Les vacances et l’ecriture*

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 1 Comment

* Vacations and Writing
by Margaret Lucke

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer,
life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”
–Eugene Ionescu

Ionesco may be right. Even when writers take time off, our brains keep chugging away on the story. Plot details pop into mind at odd moments. Characters whisper secrets in our ear. No matter what we’re doing, the story is humming in the background.

So, yes, we’re always writing. But that doesn’t mean we have to stay chained to our desks. Sometimes a change of pace in a fresh environment—in other words, a vacation—is exactly what our creativity needs.

A writers group I belonged to for many years used to have a wonderful tradition. Each autumn, we held our own writers retreat. We rented a pair of cottages in the nearby seaside town of Stinson Beach and spent a week there writing. No phones. No TV. No families. No errands to run. Just our stories and the companionship of other writers. We each had our own room to work in and a long beach to walk on. Fresh air. The sounds of the wind and the gulls. Everyone brought her own food for breakfast and lunch. In the evenings we took turns making dinner and gathered by the fireplace for wine and conversation. We went home with our spirits rejuvenated and lots of work accomplished.

Then our horizons expanded. One of our members, Joan, was offered the opportunity to spend September and October of that year in a grand maison in a medieval hilltop village in Provence. The cost was extremely reasonable, and the house would accommodate a large number of guests. Why not, she suggested, hold our annual retreat there?

So off we went to Venasque, which is to be considered one of the most beautiful of Provençal villages. It sits east of Avignon in the midst of vineyards and lavender fields, near the slopes of Mont Ventoux, the southernmost peak of the Alps. Its church was built in 1100s, next to a baptistery that dates all the way back to the 6th century. It is said that the baptistery was built on the site of a temple to Venus, the goddess of love who is still honored in the village’s name.

Not all of our writing group members could stay for the full two months but each of us got there for at least a few days, as did some of Joan’s other friends. I spent all of October in France, one of the most memorable months of my life.

The days quickly settled into an agreeable rhythm. Churchbells woke me at seven. I’d read in bed or write at the table in my pretty blue bedroom until nine. That gave me time for breakfast before the daily tour began at ten. Several of us would take off in our leased car to visit a museum or a monastery, or explore a Roman ruin or another medieval town, or stroll through a picturesque outdoor market. We’d stop at a patisserie with an outdoor terrace for a café crème and a pain au chocolat, then head home for dinner and a glass or two of the local wine. Around nine we’d start drifting to our rooms, some to sleep, others like me to write for a couple of hours.

We were enthusiastic tourists, yet we got a lot of work done. There was no computer, no phone, no TV, no billboards along the roads, no job to go to—just as at Stinson Beach, we had none of the constant distractions and demands for attention that we experienced in our normal lives. And there were plenty of new sights, sounds, and scents to stimulate both our senses and our mental story engines. Going home was hard, yet the positive effects of the trip lasted for a long time. I still get a boost just from the memories.

France was a hard act to follow, and that trip proved to be the writing group’s last retreat. The next year, and again the one after, we couldn’t find a week when we were all free to go to Stinson Beach, and sadly the tradition died.

Right now, as the summer vacation season wraps up, I’m feeling the stirrings of writer’s wanderlust. Surely a sojourn like my adventures in Stinson Beach and the south of France would help me move forward with my current novel-in-progress. If the power of positive thinking really works, I’ll soon find a good way to combine les vacances et l’ecriture—vacation and writing—no matter what Ionescu says.

The painting of Venasque is by artist Lawrence Yamamoto, a member of our group. 

* * *

This fall I will be teaching a course called The Craft of Writing for UC Berkeley’s Extension program. Ten Thursday evenings, September 10 through November 12, 6–9 pm Pacific time. If you are interested in learning more, you can find out by clicking here.

Real Murder

~ Nancy Lynn Jarvis ~ 4 Comments

In my last post I promised a cover reveal and more interesting outtakes about “A Faire to Remember,” the book my editor is reviewing, in this month’s post. Now, that lighthearted missive isn’t going to be posted until September.

I write murder mysteries for fun and hopefully for my readers entertainment. I’ve had my protagonists, Regan McHenry from the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries series and more recently Pat Pirard of the PIP Inc. Mysteries series find bodies and sometimes know the murder victim. I ‘ve done my best to have them react realistically to what those discoveries and events felt like. What I wrote doesn’t come close to what it really feels like to have someone you know die, a real victim of murder.

There’s an order and logic to the murders I make up. The victim did something in the past that caught up with them; their existence is an obstacle between the killer and something they want; they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and heard or saw something that threated their killer.

From the killer’s perspective, there’s a solid reason for committing murder: money, sex, revenge or to avenge a real or perceived injustice. At the very least, their victim poses a threat to them. During the final scenes in my books as in all cozy mysteries, the murderer explains why they did it. Most of my killers rationalized what they’ve done because, in their eyes, murder was justified or necessary. In fourteen books I’ve only written one murderer who was completely evil, the rest were flawed people, and in a couple of instances I expected my readers to sympathize with the killer.

When I killed a character who is still one of my favorites in the first book I wrote, it upset me so much that my husband found me curled up on the sofa shaking and sobbing; It all seemed so real to me. But, no matter how much I imagined it, it wasn’t real.  On July 21st I found out exactly what it feels like to lose someone you know in a senseless murder.

Rachell Summers was stabbed to death on a pleasant summer day just before 1:00 in the afternoon. Her killer is a nineteen-year-old man she didn’t know and had never met. He turned himself in within an hour of her death. He said he wanted to murder someone and she came into view.  He said he stabbed her eleven times as she cried, “Help me.” There is no order, no logic, in why she died and that is almost as troubling as her death.

Discovering that Rachell, the manager of a store that carries my books, had been murdered started out slowly with curiosity. News stories said a woman had been stabbed to death near the food court exit at the Capitola Mall. Wow, that’s the door I use when restocking books at Art of Santa Cruz because it’s close to the store. The next time I saw her, I was going to have to ask Rachell what the commotion inside the mall was like when the police were searching for the killer.

As the day progressed, news dribbled out mostly about the killer. I tried calling the store several times; no one answered and there wasn’t an outgoing message explaining why. That was odd. Like my protagonist chasing down clues I became suspicious and started doing research.

Someone released a post saying the victim’s name was Rachell Summers. It was taken down immediately. The police announced that her name was being withheld pending notification of her next of kin. I started to feel ill. I couldn’t remember Rachell’s last name, but I knew she spelled her first name in an unusual way. Had I misread that quick release? I had sent her messages so I knew she would be on my contacts list. I typed in “Rachell” and her last name and email address popped up. No. No, it can’t be. Confirmation came later in the day, and when it did, it felt like a gut punch.

I’ve thought about trying to write a book where a murder like Rachell’s happens. I won’t, though because I know I couldn’t make it work. Her death was unimaginable.

To Narrate or Not To Narrate? What a Question! by Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 4 Comments

In my novel debuting August 15th, Cleopatra almost Slept Here, I discovered I was writing narration for pages and pages and pages. My bad. One cannot/should not/must not do excessive narration. I was taught that in every writing class I took. Although, I’m not completely sure why you mustn’t. How did the “show not tell” aspect of writing come into popularity? When Wilkie Collins wrote two pages describing the act of simply opening a door I was right there with him — along with the rest of the world — devouring his words.

For those who may not remember off-hand who Wilkie Collins was, he was a pioneering English novelist and playwright (1824-1889). His most famous works include The Woman in White (1859), one of the earliest mystery novels, and The Moonstone (1868), considered by many to be the first modern English detective novel. I lifted that last sentence from the Great God Google. No doubt one of GGG’s AI buddies lifted it beforehand from a long-suffering author. There’s a history of that sort of thing. But that is another post.

Picture this: we are in Egypt. A character is standing before the Grand Pyramid. As the author, you want to wax poetic about the experience. The problem as I see it about not doing plain narrative when your heart and soul sings for it, is that then you need to have at least two people in the scene. Being pretty sharp, I realized right away it would be no good to have a character carry on a discussion with the pyramid because it was going to be short. Not the pyramid. The Great Pyramid is tall. And wide. And astonishing. But the conversation was going to be — shall we say — fairly one-sided. Unless it’s a paranormal or sci-fi. I don’t write any of those, but okay, we will imagine a conversation between a person — whom we shall call X — and the Great Pyramid:

X: “Helloooooo, GP. How are you feeling today? Old? ha-ha.” Silence. “Now that we’re alone together, I’ve been wanting to tell you this joke. What did the pyramid say to the pharaoh?” Silence. ” Don’t know? Are you ready for it?? I’ll bet you were dying to see me. Ha-ha.” Now at this point, if the pyramid doesn’t throw one of its small car-sized stones at X to end this idiot’s very existence, I’d like to know why.

When you’re standing in front of one of the seven wonders of the world, it’s a phenomenal moment. It’s a time that makes most writers want to describe the emotions, sights, and sounds in great detail. And that would be down to a spider crawling up one enormous, car-sized stone of the 2.3 million that make up the Great Pyramid. This is when a picture is NOT worth a thousand words. The words are right.

Putting aside the narration, Cleo Blah Blah has many people chatting with one another about just about everything. Families tend to do that. At least, the Alvarez family does. Often, it was more of how do I shut them up? So, it was easy for me to have dialog that informed, entertained, or thrilled … hopefully. But still, that didn’t keep me from describing the scenery, the action, the story, when I thought it was needed. Narration. Grounding in so many ways.

But when is enough enough? The time for me to back off from narration is when I begin to bore myself with silly imagery like the sun dancing across the rippling waters of the Nile. For the fifteenth time. Or when I’m in the middle of pounding on the keyboard and suddenly throw my hands in the air and cry out, “Who cares, you ninny? Get on with it!”

So, this ninny gets on with it. Or tries to. Like now. I’m done.

Guest Blogger ~ M.E. Proctor

~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

The Call of the Road

By M.E. Proctor

The Way You Say My Name, Book 3 of the Declan Shaw mystery series, will be released in September (publisher: Shotgun Honey).

In theme and mood, this book feels different to me. Love You Till Tuesday was a classical murder mystery: a singer is found dead in her apartment; there is no apparent motive; corporate and police corruption play a major role in the story. Book 2, Catch Me on a Blue Day, started with an apparent suicide and resurrected 30-year-old ghosts. The case Declan Shaw investigates has its roots in the past and the arc of the plot is a long one.

At first sight, the canvas of Book 3 seems smaller. For one, there is no murder (not in the beginning, there isn’t). Can it still be called a mystery? The situation puzzles the cop who brings Declan on board. “I almost wish somebody died,” he says. Because a body makes things clear, we know where we are, and what is expected of the wily investigator.

So what is expected of Declan in The Way You Say My Name? He’s hired to find a woman, Amanda, who doesn’t want to be found. She’s not missing, not exactly. She phoned home to tell her parents she was fine. But didn’t say where she was or how long she would be gone. Which doesn’t reassure anybody.

And so, Declan’s quest begins. It will take him from Texas to the Atlantic seaboard, and back. It won’t be a pleasure trip. He will be broken in body and spirit, unsure of what he achieved, how much he resolved, and wondering what his intervention may have made a lot worse.

Hitting the road is a recurrent film noir theme: criminal on the run, drifter showing up in a small town creating chaos, men and women fleeing from their past and hoping for a better life in a place where nobody knows them. There’s some of that in The Way You Say My Name, with a twist when the pursuer finds out that he has, in turn, become a prey.

Declan muses: “What is people’s fascination with end of the world locations? Maybe they think nobody will come that far to find them. Amanda is exactly the kind of person who would run to the end of the landmass and stop because she can go no further.”

Declan does stop when he reaches the ocean, and believes his job is done—Amanda has been found. Only to realize he would have been much better off if he’d kept running.

In many ways, this story is a road movie. Declan’s old pickup truck eats miles of freeway and back roads. There are stops in fast food joints and gas stations, nights of uneasy sleep in a cramped cabin, stiffness in the early morning, tar-laced coffee in paper cups. Encounters too, some helpful and some not so much. It’s the end of January, nobody travels for pleasure. And when Declan reaches North Carolina, the beaches are deserted and the bitter wind bites.

Years ago, I have driven the road Declan takes. I know the stops (except the one in the Jackson, Mississippi, FBI Field Office) and the final destination. It’s funny how experiences like that don’t seep into the writing right away. It takes time for the sediments to settle.

Another road trip to West Texas has given rise to two short stories already and is now the core of the work-in-progress that might become Declan Shaw Book 4 (cross fingers). I don’t know if my more recent trips—Texas to Maine, Texas to Michigan, Texas to Montana—will eventually find a way into a narrative. I hope they do; I’m keeping a journey journal, just in case.

It feels oddly appropriate to release The Way You Say My Name this year, that marks the 100th anniversary of Route 66. A hundred years since Americans realized that there was an entire country open to explore. Hop in the car and go. Hit a few National Parks on the way. I still find it seductive to open my eyes to new horizons every morning. I was born in Europe and we don’t have the same appetite for roaming over there. Yes, people get on the road at vacation time (clogged freeways prove it) but the trip is more utilitarian: the beach awaits! There’s an element of discovery in the American approach to car travel … a vague remnant of the explorer’s spirit.

I wish I could share the cover of the new book with you … Patience, it’s coming!

—-

The Way You Say My Name

A Declan Shaw Mystery

“A spiraling game of cat versus mouse.”
—Craig Terlson, author of the Luke Fischer series

On New Year’s day, P.I. Declan Shaw is hired to investigate a disappearance. Amanda Spencer, a young mother of two, slipped away from a Christmas concert without leaving a clue. What made her run and who is she running from?

While digging up shreds of info from Amanda’s parents and friends, Declan meets Sam Chandler. She’s the kind of woman who stops him in his tracks. Sexy, smart, and complicated. And skilled at keeping secrets. So skilled Declan questions his abilities as a detective. What began as an intriguing missing person case soon shifts into a cross-country pursuit with Sam’s life in the balance.

For once, Declan isn’t the searcher, he’s the one who cannot afford to be found.

In The Way You Say My Name, narratives intertwine as a double spiral winds tighter and tighter. Amanda’s story is one of them. Protecting Sam is the other.

And the closer Declan comes to finding Amanda, the more he risks losing Sam.

Buy Links:

The Way You say My Name will be available on September 22, in eBook and paperback.

You can find Books 1 and 2 in the series on the Shotgun Honey site, here.

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. She’s the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries: Love You Till Tuesday, Catch Me on a Blue Day, and the upcoming The Way You Say My Name. She’s the author of two short story collections, Family and Other Ailments and A Book to Live By, and the co-author of the retro-noirs, Bop City Swing and Kansas City Breakdown. Her fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. She’s a Shamus and Derringer awards short story nominee. Catch Me on a Blue Day was recently nominated for a Shamus Award in the Best Original Paperback category.

Social Links

Author Website: www.shawmystery.com

On Substack: https://meproctor.substack.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/martine.proctor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEProctor3

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/meproctor.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/proctormartine/

SUMMER OF ’69

~ Kimila Kay ~ 1 Comment

Hello, Ladies ~

Well … my post is late again. I’d like to blame it on my old age; after all, I turned sixty-nine this month. But my lateness isn’t due to being a doddering old lady. On the contrary, I’ve had a wonderfully blessed birthday month celebrating another trip around the sun.

This weekend found me at Willamette Vineyards camping with a group of friends, listening to music and enjoying some very fine wine. On the downside, we were without power, and there was no internet. Of course it could always be worse … I could’ve been in a tent instead of my lovely RV!

We returned today, and I have to admit I’m pretty tired after catching up on my day job, unloading the RV, doing laundry, then cooking dinner.

I have one more celebration planned this week: attending a Jason Aldean concert in Ridgefield, Washington, with my oldest son, then spending a night at ilani Casino. Winning a big jackpot would certainly be the icing on the proverbial cake.

So, for me, this summer reminds me of these lyrics from Bryan Adams’ song “Summer of ’69” to a T.

                        “Oh, when I look back now,

                        That summer seemed to last forever.

                        And if I had the choice,

                        Yeah, I’d always wanna be there.

                        Those were the best days of my life.”

I have friends who seriously struggle with aging, one of whom asked me why I choose to write stories with younger characters. At first, it took me by surprise. Thinking about the question, I knew the answer was that I see the characters in my head and simply write what I see. After giving it more thought, though, I realized I want to start my stories with younger characters, especially in the Stoneybrook Mysteries Series, so I can grow old with them.

Yes, I said it … grow old.

Now, with each book I create an older character or two. Not because I feel like I need to capture the essence of old age, but because I feel these characters add depth to my stories. My first “older” character was Harley’s mom, Esther. I loved that I could give Esther some of my mom’s characteristics. Her judgmental assumption that her daughter could always do better than her choices. Her need to point out mistakes, no matter how small. Her eventual realization that the mistakes she’d made in her life and the lessons she learned could help Harley mend her relationship with Wyatt.

In my newest Stoneybrook novel, “Fatal Falls,” I have an old rancher, Jack Norman, who’s the last living friend of Wyatt, Blake, and Derrick’s dads. Jack is the target of a drug-fueled killer who’s looking for missing gold. The book also has a demented killer, and I used Jack’s character to create some comic relief to offset the darkness of my villains. It was fun bringing in memories from my childhood. With Jack, I was able to create a brotherhood, similar to the one my dad and uncles shared, between him, the Stone brothers, and another childhood friend. I also enjoyed having a flirtatious moment between Jack and Mercy Edwards, the owner of the Babbling Brook Café.

I’m guessing if younger readers read my books, they’d be quick to point out what I get wrong about thirty-somethings. But I knew when I created the small town of Stoneybrook that I’d want Harley and Busy, along with the rest of the cast, to live simpler lives than influencers and jet setters. I do make an effort to keep my younger characters from being me. After all, thirty-something was a long time ago. But I feel small town core values fit all age groups.

While I have no intention of slowing down at sixty-nine, I know that aging will continue to steal the days I have left. Which means time is wasting, and I can’t wait to publish my next two Stoneybrook books, “Fatal Falls” and “Jamboree Jealousy,” so I can work on my next project, “Midnight Sail.” A middle school book with a cast of characters that includes curious kids, struggling moms, a time-traveling Native American girl, and a wise-cracking parrot named Pirate.

Life is short, so live yours to the fullest, Ladies! Enjoy each trip around the sun that God gives to you!

Happy Writing ~ Kimila