Lise McClendon's Blog, page 10

Life, Death, & Crime Fiction

When we write about life and death, as we do as crime writers, it’s often with a cavalier sort of attitude. It’s fiction. It doesn’t mean we hate people, want them dead, think like psychopaths, or even think that much about homicide. In some way it’s a trick we play on ourselves and our readers. For the most part it works, it’s accepted. But every so often death touches of each of us. As writers, if we are sensitive to these feelings, it gives us pause.

Sometimes these moments jar us from afar. That’s what happened to me after the events of September 11, 2001. I had just taken my youngest son to college and, I’m not ashamed to say, had shed more than a few tears onboard the plane home. Then I went to the Montana Festival of the Book. I had a recipe in the Montana Humanities cookbook, Eat%20Our Words: ..Montana Writers' Cookbook" target="_blank">Eat Our Words, a brownie recipe with a secret ingredient that the Festival folks had whipped up for the writers reception. A group of French writers came to Missoula, making the fest even more fun. I went home on Sunday. Tuesday morning, everything changed.

The days and weeks after the tragedies of September 11th put my writing on hold. I couldn’t pretend that murder, violent death, was “funny” or “cute” or merely curious. It all seemed too significant, too tragic for my words. Definitely too tragic to make mock of, to whip into a silly little fiction.

In our own lives death comes to us all. While sad and painful, it doesn’t have to be sudden, violent, or awful. Not only do we face our own ends but we all have family members, friends, and acquaintances who die. It reminds us that life is short and precious. Death is part of life. It makes us human, this knowledge. Maybe that’s why as crime and mystery writers we are fascinated with it, with the finite nature of living, the crazy, dazzling moments when we feel so alive.

This is the gift of mystery fiction, an ability to give us a glimpse of the inevitable, to come to terms with the limitations of our existence, to help us understand that we will not always be here. That we should get it together now, love the people we love, do the things we want to achieve, because life ends at some point.

I often say that I like crime fiction because of its dramatic qualities, those intense moments that make us see what a person is really like, in fiction or real life. Have you ever been disappointed by the way a person acted when push came to shove, or been surprised and pleased when they stepped up and did whatever hard deeds were necessary? I have, and if you haven’t, you will, sooner than you hope. There are moments in life where you suddenly understand what people are made of. Sometimes it cheers you, warms you. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Mystery fiction doesn’t need to be hyper-realistic to give us insight into our own lives. There are so many kinds of mysteries: comic, romantic, thrillers, the puzzle, the cozy. But the story should provide some genuine emotion about life, what it means to be human, and what it means to lose someone you love forever.

Because crime fiction is about life. And its exact opposite: death. And how we, as humans, deal with it all.

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Looking for a writing conference? Come to Bozeman on June 6 for the Get Published Conference with featured speakers Leslie Budewitz, Barbara Daniels, Kat Martin, and more. I’ll be talking about small press and self-publishing. See you there.

Tagged: crime fiction, death, Get Published, life, mystery, Mystery fiction, mystery readers, mystery writers, mystery writing, writing

Fiction as a Mirror

As crime writers we often get our ideas from the news. Remember newspapers? You still read them, I hope. Where else can you find in-depth stories about the world, where you live locally or the wide world beyond your circle? Sometimes as a writer you don’t know where your ideas come from exactly, they just pop out of the ether or the news cycle, and percolate in your mind.

That was the way it worked for me when I wrote a book about heroin, sex trafficking, and TV news. I majored in broadcast news in college and although I didn’t work in the field I am an avid observer — not that difficult in this day of 24-hour news. Although sex workers and drugs may seem like dark subjects, and they are, I made the center of my story a funny, struggling young woman, very much a career girl of today.  I wanted to write about an ethical but hapless television reporter whose ambition to get away from her ex-husband, now her boss, leads her into trouble. That novel, Jump Cut, reference to a ‘jumpy’ editing transition, was published in 2011.

As writers we often are immersed in our subject but then we write the book and go on our merry way, writing on some other topic. So when this story about the new heroin problem in the US popped up on the New York Times I stopped. And read it. All the way to the end.

“So we are at a strange new place. We enjoy blissfully low crime rates, yet every year the drug-overdose toll grows. People from the most privileged groups in one of the wealthiest countries in the world have been getting hooked and dying in almost epidemic numbers from substances meant to numb pain. Street crime is no longer the clearest barometer of our drug problem; corpses are.”

Read the NY Times piece here.

The article is about the dramatic increase in suburban heroin addiction in the least likely places, and the new distribution strategies Mexican growers are using, without the big cartels. In Jump Cut three prostitutes overdose on tainted Mexican heroin in Seattle. They are Russian-speaking women (how they arrived in the U.S. is part of the story.) Unlike the Times story they aren’t suburban teenagers who are replacing their Oxy addiction with cheaper heroin, but they are addicts. Their story is the catalyst for Jump Cut. Reporter Mimi Raynard has her own journey first, bungling their news story, looking for a new job, ultimately on her own except for the help of narcotics detective Shad Mulgrew. They both have to redeem themselves and solve this triple homicide.

The events in this Seattle story are fictional. But heroin addiction and human trafficking are still problems in this country and around the world. For research I didn’t, as one fellow writer suggested, try heroin. I did a ride-along with the Seattle narcotics detectives — great guys in a brutal business. I interviewed them and watched them do a take-down of a drug buy at a suburban shopping mall parking lot. By the time I wrote this novel heroin had ceased to be a huge epidemic in Seattle. But it didn’t just stop being a problem. It moved somewhere else, with new victims, new dealers, new addicts.

But there is hope. We could learn a lot from Portsmouth, Ohio.

Some places have gained ground on the epidemic. Portsmouth, Ohio, was among the first to see a generation addicted, and pill mills — pain clinics where doctors prescribed pills for cash and without a proper diagnosis — were virtually invented there. Portsmouth, like a junkie who has hit rock bottom, has found within it a spirit of self-reliance that has helped kindle a culture of recovery. The town shuttered the pill mills. Narcotics Anonymous meetings are now everywhere; recovering addicts are studying to be counselors. And after years of watching jobs go abroad, in 2009 townspeople stepped in to save one of Portsmouth’s last factories — a shoelace manufacturer, which now exports shoelaces to China, Mexico and Taiwan.

Like Portsmouth, we need to take accountability for our own wellness. There is a time and a place for pain pills, of course. But we need to question the drugs marketed to us, depend less on pills as solutions and stop demanding that doctors magically fix us.

It will then matter less what new product a drug company — or the drug underworld — devises.

Read more about Jump Cut here. Download a free sample on Amazon.

Tagged: broadcast news, creative writing, crime fiction, crime writing, ebook, heroin addiction, kindle, mystery, Mystery fiction, mystery writing, novels, reporters, Romance, Seattle, television news, thriller, writing

Who’s been a Bad Boy? by Lise McClendon

Lise McClendon:

Talking about the new box set I’m part of over at Book Browsing! Check out British Bad Boys — just 99 cents right now. You get six stories, some short, some long, including my thriller PLAN X. Happy spring!

Originally posted on bookbrowsing:

There are many ways to skin a cat – and promote your writing. One popular way is to create a limited edition box set and price it so low that you’re almost giving it away. The point is to get it into digital readers, not to make money. You can box up your own novels, by series or whatever theme you can conjure up, but joining with other authors can really ease the promotion burden. The idea is that cross-pollination of readers will grow all gardens. You bloom, I bloom, we all bloom with a bigger readership.

A few months ago I was asked to join five other authors to put together a box set. My invitation came through an English writer I knew mostly through social media. I had read her book, written about it, became Facebook friends, corresponded, and even met her last year at Bouchercon, the big…

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Not a joke! Free!

My newest box set has been loosed upon the world and it’s free right now!

It’s no joke! The Swing Town Mysteries include two complete novels featuring the Kansas City girl detective that Sue Grafton called “a humdinger of a private eye.” Plus a short story set just after the US joins World War II, on a train in a snowstorm. If you’ve read ‘Snow Train’ because you’re a subscriber to my newsletter now’s your chance to see what led up to December 1941. While war is breaking out in Europe, while the Germans hammer London during the blitz, while the French learn to live with Nazi occupation — the US homefront is gearing up for war. Dorie Lennox wants to fly an airplane; she grew up in Atchison, Kansas, home of Amelia Earhart. But she’s a newly-minted private detective instead, on her first tail in ‘One O’clock Jump.’ The Pendergast political machine that ran Kansas City has been broken but corruption is still behind every powerful figure. Can Dorie keep herself honest among all the trials that 1939 has to offer her?

In ‘Sweet and Lowdown’ it’s 1940 and Dorie’s partner Amos Haddam is worried about his mother. She’s in London, living in a tube station, helping the war effort and dodging the blitz. In Kansas City Dorie and Amos are hired to watch the wild daughter of a rich socialite. Much like Raymond Chandler’s ‘Big Sleep’ the girl puts them through their paces as they try to keep her safe. Publishers Weekly said about ‘Sweet and Lowdown': Masterfully evokes the period. This is a book to be savored; read it too fast and you might miss something.                                            

Available on Amazon through Wednesday only.

Tagged: amazon, Dorie Lennox, ebook, free, giveaway, historical, kindle, kindle free, mystery, private detective, private eye, Sue Grafton

Have you entered?

There’s still time to enter the Luck of the Irish giveaway, sponsored by a raft of fascinating authors and bloggers, and organized by I Am A Reader. Check it out, and good luck!

Click here: a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tagged: authors, book blogger, cash, free, giveaway, Readers, reading

A Word from Jackson Hole

It’s still winter for a few more weeks but soon it will writer’s conference season. I will be in Jackson Hole again for the writer’s conference, this year the dates are June 25 to 27. For more info on the conference and to read about the great writers who will be critiquing manuscripts — like Tobias Wolff and Nina McConigley — hop over to the website.

The day before the conference starts (Wednesday, June 24) Debby Atkinson and I get in a huddle with twelve to fifteen writers who are working on their novels. One thing that’s difficult at writers conferences is getting an overall view of your long fiction. It takes too long for someone to read it and you aren’t sure where to start with discussing problems. So Debby and I hold hands, answer questions, and help you delve below the surface to fix structural and thematic issues, as well as character and plot. The workshop is called Passion To Plot: How To Mine The Gold In Your Novel. (We renamed it this year and we’ll be doing some new exercises but it’s similar to past years’ workshops, all day, 9 to 3, lunch included. Love to see you again!)

You can attend the workshop as a stand alone, or add it to your weekend conference. Debby and I are dedicated to helping you find your best novel, however hard it seems. Attendees have often helped and encouraged each other, and continue to connect long after the workshop. We’ll figure it out together. Join us! Click here for more info.

Tagged: Deborah Turrell Atkinson, jackson hole, Lise McClendon, novel workshop, novel writing, novelists, summer workshop, writers, writers conference, writers workshop, writing mountains, writing Tetons

Writer as Sparrow

How is your writing going? I ask because I’ve been struggling with finding enough time and focus recently. I have no excuses. My life isn’t any busier than yours, I’m sure. I have no children at home, no soccer games to attend. It’s winter and the weather is frightful. I’m stuck inside with my laptop.  My brand new laptop! Look at the new widgets! Ooh, look at that…!

Where were we? Ah, my lack of focus. It’s tax season, that’s a distraction. And it’s true that I’m remodeling a bathroom, but not personally. I have to deal with a parade of carpenters, plumbers, and electricians, and yes, there’s always some new wrinkle like after the water got turned back on every faucet on the lower level seized up and will have to be replaced.

But that’s no excuse. I have hours on my own that I could be using to concentrate on a new novel. Instead I’m dithering around the internet, looking at photos of my new granddaughter who’s too far away, drafting silly tweets, and yelling at my email newsletter provider (who couldn’t care less.)

I have started something new. It’s one of those ideas that come to me out of the blue — that should scare me off. But somehow it just makes sense. It’s not a mystery or thriller. It’s not in one of my series. It’s nuts really and I’m not working on it all that much. But here’s the thing. About two weeks ago I woke up from a vivid dream one morning. The whole plot was there, in my head. I got up and wrote down everything I could remember. It didn’t look as exciting on the computer screen as it did as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and feeling the surge of my subconscious. But I loved it and I never turn my back on my subconscious.

Now I don’t believe you can just dream up your novel and dictate it to yourself. Like this:

That’s just crazy talk. Writing a long story, a novel, despite having an initial idea that drops out of the sky into your dreams, is work. It will take months just to figure out what the story is about, how to deal with those themes, how to narrate it and illustrate it with words. That’s the fun though, once you reach a sweet spot where things come alive — I’m just not there yet. And my mind is unfocused, a flighty thing, a sparrow looking for seeds, here, there, in the story and up in the tree tops.

This is why we write. To get away from the mundane, the plumbers, the weather, the tax prep, the laundry. To enter that altered state where lives make sense, where the dull stuff is edited out and all is sparkling and witty and exciting, where there is a purpose and a goal and and a satisfying end-game. To merge into the world of the story and wear it like a furry coat that saves you from freezing, insulates you from harm, and keeps you cozy and focused and in just the right place until your work is done.

I’ll be there soon. I hope.

Tagged: focus, inner music, Jules Renard, Truman Capote, writing, writing process

Slam Adams’ Top 50 Movies of 2014 (Part 2)

Lise McClendon:

Reblogging this here so I can track down some of these intriguing movies during the year. Did you see something that never made it to the Oscars but should have?

Originally posted on Funk's House of Geekery:

Out of 154 total movies seen. The movies had to be released in the US (because that’s where I am) between January 1st and December 31st, in theaters or on VOD.

Part 1

30. Run and Jump

The Irish Casey family’s world is turned upside down when their patriarch, Connor, suffers a stroke dynamically changing his personality. An American doctor is given permission to live with them documenting Connor’s progression and the effects it is having on the family. Will Forte plays the doctor, and Connor MacLiam plays the father suffering from a stroke. Both give outstanding nuanced performances, but both also have the screen completely stolen from them by Maxine Pearke as Connor’s wife, Vanetia, trying to keep the family from falling apart. It paints comedy and tragedy as very strange bedfellows with Pearke overflowing with joyous energy no matter what feelings she is actually having in the moment.

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Do Men & Women Read Alike?

Last week I read two books, one by a man and one by a woman. Both were great books but very different. Not only were they written by different genders they appeared to be written for different readers. Do men and women read alike? Do they read for different reasons?

Here are my reviews of the two books. Then we’ll discuss.

Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies is set on the coast in Australia and at first glance is a comedic chick lit novel in the Bridget Jones vein. Her main characters are mostly married women with children, and the story centers on an elementary school charity event and the parents whose children attend the school. But there is so much more to this novel. It explores the various ways women live their lives, their choices in men, the way they raise their children. The undercurrent here is domestic abuse and rape which elevates this novel into a serious story examining the ways we hurt each other. Moriarty weaves all this together with the story of a death, a possible murder and its cover-up, through the use of many voices, police reports, and family events. Brilliantly done, funny, moving, and real.

C.J. Box’s Blue Heaven is set in the panhandle of Idaho, near the Canadian border. Box is from Wyoming and the influence of his usual setting is apparent. This stand-alone thriller features ex-LAPD cops who retire to their “blue heaven” in the woods. His rugged westerner, Jess Rawlins, a local rancher and the protagonist, is more cowboy than is normally found in this area. It is fictionalized as ‘Kootenai Bay’ but is obviously Hayden Lake or more likely Sandpoint where in reality there are more tamaracks than cows. Blue Heaven is a straightforward story where the only real question is who will end up dead. The shoot-out at the finale has overtones of old westerns, the tough cowboy who just keeps on coming, righting all the wrongs in a way he summons up from the depths of his being. Great writing and some sensitive stuff, mental illness, broken families.

As you can see one of these books is written for women, one for men. The appeal of Big Little Lies is the exploration into women’s lives. The theme of rape and abuse is unlikely to appeal to male readers but is not done hysterically. The men in the novel are varied, well-rounded, all different. Even the ex that Madeleine hates turns out to be sympathetic. Immature and awful back in the day but now just trying to do his best. The bad guy is a not a surprise but shows that money doesn’t make you happy or normal. There are few cliches here, and thank god for that.

The women in Blue Heaven are not as roundly portrayed. The cast is mostly male, lots of ex-cops, cowboys, and locals. One woman is a silly caricature of the busy-body, another is the “whore with a heart of gold.” The two children whose actions start the story are done well, especially twelve-year-old Annie, a tough little nut. But mostly this is a book about men, for men. It’s a morality tale where the only bad guy who regrets his actions takes his own life in remorse, leaving behind his wife and three kids without a thought. Where pride and greed make men act stupidly. Where the weak are punished and the strong and silent rewarded. I enjoyed the book, don’t get me wrong, there was just little to hang on to here.

For a female reader I think the writer needs to help her make an emotional connection to a character in the story. Do men read for that connection? Some do, I’m sure, but maybe it’s not as important to them. While I felt sorry for Jess Rawlins — and he certainly feels sorry for himself — I didn’t connect emotionally with him. Nobody in the story connects with him. His redemption at the end is that somebody cares about him. Finally. He is the classic loner: morose, fatalistic, and unforgiving. Now that I think of it, he is like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, where he plays a caricature of his earlier roles. I loved that movie but, as Vincent Canby says in the New York Times, it “pays homage to the great tradition of movie westerns while surreptitiously expressing a certain amount of skepticism.”

But, hey, men love that shit, right? :-) The joy of fiction is that there are many levels at which to read a story: the surface, the deep, and in-between.

What’s your level?

Tagged: Australia, authors, Big Little Lies, Blue Heaven, books, CJ Box, creative writing, fiction writing, Idaho, Liane Moriarty, male readers, men who read, novels, reading, what women want, women readers, women who read, writing, Wyoming

The newsletter that didn’t quite happen

My newsletter went out for Galentine’s day last Friday but it was all muddled. Sorry! I tore my hair out all weekend! I am now bald!

Not really. But here is the pretty version. Enjoy, and thanks being a subscriber and/or a reader!

  Happy Galentine’s Day, Gals (and Guys)

Hey, better than Bad Luck Friday or (gulp) Valentine’s Day!

Every day is a day to love and be loved!

No chocolates required. But accepted with pleasure, if you feel the need to share.

With wine please.

Give Him the Ooh-la-la, Miss M!
I was listening to Bette Midler yesterday when it occurred to me that if there was ever to be a straight female drag queen, she was the one. So entertaining, her new album sounds so much like a stage show you could see the back-up singers swaying their hips.
Check it out:  Bette Midler’s It’s the Girls


Drag queens are on my mind because the new Bennett Sisters novella,  Give Him the Ooh-la-la , features a character who loves his feather boas. I was listening to Bernie Taupin last fall on his radio show on SiriusXM when he played a Blossom Dearie tune. I’d never heard of the jazz singer from the fifties and sixties. She went to Paris to make her name in nightclubs after the war. Definitely a French connection and I love her sweet, girlish style.


A few days later I thought: What if (as all plots begin) there was a drag queen who sang Blossom’s songs and was called – brain flash! – Bosom Drearie? A Frenchman who lives two lives, one as a campy drag queen and another as a wine consultant for wealthy clients, one who must keep his two worlds firmly apart. The name made me laugh and the plot had possibilities.


And so was  Give Him the Ooh-la-la  born. The song is by Cole Porter, the master songwriter who dispensed such essential lifestyle advice as:

“When your car is asked to stop By a handsome traffic cop

‘Less you want a ticket or two

Give him the ooh-la-la”

The Bennett Sisters are in New York for Christmas holidays, buche de noël, and intrigue.

Here’s how a reviewer put it :

“Though the rendezvous with Pascal might be enough to justify the “ooh-la-la”, this is a McClendon story, so romance between the characters is the undercurrent to the larger mystery that includes more wine, more scandal, more intrigue and audacity, and a touch of camp.”

Yes, Pascal is back, in case you were wondering :-)

Available as an e-book

AMAZON     Barnes & Noble    iTunes   KOBO

100 pages  $2.99
Don’t forget the original:  Blossom Dearie on iTunes
Down the Pike

Exciting projects coming for spring and summer!

I can’t spill the beans yet but I’m involved in two book projects, one original and one a collection.

I’ll let you know as soon as I can but suffice to say I’m thrilled about both of them.

In the meantime there is still time to enter to win a $250 gift card

over at I Am A Reader.com. [sorry this is no longer true :-( Deadline has passed.]

Head over while you’re sending out your Galentines. Or Valentines.

Or catching up on The Walking Dead.

Or eating chocolate you bought for yourself.

à bientôt, galentines!



Check out the blog for new stories about writing, renovating houses in France,

and why there are so many books that start with “The Girl”?
[you’re here already! So subscribe and stay up to date]http://lisemcclendon.com/blog

To sign up to receive my new and IMPROVED! newsletter click here

Tagged: Bette Midler, Blossom Dearie, drag queens, ebooks, Give Him the Ooh-la-la, It's the Girls, newsletter, writing