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.

Writing Under Any Conditions

As I'm writing this, a jackhammer is going off in the background. This is the second day of that particular noise on my block. Yesterday, we heard it almost continuously from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Today it appears to be gracing us with its presence again.

This is not unusual in the city I live in. We seem to be "enjoying" a construction boom. You can't walk more than two blocks without finding some house being torn down or under construction or being remodeled. I'm happy for the construction industry, having all those jobs created, but it can be annoying.

Some writers can write no matter what's going on around them. I know a number of them who regularly write at Starbucks or some other coffee shop. I'm not one of those. I don't even like writing in a relatively quiet library. I want to be at home with my things surrounding me.

But, with all this construction going on, I'm learning to write despite all the distractions. A house next door to ours took almost 5 years to finish before they moved in. Yep, 5 years. That's 5 years of jackhammering, pounding, sawing, Mariachi music... And you have to realize this was all within a few feet of our house, which shook when they were driving in giant metal posts and digging out the basement. Once the construction moved inside, things got better, but there was still plenty of noise.

The noise bothers me more when I'm in the first draft writing phase, less when I'm plotting or doing later edits. How much noise bothers me also depends on how I'm feeling. If I'm a bit under the weather, it bothers me a lot more. But if you have deadlines, you have to learn how to deal with it. I wrote some construction issues into my second book, PAINT THE TOWN DEAD, and I have a short story outlined, which I have yet to write, that involves conflict over construction. And I have other ideas: bodies found in porta potties, bodies falling off of roofs, bodies found in poured concrete...the possibilities are endless

I also invested in some noise-canceling headphones and play my own music to counteract what’s coming in from outside. The construction is still annoying, but I’m learning to deal with it.

What about you all? Are you sensitive to what’s going on around you? Can you do your work (whatever it is) with lots of noise?

Paint the Town Launched

ARC here. My full name is Advance Reader Copy, but I prefer ARC. It has a special ring to it, you know. Like Cher and Madonna. Sybil, my writer, is off doing last minute Christmas shopping so she left me in charge. It’s a lot of responsibility, but I can handle it.

Here I am celebrating the release of Paint the Town Dead at Disneyland I’ve got my Micky years, mint julep and Mickey-shaped beignets. Can’t get better than that.

Oh, that’s right. I’m supposed to be posting photos of the Paint the Town Dead book launch party at Mystery Ink in Huntington Beach, CA. Here’s my writer with our hostess, Debbie Mitsch. I didn’t get into this picture. Only the “official” book did. Just because I have two teeny-tiny mistakes.

Here I am with my writer as she reads a portion of the book from me. She’s not very happy about the picture of her, but I look cute, don’t I?

Here’s our spread: mini-quiches, wine, and chocolate cake that was to die for.

Everyone who attended got one of these nifty 3-D Holiday glasses that turn your tree lights into all kinds of things like snowmen, reindeer, stars... Here are the reindeer ones.

People seemed to have fun.

Hope you all have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Happy Book Birthday to Me!

Yesterday was the official book launch day for my second book, Paint the Town Dead. This book was incredibly difficult for me to write and for a while there, I didn’t think I'd ever finish it, but publication day finally arrived and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Now starts a couple weeks of an intense round of promotional activities, mostly online this time around. For my first book, Fatal Brushstroke, I went on a bookstore tour with fellow Sisters in Crime member, Diane Vallere. This time I’m concentrating on online venues. I have a 14-day blog tour through Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours as well as a few posts on other blogs. Full details are on my website if you're interested.

Saturday I’m holding my launch party at Mystery Ink in Huntington Beach, CA. If you happen to be in the area, stop by.

Details: Saturday, December 12, 2015, 4 pm, Mystery Ink 8907 Warner Ave. #135, Huntington Beach, CA 92647

The first 40 attendees get one of these beauties that turn the lights on your tree into reindeer, snowmen, etc. This is the reindeer one. I have an assortment of various kinds.

Back to celebrating and working on Book 3!

Breaking Rules

Don’t start with weather. I’ve heard some variation of that writing rule so many times over the years and from so many sources that I’ve lost count. So what am I doing in the book I’m working on right now? You guessed it. Starting with weather ‘cause I’m such a rebel. Yep, that’s how I roll.

Anyone who knows me is laughing hysterically right now because they know I’m a fairly rule bound person. I obey the laws. I don’t go in the out door. I always wait for the walk signal to cross at a light. Even if no one were around for miles, I’d have trouble crossing with no little man urging me on. It’s ingrained in my psyche.*

But every once in a while the rebel in me comes out from hiding and asserts herself.

As you might have guessed, I think rules are important. They bring order to chaos. But I also think it’s okay to break one now and then as long as there’s a good reason for it. And as long as you know what those rules are before deciding to ignore one of them.

The reason I started with weather is because the heat wave that’s hitting my fictional town of Vista Beach is critical to the story line. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. It might be partly because we're having our own heat wave here at the beach and I'm really tired of it. But I digress. I’ve barely begun this story so I have no idea if this the beginning that I’ll end up with in the version I turn over to my editor months from now or if I’ll start with something else. Time will tell.

So, dear readers, what writing rules have you broken? Do you think of writing rules more as guidelines and suggestions than actual rules? When you’re reading what someone else has written, do you care if a writer breaks a rule? Are there any rules that should never be broken?

In other news, I’m sharing the cover love in this post. The artwork pictured here is for my second book, Paint the Town Dead, which will be released on December 8th. Incidentally, this isn’t the book where I’m starting with weather. That one’s tentatively titled Trompe l’oeiled to Death.
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*This quirk is affectionately lampooned in the 1990s musical, Waiter, there’s a slug in my latte!, a spoof of Seattle fads and foibles. You guessed it. I grew up in the Seattle area.

Here I Go Again...

It seems that several of us TypeMers are starting new projects right now, including me. So I read with great interest Vicki’s post on believing in yourself and Barbara’s post on creating characters.

All the changes for my second book, Paint the Town Dead, have been made. Other than looking over the ARC, it's essentially done. So I'm now moving on to my third book, which I've tentatively titled Tromp l'oeiled to Death.

Starting a new project is both exciting and daunting. I have all of these ideas floating around in my brain, but no plan or outline yet. So I've started writing down as much as I can, including partial scenes, hoping that I'll be able to make sense of it all very soon. Things are ever so slowly coming into focus.

At times like this I feel like I'm not accomplishing much, that I'm going nowhere. I liken it to the design phase of a software project. You've got lots of stuff written on whiteboards and in documents, but since no code has been produced, it doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere. You find yourself wandering hallways, hoping the movement will trigger something in your brain. (Or in the case of writing, surfing the web researching some aspect of the book in hopes something will come to mind.)

Just as I did with software design and coding, I have to keep on reminding myself that I need to believe in the process. To believe that I can produce a good and interesting story people other than family members will want to read. And do it in a fairly short time frame. (That last part is what I have trouble with!)

I’m fairly new at this writing game so I’m still refining my process. I come up with a basic premise (for Fatal Brushstroke that was “a woman finds the body of her painting teacher in her garden” and for Paint the Town Dead it was “Rory’s friend collapses in a class at a tole painting convention and dies.”)

From the premise I move on to working on the characters that will inhabit the story since I believe that out of the characters comes the story. Since this is the third book in the series I already have half a dozen I’m going to reuse, so it’s a good start, but I still have a lot of work to do. Once I have the basic characters and understand something about them, I write a short description of the murder and the cover-up from the murderer's point of view and come up with the main turning points in the story. Then I’m pretty much off to the races. This time around I think I'll write a one to two page synopsis of the story, which I think will help me focus my writing better.

I have no idea if this is the best approach, or even if it’s the best approach for me, but you have to start somewhere. So, I’m interested in how everyone else starts a new project. Do you start with creating characters? Or do you just start writing? Any words of wisdom for me?

Only 150 Words

Writing 150 words. No big deal, right? Most of the time that’s true, but I’m talking about back of the book copy. The words potential readers use to decide whether or not your book is worth purchasing.

They are the hardest 150 words I’ve ever written. Well, actually, it turned out to be more in the neighborhood of 120.

When I signed my publishing deal, I didn’t realize I’d have to write those all important words. I figured there were people who did that, people who knew how to write copy that would inspire a reader to buy a book. Turns out for my publisher that person is...me.

Once I stopped hyperventilating and got down to business, I discovered I rather enjoy doing it. (Remind me of that the next time you see me banging my head against the wall in frustration.)

There are positives about writing your own back of the book copy. First, you know what your book’s about so the text will actually match the story. (I’ve read copy on books where that wasn’t true or, at least, was misleading.) Second, it’s nice to have control over what’s on the back cover. The only negative is that it takes time. Lots of it.

I wrote the back copy for my first book, Fatal Brushstroke, but that was much easier. Mostly because I already had some text I’d written as an exercise for a mystery writing course I took years ago so I had a good start. I think the copy turned out pretty good. Or, at least, I’m not embarrassed about the result. Here it is:

A dead body in her garden and a homicide detective on her doorstep...

Computer programmer and tole-painting enthusiast Aurora (Rory) Anderson doesn’t envision finding either when she steps outside to investigate the frenzied yipping coming from her own backyard. After all, she lives in Vista Beach, a quiet California beach community where violent crime is rare and murder even rarer.

Suspicion falls on Rory when the body buried in her flowerbed turns out to be someone she knows—her tole painting teacher, Hester Bouquet. Just two weekends before, Rory attended one of Hester’s weekend painting seminars, an unpleasant experience she vowed never to repeat. As evidence piles up against Rory, she embarks on a quest to identify the killer and clear her name. Can Rory unearth the truth before she encounters her own brush with death?

For my second book, Paint the Town Dead, I had to figure out once again how to write words that fairly portrayed my novel, while at the same time, would convince someone to consider reading more. So here’s how I went about it.

First, I thought about what I wanted to see in back of the book copy. As a reader, I really just want to get a sense of the type of book (cozy, thriller, private eye), to know who the protagonist is , where the story is set and what the main problem is. That’s all I want to know. I get irked when the back copy tells me too much about the story. Really irked.

This kind of copy has a particular style so I immersed myself in reading the backs of dozens of books similar to my own. The text on the back of a thriller is different from that on the back of a private eye novel or a cozy so reading the right kinds of books is important here. That wasn’t terribly hard since I have an extensive library of mystery books, most of them in the cozy vein. All I had to do was walk down the stairs and start reading. I also checked out Amazon and read the descriptions of other books similar to my own.

Then I checked online to see if anyone had any words of wisdom about writing back of the book copy. These two posts were the most helpful to me:
http://jamigold.com/2012/04/tips-for-writing-back-cover-copy-guest-roz-morris/
http://marilynnbyerly.com/blurb.html

Finally, I started writing. Or, should I say, staring off into space thinking about what to write. I wrote a sentence here, another there, and finally I had text I found reasonable enough to submit to my publisher. Here it is:

The Ocean Painting Society invites you to join the painting wave...

It’s June in the quiet Los Angeles County city of Vista Beach, the place computer programmer and tole-painting enthusiast Aurora (Rory) Anderson calls home. Decorative painters are flocking to the newly built Akaw hotel to attend the Ocean Painting Society’s inaugural convention.

During the weeklong event, Rory plans on shopping the trade show floor, working in her mother’s booth, taking classes and connecting with other decorative painting fans. She doesn’t expect to witness her childhood friend collapse in class and die.

When the police find no evidence of foul play, Rory embarks on her own investigation. Can she brush aside the lies to uncover the truth and bring the killer to justice?

It’s not the most wonderful text in the world. It could probably be better, but I think it fairly portrays the book I wrote and sounds cozyish.

I’ve submitted the copy to my publisher. I have no idea if they’ll deem it acceptable or if I’ll have to go back to the drawing board. I’m hoping it’s the former, but I'm prepared for the latter.

Has anyone else written back of the book copy? Any tips? ‘Cause I’ll have to do it again for book 3...

As Sick as a Parrot

Sybil here. I’ve been working through the comments from my editor for my next book, Paint the Town Dead. As usual, she has many useful things to say. And, as usual, some cliches have managed to slip through. To keep the flow of writing going, I don’t worry about cliches in the first draft, but I do try to excise them from the one I send to my editor.

This exercise got me thinking about cliches and how to get rid of them so I consulted my trusty(?) internet and came up with a few websites that I thought you all might find interesting.

The first one that popped up was from the Oxford Dictionary, which had a procedure to help get rid of cliches in your writing. (‘Cause as a former programmer, I can relate to algorithms and procedures.) What struck me as funny about this one was the first “cliche” noted on the site: as sick as a parrot. Well, as a United Statesian*, I had never heard of this one. Had to look it up on the internet to find out it means “to be very disappointed”. I’ve never read or heard this anywhere here in the U.S. I assume, given this is an Oxford Dictionary site, this is a British thing. Is it common in Canada as well? Has anyone heard it in the U.S.?

The next site I visited was tips from Grammar Girl on avoiding cliches. This one has some interesting historical tidbits on where some cliches come from as well as suggestions on how to get rid of them. Plus there are some links at the bottom of the article that I found interesting.

One in particular was the Phrase Finder where you can type in a word like “cat” and it’ll tell you phrases that include that word. Raining cats and dogs, no room to swing a cat,... For each phrase there’s a discussion on its origins. Great fun if you want to avoid doing real work.

And the last site I found before I gave up on searching was http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/cliche.html

I’m sure there are a lot more sites out there with tips but I must get back to my edits since they’re due in a week.

*United Statesian – see Donis Casey’s post awhile back on Thanksgiving where she mentions the phrase in a footnote: http://typem4murder.blogspot.com/2014/11/thanksgiving-already.html