The Story Within the Story

November 16, 2015November 15, 2015 ~ janegorman ~ 2 Comments

One of the things I love about murder mysteries – traditional mysteries such as those I write, cozy mysteries, police procedurals, noir, all of them – is that the investigation is simultaneously crucial to the story and tangential to it.

The mystery, the puzzle the detective – and the reader along with her – has to solve is “whodunit”?

But before that, long before the butler is strangled or the chef chopped up or the heiress shot, before any of those things, there’s another story. The story behind the crime. The story of the criminal.

I love writing about the criminal. What intrigues me, what challenges me as an author, is writing that story. Because you have to write it within the story of the detective.

The detective who solves the puzzle is the protagonist. He examines the dead body, sees the scene of the crime. She must dig up clues, talk to witnesses, learn about the character and background of the suspects. That all happens on the page.

The other story, embedded deep within the surface story, is the story of the criminal. In my books, this person’s story starts long before the detective shows up. A wrong was endured, for example. Or an innocent mistake made. A mistake that snowballs. That propels someone inexorably toward murder.

As an author, I can’t simply go back and write that story. It would ruin the puzzle! It’s a hidden story. Somehow, I have to find a way to paint a picture of events happening now in a way that exposes events of long before.

Telling the killer’s story means revealing feelings, actions and thoughts that led the killer to commit the crime. Exploring the passions that drove him months, perhaps years, earlier. But telling them in such a way that the reader experiences them as if they were new, fresh wounds.

That’s the story within the story of any murder mystery. The story of the killer. A story of pain, despair and ultimately a story of evil. A story that unfolds, bit by bit, piece by piece, as the detective unravels the killer’s lies, exposes the killer until his story rises to the surface.

The detective’s story and the killer’s story intertwine. By the end of the book, the two stories collide. The puzzle pieces all fit together.

Dreaming up an Amateur Sleuth by Paty Jager

November 9, 2015November 7, 2015 ~ patyjag ~ 7 Comments

Dream your dreams with your eyes closed…

But live your Dreams with your eyes open—

~Cherokee~

The amateur sleuth in my Shandra Higheagle Mystery Series is half Nez Perce. She was raised to hide her Native American heritage when her Nez Perce father died and her mother remarried. However, her paternal grandmother kept in touch, and Shandra spent a summer during her teen-age years with her grandmother on the reservation. Her grandmother said Shandra had powers. When Shandra announced that at home her mother and step-father quickly made her see it was an old woman’s way to making an awkward teenaged girl feel special–nothing more.

As an adult, Shandra visits her grandmother more and is interested in discovering more about her roots. But her grandmother dies, leaving Shandra a note requesting she attend the Seven Drum Ceremony after the funeral.

While in the midst of murders and mystery, Shandra’s grandmother comes to her in dreams showing her clues to the true murderer. While Shandra investigates the dreams and discovers helpful information, she has a hard time believing the dreams and her grandmother’s presence.

This is the information I came up with when I was brainstorming who my amateur sleuth would be in the mystery series I wanted to write. I started with the niggling that I wanted a Native American character. But not being Native American myself, I didn’t know the first thing about being from that heritage. That’s when I came up with the idea of her being kept from those roots. It allowed me to discover Shandra’s heritage as she is discovering it, a piece at a time.

To add a bit more of the “mysticism” or “dreamer” qualities to the Native American element I have her deceased grandmother come to her in dreams. Visions and dreams are instrumental in Native American culture. This was my way of drawing on elements that could be intrinsic to Shandra.

And all amateur sleuths need a person in law enforcement to keep them safe. I gave Shandra handsome Weippe County Detective Ryan Greer. He believes in Shandra’s dreams more than her in the beginning thanks to his Irish mother who taught him to believe in things you can’t see.

I’m enjoying getting to know Shandra and Ryan better with each book I write and having them meet the locals of Huckleberry, Idaho and the unique murders that draw Shandra into the investigations. And I can use the backdrop of the ski resort and the art communities because Shandra is a potter whose works are considered art.

What draws you to the main character in a mystery series? What elements in a character haven’t you seen that you would like to see?

www.patyjager.net

Writing into the Sunset

What Fresh Hell is This?

November 4, 2015 ~ jlsimpsonauthor ~ 1 Comment

You might think that the life of an author is all glamour and thrills, but you’d be wrong. I am looking down the barrel of a deadline and I am just not ready. My editor has already put the date back a month for me but I am still struggling. Book 3 in my series was going great guns. Things were happening, balls were in the air, juggling was going on. Nothing was going to stop me, until I got to the middle of the book. The nice shiny new was gone. The end seemed to be way too far to go. The plot was beyond my comprehension and I wanted to join my heroine in a large glass of wine.

So what do you do when you don’t want to do what you are supposed to be doing? You find something more interesting. My more interesting involved all sorts of things. Starting a diet, cooking (and if any of you knew me you’d know just how much I wanted to avoid writing if I was hanging out in the kitchen with a cook book), I started jogging again, and I decided to learn book marketing.

Can you guess which one had me running back to my half written manuscript? Yep, marketing. I’ve been buried in books on marketing, online videos, I have been wrestling with Amazon to add keywords to my books so that people can find them.

I am now in the midst of a course on how to advertise on Facebook. That is an exercise in frustration if ever there was one. I spent one evening wrestling with the Power Editor on Facebook creating an advert and nothing worked. The things I created kept disappearing. My stress levels were at maximum and the next morning I had an appointment with my doctor to get my blood pressure checked. I was shocked that it was normal because I felt like my head was going to explode.

Anyway, despite my best efforts, I am yet to crack marketing but it’s all good. For some unknown reason, whilst I was banging about screwing up everything I touched trying to give my first book away to a US audience, it took off in the UK and peaked at number two on the best sellers list in its genre. How or why that happened is still a mystery. Did someone somewhere talk it up online? Did Amazon decide to wind me up by emailing hundreds of people suggesting that they download it?

I wish I knew so that I could try and do it again. Meanwhile I have a photo of my computer screen showing how well it did and I will continue battling away trying to get a grip on book marketing. So, if you haven’t read my book…and there are millions of you…feel free to take tiptoe over to Amazon and download a copy. I need all the help I can get with this book selling lark.

You can download it at Amazon.

Halloween and the loss of innocence

November 2, 2015October 26, 2015 ~ sandyfairfax ~ 11 Comments

By Sally Carpenter

How did Halloween change from a day of fun for kids to a time of terror?

Many mystery writers like Halloween because of its spooky nature and ghosts of the dead (murdered?). The day itself is on the eve of All Saints Day, when Christians honor the giants of the faith who have gone on to their eternal reward. Today, Nov. 2, is All Souls Day to remember all of the dearly departed, especially loved ones.

But to most people, Halloween is a time of dressing in costumes, parties, special decorations, watching scary movies and that greatest tradition of all, trick-or-treating.

Growing up in the country outside a rural Midwest town, Halloween didn’t make an impact on me. Mother brought costumes from the five and dime store and drove my brother and me to the three or four nearby neighbor houses for trick-or-treating. My haul was only a few pieces of candy. The next day on the bus to school, I saw a couple of schoolteachers’ homes that had been TP’d (the trees covered in the toilet paper) during the night. My church youth group had a Halloween party. Halloween was just a time of fun and harmless pranks

Some years later, Halloween took a dark turn. The news media reported kids finding laxatives and razor blades in apples in their t-or-t bags. Kids were urged to only stop at the homes of people they knew, trick-or-treat in groups and go out in daylight.

Concerns grew over store-bought costumes catching fire or ill-fitting plastic masks that blocked a kids’ vision. Costumes grew gorier. Motorists were hitting trick-or-treaters crossing streets. Pranks had degraded into vandalism and destruction of property.

Halloween had become a deadly holiday.

Where I live now, many cities, schools and houses of worship host their own Halloween family events, described as “safe and fun trick or treating.” These events offer supervised games, mildly scary haunted houses, costume parades and “trunk or treat,” where adults hand out candy from the trunks of their parked vehicles. Everyone stays in one area and nobody roams through the city streets.

Police issue annual warnings, telling kids to use caution when crossing streets, to carry flashlights and wear costumes that allow one to see clearly. Adults are encouraged to hand out healthy snacks to kids at their doors. The local dentists host “buy backs,” paying kids to turn in their Halloween candy for money instead of eating all of those sugary snacks. State law forbids registered sex offenders from participating trick or treating and even from putting out Halloween decorations.

While some order has been restored to an unruly tradition, it seems to say that the world at large is a scary place. People can no longer trust their neighbors-in large cities and apartment/townhouse complexes, many residents don’t even know their neighbors. What was once a kids’ holiday has become a time of fear.

Have we degraded into such a violent society that kids can no longer trust their neighbors to give them a treat and not a trick?

What are your thoughts? Is Halloween fun for you and your family or not?