Painting with Words

Recent reads...

2012-01-13T09:52:00.003-06:00

I had a list around here somewhere of the books I'd read, but it's managed to get buried, so I'll try to remember what was on it...

Cara Black:
Murder on the Palais Royal-- Aimee Leduc's partner is shot and left for dead, and Aimee's being accused.

Charles Todd:
Wings of Fire
Search the Dark
Watchers of Time
Legacy of the Dead
A Fearsome Doubt
A Lonely Death

Inspector Ian Rutledge. Obviously, I'm trying to catch up on the series.

On the Nook:

Steve Hockensmith:
The Black Dove

Rex Stout:
A Family Affair
Gambit
Too Many Women
Three Men Out

Currently reading:
On paper:
Daphne DuMaurier:
Jamaica Inn

On Nook:
Rex Stout:
The Hand in the Glove

Up Next:

Not sure. I have Death and Judgement by Donna Leon, or another Rex Stout, or half a dozen ebooks by Margret Frazer that I haven't touched yet. Plenty of choices.

I'm planning on doing a redesign on my website, once I can figure out some background art.

Winter has been unusually mild. I'm not complaining. Still have a couple of months to go, so there's plenty of time yet for nasty weather.

Until next time~~~

Rainy November

2011-11-07T09:35:00.002-06:00

Well, it's rainy today, anyway. And it's supposed to rain the next couple of days. Sigh.

We had a bit of excitement on Saturday night. About 10:53pm, an earthquake hit an area of Oklahoma centered near Sparks, with an intensity level of 5.6, the highest on record for Oklahoma. By the time it got to us, the intensity level was somewhere around 3, which was enough to make many people sit up and take notice. Most of the earthquakes that we get are so tiny that either we don't feel them, or the vibrations are so slight that we're not certain we really felt it. This one occurred during a pretty strong series of wind gusts, and many of us locally thought it was just the wind shaking things, until it became plain that it wasn't. There was a bottle of water on my dresser, and the water inside picked up the vibration of the ground. It was interesting and a little unnerving to watch.

Yeah, I know, this was child's play compared to the ones California gets, but this isn't California. As someone in Oklahoma stated, we get tornadoes. We don't get earthquakes. The next morning, whenever two people met, the likely first question was, "Did you feel it?" I know I heard it a lot.

The Muse Online Writers Conference went well, at least my part of it. It was the first year I ran the suspense workshop solo. There was a bit of a mix-up about participants being reminded about the conference's starting date this year, so there weren't a lot of people participating, but those who did were there to learn, and it made working with them a pleasure. Hopefully I'll be a bit better prepared next year.

Reading...erm, yes, I have done some. I'm a bit blank on things right now, and will have to refresh my memory on what all I read since last time. That will have to be in another post.

Car Wrecks, BB&BBQ, and the Muse Conference

2011-09-29T16:48:00.003-05:00

The last couple of weeks have been busy. We had about $2000 in maintenance work done on the main family car somewhere around a month ago, and just over two weeks later, a young man in a pick-up truck pulled out in front of us at an intersection and there was a collision. Granted, he couldn't see us, because another SUV blocked us from sight until it was far too late. I'm thinking it was his first major collision. You don't have that deer in the headlights look when you've been in a wreck before--you're too busy stepping on the gas pedal trying to get out of the way of oncoming traffic.

The young man had no insurance, something that just astounded my father, who came out to pick us up because our car was undrivable after the wreck. 'How could he get his car licensed without insurance?' he wondered. Insurance companies call such people 'taggers', because they buy insurance just so they can get the tags on their car, then cancel the policy. The police officer who handled the report of the wreck had a nice stack of tickets for him when all was said and done. Just the ticket for failure to have insurance is $500, according to our insurance agency. Fortunately, we keep comprehensive coverage on the family car, and our insurance company has been wonderful through the whole process.

There's an unmistakable roar of Fall in the air. It's Bikes, Blues, and Barbecue week. For the uninitiated, it's rapidly becoming one of the bigger biker rallies in the US. I've heard the number 400,000 tossed around in the attendance area. Lots of free concerts, some barbecue competitions, a few not-so-free concerts. Motorcycles everywhere. Next week's going to seem very, very quiet after this one.

I'll be happy to have that peace and quiet, as next week is the Muse Online Writers Conference, an entirely online conference where instructors and students from around the world can gather at times convenient to them. The workshop 'rooms' are open 24/7, and assignments can be posted whenever, and graded when the teacher is up and ready to work on them. I'll be teaching our Suspense workshop again this year, though I will be doing it solo, because my workshop partner is unable to attend this year. Hopefully everyone will be patient with me.

Gigi Ann of Ann's Reading Corner has posted her thoughts on Reef Runner. Thank you, ma'am!

So far this fall, the weather's been pretty nice. I guess we're getting a break before winter hits us. Definitely not complaining.

Recent reads--

A Pale Horse
A Matter of Justice
both by Charles Todd

These books have a darkness to them that comes from the protagonist's state of mind. A shell-shocked WWI veteran, he has recovered enough to function in his job as a Scotland Yard detective, but never knows when it will catch him at a bad moment during an investigation. Because of that, each book carries a certain level of depression with them, but are worth reading if you space them out with other books in between.

Billy Boyle by James R. Benn

This one was read in a listserv I'm on, but it wasn't until recently I had the chance to read it. Billy Boyle is a newly-minted detective on the Boston police force, just at the beginning of the US's entry to the Second World War. Family connections bring him to the attention of a distant uncle, General Eisenhower, who snaps him up fresh out of Officer Candidate School and has him shipped to London to serve as his own personal investigator. I had a little trouble connecting with the character right at first, but as both author and character grew comfortable with their surroundings, Billy became someone whose adventures I'm interested in following.

On the Nook:

The Black Mountain, by Rex Stout.

The death of Nero Wolfe's friend sets in motion events that not only see him leave the Brownstone, but send him to his birthplace in Montenegro (then part of Yugoslavia) to find the killer. Right-hand man Archie Goodwin spends most of the book waiting for Wolfe to translate for him, since he doesn't speak Serbo-Croatian.

Currently reading:

On the Nook:

Plot It Yourself, by Rex Stout.

Am enjoying this, not only for the usual antics, but because of the fact that Wolfe's clients in this one are authors and publishers.

Up next:

Heat Rises, by 'Richard Castle'.

Book 3 of the series purportedly being written by the character Richard Castle from the TV series 'Castle'. These things are fun. Not outstanding literature, but a neat way of making viewers of the series feel 'connected' to the characters and as if they're participants in a way.

Enough for now. I need to do some prep work for the conference.

'til later~~~

Comment moderation

2011-09-10T10:55:00.002-05:00

My apologies, but I've put the blog on comment moderation. I don't have the time and energy to fend off a lot of comment spam, and I certainly didn't start this blog to give folks a place to advertise products.

Legitimate comments will be approved as I get the notifications.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Uncertain weather

2011-09-09T12:13:00.004-05:00

This has been one interesting year, weather-wise. I'm sure anyone who's had access to either a TV or the internet knows exactly what I mean by that.

We went from summer to fall overnight, with the passage of one cold front. Days with highs in the nineties went to days in the seventies, and nights in the lower seventies went to nights in the forties. It's great not to roast every day, but now I'm cold, lol! I got adjusted to the hot temperatures. We had that nice rain a couple of weeks back, which has combined with the cooler temperatures to encourage vegetation to make up for lost time in a desperate attempt to reproduce before winter. My husband started suffering from allergies a couple of weeks ago. It really started hitting me just during this past week. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on, but then I noticed things flowering. The grass greened up after the rain, but we haven't had much more than morning dew for the past couple of weeks, so things are still abnormally dry. As far as I know, we're not under a burn ban, but there are enough dead leaves on the ground from the trees trying to save themselves during the heat of summer that a carelessly discarded cigarette or match could cause a disaster.

Gigi Ann of Ann's Reading Corner has posted her thoughts about Blood Money and Rio Star. Thank you very much, ma'am!

The new novel is coming along. I have a bit more research to do on it.

As far as reading goes:

I've just finished A Duty to the Dead, by Charles Todd. The first of the Bess Crawford mysteries, set during WWI.

Murder in Belleville, by Cara Black. Second in the Aimee Leduc series.

Natural Environments of Arizona. This is a textbook, bought for story research. It's about as dry as the title suggests.

Insider's Arizona Guidebook. An Arizona Highways book. Also bought for research. The part of the state that I'm interested in got a small section, but the pictures are gorgeous.

Arizona: A Cavalcade of History, by Marshall Trimble. Actually, I haven't read this yet, but it's on the list, as it's research material.

The Nature of Arizona. A guidebook of plants, animals, and trees in Arizona. Research.

The Mountains Know Arizona. An Arizona Highways book. Expected a trade-paperback type thing, and got an fairly good-sized hardback, with big, beautiful pictures. Definitely useful. Research.

The Mapping of Love and Death, by Jacqueline Winspear. Maisie Dobbs series.

Waiting on my Nook are:

Still Life, by Louise Penny. First in series.

The Black Dove, by Steve Hockensmith. Third in the Holmes on the Range series.

Plot It Yourself
Three Men Out
Gambit
The Black Mountain
Too Many Women
--All by Rex Stout. Five Nero Wolfe books I haven't read yet.

Waiting in paper is: A Pale Horse, by Charles Todd. Inspector Ian Rutledge mystery.

Nearly a third of the way through September already. The older I get, the more I understand what the Bible means when it says that a thousand years is as a day to God.

More to come as things warrant...

~~~

Revenge of Summer, parts One and Two

2011-08-12T13:24:00.003-05:00

You may have notice that I haven't said much for the last couple of months. (Well, I know someone has--thanks, Wayne, for asking!)

You may also know that I don't have air conditioning (just look back through my posts from previous summers. You'll find it). If you also know that the midsection of the US has been getting baked in a pressure cooker of a weather system for the past couple of months, you can probably guess what I've been doing. Computer time has been limited in order to protect my computer from overheating on those long and intensely hot days we've had, starting back in June and getting hotter and more intense as the summer progressed. Just right now, we're getting a break because the high pressure ridge that was holding everything in place fell apart and set some rain and cooler weather in, but the weather service indicates that the ridge is rebuilding, so we'll likely be heading right back into heat and drought in fairly short order. Hopefully nothing as intense as it's been. We came one degree short of equaling our all time record high of 110 degrees, and have had 16 days of 100 degree or higher temperatures this year, which is very unusual for us.

I'm not looking forward to that 'part two' of the summer attack. I was really hoping our end of the summer heat was just coming early this year.

Got some reading done, though:

Gamble (otherwise known as Dick Francis' Gamble) by Felix Francis.
I think the family business is in good hands. Felix is already a good writer. There's a lot about this that's familiar, in a good way. I look forward to the next one from him.

An Impartial Witness, by Charles Todd
The first out of this series I've read. World War I nurse helping to solve the murder of a woman who was the wife of one of her patients. This era is getting a lot of play lately, with Jacquiline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs books set in the aftermath of the war, and Todd's other series centered around a man who suffers from the after-effects of battle and traumatic injuries in his life as a police detective.

Swan for the Money, by Donna Andrews
Came in on this series with Cockatiels at Seven. It's okay. Will probably pick up more.

Dare to Die, by Carolyn Hart. One of her Death on Demand books. These later ones are easier for me to read, mainly because the earlier ones felt too much like every police official in the Carolinas was presented at one time or another as a rabid idiot who was so set on convicting an innocent person that only our intrepid heroine could keep an unwilling law and order moving in the right direction. Yes, this was probably typical of mysteries at the time they were written, and yes, it bothers me in other books of the era. I did guess what it was that set Emma's memory of the attack off, and had a fair idea whodunit. I enjoyed her Henrie O series as well, and hope she'll continue writing those. Not at all interested in the ghost series she's writing now.

Next up is Dead in Vineyard Sand, by Philip Craig, and then probably Bury Your Dead, by Louise Penny. Sometime soon, possibly Absolute Zero Cool, by Declan Burke, which I'll have to order from overseas, I think.

Thunder and rain approach as I type this. Gotta enjoy it while it's here.

Mundania's having a Sale!

2011-08-12T13:17:00.003-05:00

Mundania Press is celebrating its ninth year in business with a sale. All books on their website are 29% off for the month of August.

Yes, that's all books, whether in trade paperback or in ebook format.

If you're thinking about picking up copies of the Patty O'Donnell series as gifts, or if you're missing one and would like to get it at a discount, you can find them HERE. Sale prices are only available on the Mundania website.

If you like humorous crime fiction with a definite noir edge...

2011-07-16T13:19:00.007-05:00

Just received word from Declan Burke, one of the rising young stars of Irish crime fiction, that his new book, Absolute Zero Cool, is coming very soon...

Jacket Copy:

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL

by Declan Burke

“A genuinely original take on noir, inventive and funny. Imagine, if you can, a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler.” – John Banville, author of THE SEA

Who in their right mind would want to blow up a hospital?

“Close it down, blow it up – what’s the difference?”

Billy Karlsson needs to get real. Literally. A hospital porter with a sideline in euthanasia, Billy is a character trapped in the purgatory of an abandoned novel. Deranged by logic, driven beyond sanity, Billy makes his final stand: if killing old people won’t cut the mustard, the whole hospital will have to go up in flames.

Only his creator can stop him now, the author who abandoned Billy to his half-life limbo, in which Billy schemes to do whatever it takes to get himself published, or be damned . . .

“ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, author of AMERICAN SKIN

Advance Praise for ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL:

“Stop waiting for Godot – he’s here. Declan Burke takes the existential dilemma of characters writing themselves and turns it on its ear, and then some. He gives it body and soul … an Irish soul.” - Reed Farrel Coleman, author of EMPTY EVER AFTER

“Declan Burke has broken the mould with ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which is actually very cool indeed. Funny, inventive and hugely entertaining crime fiction - I guarantee you’ll love it.” - Melissa Hill, author of SOMETHING FROM TIFFANY’S

“If you want to find something new and challenging, comic crime fiction is now the place to go … Declan Burke [is] at the vanguard of a new wave of young writers kicking against the clichés and producing ambitious, challenging, genre-bending works.” - Colin Bateman, author of NINE INCHES

“ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is a surreal rollercoaster of a read, full of the blackest humour, and yet poignant. An outrageously funny novel ... The joy is in the writing itself, all sparky dialogue and wry observation, so smooth that when it cuts, it’s like finding razor blades in honey.” - Deborah Lawrenson, author of THE LANTERN

“Burke has written a deep, lyrical and moving crime novel … an intoxicating and exciting novel of which the master himself, Flann O’Brien, would be proud.” - Adrian McKinty, author of FIFTY GRAND

Absolute Zero Cool gets its official launch on August 10th at the Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, Dublin. If you're in that area, I'm sure he'd appreciate it if you dropped in.

You should be able to find the book here once it's available, or of course, you can find it on Amazon.co.uk.

In the meantime, you can find Down These Green Streets, a collection of crime fiction short stories by Irish crime writers and edited by Declan Burke, at the link above.

Plot Device, the video

2011-07-14T14:11:00.001-05:00

If you haven't seen this yet, you really should.

Plot Device

Website update

2011-07-13T16:13:00.005-05:00

First off, I've noticed an uptick in people websearching "Pepper Smith", so greetings to everyone who's just wandered in, and unless you're looking for the Pepper Smith who is a mystery writer, you've wandered in to the wrong place. A web search shows she's just been in the news again, but I don't have links to give you. There's a link in the sidebar to a previous post, where you can find the Glamour Magazine article from January about her.

Now, if you are here about the Pepper Smith who's a mystery writer, I've just done a minor update on my website, adding in some new reviews for Rio Star and Reef Runner, and a couple of links to interviews. Still need to get the character information written up and posted, but I suspect that's going to have to wait until the heat of summer breaks. We've been having a series of 99-100 degree days, which means I don't get a lot done in the way of thinking, unless it's trying to figure out how to angle the fan so it does a better job cooling. Today we have cloud cover and rain, and temps in the lower 80s. Much better, but temporary. We'll be back into the hot stuff over the next few days. Gah! It's only July 13th. We still have to get through August. Fort Smith set a record last month, 30 days at 90 degrees or above for the high. Since June only has 30 days, you can tell the summer started out hot. We're usually a bit cooler than Fort Smith, but it's been hotter than usual for longer than usual this year, and it's not going to get better until around the end of August. If then.

If you've happened to notice, Amazon for some strange reason has decided to list the Kindle version of Blood Money as gay/lesbian fiction. I don't know why, and neither does my publisher, as the book is definitely not gay/lesbian fiction. My publisher is working on getting it properly listed as mystery/suspense, but there's no telling when Amazon will make the change. In the meantime, if you bought a copy thinking it was gay/lesbian fiction, there's nothing I can do except hope that you enjoyed it anyway. The listing was not our doing.

Recent reads:

On the Nook:

On the Wrong Track, by Steve Hockensmith. Fun series, protagonists playing Holmes and Watson in the Old West. Second in series.

A Lesson in Secrets, by Jacqueline Winspear. Maisie Dobbs works with the Special Branch in 1932 Britain.

On Paper:

The Girl in the Nile, by Michael Pearce. #5(?) in the Mamur Zapt series. The Mamur Zapt is the head of the Secret Police in Egypt in the early 1900s. Welshman Captain Gareth Owen holds the post. Usually the Secret Police are the bad guys. Not in this series. Fun reads, not overly complicated writing. Interesting insights into turn of the last century Egypt.

Murder in the Marais, by Cara Black. First in the Aimee Leduc series. Had some problems believing the leader of the neo-Nazi group, but otherwise enjoyed the read.

Did not finish The Stabbing in the Stables, by Simon Brett. Second one of this series that I've tried. Just did not mesh with the protagonists, and figured out who did the killing way early in the book, although I didn't know why the killing happened until I cheated and read the ending. I think this series is not for me.

Currently reading:

On the Nook:

Street of the Five Moons, by Elizabeth Peters. #2 Vicky Bliss. Enjoyed these books when I was younger, still enjoy them now.

On paper: Don't know yet.

The "Where Has June Gone?" post

2011-06-19T19:23:00.003-05:00

I would complain about the heat and humidity, but it's only June. I suspect July and August are going to be whoppers in the heat and humidity department. However, the Southern Sauna season is well and truly underway. You don't even need a club membership. Just pull up a chair on your front porch and don't forget the towel and the ice tea. You're gonna need them.

Recent reads:

A Question of Belief, by Donna Leon

The Wings of the Sphinx and The Track of Sand, both by Andrea Camilleri. There's a new Camilleri due out this fall, if I'm remembering correctly.

On the Nook:

Borrower of the Night, by Elizabeth Peters

Muletrain to Maggody, by Joan Hess

Apple Turnover Murder, by Joanne Fluke. I did figure out who the murderer was in this one. Unfortunately, I figured it out before there was actually a murder. Sigh.

Up next on the Nook:

A Lesson In Secrets, by Jacqueline Winspear, with her heroine Maise Dobbs.

Up next in paper:

I haven't decided yet. Depends, but it may be one of Michael Pearce's Mamur Zapt mysteries, set in Egypt in the early 1900s. Also looking forward to the new Felix Francis book, which is supposed to be out in July.

I'll be honest--nothing much of general interest has gone on this month. I went to Artfest on the main square in Bentonville on the 3rd, along with the owner of Nightbird Books and an author who writes and illustrates his own graphic novels, as representatives of the 'Literary Arts', where, between us, we sold six books during a very hot four hours under a tent. Turns out that when the organizers of the event invited us, they neglected to mention most of the booths had exhibits aimed at children. Nightbird Books is planning on going back again, but next time it will be with a display of children's books.

There's a new review of Reef Runner at Night Owl Reviews.

More when I can think of more...

New reviews for Rio Star and Reef Runner

2011-05-29T19:49:00.004-05:00

Cathy at Kittling: Books has posted her review of Rio Star here.

And RT Book Reviews has posted their review of Reef Runner here. (I suspect it's too late to correct Patty's last name in the review, but I think I can live with that.)

Thank you very much to both of you ladies!

Recent Reads

2011-05-06T16:07:00.005-05:00

Recent reads (because I can't remember exactly when I read them):

by Andrea Camilleri:
The Shape of Water (Inspector Montalbano series book #1)
The Terra Cotta Dog (#2)
The Snack Thief (#3)
The Voice of the Violin (#4)
The Patience of the Spider (#8)

Rounding the Mark (#7) was the first of the series that I read, having picked it up from B&N as a remaindered book. The series is set on Sicily, and is a bit different in tone from Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti series. I was surprised to find the first three books loaded with f-bombs, since language wasn't a marked feature of Rounding the Mark, but it had eased considerably by the fourth book. These are translated into English, and the translator did a good job making them enjoyable in English. Salvo Montalbano is a interesting character, a police officer with integrity in a land awash in crooked politics and Mafia dealings. If language doesn't bother you, dive right in. If it does, give some thought to skipping the first three, or put on your blinders.

Speaking of Donna Leon:

Dressed for Death (#3 in the Guido Brunetti series)
A Noble Radiance (#7)
The Girl of His Dreams (#17)

Brunetti and his team investigate crimes in and around Venice. Brunetti's family keeps him grounded in a world where justice is often perverted by politics.

by Cara Black:
Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis (Aimee Leduc #7)
Murder in the Rue de Paradis (#8)
Murder in the Latin Quarter (#9)

Interesting mysteries, interesting protagonist. Don't read them one after the other, because there are things about them that may annoy you, such as the pattern of informants being murdered just before Aimee gets there, and some things about Aimee's personality.

by Alan Bradley:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

First in the Flavia de Luce series. Super bright 11 year old girl, set in Britain of the 1950s. Notices things the police don't. Two older sisters, and a stamp-collecting father who's still mourning his dead wife, and seems oblivious to the presence of his daughters on most occasions. Interesting start to the series. Read for the local Mystery Book Club.

by Joanne Harris:

Gentlemen & Players

Read for the local Mystery Book Club. Set in a British boy's school. Narrative works back and forth between two first person accounts, one from the murderer's pov, the other from the pov of the Latin teacher at the school, an older gentlemen with a lot of personality. Enjoyable, but the switches in pov can be jolting.

by Brian O'Connor:

Bloodline

Debut mystery novel set in the world of Irish steeplechasing. Cover blurb says 'Beats Dick Francis at his own game'. Good, but not quite to DF's standards. Will be watching for more by this author, though.

On the Nook:

by Diane Mott Davidson:

Crunch Time (Culinary Mystery Series #16)

Goldy somewhat redeems herself from last book's extraordinary bout of Too Stupid To Live. She still does some pretty stupid stuff, but compared to the last outing, this stuff seems minor. Whether you read it or not depends on your tolerance for TSTL, though.

by Joanne Fluke:

Cream Puff Murder (Hannah Swenson Series #11)
Plum Pudding Murder (#12)

This is one of those series that I don't know why I keep following, but I can't seem to help myself when the new book comes out. I'm really tired of the love triangle. REALLY tired. Mike the Sheriff's deputy would have been out on his backside a long time ago if it were up to me. I'm also not thrilled with the cat. Don't get me wrong, I'm a cat person, but I just have a hard time believing a cat that will put away the left-over food from one of those big multi-day self-feeders. (Carried it a mouthful at a time to put it back in the bag. Uh-huh.) And Hannah's baked treats are always somewhere to be found around the murder victim. Haven't tried any of the cookie recipes. Maybe someday.

Also got and read copies of Rio Star and Reef Runner on the Nook. Wanted to see how they looked...

Celestial Rose

2011-04-24T19:51:00.003-05:00

This 'rose' is actually two interacting galaxies, in an image captured by the Hubble Telescope. You can find a larger version of it at Hubblesite.org.

Odds and ends

2011-04-24T19:50:00.002-05:00

Our yard has become part sponge, part wading pool. I think the last time there was this much water in our yard, there was a 'possum that had taken shelter under our house, and for a few days couldn't get out. The opening it had come in through was under water. We'd finally managed to prop open the access door to give it a way out, but I think it still waited a little rather than swim to get through the opening.

I'm ready for the rain to end. First the unusual winter weather, and now this. Of course, once summer gets here and we have to deal with scorching heat and tinder-dry grass, we'll be wanting a bit of this rain, but this is a bit much all at once.

Reef Runner is now available from Mundania Press. Currently, the PDF is available for immediate download. The trade paperback is orderable, but probably won't be printed until the middle of May, or thereabouts. Such is the joy of working with POD. It takes about a month for Ingram to list the book, after which time it can be ordered and received within a few days if ordered through Amazon, or a bit longer from other venues, depending. I'll keep my list of where to order kept up to date as new places become available, but for now, it's from the Mundania site.

Purplume reviewed Rio Star, for which I once again say, 'thank you'.

Cathy at Kittling: Books has done a review of Blood Money that had me grinning from ear to ear. I'm delighted that you enjoyed it, ma'am!

I'll probably start posting a monthly list of what I've been reading. I'll likely say something about the ones I really enjoyed, but I doubt I'll do more than make a notation on the ones I didn't enjoy or didn't finish. For some reason, people forget that authors are also readers with opinions, and when we express negative opinions, we're considered to be jealous, and we get pounced on by fans of the author we 'dissed'. I don't really care to deal with rabid fandom.

Looking forward to sunshine, which the weather forecast says we should get in a couple of days.

~~

Glamour article about Pepper Smith

2011-03-25T15:48:00.004-05:00

Glamour magazine's website now has the article up about the Pepper Smith who was kidnapped at age four. The link is http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/2011/03/i-was-kidnapped-at-age-4.

Again, this isn't me, but I get a lot of traffic on my website and blog looking for her, so I'm happy to direct you on to what you're probably really looking for.

Blood Money Review

2011-03-22T20:08:00.002-05:00

There's a very nice review of Blood Money over at purplume's blog.

Thank you very much, ma'am, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

New cover

2011-03-11T13:43:00.002-06:00

This is the new cover for Reef Runner. It's difficult to tell from this size, but the diver farthest from the viewer is holding a knife, which explains the weird position of the closer diver. A bit more dynamic than the first cover, I think.

If all goes to plan, the ebook version should be coming out on April 12.

Shuttle launch and cover update

2011-02-27T12:56:00.002-06:00

As many times as we've seen the space shuttle launches on TV, generally a ground view watching the column of fire and smoke rise into the air, I don't think I've seen it from the air before. This clip was caught by a passenger on a jet, which just happened to be passing by in range to see the Discovery make its last trip into space.

Shuttle Launch clip

I got a black and white copy of the Reef Runner cover for an ad in RT Book Reviews, and there are changes. I don't have a color copy yet, but I'll post it when I do.

Just a note...

2011-02-15T19:27:00.002-06:00

The CAPA winners were announced yesterday during a day-long party on The Romance Studio's website, and the winner for the Romantic Suspense category was J.D. Robb (aka Nora Roberts). Since I was a) not even aware that there was such an award until someone pointed out to me that Blood Money had been nominated, and b) realistic about my chances of winning it, I am not distressed by this, and in fact was expecting it. Congratulations to J.D. Robb for winning, and my thanks to The Romance Studio for even including me on the same list with her.

Reef Runner

2011-02-12T13:27:00.003-06:00

This is the cover image I received for Reef Runner, the third book in the Patty O'Donnell Mysteries series. There's a possibility it may end up looking a little different from this in its final form, but probably not much.

I've just finished going through the galley looking for those niggly bits that managed to escape author, editor, and proofreader on previous run-throughs. So far it looks pretty good, but there's always the chance something glaringly wrong will show up only after it's in print and nothing can be done about it.

It looks like the publication date will be in April, which means it will be available in ebook first, and then paperback about a month or so later, either in May or June, depending on when in April it comes out.

And here's the blurb from the back of the book:

Patty O’Donnell has everything she could want in life—a loving husband, a job she enjoys, and a year-old daughter she adores. An enemy from the past needs to make a lot of money quickly and believes he can use Patty’s skills and talents. Forced to choose between life as his slave and her daughter’s safety, Patty sacrifices her own future to save her child.

Every step takes Patty deeper into a world of theft and deception. A scam on the Great Barrier Reef nets two very different results—financial gain, and the unexpected attention of a dangerous crime boss, who offers them both a choice. Serve him, or die.

You can find reviews and the first chapter here.

And the winners are...

2011-02-01T00:07:00.002-06:00

...by default, Snuffygump and Purplume, since they were the only ones to enter. Ladies, take your victory stroll around the track, and when you come back, email me your addresses (erm, yes, even you, Snuffygump. I've managed to misplace it.)

The weather forecast looks nastier by the hour, so if you guys don't get email confirmation from me on your addresses, just be patient. I'll get to it once we're up and running again. I really hope it doesn't do what they're forecasting. Especially the -7 degrees they're talking about a few nights from now. The houses in this part of the country really aren't designed to handle that sort of cold. Not to mention that a lot of trees were damaged in the ice storm a couple of years ago, and even a light coating of ice with the winds they're talking about is going to bring a lot of limbs down. Ah, the lovely sound of chainsaws echoing across frozen fields buried under 4-10 inches or more of snow.

Naw, I think I'd rather not imagine that.

Last day to enter drawing

2011-01-31T09:52:00.002-06:00

This is the last day to enter the drawing for the copies of Blood Money and Rio Star.

We are scheduled for some pretty nasty weather tonight and tomorrow. If the power gets knocked out, I may not be back online for a couple of days, so please be patient. I'll hold the drawing as soon as I can get back, but if no one else enters, Snuffygump and Purplume will have it in a walkover. Only entries before midnight, January 31, are eligible. (Midnight my time, of course.)

Edits have been completed on Reef Runner, the third book in the Patty O'Donnell Mysteries series. It was originally scheduled for publication in March of this year, but due to unforeseen circumstances (my editor moved house from one state to another, with all the attendant hassles), the release date has been shifted. No word on precisely when, yet, but I'm hoping maybe May. We'll see.

Enter for a chance to win Blood Money and Rio Star

2011-01-13T20:50:00.003-06:00

I have two signed sets of my books, each with one copy of Blood Money and one of Rio Star, which I am holding a drawing for. For a chance to win one of the sets, just leave a reply to this post. (Spam and anything profanity-laden are automatically disqualified--it's my drawing, so I can set the rules.) I'll hold the drawing on January 31, and post the winner's names on February 1, at which time I'll need the winners' contact information, so if you enter, be sure to check back, otherwise I might not be able to get your books to you.

Creepy webstats

2011-01-13T20:29:00.003-06:00

Sometimes, real life throws you something that just about makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Not long ago, my Sitemeter account did just that. It tells me generally how someone reached my site--if it was through a search engine, it gives me the search terms that were used. The search terms used were: pepper smith abducted.

Yup. Creepy. Of course, having been web-cognizant for a while, I knew already that there were a number of other Pepper Smiths out there, and since I knew I hadn't been abducted, I figured it was one of the others. I followed the link to run the search myself, but nothing popped up to explain why that search term had been used.

A while after that, I got a Google alert with a link to a post by Jose Mandojana that explained that odd Google search. Jose is a photographer whose work appears in magazines, and he was blogging about a photo he'd done of a Pepper Smith in California, who had been abducted as a 4-year-old and is now an adult in her 40s. Very good shot of an attractive woman in front of a stormy seascape. Her story, and the photo, are in this month's Glamour Magazine. His post about it is titled "Kidnapped".

On edit: There's a pdf of the Glamour magazine article here.

The CAPAs

2010-12-24T15:13:00.002-06:00

The Romance Studio's nominees for the 2010 CAPAs (go here for details) have been announced, and I have been informed that my book Blood Money is among two nominees from Mundania Press in the Romantic Suspense category. Congratulations to my fellow Mundania nominee, Susan DiPlacido (House Money), and to all the other nominees. I am surprised and honored to have been nominated. Many thanks to The Romance Studio!

So You Want To Write A Novel

2010-12-13T18:13:00.003-06:00

If you're a writer and you haven't seen this video yet, go watch it. Now. I'll wait.
So You Want To Write A Novel

It's amazing how many writing misconceptions got squeezed into 4:38.
____________________________________________

I've got in mind another word-art post, but it's not fully formed yet, so I'll get it out here when it's ready.

I'm also thinking of having a drawing for copies of Rio Star, but don't have all the details worked out yet. Also coming soon.

Minor update

2010-11-17T10:38:00.001-06:00

Rio Star trade paperback is now showing on Amazon.com as available for ordering, in case you were interested.

Of La Nina winters and fire hazards

2010-11-16T10:08:00.003-06:00

They're telling us that we could have a moderate to strong La Nina weather pattern this winter, which is something of a mixed blessing. I hate the cold, so the warmer temperatures the southern US sees during La Nina are a welcome thing, but the drier weather could be problematic, especially since we're already in a moderate drought. High wind days are already cause for the weather service to issue fire weather statements. We may be seeing wildfires in Oklahoma and Texas again this winter. I hope not, but it happens in drought years.

Sometime today, we're supposed to be getting the season 5 set of Doctor Who (season 5 as in the most recent series, not the original one). Matt Smith makes a wonderful Doctor. Amy is one of the better companions (she's right up there with Sarah Jane and Donna, as far as I'm concerned). River Song is intriguing, and the fact that she and the Doctor seem to be moving in opposite directions through each other's timelines is really interesting, or at least they're meeting out of order, but so far River's the one who knows all about the Doctor, and he's just learning about her. I'll be interested to see where they take this in next year's episodes.

Rio Star is just beginning to show up in other venues. There's a listing for the trade paperback on Amazon now, but it's showing as temporarily out of stock. At least it's listed. There's a copy of the original edition (from WCP) on Amazon, listed at the appallingly high price of $274.14. I would be flattered that anyone thinks my books might be worth that much, but there's just a wee bit of insanity in believing that they really are. Especially when you can buy a brand new copy from my new publisher at $12.95, or an ebook for $4.99. The ebook has also shown up in an online store in the Netherlands, so it should begin showing up in various venues before very much longer.

I'm dealing with the aftermath of the yearly virus, which seems to run rampant through the local population beginning around the time everyone has to close up their houses and turn on the heat. Yucky stuff. Two days of constant drainage and coughing, followed by days of coughing up everything that drained into your lungs during the first two days. There's a secondary infection that goes with it, but it seems to be less of a problem if I just avoid eating anything with a lot of dairy in it. In a way, it's oddly appropriate, since the fourth book in the series (which I'm working on now) begins with Patty standing-in for her aunt somewhere due to her aunt having the flu. Not that I'm telling you anything that you don't find out in the first page or so. And Micheal will be in it. If you've ever lamented the fact that Patty's first three adventures don't include an awful lot of her husband, this will hopefully make you happy.

The first review for Rio Star has come in from the Romance Studio. Hmm. Okay, it's not the first review, since I got the review from Romantic Times a while ago. The RT reviewer was apparently not a fan of horse racing. Ah well, can't please everyone.

The Well-Dressed Word--Some thoughts on the use of modifiers

2010-11-09T12:22:00.001-06:00

There comes a time in nearly every writer’s life when one realizes that one may, in fact, be committing the literary equivalent of a fashion faux pas.

That moment occurred for me somewhere between twelve and fifteen years ago—the timing is hazy, but the event is still clear. A manuscript I had sent out that was very much not-ready-for-prime-time returned with a note scribbled on the front page. Someone had taken the time to point out to me that the manuscript was over-written.

It was probably one of the most important critiques I’ve ever gotten, and led to me taking my craft a lot more seriously.

So what does it mean to over-write something? For this, I’m going to draw on a visual metaphor, that of the best- and worst-dressed lists that always pop up around Oscar time every year.

If there’s one commonality between the dresses that make up the best-dressed list, it’s that most of them are less complicated than you’d expect them to be. In many cases, they’re closely fitted between shoulder and hip, following the contours of the body beneath without being tastelessly tight. Embellishments are carefully placed, so as to add to the beauty of the whole without overpowering it.

If there’s a commonality between the dresses on the worst-dressed list, it’s that they tend to be dominated by other things. Mounds of ruffles, overly-puffed sleeves, bows that are big enough to tie up a cargo ship, cut-outs and deep necklines that make you wonder how the woman in them stays just this side of a wardrobe malfunction. The embellishments shout ‘look at me, aren’t I clever, aren’t I daring’, putting the woman in the embarrassing situation of having to admit that perhaps her taste in clothes needs some refining.

Modifiers can be compared to the embellishments on a dress. Your use of them can put you either on the best-dressed or the worst-dressed list, and which one is which may not be what you’re expecting.

Just as fashions differ a bit from country to country, to a certain extent, the use of modifiers, the adjectives and adverbs that enhance your nouns and verbs, will be determined by what is the accepted norm in whatever genre you write in. (And if you’re not reading in your chosen genre to find these things out, why aren’t you?) Science fiction/Fantasy requires a lot more description because the worlds in which the stories are set are not the one we live in. Romance has its own set of modifiers. Mystery/Crime fiction is often tightly written, the modifiers few and well chosen in order to facilitate a fast read. Literary fiction tends to be very word-conscious, and certainly has its share of verbal peacockery.

One thing that’s true in all genres, though, is that there comes a point where the modifiers stop adding beauty and become an author’s way of shouting, ‘Look at me, aren’t I the clever one? Aren’t you impressed with my vocabulary?’ Unless you are writing for a very particular audience, the answer to that would be a resounding, ‘No.’

Like the overly puffy sleeves, the excess ruffles, and the bows that are so big that you risk putting someone’s eye out with the corners every time you turn around, flowery language can do more to obscure the natural beauty of your prose than enhance it. If you notice in your work that every noun and every verb carries a modifier or two, you’re over-writing. If you can go through and cut most of your adverbs and adjectives without making the meanings of your sentences unclear, you’ve been over-writing. If you run a search for ‘ly’ words and end up with your manuscript swimming in blue highlights, you’ve over-written. (Some people advocate not using adverbs at all, but there are extremists in every group.)

Embellishments used sparingly can make a dress with simple, classic lines into something elegant and memorable. Embellishments used to excess turn that same dress into a framework for hanging embellishments on. How can you tell which is which?

The fact is, as writers, we’re in love with words and what we can do with them. Especially in our early stages, we’re excited about those bows and ruffles and can be blind to the fact that we’re over-using them. This is where having a critique group or at least a critique partner can be very useful. Not everyone is going to agree on what’s too much in the modifier department, but if you find that everyone is remarking on the same things, it would be a good idea to look at those things to see what needs changing. In the end, it always comes back to what’s best for the story. We may love the way we phrased something, but if our words are drawing attention to themselves rather than moving the story along, we may have to ‘kill our darlings’ for the sake of the whole.

And don’t forget that reading is one of the best ways to understand what works and what doesn’t. Read what the best writers in your genre have to offer. If you read something that’s not so good, you can learn from that as well by trying to pinpoint why the prose isn’t working for you.

Just like those designer dresses that make the best-dressed lists, prose that is elegant and memorable is both deceptively simple and difficult to achieve. Both require observation of what others have done, and practice until the final product is sleek and embellished in just the right way to bring out its beauty. People may never ‘see’ the work you put in, but they will remember the final product.

Rio Star is now in print

2010-10-13T14:45:00.002-05:00

Rio Star, the second book in the Patty O'Donnell Mysteries series, has been released by Mundania Press, as of last night. Currently it's only available from Mundania, but should be up at Amazon pretty soon, and then from other outlets in the next month or so.

Envy in the writing world

2010-08-20T13:00:00.003-05:00

There's a wonderful post over at Pimp My Novel about that nasty little thing called envy and how it affects relationships among writers. It's one of those things you don't really expect to happen, but it does, and it's nice to be aware of it before it rears up and whacks you in the face, whether you find yourself being envious or on the receiving end of the envy.

Inevitable Envy

The website rewrite is coming along nicely. In fact, I've got it mostly online now. There are a few pages where information has yet to be added, but most of it's there and ready to go. Feel free to check it out here.

Sauna days

2010-08-09T21:12:00.002-05:00

If you know where to find the National Weather Service watches and warnings map, take a look at that big ugly orange spot spread out over the center of the US. We're in the middle of that. Tomorrow's supposed to be another 100 degree day. With all this humidity, the idea that you could gain the same sauna experience sitting on your front porch that you could get in a high-priced health club is not all that far-fetched.

I actually feel more sorry for the folks further south, where they live along the Arkansas River. The radar the other day showed not just the normal humidity in the air, it showed the humidity added by water evaporating from the river, in a green line that followed the course of the river. A 107 degree day with that sort of humidity must feel abysmal. Quite a bit more sauna-like than I particularly want to experience.

Being inside in front of the fans puts me in a good position to work on my website, though. The rebuild is coming along all right. It's the first time I've done the coding by hand, and I'm enjoying the process. It should be a vast improvement over the website I've got now. I'll tear down the old one and upload the new once it's finished and ready to go. I'm planning on adding brief explanations of how the various books came to be written, as well as short biographies for Patty and her family, and other characters where warranted.

Rio Star has been through the galley stage, and has been sent for at least one review. I've got cover art for Reef Runner, but I'm not sure it's the final version yet, so I'm not posting it for now. I have a writing post in mind on the use of modifiers, but I'm still gathering my thoughts on it.

Speaking of writing posts, head on over to Hey, There's A Dead Guy In The Living Room for one of those posts that you wish every novice writer would read.

Enough for now. Oh, by the way, if you've read Blood Money and enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review at Amazon, or at Barnes & Noble, or both, if you're feeling really generous. :)

~~

Turn me over, I think I'm done on that side

2010-06-21T15:14:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the post where I whine about how hot it is.

Okay, yeah, I know, it's hot everywhere. But this is my blog.

It's 93 degrees, and although the weather site says the humidity is 47%, it sure feels like it's higher. The national weather service site shows excessive heat warnings curling around the area where I live, with areas of heat advisory all around the sides where the excessive heat warning isn't. We're in an island of space that's just hot, but not so hot they felt they had to tell us about it. There's also a high pressure area over us, and watching the radar images shows weather swirling in a clockwise direction around us, but we're doing well if we get even a few sprinkles out of all those afternoon pop-up storms we keep getting told about.

It's only June 21. This is a weather pattern that usually pops up in July and August. I'm not looking forward to the next few months.

On another blog (apologies, I don't remember whose it was), I found a link that led to Author!Author!, a blog that deals a lot with issues involved in writing and publishing. The current series of posts is on what she calls "Frankenstein Manuscripts", and is well worth the time it takes to read through them. It deals a lot with what mistakes aspiring authors make that get their manuscripts rejected by literary agencies and editors. (No, it's not about the horror genre, although some of the errors she writes about are horrors themselves.)

Editing has been completed on Rio Star. There is still the galley stage to get through, but I don't expect that to be very difficult, unless something goes very, very wrong somewhere.

I've also been collecting more places where my first book is available for order. Eventually I get them added to the list at the top of the page. When I'm not melting from the heat. And don't forget that you can order a copy in at brick and mortar bookstores. It takes a little longer to get that way, but if you're concerned about doing business online, it's probably your best bet.

If you've visited my website, you'll have noticed that it's a) somewhat plain, and b) not necessarily all that well organized. I've got plans for it, but it will take a bit of work to get it where I want it. I'll post and let you know once I've got the new stuff up and running--in the meantime, the old is still there and works fine.

It's been more than a year now since my ankle was broken. It's healed, sometimes a bit sore, and although I have quite a bit of the flexibility in it that I'd had prior to the break, it's still lacking a bit when it comes to stairs. Going up them is fine. Coming down them...the joint doesn't bend quite as much as needed, which makes it a little awkward. I usually end up with a sore ankle for the rest of the day. I also have a remnant discoloration of my lower shin from the strap the doctors used to cut off the blood flow/hold my leg in place during the surgery. I tend to retain remnant discolorations in the layers under the skin from very heavy bruising on my legs. It's not dark or anything, but it will probably be there for another year or so.

I hope, wherever you are, that you're enjoying air conditioning and something cold to drink. Be safe in the heat.

~~~

And now, Rio Star's new cover

2010-05-27T13:33:00.003-05:00

Got the new cover for Rio Star. The artist kept the girl and the fonts from the Blood Money cover to help connect the series. I think (at least I hope) the top image is supposed to be Buenos Aires, and the bottom is, of course, a horse race in progress.

We're in the process of editing the book. So far it's been pretty painless, but again, this is the second publisher for these books, so most of the rough edges have already been knocked off.

More later~~

Of sales, and other things

2010-05-11T15:40:00.003-05:00

So, after nearly two months since my book's release, how are the sales?

The only answer I can give at this point is, I don't know.

My publisher does report royalties on a monthly basis--but they have to wait for the sales venues to send them their account statements and the money before they can report the sales and pay royalties, which can sometimes take a while, especially with places like the brick and mortar chain stores, which are known to take months to get around to sending reports and money.

Since Blood Money released in the second half of the month of March, and wasn't available through most online sales venues until the middle of April...well, if there were sales during that first thirty-day period, I'll be happy. But I probably won't begin to find out about them until the next month or so.

And since the vast majority of my publisher's sales do come through ebook downloads, there's no easy way of tracking them. I'm not complaining. This is just the nature of the business. And with the advent of e-reading devices that people actually want to use, the market is growing, and those publishers who are already established have a nice advantage, because readers already know they put out a good product.

One potentially encouraging sign is that my book debuted on Fictionwise a little over two weeks ago. At the beginning of its second week there, it was listed as the #5 best seller in the Mystery/Crime category. At the beginning of its third week there, it's still listed at #5, which I hope means it's selling enough copies to stay up near the top of this list, where people dropping in to look for something new to read will spot it. (With my previous publisher, the book was listed in Suspense/Thriller, and it never got all that high on the list. It was a real joy to see it at #5.) In any case, this sort of thing is pretty ephemeral. I'm going to enjoy it while it's there.

(Fictionwise is owned by Barnes & Noble, who bought them a few years ago in a bit of farsightedness. The number of formats my book is available in makes my head spin. You'll just have to look to see what's there, if you're looking for a specific format.)

I've been collecting listings for places where my book is available for order. You should be able to order in at most bookstores, but if you don't want to wait for them to get a copy in, you can order directly from one of the online retailers which I'll list in the page at the top of the blog, or you can download the ebook from one of the other retailers, which is even faster.

Enough for now~~~

New interview, with a sprinkling of green

2010-04-13T11:17:00.002-05:00

The green actually refers to the layer of pollen that covers everything outside just now, as spring desperately tries to cram itself in before summer gets here.

But the green could also refer to Irish noir author Declan Burke, who was kind enough to conduct a brief Q&A with me, the results of which are now up at his blog, Crime Always Pays.

If you like screwball noir, you can find Declan's books here.

Many thanks, Dec.

~~~

Disappearing images

2010-03-29T14:29:00.002-05:00

Okay, I don't know why the pictures all disappeared off my blog. I'm getting all sorts of invalid url notices when I check them, which is weird because they worked fine for quite some time prior to this, and were all associated with Blogger.

Hopefully it'll get worked out soon. In the meantime, you can find all images on my website.

Added two buy links in the sidebar--one goes to my publisher's website, Mundania Press, and the other goes to the buy page on Amazon.com. At this point, there's no artwork on the Amazon page. Hopefully that will get corrected soon.

"Blood Money" is now available

2010-03-22T12:44:00.002-05:00

That almost sounds ominous, doesn't it?

As of today, Blood Money, the first novel in the Patty O'Donnell series, is up for sale on the Mundania homepage. It's available in Trade Paperback for $11.95, and in PDF, HTML, MobiPocket, MS Reader, and Epub formats for $4.99.

Need a teaser?

Here's the cover blurb:

When Patty O’Donnell married her Irish sweetheart and moved from America to her husband’s small home town on the Irish seacoast, the most dangerous things she had to deal with were the half-ton racehorses in her father-in-law’s stables. But when she and her husband return from a late night out to find their house being searched, she discovers there are far worse things lurking in her bucolic surroundings than temperamental Thoroughbreds.

The teenage son of a late family friend brings proof of a long forgotten debt owed by the O’Donnells, part of a cargo lost in a shipwreck over a century and a half ago. He wants the cargo salvaged, and quickly, so he can help his mother free herself from her abusive second husband. The O’Donnells are willing, but the search and salvage mission puts them square in the sights of modern-day pirates, who want the salvage for themselves.

Suddenly, Patty finds herself hunted and in a fight for her life, where yielding to panic means a swift and ugly death.

And here's a portion of the first chapter:

The thief had been hiding in our house for nearly a week before anyone realized he was there. Oh, there’d been small signs, of course, if we’d known what we were looking at. A missing flashlight, food that didn’t stretch as far as expected, sweaters and jeans of Mícheál’s that disappeared for a day or two before turning up dirty in the wash. Small, careful thefts that looked more like carelessness than what they actually were. That, coupled with the fact that he’d chosen as his hiding place a spot no one but family should have known about, kept him safe from detection much longer than even he probably expected.

It was only because we’d returned home just after midnight that we noticed the light in a window on the top floor. The night was overcast and moonless, and the light shone out of the dark bulk of Aill Tearmann like a dim beacon. Mícheál switched off the headlights and braked the Range Rover to a stop on the crest of the hill, studying the window as the light grew dimmer and brighter by turns.

“Someone’s in the house.”

“Are you sure it’s not your dad?” I ducked my head a little lower to look at the huge family home. It was five stories, and sat with its back against the steep slope of the cliff behind it. The front of each story was set back ten feet from the one below it, so the whole looked like a stairway for giants. The kitchen occupied a separate, small rectangular building to the left, and to the right, attached by walkways at the second, third, and fourth stories, was a round tower, its top floor a full two stories above the top of the house to give its upper room a clear view of the ocean on the other side of the cliff. There were no other lights.

“My father wouldn’t be using a torch,” my husband pointed out. “And I can’t imagine why he would be on the top floor at midnight.”

I glanced at him sidelong. The light from the dashboard played over the strong, masculine lines of his handsome face but revealed little of what he was thinking.

“So what do you intend to do?”

He frowned thoughtfully before shutting off the engine. “First, we have to get down there without letting whomever that is know we’re coming.”

Shifting into neutral, he took his foot off the brake and let us roll down the hill. The pop and crunch of gravel under the tires was loud inside the silent, closed car. The vehicle picked up speed and rolled across the bottom of the bowl-shaped hollow leading up to the house. It lost momentum and rolled to a stop within a hundred yards of the front door.

“We’ll have to walk from here.” He switched off the ignition. The dash light went out, turning my spouse’s solid form into darkness and shadows. Reaching for the dome light, he switched it to the off position. He opened his door and stepped out onto the gravel, turning back to duck his head and look in at me.

“Are you coming, or would you rather wait here?”

“Are you kidding?” I popped my door open.

“Don’t slam it,” he warned in a hiss, following his own orders by carefully pushing his door shut. I followed suit. A cold breeze off the ocean competed with the knowledge some stranger was sneaking around in our home to send tingles crawling across my skin.

The light in the window had disappeared. Mícheál paused, watching, until it reappeared in the next window over.

“He’s searching the rooms.” He instinctively kept his voice low even though we both knew the intruder couldn’t hear us. “Come on.”

I wasn’t exactly dressed for creeping through the dark. We’d just come back from celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary with dinner and a show, and I was wearing impractical high heels and a tight skirt. I wobbled precariously across the gravel to the grassy verge, stepped out of the shoes, and bent carefully to pick them up. There was no telling what I might step on out here, but it was bound to be less damaging than falling and breaking my ankle.

The grass was cool beneath my feet. Mícheál caught my hand and led me toward an enclosed walkway between the house and the kitchen. The kitchen windows were pitch black—Máire, our housekeeper, had long since gone home for the night.

The air held the chill of an Irish spring. The strong breeze off the Atlantic tugged at my hair and easily found its way under my clothes, making me envious of Mícheál in his wool suit. We entered the walkway through a door close to the house, escaping the wind. He turned right along the walkway and entered the house through the side door, which as far as I knew had never been locked in recent memory. After tonight, that was probably going to change, I thought, following him inside.

The air was warmer, and smelled of furniture polish and wood smoke. Mícheál paused, listening, while our eyes adjusted to the denser darkness. Ahead of us was the parlor, curtained and empty, while to our left, along a passage where coats could be hung, was the dining room. There were quiet popping noises from that direction.

Still holding my hand, Mícheál led me up the passage. The dining room was faintly lit by the dim, sullen glow of a dying fire on the ornate hearth. Mícheál gave the room a quick glance before leading me past the heavy oak dining table and chairs, content that there was no one lurking in the shadows.

Double sliding doors, always open, led to the great hall, a cavernous two-story room with a grand staircase and galleries on the upper level. The polished marble floor gleamed softly. The great hall was comparatively brighter due to the long ranks of tall windows flanking the front doors.

There was no place here an accomplice could easily hide. We mounted the broad staircase at the back of the room, following its right wing up to the gallery and the entrance to the library.

The hearth in the library also held the glowing embers of a fire. I suspected Séamas and Aunt Liz probably had been up until quite recently. We passed silently across the carpeted floor, through the adjoining study, and out into the back hall, which was lit only with a tiny nightlight. I looked back at the study, where one of the house phones sat on the desk.

“We really ought to call the police,” I whispered.

“I’ll get Séamas up.” Mícheál gave my hand a squeeze. “We’ll be all right.”

We climbed the stairs close to the back wall, where the treads were less likely to creak. At the third floor landing, he pointed me toward our bedroom door.

“Wait there,” he whispered, his mouth so close to my ear that his breath caused the small hairs beside it to stir.

Frowning, I did as he instructed. This went against everything I’d ever been taught about dealing with intruders. He crossed the floor, freezing when a misplaced step caused a board to pop underfoot. After a few seconds he moved forward, opened his father’s door, and slid inside.

The air seemed chillier. I hovered indecisively by our door, shoes in hand, and considered changing clothes. Before I could make up my mind, Mícheál was back in the hallway. Séamas followed in hastily donned slacks and sweater, his feet bare. Even without his shoes, my father-in-law was a burly six-foot-four. I would have hated to be the thief who suddenly saw him coming out of the dark. The pair passed me without a word and started up the next flight of steps.

My uneasiness grew. They had no way of knowing if the intruder was armed. Suppose whoever it was decided to shoot first and read about it in tomorrow’s paper? We should have called the police and let them handle it.

The broad plank floor of the third story hall stretched away in front of me, warming slowly under my bare feet. A small nightlight in a wall socket provided illumination for midnight bathroom visits. Besides the master bedroom and the bedroom Mícheál and I shared, this floor also contained an upper extension of the library, and a sunroom along the front of the house, which Aunt Liz had converted into her own bedroom.

I considered her door for a moment, thinking about getting her up. She would be seriously peeved if something exciting happened and we let her sleep through it. Besides, I really wasn’t all that keen on waiting alone.

I’d just started across the hall to her room when the shouting began upstairs. There was a thud that shook the floor two stories up, followed by a stampede of footsteps. My stomach knotted, and a chill raced across my skin. No shooting, so far, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be.

Aunt Liz’s door opened. A dim blue light spilled into the hallway, telling me she’d been up working on her latest novel. She stepped out into the hall, her black curls tousled and her emerald eyes wide as she belted her robe tightly around her slim waist.

“What on earth?” She threw the ceiling a questioning look.

“Mícheál and I spotted a light upstairs when we got here. He and Séamas went to investigate.”

She advanced to the foot of the stairs, looking up them.

“Sounds like they’ve flushed their quarry.” She cocked her head. “Hang on. I think they’re coming this way. Get ready.”

She stepped to one side of the stairs, blending into the shadows in her dark robe. I scooted back out of the way. I had no intention of blocking someone who was likely bigger and heavier than me and would squash me flat on his way by.

Footsteps pounded across the ceiling above us, reaching the top of the stairs. A dark figure descended them at speed, faster than I would ever have attempted them even with the hall fully lighted. As he reached the bottom, Aunt Liz blithely thrust out a leg, hooked the intruder’s ankle, and sent him sprawling across the plank floor.

To read the entire first chapter, go here.

And it's now...spring?

2010-03-21T12:52:00.003-05:00

There are, at present, clumps of snow falling from the sky. And by that, I don't mean just the snowflakes that have clumped together as they've fallen to earth. I'm also talking about the clumps that are falling off the tree limbs, which I can see through the back window of the house.

It's snowed pretty heavily since around 3:30pm yesterday. There's probably about 8 inches or more of snow on the ground. The cars are humps of white on wheels. Tree limbs are little narrow bands of dark with thick bands of white on them. The wind is picking up some, so the snow is getting jostled off the thinner limbs. Tomorrow, the temperature is supposed to be up around 50F, which means this won't last long, but for the moment we're housebound.

This wouldn't be a problem, since we've got plenty of food and the electricity hasn't gone out, except the kiddo has picked up the yearly virus and is running the usual 100 temperature. Usually I'd give him Gatorade to drink, but the only thing I've got in the house vaguely like Gatorade is a bottle of orange Vitamin Water, which he won't drink because he thinks it smells and tastes the way old people's houses smell (uh, don't ask me. I can't figure that one out, either). Since he'll probably do little more than sleep today, I figure I'll just keep checking on him to make sure he gets enough water, and worry about the Gatorade tomorrow once the roads have cleared.

As of a moment ago, my book still wasn't listed as available for sale on my publisher's website. Still sitting on my hands, for the moment. Blogger has added a pages feature, like the one Wordpress has, so I'll probably try to get a teaser up for Blood Money on one of the pages. Keep an eye out for it.

Out for now~~~

Publication day, plus one

2010-03-17T11:13:00.002-05:00

Well.

Officially, yesterday was the day my book was to go on sale. As of a moment ago, it wasn't yet up on the Mundania homepage, so that makes it not yet officially for sale, but I'm expecting that to change soon. Patient authors realize things go wrong, and that real life gets in the way sometimes. Patience isn't always easy, of course. But I'm trying.

Stay tuned. It should be soon.

~~~

13 Days to publication

2010-03-03T15:18:00.003-06:00

Or in other words, my book, Blood Money, comes out on the 16th.

I will have to check as to format availability and all, since the two books my publisher released at the first of the month show up on their website as available in trade paperback but not yet as available in ebook, so I'm not sure exactly when the ebook will be out. I'm now up in the coming soon section on the Mundania website, though, and as far as I know, the trade paperback version will be $12.95, with the pdf ebook at $4.99. Don't know when it will be available in Kindle format--apparently Amazon picks and chooses which ones it will make available for the Kindle, and when, so it's up to them when it happens.

Blood Money got a nice 4 star review from Romantic Times. Cindy Himler wrote, "Smith’s suspenseful novel has likable characters and interesting locations. Readers will find themselves settling in for a good time." Can't complain about that. And since Elizabeth Peters' new one also got a 4 star review, I feel like I'm in pretty good company. (Can't wait to read hers--Elizabeth Peters is one of my favorite authors, and one of the big influences on my own writing.)

More to come, as the time gets closer...

Dick Francis

2010-02-14T17:59:00.002-06:00

So many writers have died in recent months that one hardly seems to be able to check the news without seeing notice of another one, and now comes news that Dick Francis, champion steeplechase jockey and award-winning novelist, has died at age 89.

Mr. Francis was one of the major influences during my early days as a writer. He is, in fact, the reason my heroine, Patty, is married to an amateur steeplechase jockey, and works as an assistant trainer in her father-in-law's stables. Mr. Francis' novels were centered around the world of steeplechase racing, but were much, much more than stories about the sport of kings. His heroes always strove to do the right thing, even in the face of nearly impossible odds, and in the end, good always overcame evil. That's something you don't see a lot anymore.

According to the post at Sarah Weinman's blog, there's one more novel coming, Crossfire, scheduled for release on August 24. Sarah's blog also has a collection of links to obituaries and articles about Mr. Francis.

He will certainly be missed.

Amazon in the spotlight of...erm...glory isn't quite the word

2010-02-01T13:41:00.005-06:00

Over the weekend, Amazon pulled a move that amounts to a tremendous hissy-fit.

Friday, Amazon pulled the buy button on all of publisher Macmillan's books, both paper and e-book. This bit of muscle-flexing was intended to frighten Macmillan into falling in line with its pricing structure for e-versions of brand-new, best-selling hardbacks.

If you missed the kerfuffle, I suggest you might want to visit John Scalzi's blog for a recap. On Scalzi's blog, the links are marked by underlines of tiny dots rather than being highlighted in a different color. Be sure to follow the links to get a fuller understanding. Also, in the comments trail was a link to an author's blog explaining how all this looks to authors. It's an interesting read.

I have to admit that I'm leaning more toward the publisher's side of this disagreement than Amazon's. Neither side is doing what it's doing for altruistic reasons, regardless of Amazon's claims that it's doing it to keep prices down for customers. They're selling the e-versions of new bestselling hardbacks at a loss simply to entice people to invest hundreds of dollars in their Kindle e-reader. Don't let them convince you otherwise.

On Macmillan's side, they're looking at the bigger picture. Amazon's pricing ploys endanger the higher-priced hardback sales, which is where the company makes back most of the cost of producing the books. (If your information on what it costs to produce a book, from acquisitions through release, comes from rumors and innuendo, I suggest you do some more research. It's mind-boggling what it actually costs.) Their reasoning is that the dramatically lower price Amazon wants to charge for e-copies will undercut the hardback sales to the point where they cannot earn back the cost of production.

Additionally, they're concerned about keeping the chain of sales venues open, which includes not just Amazon, but big box stores and independents, who cannot compete with Amazon in the long-term, since Amazon's overhead is much lower than a physical store's operating costs. It means Amazon can sell at a much lower price and still make a profit. That's often cited as a reason when independent bookstores close, which they're doing at an accelerating rate. Even the big boxes are feeling the impact.

Having grown up in Wal-Mart's back yard (we're a 30 minute drive from Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters), I tend to have more sympathy for the publisher than I do for Amazon, because I see what Amazon is doing as pulling a Wal-Mart. The problem with the Wal-Mart model is that it kills all competition as quickly and ruthlessly as it can, while at the same time destroying some of its suppliers by demanding products at a lower cost than the suppliers pay to produce them. You can find details of their practices online--just Google. I'm not going into them here. Wal-Mart wants to be the be-all and end-all in the retail market, and Amazon's showing signs of wanting to be the online Wal-Mart.

Amazon may well have succeeded in throwing its weight around on this issue, if not for the arrival of the Apple iPad, which, among other things, will supply a ebook platform that supports the new ePub format. Apple's iBook store will offer more publisher-friendly pricing, so Macmillan already had somewhere else they could take their books to. This, in addition to the fact that consumers who tried to buy Macmillan-published books on Amazon over the weekend were quick to go to places like Barnes & Noble's online store instead (this according to a report I read that tracked rankings of Macmillan books on both Amazon and B&N). Macmillan had a bit of muscle to flex as well.

Yanking Macmillan's listings was not a wise move. Amazon does not have the stranglehold on the market that it perhaps thought it did.

As a personal disclaimer, I am not a Macmillan author, and do not expect to become one. My publisher's books list at $4.99 for ebooks, and variably, according to length and whether they're trade paperback or hardback, for the printed copies. But this touches all publishers, and by extension, all authors, because by not allowing Amazon to dictate pricing to levels that threaten publishers' ability to produce books and stay financially afloat, it gives all of us a chance to continue doing what we love, rather than becoming the suppliers that Ama-Mart put out of business.

Life gets interesting sometimes, doesn't it?

Snowy, snowy day

2010-01-29T14:59:00.002-06:00

This, my friends, is what a winter storm for us usually entails. Lots of fluffy white stuff, maybe a bit of ice to make the tree limbs look all sparkly, white roads that quickly turn to slush as employees without a choice make their way to and from work. Not to mention the requisite cars in ditches. There will always be someone out there who thinks they can outsmart or outmuscle the snow. It usually doesn't end as well as they'd like.

Fortunately, that's what we got out of this storm. Or rather, it's what we're in the process of getting, since the snow isn't supposed to end until sometime around midnight for us. If you'd like to see what the weather's like where I live, go here. This is out of the Tulsa forecasting office of the National Weather Service, so you're getting it without all the slightly hysterical hype that you often get from TV weather presenters. Also, by following the appropriate links, you can get to the nearest forecast office for your area.

Last day before the storm

2010-01-27T16:03:00.003-06:00

Hmm. It appears that I was incorrect when I put the last big ice storm at the end of December 2008. Today is supposedly the one-year anniversary of the storm, which I guess is rather fitting, since we have another one coming in late tonight/early tomorrow. Possible accumulation of up to an inch of ice, plus 1-5 inches of sleet and snow. We've got candles and food for days without power, but I'm hoping it won't come to having the power knocked out. I have books to read, and pen and paper to scribble the latest story on, just in case.

Speaking of books, I gave up on the Ariana Franklin books. They're quite a bit darker than I really wanted to read.

Just finished reading Fatally Flaky, by Diane Mott Davidson. Also read Heat Wave, by "Richard Castle", and See Delphi and Die, by Lindsey Davis. Currently reading Whose Body?, by Dorothy L Sayers. I hate to admit it, but I tried to read this book before and totally couldn't get in to it. If I'd based my entire view of the series on that one book, I'd never have discovered the wonderful stories she told later. The "Richard Castle" book is a lot like an episode of the TV show, except where it isn't. If you've seen the show, you'll know where it's different when you read the book. I'll probably buy more of Lindsey Davis' work, since I enjoyed her book, which is set in the Roman era. As for Fatally Flaky...I think Goldie Shultz has finally truly hit TSTL status. I hate saying that, because I really have enjoyed previous outings.

I'm pretty sure at this point that Patty will be going solo in the new story. I'm still intending to have one with Patty's husband, Micheal, playing more than a mostly-offstage role, but it will be one with horses in it.

I've got some writing posts percolating through my brain at the moment. Hopefully I'll get them written soon.

Stay warm and dry, if possible...

Okaaaaay...

2010-01-02T11:46:00.002-06:00

I do tend to mention what books I'm currently reading, if I happen to be reading anything, so I feel the need to drop in a word of warning with regard to one I mentioned in my last post, Mistress of the Art of Death.

The main character in the book is a young woman trained as a doctor in Salerno, Sicily, and also trained to examine the dead to determine cause of death. In other words, a Medieval forensic scientist. In the course of the story, she has to examine the decaying remains of three murdered children, and the bones of a fourth (I'm not giving away anything you don't find out early in the story), and the descriptions of the violence inflicted on those children would be enough to bother a number of people I know. If you're at all sensitive, you might want to give some thought to whether you want to read this or not.

Downloaded two books for future reading: Holmes on the Range, by Steve Hockensmith , and This Dame's for Hire, by Sandra Scoppettone. I think I tried to read the Scoppettone before, but wasn't in the mood for the 1940s setting at the time. We'll see how it goes this time.

Out for now~~~

End of year post

2009-12-31T15:21:00.003-06:00

Hmm. I suppose these end-of-year posts are supposed to be somehow profound reflections on the year past, but it's really just another calender day to me. I declare this a profound-free zone, at least for today.

On that note, we've made it past the one-year mark with regard to last year's ice storm. Not that we won't still get hit by something nasty, but it was nice to see that anniversary go by without the sound of tree limbs cracking and falling.

January 2 marks seven months since I broke my ankle. There's a bit of lingering soreness-not surprising, I suppose, since the joint was basically dislocated when the fibula broke and the ligaments on the opposite side tore. People ask if the ankle hurts when the weather changes. The honest answer is...maybe. It's still too close to the time of injury for me to know for certain what's remaining from the soft-tissue damage, and what's weather-related.

I have my new calendar unwrapped and ready to hang up. Like last year's (and a number of other previous years'), it's a Classic Sailing calendar, with images from the Mystic Seaport--Rosenfeld Collection. I became fascinated with sailing ships when I researched them for Blood Money, and a boat-building firm plays a role in the short mystery "The Uncle Hunt." Looking forward to another year of gazing at water and wind-filled sails.

On the reading front--

Just recently finished The Abbot's Gibbet, by Michael Jecks. Like the Joliffe mysteries, these are set in Medieval England, though these are set slightly more than a century earlier.

Currently I have three books going. One is Murder by the Book, by Rex Stout. These are always pretty fast reads, and it's always great to get a Nero Wolfe book that I haven't read yet. The second is my 'laundromat book', to be read while waiting for the washers and dryers to finish doing their thing. It's City of Shadows, by Ariana Franklin, set in post WWI Germany. Haven't gotten far into it yet.

The third book is Mistress of the Art of Death, also by Ariana Franklin. It's set in King Henry II's England. (Detecting a pattern here?) It's also the first book I've bought and downloaded on the Barnes & Noble e-reader on my computer. It's not the first time I've read ebooks, so that's not a new experience for me, but I am finding that I like the reader software, and with the ability now to use gift cards to buy ebooks at the online store, I'll probably be doing it fairly regularly.

Does this mean I'll be going to straight e-reading? No. I've got a box of paper books coming via UPS on Monday. I really don't understand why some people freak out and declare that you'll only get their paper books when you've pried them from their cold, dead fingers. It's not an either/or proposition. Fear of change comes in many forms, I guess.

As for anything else of relevance...

Lost a friend to cancer this past month. By the time she'd gone to the doctor to find out what was wrong, the cancer had already gotten a foothold. Chemo kept it in check for a while, but in the end there was nothing that could be done. We'll miss you, Linda. See you in the resurrection.

And that's the most profound I intend to get today.

See you in the coming year...

A Senior Moment

2009-12-12T20:24:00.002-06:00

My husband and I had dinner tonight at IHOP (it's inexpensive, relatively fast, and my husband likes breakfast foods at odd hours of the day), and in looking at the bill as the time arrived to pay it, I realized we'd been undercharged for what we ate. A quick check turned up why--the waitress had rung us up for the Senior BOGO deal, where one meal bought at regular price gets you a second free, for people 55 years and up. When I protested that neither of us qualified for the discount, she smiled and said, "That's all right!"

Now, I know my husband and I both have gray hair mixed in with the brown, but I had no idea we looked that old!

It's amazing that we're nearly halfway through the final month of the year. My son is almost 21. In just a few days over three months from now, my first book comes out. At this point, my publisher is already in the process of arranging reviews, and advertising is being arranged as well. The time is going to both drag and fly, which sounds like a contradiction unless you've been in this sort of situation.

Winter has arrived, and with quite a kick. We didn't get hit as bad as people further north did, but it was much colder than what we're used to. It was only a year ago, the end of this month (I think) that we had that massive ice storm that knocked out the power for days and broke trees everywhere. You can bet it's on a lot of people's minds this year, as we watch temperatures sitting on average 10-15 degrees lower than what's normal. There were a lot of trees trimmed back after the last storm, but if we get as much ice as we did last year, the weight of it is sure to pull some of the lines down. Folks are holding their breaths. You can also bet those who got generators last year are probably going to laugh at those of us who didn't, if it happens again this year.

Just read Margaret Frazer's new Joliffe the Player mystery, A Play of Treachery. It's the fifth in the series, set in the 1400's in England and now in France. Joliffe is an interesting character. I'm glad she's spun him off into his own series.

Okay, enough for now. Until next time~~

Life's Mysteries

2009-11-30T17:32:00.003-06:00

Life is full of them. Like, for instance, where the whole of this last month went. I assume I didn't sleep through the whole thing, but there are times when I wonder.

So among the things I can remember from November--

Got the galley done for Blood Money. Found one error--but considering how often that manuscript has been combed through, that's probably about all there was in it. Not that there can't still be something lurking unfound in all those words, but that was the only one that jumped out at me.

Read some. Finished two by Georgette Heyer--Death in the Stocks, and They Found Him Dead, and one by Thea Phipps--The Doll in the Wall.

Finally gave up on a book that I'd been trying to read for months--the author writes well, but the constraints of the genre require that the main characters behave in certain ways, and they finally got too much on my nerves. I choose not to name names, because for some reason, authors aren't allowed the same freedom to point at books they didn't enjoy that other readers are. It was an historical mystery/romantic suspense, which isn't a sub-genre I normally read in. I really wanted to like it, because I enjoy historical mysteries.

For all those doing NaNoWriMo--

Congratulations if you made your goals! And congratulations even if you didn't--50K words during a holiday month is a lot to tackle, and you were brave to try it.

Okay, I'm brain-fried for now. More later~~

Post-conference recovery

2009-10-29T12:37:00.003-05:00

I always think I'm going to do a post about the Muse conference once it's over, and I never get around to it. I was tentatively diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome a number of years ago--I say tentatively, because by the time I'd gotten to see a doctor and we'd had the second blood test done, the titer levels for the marker virus had gone down, and she wasn't prepared to make a firm diagnosis based on that. It would be handy to have the label to point at, but subsequent years have shown me that she wouldn't have been wrong to make the diagnosis.

As a result, intense activity can leave me flattened for a while. The Muse conference is a pretty intense experience. The conference runs twenty-four hours a day for seven days, with instructors and students coming together from different parts of the world. Students and instructors come and go as life and available time allow. The message board the conference is held on is always available. The first couple of years, I tried taking some workshops because there were three of us involved in teaching the suspense workshop, and we really didn't need three of us for that. I have a three inch binder filled with information gleaned from the first conference. The second year, I really overreached, and took so many workshops that it took me nearly a month to recover from the stress of trying to do too much. I believe I took one workshop last year, and none this year. Last year and this year, there were only two of us teaching the suspense workshop, so that's where my energy had to go.

JD Webb, my workshop partner, and I give a lot of feedback in our workshop. We both try to reply to all the participants' assignments, but since I don't touch horror or the supernatural, JD is the one who handles those. We encourage everyone to look at everyone else's feedback as well as their own, since we've only got a week to help them see what makes suspense and how to incorporate it in their own work. It can be draining, but it's worth it to see those little virtual light bulbs coming on when they get it and start working it into their assignments.

We'll be doing the workshop again next year, of course. We'll also be doing a workshop for a chapter of the Romance Writers of America. The pace should be a little less hectic, since we'll be spreading it out over a two week period instead of trying to cram it all into one week. That workshop is scheduled for mid-December 2010, so we'll have time to recover from the Muse conference beforehand. More on that at a future date, though.

If you're interested in the Muse Online Writers Conference, hop on over to the conference website and take a look at the workshops that were offered this year. Take a look at the testimonials. Sometimes people will register for the conference, and then back out at the last moment, pointing to the fact that the conference is free while reciting that old standby, "You get what you pay for." And that's true. You get the efforts of a whole lot of industry professionals, who volunteer their time for a week to help those coming along behind them. All it costs you is a little time and effort of your own. At the end of the week, when you've got that binder full of notes, you won't think that's a bad trade-off.

New Book Drawing

2009-10-23T11:04:00.002-05:00

Thea Phipps's second book in her Bella Wildeve humorous mystery series, The Doll in the Wall, is due out in November, and she's celebrating with a giveaway. Three signed copies of the new book will be given away, one each to three winners drawn from among those who register on her forum or leave a comment on her blog. The drawing will be held November 7, so if you enjoy mysteries with humor, an interesting heroine, and a cast of quirky supporting characters, get over there and register for a chance to win.

Thea's website

Blood Money Cover Art

2009-10-15T15:38:00.004-05:00

Somehow it all feels more real when you've got that cover art. Of course, it will be even more real once I've got a copy of the printed book in my hands.

If you click on the cover, a slightly larger version of it will come up.

And we have a cover!

2009-10-09T13:22:00.002-05:00

I just got my first look at the cover art for Blood Money. As soon as I know that it's all right to go ahead and post it, I'll put up a thumbnail of it here.

Muse Conference starts on Monday. I doubt I'll be posting much during that week.

~~Until later...

Picture Imperfect is online

2009-09-29T20:01:00.003-05:00

Mysterical-E's Fall 2009 issue is up now, and among the stories on offer is "Picture Imperfect", by yours truly. The story comes in at around 20,000 words, so make sure you have a few minutes before you head over to read it.

Current read: Just started All Shots, by Susan Conant. Haven't gotten far enough into it to know if I like it yet or not.

~~'til later...

Leaves aren't the only things falling in the Autumn

2009-09-26T13:47:00.001-05:00

This time of year, when the fall allergies are just kicking off, my energy levels drop significantly. Oh, and there's this whole brain thing going on, too. I always knew the allergies were affecting my ability to think, but I didn't realize how much until I took one of those online IQ tests for fun on a good day, and then repeated it a few days later, under the influence of an allergy attack. There was a twelve-point drop. You'd think having taken the test only a few days before, there wouldn't be that much difference, but the brain-cloud from the allergies affected me that much.

It wouldn't be such a bad thing, except thinking is involved in...oh...pretty much every part of daily life. My vocabulary diminishes. Plus, my common sense seems to go on vacation. I'm more prone to saying things without giving careful thought to the words I choose, which means I mean one thing when I speak, but it comes out in a way that people think I mean something else. There are reasons I try to keep my mouth shut this time of year. I'm never certain what new ways I'm going to find of unintentionally offending everyone around me.

My current WIP is a Patty short story. It seems to be about my speed right now. More on that later, though.

I found this on one of the sites I frequent--a list of Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences. To be honest, I've never read any of Dan Brown's work, other than what's in this article, so I'm not saying anything about his abilities as a storyteller, but this article does give those of us trying to get a share of the readers' attention some pause for thought.

Recently there was an article posted by a well-known script writer, in which he explained with expletive-laced clarity why he doesn't read unsolicited material from unpublished authors. Not long after that, John Scalzi posted a similar article on his own site, minus the expletives. The thoughts included are enlightening. If you're thinking about tracking down a well-known author and asking for him/her to read your work, read this first.

The Muse Online Writers Conference is coming up in about two weeks--immediately before, during, and after, I will probably not be doing much updating of the blog, so be warned that there may not be anything new to read for a bit.

Current read: Malpractice in Maggody, by Joan Hess. This is the first of the Arly Hanks mysteries I've read. I've read all the Claire Malloy ones thus far.

~~Until later...

Book Drawing

2009-09-17T22:44:00.003-05:00

Thea Phipps, author of Charades With A Lunatic, is holding a drawing for three signed copies of her novel, to be given away to three individuals who register on her forum by September 25, 2009. This book, a humorous mystery, is a fun read, and I highly recommend that you get yourselves over there and register for a chance to get one.

Thea's website

The link to the forum is in the sidebar on the right side of her blog.

~~~

Fun with Google, and Disappearing Apples

2009-09-14T20:00:00.004-05:00

I don't know if there's an author out there who hasn't, at least once, done a vanity search on their own name on Google. It's one of those things that older and wiser authors tell you not to obsess about, though it's fun on occasion to see what's out there. Sometimes you come up with mentions of your books that you had no idea were out there. A number of authors with popular series available in ebook google from time to time to keep track of who's pirating their work. And sometimes you find things about yourself that you're not particularly happy about, though I haven't had that one happen yet.

I have found, however, that I'm not the only Pepper Smith out there. Go figure. My website is the first listing that comes up when you google my name, and a few of the other listings in the first ten pages or so are mine, but the vast majority are for other Pepper Smiths. Out of curiosity, I decided to follow the search out to 100 pages, but only got to page 81 before the same two listings kept coming up over and over again all by themselves. Beyond page 50, there were almost no mentions of the two names together, though most of the posts had both words, separately. From page 71 to page 79, there were three or four listings for this blog, for the post preceding this one.

Other than that, there were an astounding number of listings earlier in the search by other Pepper Smiths, including listings on Facebook, My Space, Twitter, posts on other people's blogs, listings for Pepper Smiths on high school reunion sites--at least the listing for the porn star seems to have disappeared. If you run across a Pepper Smith on Facebook, My Space, or Twitter, or one of the school reunion sites, it's not me. I'm on Crimespace, but that's about it for the social networking sites.

Our apple tree has presented us with a mystery this year. It had a number of small apples on it earlier this summer, green, but gradually reddening. They shouldn't have been ripe and ready until around now. However, they vanished about a month ago. I noticed them one day when I was hobbling out to the car to go somewhere, and a week later, they were gone. I checked the tree, and I checked the ground around it, and they're nowhere to be seen. I can only conclude someone picked them all, but I'm not sure when or why. They couldn't have tasted very good. We have a number of friends who come by and pick some when the apples are ripe, but there will be none for them to pick this year.

Oh well, maybe next year.

~~~

Technophobia, the old-fashioned way

2009-09-11T20:10:00.004-05:00

Before I send you to someone else's blog to watch this video, I want to point out the following post, if you were looking for the companion piece to last week's post on writing suspense.

And now, Help Desk

Some things never change!

Recently read: Consequences of Sin, by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

~~Until next time...

Adding Suspense

2009-09-11T19:43:00.004-05:00

Adding Suspense
By Pepper Smith

Suspense is defined as: A state of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen. ~~Oxford Dictionary of Current English

With that in mind, what can we as writers do to aid our readers in experiencing that state of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen next in our stories?

One thing to keep in mind about suspense is that it really only happens if the reader is given a character he or she has feelings about. This doesn’t mean that the character is someone they like—in fact, one can feel serious dislike or loathing for a character, and the suspense can come from wondering how that person is going to get caught, be murdered, or whatever the author chooses to impose on them.

Unlike thrillers, where the point is the action that propels the story breathlessly forward, suspense tends to be more character-driven, and relies heavily on the personal impact, or personal stakes, of the characters involved. What are some ways you can up those personal stakes?

Threats of Violence or Exposure

When your character has something to lose, it provides an opportunity to develop suspense.

Your protagonist’s physical well-being. Personal violence is stock-in-trade for the criminal element. Is your protagonist following a course that your villain doesn’t like? Threats of bodily injury or death make powerful deterrents. If your protagonist’s goal is strong enough to propel him or her onward in their quest, you can build suspense around their efforts to avoid attracting the villain’s attention and bringing the promised retribution down on them.

Family or Friends. As much as your protagonist may love his or her own skin, finding that a family member, such as a spouse or child, is in danger brings your protagonist’s heart into the equation and can increase the pressure exponentially. Will your hero or heroine back off? Or will they risk everything to save that family member and bring down the villain? Again, doing what they can to achieve that goal while remaining undiscovered can make a very fine line for them to walk, where the slightest misstep could bring grievous injury or death to someone they love.

A friend your protagonist is close to can also serve in this role, but it depends on how close the friend is on how much suspense the situation will bring.

Property. The threatened loss of property is another point of leverage that your villain might use, putting your protagonist in the position of having to do things to prevent that loss. Suppose what the villain asks is unacceptable to your hero or heroine? Can he or she try to rectify the situation without the villain finding out? Suppose the property isn’t land or a house, but an object, money, ampoules of a deadly toxin, a prized horse, something moveable that your protagonist must keep track of or find while staying under the villain’s radar?

In all of the above, what if the villain does find out and attempts to carry out his threats? That creates even more scope for suspense, as the protagonist tries to stay a step ahead and save himself, his family, or his property from death or disaster.

Exposure. We all have things in our past that we hope no one ever finds out about. For your characters, it could be things that might break up their marriage, lose them their job, result in a loss of position in society, maybe even send them to jail. The threat of the revelation of those secrets if your protagonist doesn’t stop their sleuthing or whatever else might be annoying the villain can up the pressure on your protagonist and increase the suspense level.

What if the one with the secrets is the villain? His knowledge that the hero or heroine is trying to expose those secrets will likely bring about a rapid and adverse response. Then it becomes a matter of the protagonist finding some way to complete their task of exposing those secrets while avoiding the consequences.

Then again, what if the supposed secret is a falsehood but achieves the goal of destroying the hero/heroine’s family/position/job/etc.? Can you imagine ways of developing suspense as your protagonist deals with the fallout while trying to clear his or her name and restore what was lost? What if the villain is actively trying to prevent that restoration?

Limited Time to Accomplish a Goal

Sometimes it all comes down to a matter of time. What if your protagonist is working against a deadline? There doesn’t actually need to be a human villain involved—what if the weather is threatening, and a trapped victim has to be rescued before floodwaters arrive? There are many possible aspects of nature-related limits on time to draw on for suspense.

This also works well with the threat of exposure or harm, upping the ante. If the protagonist doesn’t complete a specified demand by a particular time, the protagonist’s family member/property/self will be harmed, or the secret will be exposed. As the clock ticks down, the suspense can become unbearable.

Circumstances

Sometimes things happen that stand in the way of the protagonist achieving the goal, things that can be manmade, and others that aren’t. This can be along the lines of traffic mishaps, the relative who calls with a request for help that has to be dealt with right then, an illness in the family or of the hero/heroine, or perhaps the protagonist being physically restrained/stopped from carrying out the necessary actions. Some things can add temporary suspense by being overcome, while others might be permanent blocks that force your protagonist to find other ways of doing what needs doing.

Failure

Being imperfect, one can expect that sometimes the protagonist is going to fail in meeting the deadline or carrying out the demands, or in reaching their own imposed goal, and consequences are going to happen. The villain might inflict bodily harm on the protagonist as a warning. Will your hero/heroine risk further harm or even death to do what they know is right? Riding that thin edge between safety and further violence can up your suspense level.

Atmosphere

Sometimes the suspense comes not from anything tangible, but from the characters’ perceptions of things. A character can perceive a situation to be dangerous that perhaps isn’t, but until he or she is certain of that, it’s cause for suspense. This psychological atmosphere can cause threats to seem very real, even if they are all a figment of the character’s imagination.

Physical details add to that atmosphere as well. A walk along a tree-lined path on a bright, sunny day will have a different feel than walking along it with a threatening storm approaching, or in the gloom just before nightfall. Remember details of experiences that made you uneasy or uncomfortable, and if they apply to the situation of your protagonist, see if it enhances the scene to work those things in.

Again, all these things work best if they make a personal impact on your protagonist. If the villain threatens to break your protagonist’s arm and your protagonist has a genetic disorder that prevents him from feeling pain, there is no suspense because your protagonist probably won’t view a broken arm as more than a minor inconvenience. Try to keep it reasonable and real. The threat has to mean something to the protagonist.

Copyright 2007 by Pepper Smith
http://www.peppersmithbooks.com
Permission to distribute for educational purposes granted.

Click on the Writing label to find all other posts on writing.

New links

2009-09-01T18:15:00.004-05:00

Here are a couple of links to blog posts that caught my attention this past week:

Leaving Out The Parts People Skip - On writing compelling fiction.

Postage Promotion - A look at a new promotional tool being touted by some self-publishing companies. If you are self-published, be sure to read the comments--turns out it's a service you can get elsewhere for less.

Recently read: Even Money by Dick Francis.

Still doing some character juggling on my story.

Next week I'll post on ways of adding suspense to your work. Enjoy this week's post (below) on things to avoid in writing a suspense novel.

Writing Suspense: Things that may derail your quest for the perfect suspense novel

2009-09-01T17:11:00.009-05:00

I've been meaning to post this for some time--hopefully you'll find something useful in it:

Writing Suspense:
Things that may derail your quest for the perfect suspense novel.
By Pepper Smith

Not long ago, when I knew I would be contributing to this workshop, I ran several unscientific polls among readers, asking about their likes and dislikes in mystery/suspense fiction, primarily what things turned them off to a story. What follows was gathered from the responses to those polls.

There are always exceptions to every rule, but these are things that were of particular concern to the readers I corresponded with.

Look-alikes vs. Original fiction

Every now and then, a book will appear on the scene that becomes a runaway best seller. Like the weather, there’s no real way of predicting where or when it will happen—it just happens.

With it, though, comes a somewhat dangerous temptation, especially for newer authors.

“Well, if they liked The Mysterious Mountain so much, surely they’ll fall all over themselves to buy my novel, The Secret Precipice, which is just like it!”

Keep in mind that it’s probably going to take you a year or better to get your manuscript written and ready to submit, and that in all probability, you’re not the only one who’s trying to cash in on the popularity of that best-seller. Knowing that, the question becomes: Do you want to present some overworked editor with Mysterious Mountain clone #751, or with something original that will catch his or her attention because it’s different from what everyone else is submitting? And by about the fifth or sixth Mysterious Mountain clone to hit the shelves, readers are often already moving on, looking for something new.

Gimmicks

Sometimes writers will fasten onto a ‘gimmick,’ like basing a mystery/suspense story on or around an actual historical person. There are some really fine examples of using historical persons that work very well, where the characters become so real that you feel like you’ve actually spent the day with them. It becomes a gimmick, though, when an author takes the names of historical figures and slap them on generic characters, and use them as the selling point of the story—say, for instance, taking the names of a certain famous writer of Victorian era detective fiction and a colleague, and placing them in the roles of Holmes and Watson, without much regard to personality, character traits, and the realities of the time period the story’s set in.

Readers of mystery/suspense fiction are not ignorant—in fact, they tend to be highly educated, and will notice if a writer ignores essentials. If they feel a writer has simply labeled cardboard cutouts with famous names to dress up a story that otherwise isn’t particularly well-written and inventive, it’s likely they’ll pass on buying any more of that author’s work.

Research your subjects and the era you’re using; make those things as close as you can get to what actually was. Or better yet, research, and change the characters names. Write something that’s original. Maybe you’ll be starting your own series of Victorian era detective novels.

The Big Bad World

Sometimes it seems as though authors deliberately put both their characters and their readers through Hades, as if to see how much they can all take. Sometimes authors work to make their protagonists and their readers fall in love with someone, only to kill the love interest off in rather senseless ways, as if to say, “This is the real world, and it’s a horrid, nasty place.”

Well, yes, sometimes the world is a horrid, nasty place. And yes, there are readers who delight in being made to feel miserable. Most readers don’t mind if you take them on a trip through the worst parts of town, as long as there’s a payoff of some sort. If you take your protagonist to the depths of the pit and leave him/her wallowing there, it’s very probable you’re going to lose readers. To paraphrase one reader’s remarks about that sort of ultra-dark fiction, “If my life was like that, I’d slit my wrists. Why would I want to read something that’s going to make me feel like that?”

This is fiction, after all. Most people read it to escape from the realities of the Big Bad World. Does this mean that everyone wants happy endings all the time? No, of course not. But readers do like to feel that there is something, a sense of justice done, of completion. Even horror stories tend to have happy endings of sorts—the monster dies, and the protagonist has survived, scarred perhaps, but tested to the limits and proven worthy of our admiration.

The Overuse of Violence

A related issue to consider is that of the use of violence in a story. “But wait!” I can hear you say. “You can’t have a murder without violence!”

That’s true, and the issue is not whether or not to use it, it’s how to use it. Once you rely on violence to add shock value to your story, you find yourself in a cycle of having to increase the level of violence to give your readers the same thrill that they got in your last story. This spirals upward until you wonder if you can keep your protagonist alive through all the violence you’re throwing at him/her, because you feel the need to outdo yourself with each story, and what you wrote last time is now old hat to your readers. You also risk not only writer fatigue, but reader fatigue, on an emotional level. It can literally reach the point where just making it through the story is so draining that the reader feels relieved to have finished it. It’s along the lines of a critic’s complaint about a recent James Bond movie—by the fourth time a character yells out “It’s a bomb!” and there’s an explosion, the critic just plain didn’t care anymore.

Keep in mind that the suspense in a story often comes not from something happening, but from the threat of something happening. Simplified, it’s like worrying about getting a shot at your next doctor visit, as opposed to the reality of getting a shot. Once you’ve had the shot, the suspense, or the anxiety leading up to it, is gone. Once you’ve inflicted the violence on your protagonist, the suspense is gone. You either have to up the violence level, or keep the violence as an escalating threat, with the suspense coming from wondering just how far the protagonist can push things before the axe falls.

Playing Fair

Writing a mystery/suspense story can be viewed as a sort of game between the author and future readers. You want to do the best you can to present something that will surprise and delight your readers, while at the same time not giving away the ending somewhere around the middle of the book. Who is causing the bad things to happen? Why? Will the hero or heroine figure it out before the villain closes in for the kill?

There are a few, and probably more, ways of keeping your reader from figuring out the ending that amount to cheating in the game. One is a method that was frequently used by Agatha Christie. There was always some key piece of information, some vital clue, which the detective noted but the reader was never informed of. This makes for the dramatic reveal scene in the drawing room at the end of the story (or the modern equivalent), where the protagonist reinforces his reputation for god-like powers of observation and ratiocination by walking his captive audience and the reader through the events of the book before springing that last vital clue or piece of evidence on them, thus revealing who the villain is. In such a case, there was clearly never any real intention of giving the reader a fair chance of figuring it out on their own, which is half the fun of reading a mystery/suspense novel.

Another favorite among some authors is the deus ex machina, the unexpected event that saves a seemingly hopeless situation. This could be the mysterious stranger that steps in and saves the day by revealing that he’s actually Inspector Crandall from Scotland Yard, and he’s been following this ruffian for years. Now, thanks to the protagonist, he’s finally caught up with the villain and can arrest him, thank you very much… Which leaves the question of where Crandall was during the whole rest of the story, why he didn’t step in earlier to help, and actually works to negate the struggle that the protagonist has been through to that point, because it’s never actually resolved. This scenario might come about because of getting your protagonist into a situation you can’t get him or her out of. Think it through a little more, see if there’s something your protagonist can do to get out of it, or try something different. A last-minute rescue from someone who wasn’t even in the story prior to that point will leave the reader feeling cheated.

One more is the trick of making the murderer/villain someone who never shows up at any point in the story until the last few pages, where he’s suddenly revealed as being the heroine’s third grade crush, who has always been obsessed with her and is killing off her boyfriends because they’re not good enough for her. Or it’s Joe Farnam, the passing stranger who shows up in the final scene holding a dripping knife over the body of his last victim, but has never been introduced to the reader or been given any sort of motive for his killing spree. This is patently unfair, especially if you’ve been planting clues all along that point at other people. Red herrings are one thing, but never planting clues at all that lead to the actual perpetrator may cause your readers to pass on your next book.

The Villain

Somewhere along the line, it seems to have become politically incorrect for villains to be anything but poor hapless victims who had horrendous childhoods and became the way they are because they couldn’t help it. Or they’re suffering from some bizarre mental disorder that takes away their culpability. This has become so common that it’s almost trite. Yes, this does exist in the world, but a lot of people had horrendous childhoods and didn’t become mass murderers, and probably few people with a mental disorder are likely to turn into knife-wielding maniacs when someone accidentally says something to set them off. People from all walks of life commit crimes for reasons that they can easily justify to themselves, if not to the law. Using the insanity angle, especially when it’s without any sort of prior warning that there might be a problem with that character, is along the lines of using Joe Farnam, the passing mass murderer. Yes, you surprised your reader, but you didn’t play fair doing it.

Readers also indicated that they didn’t want to know too much about a villain’s motives and background, or his identity, too soon in the story. Revealing too much can take away from the sense of dread the reader feels. It takes away from the game of figuring out whodunit, and why. Balance is required to reveal just enough to provide clues without giving away too much. Many prefer the bad guy to be a mysterious figure until the climax of the book.

The Protagonist

Whether male or female, your protagonist starts off at a disadvantage. Face it—villains tend to be more colorful characters, because they don’t play by the rules. It’s up to you to make your protagonist interesting enough for a reader to care about, but there are pitfalls to avoid.

Too perfect or too flawed—As one reader brought out, there are protagonists that speak seventeen languages and can solve complex mathematical equations while working out tomorrow’s lunch menu and painting the Sistine Chapel, or other equally improbable things. There are also protagonists who are so flawed that it’s nearly impossible to imagine them being capable of dealing with the plots they’re presented with.

Too dull or wooden. Not fleshed out. Stereotypes. These are things that will render a protagonist into someone the reader cannot connect with. If they can’t connect with your protagonist, there’s a good chance they won’t read to the end to find out whodunit.

For your protagonist to connect, he or she needs to feel real to the reader. Overly perfect or overly flawed comes across as a caricature—someone who works well will have strengths as well as flaws in a good balance. Character descriptions should include physical details that will help readers picture them in their own minds, and some history to provide readers with a sense of who the protagonist is. Your protagonist becomes the reader’s closest companion for the course of the book. Would you want to go on an adventure with a perfect stranger who remains a stranger from beginning to end?

Think through who your protagonist is, how you want to present him or her. Does he or she have interesting hobbies or character quirks that can be logically worked into the story without detracting from it? Find things about your character that will make a reader want to take that journey with your protagonist as the guide.

Pacing

There are some things that can absolutely kill your pacing, which is important in suspense because the speed of the narrative, or the lack thereof, can make all the difference between a compelling tale and a slow tome that a reader might put down and never think to pick up again.

Extreme detail: Detail is important, there is no denying that. But if it takes a writer three pages to describe the room the protagonist is standing in, could that perhaps be overkill? Sometimes you want the reader to see the revolver on the mantelpiece because you intend to use it later in the story, but describing it in detail if you never intend to use it will only slow the narrative. Is it really necessary to describe every fold in the drapes to let the readers know that there are heavy blue curtains at the windows? Huge blocks of description are like unexpected speed bumps. They slow the pace and draw the reader away from the action.

There are some things that can be considered common experience. For instance, most people know what a palm tree looks like. It’s not necessary to describe what each individual frond looks like and how it’s positioned for a reader to understand that there’s a palm tree there. Most people know what a horse, a cow, or a dog looks like in general. There may be a need to throw in a qualifier, that the horse was a Clydesdale, or the cow was an Angus, or the dog was a Labrador. That, and a brief description of the animal’s color, are generally more than enough for most readers.

In other words, use a big brush when painting in the common experience details, and a fine brush to bring attention to those things that are vital to your plot or characterizations. Unnecessary detail slows you down.

Plot exposition, or the info-dump: It can be very tempting to give essential details in one big paragraph, to get it out of the way. This is another speed bump. Can you work the details in a bit at a time in other ways? A bit here or there in dialogue, or in a character’s thoughts as they’re involved in an otherwise uninteresting activity such as driving or waiting for the bus? A truckload of gravel can either make a pile five feet high, or a nice driveway surface if it’s spread out. You want the one that keeps things smooth and makes it easy to get down your driveway.

Beware—the info dump can also take place as a solid lump of dialogue, as one character shares information with another and thus with the reader. This takes on a rather ludicrous aspect in its “As you know, Bob,” form, when one character is telling another something that the second character clearly already knows, as a ploy to make sure the reader knows it as well. It’s better to find another way of sharing that with the reader.

Unnecessary repetition: This can happen more easily than you’d think, because as writers, it can take us quite a while to get a story down on paper. Details that we wrote early in the story are no longer fresh in our minds, and it’s tempting to think that we need to explain something again that we first wrote about two months ago. Remember, though, that what takes us months or even years to write will be devoured by the reader in a matter of hours, perhaps days at the most for slower readers. The same details given over and over and over will interrupt the flow, and cause your reader to question whether they’ve fallen into a time warp because they’ve read that bit before.

Inconsistencies in pacing: Have you ever read something where someone turns the heat on under a kettle, turns to have a conversation with their companion, and before they’ve gotten five words out, the kettle is whistling? This example is literally only a slight exaggeration—I have seen this type of thing in stories before. How long does it really take for a kettle to boil? How long does it take for a woman with long hair to braid it or pin it up on her head? How long does it actually take to drive across town, pick someone up, and come back? If you have one character head off to pick up the kids while two others have a conversation, and you have only five minutes of dialogue before the kids arrive, either the kids were right across the street, or you didn’t think about the time actually involved in the scene. Believe me, your readers won’t miss the mistake, and they’re going to take time out from reading your story to wonder what you were thinking when you wrote that.

Also, in describing action, it’s good to keep in mind that if it takes much longer to read your description of the action than it would have taken for the action to actually happen, it can slow your pacing tremendously.

Some things would seem to be intuitive, but sometimes aren’t:

Research

Writing about something you’ve never had hands-on experience with means you’ll be doing research if you want to write about it knowledgeably. This is not a place where you can wing it. You will have readers who will know you got it wrong, in all likelihood ones that you wanted to attract by writing about the subject in the first place. Not only will they probably not finish your story, they’ll tell their friends about you story, so you’ll lose not just those readers who bought the book, you’ll lose others who will never bother to buy it.

Do readers notice what might appear to be inconsequential details? Yes. And they will let you know about it if you get it wrong, usually in terms that will make you feel stupid. This is easy enough to avoid by making sure you know what you’re writing about before you start.

Trust Your Audience’s Intelligence

Most readers of mystery/suspense stories are intelligent, educated people who resent being talked down to. They keep track of clues and details as they try to beat your protagonist to the solution of the mystery or the identity of the villain. If you’ve done your job properly, sharing clues and information throughout the narrative, you will not need to provide your readers with a detailed summary and explanation of what happened and how your protagonist reached the conclusions he or she did. As one reader pointed out, such a summary and explanation is insulting to your readers’ intelligence. If you’re concerned that you might not have explained things well enough through the narrative, have someone read it and tell you if they found it confusing. Leave the summarizing and explaining to the writers who never intended to let you beat them to the solution, so they can show off their protagonists’ detective skills in the grand drawing-room finale.

“Man Behind the Curtain” Syndrome

A writer’s job is to engage a reader’s emotions and senses in the story. One has to be careful, though, to avoid becoming the ‘man behind the curtain,’ writing things that are so obviously meant to make the reader feel joy or fear or anger that you can almost see the man standing there with cue cards and a cattle prod. The TV Movie of the Week needs to use these sort of tricks because they’ve only got an hour and a half to tell you the story, and usually have to engage your emotions within the first few minutes if they want you to feel for a character who dies early in the movie. Writers of novels, however, have time to be subtle about it. The best way to learn this is to read the works of other writers with an eye toward what they are doing and how they’re doing it. Practice it. It’s a skill that will make your narrative much smoother, and you won’t be insulting your readers by telling them how they should be feeling at any given point in your novel.

Presented at the Muse Online Writers Conference 2006
Copyright 2006 by Pepper Smith
Permission to distribute for educational purposes granted.

Click on the Writing label to find all other posts on writing.

'til later~~~

Links Updated

2009-08-21T17:00:00.002-05:00

I've added a few links to the sidebar, so be sure to check out what's on other people's blogs in the writing and publishing world. Some agent blogs, some editor blogs, a blog dedicated to helping you polish your query letter, lots of good stuff.

Unless something untoward happens, I'm going to stop giving updates on the ankle. It's healing. Folks think I'm getting around a lot better, and it's not hurting quite so much anymore. I think I can safely say it's a hassle having to limp everywhere, but it's getting better and at least I'm getting around on it.

It's amazing how hard it is to write a story if you aren't using the right characters for it. I'm swapping some around in my current project, but I'm not saying more until I'm sure it's the right choice.

Currently reading: The Private Patient by P.D. James, and The Father Hunt by Rex Stout.

If you've signed up for our suspense workshop at the Muse Online Writers Conference, feel free to visit my website and download the articles on writing and adding suspense. They're not required reading, but it never hurts to prepare.

'til next time~~~

Editing round 2, done

2009-08-17T14:34:00.002-05:00

Got back second round edits on Blood Money, as expected. Unless Alexandra finds anything that we missed the first two times through, we're probably done.

Here are some links to blog posts that might be of interest to writers:

What do you think? -- Talks about authors' attitudes toward themselves and their work, and how it can affect promotion efforts.

The Myth of "Just An Author" -- Can an author be 'just an author' and leave everything else to his publisher?

Book Publishing Glossary -- Ever hear a publishing term and wonder what it meant? Now you can find out!

Not publishing related, but hilarious: Cake Wrecks -- When Professional Cakes Go Horribly, Hilariously Wrong.

Currently I'm reading Triple Jeopardy by Rex Stout, and Persona Non Grata by Ruth Downie. Enjoying both.

Current ankle condition: I'm up and hobbling without support now, but goodness! Sometimes it hurts more now than I did when I broke the thing!

I'm going to have to look through my saved links and update the links in the sidebar. There are a number of useful blogs I haven't got listed there, such as Pimp My Novel, which are both fun to read and informative about the publishing business.

Until next time~~

Forward motion

2009-08-10T12:15:00.004-05:00

Things are moving forward, although as usual not as easily or quickly as I might prefer. The ankle is still healing. I've gotten now to where I can walk without the walker or a cane while wearing the boot, so I am now adding in a bit of time spent walking in a regular shoe, which will no doubt help strengthen the muscles that stabilize the ankle. It's not quite as painful as it was when I started putting weight on it a few weeks ago, but it can still be very uncomfortable if I overdo.

We've done the first round of edits on Blood Money. Alexandra, my editor, says I may get the next round by Sunday. So far, so good. I'm not sure when the cover art will be started, so I'm still looking forward to seeing what the art department comes up with.

Recently read two books I enjoyed, Run Afoul, by Joan Druett, and Terra Incognita, by Ruth Downie. The first is the third novel in the Wiki Coffin series (Wiki is half-Maori, and works as a translator in an American exploring expedition fleet in the mid-1800s.) I liked the main character and the story enough that I'm considering getting the first two in the series. Terra Incognita is the second in Ruth Downie's Roman Britain series, and I enjoyed it as much as the first. I'm looking forward to reading the second.

More later~~

Ah, mobility!

2009-07-23T14:26:00.003-05:00

As of today, I am on the way back to mobility. The doctor looked at the x-rays of my ankle and declared the bone healed, stating that the fracture line was close to unnoticeable. I've begun putting weight on the foot while working my way around the house with the aid my walker, which sometimes means working my way sideways through doors because the door frames are not wide enough. Still, after seven weeks, it feels great to be up and around.

One of the books I've read, from the recent spate of book buying, is Medicus by Ruth Downie. I hit it after about four other books that just didn't grab my interest, and was pulled into the story so quickly that I immediately began looking for other titles by the author. The narrative voice is great, the characters are fun to spend time with, and the historical era--Roman Britain--is one that hasn't already been explored to death, so it was a refreshing read. Her next novel is firmly on my to-buy list.

I've just started Royal Flush, the latest in Rhys Bowen's Her Royal Spyness series. It promises to be a fun read.

A bit of progress to report on the current WIP. Now that the brain is beginning to function better, the writing's coming more easily. Certainly being able to get up and get around should help some--it's not easy typing when you're lying on your side.

After a few really hot days, we've had a continued span of nice weather, really odd for the last part of July, but I'm certainly not complaining. Hopefully it won't mean we're in for nasty weather this winter to make up for it.

I contacted Mysterical-E, and my story, "Picture Imperfect", is scheduled for the fall edition, which should be out somewhere around the end of September. I'll post a link when it's up.

If you've tried following the link to the interview in the post a couple back, it works now.

'til next time~~~

Plagiarism

2009-07-18T18:22:00.002-05:00

Plagiarism is, basically, taking the words another has written and putting your own name to them, as if they were yours.

There are some wonderful blog posts around the web on the subject of plagiarism and why it's something writers and readers shouldn't tolerate.

Anti-Plagiarism Day!

It's Anti-Plagiarism Day

The posts contain a lot of links to other posts on the subject as well, so expect to spend some time looking.

Intellectual property has always had trouble getting the respect it deserves. It is exactly that--property. When you take someone else's words and present them as your own, it's stealing. It's the same as if you walked into a craftsman's workshop, picked up a fine carving from his workbench, walked off with it, and put it on display as your own work.

This is not flattery. The person you stole from will not feel that you've paid homage to them, and will not thank you. If you like a turn of phrase or a passage from a book that much, buy the book and put it on your shelf where you can re-read it all you want. Don't steal what someone else labored over and display it as your own work.

Plagiarism doesn't happen by accident. Don't be guilty of it.

Click on the Writing label to find all other posts on writing.

'til next time~~~

Hey, who let it get so hot?

2009-07-08T14:50:00.000-05:00

Actually, we've had some really nice weather for the past week or so, but it's about to get back to summertime conditions, which I'm not looking forward to. Hot, humid air is still hot and humid, no matter how many fans you have blowing on you.

So, have I gotten anything written while I've been housebound with this ankle? Erm...no. I have been reading a lot, though. You can't call it slacking, because reading is as essential to the process of storytelling as putting words on a page. You never know when something you read will spark an idea that spins off in an entirely different direction and gives you something else to write about.

The ankle appears to be healing. I've got two more weeks of no walking, unless the doctor decides to add to it when I see him next. Hopefully he won't.

I've been telling everyone that the cutoff date for registration for the Muse Online Writers Conference is the end of August. Turns out it may actually be the first of August. If you're going to sign up, do so quickly. There's only about three weeks left in July.

My family's been bringing me gift cards from Barnes and Noble, so I can order books off their website. I've got a lovely stack of things waiting to be read, which is a delight, because I read fast. Current read is Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout. Previous reads include other Rex Stout stories, some by Donna Leon, Rhys Bowen's second "Royal Spyness" book A Royal Pain, and the first in a new series by Thea Phipps, Charades With A Lunatic. Lots of great reading there! Also looking forward to the new Dick Francis/Felix Francis book, which is out in August.

Looking forward to being up and around again, in a few weeks. Watch your footing, so you don't end up spending the best parts of summer staring at the ceiling!

Until later~~

Those low down, imperfection blues

2009-06-25T13:43:00.000-05:00

Isn't it fun when life decides to remind us that we're not the indestructible creatures that we like to think we are?

On June 2, I put my foot down wrong stepping out of my parents' house and twisted my ankle, in the process also breaking my fibula and tearing a bunch of ligaments in my right ankle. The orthopedist decided I needed a plate and screws to fix the break, and I underwent the operation on the 9th. Today was my first post-op checkup with the doctor. According to the x-ray, I have six screws in my ankle, five of which are attached to the plate and the bone, and the sixth appears to be directly linking the two bone ends. Got another four weeks to go before I'm supposed to begin walking again. No putting weight on it until then. The stitches came out today as well. I can say that I'm glad I didn't look at the incision site until after it had had a chance to do some healing.

The interview and article at Mysterious People, which I mentioned in my last post, are up, and have been since June 1 and 2. Of course, I haven't felt up to doing much computerwise during the last few weeks, so here are the links I promised before the broken ankle:

A Conversation with Pepper Smith

Writing Suspense

Hope your summer is injury-free. At least with all this down time, I don't have many excuses for not writing, lol!

'til next time~~~

Upcoming interview

2009-05-27T18:58:00.002-05:00

The lovely Jean Henry Mead, who runs the Mysterious People blog, has been posting a series of author interviews and articles, some by well known authors and some by less well known ones. I'm honored that she's chosen to include me in the series. When the interview and article post, I'll post the links here.

As a reminder, if you're looking for previous posts on writing and don't want to search through the archives, there's a link in the sidebar that will bring up only those posts with the writing tag.

If you're looking to keep up to date with posts here...the only thing I can suggest is to add yourself as a follower on the widget in the sidebar. I post when something comes up I want to yak about, which isn't as often as I should.

Another reminder about the Muse Online Writers Conference. This is a free event held for one week during October. To find out what workshops are on offer this year, please visit the website and look through the list. JD Webb and I will, of course, be doing our suspense workshop again this year. Registration is open, but will close toward the end of August, so don't wait if you want to check it out.

Still have future writing posts rolling around in my head. Will get them out here once they stop rolling...

Till later~~~

Delayed gratification

2009-05-13T12:33:00.001-05:00

Hmm. Well, if you’ve checked over at Mysterical-E, you’ve no doubt noticed that my story didn’t make this issue. Perhaps the next one, coming out in July? I’ll have to check back with them to see exactly when it’s supposed to show up if it’s not out in July.

Work is progressing on the current WIP. It remains to be seen if writing during allergy season is a good or bad thing, though. I feel like I’m in a fog so much of the time. Got to give some thought to another writing post. With everything blossoming right now, though, all I really seem to want to do is hibernate.

Once upon a time, I figured I’d put together a newsletter when enough interesting things happen to let people know about. I guess my life is just not that interesting. Check back here for any updates that I thought might be of interest, because I’m probably going to ditch the newsletter idea.

What makes suspense?

2009-05-13T12:30:00.004-05:00

I have to warn you that it's a big part of allergy season for me, so if you detect a slight incoherence, you know why.

In October for the past three years, the Muse Online Writers Conference has offered a number of workshops and live chats with authors, editors, publishers, and even a few agents, with the goal of helping authors to improve their craft and their chances at publication. We will be offering our course on adding suspense to fiction again this year, following the same lines as last year–

JD Webb and I posted a number of writing prompts, sentences that students were to take and begin a suspense story with. The results were interesting–and by the end, I believe the participants understood more clearly what suspense is and how to incorporate it.

So what is suspense? It is the feeling that something bad might happen. It is not violence, it’s the fear that the violence might happen. It is not shock effect, although suspense and shock effect work hand in hand in some genres. It can be compared in a minor way to the fear you might feel going to the doctor when you know you’re going to get a shot. You feel apprehension about getting stabbed in the arm with a needle, but once it’s actually happened, you no longer feel the fear and apprehension. In the same way, suspense loses its punch if you let the bad thing happen. The goal is to keep the reader on edge by keeping your protagonist just this side of the bad results threatened by your villain.

As instructors, we, too, each took one of the prompts and began a suspense story with it. Mine is posted below:

_______________________

The small hairs on the back of Roger’s neck rose as he slid the nozzle of the gas hose into the Miata’s tank.

He stiffened, looking up. The driver of the black Chevy at the next island over had his back to him. Close to the station’s front door, an elderly man held the lid of an old-fashioned chest freezer open, while two young boys picked out ice cream treats. No one from inside the station’s office seemed to be looking his way.

Someone, somewhere, was staring at him. And hard, by the feel of it.

He squeezed the pump handle and locked it on before turning slowly on his heel, looking around with a feigned casual air. Heat rose from the faded asphalt of Hwy 236. Directly across from him, a farmer wheeled his tractor in a tight arc and started back along the length of his field, cutting the long grass for hay. Down the road to his left, houses clustered on both sides for a distance of about a quarter of a mile. To the right, on his side of the road, was a feed store. The farmer’s field took up the rest of the other side, green grass stretching away for as far as he could see.

The small community was little more than a spot along the road, too small to be incorporated as a town. Quaint, Marissa had called it when they’d passed through on their honeymoon. There was also no one in sight, aside from the farmer, who was headed away from him.

Still…

He shook himself and turned back to the car. Marissa had fallen asleep not long before they’d gotten here. He leaned his forearms on the driver’s door, smiling as he studied her. She wasn’t one to let things get in the way of her plans. They’d made the reservations for this trip last year, before their honeymoon had ended, and not even the surprise discovery seven months ago that she was pregnant had been enough to deter her from it. He reached in and gently brushed a few strands of her long black hair from her face.

“Hey, hon, better wake up.”

One corner of her mouth quirked. “I wasn’t asleep.”

He grinned. “Sure. This is the last chance for a bathroom stop before we reach our hotel.”

She grimaced, opening her eyes. “You do know that this child of yours plays kickball with my bladder, don’t you?”

“You’ve mentioned it before.”

She sat up, unfastened her seatbelt, and opened her door.

“Need any help?” Roger asked.

“I’m not as big as a house, yet.” She carefully levered herself out of the low-slung car. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

The weight of the pregnancy had given her walk a cute little sway. Roger pushed himself upright, watching her over the roof of the Miata as she walked away.

The sense that he was being watch returned, so strong that he gave up any pretense of casual interest in his surroundings. He scanned the area, looking first past Marissa to be sure she wasn’t heading into trouble, then turning to look intently toward the small cluster of houses. A couple of children had come out onto a front lawn to play catch. An ancient Ford Fairlane rattled past along the highway, pulling off at the feed store. There were a few places where someone could have hidden behind bushes to stare at him unobserved. There was no way of knowing if anyone was using them without going to check.

The pump handle clicked off. He turned back to pull the nozzle from the tank and return it to the pump. As soon as Marissa came back from the bathroom, they’d be leaving, and his hidden observer would just have to find someone else to stare at.

A red pickup truck approached from the direction of the houses, slowing as if to turn in at the service station. Marissa swung around.

“Roger, do you have a couple of dollars for…” Her voice trailed away. He looked at her quickly. She stared past him, her eyes wide, and her face pale and blank with shock. “Billy--”

Roger half-turned, looking behind him. The red pickup had slowed to a crawl. Its driver, a lean, muscular man with short dark hair and a bushy mustache, stared back at him, cold, arrogant, a slight smile curving his mouth. Marissa’s psychotic ex-husband, who’d beaten her so badly that she’d lost their nearly full-term baby, and gotten himself convicted of manslaughter in the death of their child. She’d divorced him while he was in prison. He wasn’t supposed to be out yet.

Billy’s smile widened. He raised an arm and mimed pointing a gun at Roger’s head. His index finger crooked as if pulling the trigger. Roger’s skin crawled. Billy looked past him at Marissa, then stepped on the gas and accelerated away.

____________________________

Does this give you the feeling that something bad is going to happen? Billy has announced his intentions. If I were to continue the story, of course, it would become a contest between Roger and Billy, with the lives of Roger, Marissa, and the unborn child at stake. Keeping the suspense high requires that the readers care about what happens to this young family, which is another vital aspect of suspense. If your readers don’t have a strong desire to see them escape, they might just root for Billy to track them down and kill them.

Click on the Writing label for all other posts on writing.

Back on Blogger

2009-05-13T12:28:00.001-05:00

Erm...never mind. I didn't care as much as I ought to have for the new blog software on my website, so I'm back to posting here. I'll just transfer a couple of posts from the other blog to here, then shut the other one down.

New blog

2009-03-17T13:02:00.004-05:00

Well, I'm in the process of setting up a blog on my website. Don't know yet if I like it more than this one, but I've got a post on it about writing suspense. The new site is here. This one will stay up, in any case, because google already sends people here for a few of the writing posts.

Edited to add: In case you get here through some freak of Google pointing you here, I gave up the blog on my website and have continued this one. Just click the home tab at the top of the page to get to the newest posts.

Update on publishing schedule

2009-03-09T13:04:00.006-05:00

My books have been assigned dates for publication. They are as follows--

Blood Money--April 2010
Rio Star--October 2010
Reef Runner--April 2011

Haven't been assigned an editor yet, but that's coming.

If you haven't read anything of my series yet, don't forget the short story "The Uncle Hunt" is available in pdf on my website. Just click on the link on the front page, which will take you to the page where the download link resides (look for the download link toward the bottom of that page).

In looking through the stack of links I've been collecting, I found a couple that I think I'll add this time around. First is called The Cardinal Sins from over at Mysterious Matters, regarding what not to do in writing mysteries. Useful if you have aspirations in that direction.

The second: You know those emails going around every now and then about the woman who paid $250 for the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe and generously decided to share it with the world via email? Guess what? It's an urban legend. To get the history of that particular story, visit Snopes, the urban legend site, and enter Neiman-Marcus cookie in the search box. If you want the REAL Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe, visit their website. It's free to whoever wants it.

Publishing news

2009-02-02T17:06:00.002-06:00

Well, publishing news as it applies to me, that is.

Mundania Press has acquired my Patty O'Donnell series, as of the end of January. Blood Money is tentatively scheduled to come out next year, though there's no firm date yet. The other two are expected at six month intervals after that. Will post updates as I get them.

Whoohooo!!!

First post of 2009...

2009-01-16T10:19:00.003-06:00

Well, if you've been checking in from time to time, you've noticed that I don't tend to post much. I've added (I think) the followers function to the sidebar--if you add yourself to it, and I happen to post something, you'll know about it rather than hoping to catch a new post through randomly clicking on my blog. Not that I'm expecting there are many people actually reading this...

In any case, we're still stuck in the old house. Once the weather got cold, the mold problem got to be much less of a problem because the mold doesn't like the cold much. Still looking for financing to build the new house. The first company we applied with kept us hanging for a while before informing us that our part of the country is a declining market and declined to make the loan. The fact that pretty much the whole country is a declining market doesn't seem to figure into it.

So far as I know, my story "Picture Imperfect" should be coming out in the Spring issue of Mysterical-E. I'm thinking somewhere around the first of March, but we'll see how it goes. I'll post more on it once I get word for certain.

I have a ton of links I've been saving up, but since I'm not posting from home, they'll have to wait until the next post.

'til next time~~~

Changes...

2008-10-07T14:37:00.003-05:00

Just about wherever you are in my house, you see boxes. Some are packed full, others are flat and in stacks, waiting to be chosen because they're just the right size to put that set of knick-knacks inside, or for my husband's billion pairs of shoes. (Okay, so he doesn't have a billion pairs, but he wears size 12/13 depending on the shoe maker, so a big box is a necessity.) This process has been going on for probably two months now, mostly because I didn't want to hold off to the last minute and pack trash along with the stuff we wanted to keep. There's nothing like opening a box of treasured possessions and finding an old straw wrapper from a long-forgotten fast-food meal to bring home the need for pre-planning and organization for an undertaking of this size.

Yes, we're moving. Sort of. If all goes to plan, we're pulling down the old house we live in now and building new on the same lot. I don't think I'm going to miss this place all that much. But we've been here nineteen years, so there's a lot of junk to wade through in search of the things we really need and want to keep. Ask my son. Now that he's packing up his own things, I think he finally sees the wisdom in all those admonitions to pick up the trash so he can see what needs to be put away. He's already staked out the back bedroom in the yet-to-be-built house, which happens to be the master bedroom, but since the new house's two bedrooms are of equal size, I don't mind, because I really like the big windows in the second bedroom. Besides, the master bath is going to be cut down to a half-bath to make room for the furnace and the water heater. It's funny how not all house plans come with designated spots for those things.

I've been hearing geese, most likely on their way further south. Can't say I blame them. I hate cold weather. Leaves are falling off the trees at an increasing rate. Both remind me that we have little time left here. Not in the metaphysical sense--there's a lot of mold in the floor and the walls, and we have to have the windows open for the fresh air. Once it gets cold enough that we have to shut the windows, we will have to abandon the place, if it hasn't been pulled down before then. Mortgage paperwork is such a joy, especially when you have to rely on others to get back to you with requested information. I'm not sure we'll be done with it before we have to be out of here.

The Muse Online Writer's Conference starts next week. So far, we've got a bit over 150 people signed up for the Suspense workshop. If you're one of them and you haven't gotten my papers, "Writing Suspense" and "Adding Suspense", you might want to grab them off my website. They're not required reading, but you might find them useful, since this year, workshop attendees get to write their own short suspense scenes. My workshop partner is also running his tagline workshop again, so keep that in mind.

Now, off to wrestle with myself over whether I should be writing fiction or packing. Choices, choices...

'Til next time~~

Website update complete, plus Muse Conference

2008-08-19T18:58:00.002-05:00

Finally, got the website update finished and posted. If you find any links that don't work, click the link at the bottom of the website pages to report them, please.

The Uncle Hunt is now available as a pdf download on my website. Enjoy! I ask that you don't pass along the file. Please help me keep track of how many downloads it gets by directing people to the appropriate page on my website. They can download it themselves. Requires Adobe Reader or an equivalent pdf reader to open the file. Adobe Reader is a free download from Adobe.

The Muse Online Writers Conference registration is open until September 1, 2008. If you intended to attend this year, you've only got a few more days to register. Lea is making no exceptions this year. If you miss the cutoff date, you'll have to wait for next year's conference.

Mysterical-E has accepted my story "Picture Imperfect" for publication. It will probably be out in the spring issue, from what I'm told.

Still waiting to hear back from the publisher about my books. I will post information as I get it.

Until next time~~~

Website updates coming soon

2008-07-16T12:19:00.002-05:00

We've had problems with a computer virus getting in and messing things up (my husband's user account on the computer vanished entirely, including all his current bookmarks, which were considerable in number), followed by weeks worth of getting the harddrives reformatted, getting all the software loaded back on, and getting the computer and the router talking to each other again. A frustrating series of events for all sentients involved. I'm sure the computer didn't care one way or the other.

I plan on revamping my website, which may or may not include changing the background color scheme. Probably any future sample chapters will be posted in pdf format, and I'll likely have a free story download available sometime in August. Articles I've written for the Muse Online Writers Conference are also posted there, on the articles page. Those will continue to be available.

My three out-of-print books are currently in the queue at another publisher. The first has made it through the initial read and is waiting for an editor to give it a good look before they'll make any decisions on it. If there's one thing the writing biz teaches you eventually, it's patience.

Speaking of the Muse Online Writers Conference, registration is now open. Registration runs sometime through September--my bad on not remembering exact dates. I'll post them once I've tracked all the information down. The conference is free, and you have the advantage of being able to attend your chosen workshops in your pajamas if you choose, because no one will ever see you. Except, perhaps, your housemates and the delivery man.

Many thanks to Lynne Patrick of Creme de la Crime, an independent British crime publisher, for unwittingly giving me exactly what I needed to get my latest Patty story moving forward. You rock.

Until next time~~

Stereotypes in Writing

2008-07-10T11:54:00.003-05:00

My apologies for the extended delay in posting again. You really don't want to hear all about my allergy problems and the effect they have on my brain, so I won't get into that.

I’ve been pondering this post for a while, and decided to finally get my brain in gear and write it.

A number of years ago, before my first novel made it to print, a reader complained about the fact that my characters of a particular nationality weren’t the way characters of that nationality were portrayed in movies. I explained to her, politely, that the characters in the movies were stereotypes, and that I don’t use them.

Stereotypes are a sort of shorthand that is used to invent characters without giving much thought to it. Movies and television use them because they’ve got only so much time to tell a story, and they can’t afford to spend much of it developing their characters. Since movies and tv are such a pervasive part of our culture, their use of that particular shorthand is a trap that we can easily fall into. Got an Italian character? Throw in a love of pasta and a few ‘Mama Mia’s and you’ve got it, right?

Well, only if you’re writing a five minute children’s cartoon.

Writing characters according to stereotypes is somewhat undesirable because a) people are not all alike, inside or outside arbitrary national lines, and b) stereotypes often originated as uncomplimentary characterizations based on national prejudices.

Writing to stereotypes also suggests that the author didn’t do his/her homework.

If you have a character of a nationality other than your own, take some time to do some research into the history of the country your character comes from. If you can find books that tell you about the culture of that particular nation, it will help you to understand your character better, and you can write a more fleshed-out person rather than a one-size-fits-all, flat stereotype.

A word of caution, though—if you intend to use that nation’s slang and idioms in your character’s conversations, try to get someone from that nation to help you get it right.

Some time ago, I decided, for reasons I won’t go into, to learn Irish gaelic. I quite enjoyed the studying, learning new words and sentence structures, but discovered something that stayed with me a lot longer than the language did. Slang and idiomatic sayings are intimately tied into the culture and history of the people who made them up. If you have no understanding of the culture and history, and have no one to help you correct your mistakes, it’s better not to use them. There is nothing that screams ignorance louder than the improper use of them.

Don’t worry that not throwing in the stuff you hear in the movies is going to keep your readers from knowing who your characters are. I usually just have mine speaking good old plain English, and I can’t tell you the number of times people have told me, “Oh, such and such sounded so (fill in nationality).” Once your reader knows a character is a certain nationality, they’ll fill in the accent, among other things.

Click on the Writing label for all other posts on writing.

End of March Blues

2008-03-30T14:59:00.004-05:00

Can you say 'tax time?' April 15 is suddenly just a short period away. A quarter of the year is gone. How did that happen so quickly?

Patty has suddenly made it plain she's ready for her next story, so I guess I'll have to oblige her. It's about time, really. Some people claim there's no such thing as writer's block, but I imagine that's just because they've never experienced it. Like the girl who tried to tell me there was no such thing as PMS. Uh-huh.

I've gathered a few links to posts on other blogs that I found interesting. Especially as writers, we tend to be isolated and have ideas about how the business works that aren't really accurate.

The first is Wait, you mean THIS is the hard part? Just how do those books get to the bookstore?

Next is The Other 90% Someone may be getting rich off those books, but it might not be who you think it is.

Sandra Ruttan has some Unsolicited Advice...For Aspiring Authors Seeking Advice.

And finally, if you have something through a small press that uses a POD printer, this will probably be of interest to you, because Amazon's changing their policy about doing business with any POD printer but their own. Writers Weekly

Sigh. As if life wasn't already difficult enough.

Tomorrow is the last official day of my contract for Reef Runner. The series will be out of print in April. Hopefully I'll have news soon on if it's going back into print elsewhere.

Out for now~~~

What makes a writer a writer?

2008-03-11T13:52:00.005-05:00

I tend not to say an awful lot while I'm online. Mostly, I 'listen' to the conversations going on on message boards and lists, learning and picking up interesting tips and tidbits as I go along. I'm still too new at this, and a bit too unknown as a published author to have much of importance to add.

I have to admit that there are times when my fellow authors do and say things that leave me scratching my head. There are writers who seem to feel all authors are involved in some sort of vicious competition for readers, and that it behooves them to do everything in their power to sabotage those around them. In their opinion, anyone who hasn't jumped through all the same hoops they did isn't worthy of the name 'writer' and should be slapped down with utmost speed. Those who haven't been published yet are beneath their notice. I believe the term that often crops up in these cases is 'wannabe'.

Frankly, it's a form of 'me-ism' that turns me off. Thank you for revealing your attitudes, folks. I have quite enough stuff in my TBR pile as it is. I'm thankful that you stepped right up and took your books out of the stack.

I'm not going to point at specific individuals or organizations. That's not what this is about. It's about what makes a writer a writer.

We all, or at least most of us, learned to write in school. We learned to put words on a page in an order that made sense. Under that definition of the word, we are all writers. We all use those basic skills in some form or another in everyday life, even if it's just in making out the grocery list. That's not, however, what most people think of as being a writer. But they are the basic skills that all writers begin with.

The major difference between most people and 'writers' is that writers take those basic skills and try to convey something with them. Not all writing fields are fiction, though that's the one I'm the most familiar with. Writing is like any other skill--you start out with the basic understanding of how it works, and you work upward from there. You wouldn't spend two hours learning how to toss a set of juggling balls back and forth between your hands, and then expect to get on stage and juggle fire. The flashy tricks come after perhaps years of practice. But it's interesting to note that jugglers who are at the beginning of learning, who have mastered the basic skills and are working their way upward a bit at a time toward that goal of juggling fire, are not called 'wannabes,' except perhaps by those with a high opinion of themselves. They're simply less skilled jugglers.

If you're at the beginning, you feel the drive, you have stories to tell, and you're working on your skills, you're a writer. Publishing is a wonderful goal, a validation of your hard work, but like juggling fire, unless you're that extremely rare, extraordinary person, you're not going to get there overnight, and certainly not without the hard work. In fact, most of what is called 'overnight success' is actually the result of years of hard work.

The only time 'wannabe' should apply to any 'writer' is when that 'writer' makes big claims about what the books they're going to write and how they're going to be the biggest thing since sliced bread, but never makes an effort to see it through. That's a 'wannabe', they wannabe a writer, but don't want to put the effort into actually being one. 'Wannabe' should never be applied to writers who are making the effort to learn and practice their skills.

I know I've used the W-word quite a lot in this post. And by that, I mean 'work'. Writing is a skill that requires an apprenticeship of sorts, though nobody ever tells us that. We're taught the basic skills and then tossed out into the world to flounder around until we either figure out what we're doing or give up. If you're wise, you'll seek out a group, or maybe several groups, where you can get your work critiqued. Expect that you'll be doing your fair share of critiquing. You learn by reading what works and what doesn't in other people's work, as well as having your own strengths and mistakes pointed out to you. Don't think you're not going to make mistakes. It's how you respond to them that will make a difference in whether you'll get to your goal or not. And just because your name isn't in Books In Print, don't let anyone ever tell you you're not a writer. You may not be a published writer, but you are a writer.

My apologies for not being a more regular blogger. I seem to have hibernated through the winter, lol!

Click on the Writing label for all other posts on writing.

Erm...

2007-12-04T15:39:00.000-06:00

Hello, neglected blog. Sorry I've been away for so long.

I have a character in the Maui novel who is a jewelry maker, and have been indulging in a bit of bead-stringing so I can get a feel for what she does. Nothing spectacular, but I can see offering those neat little metal bookmarks with dangley strings of beads or interesting charms or something in future giveaways. Stay tuned--

Things have gotten cold--granted, that's not surprising considering it's the first part of December. What I want to know is where the rest of the year went. It's going by much too fast.

In case you'd missed it, Blood Money is now out of print, though I do have it out on submission again. Rio Star will go out of print at the first of the year, and Reef Runner at the first of April 2008. If you want them, get them while you can.

I have plans for some short stories, which I will hopefully get written soon. And I imagine I'll have something in the way of a contest before too much longer. Just have to think about what I want to offer. Maybe a bit of that bead-stringing I mentioned earlier.

I've got a few links for you. The first is for a post on the Rap Sheet, Authors, On and Off the Page, which includes links to author interviews (I think they're audio).

Next is from The Rejecter, Rethinking "Genre", an interesting discussion on how this whole genre distinction issue got started to begin with.

Third is from Tess Gerritsen's blog, Action Is Boring. I'll let you read why.

And finally, because this is not to be missed, a breathtakingly beautiful shot of the Earth and our Moon, taken by Voyager 1 on September 18, 1977 and posted online in honor of the probe's 30th anniversary. There's a small thumbnail of the photo on the righthand side of the page, and links below it that lead to full-sized versions. Check out the rest of the site while you're there. There are a lot of great shots from the Cassini probe, which is in orbit around Saturn.

Until next time~~

Post-conference brain-drain

2007-10-30T17:17:00.001-05:00

The Muse Online Writers Conference was earlier this month. I'm nearly recovered--I guess I shouldn't have signed up for so many courses all at once!

While I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts about it, here's a link you might be interested in, if you're interested in the crime-fiction scene. Its for the archive site of the Carnival of the Criminal Minds, a traveling post moving from blog to blog in the crime fiction world. The archive tells where the carnival's been, and where it will be next. Four weeks in, it looks pretty interesting.

Back soon...

Has it really been a month?

2007-09-19T13:25:00.000-05:00

My apologies, I never intended to let this long pass between posts...

Kira's story is presently on hold while I work out some problems with characterization. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to it soon. In the meantime, I've got a short story I'm working on. More about that at a later time.

The weather's finally changing. Days have been comfortable, in the 80s mostly, and we've had rain. The mold level's also gone up a bit, which makes it more difficult to think and write coherently. Blog posts may continue to be a bit spotty.

The Muse Online Writers Conference begins in October. I hope you have already signed up if you had intended to, because I believe registration closed on the 15th of this month.

There are a couple of posts from other blogs that I'll pass along the links to:

Jim Huang, a bookseller, makes these observations about the publishing industry from his perspective on the retail end of things--Where I am, after 20 years in bookselling The comments column is also worth a read.

If you've been following the uproar over the cutting of newspaper space for book reviews and the rather elitist view said reviewers take of online book reviewers, this post from Kassia Krozsner might interest you--Stop Your Sobbing

And finally, because you can't help but be appalled and amused at the same time over stuff like this--Clientcopia's list of the top stupid client tricks. The list changes over time, so you may want to bookmark it if it appeals to you.

Until next time~~

Greetings in August

2007-08-18T10:07:00.000-05:00

Dropping in for a quick hello before the storms get here.

You know it's been really, really hot when 82F feels wonderful. We've had a string of days in the upper 90s/lower 100s, and without air conditioning (our house never had one) it's been a lot of taking it easy and accomplishing little during the worst parts of the day. Since the most comfortable parts of the day have been at night, it's also meant getting less sleep, because that good part of the day has to be divided between getting stuff done and sleeping. It looks like we're in for a few days in the lower 90s, so maybe the really hot stuff is gone for the summer.

I'm now on chapter 6 of the new novel. I'm still not certain Kira will end up with the hero of the story, since he's got some issues with her, but there's still two thirds of the book to go, so we'll see.

I've saved some links to share with you, some of which will go in the sidebar when I eventually get around to adding them there--

From the Writer Beware blog: Writers and Money, an instructive look at reality in the writing business.

From Galleycat: The Bookshelf at Your Fingertips, Literally, a short article about what the future of reading will include.

And finally, from Crimespace: Why A Published Author Will Decline to Read Your Unpubbed Manuscript, a must-read for aspiring authors.

I'm hearing thunder, so I'm off to pull fans from windows until the storm's past. Until later~~

Website update, and Pet Responsibility

2007-07-31T13:46:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted from Crimespace--

Got to playing with the website builder and revamped my site. In doing so, I got to wondering, who sort of information do readers want to find on an author's website? Feel free to check it out, and let me know what else you might have wanted to see. The link's on the right. Updating again is no biggie.

On the other matter, we've just adopted a new cat, our third, and our second stray. The first one we adopted a year ago. She'd been hanging out in our yard for a while, and I figured she was a neighbor's cat taking advantage of the fact that our first cat was a house pet and hadn't staked a claim to the yard. She was skittish and would run before we could get close enough to check her out, so I didn't start worrying about her until she got real skinny and got bold enough to come right up onto the front porch and meow at me through the kitchen window, looking for food.

The new cat, which we adopted about a week ago, wasn't originally a stray. In fact, I know exactly where her family was. They lived in the house next door, and moved out maybe half a year ago, I'm assuming due to the breakup of the family, leaving their critters behind for a local family member to care for while they tried to sell their house. The two dogs gradually disappeared--one was an escape artist, and got the gate open, which allowed the other to get out on the road and get hit. The family member was aware of this, but it was the city that came by to dispose of the body. The escape artist eventually disappeared, though I don't know exactly what happened to it.

They also had the cat, which the family member faithfully came by and fed every day until the day the house sold. The cat hung around the house, and the new neighbors never seemed bothered that it was there, so I'd assumed they'd agreed to take the cat along with the house. The cat had always been skittish and wouldn't let me get close, so it wasn't until about a week ago, when I noticed she was terribly skinny and that her black fur was turning brown in patches, that I realized she had been abandoned and was staying alive by eating whatever she could scavenge. Once I started offering her food, she let me get close enough to pet her. She was almost literally skin and bones. I'm not sure how much longer she would have lasted if things had gone on as they were.

Which brings me to my point--when one adopts an animal, one accepts responsibility for its care. This is something at a lot of people don't really seem to understand. They'll get a puppy or a kitten, raise and care for it until it becomes inconvenient, and then dump it somewhere on the assumption that either someone will take it in, or it will hunt and feed itself. They ignore the fact that an animal raised in the wild by its mother knows how to hunt, but an animal raised by humans often will starve to death because it doesn't know how or where to find food. The casual cruelty in the act of abandoning an animal because it's become 'inconvenient' to continue owning it is appalling. I don't understand how people can leave something they once loved to die such a horrible death.

Enough for now~~

Beginning of Summer Fuzz Edition

2007-06-28T13:15:00.000-05:00

Well, it's nearly the end of June. (Where did half the year go?) I did warn you in the first post that I have some pretty fearsome allergy problems, and this is one of those times of year when it pops up and really flattens me. It truly wasn't my intention to leave this blog sitting untended for so long.

In recognition of the fact that I'm just incapable of coming up with anything interesting to post of my own at the moment, I'm posting some links to other blogs.

Diana Peterfreund has an interesting primer on publishing. You can find it here and here.

Over at Mysterious Matters is a post on why some perfectly good books get the 'not right for us' pass: How Much Formula Is Too Formulaic?

And just because I thought this was absolutely hilarious when I first read it, Protag No Nos.

Playing Catch-up

2007-06-06T10:56:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the long space between blog entries. I've actually been writing lately. May not sound like a big deal, but when you've had next to nothing in the way of output for a few years, its a relief to have the stories flowing again.

There are a few things to clear up in the first three chapters of the new novel, but other than that, I'm about to start chapter four. My husband is my first reader, and every now and then I have to stop working and get him to read and make sure it's still working and that I haven't written something terribly confusing. (Erm, yeah, it does happen.) Especially when it's something that has a strong emotional content, I have to let someone else read it to make sure I haven't over- or under-done it.

The long spell of rain has stopped, at least for the present, and the days are pretty nice, in the 70s and 80s and breezy. I don't look forward to July and August, when it will be up in the 90s and 100s.

Let me give it some thought, and I'll see if I can't come up with another writing post, or some interesting links.

~~~

Progress

2007-05-16T17:23:00.000-05:00

Ah, the joys of having new toys to play with. I think I like the new Blogger.

I’m adding a section to the sidebar with the occasional link to posts on other blogs that I think should be considered. The first one’s called “The Cost of Free Books”, and is a look at this publicity gimmick from the point of view of the publisher. Something to think about, anyway.

I’m into chapter three of the new novel, after a major rewrite of the first two. The whole mapping the story out in an outline thing didn’t work. That really doesn’t surprise me, though, since it never really has. For something non-fiction, an outline seems to work best, but not for fiction. The initial storyline is almost never what I finish with, and the story is probably that much the better for it. Kira has told me some things about herself that I hadn’t planned, familial relationships have shifted again, and this is working so much better than what I started with.

Which brings me to an interesting point—writing advice isn’t one-size-fits-all. When you’re learning to write, you’re flooded with hints and tips from every source you can get your hands on, from books to classes to critique groups, and not everything that’s suggested is going to work for you. In fact, probably a lot of it won’t. You’re getting the benefit of other people’s experience, what works for them, but what fires them up might leave you cold. Try things to find out what works for you, but if it doesn’t, don’t feel deficient or let it stop you in your tracks. There’s nothing that will give you writer’s block faster than trying to follow advice that doesn’t work for you.

The picture in the sidebar is not current. The filly with me is now probably 13 years old. She was a surprise gift from my mare, who’d secretly mated with the previous owner’s colt just before we bought her.

Until next time~~

Crimespace, and a big Thank You

2007-04-28T21:54:00.000-05:00

Erm...yeah, I've kind of been neglecting this blog lately...

Just recently discovered a place called Crimespace, which is a place for readers and writers of crime fiction to get together and discuss the genre. Great place to wander around if you're interested.

The "Thank You" goes to Lea Schizas. She's a very generous author/editor/mother hen who has taken it upon herself to help new authors get their start in the world of publishing. She's got a website and a blog, and she runs The Muse It Up Club. She is also one of the driving forces behind the Muse Online Writers Conference, at which I'll be a presenter this year. This is a free-of-charge event, over a five day period, and worth checking out. Registration ends in August, so if you're interested, don't wait around.

More later~~~

April Showers...

2007-04-05T13:14:00.000-05:00

Well, we haven't had much in the way of April showers yet, but it is only the 5th. Maybe we'll see some rain soon. The grass is green and growing, but the ground is cracked and dry where there's no ground cover.

The anthology I posted about a while back is out on submission--hopefully we'll hear back about it soon. The Book Pedler is due to review "Blood Money" sometime in the next month. I'm close to finishing chapter one of the new novel. It's still slow going--I don't think quickly during the Spring allergy season--but at least it's going. Kira's about to meet the man she might eventually marry. It depends on if I really want to inflict that on her or not. Patty insists that she's on vacation. Can't say I blame her much, considering what she went through in Reef Runner. Besides, her husband, Micheal, will get to share the task of narration in this next one, and I'm not sure either of them are ready for that yet.

I've been enjoying a blog written by a variety of professionals in the mystery publishing/selling field, titled Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room. The different perspectives on the publishing biz are quite interesting.

I will be doing another post on some aspect of writing. I just haven't decided what yet.

More when I'm thinking better~~~

Being a Butterfly

2007-03-20T15:14:00.000-05:00

Coming out of Winter makes me feel like a bit like a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis--maybe not a pretty one, but at least no longer earthbound.

Kira has changed jobs and familial relationships in the new story, which seems to be working fine. I love it when a story starts to flow! I'm much more comfortable with the character and the level of knowledge she should be expected to have in her environment.

I'm running a drawing for copies of my books in e-format. Visit my website for further info on this--but the contest ends at the end of March, so don't wait too long.

The two Stargate series start up again next month--wooohoooo!! I'm also looking forward to when the new Doctor Who series starts. Also enjoying CSI (the original series), NCIS, House, and enjoyed Eureka when it was on. My reading life has been a little sparse lately. Probably ought to dust off my library card.

I've got some links to add soon. But for now, here's one to the Writer Beware Two Thumbs Down Publishers List, which is a companion to their list of agents and agencies to avoid.

More soon~~

How time flies...

2007-03-15T09:16:00.000-05:00

Yikes! It's been a while since I posted last.

The Eppies have been awarded. Alas, my book didn't win, but I'll be getting a nice frameable finalist certificate, so I'll have something to show for it. To find out who did win in the various categories, visit the Eppies page for the complete list. And Congratulations! to the winners!

Spring is arriving at long last. I have to say that I'm much happier with the temperatures outside the house and in. Of course, eventually my worst pollen allergies will strike, but for the moment I'm all right. The grasses are pollinating, but I'm also not eating wheat right now, so it's made a difference in how reactive I am to it. (Gotta remember--don't eat wheat in the Spring!)

I have to confess that a few years ago, I wrote so much stuff in a short period of time that I burned out. It's been a chore getting myself back to the point of wanting to write, but it's happening. All my usual tricks for getting a story started aren't working anymore, so I'm having to find new ones, including something I never used to do, plotting a story out on paper before I started writing it. I've already got a lot of Kira's story plotted out on paper (although some things have changed since I first wrote it all down), so I'll give it another go and see if I can make some progress on it. I'll let you know if it makes a difference.

Hope your Spring is a great one!

~~~

The Critique, Part Two

2007-02-22T14:06:00.002-06:00

Part one is found here.

Some thoughts about the other side of the critiquing partnership…

Yes, I did write ‘partnership’. A critique is not the same as a review. It’s serious business. It implies that the one seeking the critique recognizes that their work isn’t perfect and wants to improve on it. If all you are looking for is someone to tell you how clever you are and how you’ve written the best book/story/poem/whatever that mankind has ever seen in the entire history of the planet Earth, you’re not looking for a critique. Give your story to Aunt Jane or Granny Sue. They’ll be happy to do that for you.

If you view the words that you’ve written as sacrosanct, you need to consider what your goals are as a writer. Are you happy with where you’re at? Do you have hopes of getting published? Did you know that even multi-published authors have editors? No matter how good you believe you are, there’s room for improvement. If you don’t believe that, don’t bother having someone critique your work. It’ll save someone else the aggravation of having to deal with you. Submit your work as-is, and see how many “Not right for me” rejection letters you get.

If, however, you’re serious about your craft, and you want to make your work the best it can be, getting it critiqued is highly recommended. Is there a local writers group you can join? If not, is there an online group you can join? You will be expected to critique other people’s work as well as getting your work critiqued, which will offer you valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t.

If there are no groups that you want to join, is there someone you know who is good with English who might be willing to critique your work? A working knowledge of the English language, of grammar and spelling, is an invaluable tool, so choose wisely. Pick someone who isn’t intimately concerned with your emotional well-being. You’re more likely to get an honest appraisal of your work.

Will you like everything your critiquer says? Probably not. It’s human nature. We do our best, and because we’re imperfect, our work is imperfect. We don’t see the flaws ourselves when we’re so close to it. And it’s natural to resent it when someone tells us we’ve done something the wrong way. However, try setting the critique aside after the first read, get a couple of days away from it, and then read it again. What was said will probably make more sense to you. As time goes by, you’ll learn to recognize your usual mistakes and correct them before sending future work off to be critiqued.

Will everything that your critiquer says be something that you’ll want to apply? Again, probably not, although it would be good to give each point some serious thought. Sometimes other people simply dislike words that you may have used, and their personal tastes might lead them to ask you to change those words. Are they the words you meant to use, or would the others be better? Try setting aside your ego as you go through the critique to see which suggestions you’ll apply. Do you have a love of long and complicated sentences? Or of big words? The term ‘purple prose’ is defined as prose that is too elaborate. This is not a writing sin you want to be guilty of.

Writing is not so much a destination as it is a journey. You will never reach perfection, but a good critiquer will help you get as close as you can. You will never stop learning, but the better you get, the more satisfying it will become. Don’t give it up just because, at the beginning, you found out there was actual work involved.

And don’t forget to thank your critiquer. You’ve been given a gift of someone else’s time and attention, with the aim of improving your craft. This was not something they had to do, and should never be taken for granted.

Click on the Writing label for all other posts on writing.

The Critique, Part One

2007-02-20T18:45:00.002-06:00

So you’ve been asked to critique someone’s writing.

Before you plunge headlong into that manuscript, you need to ask some questions. Not everyone means the same thing when they want a critique. You need to ask them what exactly they’re looking for. Do they just want a read-through and a pat on the head? Or are they serious about their craft and want the works—grammar errors, spelling, syntax, what works and what doesn’t in the story? Finding out these things in advance can save you some grief later.

Is the person whose work you’re about to read related to you? Someone who’s otherwise close to you? If you want my advice, don’t do it. Not only is it very hard to tell someone you’re emotionally close to that you didn’t like parts of their story, in all likelihood, they’re not going to take it well. It’s better to recommend a critiquing group. Many towns have writing groups that meet at libraries and coffee shops. Help them find one that will work for them.

It’s best to give a story a read-through first, then go back and see about errors. That will give you a chance to look at the overall structure and flow of the story, to see if anything jumps out at you right away. Take notes if something does, so you’ll remember what your impressions were. Were there mechanical errors that need fixing? Misspellings, sloppy grammar, sentences that are way too long or too convoluted to be easily followed? Make note of those, too. Is it an electronic copy of the manuscript? Some people use the ‘track changes’ function in MSWord to show their suggestions for fixing those problems. Others type the suggestions into the sentences in parentheses, in another color, to make them noticeable. Keep a dictionary and thesaurus handy, and possibly a grammar guide, if you’re not that familiar with the rules.

Remember, this is someone else’s story. All you can do is suggest, and if the writer doesn’t want to take some or all of your suggestions, it’s aggravating, but you can’t force them. As you’re writing your suggestions and giving your overall impression of the story, try to start off with something you liked or that you thought was done well, even if it was only a short description of something that really hit home with you. This will make the person on the receiving end a lot more ready to hear the not so good stuff. Try not to say things like, “This is so bad, I can’t believe you thought you could write!” You may be thinking that, but you’ll accomplish nothing useful by saying it.

When you list the things that don’t work, make suggestions for how to improve it. If word choice was a problem, what words would work better? Are there sentences that say something that the author probably didn’t intend? Point out why, and suggest other ways of saying it. Can long and convoluted sentences be divided to make several sentences that say the same thing in a less confusing way? Make note of that as well. Try to phrase things in a way that doesn’t come across as harsh. None of us like to be poked with a sharp stick. Think about how you’d feel if you were on the receiving end of your own advice.

All stories are someone’s baby. It’s human nature not to like it when someone tells us our baby isn’t beautiful. What if you did your best, offered the best advice you could, and the recipient is offended? It happens. Sometimes people tell us they're ready to hear everything that’s wrong, but they really aren’t. All you can do is let it go, and if they ask for your help again at a future date, politely decline. The same with someone who repeatedly asks you to critique for them but never takes your suggestions, even on things that are glaringly wrong like spelling and grammar. It’s not worth the aggravation. It’s also why you shouldn’t critique for family. If they get angry about what you’ve said, you’ve got to live with them, whether in the same house or within the confines of the extended family.

Next time, Part Two. ~~

Click on the Writing label for all writing posts.

Another cold weekend

2007-01-28T14:58:00.000-06:00

Did I mention before that I hate winter?

It's the all-pervasive coldness, I think. Even places that are heated are cold, at least to me. I really hate going to bed with cold feet.

The anthology story that was going through edits, titled "Picture Imperfect," is now back with the head editor. Glad to have that done. And I'm back to doing research...Kira's story is going to be a slow write, so I'm going to work on it between working on other projects.

The diet's going great. Went out to buy some new jeans this weekend, and got the next size down from where I was, figuring I'd be able to wear them in another week or so. After I got them home, I tried them on and discovered that I should have gotten the next size below that, because these are loose. Nice problem to have, though.

My website has moved to a new addy. It's now at http://www.peppersmithbooks.com There's a forward set up at the old address to get you to the new one, but that will eventually be gone.

Still pondering the critiquing post.

Until next time~~~

Mission Accomplished

2007-01-20T13:50:00.000-06:00

Whew! The talent show that got canceled last week was rescheduled for the 19th, and as the day got closer, it looked like the weather was going to get us again. It held off just long enough, though, and the program went off almost as scheduled. A couple of acts couldn't be there that night, due to scheduling problems, but all the rest came off well, I think.

Just got back that story I wrote for a new anthology, so I've got a bit of work to do. Thankfully, it's just small things, like the overuse of the word 'that'. Funny how that stuff creeps in and I never notice it. Thank goodness for editors.

Still working on the critiquing post, although I think it'll be two posts, now.

Until next time~~~

Sigh. I hate winter.

2007-01-11T13:47:00.000-06:00

We're looking at getting freezing rain Saturday. Okay, I know, it's not like other parts of the country haven't been inundated by freezing stuff already this year, but the singing group I'm part of was scheduled to be part of a talent show Saturday night. There's been a lot of time and effort put into it by all parties involved, and it will be a shame if we have to cancel, although of course lives are more important than getting up on stage and singing. There's still a chance that the weather will change before Saturday actually gets here, but it seems like every time I check the National Weather site, the forecast gets worse. We'll be rescheduling, of course, if we have to cancel. Just a matter of finding another time when the performance site is going to be available.

I'm working on a post about critiquing. Don't know exactly when it will be ready.

Kira's story is still evolving. The baddie is finally making some serious input into the story. 'Bout time, is all I can say. I hate when they hang back and don't tell me what they're up to.

Christine Speakman over at Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine reviewed the entire Patty O'Donnell series as one piece. Very nice review.

The wind that's coming in ahead of the weather has stirred up a lot of crud, so I'm a bit allergy-brained right now. More when I'm a bit more lucid.

~~~