Art Taylor's Blog, page 70

The First Two Pages: A Well-Timed Murder

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

I first met Tracee de Hahn at last year’s Malice Domestic, where we chatted briefly about her fine first novel, Swiss Vendetta. Since then, we’ve continued to be friends—catching up both in person from time to time and online (and if you aren’t already following Miss Demeanors, the group blog where Tracee contributes, you should be).

This week—today, in fact!—brings the release of Tracee’s second novel, A Well-Timed Murder, and I’m thrilled to welcome her here today to talk about the taut opening to this second outing for Detective Agnes Lüthi.

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay here to read off-line.

De Hahn

Reminder: Well Library Honors, Tuesday, February 6

On Tuesday, February 6, I’ll join two other George Mason University professors and writers for the latest Well Library Honors series, celebrating the research, scholarship, and creative works of Mason’s faculty, staff, and alumni. I’ll represent the “creative works” part of that list—reading from On the Road with Del & Louise: A Novel in Stories—and other honorees on Tuesday’s program are Beth Cabrera, author of Beyond Happy: Women, Work, and Well-Being, and Justin Gest, author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality.

The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 5 p.m. in the Mason Club on George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus. Light refreshments will be featured.

Thanks to Fall for for the Book and The Mason Club for sponsoring this event—and for including me on the program!

“A Necessary Ingredient” Named Agatha Award Finalist

My story “A Necessary Ingredient” has been named a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Short Story at this year’s Malice Domestic! The story originally appeared in the anthology Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea, edited by Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks and published by Down & Out Books. You can read the full story here for free.

I don’t usually write private eye stories, and this one is far from the traditional hard-boiled detective tale. But the narrator of “A Necessary Ingredient” is himself a reader of those stories, and much of the tale is a tip of the hat—excuse me, tip of the fedora—to classic crime fiction and to the joys of reading mystery. My very first published mystery story—”Murder on the Orient Express” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in December 1995—was also one that took its inspiration from classic crime fiction (Agatha Christie directly in that case, obviously) and that explored how our reading lives and our real lives can meld together. “A Necessary Ingredient” then comes a little full circle with some of the themes I find myself focused on—and the title itself has several meanings, one of which relates to those books we just can’t do without.

Congratulations to all of the other finalists for Best Short Story: Gretchen Archer, Barb Goffman, Debra Goldstein, and Gigi Pandian. And congrats too to all the finalists up and down this year’s slate of Agatha contenders—so many great writers, and so many friends among them. You can find the full list here.

Look forward to seeing everyone in Bethesda in April!

The First Two Pages: “The Chinese Dog Mystery” by James Lincoln Warren

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

Many years back, I was so impressed by one of James Lincoln Warren’s stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine that I tracked down his email and sent him a fan letter, to which he very graciously responded. In the years since, it’s been a great privilege of mine not only to enjoy more of Jim’s writing but also to get to know him as a person too—and not just via email but actually in person (and in all his sartorial splendor!) as well, with conversations and get-togethers with him and his wife Margaret at Bouchercon and Malice Domestic.

Jim was one of the founders of Criminal Brief, a wonderful group blog that celebrated the mystery short story (and that has since morphed into SleuthSayers, where I’m proud to now be part of the rotation myself), and his short stories and novellas have time and again shown him to be a master of the form—and a master in talking about the form. Here, he turns his analytical skills on his own work, discussing his story for the latest issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, “The Chinese Dog Mystery.”

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay here to read off-line.

Warren Chinese Dog

Well Library Reading, Tuesday, February 6

Three writers will be inducted into the Well Library at George Mason University on Tuesday, February 6—and I’m so pleased to be one of them! Also on the schedule for the event are Beth Cabrera, author of Beyond Happy: Women, Work, and Well-Being, and Justin Gest, author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality. Each author will give a brief reading and will formally have books entered into the Well Library.

The event begins at 5 p.m. in the Mason Club on George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus. Free and open to the public.

The First Two Pages: “China Mary” by Marilyn Todd

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

Marilyn Todd‘s historical mysteries include the Claudia series set in Ancient Rome and the Iliona series set in Ancient Greece, but she’s also a prolific writer of short stories that range even more widely through history and geography both and right up to the present day. Much of her short fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and the new issue of EQMM (January/February 2018) features her story “Killing Kevin.” For her “First Two Pages” essay here, Marilyn looks back at another EQMM favorite: “China Mary” from the magazine’s May/June 2017 issue—this one taking readers to the Old West.

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay here to read off-line.

Todd China Mary

Fiction Intensive: Broad Run High School

This past Friday, I had the great privilege of working with 30 students at Broad Run High School in Ashburn, VA—students interested in creative writing and taking a full day from their regular classes for a “Fiction Intensive” workshop. It was a fast, full day, covering a lot of territory with exercises on building characters, fleshing them out, and putting them on the page; on exploring character through setting; and on both shaping an overall plot and crafting the scenes that build that plot. Whew!

Along the way, students not only showed amazing imagination through their exercises—brainstorming in exciting directions!—but also produced some fine prose—nicely polished even before the major revision work that they’ll do over the next couple of weeks in advance of Part II of our workshop. That day—Friday, February 2—selected students will have the opportunity to read their work to an all-school assembly. Yikes! (I’ll be reading too, and I’m feeling as intimidated by it as they probably are.)

Special shout-out to several students who contributed the most to our discussions and shared some of their terrific early work here: Ainsley, Anna, Ben, Elena, Fletcher, Jess, Kyleigh, Milo, Naomi, Pete, Rachael, Shay, and so many more I wish I could list them all here. (And I hope I spelled these names right! I was running late leaving the workshop and left my copy of the class roster on the desk!)

Thanks too to Beth Konkoski, Barbara Musselman, Amy Buckley, Michele Evans, and the rest of the English Department for inviting me to participate and hosting me so graciously throughout the day. And thanks too to Dave Spage and Chad Runfola, Broad Run’s principal and assistant principal, for their support for this program. I met each of them too during my visit, and I’m so grateful for their hospitality and support.

Looking forward to reading some of the stories that come out of these sessions—such great talent throughout this group.

Go Spartans!

The First Two Pages: Hang Time by S.W. Lauden

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

S.W. Lauden‘s Greg Salem punk rock P.I. series includes three books: Bad Citizen Corporation, Grizzly Season, and the recently released Hang Time, the subject of his “First Two Pages” essay today. Steve has written short fiction for a number of magazines, online journals, and anthologies, and his novella Crosswise was a finalist last year for the Anthony Award for Best Novella (an award ultimately presented to “The Last Blue Glass” by B.K. Stevens, who founded this blog series). Steve is also the co-host, along with Eric Beetner, of the Writer Types podcast.

I count myself fortunate to have made many friends in the mystery community, and among friends, acquaintances, and even people I know less well personally, there are several whom I respect extraordinarily—both as writers and as people. Sometimes that respect is based on long exposure, on many encounters and interactions, but in some cases, even the smallest gesture has carried a lot of weight, and so it was with Steve Lauden. He’s a fine writer and a careful craftsman, able to speak eloquently about his own work, and he gives back to the mystery community in several ways. But he’s also simply good people, and it’s an honor to host him here today.

The first two pages of Steve’s new novel, Hang Time, depict a suicide—tense, emotional—and Steve handles both the scene and the essay about that scene with great thoughtfulness, as you’ll see.

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay here to read off-line.

Lauden Hang Time

WIROB: “I’m Your Biggest Fan”

As a preview of this Thursday’s Sisters in Crime panel at Alexandria, Virginia’s Beatley Library, I asked several friends from the local Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime to share their own stories of memorable (read: sometimes awkward) interactions with their fans—or in one case, as a fan herself with an author she admired. Here’s a preview of today’s column at the Washington Independent Review of Books:

Writers and readers meet in a common space — namely, the book or story or essay that the writer wrote and that the reader has chosen to read. But what happens when the meeting space shifts? When writers and readers come together not in that book, story, or essay, but more directly — face-to-face at a book launch or author signing? Or in a hotel lobby? Twice?

Read the entire column here—and thanks to Maya Corrigan, Sherry Harris, Alan Orloff, Aimee Hix, and Barb Goffman for their fun stories!

The First Two Pages: Beached by Micki Browning

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

I first met Micki Browning at last year’s Malice Domestic when she and I were paired up as part of a mentoring program sponsored by the Guppy Chapter of Sisters in Crime. It was Micki’s first time at Malice, so I was supposed to help welcome her, introduce her around, guide her to making the most of Malice—not sure how much I offered in those regards, but did try to play host every way I could, and it was a great pleasure getting to know Micki, spending some time with her. It was good too for her that she already had a couple of footholds on the schedule. She was being recognized as the Dorothy Cannell Scholarship recipient at the SinC breakfast and also took part in the New Author Breakfast, talking about her debut novel, Adrift, which won the 2015 Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence as well as the Royal Palm Literary Award. Check out more about Micki at her website.

For her “First Two Pages” essay here, Micki talks about opening to the second book in her Mer Cavallo mystery series: Beached, which releases this week. Congrats!

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay here to read off-line.

Browning- The First Two Pages