Random Thoughts Before Sleeping

 I often read myself to sleep with a book of poetry or a play. Yes, I'm a nerd. Being a writer, I also keep a notebook by my bedside. Many authors do this, for as you know, brilliant thoughts are ephemeral, and if you don’t get them down immediately, they are gone forever, lost, and ever to be mourned. In fact, I usually look at what I've written the next morning and have no idea what I was thinking. Here are a couple of particularly strange and poetic notes I found on one page of this notebook:

The courage to be nobody.

I have broke my heart over a lost child.

Elizabeth—this cannot stand.

I meet every man as I find him.

The book of parting.

Do you know what love is? It is bringing all of who you are every single day (I probably read this somewhere)

From Ellis Peters—they found nothing incongruous in having one foot in the 20th century and one in the roots of time.

As I look over the rest of the notebook, it occurs to me that anyone who read these scribblings would conclude that I either need a psychiatrist, or that I write mystery novels.

Here are some more odd notations taken from another random page, in order. These may be from the time I was writing Crying Blood which has a long passage about hog butchering in the fall. Or maybe All Men Fear Me, which has a riot scene. I don't know what the ennui business had to do with:

Tobacco and soapsuds to kill aphids

Boning knife – sharp point, long thin blade

Skinned hog keeps better than scalded hog

war hot blood vandals

What is this ennui? I think it must be possible to die of ennui.

[illegible]

now I had never seen a riot, but I expected I was about to

Her father hanged for murder

severed renal artery

Nothing that I see before my eyes is real

Action. Snakes. Storm. Pecan pie. Stampede.

I wish I could fit all these random thoughts together. There’s a hell of a book in there, somewhere.

The Recipe Challenge - War Cake!

Today I am rising to Rick's food-in-novel challenge, an easy challenge for me to meet, for thirteen years ago, I was not more than ten pages into the first draft of the first book in my Alafair Tucker series, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, when I realized that I was going to be writing a lot about food, and not just any food, but American farm food–heavy, caloric, abundant meals made almost exclusively from what you could grow or slaughter yourself. Because if like Alafair you live on a horse farm in Oklahoma in 1912, and you have ten kids, you’re always thinking about what’s for dinner.

It occurred to me even then that readers would probably be interested in the recipes for these old country dishes that were so common and everyday for my parents and grandparents, so from that very first Alafair novel I have included several recipes mentioned in each story. And not just the recipes themselves, but the food lore that goes along with them. For instance, there are specific ways to eat beans and cornbread, and everyone has her favorite. There are also very wrong ways to make, say, cornbread, (which is bread, Dear Reader, and not cake) if you intend to call yourself a bona fide Southerner.

Thanksgiving is next week here in the States, and I have many fabulous pie recipes from which I was going to choose for this entry, but since the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I has just passed, I'm going to include here a recipe out of my eighth Alafair novel, All Men Fear Me, which takes place in 1917, at the beginning of the American involvement in the war.

The book is not about the life of a soldier, though, or what is going on in Europe, or trench warfare. It is about the American home front. My grandparents were all in their early twenties at the time, and as much as they all loved to talk and tell tales, none of them told me anything about life in the middle of America during World War I. So for most of my life, I’ve had the mistaken impression that the war didn’t have much impact on daily life over here.

Oh, there was impact galore, Dear Reader. But today I’m restricting myself to the impact on dinner. The United States Food Administration, headed at the time by a young man named Herbert Hoover, was charged with making sure that all American housewives were doing their part for the war effort. “Our problem,” said the USFA, “is to feed our Allies by sending them as much food as we can of the most concentrated nutritive value in the least shipping space. These foods are wheat, beef, pork, dairy products, and sugar. Our solution is to eat less of these…and to waste less of all foods.”

So every housewife was encouraged to use as little of the aforementioned foodstuffs as possible. There are several surviving war cookbooks that the USFA distributed to show women how make meals for their families without using wheat, or meat, or sugar, and these are the recipes that I’ve been trying out on my long-suffering friends. To tell the truth, some of them are pretty good.

I found the recipe for War Cake in a 1918 USFA publication called War Economy in Food. Now, I’ve tested out many old recipes in the course of writing this series, and more than once the results have been less than satisfactory. Our modern tastes are different from our ancestors’, and sometimes the old dishes are so heavy and rich that a bite or two is all we can take. Of course we don’t plow the back forty after dinner like Grandpa did.

But the reviews of War Cake were very good, which surprised me a bit because this cake has no wheat, no sugar, and no eggs. It’s dense and moist and even though it has no ginger, it reminds me of gingerbread, or Boston brown bread. Here’s the recipe directly from the booklet. It’s easy to make and delicious. But I warn you, Dear Reader. Low in calories it is not.

War Cake
1 cup molasses (not blackstrap)
1 cup corn syrup
1-1/2 cup water
1 package raisins (exact quantity according to preference)
2 TB fat (vegetable oil)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
3 cups rye flour
1/2 tsp soda
2 tsp baking powder

Boil together for 5 minutes the first nine ingredients. Cool, add the sifted dry ingredients and bake in two loaves for 45 minutes in a moderate oven. (I baked it at 350º F. – Donis)

I like to use golden raisins because they are tender and look nice. I use a 1/2 pound package from Trader Joe’s. The corn syrup I’ve used is plain old white Karo, but I’ve also used maple syrup (which is delicious), agave syrup, honey, and a combination thereof. It’s all good.

Writing a Long Series

My ninth Alafair Tucker mystery (The Return of the Raven Mocker) is coming out in January of 2017. That's four months from now. And yet I’m already working on book ten. When I first began writing the Alafair Tucker Mystery series, I had a story arc in mind that was going to carry through ten books. This is a wonderful idea, but as anyone who has ever written a long series knows, after a couple of books all your plans for a story arc have been knocked into a cocked hat.

This photo has nothing to do with anything, but it's new and I like it

The reason this happened, at least to me, is that I seem to be writing about real people who have their own ideas about how things should be gone about, and once I put them into a situation, they react to it in ways I had never anticipated.

So much for a ten book arc. I think there will end up being twelve or thirteen books. I want to get all Alafair's kids out of the house and settled. Besides, I really want readers to be able to pick up any book in the series and have a satisfying experience without having to know anything about what went before. This poses the million dollar question for the author of a long series: How do you keep it fresh? How do you make every story stand alone, yet in its place as well? How do you keep from repeating yourself, or losing your spark?

I’ve had quite a journey with my protagonist over the last decade. Alafair is a farm wife with a very large family who lives in rural Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century. She is a woman who knows her world and has made her place in it. Each of the books features a different one of Alafair’s newly-grown children, with whom Alafair either works to solve a crime, or works to save from him or herself. Since each child has his or her own distinct personality and interests, this gives me a great deal of latitude to explore all kinds of things that people were into in the early 20th Century.

For each book I must come up with a compelling reason for a farm wife and mother of ten to get involved in a murder investigation. I also have to figure out a convincing way for her to either solve the murder or at least contribute to the solution, which as you might guess, isn’t that easy. I have found over the course of nine books in the same series that I have begun to depart from the usual mystery novel format. The murders take place later and later in the story with each book I write. The later books are constructed more like thrillers than puzzles. In book seven, Hell With the Lid Blown Off, I told the reader who was going to die in the first sentence, but didn’t actually kill him for a hundred pages. In book eight, All Men Fear Me, we kind of knew who was doing at least some of the killing. But the question became why, and was there more than one killer. In book nine, Raven Mocker, I immediately start out with the information that we have the wrong guy.

I want to mix it up from book to book. I want to keep the readers on their toes. And I want to keep myself amused as well!

Cover Stories

Since All Men Fear Me came out, people are always asking me about the man on the cover, but since the publisher chose the cover and I had no more to do with it than to say, "I like it", I could never tell them who he is, only that he is a perfect depiction of the villain in the book. However, thanks to a curious reader who actually queried my publisher about the cover photo*, I now know who the man is!

Here's what the cover artist revealed: "I acquired the actual photo (not a scan or reproduction) from a collector. It is an original 1900s mug shot one of about a dozen that I purchased. The collection is quite intriguing; each mug shot has a frontal face photo, a profile photo and on the back is the name of the arrested and a hand-written description of their crime! Although there were some murderers in the collection of mug shots, this man was arrested for being a 'disorderly person'. His alias was 'Jack the Hugger' and he was arrested in Jersey City, NJ in 1903."

Now there's a story. I imagine old Jack was just a bubble off plumb, and was arrested for walking around Jersey City giving random hugs to people whether they liked it or not. The saga of the man in the photo has caused me to ponder the history of the covers on my novels. When my first book came out in 2005, Amazon and the ebook were not the juggernauts they are today. Just in the past few years, cover artists have to take into consideration that most people will first see the book cover as a thumbnail online.

I was told that a book cover is like a movie poster. The whole point is to intrigue the potential reader. For my early novels in the Alafair Tucker series, the production supervisor asked me to send family photos for the cover artist to work with. So I provided the photo on novels one through four, which have rather busy covers and look a bit cut-and-paste to me.



By 2011, when the fifth novel, Crying Blood, came out, the internet was the thing, and nobody asked me to provide anything. The only input I had was when they sent me the mock-up and said, "here it is. Hope you like it." The cover artist had created a simple, colorful cover that looks good online or on a physical book. When All Men came out late last year, the cover was down to its bare essentials. The book is looking right at you. "Buy me," it says, "or you'll be sorry."

One of my favorites, the tornado book, 2014

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*Here is what the curious reader said to the publisher: "he must have been a murderer! His face was so creepy that I had to turn the book face down on the coffee table when I wasn't reading it!" She then called back a little while later to clarify that she did not mean to insult the cover--in fact, quite the opposite; she thought it caught the spirit of the villain and the book perfectly!

Life is Short. Tour Small Towns.

Donis here, feeling blue. I just spent an hour on the phone with an old friend from Tulsa whose husband died a few days ago. She and I have known one another since we were seven years old, and for most of our growing-up and young-woman years, we were BFFs. Even though I moved to Arizona in the 1980s, we have kept in touch and always got together whenever I managed to get back to the home country. I knew him pretty well, too. I was in their wedding over forty years ago.

This has been coming for a few months, so it was not unexpected, but it was not a particularly good passing. My friend is in that weird numb state right now, which everyone who has ever lost a loved one knows about. It's hard when you realize that you now belong to the "grandparent" generation, and you and your compatriots are the next to go. For most of our lives there was a buffer generation between us and the bitter end. No more. I don't mind the idea of joining the choir invisible myself, but for the past several years I've lived in a state of dread over losing my nearest and dearest. It's enough to drive you to take up Zen. Live in the moment and enjoy the day as best you can.

Holding forth in Ajo, Arizona

Anyway...on a less depressing topic, I took a few days off for Thanksgiving, but the next couple of weeks are full of promotional activities for the new book, All Men Fear Me. One of my favorite events in this cycle was my November 20 trip to Ajo, Arizona, far out in the desert, half-way to California and almost all the way to Mexico. As long as you're reimbursed for you gasoline, never pass up invitations to do events in small towns, my friends. Everybody will turn out and you'll feel like a star.

Holding forth in Boynton, Oklahoma

Nine years ago, after my second book came out, I did a book tour in Oklahoma. I hit all the big towns and did well, but we ended the tour by going to Boynton, where everything began, back in the misty past, when my great-grandparents moved to Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th Century. It was raining cats and dogs when we left Tulsa that morning, so I didn’t have much expectation of a successful event. But my expectation was wrong. The talk was held at the Boynton Historical Society building, in a 20X20 room that was bursting at the seams with people – and believe it or not, I wasn’t related to most of them! A gorgeous feature article about me and the books had appeared the day before in the Muskogee Phoenix newspaper, on top of a feature in the Haskell News, and folks had hauled out their canoes and rowed to Boynton in the rain from all around the vicinity. We even had a woman there from Oklahoma City! (130 miles away) It was a gratifying experience, to say the least, since crowd made me feel like some sort of celebrity. I sold every single book I brought with me, and could have sold a lot more if I’d had them. Pretty good for a town of about 400.*

So take advantage of every opportunity you are offered, big or small, and don't pass up the chance to eat ice cream if you want it. Because you never know.
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*Boynton now has fewer than 200 people. In another nine years it will have disappeared altogether.

Promotion

This year's Suit of Lights

Donis here, writing on a sunny Wednesday in Arizona. My latest Alafair Tucker novel, All Men Fear Me, finally had its official launch at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale last Saturday, the 14th. As usual I spent a lot of time picking out my outfit, or as I call it, my "suit of lights". This has become something of a ritual for me when a new book comes out. Though I don't know why. I've seen many a Big Name Author show up at personal appearances dressed like s/he just rolled out of bed.

My launch, with Betty Webb, Jenn McKinlay, and Kate Carlisle, was a lot of fun and there was a big crowd in attendance, which is always very nice. The very next day I drove the 100 miles down to Tucson to do an event at Clues Unlimited Bookstore along with fellow PP author Jeffrey Siger. Clues is a small place but it was packed. So my first two official promotional events for this book were successful and pleasant and many books were sold. I posted some photos of both events on my own website if you'd like to indulge.

I have today off, but tomorrow I'm off for another several day of appearances and programs around the state. When I'm in the middle of the Big Push it's very difficult for me to keep to my accustomed writing schedule, and howsoever much I enjoy myself, it is unlikely that my events are going to make me a New York Times bestseller.

Which brings up the question of why we do it. We mid-listers seldom get paid for our appearances, so travel is expensive, disrupts your life, and eventually becomes incredibly tiring. Yet it is very helpful to meet readers face to face. I'm often surprised by readers' thoughts about my novels. They see things that I didn't see myself. Sometimes I'm shocked by a reader's interpretation, and sometimes amazed and flattered to find out how insightful I am without even knowing it!

Also, I can't overstate how important it is to develop relationships with librarians and bookstore owners. They are the ones who are going to recommend your books to readers, so we authors had better do our best to deliver a good product and a good program for them.

When I can, I try to arrange appearances with other authors. First of all, that could broaden your audience appeal. Most importantly, it is incredibly helpful to get to know your fellow writers. In my experience they are a bright, thoughtful, intelligent and kind bunch, and it is very helpful to hear that even authors who are much more well-known than you also suffer the same writing pains as you do.

I don't know of one veteran author who hasn't had the experience of schlepping miles to do an event and then one or two (or no) people show up. If that happens, remember that even if just one person shows, your should treat her like Oprah's niece. Word of mouth is as valuable as gold.

Still, it is easy to become disillusioned with public appearances since they are not what is going to give you that push into best-sellerdom. My advice is not to expect them to. The thing that is going to make you the next J.K. Rowling is a dash of luck and writing a fabulous book.

There is only one of those things you can do anything about.

Did I Forget Something? Or, Launching a New Book.

Donis here. I've been carrying on about the upcoming launch of my new book, All Men Fear Me, for months. I've mentioned before on this blog that in comparison to some, I am not a fast writer. I can manage a book every year or so, which is certainly faster than George R.R. Martin, but not nearly as fast as someone like Rhys Bowen or our own Vicki Delany. So it takes me six to eight months to finish the draft, another month or so for revisions and corrections. Then after the book is accepted it's another several months before it's published and released.

By that time I'm well into the next manuscript. By the time the new book is released, I've half-forgotten the details and have to spend a little time re-familiarizing myself with whichever book I'm going to be promoting. Otherwise I find myself telling the audiences at my events all about the fascinating details of the work in progress.

All Men Fear Me is due to be released by Poisoned Pen Press on November 3, so a couple of days ago I re-read the book, just to make sure I hadn't forgotten any important plot points. I must say that I enjoyed the story, and after I was finished I felt rather proud of myself for having written it. Of course one writes the kind stories that one likes in the first place, which doesn't mean they suit anyone else. But, hey, it's a good thing if you can at least please yourself.


The other problem with only having one release every year or so is that as the launch date approaches, I have to remember all the promotional necessities. I don't want to forget to send new release announcements to Sisters in Crime, or Women Writing the West, or Historical Mystery Writers, or Mystery Writers of America, or... who have I forgotten? How about the mailing list, both electronic and non-electronic? Events? Conferences? Blog tour? How much can I afford to travel this year? Where is the most effective place to put my limited resources? Oh, how I wish I could do a giant Jenny Milchman-like tour of the entire country.

One thing I did do was update my website with new book information, including the entire first two chapters for your reading pleasure.There is also an entirely new page of traditional Southern American recipes. So many readers have told me they enjoy the old-fashioned food and cooking lore and recipes that are included in each of the Alafair books that I decided to add the Recipe page to bring all the recipes together and to add a few that are not in the books. I'm beginning with just a couple of recipes, but I'll be adding a new one at least once a month, or as often as I can make the dish at home and take a picture of it for the site!

All I can do is the best I can do. And I think that nothing is more effective than writing the best book I can write and hoping it finds its audience. Till then, Dear Readers, if you're in Arizona over the next couple of months, check out my event schedule at www.doniscasey.com. Perhaps there will be an event happening near you. I'd love to see you and say hello.

He's Alive!

My eighth Alafair Tucker novel, All Men Fear Me, comes out in November, which means I have two months before the merry-go-round of promotion begins in earnest. I'd like to at least finish the first one hundred pages of the ninth book before that time. This means that I'm letting a lot of things go in my regular life that ought to be taken care of, because I feel like I ought to be writing. As I wrote in my last entry on this blog, two weeks ago, occasionally things arise that have to be dealt with RIGHT NOW. Like my husband's kidney stones or the big tree in the front yard that was busted up in the storm a while back and had to be taken down before it fell on the house. But dusting and sweeping, not so much.

The latest distraction

I'm not a fast writer. I do the best I can. I do preliminary research and sketch out a plot and cast of characters before I start, so I do have a direction mapped out. I have a strict writing schedule and force myself to sit down and type words whether I'm in the mood or not. Miraculously, this seems to work for me. Stories do reveal themselves to me and books do come about. I just can't make them come about any faster than they do. I have great respect for and envy of writers who can knock 'em out and not only do it in three months but do it well. For me, the book just comes when it comes.

He isn't dead!

I have perhaps 80 usable pages out of 120 written thus far on book nine (Working title: Book Nine).The story is finally beginning to take a recognizable shape in my mind, but just in the past day or two a new problem has arisen that I can see is going to complicate things. It seems that I don't know who is going to get killed. I knew who the doomed party was before I started writing, but as I proceed, it begins to dawn on me that said victim may not be the victim after all. And if Party A is not the victim, I don't know who could have killed Party B. Was it the same person who was supposed to have murdered Party A? The original killer (Killer A) doesn't seem to have a compelling motive to off Party B.

I wish I could write faster, and not just because I'd like to be able to put out two or three books a year. I really would like to see how this story is going to turn out. Who IS going to die, and for heaven's sake, who is the murderer and what is the motive?

A Bad Writing Day and a Good Review

I had a good writing day yesterday. Today, not so much. To begin with, I awoke to an infestation of ants in my kitchen. There are very few things more disgusting that finding ants all over everything in your sparkling clean kitchen. It’s a little bit cooler today*, and overcast, so I’m thinking the ants are taking advantage of the fact that they can emerge from their den in the daytime and not be instantly crisp fried.

So I spent half an hour or so moving all my utensils and spraying the little buggers with fruit wash, which is lemony and kills them dead while making my kitchen smell lovely and not poisoning me at the same time. Then I have fifteen minutes of cleaning up the carnage with disinfecting wipes, after which the toaster oven, can opener, and their friends go back into their places. The fruit wash is used up, so I’m off to the store to buy more, and for good measure, some ant traps for the window sill.

I have two blog entries due over the next two days, so after fixing a bit of lunch for my better half and myself, I spent an hour on the computer writing up one post, followed by finally checking my email and social media and responding to everyone who needs a response. By this time I have become stiff and sore from standing in one place (not to be left off the latest health fad bandwagon, I’ve been writing standing up). I took some time to pay bills, and noticed that one long-standing bill has gone up for some reason not explained. Like an idiot, I called the billing department to find out why.

Forty-five minutes later, I am informed that this is an across-the-board rate hike for everyone in Arizona, and she’s so sorry that I didn’t receive a notification.

It is now 4:30 p.m. I still have to finish this entry before Don gets home and supper needs to be made. I’m almost done! I may have an hour to get some work done on the WIP!

So, to end on a high note, I’m appending an excerpt of the first review of my November release, All Men Fear Me, from the August edition of Kirkus Reviews. It was a very good review, much to my pleasure and satisfaction. I hope this is a harbinger of things to come.

“When the U.S. enters World War I, hate and suspicion triumph over rational thought…Naturally, Alafair is worried about her sons being drafted, but she never suspects that a visit from her brother, Rob Gunn, will cause problems with people she’s known for years. Rob is a union organizer who’s lying low after his release from an internment camp for his involvement in an Arizona miners’ strike. While everyone waits to hear whose number has come up in the draft, strife breaks out between the pro-war patriots, who think anyone with a foreign-sounding name is a spy, and the anti-war socialists, some of whom want to march on Washington and take over the government… Casey’s skill at making you care about the injustices of a time and place not often covered in history books is second to none. The admirable mystery is the cherry on top.” Kirkus Reviews, August 17, 2015

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*“Cooler” is 102º. I live in Arizona.

Right to the Point

Donis here. My latest book, All Men Fear Me, will not hit the shelves until November. But since one can't afford to let the grass grow under one's feet, I’ve started working on the first draft of a new novel. It will be the ninth book in my Alafair Tucker series. At the moment the extremely original working title is Nine. I’m planning on coming up with a perfect title later. Usually I wait until one of the characters says something pithy and to the point, at which moment I say to myself, “Hmm, that would be a good title.”

I’m always trying to find the perfect word to convey the subtle shade of meaning that I want, both in my titles and in my manuscripts. My first drafts are filled with blank spaces, which I leave because even though I can think of one hundred nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs that would be adequate in that place, I know the Absolutely Perfect Word exists, and I can’t quite come up with it. However, I can’t afford to spend fifteen minutes wracking my brain for it, so I leave a blank and torture myself with it on the rewrites. Sometimes I do end up having to use one of those one hundred almost-right words, but when I do, I feel a sense of abject failure.

Trying to convey some subtle meaning is only one reason why I strive to find the perfect word. Sometimes the way the sentence sounds, the poetry of it, only works with a particular combination of words. I have been know to write a narrative in the voice of one character, and then decide later that it would be better to have a different character experience the event and tell us about it. Changing the point of view necessitated a major change in language, even though the gist of the scene was the same.

I heard a Famous Author say that one of the best things he ever did to improve his prose style and technique was to learn to write poetry. He thought that there is nothing like poetry to teach a writer how to use the fewest possible words to make the biggest possible impact on the reader.

The amazing thing is that once you have written a few poems and learned how to fit your idea into the shortest possible form, your long-form style automatically changes without your having to even think about it. Your prose gains a vigor that it didn’t have before, because its power is no longer dissipated in a miasma of unnecessary words.*

I read that if you ask an author why he writes, the better and probably more successful writers will answer that it’s because they love language. I think that learning how to use language is like learning to play of a piano. Language is a writer’s instrument, and if she doesn’t practice, study, experiment, and play with it, she might end up writing “Chopsticks” instead of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.
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*Case in point …a miasma of unnecessary words.

Doomed to Repeat It?

Ah, May already. A beautiful month in much of the country, and very nice here in Arizona as well. Until the end of the month, when the desert summer begins to rear its ugly head. So I, Donis, shall enjoy the relative cool while I can and try not to complain too much when June arrives. At least I no longer live in tornado alley.

Already I digress. Writing is what we wish to to discuss today. Last time I posted here I wrote about having to cut my latest manuscript from 91,000 words to a manageable 85,000 before I sent it in to the editor for her approval. I've noticed that my books are getting longer. The first installment of my Alafair Tucker series came in at just a little over 60,000, which is really short. But with that tale I felt that I said all I need to say. With this book, I had a lot to say, and I hope I didn't oversell the story. I never know. Here's the new cover:

The book was accepted for publication with hardly any editorial changes to the story. I'm doing corrections on the ARC (advanced reading copy) right now. Lots of minor copy editing--a misplaced comma here and an inappropriate italic there. Other than that, the story is in its final form and will hit the shelves in November. The book is called All Men Fear Me, an Alafair Tucker Mystery, and it is set in Oklahoma at the beginning of World War I (for the Americans. The rest of the world had been at war for three years.) The title is lifted from an American propaganda poster that said: I am Public Opinion. All Men Fear Me.

It was interesting and rather difficult to do the research on the American home front. There is a lot of literature about the European home front and about the battle front, but what life was like for ordinary Americans during the war was not as easy to find, much to my surprise. I ended up doing a huge amount of research in contemporary newspapers.

My grandparents were all in their early twenties during WWI, but none of them ever told me anything about life while the war was on. Neither of my grandfathers went. I fear I grew up thinking that the distant European war didn't have much of an effect on folks buried deep in the hills of Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Was I ever wrong. There was a tremendous backlash in Oklahoma when the U.S. declared war on Germany, and when a draft was instituted there was nearly a civil war. Thousands of tenant farmers, workers, socialists, and Native Americans gathered in enclaves in Central Oklahoma and planned to march all the way to Washington D.C., gathering "soldiers" as they went, take the city, arrest President Wilson, and put an end to the war. The group was infiltrated by spies, and before they could put their plans into effect, a huge posse rode on the camp and scattered the rebels. In the end, some 500 people were arrested and 250 arraigned. Only a few dozen of those particular rebels ended up in prison, but some were given thirty year sentences for sedition. The last of them was pardoned by President Taft in 1921, after the war was over and everyone had calmed down.

The uprising came to be called the Green Corn Rebellion, and it helped lead to a big government crackdown on dissension. The laws that were passed at the time to limit civil rights make pretty scary reading.

Forty to fifty years later, I went through the public school system in Oklahoma and was never taught a word about the Green Corn Rebellion, among other unsavory things that had happened during the state's history. At the turn of the 20th Century, the Spaniard George Santayana said, "those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Does that apply to trying to erase the shameful past by not teaching it to our children?

A Book is Born

Spring in Arizona

It is spring, the time of new beginnings. Barbara Fradkin has completed her latest manuscript, Vicki Delany’s latest has just been released, and John Corrigan has the end of his WIP in sight. Authors are traveling all over the Western world. And I am happy to say that I just finished the first draft of my eighth book, which is a good thing since it’s due to my editor at the end of this month. Besides, I am now brain dead.

The last few weeks of writing before a manuscript is due in to the publisher is intense and hair-raising. You finish. You send it off. It’s out of your hands. You are like a cork that has been anchored under the water for weeks and months, and now the string is cut and you pop to the surface. You’re floating. The sun is shining, the air is fresh. You are drifting. Aimless. You are disoriented. You’re blinking at the light. You don’t know what to do next. This has happened to me every time I finish a novel. I despair of ever being able to write another word.

This book, All Men Fear Me, which is scheduled for publication in November, was particularly hard for me to finish. It’s long. I have a lot going on. Too much? I don’t know. It seemed to me that everything I put in was necessary to the story. For every book I must come up with a compelling reason for a farm wife and mother of ten to get involved in a murder investigation. I also have to figure out a convincing way for her to either solve the murder or at least contribute to the solution, which as you might guess, isn’t that easy.

I have found over the course of eight books in the same series that I have begun to depart from the usual mystery novel format. The murders take place later and later in the story with each book I write. The later books are constructed more like thrillers than puzzles. In book seven, Hell With the Lid Blown Off, I told the reader who was going to die in the first sentence, but didn’t actually kill him for a hundred pages. In this book…well, I’ll let you see for yourself.

Or it could be that they’re all hard for me to finish and I just don’t remember from book to book, rather like childbirth. It’s a pain, but you’re always so pleased with the result that you forget how you suffered.

Anyway, my beta reader has the MS right now. I have no idea whether the book holds together or makes sense or is any good. I like the way it turned out, but mothers love their ugly babies as much as their pretty ones.

The Exciting Climax

I’m in the midst of writing the climax to All Men Fear Me, my latest Alafair Tucker novel. It’s the big reveal, when the reader finds out whodunnit, and more importantly, when Alafair finds out whodunnit. Maybe she confronts the killer. Then what does she do? When I begin writing a new mystery novel, I usually know who the murderer is, and sometimes I know how and why s/he did it. I may also have an idea how the killer went about trying to cover up the crime. I’m pretty good about doling out clues at appropriate intervals throughout the story. But here’s the hard part: Alafair, my protagonist, has to figure out who did the deed.

And that is not easy, my friend, because I have to do it in such a way that is realistic and makes sense.

Alafair is not a law enforcement professional or a private investigator. She doesn’t do this for a living, nor does she have any official authority to compel people to answer her questions. She also lives in an era when people are constrained by fairly rigid gender roles. In fact, question number one is: what is she doing trying to solve a murder, anyway? The first thing I have to do is give her a really compelling reason to get involved at all.

Then I have to give her the means and the opportunities to uncover information and make connections, and I can’t force the action to fit the outcome I want. In other words, I can’t have Alafair doing things that a woman with the resources she has couldn’t do. I can’t have her act against her own nature, either, just to advance the plot or create tension in an artificial way.
This is the reason I’ve been known to stare at the screen for an hour when I’m at a critical juncture, thinking “how can I get Alafair off the farm and into that office in town to search for the gun, before sundown, when she has a bunch of kids and a husband, all of whom want dinner?”

I could just have her up and leave and let everyone fend for himself, or I could contrive to have all the children and the husband go out to eat at whatever the 1917 equivalent of McDonald’s was. But if I did that, I have a feeling I’d hear about it from disgruntled readers. Not to mention a horrified editor. Sometimes I just can’t come up with a plausible way to do it, and I have to go at it from a totally different angle or rework the scene altogether.

This is one of the things I like about writing an amateur sleuth. She has to be sneaky, persistent, smart, and clever in order to find her answers. And sometimes, she’s smarter than I am. In fact, there have been occasions where Alafair came upon a clue that I was not aware of myself until it appeared on the page. Toward the end of my fourth book in the series, The Sky Took Him, Alafair was sitting in a hospital corridor, having a nice, normal, conversation with the family, when she noticed something at exactly the same time I did, an observation which provided both of us with a vital piece of information. It surprised the heck out of me, but it was plausible, very much in character for Alafair, and worked like a charm. Moments like this are why writing a mystery can be such fun.

The Best Writing Advice Ever

Jenn McKinlay, Donis Casey, Rhys Bowen, "pimping" our latest books

I, Donis, did an event last week at a library in Sun Lakes, Arizona, along with Rhys Bowen and Jenn McKinlay. If you are a lover of cozy mysteries, Dear Reader, you are familiar with both of these best-selling authors. The crowd was enthusiastic and the panel was lively, and I had a great time talking about writing, the writing life, our books, characters, you name it. At the end of the session, a woman in the audience asked if had any helpful advice for aspiring authors, and Jenn McKinlay replied, “Don’t think too much.” Just keep writing.

That is the best piece of writing advice I’ve heard in a good long while, and one that I need to take to heart. The most important thing is to get those words onto the page. You can fix it later. You can have the most brilliant idea every conceived on God’s green earth but what separates the men from the boys is the ability to get it down on paper in an effective way.

Both Jenn and Rhys are not just talented, they are disciplined and effective. Both of them produce two or three (or sometimes four or five) books a year, and they are wonderful books, too. Rhys, whose Royal Spyness and Molly Murphy series are two of my favorites, has been writing professionally for all of her adult life, and with any art, the only way to get to Carnegie Hall is to practice, practice, practice. One of my favorite adages, and one I repeat constantly, is that you can study music theory until you have a Ph.D., but unless you practice the violin until your fingers bleed, you’ll never be a virtuoso.

Jenn told the crowd that she writes a book from beginning to end without stopping, without making any corrections. As she writes she keeps a list of things she will go back and fix once she has the first draft finished. My technique is similar. I always intend to write from beginning to end without stopping. If I get stuck or can’t quite figure out what to do next, I just write something, a filler, or leave a blank and plow onwards. Get that first draft done. By the time you write the last word, the story may have taken quite a turn from the way you thought it would go when you were writing the beginning.

But now you have something to work with. You can go back, if you need to, and craft the beginning to fit the end. You can cut out all the blather and redundancies that you put in there on the fly. You can tighten up that saggy middle and add another clue that will make things clearer.

I know all this very well and this is what I tell anyone who aspires to write a book. Yet sometimes I’m not so successful in taking my own advice. I’m working on a manuscript right now, and I keep obsessing over one particular scene. I sit down every day to go, go, go from beginning to end, but for the past several days I keep going back to a family dinner and messing with it. Big mistake, and I know it. If I get the whole story down, the dinner scene will resolve itself. So today my fervent resolution is to take Jenn McKinlay’s advice and not think so much. To hell with the dinner scene. Onward to the end!

The eighth Alafair Tucker novel is on the publisher’s schedule for release in November. My deadline for the complete manuscript is April 20. That is the day that no matter what, I’ll be forced to pronounce the book done and send it in to her. Sometimes this is the only way a book ever gets finished. You simply have to turn it in.

I’ll get it done. I always do.

An Ugly World

Donis here. Men are outside painting my house. All the windows are covered in opaque plastic and I can't see what's going on. Is it cloudy? Sunny? I am feeling creepily encased in a kind of half-light. But to business...

The gender debate that has been...well, let us not say "raging", but perhaps simmering along for the past few days, has made for interesting reading. I've also found it a bit depressing. Barbara's post on Wednesday nicely summed up a lot of my feelings on the matter so I won't add my two cents.

But if we ever get together for coffee and you'd like to hear what I think, Dear Reader, I'd be glad to give you the entire dollar's worth of my opinion. I've been around a long time and have had a lot of experience being an American woman of all ages and throughout several eras.

In the meantime, let us discuss writing for a bit. I've been working steadily on the eighth installment of my Alafair Tucker series, which is set in the American West during the second decade of the Twentieth Century. The new book, All Men Fear Me, should be published in the fall. The first book in the series, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, came out in July 2005, which means that I've been writing Alafair's story for ten years come this summer.

Writing series characters over a long period of time is like living with real people. When you first meet them, it takes a while to get to know how they think and act, to understand their peccadillo;and to know how they are going to behave in any given situation. But as in any relationship, your characters will surprise you, no matter how well you think you know them. If they don't, you haven't written real people.

Every book I write surprises me. Alafair is raising ten children, and I'm amazed at how each of them is turning out. I mean, I had no idea that this one would grow up to be such a hothead, or that one would be an intellectual, or a tease. Or so self-destructive. Alafair is changing as she gets older, too. She used to be so sure of herself. But then things are happening in the world that affect her and her family, and she has no control over any of it. It's like she said:
"When the kids were little, I thought that if I could just keep them from killing themselves until they were big enough to take care of themselves, then I wouldn’t be worrying about them so much. Turns out I had it backwards. When they were little, I had more charge over what happened to them. But now they’re all about their own affairs, and there’s nothing I can do about it."

It was an ugly world in 1917. I've thought before that writing historical fiction or science fiction is a way for an author to comment on the society he lives in by drawing parallels to the past or future. The more I research what life was like for ordinary people in the early 20th Century, the more I realize that as a species, we humans don't seem to learn anything.