My first novel, Murder in the Museum, was recently published by Cozy Cat Press, and I must admit it was a real labor of love. It’s the first (at least I hope it is!) in a series of Edmund DeCleryk Mysteries that takes place in Lighthouse Cove, NY, a fictional village located on the southern shores of Lake Ontario. If you know anything about the seasons in the Great Lakes, you’ll understand why I chose late fall and winter for my series’ debut. Brrrr! Lots of dark and blizzardy nights with lots of howling wind, along with stunningly gorgeous seasonal vistas.

I’ve been published before, non-fiction, and have worked as a journalist and newspaper columnist, but this was my first venture as a fiction writer. So how did I do it?

The idea:  For whatever reason, I envisioned my sleuth as a retired police chief who lives with his wife, Annie, the head of the historical society, in a small lakeside community. Ed, also a retired Navy SEAL, is hired to investigate murders when there’s an oversized work load for the village police.

The structure: Like many novelists, I began with a plot outline, list of characters, and lots of hand-scribbled notes. But I’m not good with much structure and probably wouldn’t have followed a strict outline anyway, so I let the plot meander in whatever direction made sense.  I like puzzles, and this was like solving one.

The drafts:  After completing my first draft, and several others, I realized I wasn’t even close to being finished. The book needed lots of work. I was writing like a journalist, using as few words as possible to make a point. Not a good way to go with a novel.

The rewrites: I rewrote the prologue so that it would capture readers’ attention from the get-go, expanded character development, enhanced description and created bridge narratives to link one part of the story to another. I added some twists and turns to keep readers a touch off balance, and to keep them guessing about “whodunit”.  My book grew from 30,000 to 66,000 words; at last, a novel!

The critics:  When I was minimally satisfied with my creation, I invited three close friends to serve as my readers (my patient husband had already read it multiple times). I knew they would be brutally honest about what they liked and disliked. Their excellent feedback and suggestions made the book much better.

The publisher: Finally, I researched publishers and came up with a list of those I hoped would be interested in Murder in the Museum. Cozy Cat Press has been a good fit.

The moral: Writing a novel isn’t easy, the process can take time, and it’s smart to have others read and critique your book before submitting it to a publisher. Was it worth it? You bet!

 

Recently I participated in a large outdoor book festival put on by the Visalia Library with lots of help from Leadership Visalia. It was their first annual and one of the best organized of these events I’ve attended. Besides many authors and other vendors, lots and lots of people came and it’s one of these people I want to talk about.

Near the end of the event, a young man came up to my table and looked over my books. “I see you write a lot about law enforcement.”

I launched into my usual spiel about my son-in-law being a police officer who came to our house after his shift to tell me about his adventures. I added that he took me on a ride-along, and when I moved to Springville, I also went on a ride-along with a female officer in the town of Porterville.

He asked, “Do you remember the name of the officer?”

I didn’t and he told me the name of his aunt who had been the first female office in Porterville. And it was the lady cop I did the ride-along with! I told him how great she was, she let me follow her around on every call she made, including all the bar checks. The only time she told me to stay in the car was for a domestic dispute. Her sergeant came to check on her and only listened at the door of the house.

He came back and told me that she was the best at calming volatile situations—which she did this time too.

The young man was pleased to hear all this about his aunt.

I also told him that from 3 a.m until 6, she didn’t get any other calls and as we patrolled the streets of the city, she told me all about being a single mom and the only female in the department. Through the years I’ve used so much of what she said in both my Deputy Tempe Crabtree series and my Rocky Bluff P.D. series. He promised to let her know how valuable her information had been to me.

I did sell a lot of books at the festival, but this was definitely the highlight of the day.

Marilyn Meredith

 

What makes you, as a reader, want to read a particular book? Sometimes, for me, it’s because it’s been recommended by another reader. Or I’ve read a review of it. Or my book club is reading it. But suppose you are in a bookstore or library with no reading commitments on your mind. What would make you select one book over another? What would the first paragraph or the first few sentences tell you about the book and give you enough information to want to go on?

There has been a lot written about “the first two pages” of a book: how important they are, how that’s where you capture the reader’s interest and get her to select this book above others. If the reader finds herself in a bookstore, though, she’s not going to read the first two pages. She’s probably only going to read the first paragraph. How much information do you, the writer, give to the reader in that first paragraph or two?

It’s an important question for writers because with so many books to choose from, how can you get a reader to select your book as the one to read? I looked at the first paragraphs of three mystery novels, checking out what information the first few sentences gave me, and trying to determine whether I was interested in finding out more.

I started with a book by Tom Kakonis called TREASURE COAST.

“Like most men closing in on the benchmark forty, Jim Merriman made far more promises—to others mainly, a dwindling few yet to himself—than he knew, heart of hearts, he ever intended to keep. It was a habit by now so deeply entrenched, so much a part of him, that he wore it like a second skin: Generate an earnest pledge today; effortlessly shuck it off tomorrow. Mostly it was harmless, this habitual shortfall between oath and execution, deed and good intention.”

What did those first few sentences tell me about Jim? I learned his gender and age, that forty was important to him, and that his promises, to himself and to others, were mostly empty.  I surmise he’s not a hero and guess that some promise or another is going to get him in trouble.  I don’t know where the story is based, and I don’t know anything more about Jim except that he’s relatively honest about his failings.

How about Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache novel, THE CRUELEST MONTH?

“Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper. Wiping a strand of hair from her face, she smeared bits of grass, mud and some other brown stuff that might not be mud into her tangled hair. All around, villagers wandered with their baskets of brightly colored eggs, looking for the perfect hiding place.”

This is a charming portrait of a village preparing for an Easter egg hunt, centering on one woman, Clara Morrow, about whom we know only that she doesn’t pay a lot of attention to her appearance. But what’s this: “Clara Morrow [. . .] thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper”.  What’s that got to do with hiding eggs for the Easter egg hunt? Penny has thrown a scary mystery element into the midst of a bucolic village festival.  Do I want to continue? You bet I do. I want to find out about raising the dead.

In Julia Spencer-Fleming’s I SHALL NOT WANT, the author begins in the middle of events.

“When she saw the glint of the revolver barrel through the broken glass in the window, Hadley Knox thought, I’m going to die for sixteen bucks an hour. Sixteen bucks an hour, medical, and dental. She dove behind her squad car as the thing went off, a monstrous thunderclap that rolled on and on across green-gold fields of hay. The bullet smacked into the maple tree she had parked under with a meaty thud, showering her in wet, raw splinters.”

Spencer-Fleming has told us quite a lot about Hadley Knox. She’s a cop and doesn’t make much money, although she has benefits. Right now she’s terrified because someone is trying to kill her, and she’s not sure the money is worth the danger. The setting is a country farm in late spring or summer.  We’re in the middle of the story.  Events have already occurred that have brought Hadley Knox to this position. Am I interested in finding out what happened before and what will happen in the future? Probably.

My own first paragraph in my current WIP goes like this:

“The day Captain Bradley disappeared was ordinary—at least it seemed like that to Andi Battaglia when she arrived at the station just before eight that morning. Halloween had come and gone with all its craziness, crazy at least as far as police were concerned. Christmas decorations had arrived in the Burgess Beach stores in mid-October, even earlier than the year before, and with the temperature hovering in the low nineties, Andi was in no mood for holiday cheer.”

What does the reader learn from this? Andi Battaglia is a cop. Someone disappears, and we assume he is Andi’s boss. Andi is feeling a bit grouchy about holidays. It’s November, but because the weather is in the nineties, we know the setting is tropical.  Not nearly as attention getting as Penny’s or Spencer-Fleming’s beginnings. Something to work on, so that hypothetical reader will choose Carole Sojka’s book when browsing.

This was an interesting exercise for me. Have you tried it with your own WIP?