Kathy Lynn Emerson's Blog, page 24

Weekend Update: January 6-7, 2018

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be a posts by Dick Cass (Monday), Lea Wait (Tuesday) , Barb Ross (Wednesday), Brendan Rielly (Thursday), and Jessie Crockett (Friday).

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

 

 

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

New Year’s Revolutions

Kate Flora: So far, weather-wise, the end of last year and the beginning of January has [image error]been absolutely miserable. Trees crash down. We go without phone, internet, or TV for five days. Then the power line needs to be replaced and the pipes freeze. This is the month when people make resolutions. To be more productive. To exercise more. To clean out the closets. To finally write that long imagined novel.

I’ve never been much for resolutions. They sound too much like something agreed upon in committee–even if it is a committee of me, myself, and I–and become a resolve that must be acted upon. Resolutions tend to weigh heavily on us and make us feel guilty when we fail to do the things we vowed to do. I don’t want to spend time in 2018 feeling guilty about what I haven’t done.

So this year, instead, I am planning on some New Year’s REVOLUTIONS. How will they be different? I don’t know yet. I’m only beginning to ponder on what in my life I want to overthrow, or conquer. What dictators of habit need to be deposed. What restrictions on my freedom need to be resisted. What constraints on my liberty imposed by decades of deadlines need to be removed. What I will do if I am released from book jail.

[image error]Here’s what I do know: In 2018, under new leadership, the country of Kate will emphasize the importance of having fun. Exploring new things. Learning new things. Trying out new things. I will pay attention to the messages I got on past important birthdays: What are you waiting for? What matters? What will you regret if you don’t do it?

For about thirty-five years now, my default mode has been to drift back to my desk and work. Don’t get me wrong–I love what I do. But after all these years, I think it’s time to sometimes not drift back to the desk, and instead, drift into something new, whether it be  learning how to tap dance, or practicing a new language, or taking more photos with my camera, or cooking my way through Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbooks.

It might be to finally climb Katahdin before it is too late. It might be to spend more time at Farmer’s Markets, not just exploring what farmers are growing, but watching the children, and the playful dogs, and the faces of people who are doing something that makes getting the week’s food fun. It might be to spend more time at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden. Go to the Common Ground Fair. Learn to paddle board. Take voice lessons even though I sing like a crow. (Despite twelve years in the church choir)

The arrival of those tons of flower porn that come at this season (nursery catalogues)

reminds me that this year I might spend more time in my garden. The recent gift of an apron from the neighborhood sewing and knitting circle may spur me on to get my sewing machine fixed and actually remember how to sew. A visit to the Concord Museum to see decorated holiday trees inspired by themes in children’s books makes me want to write a children’s book myself. I do not delude myself that this will be easy.

Maybe none of it will be easy. But trying things and taking chances will also likely make me a better writer, and of course, I have a Thea Kozak mystery to revise and a new Joe Burgess to write.

What will your New Year’s Revolutions be?

Booting it into the New Year

When it’s 15 below zero and the sheet of ice still encasing the earth from the pre-Christmas storm lurks beneath a three-inch layer of snow that squeaks when you walk on it, you’d better be wearing the right boots.

Fashion is not the watchword on the tundra that Maine has become in the past couple of weeks. Forget the cute ankle boots and the quasi-shoe/quasi-overshoe combos. Stylish kicks mean frostbit toes. You need a pair of big, honking, insulated, ugly boots.

Take mine, for example.

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Brenda’s trusty boots, 2018.

(Not literally, of course. They are my most precious possession this week and if you so much as lay a finger on them, I may have to kill you.)

Super-duper Keens they are, with lots of Thinsulate, a rugged sole that scoffs at ice and a layer of Gore-Tex in case it ever warms up enough for slush to be a thing again. When I slip my wool-socked feet inside, my feet are warm, dry and stable on the earth.

Sure, they make me walk like BigFoot, but that’s the de rigueur gait this winter. Haven’t you heard?

I am actually an expert on New England winter footwear. In the olden days when I was a child, winters were long and cold and pack boots had yet to be invented. Did this keep us indoors? No ma’am. We used a little ingenuity and created our own super-warm boots.

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The boots of my childhood.

The outside layer was red rubber, with a buckle on the side you had to cinch tight to keep the snow out. They had be a couple of sizes bigger than your shoes, because not only did you wear your shoes inside them, you had to account for homemade insulation, too.

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Big brother’s socks were key.

In my family, that was a pair of ragg wool socks, cast off by my high-school aged brother after my mother darned the heels one too many times for his comfort.

But the lumpy heels didn’t bother us little kids. We pulled those warm woolies over our own socks and shoes then gave them a layer of waterproofing in the form of a bread bag.

That’s right, we in the Buchanan household were reduce-reuse-recycle pioneers. Nobody threw away a perfectly good plastic bag when the loaf of Butternut cracked wheat or Kasanof’s pumpernickel was gone.

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Old-school Gore-tex

Over the too-big wool socks the bread bags would go, which eased the slide of the now gigantic foot into the oversized red rubber boot.

You think I walk like Bigfoot now? Imagine me at six years old, clad in hand-me-down snow pants and parka, with feet half as long as I was high.  Laugh if you must, but it worked.  My sisters and I were able to play outside for hours, and nary a whine was heard about having cold feet.

With the onset of early adolescence came the desire for a pair of shoe-boots, or at least that’s what we called them. Whoever came up with the idea of winter boots into which you directly slid your thin-stockinged feet and only your thin-stockinged feet had never walked to school or stood around at a cold bus stop on a January day in New England. (In my town, those were the only two ways to get to school, and most of us hiked it. I cannot remember anyone being given a ride by their parents. Ever.)

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Shoeboots went in and out of style quickly.

A few kids managed to convince their Moms to buy them a pair of groovy shoe-boots, then spent the winter hobbling to and from school with popsicle toes. Shoe-boots were sleek all right, and slick, too. Nothing but a thin layer of leather between ankle and sub-zero air, and soles devoid of any useful tread.

We set aside the red rubber monstrosities when we reached junior high school in favor of what we called “shitkickers,” bright orange boys’ construction-type shoes that offered traction in the snow and if you bought the right size, room for a couple pair of thick socks. They were not sexy, but everyone wore them, putting us on equal footing, as it were.

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Then there were the shitkickers . . .

In college I graduated to Bean boots, but in those days they didn’t sell 100 varieties like they do now. The old standbys were great in wet weather, less good in the cold, and so began my adult quest for something with the comfort of my childhood winter attire that didn’t look quite as dorky.

Have I succeeded? You be the judge. But whatever you do, keep your mitts off my boots!

Plotter or Pantser

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I’m often asked by other writers whether I am a plotter or a pantser. For those of you unfamiliar with this jargon, plotting is exactly what it sounds like, the act of plotting out a novel or story before writing it. Pantsing, on the other hand, is flying entirely by the seat of your pants. Throwing caution to the wind as your fingers dance across the keyboard leading you into the great unknown. The answer is, I’m more of a hybrid. I’m both.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Nice try, Coffin. Keeping those writerly secrets all to yourself. But I’m in earnest. Every novel is different. I find the longer I carry an idea around in my head, before putting it to paper, the more storyline I’ll have worked out. But sometimes the ideas are so fresh I really can only picture the beginning, ending, and a rough idea of what I want the story to be about.

I tend to be somewhat pragmatic in my approach to writing, in that there are things I have planned well in advance. The character arcs in my Detective Byron series are a good example of this. When I began writing Among the Shadows, the first book in the series, I already knew where I wanted Byron to be emotionally and personally by the third book.

Still, there are plenty of things that I leave to chance. I may have a general idea of the route I plan to take to get from the beginning to the end of the novel, but I don’t always take that route. Writing a book is like taking a trip to somewhere you’ve never been but always wanted to visit. You can plan your trip right down to the very last detail, maybe even haul out the GPS or the old travel atlas (you young ’uns might need to Google that), but inevitably plans go awry. Flights get delayed or canceled, road detours due to construction, bad weather, any number of things can happen that necessitate changing the route we take to our destination. Not all that much fun in the travel sense, but for writers it can be a blast. People tend to forget that all writers are readers first. We love to be entertained. We can’t wait to find out what is going to happen next. Frankly, if I knew every conceivable thing that was going to occur, and when, I would be bored out of my mind writing the actual story. Sometimes the characters will drive the story in a direction I hadn’t planned. Hey, the characters live this imaginary world. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that they might know better than I?

When we begin to write a novel, we may already have a few thoughts about how we plan to get from one point to another, but that doesn’t mean we won’t discover better ways of doing it. I’m confident that even the most rigid plotter would tell you that the muse occasionally throws them a curve.

What kind of writer are you?

The Wonderful World of Fairy Tales

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, musing today about fairy tales. It was a news item about the first performance of Peter Pan, way back in 1904, that started me pondering this topic, even though I don’t ordinarily think of Barrie’s stage play (in any of its incarnations) as being in the same genre as stories by Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. For one thing, the original versions of most classic fairy tales are short narratives without much dialogue or a lot of description—more akin to tales told around a campfire than to lavish theatrical productions or animated feature films.

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I still have the book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales I was given as a child. I was especially fond of “Jorinda and Jorindel,” “Cat-skin,” “Ashputtel,” and “King Grisly-Beard.” “Hansel and Grettel” not so much. Fairy tales are not for the fainthearted. People meet grisly fates in many of them, some deserved and some not.

My all-time favorite fairy tale has always been “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” in part because it does (sort of) have a happy ending, and in part because of the dancing. One year when I was a teenager it was the basis of our annual ballet recital. As the tallest girl in the advanced class, and the only one who did not take toe lessons, I played the prince. I even got to name him, since he doesn’t have a name in the original story. I chose Basil. Why? No idea. I was just happy the part was to be that of a prince, because in some versions of the story he’s an old soldier instead. It was a cool role to undertake. Not only did I get to do a lot of big leaps and spins and some pantomime, but I also had a magic cloak that made me invisible.

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There’s no way to write about this topic without the name Disney coming into the conversation. I admit I have always had a soft spot for Disney versions. Peter Pan was a favorite, even though I liked the live Mary Martin performance on television much better. I can remember sitting through Disney’s Sleeping Beauty numerous times at the movie theater, and Disney’s Cinderella has always appealed to me more than the various theatrical interpretations. Once upon a time, I owned my very own Snow White doll, complete with seven plastic dwarfs.

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And then, of course, there’s Into the Woods. I’ve seen it on stage and in two filmed versions. I’m not certain what the appeal is. It’s certainly not an upbeat musical and thinking about it reminds me of a song Peter, Paul, and Mary recorded many years ago. In the patter that goes along with it, they explain that “Blue” has all three basic elements of children’s songs. These work just as well for fairy tales. One is simplicity, so the child can understand it. Two is pathos, to prepare the child for later traumatic experiences. Three is repetition, to give the child a false sense of security.

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By now you’re probably asking yourself where the heck I’m going with this post. Darned if I know. Let’s call it a stream of consciousness blog. This can happen when a blogger can’t come up with any other idea and a deadline is looming. But now that I’ve rambled on about fairy tales, I am curious. What role did fairy tales play in your life? Do you think they still have a place in this big bad world? And if you choose to read or tell a fairy tale to a child or grandchild or niece or nephew, are you more likely to pick the grim Grimm version or the fluffy Disney interpretation?

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Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett is the author of more than fifty-five traditionally published books written under several names. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries and the “Deadly Edits” series (Crime & Punctuation—2018) as Kaitlyn and the historical Mistress Jaffrey Mysteries (Murder in a Cornish Alehouse) as Kathy. The latter series is a spin-off from her earlier “Face Down” mysteries and is set in Elizabethan England. Her most recent collection of short stories is Different Times, Different Crimes. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women.

 

 

What’s New in the New Year

What can readers look forward to in 2018 from the Maine Crime Writers? Take a look below.

[image error]From Kaitlyn Dunnett: The first book in my new “Deadly Edits” series, Crime and Punctuation, will be out in June. The amateur detective is Mikki Lincoln, a retired teacher. Newly widowed, she moves back to her old home town in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains after fifty years away and sets up shop as a book doctor to make ends meet. When one of her first clients is murdered, how can she not get involved in the investigation, especially after she discovers a clue to the killer’s identity in the dead woman’s manuscript? There will also be another Liss MacCrimmon mystery (Overkilt) coming out toward the end of 2018 and in other news, in April I’ll be doing a group signing in Portland, Maine and attending Malice Domestic in Bethesda, Maryland.

From Vaughn C. Hardacker: The second novel, and prequel to BLACK ORCHID, in my Ed Traynor series, MY BROTHER’S KEEPER (chapter one available on my website http://www.vaughnhardacker.com/MBK_Chap_1.html) is scheduled for release on October 12, 2018.[image error]

I am seeking representation (so any recommendations will be greatly appreciated) for my latest novel, THE EXCHANGE . I will be at The Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance in the spring and the Jesup Library’s Murder By The Book in the fall (I’m open to any recommendations for venues where I can speak).

I will be moderating Local Writers At The Library on the second Thursday of the month from January to April at the Turner Memorial Library in Presque Isle. The event is an open forum for local writers to meet, do a reading, and discuss their work.

From Lea Wait: In 2018  I’ll be at Malice Domestic and Crime Bake, speaking at Dick Cass’ class at the University of Southern Maine in January, excited about having the Portland Stage Company do a short reading from TWISTED THREADS March 5, doing a group  signing at Print in Portland April 10 … and many other events throughout the year.

June 12 will be the debut of DEATH AND A POT OF CHOWDER: A MAINE MURDER MYSTERY, my first book under the name Cornelia Kidd. Set on a Maine [image error]island, with two major characters – two very different sisters who have just met for the first time. Anna has grown up on Quarry Island, married a lobsterman, and has a teenaged son; Izzie is from Connecticut, is ten years younger, half-Korean, and a recent graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. They bond over (what else?) solving a murder, and food. I had fun including lots of recipes! Available now for pre-order.

And in early November the 7th in my Mainely Needlepoint series (THREAD HERRINGS) debuts. Sarah and Angie buy several pieces of antique needlepoint at an auction and find a mysterious paper from the mid-eighteenth century behind the stitching. Curious, Angie starts investigating … and one of her friends is murdered. When she’s put under police protection, she must find the killer …. from a distance.

From Kate Flora: I am just coming into the end zone of a first draft of the 9th Thea Kozak mystery, Schooled in Death, which I hope to have out sometime in the spring of 2018 (unless my beta readers say I’ve really blown it). I am also putting together a collection of my crime stories, published and unpublished, working title Domestic Violence and Other Stories, and thinking about the order of the stories is going to be really fun. When Thea is tweaked, I am looking forward to diving into the sixth Joe Burgess mystery, as yet untitled, a sordid world of sex trafficking and tattooed bodies. I hope to knock of a big chunk of that during my residency at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in April. I can usually write at least 120 pages while I’m there, and the opportunity to do such obsessive writing is a great gift. I haven’t suggested it to the others yet, but don’t you think a Maine Crime Writers holiday story collection would be fun? You’d read it, wouldn’t you?

[image error]From Barbara Ross: Stowed Away, my latest Maine Clambake Mystery, came out this week, so it will be awhile until the next one. I think the novella collection Yule Log Murder with Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis will come out at the end of October and the next Maine Clambake, Steamed Open, at the end of December 2018, but neither is official. Because Stowed Away came out over the holidays, I’m doing a blog tour, not actual appearances. You can follow along here. Come the spring I’m doing some real appearances, including the Portland Stage, March 5, 2018 with Lea, Dick, Brenda and Chris Holm. On March 12, I’ll be giving a talk for the Friends of the Key West Library Series, and on April 10, I’ll be at Print bookstore in Portland with Lea, Kaitlyn/Kathy and Jessie.

From Dick Cass: My biggest plan for 2018 is to finish and publish the third Elder Darrow mystery, tentatively titled Burton’s Folly. It’s well along and out to Beta readers at this point. I also have a political thriller I’m shopping separately. I’m appearing at the South Portland Library [image error]on January 13th, the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth on the 18th, and the Vose Library in Union in May. Portland Stage will be performing a short piece of In Solo Time on March 5, along with the work of other Maine crime writers: Brenda Buchanan, Barbara Ross, Lea Waite, and Chris Holm.

On the “author” side of the ledger—I’ve been asked to help judge the Edgar awards for Best Young Adult Mystery, an honor I accepted with pleasure. I’m also running a course on Maine Mystery Writers for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USM, with the help of Brenda Buchanan, Bruce Coffin, Chris Holm, Gayle Lynds, and Lea Waite, where we’ll discuss various mystery subgenres and introduce OLLI students to some of the many excellent crime writers our state is blessed with.

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From Bruce Robert Coffin: 2018 will see a summer release of the third installment of the Detective Byron mysteries, tentatively titled Beyond the Truth. And for those fans of hardcover novels, Thorndike Press will be releasing Among the Shadows in large print format on February 7th. Additionally, Thorndike has also purchased the rights to reprint Beneath the Depths in the same format, date of release TBD.

Wishing you all a happy and healthy 2018!

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This is the proposed cover art for Bad News Travels Fast, my next Bernie O’Dea mystery. We’ll see if it makes the cut.

From Maureen Milliken: Finishing up the third in the Bernie O’Dea mystery series, Bad News Travels Fast, which should be out in late spring. The writer should be coming much faster now that I’ve moved back to Belgrade Lakes after 14 months in South Portland. The story of getting back into my house over the first two weeks of December also gave me some great plot ideas for the fourth Bernie O’Dea mystery, which will definitely not take two years to get finished like its predecessor.

On a personal note, once again will be employed full time, as a reporter at Mainebiz, where I’ve been freelancing since March. It’s a great gig, but sadly will provide much less fodder for mysteries than three decades of daily newspapers did.

I’m with Bruce on wishing everyone a health and happy 2018, and look forward to lots of fun stuff with the Maine Crime Writers!

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From Jessie Crockett: August, 2018 will bring the release of the trade paperback version of Murder in an English Village written as Jessica Ellicott. October, 2018 will be the release month for the second in the Beryl and Edwina series, Murder Flies the Coop. Wishing you ll a year of happiness and wonderful reading!

 

 

From Susan Vaughan: In late winter, early spring, [image error]Dark Vision will be released. The book is a new addition to my DARK Files series and features Matt Leoni, a character introduced in Dark Vengeance. I’m also looking forward to more clients for my newish copy-editing & proofreading service.

Here’s to a wonderful 2018 with lots of great posts on Maine Crime Writers and lots of new books to read!

 

Weekend Update: December 30-31, 2017

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be a group post on Monday and posts by Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Tuesday) , Bruce Coffin (Wednesday), Brenda Buchanan (Thursday), and Kate Flora (Friday).

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

from Kaitlyn Dunnett: From December 31, 2017 through February 4, 2018, as part of Kensington’s promotion of books with winter-themed covers, the ebook of The Scottie Barked at Midnight will be on sale at all ebook outlets for just $1.99.

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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

Under Review

John Clark talking about another kind of writing that’s important to both authors and readers-the review. I started reviewing in 2003 when Beth and I became part of the Wolf Moon Journal family. Not long after, I was accepted as a reviewer for a Canadian website that has since closed. The books I reviewed for Wolf Moon were ones I had picked to read without any consideration as to whether I’d review them. They were by authors I really liked, or books whose plots intrigued me.

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(I’m including covers of some recently reviewed books)

At first, reviewing was intimidating. After, all who was I to presume whether my opinions about a work of fiction might be of interest to others. What got me over that hump were the long and animated gatherings we had with other Wolf Moon contributors, usually at Clif and Laurie Graves’ home. Conversations sparkled with energy and enthusiasm and I found myself sharing thoughts about books I was reading, or had recently finished. I realized that a good review was similar to one of those conversations. Once that light went on, reviewing became much more comfortable.

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When I began reviewing for the Canadian site, the process was different. The site manager would collect a batch of requests submitted by authors, add a brief description of each and send the list to her cadre of reviewers. The longer you had been part of the process, the more likely you were to get what you wanted to review. My first book to review was sent all the way from Australia. It was painful to read and even more painful to write a review. The thing that sticks with me about it, were the suddenly shifting emotions and behavior of the protagonist. Three sentences (and in the same paragraph) after crooning his love for the heroine, he would be batshit crazy, hammering the desert or the side of the tent with his fists. In short, there was no continuity. I wasn’t anywhere near having a comfort level with writing a review of something so bad, but sucked it up and did my best to balance the weaknesses by noting what I could that was positive.

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That was an extremely helpful experience because many of the books I reviewed for that website were self-published, or from small presses. I became a much better reviewer, focusing on balancing strengths with what needed improvement as I went along. An unexpected benefit of reviewing numerous books was getting to know and become friends with authors. I was pleasantly surprised when I got to read and review Tim Hallinan’s first Poke Rafferty book, A Nail Through The Heart. I ended up reviewing three in that series and we’re Facebook friends now. Bonnie Rozanski was another author who became a friend, as was Holly Schindler. In fact, I’m a regular reviewer of Holly’s new stuff and look forward to each one.

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Being a public librarian was a natural foundation for a book reviewer as we were responsible for buying a lot of books. Knowing authors, genres and how to interpret other people’s reviews came in handy in Boothbay Harbor and at the Hartland Public Library. In fact, an important offshoot of reviewing has been the ability to remember plots/ characters and then use that knowledge to steer patrons to books they wouldn’t otherwise discover. There’s no more satisfying feeling than having a patron come through the door, waving a book you suggested and asking for another that’s as good.

The Central Maine Library District (CMLD) has had a great opportunity in place for years. Publishers send books for readers ranging in age from toddler through young adult. Librarians can select from them at no cost. In return, they review each one and return a print copy of said review to Cheryl Ramsay at the Maine State Library, who forwards them on to the publishers. The book goes into the library collection. I’ve been a reviewer for that program since I worked at the Maine State Library. Beth and both of our daughters have reviewed them and I taught two volunteers at the Hartland Public Library how to do so as well. Our combined efforts have added several hundred books to the collection over the years. In retirement, Beth and I continue to review and pass them on to the Hartland Public Library.

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For a period of a year or more, the CMLD had its own website where several librarians posted reviews regularly. It became a place where other librarians went to get a sense of what was worth buying. In the course of reviewing there, I was alerted to the importance (for some Maine librarians) of noting levels of profanity, violence and sexual content in books as these were deal breakers in certain instances. Sadly, that site is no longer.

These days, I’m reviewing educational DVDs and audio books on CD for School Library Journal and young adult fiction for the Buried Under Books Website. However, I try to leave at least a brief review of any book I read on both Amazon.com and Goodreads, because authors appreciate the effort and people who share my taste in books often discover unknown treasures.

What are your thoughts on reviewing?

Stowed Away Released

by Barb in Virginia enjoying the holidays with family

[image error]Yesterday was the release day for the sixth Maine Clambake Mystery, Stowed Away. The book takes place in Busman’s Harbor as an enormous motor yacht waits for a major retrofit in a shipyard there.

Many of the books in the series showcase a Maine industry: blueberries (Boiled Over), lobstering (Musseled Out) and of course all the books that take place during the season center on tourism.

For Stowed Away, I wanted to highlight another important source of jobs in Maine, shipbuilding.

The Age of the Ship might be over, but shipbuilding is still very much a part of Maine’s economy, from the Bath Iron Works, one of the largest employers in the state, which builds massive modern ships for the U. S. Navy as well as private and commercial ships, to the small boat repair shop run in someone’s backyard. You can even go to a school to learn how to build wooden boats in the manner of your ancestors (or in the manner of somebody’s ancestors).

[image error]On the Boothbay peninsula we are lucky to have several successful shipyards. Perhaps the best known Hodgdon Yachts with offices in East Boothbay, Newport, RI and Monaco. Hodgdon (which I can never spell due to that dgd that trips me up every time) is now run by a fifth generation family member and has been building boats since 1816. They make gorgeous sailing and motor yachts, as well as tenders that you’d be happy to have even if you had no yacht to tend. Hodgdon particularly specializes in high performance composite materials transferred from the aerospace industry and they build racing as well as pleasure yachts. They also do both modern and traditional interiors. Their range of skills from ultramodern materials-handling to traditional cabinet-making fascinate me. You should look at all the amazingly beautiful photos on their webpage here.

[image error]Right next to Hogdgon’s main facility in East Boothbay is Washburn and Doughty. A relative newcomer, founded in 1977, Washburn and Doughty has corned the east coast market for new tugboats. It amuses me that there even is an east coast market for new tugboats, but of course there is. The company suffered a catastrophic fire in 2008, but quickly rebuilt. You can read all about the company and look at their photos here.

[image error]In Boothbay Harbor proper is the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, formerly called Samples Shipyard. It’s best known for its work doing maintenance and restorations of sailing yachts and vintage tall ships. It has a marine railway that can handle boats up to 200 feet long and 7oo tons. The shipyard twice did restoration work on the Bounty of movie fame, which was lost off of North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy. This shipyard is an easy walk from our house and we often go over to check on what’s doing when there is a big ship in for work. You can enjoy photos of the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard here

The fictional shipyard in Stowed Away is most like Hodgdon Yachts. However, the enormous yacht mysteriously docked in Busman’s Harbor never makes it there because…murder intervenes. What are the odds?

I hope the fans of the Maine Clambake Mysteries enjoy Stowed Away.

DECEMBER CRIME ODDITIES

Susan Vaughan here. Because this is a crime writers’ site, crime being one of the key words, I thought I’d check out interesting crimes during the month of December.

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According to FBI statistics of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies, violent crime increases during the summer months and decreases through the colder months, although thefts and robberies increase slightly in December. Due to Christmas shopping, maybe. My research didn’t turn up any weird or fascinating or humorous December crimes in Maine, but here are ones in other states.

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FOOD HEIST #1… In 2015 man in Albuquerque, New Mexico, craved his mother’s posole, a traditional Mexican stew so much that he stole it. The twenty-three-year-old ignored his mother’s refusal to give him the dish, so he broke in and ran off with the entire pot. Posole is traditionally made with pork, peppers, beans, and sometimes beef tripe. This recipe for Posole omits the tripe. The son was arrested on a residential burglary charge. No gift for him from mama this year, and nada from Santa.

[image error]FOOD HEIST #2… Also in 2015, in Syracuse, New York, a father and son stole more than $40,000 worth of chicken wings from the restaurant where they worked as cooks. The sheriff’s office said the men placed large chicken wing orders with the restaurant’s wholesaler over eight months time. Apparently the two sold their loot on the street and to other businesses. They’ve been charged with grand larceny and falsifying business records. I can’t imagine how the restaurant owner or bookkeeper didn’t pick up on this boom in chicken wings! Hmm, I wonder if they’re a “flight” risk.

[image error]THE CHIP HEIST (not food)… Now for a crime that yielded a much bigger haul, in Las Vegas. In December 2010, a man wearing a motorcycle helmet strolled into the Bellagio Hotel and Casino and held up a craps dealer at gunpoint. The robber ran back through the casino and sped off on his motorcycle, which he’d left parked just outside. His take? $1.5 million, but in chips that would have to be cashed in at the Bellagio or sold to a third party. Weeks later, when the brazen Biker Bandit then offered to sell some of the chips online, undercover police nabbed him. Facts emerged that after the theft, the Biker Bandit returned to the Bellagio to gamble and drink. While casing his target, he stayed at that hotel. Three weeks before, he’d robbed another casino. In an ironic twist, he was the son of a local judge. He received a sentence of three to eleven years for his crimes. And Santa repossessed the bike.

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