Kathy Lynn Emerson's Blog, page 15

Weekend Update: April 28-29, 2018

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will posts by Dorothy Cannell (Monday) Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Tuesday), Bruce Coffin (Wednesday), Brenda Buchanan (Thursday), and Sandra Neily (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

Malice Domestic is this weekend in Bethesda, Maryland. Those of us attending will try to post a picture or two.

On May 2, Lea Wait will be visiting the South Bristol Elementary School in Maine, speaking with third and fourth graders about Wintering Well and sharing nineteenth century artifacts, books — and what it’s like to write and edit a book.

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

The Maine Crime Writers at Malice Domestic

by Barb, enjoying a sneak peak of spring in Maryland

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This weekend six Maine Crime Writers, Bruce Robert Coffin, Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson, Jessie Crockett/Jessica Ellicott,  Maureen Milliken, Barbara Ross, and Lea Wait, will be at the Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda, Maryland. Malice is the fan/author conference for traditional mysteries.

If you’re at the conference, we’d love to see you. Here is our combined schedule. Or, just say hello as one of us passes you in the lobby!

Friday

10:00-11:45

Lea and Bruce will be participating in Malice Go Round. That’s speed dating for readers and authors.

Saturday

9:00-9:50

Jessie/Jessica will be on the panel Making History: Our Agatha Best Historical Novel Nominees with Harriette Sackler (moderator), Rhys Bowen and Edith Maxwell.

11-11:50

Lea will be on the panel Double Timing: Authors with Multiple Series with Kelley Letourneau (moderator), Ellery Adams, E. J. Copperman / Jeff Cohen, JR Ripley and Elaine Viets.

11:00-1:00 pm

Kathy/Kaitlyn, Jessie/Jessica, Barb and Lea will be at the Kensington book giveaway, signing and mixer outside the main ballroom along with 37 other Kensington authors

2:00-2:50

Kathy/Kaitlyn, Maureen, Bruce and Lea will be signing books in the signing area.

Barb be making up murderous stories along with Hank Phillippi Ryan, Sheila Connolly and Parnell Hall at their panel Murder at the Improv

3:00-3:50

Jessie and Barb will be signing in the signing in the signing area

[image error]7:00-9:30

The Agatha Awards banquet will feature the Agatha nominees, including our own Jessie Crockett/Jessica Ellicott, whose book Murder in an English Village is nominated for best historical novel.

Sunday

9:00-9:50

Kathy/Kaitlyn will be on the panel Seasonal Sleuths: Mature Mysteries with Patti Ruocco (moderator), Barbara Barrett, D. B. Borton, Tony Perona and M. Glenda Rosen

Maureen will moderate the panel Stop the Presses with R.G. Belsky, Melinda Mullet, Nancy Cole Silverman, LynDee Walker

Bruce will be on the panel Law and Order with Robert Downs (moderator), Roger Johns, Catherine Maiorisi, Keenan Powell, Michael H. Rubin

We hope we’ll see you there!

One Tough Tinkerer

Harold Emerson is immediately likable, as is his companion Mary. They also have that signature toughness so admirable in rural Mainers. Years ago, Mary survived an attack by a deranged neighbor that left her unable to work for several years, but she protected her youngest daughter and eventually recovered. Harold has dealt with scoliosis for much of his life and has 25% function in one kidney. The other doesn’t work at all and, no, he’s not on dialysis. As he puts it, “I don’t have the money and I don’t have the time either.”

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The rescued cabinet is in the background.

I met Harold when he started working part time at the Hartland transfer station. I noticed how he went out of his way to help those struggling with their trash or recycling. We started chatting while I went through recycling to get codes from Kelloggs and Coke products. His pithy and salty commentaries of those not smart enough to put stuff in the right place not only resonated with me, but were always good for a Sunday afternoon chuckle. It wasn’t long before I discovered that Harold was one of those human treasures unique to Maine, a self-taught tinkerer who was in it as much to keep busy and help others, as to make a buck.

Last Monday, I sat down with Harold and Mary to find out more about them. He’s 78, she’s 80 and they’ve been together for eighteen years, living on 11 acres at the end of a 500 foot driveway that can be a challenge in winter and mud season. They heat with wood most of the time, but Harold is ultra careful to make certain the woodstove is clean and carefully closed when they go somewhere. That stems from the loss of a brother in a house fire when his sibling was eight. The memory stays with him even after sixty plus years.

Harold was born in Burnham in 1940 and remembers moving around frequently because his father worked in the woods and work was hard to find. After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, he joined his father, cutting pulp and limbing trees. They didn’t have a chainsaw, but still managed to cut two cords a day with a bucksaw. From there, Harold went to work in Palermo and South China sanding winter roads when he was seventeen. His boss, recognizing untapped skills, put him to work in a garage where he honed mechanic skills learned by fixing family cars and trucks. Harold says he’s always liked hanging around garages and at various times worked in both repair and body work, as well as driving a wrecker and pumping plenty of gas, even for a stretch on Mass. Avenue in Boston.

He eventually opened his own garage in Burnham until the town opened a transfer station and hired him to run it. Like many older Maine residents, Harold hasn’t really retired, partly due to economics, but also because he likes keeping busy. In fact, he still cuts and hauls all his own firewood. Not long after starting part time at our transfer station, his skill with small engines started getting attention. Folks would take a minute to pick his brain about why their lawn mower or tractor was doing something other than running. More often than not, Harold could give an educated guess as to the problem and how to remedy it. That segued into people offering him equipment they didn’t want to keep or bother to fix, then he started being asked if he could repair stuff. He estimated he repairs eight to ten per year. Some he resells, others he gives to people in need who cannot afford to buy one. He gets more from the satisfaction of doing a good deed than money could provide.

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Harold bought this body for $400 and when it’s rehabbed, it will go on his truck.

Not long ago, someone brought in a pump and a box of fittings. Harold alerted the town crew as he realized the pump could be used at the town wastewater treatment plant, saving taxpayers as much as $1500. He also spots things like appliances, furniture and household items that still have value, directing townspeople to deposit them beside the transfer station office where they quickly find new life. Harold and Mary’s kitchen sports a china cabinet he brought home recently and refinished. It’s pretty spiffy.

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This is waiting for a new engine.

I asked him how long it takes to complete a repair. To swap out a lawn tractor engine takes a little more than an hour, while rebuilding one, providing parts are at hand, can be done in three to four hours.

One interesting note. After they got together, Harold and Mary realized they’d gone to school and church as kids, even riding the same bus.

The Long Winter Ends

Lea Wait, here.

The past winter has been rough in many parts of the United States.

Here in Maine it started with an October nor’easter that felled trees and power lines all over the state. Power lines were up in a few days, but large branches and downed trees off roads are still awaiting warmer weather and power saws.[image error]

In late December and early January we had a cold spell (temperatures below zero) for about ten days, followed by snow, and then by a January thaw. A short winter?

Not exactly. Three more nor’easters (with snow) in three weeks showed us winter was still around. And even last week — that’s right — in mid-April — many parts of Maine had snow. One of my daughters, visiting from Philadelphia, had to scrape ice off her car before she could head home.

Maine winters aren’t always like this. I even remember sitting out on my porch one March.  (Yes — that WAS unusual. But still…)

Finally, this week temperatures will finally the sixties, and the long-patient crocuses in my yard may finally make a valiant appearance. Daffodils aren’t blooming yet, but their green leaves are spiking through the winter debris of fallen leaves, pine needles, branches, and ruts where the snow plow missed our driveway and left mounds of overturned lawn. As s[image error]oon as everything dries out a little, it will definitely be time for a spring cleanup.

The welcome sun is doing its bit, winds are blowing, longer days are welcome, and I’m thinking about getting that porch furniture out of the barn.

No winter is the same. This  one was long, and dark, and I was focused on events inside my house, not on weather.

But spring is almost here. It is time for storm windows to be raised. Yard work and pruning to be done. Walks to be taken. Flower baskets to hang on the porch.[image error]

Time to focus on a new season.

In the meantime, I’m sharing pictures of my yard in previous springs: crocuses encouraging hope that life, and seasons, continue.

When the Book Won’t Write Itself

Susan Vaughan here. My latest novel of romantic suspense has just been published. [image error]Yesterday, actually. Dark Vision is an addition to the DARK Files series, and my fourteenth book. I had a glass or two of bubbly to celebrate and breathed a sigh of relief before digging in to promote the book. I don’t usually do promotion here, but this baby was a difficult birth, so here we go.

First, a little background. My career as a published novelist began in traditional publishing, with Harlequin. But after five books with them and another with a small press, I ventured into independent publishing, also known as self-publishing, because online [image error]book retailers (Amazon, B&N) were making DIY possible. My journey to finish Dark Vision was longer than usual. I should explain that The DARK Files involves officers in a government agency I made up, DARK, which stands for Domestic Antiterrorism Risk Corps. I know, that acronym would be DARC, but that wasn’t, you should pardon my pun, dark enough for its mission. I do have characters discuss that anomaly in a couple of the books.

On with Dark Vision’s conception and eventual birth. I created Matt Leoni, the protagonist, or hero, as a secondary character in the fourth book in the series, Dark Vengeance (2016). After writing that book, the character of Matt kept asking for his own book. He’s irreverent, charming, appears lazy but has a sharp brain, and can move fast—to deadly effect—when necessary. My problem was that at the end of that book, Matt resigns from DARK because scar tissue in one eye from a terrorist bomb is affecting his vision and plans to marry his fiancée and join her film company. So I decided his story, Dark Vision, [image error]would then become the first book in the series. I could use it as a vehicle to introduce some of the protagonists in the following books.

I swallowed hard and told myself I’d figure out later how to make that work. I needed a plot. How did Matt get injured? How will he meet this filmmaker who becomes his fiancée? Who is she and what are her films? I needed to research eye injuries from shrapnel, indie film making, and once I decided on the terrorist connection, foreign embassies. I love research, but doing it only delayed the actual writing.

Every author has his or her own process. One extreme is starting with a blank page and just writing “by the seat of his/her pants.” Those writers are termed pantsers. The other extreme is plotting out the story in detail before writing. Those are called plotters. I’m somewhere in the middle, more of a plotster. I need a road map of where I’m going with the story. I write down conflicts, backgrounds, personalities, and physical descriptions for the hero and heroine in detail and some of the same for important secondary characters. I figure out a general idea of the plot and the major events that turn things around, and I decide on chapters and scenes as I write. Before I write a scene, I plan it out in a few words. This gives me something to put on that blank page before I write an actual scene.

But this time, I was stuck, insecure about the story. Could I even write another book? [image error]Could I make the character conflicts and romance work with the external plot? And more. To make it easy—ha!—on myself, I would make the story a novella, less than 75 pages. A snap. Wrong! Dark Vision would not be wrestled into that short. Plot twist after relationship twist after conflict twists kept the page count mounting. Writing in fits and starts and procrastinating, I gradually made progress.

[image error]It took me nearly two years to finish Dark Vision. Perhaps you read my March blog post, “Refilling the Well,” about vacations rejuvenating and re-energizing people—me in particular. After a week or so on the beach and not writing at all, I came home and made the final push. The words flowed. The exciting climax, the romantic resolution, fell into place. Hooray, I finished the book! Editing, formatting, and the rest are all completed, and the book is for sale. It’s no longer a novella, but a short novel, and although it was a long process, I’m proud of my baby. The DARK Files is now a series of five books. For now all are only digital, but print is coming. And I hope readers of the series will be interested in how it all began for Matt and Nadia and new readers will pick up Dark Vision (only 99 cents for a short time) and move on to the rest—Dark Memories, Dark Cover, Dark Rules, and Dark Vengeance.

Enter Jen’s Pit Bull Photo Contest and Win for Your Favorite Animal Rescue

It seems as though the past few months have sped by with a mind of their own since getting the latest Flint K-9 Search and Rescue mystery — Inside the Echo — out at the end of February. I’m pleased to say that the book has been doing well, and even more pleased to note that the third book in the series is proving a lot more amenable to being written than Echo was. That book was a beast! This one, on the other hand, tends to write itself whenever I give myself a moment or two to let it do so. It’s been a real joy.

With the novel moving at such a good clip, it’s now time to start thinking about the book cover. Though I know it’s a challenge for many authors, this is actually one of my favorite parts of being a self-published author: working with my designer to come up with exactly the right cover to convey the tone of the book in a way that is visually engaging for readers. To be honest, my designer — Alisha, at a company called Damonza.com — does most if not all of the heavy lifting there. All I do is give her some details and then follow up with feedback after she’s given a few choices.

With the Flint K-9 series, I like this process even more because I’ve been able to supply the cover models for both The Darkest Thread and Inside the Echo. For The Darkest Thread, the model for Jamie Flint’s German shepherd Phantom is a beautiful shepherd named Sadie – a rescue who found her forever home with Pope Humane Society executive director Tracy Sala. Tracy provided the photos for that cover, and all I needed to do was pass them on to Alisha. Here’s the final result:

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For Inside the Echo, the cover model turned out to be one of the dogs owned by Caroline Blair-Smith of Mornington Crescent Dog Sledding – a gorgeous sled dog named Sgurr. My cover designer worked some Photoshop magic on this one to make it work with the rest of the cover, so (trade secret time) it’s actually Sgurr’s head on another dog’s body. Mad Frankenstein business, this cover design trade. At any rate, here’s my original photo, and the finished book cover:

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All of that brings me to the point of this post: the cover model for the third book in the Flint K-9 Search and Rescue series, entitled The Crush. In The Crush, an animal hoarder is found dead the night before police and animal rescue organizations — including Jamie Flint & co. — are scheduled to come in and remove the animals from the home. The woman’s autistic adult son has gone missing at the same time, and is a suspect in the  murder.

One of the main characters in this novel is Reaver, an emaciated young pit bull the victim “rescued” from a dog fighting ring down south… Only to realize she had no way to help rehabilitating the animal. Consequently, Reaver has been chained in the woman’s yard for the past six months, terrifying everyone who passed. In The Crush, Jamie and her son Bear take Reaver on as a special cause, working to rehabilitate the dog in the hopes that he might find a home with them on Windfall Island, the Maine island from which Flint K-9 is run.

I’m doing a cover model contest to find the right dog for the cover of The Crush, with the grand prize winner receiving a $100 check for the animal rescue of their choice (along with, of course, their photo appearing on the cover of the third Flint K-9 novel). I would like Reaver to be the dog on the cover, which means there are some things to keep in mind. Reaver is a male pit bull, about ten months to a year old. The trick here is that in order to ensure that I’m not pushing the old stereotype of pit bulls as a vicious and unmanageable breed, it’s critical that the winning photo be one where the dog does not look mean. He also can’t look too happy, though… If you have a pit bull that you rescued who may have started out in challenging circumstances, those early photos may work well for this.

The winning photo must be hi-resolution (300 dpi or higher preferred), and one you either have the rights to yourself, or are able to secure those rights for both promotional purposes and for sale, since that photo will be the basis for the book cover. There will be other categories in the contest, with all entries compiled into a promotional YouTube video I’ll create myself. Ten finalists in each category will be selected by popular vote, with winners chosen from a jury of three professionals (including yours truly, of course). Voting will begin Monday, May 21st, and winners will be announced on Monday, June 4th.

For complete details, join my Facebook Live chat today (Monday, April 23rd) at 4 p.m. EST on my Facebook author page (http://facebook.com/jenbloodauthor), or go to https://woobox.com/ytbg3j to submit a photo. Best of luck!

Jen Blood is USA Today-bestselling author of the Erin Solomon Mysteries and the Flint K-9 Search and Rescue Mysteries. To learn more, visit www.jenblood.com. 

Weekend Update: April 21-22, 2018

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will posts by Jen Blood (Monday) Susan Vaughan (Tuesday), Lea Wait (Wednesday), John Clark (Thursday), and Barb Ross (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 Some of us at Maine Crime Writers are off to Malice Domestic in Bethesda, Maryland, this week for a long weekend (April 27-29) of panels, mystery-related events, and socializing with our “tribe” of writers and readers. If you are attending and recognize any of us, please stop and say hello. We’d love to meet you.

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

Chained to a Desk in Rural Virginia

Kate Flora: For the next two weeks, I have the pleasure of being a fellow at the Virginia [image error]Center for the Creative Arts. VCCA is a retreat for writers, visual artists, and composers set on a hilltop in lovely Amherst, Virginia, just across the highway from Sweetbriar College. This is my third residency here, and I am thrilled to have this gift of two weeks of uninterrupted writing time. During my first stay, five years ago, I wrote 150 pages in ten days. On my second visit, I wrote the second half of the novel I’d started the first time, and wrote two short stories.

At breakfast this morning, one of the artists remarked that since someone else prepares the meals and changes the beds and there are no responsibilities, it is like living at home. For me, it is a chance to free my mind from distractions like taxes, and book promotion, and laundry, and what to make for dinner. My plan for this visit was to start the sixth Joe Burgess book, and as I write this, I am now thirty pages in.

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Creativity blossoms

For those of you who sometimes wonder about the plotting and writing process that goes into writing one of my Joe Burgess police procedurals, I thought I’d take you on a quick tour of how things progress as I begin book six in the series. Tentatively titled A Child Shall Lead Them, it opens, as my police procedurals usually do, with the discovery of a body. Before I began, I know some of the things I would put at the crime scene, and some of the details about the crime I would include to make the process of identifying the victim more difficult. I know who did it, have an idea about other suspects, and some plans for the ending. The rest develops as I write.

Some of my initial questions refer back to what has happened in prior books. Some series writers, those far cleverer and more organized than I, keep character diaries and record important details. I am forced to pull up old manuscripts and do searches. What’s the name of Stan Perry’s pregnant girlfriend? What are the name of Burgess’s sister’s daughters. The name of his other sister? I know the name of one of Terry Kyle’s daughters, but what is the younger daughter’s name? Does Burgess’s other sister have children? Who runs the deli that makes the best meatloaf sandwich in Portland? Is Kyle’s significant other Michele or Michelle?

It may be that a clue to the victim’s identity will be her sleeve of tattoos, so I have to spend some time on websites, learning about the terminology. Horror? American traditional? Ornamental? New school? I will leave the interviewing up to Detective Stan Perry, who has some tats of his own, but undoubtedly I will have to track down the family tattoo artist to get more inside details.

Fifteen years of interviewing police officers, and writing books with and about them, though, often causes me to have more questions than answers. Here are some of the questions that have arisen already.

Where shall I put a body, in the City of Portland, that is remote enough for the killer to have had a chance to hide it? So I ask a Portland police officer for suggestions. Then, because I’m in Virginia and can’t go scope it out, I search on google maps and other sources to learn more about the location.

What value might bringing in a K9 add to the investigation? That involves a call to my retired game warden friend, who knows a lot about dogs and crime scenes. He hasn’t called back, and my list of questions is getting larger.

Then there’s the jogger who found the body. What happens if he doesn’t want to cooperate in the investigation? Another query goes out to my police advisors.

Since the plot involves sex trafficking in Portland, I search on line for the name of the Portland officer who might be a good resource on sex trafficking. When I get home, I’ll have to see if I can meet with him.

And then there are my questions for the medical examiner, details of which I cannot share here without giving away too much of the plot.

Many years ago, when I embarked on this writing adventure, I thought that what writers did was sit at their desks and make things up. For crime writers, though, that simply isn’t possible.

 

Back To Basics

Vaughn C. Hardacker here: It’s been a long winter up here in The County (it’s a quarter past April and we’re still looking at two feet of snow on the ground). The winter of 2017/2018 seems to want to hang on forever and I’m starting to think I live in the north of Westeros and the winters last several years long.

Last fall [image error]I finished my novel, The Exchange, and then went into my usual funk where I begin to believe that I’ll never again write a novel. When a sports team struggles the coach will return to the basics of the game to get his/her team back to where they should be. This winter I decided that I’d go back to basics and what better way than to spend some time with the masters, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett? I’m tempted to add Mickey Spillane into this category because he raised the hard-boiled detective to a new height. However, Philip Marlowe and the Continental Op were solving cases while Mike Hammer was in grade school. Hammer was born in 1947 with the publication of I, The Jury whereas  Chandler and Hammett had already been publishing in the pulp magazines for twenty years.

Let’s take a moment to look at the commonality of their plots. Basically, good looking young woman visits detective’s office, everybody smokes and drinks whiskey, eventually [image error]the detective will get beaten up. However, being the hero he is, he overcomes, ultimately solves the crime and wins the girl (although he and she never have a long-term relationship). These two writers so dominated the short stories and novels of their time that it caused the detective novel to develop its own paradigm set: located in L. A., detective was single, hard drinker, and capable of lethal action. Surprisingly, the plots themselves still work, although I have to smile when I read (as in Chandler’s short story, The King In Yellow) about the average room rate in hotels being $8.00 and the expensive suites going for $28.00 per night, bellhops and doormen grateful when they are given a twenty-five cent tip (not to mention the handgun bought for $5.00 in Pearls Are A Nuisance).

[image error]This winter I have read Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder, The Big Sleep, and Farewell my Lovely as well as Hammett Crime Stories & Other Writings (an anthology of his short stories) and Red Harvest (one of several novels Hammett wrote that came from linked stories he’d published in the pulps). Both of these writers created private investigators who are literary legends Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Hammett’s Continental Op and, of course, Sam Spade.

To get to the point, reading these classics of our genre led me back to my desk and a new novel is born (after a week of writing it’s at 12,000 words!). If nothing else these iconic writers (along with Mickey Spillane, Ross MacDonald, Michael Connelly, John Sandford, etc, etc. inspire me to get back to work. Looking back, I didn’t waste my winter after all–now if the @$^%&ing snow will go away.

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My New Novel, THE NEIGHBOR, Set To Release

[image error]My new novel THE NEIGHBOR publishes next Tuesday. It’s been a long but enjoyable road getting to this point in the game. Two years since I finished my original draft. Then came my agent’s editorial changes (the incomparable Evan Marshall). Then there was the suspense of waiting to hear what publisher wanted to take on my novel. Or even if they wanted it. How happy was I when John Scognamiglio of Kensington Books picked it up in two-book deal? Very! Of course then I had to incorporate all of his editorial changes.

And now I sit yet again on the verge of publication, nervous and excited, and awaiting the verdict of my dear readers.

Traditional publishing is a long waiting game where one must be patient. The best advice I can give any author fortunate to be in this position is to keep writing. Start your next book. Get your marketing house in order for when the day comes to promote it, but keep the creative wheels in your head turning.

Early reviews for THE NEIGHBOR have been wonderful. Of course they all won’t be. Myrtle in Tacoma will hate everything about it. So won’t Larry in Sacramento. Not everyone is going to love your book. This is the realty every author must face, and once you accept that fact, the thicker your skin will develop. My goal was to write a book that would have the reader frantically flipping the pages. A book that was equivalent to crack cocaine. A book so addictive that if the world stopped spinning people would still keep reading my book. That was my goal, anyway.

My favorite quote about writing comes from Elmore Leonard. “I try to leave out the parts readers skip.”

It’s fun to be an author. Little scary at times as well when people realize how twisted things are inside that crazy brain of yours. It takes a bit of artistic bravery to put forth your art and let people judge it purely on its entertainment merits. THE NEIGHBOR is my first collaboration with Kensington and so far it’s been nothing short of being a wonderful experience.

I hope you get a chance to read THE NEIGHBOR. And pleas let me know what you think. It’s a noirish domestic thriller where bad people do bad things to each other, creating bad scenarios. It’s a book that’s as uncomfortable as it is twisty. Provocative while at the same time deliciously sinister. I hope you enjoy reading it as much I enjoyed writing it.

And with that I give you THE NEIGHBOR!

Thanks and best,

Joe

Here’s all the places you can pick up a copy.

Amazon:

Barnes & Noble:

BooksaMillion: