Plot Twists and Being Lucky

By Thomas Kies

One of the topics I teach in my creative writing class at the college is how to write effective plot twists. In many cases it’s a lot like a magic trick. While the audience is paying attention to what the left hand is doing, the right hand is the one making the trick happen.

Covid is like the plot twist that just keeps on giving. 

My book SHADOW HILL launched last August. I’d finished writing the book in April of 2020, but the publication date was pushed back for obvious reasons. Trying to promote a book in the throes of so many people dying in a pandemic was a bad idea.

Once it had been announced that a vaccination had been developed at the beginning of 2021, it gave me hope that I could promote SHADOW HILL as it should. I hoped to be at the usual locations including the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale where I’ve launched every book so far in my writing career.  

About the same time that vaccinations were rolling out, Barnes & Noble made a sizeable commitment to the rerelease of my first book RANDOM ROAD. It was going to be on the front table of every one of their stores. I had visions of going from one B&N to another to do book signings. 

I’d signed up for Bouchercon that was going to take place in New Orleans just in time for the release of SHADOW HILL.

It was all falling into place.

Then…POW…the Delta variant stepped in. Add to that, a confusing and confounding reluctance of a sizable portion of the public to getting a vaccination that's left a high percentage of the population to being ravaged by the disease. 

Just as the world was emerging back into a relative sense of normalcy, it all went wrong. A local restaurant I was due to have a book signing closed when one of their employees was diagnosed with Covid.

We did manage to have a book event at that restaurant two weeks later when everyone tested negative and then we did another book event at a local country club. We sold out of books in both events.  

In the meantime, Bouchercon was cancelled because of Covid fears. Just as well since Hurricane Ida hit the same weekend the conference was supposed to take place. The old double whammy.

Ever optimistic, my fifth book, WHISPER ROOM, is due for publication in August of 2022. I’m scheduled to be at Malice Domestic in April and Thrillerfest in June. That same week, I’m hoping to do a book signing at a library in Norwalk, Connecticut. I’m looking forward to having a book signing at my favorited restaurant here on the coast in August.

The latest plot twist? Omicron, the latest variant of Covid. No telling how bad that’s going to be.

I’m not complaining. I’m really not. So many people have it so much worse.  

Steven Sondheim passed away on Friday and days before he died, he reflected, “I’ve been lucky.”

So have I. My childhood dream was to be a novelist. And I am. I’ve been lucky.

Back when I was working for a newspaper in Connecticut, I had an assignment in Manhattan. A colleague of mine was with me on the Metro-North train into the city. The entire one-hour trip, she whined and complained about pretty much everything under the sun.

When we finally got to Grand Central Terminal, we went straight to the iconic clock in the Main Concourse where we were to meet our contact. We got there early and as we were chatting and people watching, a woman came up to us and asked if we would take a picture of her and her daughter. She said, “This is the first time we’ve been to New York.”

It was difficult to tell how old her daughter was because she was in a wheelchair and her poor little body seemed to be bent at strange angles. It made me want to cry.

In spite of it, they both had huge smiles on their faces. 

The little girl had the biggest grin of the two of them. After we took the photo, the mother thanked us and told us how excited they were to be in the city and how much her daughter had been looking forward to it. 

After they left, my colleague looked at me said, “If I ever bitch about anything again, just slap me.”

So, yes, Covid is sending us another plot twist. But like Steven Sondheim, I’ve been lucky.  www.thomaskiesauthor.com

Random Thoughts on Editing

 This blog will be shorter than usual because I’m working through the second set of edits from my publisher and I’m staring at a looming deadline. 

My first editor, Annette, described the editing process as a tennis game.  The way we worked was I’d send her the first hundred pages of a manuscript and she’d let me know if I was on the right track.  Then, when the manuscript was finished, I’d send it to her, she’d edit it and email it back to me.

What she would send back would be my original work marked up and obviously scanned.  I’d than get that printed and work from a hard copy.  Old school.

Now, both my editor and copy editor, work on an electronic version, email it to me and I take it from there.  New school.

I’m no longer working on a hard copy, so the good news is that a tree will live to see another day.  Bad news, I’m a knuckle dragger and not technologically inclined.  There are a lot of marks and lines and colors in the text and in the margin.

Which I find a little distracting. 

But Diane and Beth are both talented and excellent to work with, and frankly they end up helping me make my manuscript a much stronger book. 

So, this is the final set of edits I’m looking at.  And probably the twentieth time I’ve read through my book, tentatively titled WHISPER ROOM and scheduled to be released in 2022. 

Someday I’m going to count how many times I actually read my own work before it’s launched. 

Completely off topic, SHADOW HILL was released two weeks ago and I’m blessed that I’ve gotten great reviews.  One was from a writer I hold in extremely high regard.  Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Mystery and Suspense Magazine have all been exceedingly kind. 

But a review I received that surprised me was from the lady who cuts my hair.  I was there a couple of days ago and she had just finished my first two books, which she asked me to sign.  She said, “I’ve known you for years now and just got around to reading your series.  I love them and so does my father.”

She told me that even though she’s dyslexic, she read the first book in two days.

Of course, I always take that as a compliment.  But, hey, it takes me a whole year to write a novel.  It’s like Thanksgiving dinner.  It takes days to plan and cook and then just like that, the meal is over. 

Then Carley told me that the other ladies who work there were in the middle of reading my first book and loving it.

While Carley cut my hair, we all had a pleasant discussion about what a hot mess my protagonist, Geneva Chase, is.  

Then I gladly signed their books and thanked them for their kind words. 

So now it’s time to look over the last of the final edits.  

Stay safe!

Launch Date

Tomorrow, my fourth book Shadow Hill is officially released.  I’m having a book launch party on the patio of one of my favorite restaurants here on the coast called Floyd’s 1921 Restaurant.  It’s an outside venue which has become an important factor now that the Delta Variant of Covid is raging through the unvaccinated public.  

Sadly, only about 35% of the population here in our coastal county has been vaccinated and the number of illnesses and hospitalizations are spiking. 

So, I’m writing about good news/bad news.  

A book launch is always good news but why are they always on Tuesdays?  I’ve Googled it to death and no one has a solid answer.  One theory is that Tuesday is the slowest sales day.  That really doesn’t make sense to me, but there it is.

Another theory is that all the new books launching on that particular week are out on the same day, there’s less of a cost for distributors.  But why Tuesday?  Why not Wednesday?

Yet a third theory is that if the book sells really well early on, that gives a bookstore an opportunity to order more before the weekend.

The real reason?  They’ve just always done it that way.   

In the past, a book launch date was just that, the  first day you can buy the book.  But for Shadow Hill, that didn’t seem to be the case.  For the last month, Amazon has been shipping them out as quickly as the orders come in.  Barnes & Noble was shipping and selling at the beginning of August.  Other bookstores had them on sale as well.

Am I complaining?  Absolutely not.  Sell those books as fast as you can.

Anyway you look at it, launching the book is really good news.

What’s the bad news?  The Delta Variant of Covid is raging through the unvaccinated public.  Just this past week we heard that Bouchercon 2021 in New Orleans was cancelled.  It didn’t come as a surprise. If you have any kind of presence on social media and you’re friends with other writers, they were dropping out one at a time.

I’d been asked to be on a panel and to moderate a second.  I reached out to the five panelists last week to introduce myself and immediately, three of them told me they had cancelled.  

With New Orleans being one of the cities with the highest infections rate, it made sense for the conference organizers to make the painful decision to cancel.  They offered to refund my registration fee or I could donate it back to them.

I know they have expenses to cover so I didn’t hesitate to donate it to them

Tomorrow, I’m raising a glass with my friends, signing some books, and eating the outstanding appetizers that Floyd’s will be serving.  And for the rest of today, I’m looking over a manuscript due to be released in 2022 that has been marked up by my editor.  

Cheers.  

Art Imitating Life?

 My newest book, SHADOW HILL, due to be released in August has the following descriptive blurb: 

“Just days before Morris Cutter, a retired powerful oil executive, is scheduled to give a pseudo-scientific report to Congress that will delay crucial action on climate change for decades, he and his wife are found shot to death in their Greenwich, Connecticut, home. The police call it murder-suicide. The couple's son refuses to accept the official conclusion and hires Geneva Chase, crime reporter turned private detective, to prove otherwise.

“Genie soon learns that there are suspects everywhere, including within the deceased's immediate family. Morris Cutter's own daughter hadn't spoken with him in years, and his nephew is a climate activist with a radical organization. But Cutter's former company has a vested interest in keeping a low profile until it is able to present its mock-science on Capitol Hill. Genie is bribed, then threatened, to wrap up her investigation before the scheduled hearing date and to concur with the police findings.

“When the lead scientist of the study goes missing, followed by Cutter's daughter, Genie begins to piece together what actually may have happened to Morris and Julia Cutter, putting herself in harm's way as she races to find the truth.”

In addition to being the president of our county's chamber of commerce, I'm also the president of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast (BAPAC) representing over 42,000 businesses from Maine to Florida.

On Thursday of last week, I was invited to testify in front of a Congressional Subcommittee and Mineral Resources at a hearing called, “Protecting Coastal Communities and Ocean Resources from Offshore Drilling.” I was there to support a bill called the Clean Ocean and Safe Tourism (COAST) Anti-Drilling Act that, if passed, will permanently ban offshore oil drilling off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.  

Similar bills are moving through the House of Representatives protecting the Pacific Coast and the western coast of Florida. 

In SHADOW HILL I write about how some lawmakers know the truth about climate change and how dangerous it is but are still hellbent to support burning fossil fuels.  I suspected that was true, but after seeing the performance of some of the members of the House of Representatives, now I’m certain.

It’s ironic when one of the witnesses offering testimony against the bills that will ban additional offshore oil drilling, said that in the state of Louisiana, the percentage of revenue they get from oil helps to build levees and mitigation efforts to protect against powerful hurricanes and sea level rise.  The irony of that is if we weren’t burning fossil fuels like we’ve been doing, we wouldn’t have more and more powerful hurricanes or rising sea levels.

This week, we saw the shutdown of the Colonial pipeline from a cyber ransomware attack.  Here in North Carolina, there were long lines at the pumps for the better part of a week.  One of the members of the committee in their opening statement said, “See?  See what happens when we cut off the supply of gas and oil?”

I wanted to point out that this was not a lack of supply.  This was a lack of security being in place to safeguard the smooth flow of supply.

Enough about oil and how art imitates life. 

The mask mandate has been removed here in our state for those who have been vaccinated.  I’ve missed seeing peoples’ faces and their smiles. I’ve missed shaking hands and the hugs.  

I know we’re not out of the woods yet, but boy it feels good. 

Announcing the Reissue of My First Book, RANDOM ROAD.

They say that writing a book is a little like telling a joke and waiting two years to see if anyone laughs.  I wrote my fourth book, Shadow Hill, in 2019.  It was originally set for publication for July of 2020.  But, even before the pandemic struck, the publication date was moved to September of 2020.

Then all hell broke loose, and the new date was set for July 2021.

I was fine with that.   In addition to the delay, Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks, my publisher, is reissuing my first book, Random Road, for April 13 (about a week from now) to gin up some interest in Shadow Hill.  The new edition of Random Road contains an introduction by the author, a conversation with the author, a reading group guide, and the first pages of the sequel to Random Road entitled Darkness Lane.  It also sports a dynamite new cover. 

Something I didn’t expect happened.  The interest level and buzz for the reissue has been so intense that the publisher asked to move the publication date of Shadow Hill one more time, to August 10, to extend the marketing efforts for Random Road. 

Additionally, Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks has redesigned all the covers of my former books and asked me to start work on a fifth Geneva Chase mystery.  By the way, the redesigned covers are fantastic!!

2020 was a strange year and I watched while a lot of my author friends launched their books during the height of the pandemic.  Many of them had to pivot in the ways they marketed themselves and their novels.  

Many bookstores were closed altogether and, even now, they’re open at reduced capacity.  Nobody did book signings.  No mystery conferences were held. You couldn’t visit book clubs. 

Online video was nearly the only way to reach potential readers.  I think that even as life returns to normal, we’ll find that online will remain a powerful marketing tool.  Shameless self-promotion…I’m doing an online conversation with the Poisoned Pen Bookstore on Thursday, April 22, at 8 p.m., Eastern Time. 

So, this is my celebratory blog for the re-release of Random Road and it’s mercifully brief.  

I hope you’ve been vaccinated and were able to be with friends and family this past weekend.  I know that the only thing that will make me happier than seeing my books released is when I can visit my own family and see my grandchildren. 

In the meantime, stay safe and stay healthy.