Kindle In Motion

Since I turned in my book I’ve been doing some reading, including checking out several books in Kindle in Motion format.

You haven’t heard of Kindle in Motion, you say? I hadn’t either until a few weeks ago. Apparently, the e-format has been around since 2016. This Kindle format adds animated book covers, animated gifs, embedded videos (this is also something you can do with the Kindle with A/V format, different from KIM), and custom page backgrounds to an e-book.

The added items can only be viewed on the Fire tablet (that’s what I read my e-books on) or on the Kindle apps on iOS and Android. If you read the book on an e-reader like the Paperwhite, only the text elements will be viewable. If you don’t want to see any of these enhanced elements, you can just turn them off.

I checked out a few titles, some fiction, some nonfiction. The animations and illustrations were very cool but, honestly, I don’t really think they added much to the story in any of the books I read. Maybe I’m just not the right demographic for it. Or maybe it would be good for children’s books. Or I haven’t read the right books.

I didn’t check out the illustrated version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (didn’t feel like shelling out the cash for it), but from this clip it looks like they really went to town on the illustrations and animation for it. You can check it out here:

Where I can see it as being useful is in history books about presidents or events that took place in a time where video clips would be available say of inauguration speeches or other such things.

Have you all read any of the few hundred books available in Kindle in Motion format? If so, what did you think of it? Did it enhance the story for you?

In other news, the audio version of the third book in my Aurora Anderson Mystery series, A Palette for Murder, is now out. Like the other two books, it’s unabridged and read by Vanessa Daniels. You can check it out here.

If you're attending Left Coast Crime in Reno, I will be there! I'm on a panel on Friday, March 23rd called Wooden Hearts: Craft Mysteries from 2:45-3:30 pm. It's moderated by Gay Gale. Other panelists are Peggy Ehrhart, Cheryl Hollon, Camille Minichino  If you see me, say hi!

Thanksgiving at the Beach

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the U.S. Time for half the population to travel to visit the other half. Or that’s the way it seems, anyway.

I enjoyed the recent posts by Aline and Barbara on setting so I thought I’d chime in.

I live in a Southern California beach city. Temperatures here are fairly mild as far as fall and winter are concerned, although we did register unseasonably warm temps in the upper 90s less than a month ago. You never know when a hot spell is going to crop up. Here’s a photo I took on Thanksgiving Day a few years back.

My books take place in the fictional town of Vista Beach, similar to the one I live in, so I look at the events and happenings that occur in my area around the time the book is set. Then I create my own event that’s a take off from the real one. In my last book, A PALETTE FOR MURDER, I have a chalk art festival that is roughly based on the one that happens in Redondo Beach every September. Here’s one of the entries from this past year.

Right now I’m working on a story set in October so I’ve been immersing myself in Halloween for months now. That means my writing has overlapped the actual October here at the beach. This time around I spent some time at the Old Town Music Hall in neighboring El Segundo. The theater regularly shows silents accompanied by live music on its Mighty Wurlitzer organ. This year they played several horror classics including Nosferatu (1922), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) and Phantom of the Opera (1925). In my WIP, I have a scene set at Vista Beach’s own silent movie theater so of course I had to go to the OTMH to see some silent films. I've seen silents there before, but I wanted to double-check my memories.

Old Town Music Hall interior

The other thing that I’m including in my WIP is a version of the pumpkin race that takes place here every year. Yep, people decorate pumpkins, attach wheels to them and race them down the hill toward the pier. It’s quite fun to watch.

My next book is taking place during December so I’m getting a headstart on research for that one by noticing all of the holiday events that occur around the South Bay to see which ones might be good candidates for inclusion. I’ll have one more Christmas season before it’s due, but it’s nice to get a headstart on my research. And fun, too, of course.

That’s it from the beach. I hope everyone in the U.S. has a nice Thanksgiving and, to everyone else, I hope you have a great week.

Keeping Track

Right now I’m looking for a sentence. Not just any old sentence—the first sentence of my WIP. Sometime when I was working on the final edits to A Palette for Murder I thought of the perfect sentence for the next book. I wrote it down in a safe place so I wouldn’t lose it. Trouble is, I don’t remember where that “safe place” is. It could be anywhere.

I tend to write down my thoughts in random places on pretty much anything—Post-it notes, envelopes, travel brochures, stray pieces of paper. I’ve even written a short note on my hand when nothing else was available. (Hey, it’s washable!) I always intend to transfer these gems somewhere more permanent, but they don’t always make it. I’m a lot like my amateur sleuth, Aurora Anderson, in this respect. She learned her lesson in Fatal Brushstroke when a Post-it note she’d written something on ended up where it shouldn’t. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet learned mine.

So now I’ve started writing everything to do with a story in blank notebooks I pick up all over the place. Okay, mostly at Disneyland. I’m hoping I’ll lose less that way.

I may have problems keeping track of notes, but I don’t have a problem keeping track of the timeline for my books. I’ve got a system for that.

In a past life, I worked as a script supervisor on a handful of student films. That’s the person responsible for preserving continuity while filming—within a scene as well as between scenes. As you might guess, there’s a lot to remember so script supervisors use all kinds of forms to keep track of important information. When I started writing mysteries, I realized some of those forms could be repurposed to do the same for a book.

One of my script supervisor duties was to create a list of “one-liners”. Essentially, these are one line descriptions of what happens in each scene. In the course of working on those, I also noted down the time within the story, i.e. when a scene takes place in relation to other scenes.

I modified the Story Breakdown/Chronology form I used on those films, substituting ‘chapter’ for ‘scene’ and voila! I have a way to keep track of the timeframe of each chapter and its contents.

I fill out the form as I’m writing. Whenever I have a question about when a scene takes place, I have a ready reference. It only takes me moments to find the answer. Or if I’m looking for when an event takes place, like the finding of a body, I can easily look that up as well. I also use it for a final review of my manuscript, making sure what I’ve written on the page matches the timeline I mapped out.

The form I use is a table with three columns labeled ‘Chapter’, ‘Time’ and ‘Description’. ‘Chapter’ is the chapter number. ‘Time’ is the day number on which the chapter takes place in the story. ‘Description’ is a one-line, barebones description of what happens in the chapter, something that will jog my memory about its contents. By the time you’ve finished a draft of a book, you’ll have all of the chapters listed with the time they occur and a short description.

Entries in the time column are in the format D or N followed by a number, e.g. D1 or N1 for day 1 and night 1, respectively. Chapters that take place during the day use the D designation; those that take place at night use the N designation. D1 is the first day in story time, D2 the second day and so on. D1 and D2 don’t have to be consecutive days, they could occur days, weeks or months apart. But, in terms of story chronology, D1 comes before D2. If there’s a gap in time, add a plus sign to the time designation. e.g. D1+ indicates a chapter that takes place on day 1, but there’s a gap in time from the previous chapter.

If a chapter spans more than one time designation, you can split it onto two lines or leave it on one line and put a slash between the times, e.g. D1/N1 denotes a chapter that takes place during the day as well as at night. Do whatever works best for you.

So, for the first chapter of my book, Fatal Brushstroke, the columns in the first line on the form were filled in as follows: Chapter: ‘1’, Time: ‘D1 (Tues)’, Description: ‘Rory discovers body in garden and police come to investigate.’ (I like to keep track of the day of the week in the time column since that’s important to me; if you’re writing something where the actual date is important, put that there also.)

I don’t generally use flashbacks in my books, but if I did I’d probably use an FB designation for those to indicate they’re taking place at a different time. I generally have one line for each chapter though, if two chapters cover the same event such as a memorial service, I might combine them on one line.

That’s it. I hope you find this interesting and useful. It’s pretty easy to set up the form in Word or any other program you want to use. Now, back to seeing if I can find that sentence...

The Courage of a Writer

This week I’m on my annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Creative Painting convention. While I’m gambling, er, painting, I thought you might enjoy this blog post which originally appeared on Femmes Fatales about a year ago. Enjoy!

Courage 

by Sybil Johnson 

I’ve been told I’m courageous for creating a protagonist who is a computer programmer, an occupation some people consider unusual for cozy mysteries. Someone else told me I have courage when I mentioned I’d changed the process I was using to write my third book. I don’t consider either of these things particularly courageous, but it did get me thinking about courage—what it is and how important it can be to a story.

Me? I’m a wimp. I don’t like heights. I’m deathly afraid of the water to the point where I even dislike hot tubs. I won’t be in the same room with a snake, and I hyperventilate every time I need to send email to someone I don’t know.

Bystanders who pull people out of crashed cars, firefighters who run into burning buildings, police officers who patrol the streets are all courageous people. But there’s a less obvious kind of courage that we all to a certain extent exhibit every day—at a less dramatic level. It’s courage nonetheless. Something as simple as giving a presentation in front of a large group or driving in an unfamiliar city takes courage if those things frighten you.

As mystery readers and writers, we want our protagonists to have courage, to brush aside their fears and discover the truth. Minor characters can be total wimps and cower in a corner, but our main characters need to display courage. They don’t have to be superheroes. We want them to have faults and fears like real people. But don’t we root for a character a little more when she takes action despite her fears?

And what about writers? Aren’t all writers courageous? We send our words out into the sometimes cruel world not knowing if they’ll be accepted or rejected, if a reviewer will pan our book or praise it. No matter how experienced the writer, for must of us I think there’s that niggling doubt in the back of our minds that the last book was a fluke and that we’ll never be able to do it again. Yet, we still keep on writing and submitting stories despite that.

I guess I do possess courage after all. So does every other writer, whether they think of it that way or not. The next time you read a book, even if it’s not your cup of tea, applaud the courage of the person who wrote it.

Mystery on the Menu

Last Saturday I planned on cutting down the roses in our back yard (it’s that time of year here in Southern California), but instead I found myself appearing along with 14 other authors at Mystery on The Menu at the Cerritos Library. One of the scheduled authors dropped out so they asked me to fill in, which I was happy to do.

Presented by the Friends of the Cerritos Library, it ran from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Besides me, participating authors were: Jill Amadio, Connie Archer/Connie Di Marco, Mike Befeler, Marcia Clark, Dianne Emley, Betty Hechtman, Naomi Hirahara, Linda O. Johnston, D.P. Lyle, M.D., Christopher J. Lynch, Paul D. Marks, David Putnam, Nancy Cole Silverman, and Patricia Smiley. I was happy to be included among so many wonderful authors.

This was the 13th year of this sold out event. I’d never been to an event like this before so I didn’t really know what to expect. There were 3 panels lasting about 35 minutes with each author serving on one panel. The first panel was held prior to lunch, the two other panels after. The ballroom was full of enthusiastic mystery readers, 18 tables worth! The time just flew by. It was wonderful to see and connect with so many people who enjoy mysteries as much as I do. The Cerritos Library is also quite beautiful, listed as number 28 in Best Value Schools 50 most beautiful libraries in the world.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos so I don’t have any to share.

P.S. Yesterday was official release day for A Palette for Murder, the third book in the Aurora Anderson Mystery series.

1969: The Astronauts' Reading Club

It’s the summer of 1969. While man is walking on the moon, I’m enjoying playing outside with my sister and reading lots and lots of books. I was a voracious reader. I read everything I could get my hands on. The library was my best friend.

This particular summer I participated in the local library’s reading club, called The Astronauts’ Reading Club. If kids read 5 books, they got a badge, 10 books they got a certificate AND their name in the paper! Who knew you could get your name in the paper for reading books!

Ten books was pretty easy peasy for me. I’m sure I read many more than that this summer between 4th and 5th grades. I looked at the list of books I read: three Freddy the Pig books (I honestly don’t remember these at all, but I know I liked pigs); two Great Mouse Detective books (those I do remember, I had a thing for books with mice), The Horse and His Boy (part of the Chronicles of Narnia series), and several others.

I don’t really know what sparked my interest in books. Perhaps it was being read to as other Type Mers noted in their posts. I’m sure I was read to, but I honestly don’t remember anything specific. All I know is that I was always fascinated by books. There’s a wonderful picture of me and my sister sitting side by side on the couch, reading. I use the term “reading” very loosely when it comes to me. Being almost 4 years older than I am, my sister actually knew how to read but, at 3, I was just looking at the pictures, imitating my big sis.

The most vivid memory of early reading for me was in kindergarten. Back in the stone ages, you learned your alphabet in kindergarten and learned to read in first grade. I remember looking through a book and being very angry that I couldn’t read the words on the page. I mean, really, really angry! I wanted to know what those three little pigs were doing! I knew the words told the tale and were very, very important, but I couldn’t yet read them. That fueled my eagerness to learn to read more than anything else. By the time first grade rolled around, I was off and running, reading well above my grade level in no time.

Reading has given a lot to me. I’ve visited foreign places, relived historical events, had great adventures and solved mysteries alongside Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew. I can’t imagine not being able to read or not having access to books.

Even though reading has been a large part of my life, I never really thought I’d be a writer. But I’m glad I took the leap of faith and started writing stories. Even though it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, it’s also given me a lot.

P.S. My third book, A Palette for Murder, officially releases January 31st. To celebrate I’m having a launch event, Sunday, February 5, 2017, 3:30-5pm at the Manhattan Beach Library in Manhattan Beach, CA. Stop by if you’re in the area and help me celebrate!

Traditional and Cozy Mysteries

The pies are in the oven. Plans are set for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving celebration. Time to talk mysteries, cozy and traditional.

I’ve always considered my own books to be solidly in the cozy camp. Then someone commented to me that they thought they tended more toward the traditional. That got me thinking. What makes a book a cozy?

I’ve been mulling over this for a while now. Aline’s recent post on cozies brought it to the forefront once again.

For the last few years, I’ve attended the Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda, MD, a celebration of traditional mysteries. The Malice website loosely defines this genre as books having no explicit sex, excessive gore or gratuitous violence. Think Agatha Christie.

I think everyone pretty much agrees that cozies are a subset of traditional mysteries. So the above definition applies to cozies as well. Beyond that, though, what pushes the book over the edge into the cozy camp? I have my own thoughts, but I decided to query a group of people who read a lot of them to see what their take was.

The following came up in the discussion:

- Traditional mysteries are grittier and have more of a police presence.
- Cozies tend to be more humorous.
- In cozies, the main character is usually an amateur sleuth. And that sleuth is often involved in a hobby/craft and/or runs a business centered around a hobby/craft. Cooking mysteries are extremely common in the cozy world, so I’d add that the sleuth might have a business involving food, like a bakery. I don’t think either is a requirement for a cozy, though. I can think of series that feature college professors or columnists for newspapers.
- Historical mysteries fall in the traditional camp and aren’t cozies.
- Having a romantic interest in the story also came up. Pretty common in cozies, but not required, I think.
- And there are often pets in the stories. Cats, dogs... I wrote a post about that once on National Cat Day on my take of why that’s so common. Here it is, if you want to read it. http://typem4murder.blogspot.com/2014/10/national-cat-day.html
- Cozies often have “cute” titles in which puns are pretty common.

In addition to all of that, the crime often takes place in a small community of some kind. That might mean a small town, but it also might mean a community of people interested in the same thing like knitters, tole painters, etc. And what I think is most important, the bad guy is always revealed at the end and they get their comeuppance. I think that’s probably true of traditional mysteries as well, though I’m not sure it’s really a requirement.

So where does that leave my books? First, look at those covers. They look pretty cozy with their bright colors. And the titles are pretty cozy-like in my opinion. My protagonist is a freelance computer programmer (amateur sleuth, check) whose hobby is tole/decorative painting (craft, check). She lives in a Los Angeles county beach city, which has a small town feel. The books do involve the tole painting community so I’d say check on the small community. The bad guys are always revealed in the end and they get their comeuppance, so there’s a check on that as well. No sex, but there’s a bit of romance (check). There’s a bit of humor (check). And neighborhood cats and dogs play a role in my stories (pets, check).

So what might take me out of the cozy camp? While I don’t have gory scenes or gratuitous violence, I do occasionally have a scene where my main character, Aurora (Rory), is hit on the head or finds herself shoved into traffic. (Poor thing has been hit on the head too many times. I’m beginning to worry about her.) That may be where the idea that my books tend toward the traditional comes from. I can see that.

This has been a fun exercise, but it doesn’t really matter to me how my books are categorized as long as people read and enjoy them.

Cozies transport you into another world where you can forget about your own problems for a while. And, in the end, the case is solved, the bad guy is punished in some way, and order is restored. Rick wondered in a recent post if, with the discord in the world today, if more people would start reading more cozies. I wouldn’t be surprised.

That’s my two cents for today. I think I’ll go read a cozy right now. Those pies aren’t ready to come out of the oven yet.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

Cover Reveals and Interviews

I’m tickled pink these days. My third book, A Palette for Murder, is available for pre-order this week. Once people start being able to pre-order, things seem more real to me somehow.

This time around I did a cover reveal on Dru’s Book Musings. I’d never done one before, but I know lots of other authors who have. I love the covers of my books so it’s nice to be able to highlight the artwork and, hopefully, get people excited about the book. In my last newsletter, which I admittedly rarely send out, I put in a short interview with Stephanie Savage, the talented artist who creates the covers for my books as well as those for a lot of other Henery Press authors. She designs roughly 12-16 covers a year. It normally takes her 8-12 hours per cover. The shortest one was completed in 5 hours.

The other interesting thing that happened to me recently – I was contacted by a high school student who is doing an independent study project. She’d gotten my name from the Henery Press website and thought I was interesting enough she wanted to interview me. Me, being interviewed for someone’s project!

That may not seem like much to most people, but I was first off, gobsmacked that anyone wanted to ask me questions about my experiences in the publishing industry and was actually interested in hearing what I had to say. I was happy to help her out and I had a very interesting phone conversation with the student. She asked a lot of interesting and insightful questions.

Apparently, most of the authors she interviewed for the project had always wanted to write, most of them continously writing stories from the time they were kids. That’s not me. I wrote stories in grade school and junior high and enjoyed doing those at the time. I mentioned a couple of them in a blog post I wrote way back when I started on Type M. You can read that post here. But, after that, I never thought about becoming a writer until I was in my 40s. Mumble, cough, mumble years ago.

That’s what’s been going on in my world. What’s been going on in yours?