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I’m a setting thief. Lots of writers are, but I always set books where I can see what’s happening which probably isn’t true of all writers. I also steal dialogue, people, and events. What that means right now is book seven in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series isn’t the one I expected to be writing. Originally, I had a great idea about using AI to facilitate a murder, and I will get around to that book, but as number eight, not number seven. What changed the story order was what happened at a two-day Christmas faire last year where I was selling my books when opportunities for theft of setting, dialogue, characters, and of course murder, presented themselves and I decided to steal all of them.

The faire was held at the fire station in spaces normally reserved for huge engines and in the other rooms reserved for meetings, food prep, overnight sleeping, and storage of all sorts of equipment and supplies the firefighters use. The engines were discretely relocated outside for the event and I was lucky enough to be assigned a booth in the part of the fire station where they normally were housed.

Fire engines are incredibly tall vehicles so the garage part of the firehouse had ceilings high enough to accommodate them. Lighting was supplied by banks of lights built into the ceiling. As we vendors began setting up our booths on Saturday morning, one of the lights over where I was started strobing, flashing on and off with bright bursts of light. It was disturbing and likely to cause headaches or worse if we had to try and work under such conditions.

The firefighters, as firefighters do, rushed to help. They took a tall ladder off one of the engines and placed it under the offending light. A brave young firefighter climbed it and decided which florescent lightbulb was the trouble maker. He shouted down to us that he thought it would be an easy fix, but when he removed the bulb, the whole bank went dark. A search for a replacement bulb was started, but it seemed the fire station with its vast stores of equipment was out of lights of that length. He replaced the bulb, towels were collected, and an attempt was made to wrap them around the offending bulb. It didn’t work. The only way to stop the light from causing us all to lose our sanity was to cover the entire bank of lights.

The strobing stopped, but some of us were plunged into late-afternoon-post-time-change darkness. We needed light to show off our wares. Many vendors were distraught. We tried to help one another with some booth occupiers switching places, but there were still problems. Lamps, hurriedly gathered from other rooms in the fire station satisfied some of our needs, but there were many unhappy people and one vendor remained outraged at how dark his space was and caused a scene. At that moment, I decided to kill him.

The light situation presented a great opportunity to do so. No stabbings or poisonings for him. No gunshots. He was going to die by electrocution. My creative, or should I say warped, mind immediately came up with some ideas for how his murder would take place and a clever twist about who his killer was. All I was missing was a motive for his murder since it didn’t seem reasonable to kill him for being annoying. By the time the faire was over on Sunday afternoon, I had watched how other vendors moved around the faire, who covered for whom for food runs and bathroom visits, and where firefighters slipped off to for breaks. I had many red herring suspects with opportunity…but still no motive.

Writers know that sometimes you just have to stop pondering and sleep on it; which was exactly what I did. The motive came to me in the middle of the night, not exactly in a dream, but in a moment of sleepless restlessness.

 “A Faire to Remember” will be out later this year. A cover reveal and more about the book in next month’s post.

It can be done but straighten your lederhosen, it will be tough. When I started my latest book of the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, Cleopatra Almost Slept Here (set to debut mid-August), I thought it would be an easy write. Here was my reasoning: A – it would be my 19^th novel, the 11^th of the Alvarez series. By now I should know what I’m doing. Pardon my naivete. B – It takes place in Egypt. I love Egypt. It is a country chockful of history, hope, and filled with wonderful people. I even met a sweetheart of a camel named KFC who so captivated me, he became a central part of the novel. So, wouldn’t you think this would be an easy book to write? Pardon my belly-laugh.

Here was my problem: Book 9 of the series is called The Drop-Dead Temple of Doom. It takes place in the jungles of Guatemala and is about, among other things, ancient Mayans, their temples, and their pyramids. Book 11, Cleopatra almost Slept Here, takes place in the deserts of Egypt and is about, among other things, ancient Egyptians, their temples, and their pyramids. These minor similarities got by me until I finished writing the first chapter of Cleo blah-blah. Then something seemed eerily familiar. Sure enough, it was almost word for word as chapter one of Drop-Dead.

After realization clobbered me over the head, I buried my face in the warm, furry belly of one of our two cats, Niles, sleeping on his back next to the monitor with all four paws in the air. Niles has gained a few pounds as of late and his belly was soooo comforting and soft. But his ‘tude was not.

Said feline is on a diet, as is his twin sister, Daphne, who has to lose a pound or two herself. Like any hungry being whose food supply has been rationed, he was not in a good mood. Instead of lying there purring and patting my head with a paw in a ‘there, there’ fashion, he got up, jumped off my desk, and ran to his cereal bowl. A bowl, which as far as he was concerned, was seeing too much light of day and not enough action. He began caterwauling. I’m sure if he could have gotten to any pots and pans, he would have started banging on them with a spoon.  He was joined at the cereal bowls by Daphne who is never one to let a good time go on without her. She began yowling in harmony. My not-so-little love buckets.

After giving them a limited amount of treats, for which there was no thanks, I went back to my problem: how to keep Cleo from bearing any resemblance to Drop-Dead, especially with me being my own worst enemy. That meant I had to throw away any preconceived notions of the novel.  How can I make a story different when it takes place in a foreign country as exotic and magical as Egypt? Then I had it. While in Egypt, my protagonist, Lee Alvarez, was not going to see one single sight. She would be too busy solving ‘the mystery.’ Imagine the frustration? While the family visits such places as the Valley of the Kings, she tackles thieves, hides in closets, and files reports at Egyptian police stations, which are, as she says, surprisingly similar to American ones.

That meant there wouldn’t be a lot of travelogue. But still there would be KFC who likes to bury his face in Lee’s neck while making a sound somewhere between a hum and a purr. To the left is KFC and me in Giza. When I met him, he did that to me. Of course, I initiated it by wrapping my arms around his neck and hugging him. When he began to hum/purr, I knew I had to have him in my story. My great big love-bucket.

There are also no heavy-duty descriptions of well-known tourist destinations, either. Well, I did throw in the pyramids. One has to. When seen in person, the pyramids are astonishing. And then there’s the Nile River. But Lee gets to know the Nile a little better than she wants. She has to jump in to save … hmmm. Too much info?

Cleopatra almost Slept Here is a mystery about a family on the vacation of a lifetime that seems to be out to kill them. Menacing notes, car chases, Egyptian cobras, crumbling temples, passenger ships that go nowhere, and a drug lord with an appetite for murder are only part of the daily routine. The final draft came back from the editors and the beta readers seem to like this story. They are calling it another winner. Yay! And it’s nothing like Drop-Dead.

On to Daphne and Niles’ success rate. Or, rather, lack of it. After a weigh in, neither of them lost or gained an ounce! As that didn’t seem possible, I reflected. The vet told me to give them ¼ cup of food each, but I was thinking about Cleo blah-blah at the time and neglected to ask how many times a day I should do this. Was it three? Six? Hmmm. I may have another ‘realization’ moment ahead of me. Where’s that warm, fat, furry belly?

Below is what I hope is the final version of the cover. I just love it, but the CA may still have a tweak or two.

Back in the Dark Ages, probably only in the 1980s though it feels like it was that long ago, I was hired to edit the manuscript of a visiting scholar at MIT who was considered “very important.” As a result, another academic had already taken a pass over his ms before it was sent to the press and then to me. I don’t know why they did this, but they did. It was probably a warning, akin to carrots are good for you, and so is liver.

The ms was pretty clean, as we say, and I settled down for what I considered an easy job. My biggest decision was how to style certain topic titles that he used throughout the book. I scanned the pages, saw no consistent choice had been made, and picked a format that wouldn’t clutter up the page visually and yet be clear for the reader. I chugged along happily, with few other editorial issues to slow me down, and turned in the ms on time. Piece of cake.

About a week later I heard from the helpful academic who had read the ms first and, unknown to me (and not evident to me or anyone else), had made some stylistic choices that, in my drive for consistency, I had reversed, and instead imposed another stylistic choice, mine. To this day I still wonder that he thought he had sent over a completely edited ms.

I rarely edited fiction, but when we first set up the Larcom Review, in 1998, that changed, and I learned that writers of fiction have a different attitude to editing compared to writers of nonfiction, and I don’t argue with it most of the time. In one short story, the only change I made was to remove a single comma. The author restored it. The story was not, I hasten to explain, a mystery but a literary story, so perhaps that explains it.

Editing is always on my mind, but especially now because the editors at Crime Spell Books are editing the sixth anthology this summer. Death Camas will be out in the fall, in October, but the work is done in the summer. The other editors have turned in their changes, and I’m adding mine. So far the editors fall into two camps, those who take out commas, and those who put them in. My job is to integrate my edits and approve the ms changes overall.

At this point in a discussion about editing someone always pops up with the infamous quote: “Consistency—the hobgoblin of small minds.” At which point I used to send them to some poorly edited books so they could enjoy a text free of consistency and even coherence sometimes.

The trouble with editing is we all need it, no one wants to admit they need it, and amateurs aren’t really clear on what it is or entails. But it’s good for all of us, like veggies. One or two of my Beta readers have also been editors and I always looked forward to what I could learn from their reports and responses. Good editing is like a healthy dessert, an oatmeal cookie instead of a chocolate torte, after a healthy main course of composing the ms.

I’ve stretched the food metaphor till it’s ready to snap, if I can mix metaphors here (and I can because I’m the author), but we all come up against editing. How we feel about it is key to how much we’ll benefit from it. I try to tell other writers that it doesn’t mean they have to take every suggestion (and each editorial change should be considered a suggestion), but they should care enough about their work to think about why the editor made the change. Is the editor following a strict grammatical rule that offers no flexibility? Does the change take a light-hearted verbal twist and reduce it to a pedestrian phrase? Does the editorial change erase an allusion to another story or author, something to entertain the well-read mystery fan? Is the editor’s change clarifying an idea the author struggled with but couldn’t quite express satisfactorily?

Editing is work. If you love working with words, as I do, it can also be fun. Done with respect for the work and the author, editing can steady a ms, an overarching idea, strengthen the work’s best qualities. Editor and author always have the same goal: to take a good book and make it better.

Good morning, Ladies ~

I hope everyone had a wonderful Father’s Day weekend. Ours was filled with yard work and cabin remodeling, which left me so exhausted that I fell asleep on the couch last night before I posted this piece.

Who remembers this question from many years ago: “How many licks?”

I recently finished the sixth book in my Stoneybrook Mystery Series, “Fatal Falls.” When I begin a Stoneybrook novel, I’ve fleshed out the basics, such as what joys or challenges my heroine, Harley Harper, is facing. What crime was committed by my dark and twisty villain that Sheriff Wyatt Stone and his deputies will need to solve? What issues or romantic tidbits might make Wyatt and Harley’s relationship interesting? Of course, I also need to create entertaining situations for my supporting characters and animal actors, too.

Once I’m ten chapters in, I usually have all these plot points introduced, and then I’m off to the races, headed for the “The End” finish line.

When I write a book, I carry the storyline around in my head and love when a fabulous idea for a character pops into my mind. Generally, this plot point will be important to my character’s story arc. I write the scene in my mind, then add it to my list of plans for my characters.

And hence the question: How many licks? Except insert words for licks. The answer is so, so many! I mean, seriously, there are a lot of … the, this, that, is, was, said, he, she, them, they, who, what, when, where, etc. Even though I can’t wait to place the various scenes I’ve conjured up, I know I need to set up each scenario. Keep the reader engaged with other aspects of the story until they reach what I believe is a wonderful plot turn.

So, I plod along, one important word after another. When I reach the middle (or what I estimate to be the middle) of the book, I can tell the storyline is heading in the right direction. Excitement builds since I know I’m getting close to the places I want my previously developed ideas to go. Imagine my frustration when the story takes a slight detour from my intended path, changing where those fabulous ideas will go. Two of the four excellent plot points will now be near and at the end of the book.

I wanted to create a sense of separation in Harley and Wyatt’s romance. We find Harley dealing with a pregnant stray Lab, a blind horse, and her seeing-eye donkey, not to mention her bestie, Busy, is avoiding her. Wyatt is juggling a murdered family friend, a body in Broken River, a missing woman, and the search for hidden gold. And what love story doesn’t need a little strife to keep readers on their toes? In this plot point scene, we find Wyatt and Harley at a country honky tonk bar. When a woman from Wyatt’s past escorts him to the dance floor, Harley watches from the sidelines as he leads the mysterious female in a slow, sensual version of the country swing. How many words did it take to arrive at this scene? 68,044

Fast forward to 119,748 words, where we find Wyatt and Harley fishing as part of a plan to locate a killer Wyatt has been hunting for over a year. When the killer realizes he’s close to being captured, he puts his escape plan in motion, and in another 4,272 words, my villain finally meets the fitting ending I had planned for him from the very beginning of the book. It only took 124,020 words to get there. I breathe a sigh of relief when my villain meets his end, thinking I’m close to typing “The End.” Oh, silly me …

After I placed the first plot point at the halfway mark, I started to feel as if this book had a mind of its own and no intention of stopping at my initially planned word count. This becomes more obvious as I write my way toward the ending I’ve imagined from the very first words of “Fatal Falls.” But “The End” looms in the distance like a floating finish line. I take a deep breath and focus on ensuring all the story threads I’ve woven throughout the book are resolved.

Do Harley and Busy find their way back to their “bestie” status? Does Daisy, the blind mare and her seeing-eye donkey, Mo, find their forever home? And will Maggie, the Lab, survive a difficult puppy delivery?

So … finally, Chapter Ninety-Eight is ready to be written, and it only took 130,935 words to get to Harley and Wyatt’s closing scene, and the ever-elusive “The End” arrives at 132,185 words.

With this book, I’ve learned that my creative brain, along with my characters, plan to insert ideas about how a story will be told. It may have only taken three licks to get to the center of a tootsie pop, but I obviously have no idea how many words it takes to bring my stories to an end.

Happy Writing, Ladies ~