Brenda Chapman on keeping it all straight!

Please welcome this weekend's guest blogger, my good friend and fellow Ottawa mystery author, Brenda Chapman. A prolific author equally at home with young adult, stand-alone adult thrillers, and two mystery series, Brenda is best known as the author of the Stonechild and Rouleau police procedurals published by Dundurn. Cold Mourning, first in the series was shortlisted for an Arthur Ellis award in 2015 for best  novel.Tumbled Graves, third in the series, was released in February 2016. Brenda also writes the Anna Sweet novellas for Grass Roots Press. 

Learn more about Brenda at brendachapman.ca 

Thank you to Barbara Fradkin for inviting me to share a blog post with you today. I thought I’d take this opportunity to raise an affliction common to many authors…

A dutiful parent does not forget the names of their children, or the moment their child took their first step, graduated high school or backed the family car into a tree. Books are often compared to an author’s children, but remembering the plot, the characters and even the specifics of a crime can tax any writer’s memory cells. Case in point: An author (whose name escapes me) recounted the time he appeared on a radio program and forgot the plot of his newly released book. The interviewer asked questions but the author drew blanks. Some might see this as an unbelievable memory lapse, since who better to know the content of a book than its originator…especially a book hot on the shelves?

Tumbled Graves is the third in my Stonechild and Rouleau police procedural series. I have several main characters who are getting into all kinds of scrapes and suffering through unexpected turmoil — trying to lead happy lives while solving crimes. Half the time, I can’t remember who did what in which book. I have to look up the characters’ names, search their physical descriptions and reread passages to find out where they left off.

Yet something readers might not understand is that by the time a book reaches the shelves, often close to two years have passed since the writer submitted the final manuscript to the publisher. In my case, when Tumbled Graves was released at the end of February, I had already submitted the manuscript to Dundurn for book four and gotten a start on book five. To make life even more complicated, I completed an Anna Sweet novella for a separate mystery series with Grass Roots Press in between books four and five, and a few weeks ago, I set aside my latest Stonechild writing project to work on the edits. Not to mention my full-time communications job….

Taking a cue from the author who forgot the plot of his book, I’ve learned to skim through my notes about a book before an event. I run the names of characters and the crime through my mind before an interview. I make notes on scraps of paper. I head off brain freezes through careful preparation — much like studying for an exam at school.Of course, this cannot save me from out-of-the-blue questions from readers I meet in my travels, so I ask in advance for understanding as I stare back blankly while fumbling for a response. I really did write the book you are asking about. Those really are my children. It’s just that I’ve given birth to fourteen at last count with a couple more in gestation. It goes without saying that I love them all equally…once I can recall the details of their birth.

When the dream becomes a reality

This weekend's guest blogger is my very good friend and fellow Ottawa writer R.J. (Robin) Harlick, whose gritty, thought-provoking Meg Harris series is set in the rural wilderness of nearby West Quebec. Part mystery, part thriller, always exciting. Here she blogs about how and why she got started.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion on the Bechdel Test and the gender bias in literature and film. I will admit I could write ad infinitum on the topic, but like Donis, I will save this discussion for over a glass of wine.

At some point in our lives we writers make the decision to become one. Some of us know from a young age that writing stories is what we want to do, while for others, it is a more gradual transformation.

For me, there was never really a definitive moment when I shouted, ‘Yes, I want to be a writer.” I more or less slid into it, starting where most writers start, as a reader. As a child, I devoured books, in particular mysteries beginning with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and eventually graduating to Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy Sayres, Raymond Chandler, Nero Wolf and the like. Sometimes I thought it would be fun to write one of these myself.

Though I loved reading, English wasn’t my favourite subject. I found the piecemeal taking apart of a story destroyed the magical hold it had over me.  But I loved the creative writing part of English classes and would spend many an hour on class assignments making the stories that swirled around in my head come alive with words. Needless to say many had a mystery angle to them.

In university, I continued to enjoy playing around with words. I excelled at making essays sound as if I knew something about the topics about which I was writing, when I didn’t. Studying wasn’t one of my strengths. Perhaps this is where my penchant for creative writing started.

I also continued to read voraciously branching out into the world of the greats. Though I thought it might be fun to become a writer, like Ernest Hemingway or Somerset Maugham, I didn’t treat it seriously. I didn’t really think I had it in me.

This enjoyment for words continued on into my work life. I invariable preferred the writing part of my job to other aspects. But it was business writing; letters, proposals and reports. Nonetheless I continued to harbour the dream of being ensconced somewhere bucolic penning the next great Canadian novel.

To satisfy my need to write, I started recording my time spent at my log cabin in the woods in a journal. Finally, one day after reaching a significant birthday, I decided it was time to find out if I could become the fiction writer in the bucolic setting of my dreams. The setting was easy. I was already sitting in it; the screened-in porch of my log cabin overlooking the surrounding forests. And so I set out to write what would eventually be published as my first Meg Harris mystery, Death’s Golden Whisper.

My first goal was to see if I could even write a novel. Until that point, none of my business writing had approached the 100,000 word length of a typical novel. The next was to determine if I could write fiction, for I quickly discovered fiction writing is a totally different animal from business writing.  As I marched along this new adventure, scene after scene, chapter after chapter, towards the climactic end, I realized I really enjoyed it. And so I decided writing was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Six books and the odd short story later here I am continuing the adventure with the next and seventh Meg Harris mystery, A Cold White Fear.

What about you? Was it a slow gradual slide into becoming a writer or did you know from the get-go that you wanted to be one?

_________________

RJ Harlick writes the popular wilderness-based Meg Harris mystery series set in the wilds of Quebec. RJ divides her time between her home in Ottawa and her log cabin in Quebec. And like her heroine Meg Harris, RJ loves nothing better than to roam the forests surrounding her wilderness cabin or paddle the endless lakes and rivers. There are 6 books in the series. The fourth, Arctic Blue Death was a finalist for the 2010 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel. In the latest release, Silver Totem of Shame, Meg travels to Canada’s west coast, to Haida Gwaii, the mystical islands of the Haida, where she unravels a story of shame and betrayal that reaches back to when the Haida ruled the seas. She is a past president of Crime Writers of Canada. She is currently working on a Cold White Fear, the seventh Meg Harris mystery, scheduled for late 2015 or early 2016 release. Visit her website: www.rjharlick.ca/.