A MURDERER AMONG US is available at Wingsepress.com.  Click on: http://bit.ly/kOZgcz It will soon be available on Amazon.com, Kindle, and Fictionwise.com
Thank you Marilyn for an informative look at your work. Sounds quite exciting.
Gerrie
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com/THE GHOST SHIP, June 28, 2011

FINDING TIME TO WRITE

       With the demands on a published author - and for that matter an unpublished writer looking to get published - to brand and promote oneself, the serious question arises: when do I have time to write?

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I can't begin to name all the social and professional networks I belong to that give me a web presence, including writing blogs like this one, but I will list a few. Twitter and Facebook, of course, KindleBoards, Goodreads, Shelfari, LinkedIn, Red Room, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America; then there are the listservs like DorothyL. I've been on and off DL for ten years. Like me, book people come and go.


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I don't know how many readers I've acquired through the listservs and groups like Murder Must Advertise, but I get a lot of good information and I conduct free book drawings from time to time.  It's a way to stay connected with the reading and writing community, not just for sales but to interact with friends I've met online and in person.

So, when do I write?

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On weekday afternoons unless on a tight deadline. There are so many things to take care of in the morning - housewifey stuff, returning put-off calls from yesterday, reading and answering emails - that I've designated morning as taking-care-of-business time.

At one o'clock (if I'm not playing golf), I write until five with necessary breaks - for me and Bogey, the demanding standard poodle who adorns my book covers.


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 Unless for research, I don't crawl the net or answer the telephone. I research, edit, write. Period.

About golf. I play on Saturday and Sunday - again, unless on a tight deadline. One day during the week, I play and usually I'm finished and back at my desk by one-thirty. Two at the latest. Then I extend my work day until six o'clock.

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Writing is a demanding master (aka self-flagellation), but publication is vindication for the blood and toil. Then I have to address an even more demanding master: promotion.

Gerrie Ferris Finger
THE END GAME
THE LAST TEMPTATION released 2012
THE GHOST SHIP  released 2011
HONORED DAUGHTERS
WHEN SERPENTS DIE
WAGON DOGS
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com/
http://www.crimewritersblog.blogspot.com/


COMING JUNE 2011

INVISIBLE PATH - A Carl Brookins Review

Invisible Path
By Marilyn Meredith
ISBN: 978-1-60659-239-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60659-238-0
2010 Release from
Mundania Press. 224 pages


This charming story from a veteran author is the ninth in her series of Tempe Crabtree crime novels. Tempe is a deputy sheriff in the small town of Bear Creek near an Indian reservation in the mountains of central California.

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A young man named Daniel Tofoya is sadly murdered and it develops that while he was a talented and often charming athlete, he could be a nasty bully if the mood took him. There are several possible perpetrators, but as often happens, most attention focuses on a stranger who has come to live on the reservation. The story is complicated by the appearance in town of a small separatist movement, stockpiling supplies in anticipation of a coming explosion of what could be racial and class warfare.


All of this gets sorted out by the patient and wise Deputy Crabtree. With help from her long-suffering pastor husband and exuberant son, Tempe is able to avert several disasters and calm some difficult situations.


The novel is in the classic traditional mystery mode with a lot of emphasis on character development and setting. Relations between members of different races and religious beliefs are very well handled with insight and care. This is another enjoyable and satisfying adventure with Deputy Tempe Crabtree.
--


Carl Brookins
www.carlbrookins.com
http://agora2.blogspot.com
Case of the Great Train Robbery, Reunion, Red Sky

TOP TWENTY WELL-READ CITIES

Is it any wonder that Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Harvard University calls home, topped Amazon.com's recent listing of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America?

I lived in Cambridge eons ago. Residents walked along streets reading books, book stores - be they large retail outlets or mom and pop resellits - on nearly every block, citizens in the parks reading magazines or best sellers, riders of MBTA missing their stops while engrossed in Follett or Oates. Add the Kindle and residents are now ordering more books, magazines and newspapers in print and Kindle formats. The survey began Jan. 1, 2011 and was based on cities with more than 100,000 residents. Cambridge residents also ordered the highest number of nonfiction books.

The Amazon.com top 20 list:

1. Cambridge, Massachusetts
2. Alexandria, Virginia
3. Berkeley, California
4. Ann Arbor, Michigan
5. Boulder, Colorado
6. Miami, Florida
7. Salt Lake City, Utah
8. Gainesville, Florida
9. Seattle, Washington
10. Arlington, Virginia
11. Knoxville, Tennessee
12. Orlando, Florida
13. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
14. Washington, D.C.
15. Bellevue, Washington
16. Columbia, South Carolina
17. St. Louis, Missouri
18. Cincinnati, Ohio
19. Portland, Oregon
20. Atlanta, Georgia

Happy to see Atlanta, my adopted home of many decades ago, sneak onto the list. St. Louis, my birth place, came in 17.
Echoing results from Sisters in Crime's recent Mystery Book Buyer Study, nearly half of the cities on the Amazon.com list are located below the Mason-Dixon line.

The Washington, D.C. area includes three of the top 20 cities – Alexandria, Va. (#2), Arlington, Va. (#10) and Washington itself (#14). Alexandria residents also topped the list of buyers of children's books.

The sunshine state, Florida, has three cities in the top 20 – Miami (#6), Gainesville (#8) and Orlando (#12).

"We hope book lovers across the country enjoy this fun look at where the most voracious readers reside," said Mari Malcolm, managing editor of Books at Amazon.com.

Submitted by
Gerrie Ferris Finger
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com/

SOON TO BE RELEASED: THE GHOST SHIP

PLATFORM SCHMATFORM

What's all this talk about platform?

I'm confused. It used to be a platform was something a non-fiction writer needed to sell a book. Think of it as an expertise. Think Dr. Spock. A pediatrician writing about raising children.   

But the last few years platform has come to mean a lot more. Not only must you be an expert on your subject, you must bring along an audience to buy the book on your expertise. You must, in other words, have guaranteed publicity. Which is why celebrities of every ilk write books. Have you become infamous, involved in a sex scandal, now everyone knows your name? Write a book, go on TV, sell a million copies. 

A few years ago, novelists didn't worry about platform. Your editor bought your book, arranged book signings, provided a little upfront money so you could hit the streets and help sell your book.

Not true today. You must have a platform to get your fiction published and that platform must be in place before a lot of editors look at your book. You must have a website, blog, do workshops, book clubs, Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads, LinkedIn, every list you can think of, pester librarians and book store owners - every avenue that leads to sales. If you're young and cute, so much the better. Write a (fictional) memoir ala James Frey and his million little pieces and touch the public's heart strings. Voila! There's your platform.

Editors say they want great writing, and they do. The marketing department wants great sales. Where the twain meet is your platform. The bigger it is, the more buyers it will entice. Buyers equal audience. Audience equals publicity. Publicity equals sales.  

I must go lie down. Standing on this platform is exhausting.

Cheers,

Gerrie Ferris Finger
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com/

WHAT'S YOUR CHARACTER'S CHARACTER?

I'm happy to welcome Mark Terry. Mark is a full-time freelance writer, editor and novelist. He is the author of numerous novels including the bestselling DANCING IN THE DARK, THE FALLEN, THE  DEVIL'S PITCHFORK, THE SERPENT'S KISS and others. He lives in Michigan with his wife, two sons, dog named Frodo, and a bunch of  guitars mostly named after Greek gods: Athena, Poseidon, Ares, and Larry. His favorite guitar's name is Layla. His latest novel to feature Homeland Security troubleshooter Dr. Derek Stillwater, is THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS. When not writing, Mark runs, bikes, lifts weights and teaches Sanchin-Ryu karate, where he is training a Midget Ninja Army with plans for world domination. Of his writing The Lansing State Journal said, "Terry writes like Lee Child on steroids."
  http://www.markterrybooks.com/
By Mark Terry


I've been thinking a lot about characters -what makes them memorable, what doesn't. I honestly don't have an answer about why one character will stay in your mind and others don't. I'm also not 100% sure why some readers – often critics – will complain about a lack of character development when readers rave about how much they like the character.

My oldest son, Ian, who is 17, sometimes seems to have a better grip on the theory of characterization, maybe because he's still taking high school language arts courses. He'll babble on about an anti-hero and I confess to being someone fuzzy on the definition. So I looked it up. Wikipedia says, "an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis."
I find that so broad, practically speaking, as to be useless.
For those few of you who watched Stargate Universe (SGU), Dr. Nicholas Rush, played by Robert Carlyle, has been described as an antihero. Which is interesting and sort of helps me understand the concept, but during one of the episodes the military leader of the ship, Colonel Everett Young, kicked the crap out of Rush and stranded him on a planet, presumably to die. As a viewer of the show, I knew he wouldn't stay down, but I did imagine that if I had been Colonel Young I would have jettisoned Rush out of an airlock or shot him in the head long before Young did. He might have been a genius and the person on board the ship who knew the most about the ship and spoke the language of the Ancients best, but I viewed him as a liability we probably would have muddled along without.

And he was fascinating. Arrogant, brilliant, complicated, rude – a total prick, actually – selfish, self-centered, wandering off on his own agenda, seemingly putting the human beings' survival onboard the ship completely secondary to his own intellectual interests.
[image error]
Wandering away from SGU, I think any character we think of as "memorable" probably has to be flawed. Maybe a LOT flawed. In my own thriller series featuring Homeland Security troubleshooter Derek Stillwater, I understand that on the basis of society's standards, Derek is kind of a menace – a little bit of a vigilante, he doesn't follow the chain of command, he often breaks the law to accomplish his ends… hell, in The Devil's Pitchfork he tortured a woman to death (accidentally) to get information he needed. That's not heroic or noble behavior, and prior to writing that scene I had a huge argument with myself. And my conclusion was that in that situation that's what Derek would do. Not happily, but extremely reluctantly, with terrible consequences (that come back to haunt him in subsequent books).

That sort of thing's a balancing act for the writer. And my way of dealing with Derek's flaws is not to think of them as flaws or even character traits. I just figure out what Derek stands for, what it is his goals and reason for being is, and then put him in situations that test those goals. The character's there, now let's see how he reacts.

Put it another way, borrowing from the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, Captain Jack Sparrow, rather tired of Will Turner's complaints and criticisms, puts him out on the yardarm (I guess, maybe it's the boom) and says, "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can't."

And as the writer of your flawed character – perhaps very, very flawed character – you need to decide what you can or cannot accept.


Thoughts?

Cheers,
Mark

WHAT'S YOUR CHARACTER'S CHARACTER?

I'm happy to welcome Mark Terry. Mark is a full-time freelance writer, editor and novelist. He is the author of numerous novels including the bestselling DANCING IN THE DARK, THE FALLEN, THE  DEVIL'S PITCHFORK, THE SERPENT'S KISS and others. He lives in Michigan with his wife, two sons, dog named Frodo, and a bunch of  guitars mostly named after Greek gods: Athena, Poseidon, Ares, and Larry. His favorite guitar's name is Layla. His latest novel to feature Homeland Security troubleshooter Dr. Derek Stillwater, is THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS. When not writing, Mark runs, bikes, lifts weights and teaches Sanchin-Ryu karate, where he is training a Midget Ninja Army with plans for world domination. Of his writing The Lansing State Journal said, "Terry writes like Lee Child on steroids."
  http://www.markterrybooks.com/
By Mark Terry


I've been thinking a lot about characters -what makes them memorable, what doesn't. I honestly don't have an answer about why one character will stay in your mind and others don't. I'm also not 100% sure why some readers – often critics – will complain about a lack of character development when readers rave about how much they like the character.

My oldest son, Ian, who is 17, sometimes seems to have a better grip on the theory of characterization, maybe because he's still taking high school language arts courses. He'll babble on about an anti-hero and I confess to being someone fuzzy on the definition. So I looked it up. Wikipedia says, "an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis."
I find that so broad, practically speaking, as to be useless.
For those few of you who watched Stargate Universe (SGU), Dr. Nicholas Rush, played by Robert Carlyle, has been described as an antihero. Which is interesting and sort of helps me understand the concept, but during one of the episodes the military leader of the ship, Colonel Everett Young, kicked the crap out of Rush and stranded him on a planet, presumably to die. As a viewer of the show, I knew he wouldn't stay down, but I did imagine that if I had been Colonel Young I would have jettisoned Rush out of an airlock or shot him in the head long before Young did. He might have been a genius and the person on board the ship who knew the most about the ship and spoke the language of the Ancients best, but I viewed him as a liability we probably would have muddled along without.

And he was fascinating. Arrogant, brilliant, complicated, rude – a total prick, actually – selfish, self-centered, wandering off on his own agenda, seemingly putting the human beings' survival onboard the ship completely secondary to his own intellectual interests.
[image error]
Wandering away from SGU, I think any character we think of as "memorable" probably has to be flawed. Maybe a LOT flawed. In my own thriller series featuring Homeland Security troubleshooter Derek Stillwater, I understand that on the basis of society's standards, Derek is kind of a menace – a little bit of a vigilante, he doesn't follow the chain of command, he often breaks the law to accomplish his ends… hell, in The Devil's Pitchfork he tortured a woman to death (accidentally) to get information he needed. That's not heroic or noble behavior, and prior to writing that scene I had a huge argument with myself. And my conclusion was that in that situation that's what Derek would do. Not happily, but extremely reluctantly, with terrible consequences (that come back to haunt him in subsequent books).

That sort of thing's a balancing act for the writer. And my way of dealing with Derek's flaws is not to think of them as flaws or even character traits. I just figure out what Derek stands for, what it is his goals and reason for being is, and then put him in situations that test those goals. The character's there, now let's see how he reacts.

Put it another way, borrowing from the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, Captain Jack Sparrow, rather tired of Will Turner's complaints and criticisms, puts him out on the yardarm (I guess, maybe it's the boom) and says, "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can't."

And as the writer of your flawed character – perhaps very, very flawed character – you need to decide what you can or cannot accept.


Thoughts?

Cheers,
Mark

Gerrie Ferris Finger | WritersCafe.org

Gerrie Ferris Finger WritersCafe.org