Month: December 2015

What Does it Take to Write Nearly 40 Books?

~ marilynm ~ 10 Comments

That was the topic I was given by a new Sisters of Crime group when I was invited to come and speak. Here are some of the things I told them:

I didn’t get published until I was a grandmother, but I’d been writing since I was a kid. And I read everything I could get my hands on.

My first book to be published was an historical family saga based in my mother’s genealogy. That wasn’t so easy–it was rejected nearly 30 times, and rewritten over and over–before it was finally accepted. So that meant I had it made, right? Not so, the editor that took the first book moved on. When I sent in the book written about my father’s genealogy, the new editor wasn’t interested. Took a long time before I found another publisher–and many more rejections.

The point is I wasn’t easily discouraged–and  despite many set-backs (crooked publishers, publishers who died, agents who did nothing) I kept plugging away.

When I finished the two family sagas, I wondered what I should write next? What did I like to read? Mysteries–so writing one seemed what I should do next.

I started with a book I called The Astral Gift. It found a publisher right away–one of the crooks. It has been republished twice, once by the first publisher of my Deputy Tempe Crabtree series, and again by the publisher of my Rocky Bluff P.D. series.

The first book in the Rocky Bluff P.D. series, Final Respects, was published as an e-book long before anyone had a clue what that meant, and there was no such thing as an e-reader. Another publisher picked up the first two books in the series, but wasn’t a good relationship. A new publisher published the next two books in the series, and then decided not to continue as a publisher. The fifth, No Sanctuary, was picked up by Oak Tree Press who also reprinted the earlier books, and is still the publisher of that series.

The publisher of the first four books in the Deputy Tempe Crabtree series passed away. The series is now being published by Mundania Press.

In between all of this, I wrote other books, psychological horror, Christian horror, and my romance with a touch of the supernatural, and a few others that never got published for one reason or another.

I’ve left out many of the set-backs and problems I faced, but I’m sure you’ve gotten the idea and the reasons I’ve had nearly forty books published. It’s really quite simple:

  1. I learned from rejections and was willing to rewrite.
  2. Nothing that happened discouraged me.
  3. Most importantly, I kept on writing.

Marilyn Meredith, who also writes under the name F. M. Meredith

 

 

Unwrapping a Book: Super Structure Analysis of The Shaman Sings

~ Amber Foxx ~ 1 Comment

I hope you’re having a lovely Christmas Eve and that you’ll find some books in your stocking. My turn on this blog comes up on the fourth Thursday of every month, which makes me the Thanksgiving and Christmas person. I debated doing a holiday-themed post, since I didn’t do one on Thanksgiving, but I have one on my other blog, a free holiday short story I did as part of a B.R.A.G. Medallion authors’ blog hop. And over the holidays I have more time to read and write, as perhaps you do too, so I chose this time to thoroughly unwrap a favorite book’s structure. If you’re in the mood for something seasonal, here’s a link to the holiday story: https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/indiebrag-christmas-blog-hop-a-free-holiday-short-story)

If you’re in the mood to think about the craft of writing a mystery, keep going.

In previous posts on this blog, I’ve reviewed James Scott Bell’s writing guide, Super Structure, and shared why I love the mystical mysteries of James D. Doss. To teach myself to better apply Bell’s structural signposts, I reread Doss’s first book, analyzing how he used those story-line elements in his unconventional way, long before Bell wrote the book. (FYI: I worked hard to avoid plot spoilers while doing this analysis.)

Bell’s first signpost—The Initial Disturbance

This has to be the rock that starts the landslide of the rest of the plot. It can be a pebble or a boulder, but it shifts the status quo in the world of the protagonist, requiring change and action in response. In the first chapter of The Shaman Sings, the disturbance is the arrival of a coyote near Daisy Perika’s isolated trailer home at the mouth of the Canyon of the Spirits. This book is immediately set up to be deeply mystical and yet also funny. In a few pages of conflict between an old shaman and a spirit coyote—and her own thoughts, her inner conflict—it’s not obvious what the impact of the animal’s message will be, but the feeling is strong: there will be one.

Doss delivers the same disturbance—a premonition of evil—in the point pf view of an Anglo newcomer to the region, police chief Scott Parris, the second lead character. The disturbance comes around a third time in the point of view of a nameless stalker observing physics graduate student in a laboratory at night, a nameless stalker who understands what she’s doing scientifically, and who hears a Voice.

Doss inserts the second sign post—The Care Package—into these scenes. Daisy gives coffee and companionship to the eccentric shepherd Nahum Yaciti who comes to visit, and to share his premonitions. Scott recalls his last premonition was before his wife died. We see him as a man who has loved deeply and lost. We see Daisy as a difficult person but capable of friendship. And we see the student as vulnerable, alone in her endeavors.

Third signpost—Trouble Brewing

This explodes with the murder and then is doled out steadily. It accelerates when the readers knows the cops are after the wrong suspect and that there are three possible candidates for the real killer.

Fourth signpost—The Argument against Transformation:

Scott moved from Chicago to start life over after his wife died. He wants to get away from death and violence. In Chicago he saw enough of that without working homicide, a job he avoided. He hates looking at dead bodies. He’d thought a small college town would be a safe and peaceful escape, but now he has a murder investigation on his hands. Daisy doesn’t want to answer the spirit world’s call. She is old and tired. But the threat of darkness is demanding her attention.

Fifth and sixth signposts—The Kick in the Shins and the Doorway of No Return:

These are hard to pin down, because the book shifts points of view at every turn, even though it’s essentially an interweaving of Scott’s story and Daisy’s story. Scott’s new girlfriend, an investigative reporter following the same crime, plays a major role. A setback that strikes her could be seen as both the “kick in the shins” for all concerned and a doorway of no return for her and for Scott. This event is blended with a reminder of the otherworldly forces at work. Deciding to share her knowledge with the police is Daisy’s doorway of no return. This is also part of the next signpost. (In Doss’s two-protagonist structure, the essential pieces of the story that Bell identifies are all there, but the pacing and placement vary from Bell’s recommendations.)

Seventh signpost—The Mirror Moment:

Scott and Daisy both have visions of the victim that deliver puzzling clues about her. These come to him in dreams and to her in a shamanic journey. When she meets Scott, something extraordinary happens between them at the level of spiritual consciousness. Neither of them can deny the power of what they know and the need to act on it. The argument against transformation has been won by transformation. She has accepted the continuing burden of her gift. Scott is committed to not only solving murder, but accepting that powers he never believed in might help.

 Eight signpost—Pet the Dog:

Scott’s mix of patience and impatience with his inept officers, Slocum and Knox, is the closest I can come to identifying a “pet the dog” moment. Slocum’s ongoing incompetence sets many parts of the plot motion, so Scott’s tolerance of this particular cop is a key weakness, and yet a trait that makes the reader identify with him (at least the reader who would find it hard to fire a well-meaning but bumbling subordinate) and that’s the purpose of Bell’s “pet the dog” scene.

The last signposts—Mounting Forces, Lights Out, the Q factor, and the Final Battle

By this point in the book— the part which Bell in Super Structure describes as being like a raft going over a waterfall—I couldn’t slow my reading down even though I’d read the book before. To avoid spoilers I’m making this part of the analysis brief and skipping the mounting forces. Doss integrates the police work and Daisy’s mystical powers into a stunning final battle. He sets up his “Q Factor” at the outset—that thing which the lead can pull out and use to survive and keep going against all odds during the “lights out” moment. Scott, as a dedicated cop, of course has the motivation and the resources. Without the very beginning of the book, this perfect ending that blends both leads’ storylines wouldn’t work. What makes the finale succeed is that Daisy, as a shaman, also has motivation and resources.

 A few more words of review:

The complex plot and colorful characters make this page-turning read. Doss never wastes a character. Why have a boring person as the code expert when he could have an eccentric old British hermit, a retired mathematician who is having an affair with young librarian? Why have just any cop mess up a few times when it could be one like Piggy Slocum? And Daisy Perika is no stereotypical Indian wise woman. The Wild West moment between Officer Knox and Julio Pacheco is classic Doss comedy and drama. The way he uses point of view shifts and humor in a thrilling mystery is unusual, but he pulls it off and never misses a step on the path of building a story.

 A note to new readers discovering Doss:

This book is now labeled as the first Charlie Moon mystery. When you find Charlie to be a minor character, it may be puzzling, but at the time Doss wrote the first few books, they were called Shaman Mysteries. Then the author found that the shaman’s nephew, a Ute tribal policeman, was taking over, and he followed his characters’ wishes. The series became the Charlie Moon Mysteries, with his aunt Daisy’s shamanism still part of the stories, and with Scott Parris becoming a close friend as well as collaborating in investigations.

Hope, or, Why we love a good #mystery #series

~ janegorman ~ 2 Comments

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At this time of year, it seems perfectly reasonable to write about hope. We gather with family and friends, cuddle up in front of a cozy fire, laugh, talk — and read, of course! As the song says, “we’ll conspire, as we dream by the fire, to face unafraid, the plans that we made …”

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I’ve been thinking about plans and hope. Not my plans (or my hopes) but those of Adam Kaminski, the hero in the Adam Kaminski mystery series.

Adam has dreams. Or at least he did. Until his view of the world was shattered through one cruel, heartless act. That devastation changed his dreams and changed his life course. He left teaching to join the Philadelphia Police Department, intent on chasing down the bad guys who posed a threat to the safety of the people he loved and cared for.

My job as author is to force Adam to face his lost dreams, to help him strive for his lost hope. It’s not easy! Sometimes it’s so much easier to let him sit back, take life as it comes, watch from the sidelines even. But that wouldn’t make for very interesting reading.

In any mystery, the detective, whether amateur or professional, must throw himself into the path of danger. She must face her fears, thwart the villain. And in each book, that’s exactly what happens. But the attraction of a series is that other story, the longer story arc that the character follows over multiple books.

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For Adam Kaminski, that longer story sends him on a quest to find the truth about his family legacy and to find the hope that he lost, the hope that led him to be a teacher in the first place.

Whenever I’m tempted to make life easy for Adam, to let him zip through a case, solve the murder in front of him without delving too deeply into other mysteries, I remind myself of his dream. I owe him. He needs me to let him dig deeper, to send him to unknown places, so that he can find the answers he needs, the faith in humanity that will give him back his hope.

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Links to all available retailers for the Adam Kaminski mystery series can be found at my website.

 

WHERE DO YOU START YOUR STORY?

~ casojka123 ~ 2 Comments

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I’ve been cleaning out some old files lately and came across some early writing I’d done. What I found particularly interesting was at least fifty pages of introduction I had written for my first novel, SO MANY REASONS TO DIE. Apparently when I began the book, I felt it necessary to bring my readers up to date on everything that had happened before the murder, so that they would know all the characters and their roles in the story.

So I introduced all the characters, got them all together in a Cover__8x5preliminary meeting, and then, many pages later, the murder happened. By that time, I now realize, I would have lost any readers who had begun the book. Readers want to get to the conflict in a reasonable length of time. They don’t want to know all the characters intimately before anything happens. That can be filled in later, in back story.

That is definitely the way modern novels—genre and literary—are written. Charles Dickens, who of course was paid by the word and wrote his books to be published in serial form, was expected to write a leisurely start, a lot of character and descriptive detail and to have the action led up to gradually. But, he wasn’t competing with television, movies, iphones, e-books, and all kinds of other distractions. He was the distraction. So, writing has changed, and writers have had to change with it.

I remember feeling that there was no way I could delete that first fifty or sixty pages, but I did, and no one missed it—not even me. The murder had already happened when the book opens, the murder scene is retold from various characters’ points of view, and the book is a lot shorter—and read by more people.

Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to know where to start a story. In PSYCHIC DAMAGE, due out this spring, I began with a murder: a driveby shooting. That was the beginning for quite some time and lasted through much editing, but finally I changed the story to the setting which had inspired its creation. In the building where I worked, there was a floor between the fourth and fifth floors, called the four-and-a-half. I’d had occasion to go up there from time to time and had thought several times of it being the perfect spot to Jans Photooverhear something mysterious—some foul deed about to be done or just having been done. It became the setting for the first scene of PSYCHIC DAMAGE when the protagonist, Eva Stuart, overhears talk about a murder which has been committed: the driveby shooting that had originally been the first scene. I think it reads better that way. I hope you’ll agree.

A book has to grab me within a few pages, either by action or character or setting. If not, I don’t continue reading. Sometimes I’m more patient, but I want to know what I’m reading about. What makes you keep reading? How long does it take you to get into what you’re reading or to put it down and say, “Boring!” I’d love to hear from you.

Ax-murderess or Victim by Paty Jager

~ patyjag ~ 7 Comments

paty shadow (1)I recently ran across a story in the local paper written by an Oregon State University Professor. He brought to light the first female murderer in Oregon’s territorial prison. Her story is interesting to my mystery writer mind. Back when she took an ax to her husband, they didn’t take spousal abuse into consideration for a woman’s actions. But this story lends itself well to several directions a mystery writer could take it.

Charity Lamb and her husband traveled to Oregon Territory in 1852 via the Oregon Trail. They had five children ages, nineteen to a newborn baby. The Oregon Territory at that time had few woman and the family was busy trying to build a house and starting crops.

The husband on several occasions had punched, kicked, and thrown a hammer at Charity leaving a large gash on her forehead.

The nineteen-year-old daughter fancied she was in love with a drifter. The man was also smitten with the daughter and showed Charity kindness. Mr. Lamb refused to allow the two to marry and forbid the daughter to converse with the man when he left the area. Charity helped her daughter write and mail letters to the man. Mr. Lamb caught Charity with one of the letters and told her he would kill her before he’d let her leave.

A day later as he was leaving to go hunting, Mr. Lamb turned at the gate, drew up his rifle, and aimed it at Charity. One of the children noticed and he turned the barrel, shooting into a tree. That day Charity and the daughter planned a way to murder Mr. Lamb. That night as they all sat down to dinner, Charity excused herself and walked back in with an ax and hit Mr. Lamb twice with it, making a two inch cut in his skull. Mr. Lamb wasn’t dead. Charity and her daughter fled to the neighbors and a doctor took care of Mr. Lamb until he died a week later. But not before telling everyone he didn’t mistreat his wife.

Charity and her daughter were looked upon as ruthless women, until the children were put on the stand and told of the abuse Mr. Lamb had given their mother. The daughter’s trial was first. She was acquitted. But at that time the courts couldn’t figure out how to try Charity. It was self-defense but not really as the man was sitting at the table not attacking her when she axed him. Which made it seem like insanity, but they found her sane.

And so, Charity Lamb received second-degree murder with life in prison. She was the only woman at the territorial prison. Years later she was sent to the insane asylum where she lived out the rest of her sentence, dying in 1879.

From this story I see spousal abuse as a means for someone to murder and in the case of the daughter she wanted to be with her love. Two good reasons to kill, well for a character in a murder mystery not in real life. But it does happen in real life, so using these premises in a book, would work in the reader’s mind.

What do you think? Would a story like Charity’s be plausible or unbelievable in a book today?

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