A Really Good Villain

 I (Donis) was told once that the construction of a mystery begins with a villain. I think it isn’t that simple. A mystery isn’t necessarily about heroes and villains, but more properly an exploration of the nature of evil, if I may wax pompous for a moment.  

I am especially intrigued by books that cause the reader to re-examine his ideas about right and wrong.  We’ve talked before on this blog about the need for justice to be done in a mystery novel, but does that mean that the killer is always caught and punished?  Case in point: Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Was justice done when the killers were discovered? But no. Justice was done when the victim was murdered, and right was done when Hercule Poirot contrived to see that the murderers were not punished. Same deal in my first book, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming.  The killer was not the villain at all.

My sleuth in that series, Alafair Tucker, very much had her own ideas of right and wrong, which may or may not have anything to do with legal and illegal. This makes for interesting resolutions to the mysteries, I think. If the author can pull it off, mysteries can really be wonderful explorations of the human psyche. Why do people do what they do?  What seems right to one person can do another tremendous harm. Even an insane killer has reasons for murder that make perfect sense to him.

I'm working on a book now in which the protagonist is the villain in two of my previous novels from the Bianca Dangereuse Hollywood series. Her name is Katy, and in The Wrong Girl and Valentino Will Die, she was very much the bad guy. But she was such a fun character that I couldn't let her go. And now, in her very own book she's the heroine of her own life, but she's still has no moral code other than her own survival. She's a delight to write, but she isn't someone you'd trust to watch your jewelry. 

One of my favorite villains to write showed up in my eighth Alafair book. He was a charming psychopath, so evil that who knows, he might even have been the devil. When the first edition of All Men Fear Me came out, people were 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. 

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!

Big Fish, Little Pond

Oklahoma Promotin'

 Donis here. Since my fellow Type M-ers are musing about promotion, allow me to share an excellent  piece of advice I received many years ago. When my first book, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, was just about to come out in 2005, I asked my beloved editor Barbara Peters what she thought would be the most effective actions I could take to publicize my work. (Keep in mind this was before the great flowering of social media.) Attend Bouchercon? Do a national tour? Hire a publicist? Her advice was to concentrate on activities in Oklahoma, where the book is set, and environs – at least at first – because readers are always interested in reading about a place they recognize and people they are familiar with. This advice had done me well. Over past past decades I have attended conferences all over the country and done book tours all over the U.S. I receive fan letters and notes from everywhere in the wide world, but when I do anything in person, I always draw a bigger audience when I'm in my home territory of Oklahoma and its sister states of Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas. The only book in the Oklahoma-set series that did better here in Arizona, where I live, than it did in Oklahoma was The Wrong Hill To Die On, which was set in ... you guessed it ... Arizona.

So here is what I'd advise any author early in their career who asked me about promotion. Concentrate your efforts on whoever is your audience. My books are regional and seem to strike the loudest chord with those who are familiar with the region, though I get a fair number who are simply fascinated with life in pre-World War I America. If I were writing a series about a gourmet chef, I'd be hunting out foodies. Fashion for fashionistas, racing for race aficionados, genealogy for family historian, apple farming for Washingtonians. This is not to say that others won't be delighted by your brilliant plotting or gorgeous prose, and as time goes on it's very good to expand your publicity efforts to a broader audience. But since there's only so much time and money to go around, spend it to build your base, especially when you're starting out. 

Independence Day

original cover

 Tomorrow being the 4th of July has caused me to reflect upon all the many, many U.S. Independence Days I have enjoyed in the past. Like birthdays, most of the 4ths I have lived through blur together now, or are completely lost to memory, but one in particular stands out for me, and that is the Bicentennial.

Talk about a once-in-a-lifetime experience. (I suppose that a person could live through more than one centennial event, but could one remember both of them? That is the question.)

In 1976, I was newly married and living in Lubbock Texas. We went downtown on the day and joined the crowd for the Independence Day Parade. I love parades, anyway, to the extent that I almost always tear up when I hear the drums and first catch sight of the flag corps, and of course this parade was spectacular in that already-spectacular Texas fashion.

Fourth of July, Boynton OK, 1912

Several local businesses were giving away free cake and hotdogs. The crowd around the tables was rather like a monkey riot, what with people grabbing free food hand over fist, and Don ended up with one whole hot dog and one that had been ripped in half. Both were squashed, and just delicious.

This brings to mind other memorable anniversary dates. Many years ago, we returned to the Western Hemisphere on a Polish ocean liner, the Stefan Batory, after several months Europe. We sailed across the Atlantic and right up the Saint Laurence Seaway to Montreal and landed on Canada Day, July 1, for a wonderful welcome home.

Four days from today, on July 7, is the twentieth anniversary of the launch of my first novel, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming. The joy of the occasion was dampened by the fact that my mother, who had been instrumental in the research for the book, had just died a few months earlier. Besides, I was so nervous at my first book launch that I practically had an out-of-body experience. I’ve launched eleven other books since then, and I have to say that thus far it hasn’t gotten a whole lot easier.

By the way, you can read an excerpt from The Old Buzzard Had It Coming here. In fact, one can read excerpts from all my books as https://doniscasey.com

Parents

 Dad and Mom and Me

Donis here. May and June always put me in mind of my parents, both of whom are gone now. Both Fathers' Day and Memorial Day bring my father to mind. He was 19 years old in 1942, a gung-ho small town boy from Boynton, Oklahoma, who enlisted as a Marine after Pearl Harbor. He was an anti-aircraft gunner, present at some of the more infamous battles of the Pacific – Saipan, Tinian, the Marianas. He never talked about it much, but my sibs and I all played with his kit as children and learned the Marine hymn as soon as we could form words and carry a tune. He was a great, fun, hands-on dad, who died too early at age 44, when I was 19 and my youngest sibling was 18 months old.

Then of course, there's Mother's Day. I'm like many people in that my mother drove me crazy but I loved her to distraction. She was widowed at 39 and raised her younger kids all by herself. She's the source of many of the tales I use in my books. Her help with my first Alafair Tucker novel, The Old Buzzard Had it Coming, was invaluable and I dedicated the book to her. She did read the book in manuscript, but she died a few month before it came out, which really took the shine off.

My parents were very young when I came along, and I believe that I was something of a practice child for them. But they seemed to enjoy themselves with me and decided to carry on (you're welcome, siblings). As the years went by and the family grew, they both became expert child wranglers, especially my mother. Her attitude toward her little kids informs the character of Alafair, who is the mother of ten children. It's a good thing I had such an example to draw on when I wrote my Alafair books, because I have no children of my own.

However, here is an experience to which all can relate. Once upon a time, while in a grocery store, I saw a woman being terrorized by her small child. "Johnny," she kept pleading, "don't do that. Don't touch that. Be quiet." And did little Johnny listen to his mother? He did not. My thought on observing this pitiful scene was this – my mother would have jerked my arm out of its socket if I had behaved like that in public.

It used to be that people learned to parent by observing their own parents and grandparents and practising on their many younger siblings, nieces, and nephews. By the time a person grew up, he or she was already a skilled child caregiver. It's not as easy for young parents any more. People don't grow up in big family groups like they did in Alafair's day. As for me, I have younger siblings and observed expert parenting first hand. I was also an elementary school teacher for while, which enlightened me, as well.

It's true, though, that it's easier for me to romanticize parenting, having never had to do it day in and day out – forever. (I was going to say 'for eighteen years', but even I know better than that.) Someone asked C.S.Lewis how he could write so well for children, not having any himself. "I was a child, once," he replied. So was I. I have also witnessed first hand some pretty skilled parenting in my day.

A Love Affair With Writing

 A lot has been happening in my daily life, as usual, and it's been hard to find adequate time to write. Especially considering the fact that I'm trying to write two novels at once. 

When my first mystery novel, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, was published by Poisoned Pen Press in 2005, I was hardly a neophyte author. I had been writing professionally for untold years, and though I had never had any fiction published before, I expected that being a novelist was not going to hold any surprises for me.

My twelfth novel, Valentino Will Die, came out last year, and after twelve books I’m here to tell you that I was wrong. Oh, I held no illusions about the romance of the authorly life. I knew it was going to be hard, and it is. I knew there would be days when you sit and stare at the screen, unable to type a single word that isn’t crap and you know that you’ll never be able to write again.

I knew that it was going to be wonderful, that there would be days that deathless prose flows so effortlessly that it makes you believe in God and divine inspiration. 

I knew you had to have a hide like a rhinoceros and never take your reviews to heart, good or bad. I was perfectly aware that you have to know your craft. You have to practice, practice, practice, like a concert violinist, because it doesn’t matter if you have the skill of your art like Leonardo DaVinci and the genius in your field of Albert Einstein, if you don’t actually sit yourself down and put words to paper with ruthless determination, you ain’t a writer.

I was well aware that, unless the planets aligned and the gods conspired, I was not going to be able to support myself on royalty payments. Thus far, the planets have not aligned nor have the gods conspired.

I knew that you must never give up, even when you wonder why on earth you’re putting yourself through this for so little reward. I even knew how brave you have to be, to persevere, to trust the process, to write what you know you should write without wondering if it’s going to sell. (And believe me, that takes more courage than I sometimes have.)

I even knew that it was going to take over my life.

What I didn’t fully realize is how much writing is like being in love. You do things for it that you never thought you’d do. You long for it when something keeps you from it, and yet you resent how it takes over your life. You break your heart for it. You can’t give it up.

But when it loves you back, there’s nothing like it.

Limbo

Pandemic writing

I (Donis) can relate to Barbara's feeling of discombobulation at not having a deadline to face down. Since The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, my first mystery, was published in 2005, I've faithfully produced about one book a year, all of which were accepted and published – until my publisher changed at the almost same time the dreaded pandemic hit in 2020. AND I had just launched a new series set in Hollywood during the silent movie era of the 1920s.

The first Hollywood book, The Wrong Girl,  came out only weeks before the shutdown. The publication date for the second, Valentino Will Die, was pushed back six months as the pandemic ground on. I turned in the third, The Beasts of Hollywood, almost a year ago.

It has yet to be accepted. Or rejected. A few weeks ago, the acquisitions editor, whom I've known and admired for years, finally sent me a note asking forgiveness for being so slow and assuring me that though she hadn't read the MS yet, she'd get to it as soon as she could. Apparently the publishing industry is suffering its own bout of discombobulation.  

So here I am, in publishing limbo. 

I've done preliminary work on another Hollywood book, but I've gotten so many emails from readers who asked if I'd write another Alafair Tucker mystery (my original series) that I've spent most of the past contract-less year working on an eleventh Alafair.

It's hard. I'm using my work-in-progress to fictionalize a really problematic theme that has run through my life – racism. The new book is part of a long-running series set in Oklahoma, with established characters and situations. The series began in 1912 and moved forward year by year, and  I've now reached 1921, the year of the Tulsa Race Massacre. It's also the year that the KKK had a horrifying resurgence in Oklahoma. I can't pretend like nothing happened. When I write I always wonder if I can make the book as good as the one I have in my head, and this one is particularly scary. Can I do it justice?

I feel like if I can pull it off, the book could tell an important tale. But I'm doing this hard work basically on spec. When I finish it to my own satisfaction, I have no idea how I'll be able to get it published. After nearly twenty years, I feel like I'm back at square one.

I'm not complaining, really (Well, maybe a little) At least I have a publishing track record and I will get this story told one way or another.

The Perfect Word

 Donis here, at last. I missed my last Thursday slot because I've been having lots of trouble with my eyes, but today is a pretty good day, so I'm writing while the writing is good. 

First of all, I extend my dearest sympathy to those of you who live in blizzard-land. I hesitate to point out that the temperature here in the Phoenix area has been around 70ºF for the past few weeks lest you think I'm gloating, but remember that this is our reward for living through our Southern Arizona summers. Check back with me in July. You can gloat then.

I've been enjoying my blogmates' entries on titles. Titles are important. You want to convey something of the spirit of the story, catch the reader’s eye, intrigue her enough that she wants to read that book. For the first book in my Alafair Tucker series, I went through several titles before I landed on The Old Buzzard Had It Coming. Since the book takes place in Oklahoma in the dead of the winter of 1912, I first tried to find a title with the word “cold” in it, as in “cold blooded murder”. For a long time, the working title was Blood Run Cold, but in the end, I decided that wasn’t ethnic enough, and changed it to He Had It Coming, since the murder victim is quite a horrible person. Then, one day my mother described a man who lived in her apartment complex as an “old buzzard”. Aha!

That title has served me well, even if early on, my late sister-in-law Dolores couldn’t quite remember how the title went and called it The Old Coot Deserved What He Got, which is pretty good, too. In fact, we considered an entire series with similar titles: The Miserable Son-of-a-Gun Got What Was Coming to Him, The Skunk Couldn’t Have Died Soon Enough, and the like.

I decided to go for something short for the second book, and agonized for a long time before my husband actually dreamed the title Hornswoggled. Since that book, I’ve more or less given up on short titles. The production manager at my press used to tease me for using such long titles that she couldn’t fit them on the spine. But what can you do? 

I sometimes have a title before I have a story in mind. That’s what happened with my sixth book, The Wrong Hill To Die On. The idea for that title was given me by an Illinois mystery author, Denisa Hanania. People are always giving me ideas for book titles. Seems every person living has heard her grandmother reel off a folksy saying that would fit right into the world of my early 20th Century Oklahoma family.

Most of the time I don’t have a title in mind. I just wait until one of the characters says something that sums it all up in one eye-catching phrase. Often for me, good title is like pornography. I can’t really define it, but I know it when I see it. That’s what happened with Hell With the Lid Blown Off. One of the characters was surveying the devastation following a tornado that rolled over Muskogee County Oklahoma. It looked like hell with the lid blown off, says he. 

I'm working on a new Alafair manuscript right now. I have no title in mind. I've always been lucky enough to choose my own titles - at least until my second series, the Adventures of Bianca Dangereuse, was acquired by a different publisher. They chose the title for first book in the series, The Wrong Girl, which was also something one of the characters said (One of these days, you're going to pick the wrong girl).

It made sense, but to my ear, it just didn't have quite the cachet...

They let me pick my own title for book two, Valentino Will Die, since it's about, what else, the death of Rudolph Valentino. I like that better. The third book, which has yet to be picked up, is called The Beasts of Hollywood. I feel like I'm hitting my stride.

And last but not least, my guest on my own website for this month's Tell Me Your Story is the fabulous Mary Miley, who tells us how she got into the historical mystery business. If you missed her guest entry here at Type M, you missed a treat. Check it out here.

The Wrong Girl, The Right Title

I (Donis) have been enjoying our recent posts about elegant variations, but today I want to throw back to last Thursday's entry concerning titles, by John. And the main reason I want to do that is because my publisher recently informed me that they have changed the title of my upcoming novel. They ran the new title by me, of course, and asked if I had objections. I didn't, even thought this is the first time in eleven books that I've had a publisher change the title I put on the manuscript. The upcoming book, which will be out in November, is the first of a new series for me, and I had a lot of trouble coming up with a title in the first place. I love the series title, The Adventures of Bianca Dangereuse, and fortunately that is not changing. The new series is structured like the episodes in an old silent movie serial, and like those movies, I had chosen a book title that was overblown and overdramatic. That's what the publisher thought, too. Overblown and overdramatic.* So they suggested that the book be called The Wrong Girl, because this is what one of the characters says to a man who seduces and kidnaps young women.

"One of these days, you're going to choose the wrong girl."

And does he ever.

I like their thinking, too. Whenever I write an Alafair Tucker mystery, I spend many weeks trying out prospective titles on friends and relatives, judging titleworthiness by the look in their eyes. For most of my past endeavors, I have chosen a title early on in the writing process, and then changed it when the book was finished. For the Alafair series, all the titles are taken from something that one of the book's characters says in the course of the story:

"I think The Old Buzzard Had It Coming"
"He was standing on The Drop Edge of Yonder"
"It looked like Hell With the Lid Blown Off"
"Here's your Forty Dead Men, McBride. Don't waste them, 'cause the man you miss may be the one who kills you."

 And so on... While I'm writing, I'm always waiting for someone in the novel to tell me what to call it.

I love reading about how the titles for my favorite books come about. Titles are important. You want to convey something of the spirit of the story, catch the reader’s eye, intrigue her enough that she wants to read that book. When friends and family hear that a new book is underway, one of the first questions I get is, "What's the title?"

How about you, dear reader? Does a fabulous title make you want to buy a book? I’m trying to think of books that I actually wanted to read because of the title. The only one that comes immediately to mind was Bad Luck and Trouble, by Lee Child. Tom Wolfe titles catch my eye, but which of his books have I actually read? Did I read Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers? No, I did not. I read The Right Stuff, Hooking Up, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. (Okay, I also read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but I was young and it was the ‘60s.)

Commonly authors don't get the final say on what the title of their novel will be. Publishers have the idea that they know what will sell a lot better than some introverted, socially inept author does. Maybe they do. Being introverted and socially inept, I wouldn't know. This time, I think they made a good business decision.
________
*The old title: Lust for Vengeance. What do you think?

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.

She Needs a Dog

My work in progress is beginning to take shape. This is a relief, because the WIP is the first book in what may become a new series for me. Over the past 13 years, I have written ten books in the Alafair Tucker series, which is set in the 1910s and features a woman with ten children. The first book, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, took place in 1912 and the most recent, Forty Dead Men, took place in 1919 and dealt with the aftermath of World War I. I’ve reached 1920. Most of the children are grown by now, and for some time I’ve been wondering about how their adult lives turned out.

So...in order to satisfy my own curiosity and shake things up a bit, I decided to follow one of the children into the Roaring Twenties and see what became of her. As it turns out, she left Oklahoma altogether and had a really exciting life.

A new series set in a new location and era means lots of research, and it also means that I have to get to know a whole bunch of new characters. As my blogmates have been so ably discussing over the past week, a good plot is an excellent thing, but memorable characters are the most important thing if you want your readers to keep coming back for more.

When I started out on the new book, I had what I though was a complete cast of characters ready to go, but as I write, new characters keep suggesting themselves. It’s interesting to see how every new character’s very presence affects the tale, just as the insertion of a real person into a group changes its entire chemistry and dynamic. Adding a new character into a book that is well underway gives me a jolt of writing energy. It’s amazing how little it takes to make big changes in the way a story unfolds.

This is not the first time added a new character in the middle of the process. Whenever I have done such a thing, it has been as though the character was on the sidelines the whole time, like a relief quarterback, just waiting to jump into the game and throw the winning pass. Usually it’s a person, but sometimes it’s an animal. I was busily typing along on the MS when it struck me like lighting that my heroine needs a dog, and that dog is going do something that saves the day. In my fourth book, The Sky Took Him, I added Ike the cat after the entire story was written. I had to go back and sprinkle Ike’s presence through the novel and it was a lot of trouble. And yet, I don’t know he did it, but that cat tied the action together with a big red bow. He was a magic character. I can only hope that my new guy has the same juju.

When you create new characters, either for a series or a stand-alone, you may feel a bit like God, making people behave like this or that and causing all sorts of unpleasant things to happen to them.  But no matter how much you think you’re in control, eventually some miracle happens and the characters develop wills of their own and don't listen to you any more.  I think this is not an uncommon experience for writers.  After a while, you can't force characters to respond to the action in the way you want them to any more than you could force a real person to do what you want.  When this happens, you know you've succeeded.  If your character behaves like a living person, then your readers are going to care about her like they would a living person.

How We Learn to Love Books

Rick and Aline both wrote wonderful entries this week about being read to as a child. I'm sure every book-lover has a similar story. When your parents read to you when you're little, you learn to associate the experience with being loved and safe. I, of course, have stories of my own. Rick's story in particular brought to mind the Golden Book of poems and riddles my parents bought for me when I was little more than a toddler.

I had a lot of books when I was a kid. My parents bought them for me long before I could read, for which bless you, parents. This little Golden Book was one of my favorites, and I can still recite parts of it to this day. For instance: “What did the old woman say when she looked down the rain barrel?” Answer: OICURMT (It took me years to figure out what Oicurmt meant). But the poem I loved the most was You Are Old, Father William, by Lewis Carroll. I enjoyed it enough to memorize when I was a little girl. I still remember it, and as the years pass, it means more to me now than it ever did.

My parents took turns reading to me every night, and I never, ever let them weasel out of it for any silly reason like floods or fires or deathly illnesses. They read the same books to me so many times that I knew them by heart. I still remember very clearly an incident that occurred when I was about four and spending the night with my grandmother. I had brought my pre-sleep book with me, but my grandmother--a notoriously impatient woman--kept trying to skip lines. Needless to say this was not going to pass unchallenged. My grandmother also had a somewhat perverse sense of humor, so once she realized that she wasn't going to get away with it, she made a game of leaving out words and changing sentences to see if I'd catch her. I always did. This may have amused my grandmother, but it didn't contribute to a peaceful night's sleep for her little fusspot of a grandchild.

The joy of a good story well told turns a child into a book-loving adult. I spent much of my teenaged years and young adulthood with my nose in a book. So much so that my mother was a bit concerned about the fact that I'd rather read than play or hang around with friends. It was something of a joke in my family that if I was reading, I couldn't hear the phone ring or knocking at the door or gunshots and screaming.

A good book has gotten me through many a tough situation. A well written story teaches a child about compassion, perseverance, bravery, and lets him walk in another's shoes in a way a thousand lectures can't do. I can't imagine a better gift a parent can give her child.

p.s. On another note, don't forget that my first Alafair Tucker Mystery, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, is being offered as a free download at Amazon and iTunes through the month of January. Don't miss your chance!

The Return of the Raven Mocker; An Alafair Tucker Mystery for 2017

Happy New Year to all and Happy Birthday to me. Yes, today (December 29) is my birthday. It's the end of another decade for me, and the beginning of a year that I could face with some trepidation if I allow myself to do so. But let's be merry where we can! I'm celebrating 2017 by announcing the release of my ninth Alafair Tucker Mystery, The Return of the Raven Mocker, as hardback, paper, and ebook, on January 3.

Raven Mocker is a Cherokee legend, an evil spirit who takes the form of a raven and takes wing at night to possess the bodies of the sick and elderly and torment them until they die. When the Raven Mocker returns to little Boynton, Oklahoma, in the fall of 1918, he brings with him the great influenza pandemic that claimed fifty million lives all over the world. World War I is still raging in Europe, but the women of Boynton are fighting their own war as the epidemic sweeps through like wildfire. What a perfect time to commit murder. Who’s going to notice?

People are dying in droves, most of the doctors are gone to the war, and the nurses are all falling ill themselves. Alafair and her husband Shaw quarantine their younger children on the farm and Alafair moves into town to care for her stricken daughter Alice and son-in-law Walter.

No one has the time or inclination to wonder about the the circumstance when Alice's neighbor Nola and her son Lewis die, but Alafair suspects that these particular deaths were unnatural. The epidemic is so overwhelming that it is many days before the only doctor left in town can confirm Alafair’s suspicions. The only witness, twelve-year-old Dorothy Thomason, is so traumatized that she is rendered mute. Were Nola and her son really murdered, and if so, why?

My publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, is featuring the entire Alafair Tucker series, including the first, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, which is being reissued with a new cover. I wrote a new forward for it, explaining  how I got the idea for a series set in my native Oklahoma, and how Alafair herself came to be.

In fact, iTunes is offering The Old Buzzard Had It Coming as a FREE download,. The Press aims to promote my series through BookBub, but the promotion won't work as intended unless Amazon also lowers their price for the electronic version of Buzzard to zero as well. They won't lower their price unless enough readers notify them that another outlet (iTunes) is offering the book for free. So allow me intrude upon you holiday season to ask you to help me persuade Amazon to offer Buzzard as free ebook. Here's how:

Please go to the Amazon page for the ebook version of The Old Buzzard Had It Coming by clicking here.

Scroll down to the bottom of the Product Details section where it says: "Would you like to give feedback on images or tell us about a lower price?"

Choose "tell us about a lower price" which will bring up a dialog asking to choose Store or Website.

Click on Website and enter the URL for the iTunes page:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-old-buzzard-had-it-coming/id1131439110?mt=11&uo=4&at=11lSh9

and and $0.00 for the price AND for shipping cost and then Submit Feedback.

That’s all there is to it. If enough people participate, Amazon will drop the price to zero. And if you make it over to Amazon (or iTunes) and the price is already zero, you can download your very own e-copy of The Old Buzzard Had It Coming for nothing.

On top of everything, I'm offering a giveaway of The Return of the Raven Mocker, and you can read the first chapter of it and all of my other books at my website, www.doniscasey.com.

Thanks for all your support over the years, Dear Reader, and may 2017 be a wonderful year for you and yours.

So How I Choose a Title and Why I Choose a Book to Read

This week’s discussion at Type M is all about what makes a reader pick up a book. Here is what appeals to me: First, if I like a particular author, I will generally read anything s/he puts out. Second, I am swayed by the recommendations of people whose taste I admire. Third, if I am not as familiar with the author, the blurb is what persuades me to give the book a try. Fourth, a good title will entice me to pick up a book and read the blurbs. The cover may make me look, but I am not particularly influenced, unless the cover is really ugly or bloody, in which case I am inclined NOT to read the book.

I’ve written before about the importance of choosing a good title and how hard I work at it. My publisher lets me choose my titles, and thus far has not changed any that I have picked. My first Alafair book was entitled The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, because I wanted something that was eye-catching and conveyed a sense of ethnicity. I was a little surprised that the publisher kept it, but that title has served me well over the years. The only problem with it is that now I feel like I have to come up with something equally good every time. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I succeed less.

And on that note, look what I received in the mail today. These are the ARCs, or what used to be known as the “galley proofs” of my ninth Alafair Tucker Mystery, The Return of the Raven Mocker, which is due to hit the shelves in January 2017. It is somewhat shorter than most of my Alafair books—less than 300 pages. As I hold it in my hand, it feels slight, which is odd considering how hard I worked on it and how long it took me to finish. Raven Mocker reminds me of the first book I wrote in this series, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, and not just because both of them have birds in the title. The stories are not alike at all, but the mood and feeling seem alike to me. Alafair is much more concerned with the welfare of her children than she is with finding justice. Though of course, justice does get found.

The title is taken from the Cherokee legend of Raven Mocker, an evil witch/wizard who takes the form of a raven at night and flies about looking for the old and the sick to torment and suck the life out of them. I chose that because the novel is set during the influenza pandemic of 1918, an epidemic so virulent that experts believe close to fifty million people worldwide died from it.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting an excerpt on my website, as well as reviews when they start coming in.

So…on another topic entirely—my husband and I were watching the news a few weeks ago when out of the blue he said, “Have you noticed that these days everyone begins their sentences with the word ‘so’?”

I had not noticed that. But since he pointed it out, I have become hyper-aware that it is true. I challenge you, Dear Reader, to listen to a radio or television interview and count the number of “so”s. How this language hiccup came about I do not know, but it does remind me that when I was growing up in the wilds of Oklahoma, it was very common for the folks to begin every sentence with “well…” I have considered making a drinking game out of the “so” habit, but I’m afraid that if I took a shot of  something every time someone on t.v. or elsewhere began a sentence with “so”, I’d end up passed out on the floor.

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

_______________

*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!

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.