Is it a Mystery?

The other day, a friend asked if I would read his new manuscript before he started the process of submitting to agents. Since this particular writer is not only a friend, but a longtime member of my critique group and particularly talented where scene and imagery are concerned, I was not only glad to oblige, but looked forward to the read.

         Then, he threw me for a bit of a curve.

         “It’s a mystery,” he said.

         Even better, I thought anticipating a more commercial blend of plot with the well-crafted literary work I’ve come to expect from him.

          And then he threw me for another curve. 

         “I just got comments back from a contest I entered and they questioned whether it was really a mystery,” he said. “Can you read it and let me know?”

         I’m halfway through the book and, as expected, am enjoying so much about this story, but is it a mystery?
         Actually, I think there are two, potentially strong mysteries in the manuscript, possibly three. What my friend has done, is create what I believe could be a strong series. But, and it’s something of a big but, if he wants to sell this manuscript(s) as a genre story, I think he needs to break the plot lines down and examine what he is trying to do with his main character in light of the good old rules of mystery writing.

         Which led me to the Internet where I found an amusing set of guidelines I thought I’d share:                 

RONALD KNOX'S DECALOGUE

Here is Fr. Ronald Knox's famous Ten Commandment list for Detective Novelists (copyright © 1929 Ronald Knox and Pope Somebody):

•               The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

•               All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

•               Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

•               No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

•               No Chinaman must figure in the story.

•               No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

•               The detective must not himself commit the crime.

•               The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

•               The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

•               Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

As for my friend, I think I’ll suggest a more current version.  Or, maybe I won’t and see if I can persuade him to write in a Chinaman!

Ode to the Walpole Library

by Vicki Doudera

It was a Thursday night ritual.

As soon as dinner ended, my Dad and I would gather our books and then hop in the car and drive ten minutes or so to neighboring Walpole, one of those old Massachusetts towns with white colonial homes encircling a big village green dating from 1659 or so. We'd park on Common Street and climb the granite steps to the Walpole Library, where we'd both plunk our books on the portion of the desk marked "returns" and then head off into the stacks.

An hour or so later we'd meet at the main desk, our new stacks of books in hand. My father was a fan of glossy art books with beautiful covers, self-help books, and the occasional biography.  I loved mysteries, biographies, and whatever happened to strike my fancy. That's the feeling I remember most about those Thursday nights: the sense that I was free to choose any book in the building, take it home, and enter its world. Back then, I loved wandering the long rows of shelves, opening titles at random, and reading. Sometimes I became so engrossed that I'd sit right down on the floor. You want to know a secret? I still do, although now I'm up in Maine, at the Camden Public Library.

Last month, residents of Walpole dedicated a brand spanking new Library on School Street. According to the Walpole Times, it’s a "green building," with an outdoor garden, a water conservation feature and green roof on top of the first floor. The green roof has low-growing turf that requires next to no maintenance and acts as an insulator for the community room below.

There's a new "Walpole Room" for local history buffs, a children's program room, plenty of meeting space, and local art is displayed in the lobby of the School Street entrance. One of these days, I will stop in and check it out.

April 8-14 is National Library Week.Take a moment to tell us about the library that made an impact on you.

Realtor Vicki Doudera uses high-stakes real estate as the setting for a suspenseful series starring crime-solving, deal-making agent Darby Farr. Just released is DEADLY OFFER, which takes Darby to a winery where murder, mayhem, and Merlot all mingle. As in 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

Getting Smart about the Muse

By Shannon Baker

I’ve seen lots of references to the muse lately. Writers talk about this tricky, willful and fickle instrument of inspiration who flits in and out of our minds as if he/she is the reason we create beautiful words or twisting plots. I’m often jabbed by an idea that seems to come out of nowhere and all I can do is shiver a little that some other-worldly creature took pity on my feeble wordly wranglings and threw me a bone.

“Some ditzy woman named Bambi just inserted herself into my book, "The Llama of Death." Now I've got to find out what the heck she's doing in there. Writing is so mysterious -- even to the author.”

This was a status update on Facebook from mystery writer, Betty Webb. No doubt Bambi will become a necessary component to the plot, even if Betty hasn’t figured it out, yet. Her comment let me know I’m not alone in these strange bursts of detail.

I had no idea why I added that tiny apartment with the closet under the stairs in the third chapter…until late in the book when I needed to hide a clue there. What about the certainty that the car burned too much oil and smelled bad, only to need the sense of smell later on?
Since I’m such a dogged plotter I used to resist these surprises but have learned to trust the weirdness and let them stay. They usually end up being essential. But how do I know this without knowing? Do I have a muse trying to help me out? Is it magic? For a long time I didn’t question it too much, just accepted that the Universe knew better than me.

Then I picked up Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. With my apologies to Mr. Gladwell, I believe he explained exactly why we unconsciously come up with these gems that seem like gifts from the Writing Gods. I say apologize, because this may not be the point he was trying to get to at all.

What I got out of the book is this: We all have a part of the brain that is hidden from our conscious, everyday existence. It stores all this experience and information behind a series of locked doors like the vault where Maxwell Smart’s headquarters at CONTROL are located. We can’t access it consciously. But this part of our brain works rapidly, sort of like the processer on my work computer doesn’t. We actually know a lot more than we know we know.

This super part of our brain is responsible for those instant decisions we make that seem so right. It’s the intuition part of us (though Gladwell hates the word intuition) that tells us immediately if we can trust someone, if that job is the right one, if the move to Colorado is a good decision. Within two minutes, our brain sorts through everything it knows and spits out the answer—maybe it sends out our own private Maxwell Smart to pass it along. I’m sure your messenger is more like Agent 99 than Max, but from the evidence of some of my decisions I’m pretty sure my contact at CONTROL is Agent 86. Either that, or I have an overactive KAOS factor in my life.

Galdwell doesn’t extrapolate to writing mysteries but I have no problem making that jump. I think this hidden brain knows way more about our stories than we do. Every now and then, it has to give us a little help and sends that perfect detail we don’t know we need until we need it. Good job, Max.

I don’t know about you, but I’m way more comfortable believing I hold all the answers in my secret vault than I am wishing and hoping the muse feels amiable toward me on any given day. Even if some days it feels like all the good ideas are locked in the Cone of Silence.

What's one of those nuggets you included in a story that you didn't know you'd need until later?

Grunt Goes to Canada

A guest post by m.c. grant

It was likely the strong, undiluted accent, but it could have been shyness or the overwhelming heaviness of being suddenly different.

Whatever it was, to their Canadian ears, my name sounded like Grunt.

You can imagine the laughter--and the sound effects.

There I was, as Scottish as can be: orange hair so bright it practically glowed, freckles (masses of them since it was a hot summer) and the pale white skin that comes after painful lessons learned on the sandy beaches of Troon.

Most people believe there shouldn't be any language barriers when one emigrates between English-speaking countries, but they're wrong.

This was 1976. I was thirteen years old. And I didn't speak English, I spoke Glaswegian with an East Kilbridian burr.

My working-class brogue had erased the "th" sound from my vocabulary, so words like "think" and "thought" became "fink" and "fought." I also used such foreign phrasing as "Aye" for "Yes" and "Ta" in place of "thanks." There were even times when you would have thought I was speaking Gaelic rather than just trying to ask a teacher for permission to go to the washroom. "I'm burstin', miss. Canna no use the loo?"

This language barrier became even more impenetrable when I attended French class at A. E. Cross Junior High. As an official bilingual country, Canada tries to place an emphasis on its second national language. Fortunately, I had a year of French at Claremont High School before leaving Scotland, and so I believed I was in with a shot. I was a good student and knew how to ask for the time, close the door and hang up my hat, all in French.

The teacher, however, thought I had been sent by Candid Camera. She was from Quebec (a province that speaks a different variety of French from France, just to confuse matters) and to her, I sounded like a tractor ripping her language up by the roots and shredding it to tatters before her ears.

My ability to master the written portion of the exams seemed to only frustrate her further as I believe she thought I was actually speaking some form of Scandinavian.

Scotland has changed dramatically since I left, but in 1976, we only had three television channels (although BBC2 barely counted) and the only American shows I can remember were a few cartoons, an occasional John Wayne movie and The Wizard of Oz every Christmas.

Canada didn't look or sound like any of them, even though my family landed in Calgary, the cowboy capital of the country. This wasn't Cowboys and Indians (although there were plenty of both), this was oil country with belt buckles the size of your face and ¾-ton, extended-cab pickup trucks larger than a council flat. The city was clean and noticeably graffiti free with large blue skies and powerful Chinook winds that could pick up a small dog and carry it off to Saskatchewan.

It was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. The city sprawled, stretching itself across hills and valleys, spacing everything out so that people didn't walk--they drove. And they drove a lot. In Canada, but especially in the prairie provinces, people think nothing of driving hundreds of kilometers to find a nice spot for lunch.

But although Calgary was newer and shinier than the city I left, it still had problems that wouldn't arrive in Scotland for several more years.

I discovered this on my first week of school when my English teacher gave the class an essay assignment to write about a "pot party." The other students thought this was hilarious, but I was completely befuddled. The only pot party I could imagine was one where a group of people brought over their fat-blackened chip pots and made a huge load of steaming, hot chips.

Now, although that sounded like a fun time to me as I loved a good poke of vinegar-soaked chips, the teacher went on to say that our story should end with the police arriving at the door and the consequences that would entail.

I had to raise my hand.

What the heck could the criminal charges be? Too much hot fat bubbling on top of a stove at the same time?

I was clueless. Drugs just hadn't entered the mainstream of Scottish education at that time. We had alcohol and violence--I knew all about that. You would be hard pressed to find any schoolboy or girl who hadn't been a victim and/or witness to some horrific thuggery, but drugs weren't part of that--not yet.

In Canada, however, every teenager was well versed about cannabis and all its various and colorful aliases.

It sounds horribly naive, but I didn't even know what you did with it.

The teacher seemed dumbfounded when she had to explain to the foreign kid--who, with the exception of his bright ginger hair, looked just like everyone else in class--that pot was an illegal plant that grew all over Canada (but especially in British Columbia) that people dried and smoked to get high.

As you can imagine, the other students loved this and my status quickly dropped from unusual but kinda cute foreign kid to weird loser who no one could understand.

I further cemented my weird reputation when the school announced that the first theme day of the year was Greaser Day. Naturally, I once again had no clue what a greaser was, but I was determined to find out.

No one sticks out further on theme day than the kid without a costume--or so I thought.

In my research of greaserdom, I discovered it was a term used to describe a 1950s-style rocker. No problem. My dad, a joiner from Burnbank, and my mum, a Glasgow seamstress, had met at the big city dancehalls that were all the rage in the '50s and '60s. My dad was so cool back then that he spent his carpentry paycheques on handmade suits from an Italian tailor and had even won a contest to meet Bill Haley and His Comets on their first visit to the UK.

I told my parents that I wanted to look like a '50s rocker, and they did their best. Unfortunately, the '50s in Glasgow was an entirely different beast from the '50s in Canada. Canada basically stole its '50s memories from America, or more specifically from American TV shows and movies that glamorized that era.

So while every other kid looked like The Fonz from Happy Days in black leather jacket, white T-shirt, blue jeans and greased hair, I arrived looking dapper in a collared shirt and skinny tie, suit jacket borrowed from my mum, and my unruly hair blow-dried into a giant, orange pompadour.

After that disaster, even the really weird kids started ostracizing me.

Fortunately, I switched schools at the end of that year and was given a chance to start again. This time my accent was not quite as broad (although I still cling to it even to this day); I knew what the traditional teenage delicacies of Slurpees, Hoagies and Big Macs were; I could use cool words like "keen" and "keen-o"; I had a cowboy hat for the summer and a toque for the winter; I became an avid downhill skier and I even learned how to roller-skate.

I never stopped being proud of my heritage, but I also became equally proud of growing to be more than I was, a citizen of two countries with memories in each that make me the person I am today: the weird adult with the ginger hair and a stubborn perseverance that refuses to give in even when the odds seem stacked against me.

Without that indefatigability, I would have used all those numerous rejection slips of my early work as an excuse to stop writing. Instead, they became stepping stones to become a better writer and signposts that to my stubborn, Celtic blue eyes read: Never Give Up.

m.c. grant is the author of the upcoming Midnight Ink mystery, Angel with a Bullet. You can visit the author's website here.

Lamenting the Closing of Another Independent Bookstore

By Beth Groundwater

I am still absorbing the sad news of the closing of the last bookstore in my new hometown, Breckenridge, Colorado. It is an independent bookstore that has been a long-time (26 years) local institution and supporter of Colorado authors: Weber's Books & Drawings. It's one of about 500 independent bookstores that have closed in the past decade, but this closing is especially tough for us Breckenridge residents because Weber's is our only bookstore.

Owners Jolanta and Charles Weber have become friends, and I sympathize with their desire to retire and enjoy some relaxation away from the pressures of running their own business. They had tried to find a buyer for the store for a couple of years, but with no takers, they made the reluctant decision to close the store and are selling off their inventory at 35% off list prices.

Jolanta and Charles have been actively hand-selling my books even before I made Breckenridge my full-time home. They sold over seventy copies of my To Hell in a Handbasket title that is set in Breckenridge, and they have displayed two shelves of my autographed titles on an end-cap that faces the front door of the store. I'm definitely going to miss having that local showcase!

And its not just Breckenridge residents and Colorado authors who are lamenting the store closing. Visitors to our area who return year after year have been coming in to say their goodbyes to Jolanta and Charles. Some customers have cried. We will all miss the personal touch they brought to selecting just the right books for our reading tastes. A great article about the closing, including a photo of the store owners was included in the Summit Daily News.

Below is a photo from a signing of To Hell in a Handbasket that Weber's hosted. The woman with me is Jolanta Weber. Notice that she even dressed in colors to match the book cover. What a businesswoman! I was hoping to have a signing for my May release, Wicked Eddies, at Weber's, but now I'll have to find another local venue.


How about you? Do you have a favorite nearby bookstore? Or did you have one, and it's now closed? How do you feel about the recent trend of bookstore closings?

Decisions, Decisions

Cricket McRae

Last weekend I led a workshop on avoiding self-sabotage at the Northern Colorado Writers Conference. Even when I proposed it to the conference director, I wondered if anyone would show up. The things that writers do to get in their own way often seem like dirty little secrets.

All of us are, after all, highly efficient, well-organized, fabulous time managers, and understand that nothing is ever perfect so we know when to stop agonizing and move on. Furthermore, we never procrastinate. Ever.

Right?

Nevertheless, I thought I’d share one thing I learned when putting the workshop together. This is about writing, but also applies to just about any other artistic endeavor.

I went to hear the comedian Lewis Black speak when he was on a book tour about six years ago. He said, with his typical New York sass, that it would be a good long time before he wrote another book. Someone asked him why.

“Because when you’re writing a book it feels like you’re a ten-year-old boy, and it’s Sunday night, and you haven’t even started your homework yet. And it feels like that ALL THE TIME.”

I laughed. I winced. It struck home.

There can be so much anxiety about not writing when you’re not writing. How can that not provide the impetus to chuck your dinner plans, put the kids to bed at six, and race to the keyboard?

Because writing can also cause anxiety. And if it doesn’t, at least sometimes, then it’s possible we’re not challenging ourselves quite enough.

But why would it cause anxiety?

Because we have to make decisions. In fact, we make decisions about every single aspect of writing. Even after we’ve decided between fiction and nonfiction, long or short, genre, subgenre, and even sub-subgenre, we have to decide about plot, subplot, setting, character, scene placement, pacing, overarching themes and meaning. And then? Every sentence and every word is a decision. The more we do it the easier some of those decisions become, but they’re still there. Then comes the editing – what to keep, what to toss, what to add.

Not to mention the decisions we have to make once we’re finished. After we’ve actually decided we’re finished, of course.

Yeah, yeah. Life if full of decisions. So what’s the big deal? Buck up.

Of course. But it’s helpful to be aware that decisions are exhausting. Literally, physically exhausting. Our brain makes up about 4% of of our physiology, but uses 20% of the available glucose in our bodies. The more it has to work making decisions, the more glucose it uses.

In study after study, subjects who have recently eaten display more willpower than those who don’t. (Hello, procrastinators! Have a snack and try again!)

They also make better – or at least better thought-out – decisions. For example, a study of judges showed that they were more likely to grant parole to prisoners whose parole hearings were first thing in the morning or shortly after lunch. If a prisoner was unlucky enough to be scheduled for a hearing late in the afternoon the chances that they’d be granted parole went way down.

It was determined that was in part because the judges had used up the ready glucose in their systems and so tended, in essence, to not decide by simply choosing the status quo. It was also in part because they were suffering from decision fatigue. The more decisions you make, the harder the next one will be.

And we already have a lot of choices in our lives already. I don’t know about you, but after a good, strong writing session of three or four hours I can walk away feeling stretched thin and acting pretty spaced out. Forget asking me what I want for dinner.

Does any of this resonate with you, whether in writing or another form of creating? Or does it sound like a bunch o’ hooey?

(p.s. – the workshop was packed!)

Killing the Good Guys

by Kathleen Ernst

I recently joined a book group to discuss my Chloe Ellefson mysteries, and one of the members had a question I hadn’t fielded before. In the first book, Old World Murder, a very nice character is killed about mid-way through. “How can you create such an appealing character and then kill him off?” she asked.

We discussed the choice of victims in murder mysteries, and the conversation moved on. However, I’ve been thinking more about it. In the second Chloe mystery, The Heirloom Murders, two nice people are killed. In The Light Keeper’s Legacy, which comes out in October, another nice person takes the hit.

I didn’t plan to kill a sympathetic character per se. In each case, the victim suited the needs of the story. Creating a sympathetic victim can up the emotional stakes too, making it even more important to find the killer and bring him/her to justice.

I’m well into the opening stages of writing a fourth Chloe mystery. In this one, by chance, I took the opposite approach. The victim is a generally unpleasant woman. Once the crime is committed lots of people can go on the suspect list because she did so many not-nice things to so many people.

Obviously, there is no right or wrong approach. I do think, though, that I’ll try to keep balance in mind as the series progresses.

How about you? Do you prefer your mysteries to include unlikeable murder victims? Do you appreciate the extra heart-tug when a favorite character dies? Or does it not matter? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

http: kathleenernst.com

image courtesy Simon Howden, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=404

It Really IS About the Journey.

Hello there.

It took me a long time to figure out what I was going to write about today. I just couldn't figure out what to say. Did I really have anything to say?

What I decided on came to me as I sat here at my old desk, a desk my wife found for me on Craigslist. It's from the 1930's. Solid wood, chipped and scarred. One of the drawers has the remains of an old card still glued to the handle, both card and glue now deeply yellowed. The spidery writing on the card, barely visible, says simply, "Red Sox Yearbooks". There's some other writing below that, but I can't make it out. I think it says "1952".

This desk has had a journey, and that's a fact.

Just like most writers. We are in the midst of a journey. That's really what, for me, writing is all about: the journey.

Case in point: back on Friday, I signed my first book contract. A surreal moment for me, as I'd been working to get here for a very, very long time. Many, many years. A HELLUVA lot of sacrafice. I signed in blue pen, as I'd heard that's what you're supposed to do with contracts. I figure one of those copies will be returned me after being countersigned. I'm going to put the front sheet in a frame and put it up on my wall. It'll be one of the "road signs" along the way.

I've finally approached a turning point in my career. Definitely the ending of one phase, and the beginning of the next.

Why am I talking about this? Well, on my bedside table is a copy of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces." I haven't read it in years, not since I started writing back in like 1997. The book got me thinking again about Joseph Campbell in general, and how brilliant and awakened he was. I think one of my most favorite quotes by him is this one: "Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls."

That is SO true. It's happened for me.

I had realized, back in my early twenties, that I was just not going to make a lot of money at some day job/career sort of thing. That just wasn't me. I wanted to learn to play blues guitar and play in clubs all over this country and overseas. That didn't work out, BUT that led me to painting. (I DO still play blues guitar everyday though, lol. Love it LOUD!) I painted for ten years, selling some of my work, but then one day I realized I'd hit a wall. I didn't know how to paint through it, but through THAT incident I got the bug to write.

And that was how my writing career started. The WHY of it starting was because I followed my bliss. And that can, again, mean a LOT of sacrifice. Money for drinks and dinner with friends was instead given over to paints and canvas and later on, paper and postage.

And then there's the time needed to follow your bliss. You.Need.To.Have.The.Time. And that's definitely one of the harder aspects of this whole thing. The time needed, along with your desire and need to commit to the journey itself. That's not an easy thing, for sure. Especially in today's culture that's all about fitting as much into your day as possible, at all cost. The people around you, and your loved ones figure into this, too, let me tell you. I've been blessed with a VERY understanding spouse, who is also my biggest cheerleader. When I get paid for the book, she's going to get a BIG prize for being so supportive of my journey. It's been so earned, many times over, I can tell you. :-)

I can sit here today and tell you that what Campbell was talking about is true. 100% true. If you follow your path, that path that is laid out only FOR YOU, then doors WILL open for you that would not have opened for someone else had they been standing in that exact same spot.

I've spent the last fifteen years following this writing path, and I've enjoyed every step, even the ones when I step in a pile of... well, you get me, I'm sure. :-)

One part of my journey is now over, and the next is now underway. I wish ALL of you success in following your bliss, and that when those doors open for you, the joy that fills you as you walk through is enough to fill the heavens.

Best,

RKLewis