Month: October 2021

Guest Blogger ~ Sharon L. Dean

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

(Re)appearing Ladies

It’s Halloween. What better time to write about ghosts, real and imagined. I spent my academic career writing about the nineteenth-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. Woolson had her own family ghost story to tell about the haunting of the bedroom where her sister Emma died. A scholar I know claims she felt Woolson’s presence when she visited the apartment where Woolson leapt or fell to her death in Venice.

 I  felt no such presence there, but like so many scholars I know, once Woolson gets hold of us, we can’t let her go. She materialized for me in my second novel, Death of the Keynote Speaker, where I imagined her as a fictionalized Abigail Brewster in a setting on one of the Isles of Shoals off the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine. Woolson never visited those islands, but I drew on real life historical figures for an appearance in that novel: Celia Thaxter, who held a literary salon on Appledore Island; Karen and  Anethe Christensen who were murdered on Smuttynose Island in 1873; and abortionist Madame Restell, who was known as “The Wickedest Woman in New York.”

            After I published Death of the Keynote Speaker, I wasn’t finished with my ghosts. My newest novel, The Wicked Bible, reimagines Abigail Brewster and Madame Restell. How could I not reprise “The Wickedest Woman in New York” in a novel titled after an actual 1631 Bible dubbed “The Wicked Bible?”

            I’m not done with reappearances. The novel I’m working on now reprised a character I named Connie in Leaving Freedom. Woolson left her childhood home in Cleveland to accompany her mother to Florida and the beginnings of a writing career. My Connie also leaves her hometown in Freedom, Massachusetts, to care for her mother in Florida where she also finds success as a writer. My novel in progress is bringing Connie, now eighty years old, back to Freedom. It’s tentatively titled Finding Freedom. I don’t know yet what Connie will find, but I know that the ghost of Constance Fenimore Woolson has given me plenty of inspiration. I wonder what ghosts live for you, whether they be haunting or inspirational?

After a winter when she solved the cold case of a high school friend found dead in a barn, Deborah Strong needs a distraction. She joins a conference, “Libraries: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going?” that will be useful for her work as a librarian in the small town of Shelby. The setting at a picturesque college in New Hampshire should also be healing.

Deborah’s project for the week plunges her into a mystery that would delight most researchers. What are the connections between a Bible dubbed “The Wicked Bible,” a woman called “The Wickedest Woman in New York,” a book written by a nineteenth-century author, and a letter penned to the author? As she slowly unravels the connections, Deborah confronts an event from her own past and anticipates a future that could be as brilliant as New Hampshire’s September foliage.

Buy links: Amazon- https://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Bible-Deborah-Strong-Mystery/dp/1645992810

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/new/59432097-the-wicked-bible

Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived and taught in before moving to Oregon. Although she has given up writing scholarly books that require footnotes, she incorporates much of her academic research as background in her mysteries. She is the author of three Susan Warner mysteries and of a literary novel titled Leaving Freedom. Her new seriesfeatures librarian and reluctant sleuth Deborah Strong. In The Barn, Deborah solves a thirty-year-old cold case. The Wicked Bible, scheduled for an October 2021 release by Encircle Publications,brings Deborah to a college campus and a search for who stole a Bible and a letter from the library’s archives. The third in the series, Calderwood Cove, forthcoming in 2022, will bring her to the coast of Maine and a murder. She continues to write and research in the landscape she’s discovering the Northwest.

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Website: https://sharonldean.com/ Publisher: https://encirclepub.com/

The Paths through the Forest

~ dzchurch ~ 7 Comments

A storm is brewing out my windows, clouds dense with rain hang heavy over the hills. You can feel the damp in your bones, in the air you breathe, and the chill that falls at your feet. Depending on your perspective, the promise of a deep drenching rain either fills you with trepidation or joy. Joy for me…always.

Weather has been part of my being since I was a child, thanks to my father, who flew through it all. And though I spent my time in the Navy in weather, I never once dreamed of taking that path in my life. But my broad brush with it has enriched me and my writing. I look at the sky, read the signs, and assess how what I see will affect my world, real or imaginary. In my stories, rocks, dirt, and slush roil down hillsides, a dry roadway on a frosty night hides a bridge slick with black ice, and the ocean sucks life from the beaches depositing its victims with the tide.

I have an affinity for the muddy side!

Like all of us, I’ve stared down many forks in the road and chosen a path through the forest of opportunity, fear, and hope lying undefined before me. I reinvented myself time and again to succeed in male-dominated businesses. I bucked trends, bosses, been on bucking horses, driven sixty-thousand miles a year back and forth over two states in a station wagon filled with educational assessments, flown hundreds of thousands of miles in the same quest, set up on demand scoring facilities nationwide, and my husband wants me to add, ridden an elephant.

My point is this . . . one of the great joys of writing is the ability it presents to follow anew the paths not taken. Each plot is an opportunity to ask what if I had become an anthropologist, a minister, a professor of English literature, a Naval aviator, or taken the bigtime NY advertising agency job when it was offered. Maybe I should have apprenticed at Vogue like my great aunt wanted or started at the bottom at National Geographic and worked my way up? What if I had purchased the family farm and lived that dream?

How different would my life have been if I had grown up in the town we were born in, married my high school sweetheart, and lived there still. Who would I be? I know I would be mad as a hatter and ready for the brick sanitarium with barred windows that once overlooked a sharply manicured lawn in the town I consider home. I can imagine being that person, bound to a town, a husband, a job, children, and family. How does that me react to the current me when we meet head-on in a plot?

Each path we don’t take informs and colors us as much as the one we did. The curiosity that drove us toward that choice lingers inside us. What we learned before we turned away still piques our curiosity and benefits our knowledge base. Writing is our opportunity to find out through our characters what might have been. Of course, as ladies of mystery, we spice it all up with a dead body or two, a conspiracy, a disappearance, or perhaps just the evil that stalks the dark of night. Boo!

I chose to leave the Navy when the life of one of my division members was destroyed by an unethical decision, supported by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and three fearful men. What if I had chosen to stay in? I’ll never know. But the incident and my resulting decision rode my shoulder as I drafted the final book of the Cooper Quartet, my series about a military family in the Vietnam Era. Don’t Tell will be released November 11 and is already a Reedsy Must Read, noting, “This author is an expert at action-packed intrigue and mystery.” And just in, from Booklife, “In this military milieu, Church—a Vietnam-era Navy veteran herself—does a remarkable job of keeping multiple plotlines running with clarity and power. Church spins a lively tale where motives are unclear in a vividly realized hothouse naval environment. The engaging characters and their detailed histories make this a satisfying capstone to a wide-ranging epic.”

Don’t Tell will be available November 11 on Amazon as an ebook, paperback, or in hardcover. In the meantime here is a link to the Booklife Review: https://booklife.com/project/don-t-tell-59592

“STICK-TO-IT-IVENESS”

~ marilynm ~ 11 Comments

This has been something I’ve done all my life. When I start something, I have to finish, whether it’s a chore, a volunteer job, writing a book, or anything that comes up in life.

Yes, I’m old, so there has been a lot to finish along the way. Right now I have 20 books in the Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series in print and available for Kindle, 16 books in the Rocky Bluff P.D. series in print and on Kindle, 8 stand-alones, 2 short stories and one cookbook (which is always my best seller).

I’m working on a new as yet-unnamed Rocky Bluff P.D. and have had a lot of other things I’ve had to do, so it’s slow going.

However, my biggest accomplishment, one that isn’t finished yet, is the fact that my husband and I reached 70 years of marriage on October 24th. Believe me, it hasn’t been easy. We didn’t really know each other well, were just kids (18-21), came from two different coasts and very different families and cultures. Because hubby was a career Seabee, he was gone a lot during the time we had young children (five in all), not ideal. When he retired, life became better for all of us. Both of us worked various jobs. I went to college to get my AA Degree in Child Development.

When the kids were all grown and all on their own, but one, we moved from our near the beach home to the foothills of the Sierra and became the owners and operators of a residential care facility for six women with developmental disabilities. This was a great time for both of us, though lots of work, we loved it.

And yes, I wrote, published and promoted during this time. I also wrote articles for the local newspaper for several years. I did many other jobs related to the residential care business, teaching classes, publishing a newsletter for other providers, and putting together an organization for providers.

We also enjoyed many mystery conferences all over the country, saw interesting sites, made many wonderful writer and reader friends. We did other fun things, gave lots of parties, went on cruises, and traveled to meet with writing groups.

All that is behind us now, but they were good years.

We have a big family we love and enjoy and those who are close by give us much pleasure, and  needed support in what is called our “golden years.”

And yes, if I start a project or job of any kind, you can be sure I’ll stick to it until I’m finished.

Marilyn

My Take on the Natural World

~ susanoleksiw ~ 6 Comments

I’ve been thinking about how I and other writers use the natural world in my stories. It’s a cliche to use a storm to reflect the turmoil within, sunny weather to underscore the openheartedness of a certain character, a snowstorm to emphasize the challenges that someone faces. To give readers a sense of the season, I might talk about the unexpected rain that thwarts a character’s effort to sneak into a home without leaving a trace, or the noisy dry leaves underfoot that give her away as she tries to sneak up to an open window. I’ve been thinking recently about how the literary use of fiction differs from the natural world as I encounter it daily.

My experience of the natural world consists of squirrels eating the pumpkins decoratively arranged on my front porch. And then there are the half-eaten early apples left by the rabbits. The raccoons have moved out of the garage because there’s a hole in the roof that lets in too much light. The skunks moved out ages ago because of the neighbor’s dog always barking at them. The mice have learned to stay out of the kitchen because we have a dog is too interested in them. That said, I have nothing against mice.

In this area, residents who live along the water, in lovely homes with terraces facing the sea, time their evening dog walks to avoid the coyote who has moved in recently. I spotted him trotting down the middle of the street when I was driving home late one night from an event. The wild turkeys seem to have moved on, which is fine with me. During the spring mating season the toms are aggressive. During the summer the birds stop traffic, attack any car that honks at them, and befoul yards and damage feeders. The toads in the garden are welcome but the aphids are not. The worms are also welcome, but I haven’t seen a garter snake in years. I’m very fond of bees, but they’re scarce now, as are the monarch butterflies. 

As writers we get to pick and choose the details we want to work with. If a man is trying to elude a car following him, he might speed up and then skid on wet leaves, which are as dangerous as snow and ice in some parts of the country. An old woman with dementia wants to hide her wealth from a designing nephew and buries it in the garden. We can see the plot twist coming–she never tells anyone and forgets where it is. But what about the squirrels that will dig up and eat anything? Now the squirrel is relevant.

The features of nature that are so prominent in ordinary life have no value if they don’t advance the story. Describing the mice that sneak around the kitchen at night might make the story feel grounded in real life but unless at least one mouse does something to help the story along, he’s clutter. The art of fiction is in transforming the mundane into something that matters, the string of a tea bag twisted around the bag and spoon to squeeze out every drop by a woman who resents her co-workers. The coyote no one has seen except one neighbor, who insists it’s out there, roaming the neighborhood after midnight. I want to know more about these two, that woman and that man.

The ordinary matters only when I as a writer make it matter. As I scratch out sentences and then tap them into the computer, I use what I see or recall to set the stage for a new story, and then I try to twist it into a compelling, haunting moment. Nature is neutral until it takes sides, helping one character or hurting another. One of my goals this year is to use more of the natural world that I experience and avoid cliches.

The Things that Haunt This Mystery Author

~ Pamela Beason ~ 5 Comments

It’s nearly Halloween. My neighbors have pumpkins and ghosts and emerging skeleton hands in their front yards. And the minds of most authors turn to all things creepy. As usual, I’m busy killing off imaginary victims in my new manuscript, and feeling a bit conflicted about that. But I have found that real life can be even more creepy than the scenarios that plague my imagination. I am updating this old post to describe the events that still haunt me.

Yesterday as I was doing the weekly shopping for my cats at their favorite pet food store, I couldn’t help noticing the older man perched on a bench outside the door. His hand was clutched around a paper coffee cup and he rocked back and forth, muttering, “The witching hour is coming…the witching hour is coming!”

I examined him out of the corner of my eye, like we all do with many of the homeless. He didn’t look like he lived on the streets. His clothes were clean and appropriate for the cool, wet weather; his hair and beard were neatly trimmed. I wondered if he was inspired by the idea of Halloween approaching, or if he felt he needed to sound the warning about the witching hour on a daily basis. The idea clearly haunted him.

I think most adults are haunted by something. That something might very well be the ghost of a deceased or missing person, but it can also be an old grievance, a regret, or even a horrible event that happened to perfect strangers. And I believe writers are the most haunted of all. Some of us write to exorcise those demons; others write in an attempt to silence them.

Real-life tragedies caused by malevolent people haunt me the most. I’ve written about kidnapped children, public furor gone awry due to media coverage, racist militia groups, and the ways in which innocent animals are trapped by human schemes. Most of these things I’ve learned about from media coverage, and although they happened to people I never met, they still haunt me.

Many people use the word “inspiration” to mean motivation that comes from a positive influence, but much of the inspiration that writers use comes from negative sources.

My friends know that I am an avid hiker. I spend a lot of time on the trails in the mountains and forests of the North Cascades. These are normally the places where I am most happy. So it was especially haunting to me to learn about the murders of nature lovers Susanna Stodden and her mother Mary Cooper in 2006 on a hiking trail, and then, two years later, the killing of another hiker, Pamela Almli, by a negligent 14-year-old hunter.

Author Pamela Beason at Pinnacle Lake, where Susanna Stodden and Mary Cooper were murdered

Many years have passed, but I think about all three of these women whenever I am hiking my beloved trails. Years ago, I wrote a novel that includes a combination of these two horrific events, in addition to another subject that is close to my heart, taking teens into the wilderness to teach them how to live without electronic devices.  I fictionalized all this, of course, to produce my fourth Summer “Sam” Westin mystery, Backcountry, in which Sam steps in as a replacement for her murdered friend to lead a group of troubled teens in a wilderness therapy program.

Writing and publishing Backcountry did not truly exorcise the demons that haunt me, because nothing has changed since these two cases occurred. The killer of Susanna and Mary is still unidentified, and it’s still legal in Washington State for 14-year-olds to hunt with only other teens for companions.

But I like to think that Susanna and Mary and Pamela would be pleased that I’m trying to tell their stories and keep their memories alive. And if their ghosts come to visit me at “the witching hour” on Halloween, I’ll be happy to spend time with them, because I know we are all kindred spirits.