Month: February 2021

~ susanoleksiw ~ 6 Comments

After publishing the first four Anita Ray mysteries, my publisher ended its mystery line. For many writers the transition to being a hybrid author was easy, but for me it was fraught with frustrations. I moved on to writing another series based in the US and not South India, and limited my work on the India series to putting the first three books into trade paperbacks. That’s about to change.

The fifth Anita Ray has been sitting on my desk (almost literally) for over a year while I focus on other stories (short and novel length), but the time has come. In Sita’s Shadow continues the story of Anita and her Auntie Meena and their hotel guests, who arrive as a large tour (large for Hotel Delite) and take over the little converted home.

Anita Ray and her aunt have a small group of devoted followers who occasionally ask me about the next book. I reply as any ambivalent writer might, mentioning a work in progress, other demands, and lots of mumbling. But the time has come and my ambivalence is once again being challenged.

I am not Indian. My love affair with Asia, and India in particular, began when I was young, a preteen, and continued through high school, college, and into graduate school. I was fortunate enough to live there for a year in 1976 and again in 1981-1982, while writing my dissertation and later doing research. With a PhD in Sanskrit and Indian studies, I’m always eager to learn ore. I’ve returned for monthlong visits almost every year since 1999, but that stopped in 2014 for family medical reasons. 

In the advancing twenty-first century, writers are less likely to tell a story through the mind and heart of a character outside their own personal history and ethnic experience. This is unfortunate because the imagination opens doors—it doesn’t close them—to our understanding of the human experience, and the more we stretch ourselves, the more we grow and the more we have to share with others. When I’m reading a well-written and well-thought-out mystery, I never think about who the author is in relation to the cultural identity of the protagonist or any other character in the story. The story is all that matters to me.

By this spring Anita Ray will once again be chasing down a murderer at Hotel Delite (really, it’s a wonder they still have any business at all, considering the body count) and coping with Auntie Meena’s anxieties over her niece’s unmarried state and shameful obsession with murder. 

As the TV announcer used to say, Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

Weather or not?

~ dzchurch ~ 5 Comments

D. Z. Church

My father, a flight instructor at the time, decided eight was the perfect age to teach his eager daughter to fly. I had a logbook, and we had a plan that I would solo as soon as I could, which was at 16. Never mind that the plan went horribly awry when my father decided to become a Meteorological Research Pilot and famously fly through hailstorms, erupting volcanoes, and hurricanes.*

When we started, I couldn’t see out of the cockpit (too short), so I learned to fly by instrument. Yes, this is the wrong way round. Usually, you start by using the actual horizon to keep your wings even, your nose up or down as the earth passes quickly below. Some would argue that nothing passes quickly below a Piper Cub. Once, in a Lake Michigan gale, my father flew a Cub halfway across the state backward.

There are very few instruments in a Cub, altimeter (how high), airspeed indicator (how fast), compass (where), oil gauge (obvious). After one lesson in a Piper Cub, with me unable to see out and fly level, Dad stepped me up to a Cessna 150 equipped with an attitude indicator. The attitude indicator provides information such as up, down, level via an artificial horizon, in short, the plane’s general relationship to the earth and air. Attitude is everything, or so Bernoulli and guidance counselors advise us.

So, I learned to trust my instruments before I trusted my eyes. One of the greatest mistakes that pilots make in bad weather, especially new ones, is mistrusting their instruments, think John F. Kennedy Jr.. Dad warned me to trust science over intuition when the horizon was obscured, meaning in the air and in life. I thank him for that and this; once you’ve navigated through bumptious clouds at the controls of a light plane reading the wind, clouds, and sun to stay up and on course, you never take the earth or the sky for granted again.*

Gust Front outside Miles City, MT (L. M. Zinser)

Or the adventures! My husband and I were shrink-wrapped in a tent by a tornado once (once was enough). I was in a one-hole tin outhouse as it was struck by lightning and watched St. Elmo’s Fire flow down the metal walls. A hurricane made landfall while I was on Assateague Island visiting the Chincoteague ponies. I outran it to safety, the rain hitting the car on the way down and back up. I’ve tried to sleep through a hundred mile an hour winds ripping shingles off the roof, watched drenching rain turn into a muddy flood, seen twin tornadoes dance, and lost a dinghy while sailing in a squall and dove in after it. And that’s not all the sky has tossed my way.

Now, when I write, the cast of the sun, the thunder of rain, and the howl of the wind sit on my shoulders, waiting a chance to cause havoc in a thriller. They know I can’t help myself. Head First, the second book in the Cooper Quartet, is set in Central California in the winter of 1972-73 during an El Nino that changed the entrance to Big Sur State Park forever. Pay Back, the third book in the Quartet, takes place during the Fall of Saigon. Late April 1975, the monsoons started early, drubbing Saigon the day before the North Vietnamese stormed the city. Perfidia is set on a Caribbean island given to sparkling sun and afternoon squalls while Saving Calypso unfolds in the Sierra Nevada’s wind and fire zone. Booth Island (just released) is in a lake in Canada given to late spring rains and rough water. Like I said, I can’t help myself.

I blame Dad; he gave me the sky. And the Navy. I ended up at a Meteorology and Oceanography Command (not much of a stretch) though I joined hoping to become one of the first female attack pilots (taller but still too short).

Postscript: It is no accident that Byron Cooper is a Navy attack pilot in the first two books of the Cooper Quartet. I may have been writing vicariously.

*If you want to know more about the adventures of a Meteorological Research Pilot, you might look into the memoir Pilot Log Book Lies and More by Lester M. Zinser. Warning, it is a bit technical.

*If you haven’t read The Cloudspotter’s Guide (Gavin Pretor-Pinney) yet, run out and get a copy. Besides being a terrific read, it is a good resource for all things cloud.

The Dilemma of the Little-Known Author

~ Pamela Beason ~ 6 Comments

Note: This a pre-Covid memory, so don’t be alarmed at the close proximity of strangers mentioned in this post. Remember those days when we weren’t afraid of breathing the same air?

“Hi, I’m Rae Ellen Lee, an internationally unknown author,” my friend says to the bicycle rider who has stopped to chat with us in a Utah canyon.

Rae Ellen Lee is a fellow author and artist, and she’s more forward and much funnier than I am, and I love this line. It cuts through the embarrassing back-and-forth that, for me, usually goes something like this:

Me: “I’m an author. I write mysteries and romantic suspense.”

Polite Stranger: “That’s great!” Then, peering at me with curiosity, “Would I have heard of you?”

Me (mortified): “Probably not. My publisher never promoted my books.” (Unsaid: And I’m obviously a total nincompoop when it comes to marketing, still true now even after I took back my rights and self-published.) “But here’s a card describing my books.” (Nervous laugh.) “Do me a favor and leave it in a public place.”

Sigh. It’s such a dilemma. How and when does a clueless introvert author make herself known to new readers? Personally, I avoid anyone who constantly hawks herself or her products; why would anyone appreciate that? But I don’t have a big family-and-friends network out there supporting me, and I can’t afford to advertise in expensive venues. I write outdoorsy animal lover mysteries and although many hikers and nature enthusiasts are big readers like me, we outdoorsy animal lover types don’t tend to sit around chatting on social media.

So when I pass up the opportunity to tell a friendly stranger that I’m an author, I never know whether to feel like I’m being just a nice normal person or some sort of expert self-defeating anti-preneur. So I generally say something only half the time and almost always end up feeling like a complete loser.

A couple of days after meeting the bicyclist, as I ride the shuttle from St. George to the Las Vegas airport, I chat with my very nice seatmate. We talk about Utah and other places we have visited, and after a while, she mentions that she reads constantly. Aha-an opening! I tell her I am a voracious reader, too. And then she says she likes mysteries. Feeling like a hunter with a deer in the crosshairs, I tell her I am a mystery author, pull out my card that describes my books, and hand it over. She says she’ll definitely look for my books.

Later, at the airport, I share a restaurant table with an interesting man from Germany who has been visiting all the western parks. I love Germans; they are such adventurers, and like me, many are enthusiastic about the American West, its culture and its beautiful wild places. We talk about places he visited on this trip (he flew to the Cook Islands, too!) and a bit about how Americans and Cook Islanders eat unhealthy diets and will pay for that in the long run, and briefly agree on how politics need to move away from the current all-about-the-profit mode to the work-for-the-common-good mode.

Close-up of magnifying glass focusing on two people

Of course, while we talk, I’m thinking, do I tell him I’m an author and three of my books are published in Germany? Would that be a typical it’s-all-about-me American move? Besides, he’d probably ask me the name of my books there, and my cards are all in English. I can’t even spell the German titles, let alone pronounce them. Nor could I cough up the name of the German publisher. So we part politely without exchanging names and wander off to catch our separate flights back home.

From now on, I’m borrowing Rae Ellen’s line: “Hi, I’m Pamela Beason, an internationally unknown author.”

And I’ll keep using it until a stranger says, “Oh, I know that name! I love your books!”

I really am an author! This is me signing books at Seattle Mystery Bookshop
I’m not lying. Really, I am an author. Here I am years ago, signing books at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, which, sadly, no longer exists. I have 13 novels in print and ebook forms today. Really!

The Wine Blog by Karen Shughart

~ kshughart47 ~ 6 Comments

I’ve always believed that it’s easier to write about what you know, which is why wine features so prominently in my Edmund DeCleryk mysteries. Like my husband and me, Ed, and his wife Annie, live in the northern Finger Lakes region of New York, the second largest wine producer in the U. S. Wine is very much part of the lifestyle here.

Our own wine journey began many years ago. Our kids were in college, our careers at their peak, and we came home each night exhausted. We made the transition from workday to evening by having a glass of wine (or sometimes for Lyle, a Scotch) before dinner.  We caught up, chatted about our day, and even when my husband traveled for business, we designated a time to call each other, evening drink in hand. Although now retired, we continue the tradition to this day.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is restaurant-love-romantic-dinner.jpg

One weekend we were invited to a dinner party at some friends’ house. We were asked to bring a dish to share and a bottle of wine to pair with it. It was the genesis of a gourmet group that met quarterly for many years, rotating hosts. A specialist at a wine store helped us choose the wines to go with each course. We quickly learned that to enjoy wine is to slowly sip and savor it.

Some of us took a cruise together from San Francisco Bay, along rivers that led to the Napa, Sonoma and Carneros wine regions of California.  Each evening we’d dock and before dinner attend a wine education session. The next morning we’d board a bus that would take us to charming towns for vineyard tours, wine tastings and to explore galleries and shops.

One weekend Lyle and I traveled to the Finger Lakes; a short drive from where we lived in Pennsylvania. We were enchanted by the wineries and restaurants, the vibrant jazz scene, and postcard-picture beauty.  We purchased an 1890s cottage on Lake Ontario; after retirement, we decided to make it our permanent home.

We joined a wine club.  At a series of monthly classes at New York Kitchen in Canandaigua, we learned about regions around the world where wine is crafted and how terroir, the natural environment in which grapes are grown, results in differences in color, smell and taste of the same varietal.  We cleaned up our musty basement and created a wine cellar in what was once a cistern, dry as a bone with thick stone walls and floor and about 56 degrees year ‘round.

Over the years I’ve learned a lot about wine, and I write about it in my mysteries. It is, after all, part of the local lore, and an integral part of the culture. And just like Lyle and me, having a glass of wine at the end of the day is a way for Ed and Annie to unwind and share their stories.

Ol’ Man Janus Ain’wah He Use-ta Be

~ Missye K. Clarke ~ 3 Comments

by Missye K. Clarke

I’m at my new tripod desk as I work on this month’s longish post, so I please ask your pardon for the inconvenience. Truthfully–and warring winter allergies with pet dander while half-zonked on antihistamines meds–I’m half-winging this, uncertain how to open or grab your attention on a writing topic not done past use, but I suppose this works. I wasn’t about to offer another post of life post-couvid, or kvetch to y’all when do I get my former life back, how I’m adjusting without this or that. Although nothing wrong with those subjects in/of themselves, for one usually a big mouth on issues . . . couvid silenced me another way: The shock of how fast humanity changed past the point of know return, the shock itself, and how this event’s deepoend me despite not wanting to go that crazy depth. Like in almost every writing reference around insisting the main character must adjust to his or her new normal in their worlds, I’ve been forced again to follow suit. Guess my cast is having a good belly laugh at my expense, because in their words: this constant compass-adjusting just fuckin’ sucks. They’re not wrong.

Still . . . I’m notorious for delayed shock, unfortunately exposed to this at an early age. Knocked out cold by a thrown rock when I was nine, I had my first of several out of body experiences, being knocked silly to start with, subsuquent recovery from the OBE, and the shock itself until many weeks later. 9/11/2001, another stunner, now much bigger and deeper with the emergence of a more likely storyline behind that event I’m still unpacking. Still sweaty from kidhood at twenty whem my forty-year-young mom lost her cancer fight; and four years hence, more shock during what should’ve been a joyous time receiving my firstborn the same year my father violently died. As you can imagine, also released that year, Mike + The Mechanics’ “The Living Years” will always hold a certain poignance, the last verse especially useful when I need a good cry to wash my eyes out before allergy meds kick in.

But even couvid and a rigged election’s aftermath still being written before our eyes isn’t my biggest shock, despite the resonance these events still hold. For the longest time, I’ve struggled to put my thoughts and feelings into digestable bites for readers and contributors of this platform to understand, cogitate, and maybe help me change–and on another level, maybe even relate a little to me–without coming off bitchy, arguing too much, or generally be that unlikeable narrator. This subject’s been on my heart since I could remember, only recently instigated by open mockery, hot disdain, and the flat-out exile from groups, orgs., and other socials of daring to hold a dissenting point of view. What was once done in pockets of academia–being a target from both sides while finishing college, you learn a few things–the veneer of impartiality and evenhandedness in the open marketplace of ideas is gone, if it existed to begin with. In its place is a scary, filthy leviathan of a share-our-view-or-else slant now so mainstream you’d have to be living on Pluto most of your life not to see how bad times have become. Don’t misunderstand–this isn’t a political post, nor will such ever be shared here. But I’m speaking–pleading, if I’m being honest–strictly from the standpoint of an author making a modest living on a basic tenet: to speak his or her mind freely no matter how appalling, offensive, or dangerous it may come across. I do not sanction violence. But the right to be as you are, say what you like, how, where, when, or which you like–just being heard, damn it!–is being persecuted in unprecedented ways. I hope to help quelch this, not only in picking up the reins where the fantastic, late, great Nat Hentoff dropped off, but holding to that late Sixties drumbeat I was taught in school: DIFFERENCES ARE GOOD! As I opine this, I’ve tears in my eyes where free speech, free thought, and free expression will go–the helpful, beneficial, positive, uplifting, and inspiring kinds that call on pulling together differences in every one of us we’re the same to and in at the end of the day despite the awful-icky speech we’ve dealt with. Solomon of Proverbs was spot on when he said the tongue is more powerful than the strongest sword or the heftiest ship’s rudder. Hoo-boy, isn’t it ever.

In the guise of “wokeism,” I found myself in #1stAHasAVoice jail from certain platforms within the past year. One was with two scribe orgs. I’m happily no longer assosicated with; Twitter, where I called out several NYT bestselling authors for treating their readers like they’d been asked to enjoy a roten fish smoothie for lunch; and the third was a monthly box I’d gushed over several months back (This last, I owe you a deep apology for–not that you’ll like what I do, but I should’ve vetted this company more thoroughly for my tastes.) I could’ve been a little more diplomatic, suave, evenhanded in my responses. But I suppose holding my feelings and thoughts of what’s moral and just in the name of professionalism was what got even one of us here to begin with is problamatic. Done with being nice, I gave my own exit interviews to those outlets like a wrecking ball discovering demolition sex, having nothing else, in my eyes, to professionally lose. Banned from the blue bird (Sidenote: why are some to most beta males disgusting to strong women they secretly want? What, SWINOs–strong women in name only–need only apply?)–no real loss, since it’s permitting child porn and okaying snitching on your friends/followers/following, euphamistically labeled “Birdwatching” if you haven’t heard, with zero discernment. The tea has it through other socials membership is continuing to decline in my former orgs, including those rethinking their membership in wake of my treatment on principle, and take their wallets where viewpoint alienation isn’t a menu regular. As the quasi-tired expression goes, some are finally seeing the true light in the contrived darkness. I’m happy for this. Being that casuality, or witnessing one, isn’t a picnic, nor is going outside my comfort zone defending the attacked, or letting them stay persecuted (i.e.: capitulation by proxy) hoping in that skein, maybe I won’t be. Un/Fortunately, we’re not in polite times or polite society anymore. Positions will be taken, rooted deeper into, right POV or no. Whichever yours are, hold fast boldly, go all in, bake until done. Lukewarm, wimpy, or milquetoasts anything is unacceptable–in the writing life and your right to speak in it!–and that’s how it is.

As my box-drop is funniest in a you-hadda-be-there kind of way, I’ll expound. Comedians like Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Fred Rubino, identical twins Kevin & Keith Hodge, Larry the Cable Guy, Jeff Foxworthy, Tim Allen, and a slew of others lamented they can’t visit American college and university campuses anymore for stand-up routines. Why? Co-eds are so indoctrinated with unevidenced fear and anger over jokes being offensive to anyone, when it’s that means making dark times more bearable. The kids are right in one sense–even through we ladies might find gallows humor appalling, laughter makes those intense moments less so; I can only imagine the sick jokes during and after Christ’s execution or the rotten timing of satire from some in Titanic’s lifeboats as they waited for the Carpethia. But psychological studies of this phenom back this to be legitimate: dangerous vocations like First Responders or high-rise window cleaners have, or one in a horrific life-changing event, often crack morbid, greusome, or gory jokes to help themselves deal with nightmarish tasks they’d like to forget forever. In the place of some NYPD detectives having to handle recent affairs of child sex trafficking–those terrifying images involved they had to see, they’d damn better joke, joke, joke all the way home. #TooSoon isn’t applicable here.

But an author serving a spoof at couvid’s or its country of origin’s espense? No! Go! Scared me so! Get out, get out, GET!!!! OUT!!!! Not hyperbole, either–it happened all that way. Even this platform came under recent fire for contributors not towing the censorship line others wished they’d do. I defended my fellow authors in both cases that tasteless, crass speech is free to be expressed, as it’s on the reader/listener/viewer to discriminate if they’ll be in audience. Sadly, with many millennials freefalling into the dangers of okaying piecemeal’ed to extreme censorship–and not a few boomers declaring themselves God to push such impositions on–they complained to the CEO and group owners about the emerging author’s share and complained about those who supported her right to express herself. No avail. We were permanantly excused. Just as well–I can’t justify monthly writing tchotchkes on a lean budget, but more imporantly, I won’t patron a business hellbent on quelling voices or views they find objectionable because it challenges their hegemony or stances. Sharing my argument to the CEO that I expected to go unanswered (it did), later that week I received a snarkily-comedic worded exit email, feigning sadness in its “Dear John” seeing me go. Tough sh*t, I’m staying ghost. I won’t give anything of me to anyone, anything, or any cause showing its ass, even more so since my position’s been thoroughly belittled, dismissed, scorned, or openly made fun of. All in the name of tolerance, of course.

Although a tired expression, it’s one worth sharing again: Where He closes a door, He opens a window. Opportunities abound for a warrior. During times of great upheaval, they always, always do.

So. That was my January. The bearded god looking in our past sees . . . what? Wreckage of a broken everything, if we’re being raw honest. The god’s other bearded face looking into our sunrise of what’s to come . . . sees what, exactly? Wreckage illuminated? The glow to rebuild, the light to guide?

The resplendwency to constntly keep in plain sight what never to revisit in history ever again?

That dude’s role sure ain’t what it use-ta be.

Then again, ain’t none of us are.

Stay strong in the fight for the pursuit of life, liberty, and that ever elusive bitch of happiness, my friends and scribe warriors. We’ve only just gotten started.

ps: Almost forgot: Happy Valentines’ Day. May you all be showered in flowers today and always.

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