Writing is writing

I’ve been doing a lot of writing over the past week. Unfortunately, it’s not been for the novella I have due on June 1st nor for my new full-length novel. It’s copywriting for an important client and it’s got a much earlier due date, so write I must!

However, last night, completely fried after a work day in the salt mines that didn’t end until after nine (starting at 8 a.m., too!), I still had a spark of creative energy left, so I opened up the novella file and did some work.

And a curious thing happened.

Before continuing, I have a small confession to make. You see, for some reason, the first draft of nearly everything I’ve ever written contains what my good friend, editor Cheryl Freedman, calls “weasel words”. What she means by that term is that the way my characters speak and the way I describe things prevaricates. I don’t come right out and confidently state things. The evidence of this going on is when I use phrases like “it seemed”, “I think”, “it appeared as if” and too many others to list here. Occasionally, some of my weasel words are there for a very good reason, but more often than not, it’s an indicator that I’m not completely sure of what I’m trying to say. That may be because I haven’t completely worked something out in my story, or I’m not clear about who the character is, but the end result is that my writing comes across as if I’m waffling — which I guess I am. (See? I just weaseled in that last sentence.) Cheryl, a dear and generous thing for sure, always reads my mss as soon as I think I’m done. I phrase it that way because she always finds that I’m not as done as I believe I am. Her experienced eye picks up wherever I’m (still) “weaseling” and calls me on it. While it often frustrates me, I am certainly more than grateful for her eagle eye.

So there’s the back story.

Now the thing with advertising copy is that you always want to project confidence and knowledge in equal proportions. Readers must feel that you know what you’re talking about or you’ll lose them (and their money). You also can’t use a lot of words. Every single one has to have impact but appear artless at the same time. You can never reveal the “man behind the curtain” and make people feel as if they’re being manipulated — even though they are.

Last night, in bed with my journal on my lap, I began working on a new chapter. Because my publisher requires a written chapter summary beforehand, I knew what I needed to say. After glancing at the previous chapter written nearly a week earlier, I started in. An hour and a bit later, I was finished. (They’re short chapters in this format.) Before closing up for the night, I read through it, and I was astounded to see not one example of weaseling, even though I had only the barest of ideas about what I wanted to say. Every word of dialogue projected confidence on the part of each character which was especially surprising because one of them just “wandered” into the chapter unexpectedly — usually a place where weaseling is rampant.

Did I suddenly learn how to avoid my perennial problem? I don’t think so. I have to put it down to a week of hard work writing ad copy (and believe me that is very hard work).

Now I’m not suggesting every novelist take up writing advertising copy, but I am beginning to see the value of staring out the window or at the ceiling (or whatever you do when you’re concentrating) and working things out in greater detail before you pick up your writing implement or lay a finger on your computer keyboard. In other words, more reflection is needed. Normally, I just jump in and throw words around with abandon until I run out of gas, at which time I read through what I’ve created so haphazardly and am appalled at the sloppiness — even though the basic ideas are good.

You’re probably laughing at my coming to this conclusion at such a late date, but that’s the way these things work. The best way to learn is by working things out yourself — at least, that’s the best way for me.

The other thing that struck me was, “Dear Lord! You’re becoming one of those writers who outlines before writing!” That’s something I never thought I would espouse, but I seem to be heading down that path. I’m currently comforting myself by saying that I won’t actually write my thoughts down, but even if I only do them in my head, it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?

It also appears that you can teach an old dog new tricks…

Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It

I am in the terrible position of having to get a new computer. My PC is ten years old, having far outlasted all the fancy laptops and i-Pads my technology-addicted family have bought in between.

It’s been kept going by Brian, who comes in when something goes wrong, shakes his head and says that what I need is a new hard-drive, but then fixes it so that it works all right for a while and I put off having to face the dread of losing really important stuff in the transfer – like that email in the Family folder that my daughter sent me about a visit they made seven years ago and all the similar emails lingering in all the other folders too.

My more technically-minded husband has been helping to nurse it along but it has been a severe strain. I realised the time had come for drastic action when I found him standing looking blankly at a shelf in the supermarket. ‘I think I’ve caught a virus from your computer,’ he said. ‘My brain is Not Responding.’

So even I have realised that The Time Has Come and I have to get rid of it before it has whatever PCs have when they take a fatal seizure and die and all my files die with it.

Under the direction of my long-suffering and more technically-minded husband I have been saving all my files and email folders to a USP stick while he has been putting everything into a Drop Box so we’ve done a sort of belt-and-braces job. The new hard drive is sitting on the floor, waiting for Brian to come and install Word 8.1 - and why, pray, do computers not come with the programmes installed? I don’t expect to have to pay extra and spend hours on making my new washing-machine ready to wash clothes. But I digress.

I have a bad habit of anthropomorphising the machines that serve me and feeling guilty when their natural life is at an end: my loyal Kenwood mixer - forty years of glorious service, now old and tired and consigned to landfill; Henry, our vacuum cleaner, with the cheerful face on his cylinder, superseded by a new and - shh! more effective model.

I feel no such affection and guilt for my PC. We have squabbled constantly over the years, when it performed unprompted some unhelpful and spiteful act that caused no end of trouble and angst. Loyalty had no part in our long relationship.

But having grown used over the years to its little quirks, I’ll now have to adapt to new systems and layouts. I have the dreadful feeling that it will all have become much cleverer and more sophisticated. The trouble is, I haven’t. Oh dear.

Weekend Guest Poster: K.A. Laity

I'm delighted to welcome K.A. Laity, a fellow member of the Upper Hudson (Mavens of Mayhem) chapter of Sisters in Crime as our welcome guest.

K. A. Laity is the award-winning author of White Rabbit, A Cut-Throat Business, Lush Situation, Owl Stretching, Unquiet Dreams, À la Mort Subite, The Claddagh Icon, Chastity Flame, Pelzmantel and Other Medieval Tales of Magic and Unikirja, as well as editor of Weird Noir, Noir Carnival and Drag Noir. Her bibliography is chock full of short stories, humor pieces, plays and essays, both scholarly and popular. She spent the 2011-2012 academic year in Galway, Ireland where she was a Fulbright Fellow in digital humanities at NUIG. Dr. Laity teaches medieval literature, film, gender studies, New Media and popular culture at the College of Saint Rose. She divides her time between upstate New York and Dundee.

Simplify

by K. A. Laity

I used to have Thoreau’s mantra posted on the wall of my Cambridge apartment. I had illusions that somehow my huge piles of books and papers would magically disappear or tidy or somehow look less cluttered. Living in three countries in the last three years, I have managed to unload a good deal of belongings, but I’m a writer. There’s only so many books you can manage to pry from your hands.

I’ve been more successful in trying to employ it in my writing. The reminders keep coming at me lately. The other day Bish’s Beat posted a reflection on a conversation with a best selling writer who went on about simplifying everything: “Cut exposition to an absolute minimum.” Maybe you don’t want to write a bestseller, but as my pal Saranna DeWylde posted, classic authors also tend to write more simply than you think.

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” ― Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

I’m in the midst of teaching a noir fiction course and re-reading Hammett, Chandler, Sanxay-Holding and Hughes has reminded me how lean their prose is. As usual I teach to learn and I am excited by the re-discovery of why I love these books so much. There are so few wasted words. So much is left to the reader to fill in.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York: they assume you know the cities or will take their word for it about how they are. Specific locations we need to know practical things about get just the important details: Sam Spade’s apartment, the Sternwood family estate, the Holley’s boathouse. We know Effie Perine’s boyish face—and we know that no romance will happen between her and Sam because of that description. She’s able and attractive, but no femme fatale. Carmen Sternwood doesn’t just suck her thumb, her thumb is weirdly formed, another finger, so the image becomes an indelible part of her character and her wrongness. And after our introduction to Dix Steele imagining himself flying in the midst of the fog then following the girl even though he “didn’t intend” to do so, there are no more direct words than “She was afraid.” You learn all you need to know about him from his pleasure at that knowledge.

“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.” ― George Sand

I’m changing my own writing. In the midst of a new novel, I am taking the unusual step of backtracking. I like to burn through a first draft without looking back and then edit afterward. But I feel bloat creeping in and I want to snuff it out at the start and go on the same way. It’s the same way with teaching. You can see on their faces when you lose them. I stop and go back, try other words, find out where we parted company. You can do that in a class room. In a novel, a reader’s patience only lasts so long. As a reader, I’m rather ruthless when it comes to giving up on a book. There are so many books to read after all.

So I cut the words that are unnecessary. I cut the passages where my joy in describing a scene goes beyond what the reader needs to know into my pleasure at throwing words on the page. I cut to the best words, the specific ones, because the right word is more indelible than a whole paragraph of prose. I cut until it bleeds.

The Built-in Topic

Everyone's mystery is about some particular setting or topic that can be exploited for talks. That little something in the background is much more likely to hold a readers' attention than trying to persuade people to buy your mystery book. Why is your book different from everyone else's book?

I've always known this, but with the advent of social media, I'm just now beginning to realize how much can be done. Recently I received a request to speak at Nicodemus, Kansas on the topic of my new history book. The book is about 19th century Kansas African American politicians. There were hints that I might receive a stipend. We'll see. Considering the state's draconian budget cuts, I'm not counting on it.

To me, it was terrific to have to an unsolicited invitation to speak to people on a topic that they are interested in. I accepted happily with the usual warning, however, that I don't do weather. Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas are famous for savage last minute storms and I often have to cancel plans.

Because the book won't be out until 2016, I'll take my mysteries along and do a little mini-pitch for the Lottie Albright series. I'll talk about the differences between fiction and non-fiction writing.

Between now and time University of Oklahoma Press's catalog comes out, I need to take the time to sit down and think.

For some reason planning marketing comes hard for me. It's not that I can't think. It's just that I don't like to. Oddly enough I love to solve problems. That helps me a lot with my wretched computer wrecks. An ability to solve problems would seem to carry over to futuristic planning, but it doesn't.

To stay afloat in this noisy overcrowded word of mystery writing, we simply have to learn to plan campaigns. Oddly enough, there has been very little written on this subject.

Care to share how you do it. Do you simply respond to whatever falls in your lap? Or plan ahead.?

Eating Dostoyevsky

Shoveling gives me time to think. And unlike my Type M colleagues who are smart enough to live in Arizona, I've had plenty of time to think lately – western Massachusetts was pounded with two feet of snow last week and got a dusting of eighteen inches Monday.

One thing I've been musing of late has been Crime and Punishment, which I've read three times since June. (Yes, I'm teaching it.) If I read it in high school, I don't remember doing so. And if I read it in college, I was too busy majoring in the college newspaper, working evenings at the local daily paper, and chasing pucks and members of the opposite sex to remember it. But now, I'm devouring the novel.

The late poet Mark Strand understood this. In his wonderful ode "Eating Poetry," he describes the sensation:
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

Maybe we all have that book we've been waiting to devour, written by that author we've been waiting to meet, waiting fall in love with. These works speak to us for many reasons, some unknown. However, as a writer of crime novels and a fan of any work in any genre that deals with the individual struggling with internal conflict and delves into utilitarian themes, questions of religion and moral and societal corruption – Crime and Punishment doesn't just speak to me; it shouts.

The book opens with our protagonist (anti hero) Raskolnikov leaving his terrible dwelling to walk to a pawnbroker – a terrible, nasty woman – whom he plans to murder in the coming days. His rationale: she won't live long, and he (and others) can benefit from the money. He even meets a police officer along the way who, theoretically, agrees with his thinking, but reminds him of the absurdity of the world, which, in a society dominated by a czar, has left Raskolnikov penniless and his sister facing what amounts to prostitution to save the family. In my Crime Literature course, we speak often about issues like socio-economics and class in the criminal justice system. Dostoyevsky was only a couple hundred years ahead of me. The universality of this crime novel? Anyone who reads the book and followed recent events in Ferguson, MO, will make the connection.

Interestingly, I figured I was the lone crime writer on planet earth to not have read Crime and Punishment. Yet I've come to realize many of my friends have not (or, like me, might have but not for many, many years). I'd urge members of the Type M community, writers and readers alike, to put a copy on your nightstand. And, once finished, tell me what you think.

The End of Cursive?

Every time I hear about another school system deciding to remove cursive writing from their curriculum, I get a little sadder. Learning cursive used to be a rite of passage in grade school along with learning how to tie one’s shoes. One of those skills that comes in handy throughout your life.

Apparently, this isn’t just an issue here in the U.S. Our neighbors to the north have also been removing cursive from the curriculum for a while now. http://www.todaysparent.com/family/education/cursive-writing-in-schools/

(Interesting side note: according to the above article, the form of cursive taught in the U.S. and Canada is particular to North America. Developed by a Canadian, H.B. MacLean, the MacLean Method was taught widely throughout both countries. Looking at the letters for the MacLean method, I'm not totally convinced it's what I learned. My handwriting certainly doesn't look as fancy as those letters. But, still, it's an interesting side note.)

I’m definitely in the pro-cursive camp. I still believe this “ancient skill” has a use today. I’ve always felt that I remember things better if I write them down. Something about putting pen to paper ingrains whatever I’m writing into my brain that typing (sorry, keyboarding) does not. And there’s just something comforting about writing in a flowing script. (Don’t tell me I can print. It’s just not the same thing and so much more painful.) Plus I also find I write better drafts of a chapter for a WIP if I write the initial version in longhand.

There are a number of different studies that seem to support the idea that learning cursive is good for the brain. According to this article in Psychology Today, “scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development” and that cursive “activates areas of the brain that do not participate in keyboarding."

Then there are some articles here on the Campaign for Cursive blog that support the idea that students who take notes in longhand in class retain more than those who take notes using a keyboard.

But, what really got to me recently was this Huffington Post blog post that points out what people who can’t read cursive could be missing out on: a recipe written out in cursive by a grandparent, a letter written by an ancestor.

I know there are more pressing problems in the world, but this one still bugs me. What do you all think?

Standing on your own two feet

Regardless of what people think the life of an author is like, the truth is that it’s a lot of work, much of it not much fun. The reality of the current marketplace is that most of the grunt work is done by the author, not by the publisher, the media or publicists — unless said author hires the publicist him/herself.

Has it always been like this? I really don’t know, but I would expect things were more dependent on other people rather than the author.

But we now live in an age of “downsizing”, “rationalization”, “outsourcing”, all nicely manufactured terms for corporations telling us we must “do more with less” (except for the people at the top). Sure, we can complain, gnash our teeth, protest, but the truth is, there’s very little that can be done about it.

Publishers have long known that writers are desperate to see their books in print – even high-profile authors when it comes down to it. There is far more truth in in the words “Publish or Perish” than most would believe. Desperate people can be talked into a lot of things simply because they’re desperate. Some (certainly not all) publishers will take advantage of this. It’s not because they’re inherently nasty people working for nasty corporations. Most often, they’re moved by simple economics: there’s less money to go around and the money that’s available must be put to work in the places where it will have maximum return.

Being at the bottom of the food change in publishing (as they always have been), writers who then become authors upon publication of their deathless prose (my designation of the difference between these two jobs), will take on a lot of the promotional work simply because they want to get ahead. They will pay for publicists, arrange their own book events, send out press releases, design publicity materials. When the publisher is also doing some of this work, too, you can get a lot of bang for your buck, but far too often, authors are out on their own.

For me, sure, I don’t like having to do it, truth be told. I have obligations beyond my writing that must be attended to – like making enough money so I and my family can survive, and there are only so many hours in the day. But I also love writing. I want to share my work with as wide an audience as I can reach. If I get really lucky, I might even make enough money so that my writing habit would actually generate enough income to support us – and allow me to write full-time. There are very few authors who don’t wish for this, though only a lucky few achieve this lofty goal. Those are usually the ones who embrace the paradigm of the author being prepared to do anything and work hard at it in order to maximize their chances for grabbing the brass ring.

Make no mistake: success in publishing has as much to do with luck as skill. You have to be in the right place at the right time. However, if you don’t maximize your chances, you’ll likely remain on the fringes. Let me put it this way: you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

So the next time you ask yourself, “Why, oh why, am I having to do all this?” answer yourself this way. Look in the mirror and say, “You brought this situation on yourself. You wanted to be published, you want to be successful at it. So dig in and get to work!” For me, being in control of these sorts of things means that I don’t have to rely on other people to do it. Sure, that would be nice and all, but how much of the needed work would get done promptly, and more importantly, correctly?

Faced with that reality, I’ll do it myself, thank you!

Release day for By Book or By Crook

By Vicki Delany

Hi, from an airport somewhere.

I am on my way to Phoenix right now, and tomorrow is release day for the first book in my cozy series from Penguin/Obsidian. The book is titled By Book or By Crook, and is the first in the Lighthouse Library series.

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m appearing at the Cave Creek Library with TWO New York Times bestselling cozy writers, Kate Carlisle and Jenn McKinley.  I am really honored to have been included!

And then in the evening we're launching the book along with Kate’s newest in the Fixer-Upper Series, This Old Homicide at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale.

Kate and I will be doing other events around Phoenix in the next couple of days, and I will be travelling to North Carolina and Florida later in February, and to Oregon, Michigan and Pennsylvania in March.

For those closer to home, the Canadian launch of By Book or By Crook will be at the Picton Library, Tuesday Feb. 10th at 7:00. Snow date is the 12th.  (I note that we weren’t given a snow date in Scottsdale.)

My detailed list of events can be found at www.vickidelany.blogspot.com. 

By Book or By Crook got a starred review from Library Journal which said:

“This charming, entertaining, and smart series launch by Gates ... features an unusual (and real) setting and colorful cast of characters that set it apart from other bookish cozies.”

And it was a staff pick at the Sleuth of Baker Street bookstore in Toronto:

“Fun to read, interesting insights on Jane Austen, great setting, it makes me want to visit Bodie Island and I was jealous that Lucy got to live in the lighthouse as part of her job.” 

If you’re near any of those locations, I’d love to say hi.

Weekend Guest Blogger: Reed Farrel Coleman

I'd like to introduce the Type M for Murder community to Reed Farrel Coleman, who is making his second appearance as a Sunday contributor. A lot has changed for Reed since we last heard for him, as you will soon read.

Reed is the New York Times Bestselling author of Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone series. He has published twenty-two novels and novellas as well as short stories, essays, and poetry. His a three-time recipient of the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the Year and a three-time Edgar nominee in three different categories. He has also won the Audie, Barry, Macavity, and Anthony Awards. Reed is a former Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America and an adjunct instructor of English at Hofstra University. He lives with his family on Long Island.

You can find him at: Reedcoleman.com
Facebook.com/ReedFColeman
Twitter: @ReedFColeman

Becoming Parker

By Reed Farrel Coleman

After his death in 2010, Robert B. Parker’s wife, Joan, went to Otto Penzler and asked him to create a project that would pay homage to Mr. Parker’s career. So was created In Pursuit of Spenser, a collection of essays on the subject of Robert B. Parker’s literary legacy. Contributors included Lawrence Block, Dennis Lehane, SJ Rozan, Ace Atkins, a host of other noted crime fiction authors, and yours truly. Otto asked if I would do a piece on Jesse Stone, Mr. Parker’s second most popular protagonist after Spenser. I gladly accepted the assignment. I wasn’t a voracious Parker reader. I had read some of his novels: a few Spensers and a couple of Jesse Stones. But given my assignment, I went back and read several more of each, adding a Western as well, and gained a greater appreciation for the characters and Mr. Parker’s writing talents. In the end, I wrote an essay entitled “Go East, Young Man: Robert B. Parker, Jesse Stone, and Spenser.” The well-received tribute was published in 2012, and that, as they say, was that … or so I thought.

Skip forward to early May of 2013. Two weeks earlier I had finished writing The Hollow Girl, the ninth and final installment of my Moe Prager Mystery series. The only contract I had was to write novellas for the Raven Books imprint of the Canadian house Orca Book Publishers. These are twenty thousand word books featuring little person detective Gulliver Dowd. They’re fun books to write and I love Gulliver, but they only take me about a month to do. What was I going to do with the other eleven months of the year? I suppose I thought I would write the books I always wanted to write, but never had time to do before: the YA/sci fi novel, the straight literary novel, the series of connected short stories. You know, all the ideas that had been kicking around in my head for years. I never got the chance.

At about 3 PM on the first Wednesday in that early May of 2013, I got a call from my agent. He kept asking me if I was sitting down. He asked me so many times that I threatened to strangle him if he didn’t just say what he had to say. “How would you like to be Robert B. Parker?” is what he asked. I knew he couldn’t be asking me to do the Spenser novels because my old pal Ace Atkins was doing a brilliant job with those. I had never written a Western, so he couldn’t be asking about Hitch and Cole. Sunny Randall? Maybe, but I was hoping he was asking about Jesse Stone. Bingo! It took me about a nanosecond to say yes. My life has taken quite a turn since then, including a stay at numbers 11 and number 17 on the New York Times Bestsellers list last September and October.

Here’s the funny part, though. I had assumed I got the gig because of my essay in In Pursuit of Spenser. It made sense, right? And that was the narrative I had created. Only when I had my first conversation with my editor and I mentioned the essay, she said, “Oh, that sounds interesting. I’ll have to read it.” So far becoming Robert B. Parker has been a lot like that, full of unexpected turns and surprises.

Okay, so now I had the gig. How was I going to handle moving forward with Mr. Parker’s Jesse Stone series? Would I try to do imitation of style in the way that *Michael Brandman had? Or should I take a different approach with the series? I am good at imitating voice, but after twenty-five years at this, I have also developed my own strong authorial voice. I sought the advice of several respected colleagues. The most influential of which was with my close pal Tom Schreck, the author of the popular Duffy Dombrowski series.

Tom is a huge Elvis Presley fan. What has Elvis to do with Jesse Stone? For me, everything. What Tom said to me was that he had seen the best Elvis impersonators in the world, but that even the greatest of them was limited by one unalterable factor: they could never do anything new. I can’t oversell the impact Tom’s words had on me. I realized that to do imitation would be a trap, that no matter how skilled I might be at it, the readers would always see my work as imitation. I further realized I hadn’t struggled for so long and sacrificed so much to do imitation. And had I been willing, imitation is hard to sustain. Easy to do for a page. Difficult to do for three hundred pages.

I took following approach: 1) Respect the protagonist and his supporting cast as they had previously been written. 2) Keep the form of the previous novels—third person, short chapters—intact. 3) Return to the darker, grittier tone of the early novels in the series. Even with this plan, I had to find my own way into the character(s). Although I had written several series and knew the mechanics of writing series novels, this wasn’t my series. Jesse wasn’t my character. How could I get into his head, his heart, and, most importantly, into his soul?

I came at Jesse as I have always come at characters, through their foibles, flaws, regrets. Jesse has three glaring problem areas: alcohol, his ex, his baseball injury. Of these, baseball my way into Jesse.  He regrets his drinking. Is torn over his divorce. But it is the baseball injury that haunts him. It was easy for me to put myself in his shoes. Easy to imagine being one phone call away from Dodger Stadium only to have his future turned upside down by a stupid, careless incident. Once I found that sweet spot, writing Jesse became a joyful challenge, one I hope to keep at for many years.

_________________
*A longtime friend and associate of Robert B. Parker, Michael Brandman wrote the three Jesse Stone novels immediately following Mr. Parker’s death. He was, and continues to be, a major force in the production of the acclaimed Jesse Stone TV movies.

The Name's the Thing

I've been thinking about names -- character names. My strategy for finding names when I first started to write was to go to the telephone book (the old days when we received a printed directory). Often, when I was feeling creative, I would compile a list of first names from several alphabets, and a list of last names from other alphabets and mix and match. Often this strategy didn't work. I would start to write and find the name didn't fit. That's why when I look back at the notebook that I kept in the early days of my writing career, I'm amazed to see how often names -- even those of my protagonist and other ensemble characters -- changed. My crime historian Lizzie Stuart was "Sarah" at one point. John Quinn, the cop in that series, was once "Nicholas". He is definitely not a "Nicholas" or a "Nick". And the former "Sarah Adams" has fared much better as "Lizabeth ('Lizzie') Stuart".

Luckily before I stuck my characters with names they would have to live with, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to think about who they were. Maybe that was why I struggled with names in the beginning -- because I hadn't figured out who my characters were or would be. Interesting how much easier the naming of the characters came with my second series. But by then -- fifteen years later -- I had learned to think first, then write. Yes, I'm a plotter, not a pantser. I need to plan, not plunge in. Or, rather, I'm a hybrid. I need to plan enough so that I have a rough road map. That now includes knowing enough about my main characters to give each a name that conjures up an image in their head. "Hannah McCabe," the police detective in my second series, is the daughter of "Angus". Once I knew her father's name, I knew much more about her and who she would be.

The Bad Seed (1956), a movie that I'm using for some academic research, provides a textbook example of how to get maximum mileage out of names. In a riveting performance, Eileen Heckart portrays the mother of a small boy who has drowned under mysterious circumstances at a school picnic. His penmanship medal -- pinned to his shirt by his mother -- is missing. Drunk and grieving, she comes to visit the mother of another student, wanting to know if the woman's daughter can tell her what happened. In a raw, painful scene, she compares her name -- "Hortense" -- to that of the other mother -- "Christine". Christine is a "gentle name," she says. "Hortense" is "fat" and awkward. She recites the limerick that her own schoolmates made up to tease her. The two characters are a study in contrast. As Hortense Daigle points out, Christine Penmark is wealthy (the daughter of a famous reporter and the wife of a colonel). Christine knows how to wear simple clothes. When Hortense buys simple clothes, they never fit right. The irony of this scene is that Christine, of the gentle name and good breeding, is about to discover that her birth mother was a serial killer and that her pig-tailed, curtseying daughter "Rhoda" has her grandmother's homicidal tendencies. Rhoda kills "LeRoy," the janitor and contemplates the murder of their landlady, "Monica Breedlove," a large, nurturing woman, whose married name once became a topic for discussion with her analyst. Monica is a Freudian.

Some of the lessons I've learned about naming characters:

1. Consider character's size, shape, and other physical characteristics
2. Consider the time period and region of the country in which character was born
3. Consider the naming traditions of the racial/ethnic/religious/cultural group into which character was born
4. Consider the name customs of the family into which the character was born
5. Consider the special circumstances that might have affected the choice of character's name
6. Consider decisions that might have been made by others after character was named
7. Consider decisions the character might have made about his/her given name

For example, do you want to give a character a name that "fits" or that will surprise others and/or make the character uncomfortable or resigned to the reaction. If you're naming a female character born in colonial New York into a Dutch family, it might be a good idea to do some research. Do you want to challenge stereotypes and assumptions your readers might have about certain names and the people who have them? Do you want to use the character's name to reveal something important about the character's history? What does the character prefer to be called and by whom?

The more I think about names, the more I realize how names choices by a writer can open up a story and invite the reader in. Names matter. Just ask "Sherlock Holmes" or "Jane Eyre".

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.

New beginnings

Barbara here. What an interesting, meandering examination of gender, identity, and character creation we have been having over here at Type M in the past couple of weeks. Several of us have also talked about changing hats and writing a new style, or creating a new series, and how that has enriched and invigorated their writing.

Writers face three challenges in continuing to write a long-running series. Firstly that they start to repeat themselves and fail to grow as writers, which most of us dread. Series allow us to stay with old friends we know so well that it takes little effort to get into their heads. It allows us to stay in comforting surroundings, using the neighbourhoods and background colour that has become as familiar as our own back yards. These two advantages are also the greatest pitfalls. Comfortable and familiar does not encourage risk, growth, or leaps of imagination.

The second challenge is that the series dictates the kind of story that can be told. My Inspector Green novels are police procedurals, and no matter what curves I throw at Green nor what detours my stories take, a police procedural has the particular flow of a police investigation. Moreover, all the stories have to take place in Ottawa (well, I cheat a little) because that is where Green has jurisdiction.

The third challenge derives from reader expectations. Both Rick and Vicki had alluded to this notion that a reader buys a book expecting a particular kind of story, and may rebel if they don't get it. The Green stories are gritty and realistic, but with a heavier emphasis on psychology than on blood and gore. If the next book turned out cozy (or serial-killer horror), I would likely get a slew of complaining emails. Writers, and their publishers, deviate from the winning "formula" at their peril.

But writers get all kinds of story ideas involving different heroes and places, and those stories can't be shoehorned into a police investigation in Ottawa. Writers of long-standing series sometimes solve this feeling of straitjacket by writing occasional standalones. Or by writing a second series, which is sufficiently different in tone, form, and setting that they can explore new vistas and experiment with new styles.

This is why the start of 2015 marks a new beginning for me as well, as I embark on a new three-book contract for a completely different series. There are ten books in the Green series, and it seemed like a solid place to take a break and explore something new. Green will be back, and I suspect I will be delighted to reconnect with him when I am ready. But for now, I am deep in the world of a very different character.

First off, my main character is a woman. I always thought it amusing that authors were often mistaken for their main character, or that the lines between author and character blurred, because Green was quite clearly distinct from me. Although as any author knows, not as distinct as one might think.

My new character is also not me. Amanda Doucette is a lot younger than me, the age of my daughters in fact, and is still searching for her place and her path, which allows her to have adventures and experiences which I get to share vicariously. Always fun for a writer. But she shares many of my passions and my values, and is in some ways who I might have been had I been young in today's world. I became a psychologist to help people; she became an international aid worker. She is resourceful and smart, determined and action-oriented, yet she struggles with what she has seen. She is a powerful and interesting person for me as a writer to spend time with, and I hope readers will think so too.

The setting of my new series is a wholly different concept as well. Each book will take place in a different setting across Canada, the first one in Newfoundland and the second in Quebec's Laurentian Mountains. I hope to explore wonderful locales across the country, taking myself on adventures and never growing tired of one place. Some of these adventures I will take in person, as on last fall's Newfoundland trip, but some of it will be within my own living room, as these photos attest.

Pidgeonholed!

Vicki’s post from last week, as well as others here on Type M recently, plus some side discussions I’ve had with people, have got me thinking how the crime fiction genre has gotten divided and subdivided and then subdivided again over the past several years, to the point where it’s getting quite, well, silly in many way. Publishers, readers and writers, we’re all guilty in this…crime.

Several years ago, I was describing a novel I was working on to an interested bookseller. “Oh, it’s a chase thriller then.” Huh? “There’s a category for this kind of story?” “Certainly. I have customers who will read nothing else.”

I’ve found out since that there are now very specific categories called things like “woman in peril”, “crafting mysteries”, “food mysteries”. Vicki has started a new series that I guess should be called a “library mystery”. All of this on top of the older categories made up of things like “thrillers”, “hardboiled”, “police procedural”, “amateur sleuth” and “cozy”, to name a few of the main ones.

But now it’s all sliced and diced and readers and publishers are demanding that your novel fall into a neat, little pigeonhole. From a marketing standpoint, I can see why publishers and booksellers might want this. It used to be that you only had to deal with whether you were writing standalones or a series. Bookstore owners usually knew what they were selling so they could tell you about a specific book. Even if you preferred a certain kind of story, you could often be persuaded by someone’s enthusiastic endorsement. If you’re purchasing a book and lack that personal description and recommendation, you might well hesitate to put done as much as forty dollars on a hardcover.

So for various reasons, we’ve become a lot more exclusive these days. It goes far beyond economics and marketing. As I’ve already mentioned in a recent post, many people won’t step outside the little box into which they’ve put themselves. I guess some of it has to do with comfort zones, and for sure, those are important. If a person is not up for a “blood and guts” storyline, it would be a shame to sell them a book that contains this sort of thing.

But these “product placement” boxes may also lead to comments like, “This story is unlike anything we’ve seen. We wouldn’t begin to know how to market it.” Now, unless the writing being commented thusly on is drop-dead, best-ever stuff, the person saying this might well be tempted to take a pass, be they agent, publisher, bookseller or book buyer. I know it happens. One of my novels was stillborn because my description of its plot led to a very similar comment being made by my then-agent. That’s a shame. I still believe it might have been a very interesting story, but I have little enough time to spend on writing to take chances with a dodgy plot line somebody might not be interested in buying into.

Often the best and most groundbreaking writing comes from something experimental or just plain different. These days, for some very good reasons — but also some very bad ones — experimental writing and storylines have a much harder go of it. We’re probably missing some exceptional writing and stories because of it.

Here’s your homework: come with an exact and specific category in which to place your work if you’re a writer. For readers, describe your ideal sort of book. You must be very, very specific so that you can go right to a bookshelf in a store to find it. For my current novel, Roses for a Diva, it would have to be something like “woman in peril, psychopathic chase, musical thriller”.

Sounds enticing doesn’t it? And I’ve also given away a large part of the plot, too!

Just Who is Your Main Character?

John raised some interesting points in his recent post when he talked about not using real people in books. I don't either, at least not consciously, though as I've written here in the past I did base a major character on someone I had met many years before, someone I'd completely forgotten about until something jogged my memory. I suspect there are more fragments of real people in my books than I realize.

The other thing he said that intrigued me was that he constantly has to tell people, 'No, I am not Jack Austin. No, my wife isn't Lisa Trembley.'

When you've written am extended series, people do tend to assume that you and your heroine are, to some extent, the same person. I was on a panel once where the chair decided that we were actually to come as our detectives, answering the questions in the way that he/she would. I commend it to you as an idea; it was great fun, but it was quite enlightening as well.

Working out how to present myself was a challenge as DI Marjory Fleming is nearly six feet tall, slim and athletic-looking, while I'm – well, not. But I did think to bring in half-a-dozen eggs for the chair from her flock of hens to, as WS Gilbert put it, lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

The most memorable question asked the country-loving farmer's wife 'Marjory' what did she think of her author? The reply was basically, couch potato, spends all her time with her nose in a book – often a cookery book,ugh – lives in a town of all dreadful places to live, has never been known to have a good yomp up a hill.

I wasn't allowed a reply, as me, but at the very least I would have expressed my contempt for her total lack of culinary skills since it has always seemed to me that if you can read, you can cook.& Oh, I forgot. She doesn't read either. No, I'm not Marjory Fleming.

But John raised the question of identity. Whose mind is it behind the character's thoughts, decisions, judgements, values – unless our own? In fact I suppose every character we create comes from some aspect of our own brain; where else could they come from? So are we the villain as well as the hero? Just a thought.

Toting your heater

Since we are Type M for Murder, and murder is homicide, and about half of all homicides in the U.S. are committed with firearms, I thought I'd share a few thoughts about guns. First of all, talking about guns is like talking about grammar and punctuation; there's always an exception to the rule!

A lot is written about guns for mystery writers but I don't see much information aside from the hardware; advice like revolvers don't have safeties, don't call a magazine a clip, etc,. Instead I decided to write briefly about the legalities of carrying a gun in the U.S.

What astonishes a lot of non-gun people is learning that in most places in the U.S. as a private citizen you don't need a permit (or license) to own or buy a gun. (Automatic weapons like machine guns do require a special federal license and a lot of red tape to purchase.) The laws vary from state-to-state and some municipalities have their own restrictions, and these laws change as the debate over gun rights ebbs and flows. Federal law says that if you buy from a dealer (such as a gun shop, sporting goods store, Walmart), you have to fill out a form attesting that you have no record of violent felonies, never been convicted of certain drug crimes, not have any protective orders against you, not have mental health restrictions, etc., Then you pay ten bucks and the dealer runs your name through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The law doesn't restrict sales or transfers between private individuals in the same state, however, in some states all gun transfers require a background check. Also, federal law prohibits the sale of guns across state lines unless it goes through a dealer. And how does a gun cross state lines to get from dealer to dealer? Through the US Mail.

Once you have a gun, carrying it is another matter. In Colorado you are allowed (assuming you are entitled to possess the gun) without a permit to carry a loaded pistol in your car or truck for protection of life and property. The caveat is that if you get into trouble and the police find that gun, they're very likely going to slam the cuffs on you for a stay at the iron-bar hotel. You are prohibited from carrying a loaded shotgun or rifle in your conveyance and the ammunition must be stored separately. You can get a concealed carry permit which does allow you to carry a loaded handgun. The requirements (such as training) for that permit vary from state-to-state. You have "Shall-issue" which means that if you're entitled to own a pistol, then you are issued the permit. "May-issue" is a lot more restrictive and you have to prove why you need the permit. In some states, like New York or Hawaii, getting a "may-issue" permit is almost impossible. "No-issue" means what it says, and we're talking Guam and Puerto Rico. And then you have other restrictions such as no firearms allowed in places that serve alcohol, on public school grounds, on federal property, that sell marijuana, etc., However, many colleges do allow concealed carry on their campuses. Some states have reciprocity agreements that recognize a permit from another state, but that requires that you do your homework. Remember, concealed carry means "concealed" and if you flash your piece without good cause, then you've violated the conditions of that right to carry. An example would be that if you have a concealed-carry permitted pistol, get into an argument with someone and to prove your point, you show your gun...then WHOA! You could be accused of menacing with a deadly weapon. And if you do get a concealed carry permit you're advised to buy legal insurance because should you ever have to use the gun, you can lawyer up and protect yourself from over-zealous prosecutors and getting sued by your attacker!

"Open carry" is another patchwork of laws. Basically open carry allows you to carry your gun in public. In most places that means unloaded unless you're in the act of hunting and have the appropriate hunting permit. Some states allow the open carry of handguns and others do not. Interestingly, a lot of businesses that sell guns, such as sporting goods stores and gun shops, do not allow open carry. If you bring a gun onto the premises, it had better be in a case, often with a trigger lock, and definitely not loaded.

For law enforcement the rules are different. If a cop or agent is authorized a firearm, then he or she can carry concealed without a permit. And Congress passed the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act which means that such a law enforcement officer or retired law enforcement officer can carry a firearm in any jurisdiction in the U.S. But there are exceptions.

Whew. So many rules. Fortunately with the mighty Internet, you can type in "gun laws" and the name of wherever you live or want to do research and find plenty of information. Just don't shoot yourself.

Clearing Time for Writing

Last summer I heard Craig Johnson speak. He's one of our family's favorite authors. Craig is a mesmerizing speaker and there were 500 people in attendance.

After he gave his talk there was a huge line waiting to buy his newest book, Any Other Name. An even longer line snaked across the Old Library Park with armloads of previously purchased books. It was the most organized set-up I’ve seen. Several employees from Old Firehouse Books politely went through the lines and handed each person a yellow sticky note instructing the customer to write the desired name to be used in the autograph and put in on the title page. It was an outdoor event. The evening was lovely, and the sound system was superb.

No one seemed to mind waiting in the long line because we were all among booklovers. I met a delightful lady who recommended a number of titles. She appreciated audiobooks. Naturally, I whipped out my card told her about the variety of books published by Poisoned Pen Press.

I was impressed with Craig’s energy. He greeted each person like they were a long lost friend. Since I was at the tail end of the line, I took the opportunity to ask him how he managed to participate in so many events and simultaneously write so many wonderful books. He said he was able to write anywhere at any time. He used a computer or a spiral notebook or anything else that was handy. It didn’t matter. He said he used to be very precious about his writing and had to do it in a certain place at a certain time of day. But he had to give that up.

Then he said what we’ve all heard a jillion times–the secret is to keep at it and write every day. He knows how to think! He gave up a method that wasn’t working anymore and rebooted himself with a new operating system. Wow!

There are many times during my life I’ve had to admit my usual modus operandi simply wasn’t working anymore. I’ve gotten trapped psychologically into believing I’m handling things when I’ve not. My latest pitfall is the myth of  believing I can “clear time” for writing. That has never ever worked for me. It’s not working now. It won’t work in the future. This Christmas has been especially disruptive. It was full of mini-exchanges that drifted into January. Something always happened to blow the “cleared time” sky high.

 My best approach has always been to write five days a week. Naturally that expands to include weekends at certain stages.

There were many questions I wanted to ask Craig. One concerns social media. Does he use hired help? How many blogs does he follow? What all does he do?

In the meantime, my life needs more Tweaking, not Tweeting. I need to get comfortable with a social media approach and go back to a more consistence approach to writing.

Some people never write when they are promoting. Some, like Craig, write every day no matter what the circumstances. Some take long breaks between drafts of a book. Some write in multiple genres.
So how do you do it, Type M'ers? Have there been times when you’ve had to switch methods? How did that work for you?

I Am Woman: A Personal Approach to Gender

I read Rick's and Barbara's recent posts regarding gender in our genre, and I enjoyed their respective insights. I will stumble into the discussion here — the way I did into my new series and in turn my experience with the topic.

After writing my first six novels using the first-person point of view of hard-boiled males (both PI and amateur-sleuth), I taught a woman named Kylie, an early childhood-education major taking my night class at Northern Maine Community College. She was probably my age at the time (early thirties), and she worked harder than anyone I'd ever taught: she was a single mother (I'd see her dropping her toddler off early each morning at the same Head Start program my infant attended). Then each of us would leave to work for the day — me, to teach technical writing and composition at NMCC; she, to do menial labor (multiple jobs) all day before attending night classes.

My work at NMCC taught me many things. Among them: that most of my struggles are First World problems — that I have it a hell of a lot better than most. And Kylie, unbeknownst to her, drove that point home, wearily showing up each night, always prepared, always ready to lead discussions, writing and rewriting essays, and every bit earning her "A."

I never forgot her. And a few years later, I found myself writing a scene featuring a mother and a daughter at a kitchen table in Aroostook County, Maine, arguing about the way the younger woman was raising her daughter. The grandmother couldn't grasp the realities of single-motherhood.

I don't base my characters on people I know. (No, I'm not Jack Austin. No my wife isn't Lisa Trembley — Stop asking!) But many of my characters possess the attributes of people I have watched/known/or met. A nervous habit. A way of pronouncing a particular word. A hand gesture. These are things I notice, details I can use that (hopefully) bring a scene to life for the reader.

But as I wrote that kitchen-table scene, I knew Kylie was (in part) the daughter. And the more I wrote and allowed the character to breathe, the more I realized how heroic the character was. I knew she was representing more than just herself, that if I wrote honestly enough (I believe deeply in Hemingway's adage "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.") that my character Peyton Cote would resonate with other single mothers, who experience the same hardships, challenges, and rewards that Kylie did and Peyton does.

Did I succeed? Who knows. But the effort was and continues to be there.

Using Technology in Fiction

Rick’s post yesterday about his background in music got me thinking about my own background, i.e. what I did before I started writing. I was a Computer Science major in college, earning both of my degrees during the 1980s. When I started studying computers,

Xerox 8010 time share systems were on their way in and punch cards were on their way out. The Apple II and TRS-80 came out the year I started my undergraduate degree. By the time I received my B.S. four years later, the IBM PC was on the way to store shelves, helping to bring personal computing to the masses.

My first programming assignment was writing software for the Xerox Star 8010 http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/xerox-8010/. (I started working at Xerox right before the first release came out in 1981.) For many years, I worked on it and the systems that followed. It was a great time to be programming. Icon based systems were new and you felt like you were on the cutting edge. I have many fond memories of my time there. By the time I stopped programming twenty years or so later, the computer world had drastically changed.

Technology can be a lot of fun to include in a story, particularly in a mystery. You’ve heard pacemakers can be hacked, right? That’s an interesting method of murder to use in a story. But, technology changes at light speed. Apparently, now traces are left behind when someone hacks a pacemaker. https://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/hacking-pacemakers-for-murder-no-longer-the-perfect-crime/

So, when you’re writing a crime story you have to decide how much technology to put in and be aware that what you use in a story may not work the same even a year later. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put it in. You just have to be aware that an intricate plot device you set up today may not make sense to someone who reads the book years later.

Then there’s the ubiquitousness of cell phones in every day life today. Plots set in modern times have to take into account that calls can be made from pretty much anywhere so if you want a character to be out of reach you either have to put him in a dead zone, have him forget to charge his/her phone, have him/her lose the phone or have it no longer functioning for some reason. Then there’s the use of phones by people of different ages. Someone in their 70s probably uses a phone differently than someone in their 20s. Sometimes, I think Sue Grafton has the right idea by setting her Kinsey Millhone mysteries in the 1980s before cell phones, the internet, Facebook, twitter and wi-fi existed or were common.

My protagonist in Fatal Brushstroke is a freelance programmer. I don’t dwell on what she does because, well, programming can be quite boring to read about. But she is of an analytical bent, as many programmers are, and she does use the internet to do research. (And the fact she works freelance means she makes her own schedule and can do her sleuthing any time of the day or night.)

Keeping up with all the technology changes can be quite daunting. I’m not sure it’s even possible. But I still intend to put bits and pieces of technology in my stories. But when I need a break, I think I’ll write that historical I’ve been thinking about. Of course, that brings up a whole other set of problems...

Donning another hat

Me in 1973,  just out university and dreaming of stardom!

As I’m sure longtime readers of Type M are no doubt acutely aware, my original vocation was as a musician.

I had my first piano lesson at age 7 (I will not tell you in what year!) and I was immediately hooked. Later on, wanting to play “popular music”, I branched out to organ, started a band, and, well, that was it for me. Music absolutely consumed my life. By the time I was 16, I was playing in a bar two nights a week with a very good soul band, Gene Sayles and the Soul Salesmen. More time passed with a lot of nights spent in bars. During this time, I also learned to appreciate jazz and took lessons from a gentleman named Weldon Irvine. Along with Jimmy Smith, he was my musical hero.

Late in high school, I wanted to join the school band, and since they needed trombones, I took that up. With university beckoning and my heart set on a music career, I practised my butt off and got into the Music Department at the NYU School of Education. Playing in band sort of took a back seat after that. There was just too much to learn and not enough hours in the day to do it!

I transferred to McGill University in my third year for various reasons (love being the major one), and that required a sea change in my life. I was out on my own and living in Montreal (with my girlfriend, also a musician). I did do some semi-professional playing during this period, but it was mostly on French horn, the instrument I took up in university — mainly because there were so many great trombonists in the school and not as many hornists.

But once university ended, I immediately formed a new band, and with dreams of fame and fortune in my eyes (much like budding authors), we set out on the road to stardom. This time, though, I was playing progressive rock. You know, those ponderous songs of half an hour each, played on many instruments and with poetic lyrics that made absolutely no sense. That band, Devotion, was really exceptional. We felt we could play anything — and did. A volatile mix of talent and ego, sadly, the band broke up after two great years. After trying one more time with another band, I saw the handwriting on the wall: time to find alternative means of employment. Having gotten a Music Ed degree, I began teaching and did little performing far too little performing for the next 24 years.

But buried deep in the background, I still remembered my early roots in soul music. I’d hear a tune by Otis Redding or James Brown and get excited all over again by the music’s raw power.

Coming full circle – but on a different instrument!

As often happens as we get older, when I was back visiting in suburban New York where I’d grown up, I’d get together with old friends, many former performers in my old soul band or in others in the area. “Hey! Let’s put something together and play!” Since I’d always enjoyed and been adept at arranging, even back in the day, it fell on me to produce the horn charts and rudimentary rhythm section parts. We played. It sounded great and was huge fun. We did it a few more times, the band swelling to a dozen people. I was re-hooked on soul music.

That re-routing of my musical career comes full-circle on Thursday this week when a new band I’ve put together makes its debut performance in a Toronto club. Am I excited? You bet. This is no time to be a jaded, long-suffering musical “veteran”. We’re playing what I consider some of the best music created in the past century. Best of all, my fellow band members are playing it very well. The sound we have is authentic, a bit raw (purposely) and still very vital.

What does all of this have to do with writing? Not a heck of a lot, actually, but I am looking forward to Thursday with excitement I haven’t felt since printed copies of my first novel arrived at my house in 1992.

There! That’s a writing connection, isn’t it? If you’re in the Toronto area, please come to hear SOULidified at The Orbit Room, and watch Blechta with his musical hat on for a change.

Consider this your invitation!

Switching Gears

I once tried writing a very dark crime novel. My original premise had been about these two tough cops in B.C., a young woman and an older man, up against drug and motorcycle gangs, sex traffickers and really bad killers (as opposed to really nice killers??).

At the end of the first book in the series, the older male would be killed in a bomb explosion and the woman would go on to seek revenge.

Believe it or not, that book didn’t come out very dark and ended up being In the Shadow of the Glacier, the first Constable Molly Smith book.

Which, if you haven’t read the books, is a realistic police procedural about the lives and jobs of cops in small town British Columbia. Some reviews have called the series cozy, but they definitely are not.

In one book, Molly Smith kills a man, in them all the fall out of the murder or crime is wide-spread and devastating. I’ve dealt with the murder of a mother, the disappearance of a father, the suspected betrayal of a spouse, the death of adult children (not touching little kids), and even a soldier with PTSD and a gun on his lap.

So, not cozy. But nowhere near as dark as intended originally. Which is no doubt all for the better.

My standalone suspense novels have a modern gothic touch, and all deal with betrayals past and present.

My Klondike Gold Rush books are lighter, but they still have an edge. The main character is a woman with a past and she knows there are people out there looking for her. She runs a saloon and dance hall, and the occasional shady character drops in.

So, all in all, I think I’m a varied writer. I can write in different sub-genres and use different styles and tones in my writing.

Except, it seems, the dark stuff.

My newest style is very light. Under the pen name Eva Gates, I’m writing true cozies.

And having a lot of fun with it. Maybe I was burning out with the stuff I was writing, but the cozies have given me a giant boost. Then again, maybe I’m just enjoying not worrying about grief, and loss, and the tragedy of human existence.

Cozies are intended to be nothing more than an entertaining read. You won’t learn many lessons about the human condition, there is no one suffering from angst or threatening to kill themselves because of depression. No PTSD. No terrorist attacks or serial killers. Just people with friends and lovers and community. And the occasional enemy. And a murder of course.

Some cozies are humourous, some are not. I have tried to be.

Even if you’ve never read a cozy before, I invite you to give it a try. By Book or By Crook will be out on February 3rd. I'll be travelling extensively in the US on book tour, and meeting up with some great authors to share events along the way. The detailed schedule can be found at www.vickidelany.blogspot.com.