Terry Odell's Blog, page 250

What’s Romantic Suspense?

[image error]I’m blogging over at Fresh Fiction today, and there’s a one-day contest. Comment to be entered to win any one of my e-books. Winner’s Choice. I hope you’ll all drop. It’s my first blog for Fresh Fiction, and I don’t want to feel unloved.

 

Friday Field Trip — Sand Dunes

Last weekend, Hubster and son went to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Hubster’s sharing a few of his photos this week. Enjoy.

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[image error]Have a great weekend, everyone.

Wrapping Things Up

[image error]When I was a kid, there was a riddle that asked why when you’re looking for something, is it always in the last place you look? Because once you find it, you stop looking. When you’re crafting a mystery, the last thing that happens is the mystery is solved. The entire book has been setting up clues and red herrings, introducing facts and characters that may or may not play a prominent role in solving the crime.

In classic mysteries, all the suspects were gathered in the drawing room and the detective would summarize the crime and accuse each suspect in turn, then explain why that person couldn’t have been the killer.

It’s a little harder to get away with that nowadays. And, in truth, the cops keep working until they’ve eliminated everyone and zero in on the real suspect, so solving the crime means ending the case—at least until it goes to court, but I don’t write that part of my mysteries.

How do you keep from a huge dump at the end, even if it’s not in a drawing room?(and a tidbit—Agatha Christie originally wanted Poirot to solve the cases in the courtroom, but she was told that would never happen in a court of law, so she shifted it to the drawing room)

First off, it’s doubtful that your detective is really working alone. At the very least, he’ll have a partner or colleague. There are also the lab techs, the crime scene investigators, the researchers…all providing information that has to be communicated, and at the right time. Reveal something too soon, and it’s going to spoil the mystery. Wait too long and it looks contrived. Save too much for the wrap-up and you’ll confuse your readers by bringing too many characters into the scene.

What I’m finding as I write the final chapters of my Deadly Secrets sequel is that I need to foreshadow a little more. Since I don’t plot in advance, this isn’t surprising.

Do I need my hero to find a specific clue—something that belongs to another character? I need to go back and make sure I’ve shown the reader that the character owns the item—and, to be fair, that it shows up more than once, and has some significance. Of course, to keep the mystery, all of these clues have to be subtle. We want red herrings, not red flags. One good way to do this is to show the specific item along with others. Maybe the character is emptying her purse and we see lots of items inside. The significant item becomes one of many.

Or, your character is caught and the detective starts asking questions. Your character answers, providing explanations to both the detective and the reader. But why is this character so willing to tell all when the detective questions him? Is he timid and easily cowed when the detective asks him a question? Is he arrogant and has to boast about how clever he was? Or does he simply admit defeat and confess? When I answer that kind of question, I’ll go back through the manuscript and add a snippet or two early on showing those traits.

Thus, as I’m wrapping up my sequel to Deadly Secrets, I’m pulling threads together. I’ve got my “idea board” full of sticky notes reminding me what things have to be addressed. Even as I’m trying to get to “the end” as quickly as possible, when I discover things haven’t been foreshadowed (usually because I had no idea the story was going there), I have to stop and fix them. Usually, it’s just a matter of adding a paragraph—often less—to cover things. So, although it seems that forward motion is slowing down, in reality, in the long run, it’s going to make a cleaner manuscript needing fewer edits.

Do you read mysteries? Do you beat the detective to the solution, or do you need to go back and see that yes, the author did provide all the clues, but they were so well hidden, you didn’t recognize them. Do you ever feel like the ending is rushed as the author is trying to wrap everything up in one final scene?

Come back tomorrow for a virtual trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

Wrapping Thing Up

[image error]When I was a kid, there was a riddle that asked why when you’re looking for something, is it always in the last place you look? Because once you find it, you stop looking. When you’re crafting a mystery, the last thing that happens is the mystery is solved. The entire book has been setting up clues and red herrings, introducing facts and characters that may or may not play a prominent role in solving the crime.

In classic mysteries, all the suspects were gathered in the drawing room and the detective would summarize the crime and accuse each suspect in turn, then explain why that person couldn’t have been the killer.

It’s a little harder to get away with that nowadays. And, in truth, the cops keep working until they’ve eliminated everyone and zero in on the real suspect, so solving the crime means ending the case—at least until it goes to court, but I don’t write that part of my mysteries.

How do you keep from a huge dump at the end, even if it’s not in a drawing room?(and a tidbit—Agatha Christie originally wanted Poirot to solve the cases in the courtroom, but she was told that would never happen in a court of law, so she shifted it to the drawing room)

First off, it’s doubtful that your detective is really working alone. At the very least, he’ll have a partner or colleague. There are also the lab techs, the crime scene investigators, the researchers…all providing information that has to be communicated, and at the right time. Reveal something too soon, and it’s going to spoil the mystery. Wait too long and it looks contrived. Save too much for the wrap-up and you’ll confuse your readers by bringing too many characters into the scene.

What I’m finding as I write the final chapters of my Deadly Secrets sequel is that I need to foreshadow a little more. Since I don’t plot in advance, this isn’t surprising.

Do I need my hero to find a specific clue—something that belongs to another character? I need to go back and make sure I’ve shown the reader that the character owns the item—and, to be fair, that it shows up more than once, and has some significance. Of course, to keep the mystery, all of these clues have to be subtle. We want red herrings, not red flags. One good way to do this is to show the specific item along with others. Maybe the character is emptying her purse and we see lots of items inside. The significant item becomes one of many.

Or, your character is caught and the detective starts asking questions. Your character answers, providing explanations to both the detective and the reader. But why is this character so willing to tell all when the detective questions him? Is he timid and easily cowed when the detective asks him a question? Is he arrogant and has to boast about how clever he was? Or does he simply admit defeat and confess? When I answer that kind of question, I’ll go back through the manuscript and add a snippet or two early on showing those traits.

Thus, as I’m wrapping up my sequel to Deadly Secrets, I’m pulling threads together. I’ve got my “idea board” full of sticky notes reminding me what things have to be addressed. Even as I’m trying to get to “the end” as quickly as possible, when I discover things haven’t been foreshadowed (usually because I had no idea the story was going there), I have to stop and fix them. Usually, it’s just a matter of adding a paragraph—often less—to cover things. So, although it seems that forward motion is slowing down, in reality, in the long run, it’s going to make a cleaner manuscript needing fewer edits.

Do you read mysteries? Do you beat the detective to the solution, or do you need to go back and see that yes, the author did provide all the clues, but they were so well hidden, you didn’t recognize them. Do you ever feel like the ending is rushed as the author is trying to wrap everything up in one final scene?

Come back tomorrow for a virtual trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

What’s Cooking Wednesday — Butter Tarts

Today’s recipe comes courtesy of Victoria Allman.

Butter Tarts

[image error]Pastry:

1 cup flour

1 tablespoon sugar

6 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons ice water

Mix flour and sugar in a bowl.  Add the butter and rub together with your fingertips until the butter is incorporated.  Drizzle the water over the mixture and mix together until the dough is evenly moist and begins to come together. Transfer dough to a floured work surface and shape into a 6-inch disk.  Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Pre-heat oven to 400.

Remove pastry from fridge and roll to 1/4-inch thickness.  Using a round cutter, 1-inch larger than the diameter of a muffin tin, cut 12 pastry rounds and press into greased muffin tins to form tart shells.

Filing:

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup corn syrup

2 eggs

1/4 cup butter, melted

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 teaspoons vinegar

1 cup raisins

Fill tart shells with 1 1/2 tablespoons of raisins.  Whisk together the brown sugar, corn syrup, eggs, butter, vanilla, and vinegar.  Fill tart shells with sugar mixture to 3/4’s full.

Bake @400 for 12 minutes. Cool.

Makes 12 tarts.

Victoria Allman has been following her stomach around the globe for thirteen years as a yacht chef. You can read more of her food-driven escapades through her web-site, www.victoriaallman.com

Fleeing Headlong Into the Past

[image error]First — I hope everyone will take a moment today to remember those who gave their lives on September 11, 2001. It’s hard to believe eleven years have passed.

Today I welcome Rob Kresge to Terry’s Place. Rob used to work for the CIA, whose Publications Review Board wants to approve every word written by former employees about events or countries since 1947. So Rob, an avid reader of historical mysteries, went back to 1870s Wyoming to create the Warbonnet mystery series.

Before I retired from the Army Reserve and CIA, my commuting buddies on audio books were Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael, Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody, Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe, and Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey.  The old saying is “write what you know,” but I’ve heard a more recent one, “write what you don’t know but would like to find out.”
I began to think about an historical mystery series set in a time and place not already overrun by sleuths like Ancient Egypt, Imperial Rome, the Middle Ages, and nineteenth century Victorian England and America.  I’d learned to ride in Wyoming as boy and found that that state (then a territory) had, to quote what Winston Churchill said about the Balkans, “manufactured more history than could be consumed locally.”
The first place in America (and nearly the world) where women could vote, the world’s first national park, the first female jurors, justices of the peace, Congresswoman, and governor.  The scene of literally battling dinosaur hunters, salted gem mines, mail-order brides, orphan trains, visits by Theodore Roosevelt and Virginian author Owen Wister, and the scene of many confrontations with Indian tribes being displaced.

I’d found my location, came up with my central characters—a Buffalo, NY newly-minted schoolteacher and a former Texas cowboy—and  identified the historical event that would underlie my first murder.  In 2000, I founded a writers group at CIA that included employees of all levels of accomplishment and every intelligence profession.  It had 180 members when I retired and is still active today.
But the road to publication is seldom smooth for first-time novelists.  I piled up about a hundred rejection letters, a few of which said “this is only a Western and we don’t publish/aren’t interested in Westerns”  What do you do when you get rejected?  Write another book.  Like a dummy, I liked my characters so much that I wrote two more Warbonnet novels while I kept querying.
Not having learned my lesson, I also wrote a Civil War female spy novel based on a true story that so far has not found a publisher.  Because of the timeframe, the Review Board isn’t interested in this manuscript either, although I found out about the true story in a book by a retired commander of the CIA’s Joint Military Reserve unit.
The one characteristic all my historical fiction shares is a strong romantic element.  I guess writing about historical women protagonists and other characters has stood me in good stead.  I set out to write what I didn’t know, but wanted to find out about.

For more about Rob’s books, you can  find the prologues and first three chapters of each novel at his website, www.robertkresge.com and order them from the publisher, www.abqpress.com, or from Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, your favorite independent bookstore via Indie Bound, Amazon, and on other ebook apps.

Put Your Characters to Work

What I’m reading: Nothing Daunted, by Dorothy Wickenden (book club)

[image error]I’m approaching the end of my sequel to Deadly Secrets. No title yet—it’s simply “Mapleton 2″ in my computer. But that’s another story.

I’m not a plotter, but toward the end of a book, especially one with a mystery theme, be it romantic suspense or straight mystery, it’s critical to have all the threads tied up. While it’s okay to mislead readers, again—important in mystery—you can’t cheat them. It wouldn’t be fair for me to have Bob turn out to be the bad guy if Bob hasn’t appeared in the book before. Or, in the case of a book where things happened in the past, at least mentioned in the book before. Or to have Bob play an important role, and then disappear.

For those who read last week’s post about my issues with chronology, you might remember that this book focuses on a cold case and covers several generations of back story, although the book covers less than a week in “real” time. And I’m not using flashbacks, so the reader isn’t going to see what happened until my cops find it. My cops have to dig out all the clues when they don’t have a lot of people still alive to question. So, for them, it’s a matter of brainstorming and spending time with search engines, taking each new fact and trying to see if or how it might connect to the others. My job is to keep track of all these threads and then check them off as I tie them up.

When my kids were little, they went to special classes (I was going to say a gifted program, but that would sound like bragging – oh, I did say it — Ooops) where they were taught to brainstorm. It meant coming up with every possible idea, and the “rule” was that nothing was too far-fetched to be considered. This is kind of like the Rule of Twenty I posted about a while back.

Now, if I were a plotter, I might know all this before the book started. But I don’t.

At any rate, I don’t have local brainstorming partners, and one of the tenets of my small on-line crit group is that we discover the books as they’re written: no spoilers which could influence feedback. So who are my brainstorming partners? My characters. Since they’re cops, they’re going to ask a lot of questions—both amongst themselves and of witnesses and suspects. Although I might not use everything, I find that putting them together and letting them talk while I type can reveal plot ideas I hadn’t considered.

Here’s an example from the unedited draft of the new book. Those of you who’ve read Deadly Secrets might remember Gordon, Mapleton’s reluctant Chief of Police, and Colfax, the county detective who’s a thorn in his side.

“This is going to be one hell of a long timeline,” Gordon said.
“Let’s start at the beginning.” Colfax went to the board and picked up one of the markers. At the far left of the board, he drew a large X. “Somewhere around here, we have a dead body.”
“Just one? There were bones from two females.”
“Until we get confirmation that the bones have been in the ground the same length of time, let’s look at one as our primary.”
“You think someone added the second bones later?”
“I don’t think anything. I’m collecting facts.” Colfax wrote Body #1 on the board. Above that, he wrote Body #2. “What else do we have?”
“Questions is what we have. Where were they killed?” Gordon said. “Were they killed in the same place? At the same time? What’s the connection between victims? I could go on forever.”
Without comment, Colfax simply wrote the questions on the board. “Who was the guy you wanted me to question?”
“Roger Ignatius. And the now-defunct corporation—Roger, Suben and Clark. They owned the property adjacent to the Kretzers’, and even though we don’t have a surveyor’s report, we’re looking at that part of the property as the bone site, so we can’t discount their involvement.”
“You’re saying if the bones are on the Kretzers’ property now, it wasn’t their property when they were buried?”
“Correct.”
Colfax added Roger, Suben and Clark to the board, paused, and wrote Kretzer as well. Although Gordon’s stomach did a quick twirl at that, he knew they had to be included. He hoped they’d be eliminated as quickly as they went up.
Which reminded him of Megan’s picture. He picked up another marker and started writing names at the upper right of the board. Fred Easterbrook. Below his name, Gordon taped the newspaper picture and added a large question mark above it.
Gordon stood back and studied the board. “You know what’s missing?”
“Other than a viable suspect, the names of the victims, and a motive?”

 

Friday Field Trip — Royal Gorge

[image error]Today’s photos are brought to you by my grandson, Joey Odell. He’s 4 years old, but his dad (Jason, whose photographs are featured here on a regular basis) put a camera in his hands when he was 2. These were all taken with his blue (very important) Fisher Price camera. We rode the Royal Gorge Route, and had a gourmet lunch in the dome dining car. There was also an open-air observation car, but Joey did a great job shooting through the glass. I was going to post mine, but frankly, they’re not any better than his.

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[image error]Have a great weekend, everyone!

 

 

 

Real Time in Fiction

What I’m reading: 212 by Alafair Burke (Nook)

During my recaps of the Mystery Writers of America University sessions, one point that was made by several presenters was keeping track of what’s happened in “real time” during your story. Even if you’re not a plotter (raising hand), you do have to know what’s going on even if it’s not on the page.

I’m not talking about back story here. I’m talking about the Big Picture. I ran into this yesterday when I reached the “tying thing up” phase in my current manuscript. Although I don’t plot most of the book, when it comes to the end, especially in a mystery, it’s important not to leave threads dangling.

This book covers multi-generations—not on the page, necessarily, but since the central crime in the book is a cold case, my cops are looking at things that happened decades ago, and the players aren’t necessarily still around. I have a core of potential suspects, and at some point, the cops have to discover the connections, both to each other and to the case.

I found that while I was writing, it was easy enough to toss names and some basic information out there, but once my cops started looking for these connections, I needed to backtrack—way back—and recreate the chronology.

In my romantic suspense books, I’m normally dealing with a very small cast–hero, heroine, and a few secondary characters. They also tend to be around the same age, usually in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties.

However, in this mystery, with its cold-case focus, I’m dealing with secondary characters who cover a much wider age range. It was easy enough when I was writing to say, “XX has a daughter and a grandson” but if said grandson was in his fifties, I had to figure out how old daughter and grandfather would have been.

I actually started a spreadsheet showing when each character in this group was born, created an abbreviated family tree, since I’m going back 3 generations. I did a lot of math, and a lot of number-juggling, to make sure I didn’t have characters giving birth at age 7, or joining the army when they were in their 40s, or living to be 107.

Although very little of these events are shown in the book, it’s important to make sure that you, as the author, knows what’s going on. So, although the book takes place in 2012, the cold case in this book happened in the mid 1970s, so I had to go back to 1912 and follow the lifeline of the character who ended up being the connecting element for the crime, even though he’s not even alive when the book starts.

This is an abbreviated version–I added another column with more details about who was connected to whom, and how, but on the off chance some of you might read the book when it comes out, I didn’t want to include spoilers!

Would a reader stop and do the math? I don’t know. I don’t think I’d notice, but then, I’m the kind of reader who assumes the author made sure it was right. Which is why I feel compelled to make sure I get it right, too. (And if you see any math errors in my spreadsheet, feel free to let me know)

Special surprise field trip pictures tomorrow – I think you’ll enjoy them!

What’s Cooking Wednesday — Deacon Burgers

Today’s recipe comes from writing colleague Maryann Miller, who’s a regular contributor at The Blood-Red Pencil. Thanks, Maryann

Not long after my husband was ordained as a Permanent Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, we were assigned to a parish where the ladies were putting together a cookbook. They asked me if I had a special recipe to contribute. Being the terrific cook that I am, I drew a blank. Then I thought of the great hamburgers my husband made on the grill.
My second moment of complete blankness came when the head of the Ladies Guild asked what this recipe was called. Gosh, it never had a name. When I needed some kitchen help, I would always just ask my hubby if he would make his hamburgers.
“Well, it really needs a name if it will be in the book.”
“Uh….. Deacon Burgers?”
So the name was born and continues to remain.

Deacon Burgers

Ingredients:

1 lb Lean Ground Beef

1 lb Ground Turkey

1 c Oatmeal

1 Egg

Worcestershire Sauce

Soy Sauce

Garlic powder

Onion Flakes

Salt & Pepper

instructions:

In a large bowl, mix the meat and egg thoroughly, then punch a hollow in the middle. Put the oatmeal in the hollow, then sprinkle Worcestershire Sauce and Soy Sauce over the oatmeal. For a different flavor, you could put Barbecue Sauce instead of the Worcestershire and Soy sauces. The amount depends on personal tastes.

Mix well, then add the spices. Since my husband never measures, it is hard to give amounts. I would estimate his sprinkling equals a tablespoon of onion flakes and a teaspoon of garlic powder. Salt and pepper according to personal tastes.

I like to skip the onion flakes and use real onion chopped fine — about a half a cup. I’ve also been known to sneak in a grated carrot, but don’t tell my husband. He would be aghast to know a real vegetable touched his hamburger until he put a pickle on it to eat.

After all spices are mixed in form into 8 patties and grill. They can be fried, but taste so much better from the grill.

NOTE: This basic recipe works well for meatloaf, too. For that, I definitely add the grated carrot, as that gives the meatloaf more moisture. I use less Soy and Worcestershire, and add a bit of catsup to my meatloaf mixture.

Visit Maryann Miller’s blog where she seldom shares a recipe, but does have lots of humor, some book reviews, a few snarky posts, and lots of guests.