Terry Odell's Blog, page 268

What's Cooking Wednesday - Joy's Eazy Peazy Meat Dish

Thanks to Elizabeth for her post yesterday, and showing us how to use our darkest memories to enrich our writing.



Today, I'd like to welcome Joy Isley to Terry's Place. She's sharing a recipe that's perfect for those days when you don't really feel much like cooking, or don't have a lot of time to assemble ingredients. I hope more of you will follow with favorites of your own. Remember, if you share a recipe, you get an additional contest entry.



Joy says: "When I don't have time this is what I fix, and my family often requests it."

Joy's EAZY PEAZY MEAT DISH



Heat oven to 350 degrees.



In a baking dish, place a round steak that has been cut into 4 sections. Pour over it 1 can of Campbell's Golden Mushroom soup and 1 can of Campbell's French Onion soup. Pour over that 1/2 a can of cold water.



Cover and bake for an hour or until fork tender.



Serve with cooked rice.



YUMMY



Thanks, Joy



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Giveaway #1 Winner

Thanks to everyone who entered. My random number generation has spoken. The winner of a selection of books from my overflow shelf is Dee Bibb. Dee, your prize will be on its way to you.



Don't forget - there will be more giveaways, so tell your friends to follow the blog, like the blog, sign up for my newsletter on my website, and share photos and recipes.

Dirt Yields Gold

Today I'm pleased to welcome Elizabeth C. Main to Terry's Place. A Central Oregon author who writes mystery, romance, and young adult fiction, Elizabeth has discovered that writers shouldn't bury painful memories. Dredging up traumatic episodes from the past often produces the best writing.





"The flowers that bloom in the spring,Tra la,Breathe promise of merry sunshine--"

Do those lyrics from The Mikado make me long to hear the rest of the song? Not really, though I have nothing against flowers or spring, especially with sunshine to follow.

But beauty and warmth don't cut it in chapter one, though they have their place. Something bad has to happen fast to snap the reader to attention, so skip the sunshine and muck around in the dirt.

Discover a dismembered body under the blooming flowers and you have the beginning of a mystery. Unearth a moldy stack of letters from the soil and a long-concealed romance emerges. A half-rotted sign pried from beneath your garden could provide words that lead to a poem.

An even more productive location to find dirt, metaphorically speaking, is in the sifting of your own memories. I'm talking about the distressing memories we all harbor, sometimes shielded even from ourselves. Those memories, though painful or humiliating, deliver the best stories . . . the gold we seek as writers.


When Cinderella went to the ball, it wouldn't have been much of a story had she danced the night away and captivated the handsome prince. It's the clock striking midnight, the panic, the lost slipper, which compel us to read on.

Our own lives contain drama, too, though most of us don't marry a prince and rule a kingdom. If we did, we'd proudly sell those stories for gigantic advances and everyone would sigh at our good fortune. But we each have unique personal experiences. If we have the stomach for it, we can dig into our disturbing memories to pull out stories that resonate with others.

For example, as a teen I went on dates. Not like Cinderella's royal ball, but I could write about wonderful evenings at dances, movies, and pizza parlors. That is, I could relate those stories if I didn't want anyone to read my work. Enjoyable outings typically don't contain enough steam to power stories.

Once, to find a gold nugget in an ordinary experience, I dug deeper, unearthing at last a humiliating evening buried in the dim recesses of my memory bank fifty-plus years ago. As I probed the recollection, details flooded my awareness as though the incident had happened only the day before. That depth of avoidance and awareness told me I was on to something other people might want to read.

The event? The night I waited and waited for a blind date with a boy from another high school. Our date had been set during a delightful and extended phone conversation, but he never came and he never called again. Being stood up might not be a universal experience, but being humiliated is. Digging in that particular patch of dirt yielded gold for my writing. And, since I was eventually lucky enough to marry a prince—again, metaphorically speaking—scraping up the details of that painful teen experience gave me authentic emotion to employ in a story. Years later, with my ancient angst put to good use, I can relax and enjoy "the flowers that bloom in the spring." Tra la, indeed.

Sometimes the memory locked away involves an incident that happened to someone else. For example, our pre-school son once caught his hand in an abandoned coyote trap hidden amid a rock pile in the rural Oregon scrubland. We were taking a peaceful family hike when he started screaming. Almost forty years later, my heart still does flips when I remember that seemingly endless scramble up the hill to reach him.

The sight of his poor imprisoned hand nearly made me sick to my stomach. Fortunately, my husband soon freed him. No broken bones, no damage beyond a bruise and shredded parental nerves, but I still squirm when I remember his terrified screams. Dragging out that wrenching memory and reworking it years later led to publication of "The Trap" in Cricket magazine.

What painful experiences do you have locked away? Even in the happiest of lives, uncomfortable memories lie buried in the everyday dirt. As a writer, you can burrow into them to find gold.

For more about Elizabeth and her books, including NO REST FOR THE WICKED and MURDER OF THE MONTH visit her website, www.elizabethcmain.com





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Homicide Hussey and the Haunted House

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Happy Halloween, all. Since I'm on the road, I thought I'd share one of Homicide Hussey's previous posts -- his encounter with the paranormal. I originally ran it in two posts, so it's longer than my usual posts. Hope you enjoy. (And don't forget my first giveaway deadline is tomorrow!)



Here, Detective Hussey is training a new rookie partner, Vlad. They're finishing dinner when they get a call...



"I've got a suspicious incident call at the Carpenter's Home on North. 98. Meet with the security guard who heard noises upstairs."



Vlad responded, "Fifty-one from Florida and the Boulevard."



In training new recruits, I always try to encourage them to formulate a plan in their minds. To visualize what they might find when they get to the call. I then caution them not to get tunnel vision. In other words, to develop several scenarios in their minds just in case.



This call, for instance, could be a burglar, a prowler, kids playing where they don't belong, or just the wind blowing against a loose shutter. It would be our job to investigate, search and locate the source of the noise, or to determine if the security guard was a little stir crazy.



When we arrived, I might have voted for the latter. Twenty-year-old security officer Luther Parton was about 5'3" tall and weighed about a hundred pounds.



His black leather belt was cinched so tightly around his waist, with the uniform shirt and trousers two sizes too large, that he looked like a tube of toothpaste, squeezed in the middle. Luther wore those black rimmed "Buddy Holly" glasses with real thick lenses. He seemed a little breathless when he ran up to the cruiser.



"I heard someone upstairs" he panted. "Then I was going up to take a look, my flashlight just quit."



"What did you hear?" I asked.



"It sounded like voices," the kid said. "Third floor of A wing."



"Any other ways into this place?" my partner asked.



"No, they're all locked and barred, just the front door, I checked them myself."



When we entered the lobby area of the building I could see that at one time this was a grand architectural work of art. The exposed beams and huge wooden doors gave it an almost medieval look. "When's the last time the upstairs were checked?" I asked.



"This morning by the day shift," the guard answered. "What're you guys carryin' there?" He pointed to the gun on my right side.



"It's a model 64 Smith, 38 special," I replied matter-of-factly.



"Ever shoot anybody?"



Jesus I knew that question was coming. It was always easier to say no.



"Oh." He sounded disappointed.



I let the rookie go up the stairs first, because I didn't think we would find any bad guys and he needed the experience of searching buildings. This one would give him plenty. The interior of the building was 180,000 square feet. We checked the first floor together, tediously looking into every room. Opening the room doors first, then looking cautiously into the bathrooms and closets. The electricity was off in the building, and thus the air conditioner was off. All the windows had been boarded up. The hot, stagnant air inside the building made it difficult to breathe. Vlad and I began to sweat profusely.




"Look, this place is huge and this is going to take us forever," I said. "I'll take the second floor and you take the third. If either of us finds anything, we'll holler for the other."



Vlad nodded and disappeared up the stairs. I followed, checking the stairwell and landings with my "Kell" light.



When I reached the second floor, I checked the rooms sporadically. It was getting really hot in there and I wanted to get out as quickly as possible. When I reached the end of the hallway, I yelled for Vlad. The echo in the old building was interesting. I heard no answer, so I yelled again. Still, no answer. Perhaps the rookie had finished his search too and gone back downstairs. I followed the beam of my flashlight back to the lobby and looked for Luther and Vlad. Finding neither one, I walked outside.



I found the security guard, sitting in the front seat of a golf cart, smoking a cigarette. "See anything?" he asked.



"Just a lot of empty rooms." We made small talk for a while. He was a "Wisheye" for sure: you know, "Wish I was the police." Eventually my young partner emerged.



"Ready?" I asked Vlad.



"Yeah. Who's staying in those rooms on the third floor?" he asked, looking at the guard.



"You saw someone, where..." The startled Luther jumped from the golf cart.



"I didn't see anybody," Vlad said "but there's furniture and things in two of the rooms up there."



"I don't know what you saw, but there ain't no anything in any of those rooms and ain't been anything in a couple of years."



It was pretty dark outside, but I could see the color drain from Vlad's face. His voice raised an octave as he said, "I know I'm not crazy. Two of the rooms had beds, dressers and night tables, you know old fashioned stuff."



"Calm down and let's take a look," I said. "Was the stuff stacked, or piled up, maybe it just got left when the old guys moved out." Both men tried to answer frantically. "Let's head up there and see." I turned toward the door. Vlad was a little hesitant, but followed.



We climbed quickly to the third floor, and as I stepped into the hallway, I unsnapped and drew my service revolver. I wasn't taking any chances. The rookie followed my lead.



"Which room was it?" I whispered.



The kid pointed to a door near the end of the hallway on the right. We made our way carefully down the hallway, sliding close to the wall. When we reached the door, I crouched down and motioned for Vlad to take my position. I then moved to an area in front and slightly to the left of the door. This would afford me a view of the interior of the room when the door was opened. I made note of the fact that door was hung on the right and swung inward. I nodded my head to my partner. Vlad reached up with his left hand, pointing his revolver at the door with his right. He turned the doorknob left, then right.



"Locked", he whispered.



"I'll stay here and cover the door, while you see if the guard has a key." Vlad walked quietly down the hall to the stairwell.



He returned a short time later with the security guard, who was mumbling something about the doors not being locked and fumbling through a large ring of keys.



"It's either this one or this one," he said, separating two keys from the large ring.





"Stand back." I motioned with the right hand. This time, Vlad crouched down and covered the door, while I reached up and worked the keys. The doorknob was wet like it had condensation on it.



That was weird, I thought. It's three hundred degrees in here.



The first key wasn't it. I inserted the second. Bingo. I dropped the keys, and the door swung open, hitting the wall on the inside. As the door opened, a blast of cool air hit me like a wave. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as we worked slowly around the corner, shining the flashlights in every corner and crack. When we went inside, the temperature seemed to drop even more. It was a good forty degrees cooler at the center of that room than it was in the hallway. It wasn't even like air conditioning. It was...damp, cold. I mean cold, not cool.



"What the hell?" I said out loud. "You sure this place ain't air conditioned?"



The guard just shook his head. His eyes were two tiny beads at the end of glass tunnels. "No power."



My partner had lost it. He was running frantically back and forth from one room to the other. "I know what I saw!" he screamed.



I tried to reason out the situation. It was obviously not working.



"There were beds with brown spreads and doilies on the tables and lamps and a toothbrush in the bathroom."



"Are you sure it was this room?" I asked



"Positive. I'm not crazy."



I was starting to feel a little spooky myself. "Let's get the hell outa here."



I'd barely gotten the words out before Vlad and Luther were running down the hallway. When I got downstairs, the guard was on his second cigarette having inhaled the first one in one puff, and my trainee was seated in the passenger's seat of the cruiser, staring straight ahead.



"You okay?" I asked



"Yeah," he replied, not looking at me.



We drove the rest of the night without much conversation. Vlad finished his training time with me and moved on. He seemed to be preoccupied. Several months later, recruit Vladimir Novanavich reenlisted as a second lieutenant in the United States Army infantry, and resigned from the Lakeland Police Department. He would never discuss the Carpenter's Home incident, and in later years he would say that I had probably played some practical joke on him.



Hey, even I wasn't that good.



As for me, I've never seen a U.F.O. Or a ghost. Or talked to Elvis through my television set. But on a hot August night in Lakeland in the early eighties, I did work a genuine "unknown" trouble call.





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Friday Field Trip - The Pumpkin Patch

Since I'm away at the Emerald City Conference, I'm re-running last Halloween's post. Hope you enjoy! These are some of the jack o'lanternes my kids have produced over the years.

Which is your favorite?





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Going Indie?

Today, I'm off to the Emerald City Conference. I'm traveling light, since I couldn't find a convenient itinerary with "my" airline, so I'm flying without any of my usual perks, including that free checked bag. Plus, I'm flying out of Denver, which creates issues with parking and schlepping to the terminal. So, it's a 'cram everything into one carryon' trip. I decided I could live without my laptop for the relatively short time I'll be gone.



I hope everyone continues to follow the blog, sign up for my newsletter, and all the other contest-entering options. I just won't be able to respond to comments. But I'll love it if when I come back, I have lots of new followers, contest entries, and comments. I've had two readers offer recipes already.

Last weekend, I attended the monthly meeting of my RWA chapter. Their program was a panel of authors who had recently decided to take the indie publishing route. They shared their approaches, which ranged from "do everything myself" to "pay a company to be my publisher."



There are pros and cons, of course. The author who paid for the service spent several thousand dollars for editing, formatting, and cover art. The company charges a separate fee for print and e-book formatting. Doing it yourself, of course, means learning how to follow all the formatting directions, and spending a lot of time. Time, as we all know, is money, so it's something everyone has to decide on an individual basis.



My thoughts. With the rise in indie publishing, there are going to be a lot of people out there who will take advantage of an author looking for help. You have to do your homework and shop around, because prices vary wildly, and I fear there will be horror stories about ripoffs. I've been lucky finding a good designer with reasonable prices for my cover art—I know I don't have the skills. Likewise, for my two original projects, I also added the cost of an editor. Again, I've been fortunate with reasonable prices. And I do think if you're going to indie-publish, you need to have a professional editor go through your manuscript. It doesn't matter whether you've been published before, or your critique groups say it's great. You need fresh eyes.



Case in point:


One of my short stories is part of an anthology being put together by the Backlist eBook group. It had been published by one of my publishers, which meant professional editing. I re-edited it before sending it to the Backlist editor. She found a few places that could have been clearer, and caught an error or two. Then, when the book was in the proofing stage, I read it again. As a final check, everyone in the anthology read someone else's story. My reader found two typos. And when I went to correct them, I found a third.



And this is only line editing. You need someone who will look at your story. I read—or started reading—an indie published book and it was clear that the author didn't have an editor who could tell her to tighten her story. Because of the poor storytelling, I won't be reading anything else by that author.



As far as formatting, I haven't seen the need to pay someone else to do it. The Smashwords Style Guide gives step-by-step instructions, and since I'm comfortable with my word processor, nothing seemed beyond my comprehension. Again, that's me.



Thus, I haven't had to outlay any phenomenal amount of money when I average the cost over the 6 books I've indie-published. To publish with any of the e-tailers, there's no up front cost to authors unless they want to purchase an ISBN. For print, I went with Create Space for DANGER IN DEER RIDGE, which sells on Amazon.com. The outlay there was $39 to have them take care of all aspect of sales. I don't expect to sell many print books, but they're there should someone want them. Consensus seems to be that print sales are a tiny fraction of e-book sales for indie authors.



What you shouldn't expect if you go the indie route is making lots of sales, either print or digital. Not unless you've got a good following. Joe Konrath had an interesting post the other day. He's suggesting that authors go no lower than the $2.99 price point (which is the lowest price Amazon allows for the 70% royalty.)



However, despite his arguments, I've decided to lower the price of WHAT'S IN A NAME? to 99 cents. Why? Because first, I'm not Joe Konrath. Or Barry Eisler, or any of the other authors whose names sell their books. People are more willing to pay 99 cents to take a chance on a new author. And that's what I am to most people.



We'll see what happens. I'll let you know. Tomorrow, while I'm in Washington, come back for a virtual trip to the pumpkin patch.



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What's Cooking Wednesday - German Apple Cake

Thanks to Susan Oleksiw for yesterday's guest post. Characters are my favorite part of reading and writing, and it's wonderful to see how others approach them.



Sorry there's no picture of the completed recipe this week. I'm trying to have everything ready for my trip to the Emerald City Writer's Conference, so I'm not cooking much. I do want to keep sharing recipes on Wednesdays, however, so here's one from my mom. She likes things simple, and this one, like the almond torte recipe which is also one of hers, is done in a food processor.



(And remember – if you share a recipe, you get an entry into my "cleaning out my bookshelf" contest.)



German Apple Cake

Preheat oven to 350.

Grease a 9" springform pan




IngredientsCake



1 c sugar

1 t vanilla

1 c flour

1 egg

4 T butter

4 large tart apples

1 t baking powder



Topping



3 T sugar

1 t cinnamon

3 T melted butter

1 egg



Directions



Cake:

With metal blade, add all ingredients except apples to bowl of processor. Process until mixture resembles cornmeal. Spread mixture in bottom of a well greased 9" springform pan



Peel, quarter & seed apples. Slice in the food processor. Arrange in layers on top of crumb mixture. Bake 45 minutes. (I put cake mixture up sides of pan about ½ - 1 inch). Save the 'best' apples slices for top layer so it looks like you've spent a lot of time on presentation.



Topping:



Add sugar, butter, cinnamon & egg to bowl of processor with metal blade. Process until mixture is smooth and sugar dissolves. Spoon mixture over apples & bake until top is firm, 30-45 minutes.



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Tips on Developing Characters

Today I welcome returning guest, Susan Oleksiw. Susan is the author of the author of two mystery series, one set in coastal South India, and the other in a small New England town. Today she draws on her experience as a writing teacher to offer some suggestions for developing characters.



The best stories are about people we can't stop thinking about. We get involved in their problems and want to find out what's going to happen to them--we fear for them, worry about them, feel joy at their escape from near death. And if it's a character in a mystery, we wait eagerly for the next installment in the series.

One of a writer's biggest challenges is developing characters the reader will care about and seek out again and again. Coming up with these riveting characters is easier said than done.

I have a few standard exercises that I hand out whenever I'm conducting a writing workshop, and one of them focuses on character development. One exercise is adapted from WHAT IF? WRITING EXERCISES FOR FICTION WRITERS by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter. The exercise is to write a paragraph about each of three characters--first is someone you know well, perhaps a relative or close friend; second is an acquaintance, someone you know less well but encounter once in a while; third is an individual you invent entirely on your own.




The exercise is interesting for a lot of reasons. The students make a variety of discoveries--about how well they think they know or understand someone close to them; the level of their own observation skills; the kinds of details that give a person a strong or clear identity; and the challenge in creating something that feels real without using some detail from real experience.

Students also learn how easy it is to let a cliche take over the description, and how hard it is to eliminate cliches or lazy thinking, but when a writer hones in on the individual's deeper motivations and feelings, he or she no longer needs to lean on cliches. When writers are thinking through the eyes of the character, the language reflects that as well as what the character talks about and sees and feels. Vocabulary the writer had rarely uses comes to the fore because it suits the character being presented. The goal is for the character to feel unique rather than be made distinct by a quirky hairstyle or verbal tic.

I use another exercise for discovering character, which came to mind recently. I attended an art exhibit and was just as interested in the other visitors as in the art--I love watching people. A couple of them seemed especially interesting and I know they'll pop up in a story some day. When I start work on a new story, I see the characters moving about in their given environment and I start describing them. The process of presenting the character on the page, describing his or her outfit, way of walking or speaking to another, becomes a springboard into a more metaphorical understanding of the person. Simply by describing someone interesting I have seen I can add layers of personality or motivations for what is to come.

The purpose of any exercise is to help the writer focus on the process of getting the image in the head onto the page, where it can be refined and refashioned as necessary. The goal is to create a character who will resonate with the reader.

Susan Oleksiw's current book Under the Eye of Kali: An Anita Ray Mystery is available in paperback from Worldwide. The second in the Anita Ray series, The Wrath of Shiva, will be available in June 2012. For more on Susan's approach to writing, visit her blog.



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Do You Need a Dead Body?

What I'm reading: Robert B. Parker's Killing the Blues, by Michael Brandman
I've hit Milestone #1 in my giveaway. You can't win unless you enter, so check the Deals & Steals tab.
Last week, on The Graveyard Shift, Lee Lofland shared some important information about property crimes, and how patrol officers work to solve them. He presented a lot of good information, including how useful fingerprints are (usually they aren't), and how people talk to cops. Take a minute to read it here .


But my takeaway from his post, and one that was followed up in the comments of the post, was that there's a lot of police work that has nothing to do with solving homicides. If you tell someone you write mysteries, odds are pretty good they automatically hear "murder mystery."

Can't you have a mystery that doesn't include a dead body? There are certainly enough other crimes out there, and they'll impact the lives of your characters even if nobody dies. And for me, it's always about the characters.

When I wrote FINDING SARAH, I thought it was going to be a mystery. But it began with a robbery (Anyone know the difference between a burglary and a robbery? The terms aren't interchangeable.) which brought a detective onto the scene. Now, maybe I got away without having the detective solve a murder because I discovered, thanks to my beta-reading daughters, that I was really writing a romance.


HIDDEN FIRE, the sequel, however did start with a murder, and solving it hung at the center of that plot. But here, the characters were established in the other book, and it seemed logical for me to test Randy with a homicide, since that kind of a crime was almost unheard of in Pine Hills.

(And that's another issue, touched upon by a recent guest. Small towns really don't have that many homicides. You are asking readers to suspend disbelief if you have a series set in a small town where people are dropping dead right and left.)

WHAT'S IN A NAME? had no dead bodies. NOWHERE TO HIDE started out with a simple missing persons case, although it escalated to murder well into the book. WHEN DANGER CALLS and WHERE DANGER HIDES also bypassed the central dead body issue.

Maybe it's because in the mystery sub-genres of romance, an author has more leeway, since the relationship between the hero and heroine has to be central to the plot, as important as solving the crime, or preventing world domination, or whatever other mayhem brought them together.

What's your take? If you're a mystery reader/author, do you think a book that centered around a non-homicide crime would keep a reader's interest. Or do we demand our detectives solve murders rather than bank robberies or breaking and entering?

Tomorrow, my guest is Susan Oleksiw, and she's talking about one of my favorite topics: characters. Come back and pick up some new tips.
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You Can't Win Unless You Enter

[image error] I've reached Milestone #1 by surpassing 375 followers, and am ready to start giving away books. Here's how it all works.

The BIG CONTEST has lots of ways to win. Along the way, there will be smaller giveaways, such as the one going on now. You can enter each individual giveaway as well as the one for the BIG Prize -- an envelope crammed with books and goodies.

But you have to tell me you've entered, which means emailing my contest address. Check the Deals & Steals tab for directions, deadlines, and details, and the Sidebar for updates.