INKSPOT NEWS, MARCH 17, 2012

Today, March 17th, Lois Winston will be taking part in the Liberty States Fiction Writers
Create Something Magical conference for readers and writers. A book fair, open to the public, will take place from 5:30pm - 7pm at the Renaissance Woodbridge Hotel, 515 Route 1 South and Gill Lane, Iselin, NJ 

A Pleasant Shock

a guest post from mystery author Kaye George

Something happened to me this year that I still can't believe. I'll tell you at the end, but it involves Agatha Christie and an organization called Malice Domestic. I'd like to tell you a bit about both of these first.

The Agatha Awards are named after the British Queen of Mystery, Agatha Christie. Her books were written in a time, some might say, of less exposure to violence, although I think the two World Wars exposed everyone in her generation to quite a bit of it. She wrote two series that are read and re-read today, those starring Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Her Tommy and Tuppence books and some stories with other sleuths aren't widely read, but I'll bet you'll find a Miss Marple and a Hercule Poirot, at least one of each, checked out of your local library every time you go. You'll also find them on bookshelves everywhere--36 years after her death in 1976. (For writers today, take heart, it took even Agatha several years to get her first novel published.)

The Awards, given annually at the Malice Domestic conference, are given to mystery and crime writers who write via the same method as Agatha Christie. Ideally, that means there is a closed setting, no sex or violence, and an amateur detective. Global thriller and psychological suspense writers need to seek awards elsewhere.

Malice Domestic Ltd. has been around since 1989 when Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Short Story Awards were given. Other categories were added over the years, and a new one appeared this year. Awards are now given for Best Novel, Best First Mystery, Best Short Story, Best Non-Fiction, Best Children's/Young Adult Mystery, Best Historical Mystery (the new one this year).

Everyone who is registered for the April-May conference by December 31st of the preceding year receives a ballot and is invited to nominate five books or stories in each category. A panel of judges chooses the five in each category to put on the ballot. The attendees vote for one of each and the award, a teapot, is given at the banquet on Saturday night.

This conference is so well-organized and fun. And it's run by a volunteer board of people who give up their outside lives (I'm sure) for a few months to run it.

A picture of a teapot is here. This is Avery Aames winning last year! Coincidentally, the two gigglers in the background are me and Janet Bolin.

It's a coincidence, because here's the list for Best First Novel for this year:

Dire Threads by Janet Bolin (Berkley)
Choke by Kaye George (Mainly Murder Press)
Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry (Crown)
Who Do, Voodoo? by Rochelle Staab (Berkley)
Tempest in the Tea Leaves by Kari Lee Townsend (Berkley)

I am still hyperventilating when I see that list! You can read this year's complete list of nominees in all categories here.

Kaye George is the Agatha-nominated author of Choke.







Some of the information for this post was taken from the Agatha Christie website and Wikipedia.

Three’s the Charm

by Vicki Doudera

Three is a magic number,
Yes it is, it's a magic number.
Somewhere in the ancient, mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number.
The past and the present and the future.
Faith and Hope and Charity,
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number.             
(Lyrics by Bob Dorough)

I’ve always loved the number three.

It’s what I count to before losing my cool, how many square meals I’ll down in a day, and the amount of tasks I can juggle and still keep smiling. It’s the number of acts in a classic story structure, and the number of elements in a joke. It’s how many kids I always wanted, as well as how many I’m blessed to have.  And now, it’s even more magical because of the arrival of my third mystery, Deadly Offer.

There are several reasons why this new novel thrills me. First, I particularly love Deadly Offer’s cover, with its gorgeous depiction of a creepy vineyard. I like the back cover’s heading, “A Twisted Vine of Secrets,” and the prologue’s succinct, scary, opening line: “I will kill you.”

I love the fact that I have a growing stack of Darby Farr Mysteries on my writing desk. Three! Count ‘em, three! One could have been a fluke; two, a lucky break, but three has the power of intention. My career as a mystery writer feels real.

The ancient Romans believed '”omne trium perfectum,” or, everything that comes in threes is perfect. I like that idea, and consequently I’m commemorating Deadly Offer’s publication with a party in a picture-perfect setting: Cellardoor Winery, located right here in coastal Maine.

If you’re in the area, please join me on April 5th and help me celebrate a magic number and my magical day. I f you can’t make it, raise a glass (or three) to Deadly Offer’s launch. Thanks!

Top producing Realtor Vicki Doudera uses high-stakes, luxury real estate as the setting for a suspenseful mystery series starring crime-solving, deal-making agent Darby Farr. A broker with a busy coastal firm since 2003 and former Realtor of the Year, Vicki’s latest mystery, DEADLY OFFER, takes Darby to a winery where murder, mayhem, and Merlot all mingle. As in the popular KILLER LISTING and A HOUSE TO DIE FOR, Darby discovers a dangerous truth: real estate means real trouble. Read more about the Darby Farr Mystery Series and Vicki at her website, www.vickidoudera.com.

Multitasking as a Series Author

By Beth Groundwater

I'm sure many of my fellow Midnight Ink authors are going to relate to this post, because most of us are writing a series and many of us are writing more than one series. What that means is that at any given moment in time, like the juggler above, we have multiple balls (book projects) in the air, that all demand a piece of our attention.

Right now, I am frantically editing the third manuscript for my RM Outdoor Adventures mystery series, that I am calling Cataract Canyon. It is due in April, and I have multiple critiques to respond to. My critique group has been giving me feedback a couple of chapters at a time, and has four chapters to go. Also, my agent and a trusted fellow mystery author are reading the full manuscript. My agent has already sent me some suggestions, and I'm expecting more from her and those from my author friend soon. Then, I'll somehow have to merge all of the fixes from all of those critiques into one coherent manuscript in less than a month. Eek!


At the same time, I have another ball in the air, the release in May of the second book in the RM Outdoor Adventures mystery series, Wicked Eddies. For that, I need to design and print bookmarks, prepare blog posts for blogs that I'll visit to promote that release, schedule booksignings at bookstores and whitewater festivals and get those appearances listed on my website, plan travel to mystery conferences and writing workshops and prepare panel presentations and speeches, and much more.

How do I manage? Every morning, I look at my long, long to-do list, find the long-pole items that need to be completed first for other things to happen, or tasks that take a long time and should be chipped away at, or tasks that are due very soon, and put those on my daily to-do list. For instance, here's what I did yesterday and the day before.

I need to get an email newsletter out soon to my subscribers. But for that to happen, I need to list my appearances on my website because I'll be referring to those in the newsletter, which means I need to finalize them. So, phone calls to bookstore owners went on the list, as did finalizing travel plans to the Malice Domestic conference and the Festival of Mystery. And, I emailed the latest winner of my email newsletter subscriber contest, because the announcement of her win will go in the newsletter. Also, I edited the first two chapters of Cataract Canyon (again) based on my agent's feedback, and I will edit the next two today. Lastly, I had to write this post, because it was due today. Then there's the daily email and social networking to get through. And there's the rest of my life--laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, and a couple of hours of skiing for exercise.

Every day I have decisions to make, too, about promotion opportunities, requests from fellow writers for advice, blurbs, blog visits, etc., and other demands for my time. I've learned to never say yes right away. Instead, I let the request lie in my inbox or in my voice mail for awhile. Then, when I get a breather between my scheduled tasks, I go back to my to-do list and calendar and make a realistic assessment about how important the request is and whether I can cram the new task into my schedule.


You may think that after May, I get a breather. But no. Hovering in the air are two more book project balls. I need to do a final edit of the third book in my Claire Hanover Gift Basket Designer mystery series, that I'm calling Basketful of Troubles, by its due date in August. Then, there's promotion to be planned for the re-release of the second book in that series, To Hell in a Handbasket, in November. Then the cycle begins again for the RM Outdoor Adventures series!

Many of my non-author friends think that because I can schedule my own time, I have a lot of free time. That's not the case by a long-shot. My writing career is a full-time job, and I work at least forty hours a week at it. That means that if I go skiing in the morning, I'm writing a blog post at 9 PM, like I'm doing now.

So, what about you? How do you keep those balls in the air in your life?

10+ Favorite Writing Books

Cricket McRae

You can’t learn how to write from a book. Wait, that’s only partially true. Because I think you can learn a lot about how to write from a combination of many books.

I cut my teeth on Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer and Barbara Ueland’s If You Want to Write as basics. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Vein of Gold, and The Sound of Paper are a lot about finding yourself as an artist, and still provide inspiration when I’m wondering why the heck I do this again? But if I had to choose just ten books to keep on my office shelf (not counting things like a Webster’s Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and Elements of Grammar), these are the volumes I’d choose.

On Writing by Stephen King. Well, duh. Not exactly like I’m alone in this one. Full of practical advice, inspiration, and autobiographical detail.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Sorry – another duh, but still one of my favorite books for keeping sane in the middle of a project, reminding me that I only have to fill a space the size of a picture frame right now, not write the whole book at once, and that shitty first drafts can be fixed up later.

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. A collection of essays that are not only examples of writing I want to emulate, but full of joy and passion for the craft. He wants you to love it, to do it every day, and to be true to your voice.

Starting from Scratch by Rita Mae Brown. I love her mysteries, I love her mainstream literary fiction, and I love her writing book. She includes practical writing advice (with an emphasis on the classics) but also practical living-as-a-writer advice. Things like writing with a day job, dealing with critics, editors, agents, and others in the industry, as well as emphasizing that you have to persist no matter what.

Anything by Eric Maisel. Yes, this is totally cheating because now there are more than ten books. But Maisel wears a lot of useful hats, because he’s a doctor of psychology with an MFA, as well as a professional, hands on, writer of fiction and nonfiction with a degree in philosophy. He’s a creativity coach, and understands some of the craziness writers and other artists are prone to. Of course, I’m not talking about anyone here, right? The following are a sampling of his titles:

• Fearless Creating: A Step-by-Step Guide to Starting and Completing Your Work of Art
• Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions
• Mastering Creative Anxiety
• The Van Gogh’s Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression
• Deep Writing: 7 Principles That Bring Ideas to Life
• Ten Zen Seconds

The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler. I’ve heard this modern classic called a book on formula, but I think it’s more about the universal elements of storytelling that have appealed, well, forever. He breaks things down in terms of structure, archetypes, and the psychology of myth.

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. Yeah, okay, I love the movie Adaptation and how Charlie Kaufman pokes fun at McKee, but I learned a lot about storytelling from this book – including why my instincts told me to go certain directions with plot or character. It’s a heavy tome, though, and if you want a short work with many of the same concepts, try The Poetics by Aristotle.

How to Write: Advice and Reflections by Richard Rhodes. From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, this is another book with practical advice woven into personal essay. It’s part memoir and part psychological treatise on the emotional aspects of writing well. However, the best writing advice in it might be, “Apply ass to chair.”

No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript that Sells by Alice Orr. Though the subtitle on this book is small enough that I’m afraid people in the coffee shop will think I’m having relationship problems (like they give a hoot what I read, right?) this book is chock full of good, practical stuff that, to my great chagrin, I sometimes forget: How to deepen characters, how to write a good, useful sex scene, what you need to know before you start to write even if you end up leaving it out, etc. It’s geared for novel writers, especially genre writers.

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. Yep, another Pulitzer Prize winner (for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Rather than a pep talk, she delves into how hard writing can be – she really hates it sometimes – and how utterly frightening, while at the same time it can be an almost spiritual experience. Her writing is real and human and accessible while being inspirational and raw as well. Of course, I love everything she’s written, even the rather obscure The Living.

What are your favorite writing books? As a reader, do you like reading about how writers like these think?

And We Have A Series

by Kathleen Ernst

Two good writerly things happened in the past couple of weeks. First, I got to see the final cover art for the third Chloe Ellefson mystery, The Light Keeper’s Legacy, which will be out in October. I love the cover, and suspect that readers will too.

Second, I got to announce a big project in the children’s arena. For the past three years I’ve been working on a six-book series for American Girl, but it’s all been under wraps. Although most of it is still under wraps, I was able to announce that it’s going to be published in the fall. That was fun.

Writers seize opportunities when they come. I’ve been blessed with a lot of opportunity lately. That’s wonderful, but it also meant that the past year in particular was…shall we say…intense.

Early on, my husband and I talked about keeping on a book-a-year schedule for Chloe, and we both felt that was important. The Light Keeper’s Legacy turned out to be the most complicated book yet. (I didn’t plan it that way, but that’s the way the story evolved.) It includes multiple timelines and required a lot of research. I ju-u-ust barely made my deadline. At more than one point I truly wondered if I could pull it off. I was so head-down on the thing that it all felt very abstract.

Then I got to see the cover. Suddenly, it started looking and feeling like a real book.

Even better, it’s the third Chloe Ellefson mystery. To me, that makes it official: I’m writing a series. The dictionary I checked defined a series as “a set of successive volumes published in like form with similarity of subject or purpose.” I’d like to think I’m building some momentum.

Midnight Ink recently released their list of titles for the fall 2012 list. It’s an impressive list. I’m proud to be part of it.

http://kathleenernst.com
http://sitesandstories.wordpress.com

INKSPOT NEWS, MARCH 10, 2012

On Friday March 16th, Lois Winston will be taking part in two booksignings at the Public Library Association conference being held at the Philadelphia Convention Center, 1101 Arch St., Philadelphia, PA. From 12:30pm - 2pm, she'll be at the Sisters in Crime book #947, and from 2pm - 3pm, she'll be at the Midnight Ink booth #1244. 

On Saturday, March 17th, Lois Winston will be taking part in the Liberty States Fiction Writers
Create Something Magical conference for readers and writers. A book fair, open to the public, will take place from 5:30pm - 7pm at the Renaissance Woodbridge Hotel, 515 Route 1 South and Gill Lane, Iselin, NJ 

Belly Up to the Bar and Have a Drink With Me.

Hello there everyone!

My name is Robert K. Lewis, and I'm one of the new kids on the Inkspot block. I got the call about my Midnight Ink sale back in January, and since then have been up to my elbows in rewrites until just about five days ago. So now I have a little room to breathe, which is nice, and which also means I can start contributing to this great blog on a regular rotation. I'm very excited to be able to do so, too. :-)

Before I do anything else, I want to first give a huge thank you to all the other Inkers who have welcomed me so warmly and graciously. What an amazing group of writers I find myself involved with! Truly awesome!

For my first blog post, I thought I would just tell you a little bit about myself, so without further ado...

I started writing novels about seven years ago, those first couple years overlapping with the decade I spent writing screenplays. As a screenwriter, I sold one script to an indie producer, and though it got made into a film, the film never could land a distribution deal. I had a few screenplay managers over that decade, and a few options. The novel that landed me my wonderful agent, Barbara Poelle, was the fourth novel I'd written, and was an earlier incarnation of the book that eventually sold to Midnight Ink. The tentative title is Unknown Damage, and features the debut of my series detective, the ex-narco cop Mark Mallen. If Mallen and I are lucky, I'll be writing him for a long time.

My influences would not only be the noirish and gritty detectives of authors like Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane, but also Frank and Henry Kane, Donald Westlake and his alter ego, Richard Stark.

Beyond that, however is the influence of movies shot in New York between 1968 through about 1981. New York in those days wasn't just a location, it was practically another character. Movies such as Midnight Cowboy, Panic in Needle Park, Serpico, Death Wish, Fort Apache the Bronx, The French Connection, and The Seven Ups went far in influencing my writing style and the characters that inhabit my book worlds.

I also play blues guitar, with some rock tossed into the mix. Stevie Ray Vaughn, Albert, B.B., and Freddie King, Buddy Guy, Hendrix, Jimmy Page... these are the guys that have heavily influenced my playing. I'm a total guitar junkie, if truth be told.

Oh, and there's the red wine. Old vine Zin, please, thank you!

Anyway, I would just like to say again how happy I am to be a part of this group of writers, and this publisher. I'm very many times blessed, and that's a fact.

Best, and see you again soon!

RkL