Catching Several Birds with One Book

by Sheila Webster Boneham

Yippee! It's alive! It's launched! It's a book! Oh, sorry, but even after nineteen books published, it's still exciting to know that the new one is out there, on bookstore shelves, in libraries, on e-readers, in people's hot little hands. My new one is The Money Bird, second in my Animals in Focus Mystery series. The first book, Drop Dead on Recall, has been well received, especially among my fellow dog & cat fanciers and dog-sport enthusiasts. It was even named one of the Ten Best Dog Books of 2012 by NBC PetSide! 

The Money Bird begins when photographer cum accidental amateur sleuth Janet MacPhail sees her friend Tom's dog, Drake, retrieve something mysterious during a retriever training session. As in the first book, the setting for the story includes an animal-oriented activity taking place in northeastern Indiana. I've been involved with animal sports since I was a kid -- first with horses, then with dogs -- and I've been writing about dogs and cats for nearly 20 years, so I know this world and its many characters well. 

I know that there's more to the world of animals, even those we bring into our homes as companions, than sometimes meets the public eye. Although my first goal as a mystery writer is to spin an entertaining story, I also hope to tickle my readers' curiosity bones. I believe that fiction can raise people's consciousness without beating them over the head, which is why my mysteries all quietly raise issues for consideration. In The Money Bird, the issue is wildlife trafficking, specifically the ugly but lucrative trade in tropical birds, many of them members of endangered species. 

So in The Money Bird we have dogs -- lots of dogs, many of them wet! -- and Leo, Janet's heroic little cat, and some birds who shouldn't be flying around a lake in northern Indiana. And aside from all this, Janet has to continue to meet her normal challenges: she's running a business, dealing on many levels with her mother's dementia, and trying to sort out just what she wants her relationship with Tom to be. That's a lot of birds - let's hope Janet has a big net!

~~~~

Sheila Boneham has published 17 nonfiction books about dogs, cats, and animal rescue, six of which have won "best book" awards in their categories in competitions of the Dog Writers Association of America and the Cat Writers' Association. Her feature articles have been published in Dog Fancy, Dog World, The AKC Gazette, Cat Fancy, and more. She holds a PhD in folklore from Indiana University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. Sheila lives in North Carolina with her husband Roger and her retriever girls, Lily the Lab (that's her, not Sheila, in the photo!) and Sunny the Golden. She's at work on the third Animals in Focus Mystery. You can reach her at www.sheilaboneham.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sheilawrites. She'd love to hear from you!

What My Dogs Have Taught Me About Writing

by Sheila Webster Boneham

For the past couple of decades, I've spent a lot of time, energy, sweat, tears, and love on my writing and on my dogs. In that time, I've written twenty plus books, had articles and short stories published in national magazines, anthologies, and journals, and in itty bitty newsletters.

In that time I've also not only lived with and loved a lot of dogs (and cats, but they'll have their day later), but also competed with my dogs in several sports, founded two rescue programs, fostered and rehomed many Labrador Retrievers, Australian Shepherds, and other dogs, volunteered as a trainer and evaluator for three shelters, volunteered with my registered therapy dogs, and bred highly competitive Australian Shepherds. 

Sunny (left) and Lily, aka
UCDX Diamonds Perennial Waterlily
AKC CD RN TD CGC, ASCA CD, TDI

Right now, my husband and I share our home with Lily, a 7-year-old Lab, and Sunny, a Golden Retriever we adopted last November when she was 11.5.  

As you might imagine, my Animals in Focus mysteries have paw prints all over them. Dogs, cats, and other animals are realistic, vital characters and are essential to the plots of the books. What most people don't imagine is how many of the lessons my dogs have taught me over the years apply to writing as well. So I thought I would share a few of them.

Sage, aka Perennial Meadowsage,
retrieving at 7 weeks old. 

Work is play, play is work. The expression "work like a dog," means to labor without joy, but the truth is that dogs who have fun work harder and better. Even when there's heavy lifting involved. 

Jay (UCD Perennial See You At
the Top, AKC CD, RN, CGC,
ASCA CD, Delta) & Lily

You don't always have to do what you're told, but....

Summer (Master Agility Champion
Perennial Hot Sultry Summer)

...sometimes you have to jump through hoops to get the reward.

Kitty Boneham, dog expert.

Ideas can come from unexpected sources, so don't discount anyone. 

Me and Katy during a canine safety
session at an elementary school.

It's important to make time for your friends. Writing is a solitary pursuit, but without love, friendship, and social interaction, we have nothing to write about. 

And now, according to my technical advisors, it's time for a game of tennis ball!



Sheila Webster Boneham is the author of 17 nonfiction books about dogs and cats as well as the Animals in Focus mystery series. Drop Dead on Recall came out in 2012, and The Money Bird will be out next month. Autographed copies of Sheila's books are available on her website at www.sheilaboneham.com. 

Memoir, Mystery, and the Muse

by Sheila Webster Boneham


I recently taught a six-week "Write Your Memoir" class through the Cameron Art Museum here in Wilmington, NC. I love teaching through the Museum School - we get terrific students. Writing is rather new to the Museum School's offerings and we are still building up that portion of the catalog, but things are looking up as people find out about the writing classes. 

Now that "Memoir" is finished, I'm back to focusing on the third book in my Animals in Focus Mystery series, tentatively titled Catwalk, and I've been thinking about some of the links between memoirs, mysteries, and that slippery character, the writer's Muse. Creativity, after all, works in similar ways regardless of the genre -- or even the medium -- in which we work.  

One of the tools I shared with my memoir students was a series of questions to ask of old photographs. We've all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a photo (or other visual image) may also help inspire and expand ideas. It's no surprise that photos can be used to bring up memories of places we've been, or people and animals we've known, or events we've experienced. 

What may not be so obvious is that  photos can be useful creative tools for  writers in other genres, including mystery. Images of settings, people, animals, or objects can serve to inspire short stories or scenes in longer works, especially when the narrator or a character answers the questions I pose below. An image might even provide the kernel for a longer piece of writing. For instance, one of my inspirations for The Money Bird, which will be out in September, was a photo of an escaped pet parrot in a tree in the Midwest. 

So if you're looking for a way to go deeper, or wider, or to find new ideas, try "interrogating" a photo or painting. Better yet, have one of your characters do it. Start with these questions:

• Where is this?
• When?
• Why are you there?
• Who else is there?
• Have you been there before?
• What is happening, or not happening?
• Is some object in the photo significant to you?
• Is a person or animal in the picture significant to you?

Now dig deeper:

• What do you hear?
• What do you smell?
• What did you eat or drink?
• What does it taste like?
• What’s the weather like?
• What time of day is it?
• What are you wearing?
• Who else is there?
• What do you feel with your hands, your feet, your skin….
• What emotions do you feel?

And so on....

Give it a try. Let me know how it goes. Send a picture! You can find me at www.sheilaboneham.com or on my Write Here, Write Now! blog. 

Details, Details

by Sheila Webster Boneham

 



Years ago (at least fifteen), I passed a novel I had enjoyed along to my husband. Roger is a geologist, and the "love interest" in the book is a geologist, and I thought he might enjoy the story and relish meeting one of his own in a romantic lead of sorts. And he did, for the first chapter or so. Then he put it down in disgust.

"Some geologist!" he said.

Turns out the guy in the book had waxed eloquent about the cleavage in a piece of quartz. Problem is, quartz has no cleavage (which means that when it breaks, it has no parallel surfaces). That booboo clattered right by me, but for the reader in the know, it was a book-stopper.

I run into this all the time in books with animals, especially dogs. (I've shown, bred, rescued, written about, trained, and judged dogs for more than two decades, so, yeah, I care that "dog things" are accurate.") I recently read a novel in which the protagonist's dog is identified as a specific rare breed. Exciting! Then the dog is described. She's a color combination that doesn't occur in the breed and she weighs about half what she should. I had enjoyed the first pages of the book, but found it hard to keep reading past such glaring errors.

And then there was the best-selling memoir a few years ago about growing up in southern Indiana, a place of forests, deep ravines, and rolling country that I know well. I perused the book at a conference in Indianapolis, thinking I would buy a copy, but when I read that Indiana is "flat as a pancake," I was finished. Well, almost finished - I did point out the passage to a friend and the two of us snorted and laughed and snarked about pandering to East-Coaster sterotypes about the Midwest. The author's mother was standing right behind us. Ah, well.

I'm sure we've all read things in which some error in our own field of knowledge damaged or destroyed our faith in the author. In fact, almost everyone I've asked about this has produced an example from personal experience. Many of them also express similar reactions. Disappointment ("I was looking forward to this book, and then..."). Loss of trust ("If the author is wrong about the things I know, how can I trust the rest of the information?). Disgust ("It's not that hard to check the facts!").

And really, it's not hard at all. First, of course, we have the Internet. Granted, we have to be judicious about our sources, but as long as we use credible websites, blogs, forums, and other online resources, we can check out almost anything. Or at least get a leg up.

We can also go old school - libraries, books, reference librarians. All good.

We can find people who know. I saved myself from a serious error in Drop Dead on Recall by asking a physician friend read a passage in which a character uses an epinephrin pen on his wife, who seems to be having an allergic reaction. Myfriend's terse response? "Well, he just killed her." Seems my character's technique left a little to be desired. I learned, and he does it properly in the book. In that case, I called on a friend, but it isn't hard to find people in the know, and most people are generous about helping us get things right.

Need the skinny on a location? As my husband, Roger, likes to say, there's nothing like a site visit. Whether its a place or a kind of event or an institutional setting, we can do lots of reading, watch videos and films, peruse photographs, but nothing beats being there. How does the quality of light shift by the minute on the Carolina coast at sunrise? How does the heat dissipate in the high desert as the sun drops behind the Sierras? How does the grooming area at a dog show smell, or the waiting room in a hospital sound? If we can't get there, then once again, finding someone who has been there to read what we write can save us from grievous goofs, and may even give us some telling detail to add.

I'm working on the third Animals in Focus mystery right now, and am planning a couple of site visits of my own. I've already lined up some experts to keep me honest, and I have files upon files of background info. Luckily for me, the research I'm doing for this book isn't tedious at all. I get to interview lots of lovely cats and dogs.