Month: August 2025

First sentence, first page, a first for me

~ donaleeMoulton ~ 3 Comments

By donalee Moulton

Summer is here—and it has brought with it sunshine, warmth, and my new mystery Melt. I thought I’d share the opening page with you. It’s a different kind of first page for me, but then Melt is a different kind of book for me.

It’s the second in the Lotus Detective Agency series, and my first sequel. The first book, Bind, introduced three women who meet in a yoga studio and join forces to discover who’s stolen a Patek Philippe watch from what was supposed to be a secure locker. It opens gently basking in the warmth and serenity of the Asana yoga studio. There is no basking in Melt.

The first line came quickly. I deleted it just as quickly. It came back and stubbornly refused to move from top spot. I asked others—writers, editors, friends, wonderful strangers who turned up at my readings—for their opinion. Most liked it. Some loved it. Some shuddered.

Now I get to ask you what you think about the first sentence, and the first page. As you’ll read, there’s a bit of theme in these first 500 words.

Excerpt

Luke’s balls are itchy.

His left hand, casually resting on his left thigh, is mere inches from his testicles. He could surreptitiously edge his hand forward and find relief.

“Surreptitiously” is not a word in Luke’s usual vocabulary. It has nothing to do with IQ. Indeed, Luke is smart enough to read the room before he moves his hand a nanometer. He scans the beige walls, the brown tables, the black gowns, the onyx gavel. A courtroom, he concludes, is not the best place to scratch your scrotum. Luke clenches his legs together to stop the itching. Now he has to piss.

Luke looks up to see the judge looking down at him. “I want to confirm your plea. You understand by pleading guilty to trafficking a schedule one drug you could spend 25 years in a federal prison.”

This is not news to Luke. It is not good news, certainly, but it is not a surprise. It is what he has signed on for. Luke’s lawyer nudges him. Luke stands up. He returns the judge’s gaze without malice or defiance. “Yes, your honor, I understand.”

The associate chief justice of the supreme court of Nova Scotia quickly and efficiently takes in Luke’s demeanor, his clarity of voice. She takes in his blue suit, at least one size too large; his tartan tie, with Value Village written all over it; his left hand, which seems to have a small twitch. She looks into Luke Castle’s eyes. She sees what she often sees: fear. What she does not see is hope.

Justice Louise Redmond shifts her gaze to the Crown prosecutor. Then to defense counsel. She reaches for the gavel. “I am not sentencing a seventeen-year-old boy to federal prison before I have a fitness assessment conducted.” The judicial mallet hits its thick round oak base. “Under section 672.11 of the Criminal Code of Canada, I hereby order a comprehensive competency assessment be conducted on Lucas Raymond Castle. Sentencing will follow pending the results of the assessment.”

There is a shuffle of chairs as the lawyers rise. They reach for their files and their briefcases. The court reporter removes the flash drive from the stenograph. The bailiff moves toward the rear door that leads into the judges’ private offices. Justice Louise Redmond is not finished, however. She stands. “I would like to see counsel in my chambers immediately.”  Looking into the public gallery, she locks eyes with an attractive man in a grey suit and black turtleneck that contrasts perfectly with his onyx skin. “Detective Terrell, please join us.”

Justice Redmond walks through the rear door without looking back. The two lawyers look at each other and shrug. They turn to look at Detective First Class Michael Terrell. He shrugs.

Luke Castle scratches his balls.

Guest Blogger ~ Lee Upton

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

The Romance of Reading

When I entered first grade I didn’t know the alphabet and was put in the group of children who were having the most difficulty learning to read. At some point I began to read without any  trouble. Then came third grade when all of us children were told if we finished ten books we could claim a prize. 

To claim the prize meant telling the teacher, which meant she would lead us to the box to select from among the many-colored jumble of prizes: tiny plastic dolls and pretty paper fans and box cars and gold-spined books. I coveted those treasures with all my heart.

And yet I would not claim the prize.

Instead, I re-read the tenth book for weeks, staring at the pages. The book was about a child who lived in a city, walked to school, and learned how to obey the stoplights to cross the street safely. I was a child who rode the bus to a rural Catholic school where someone got punished for putting a cigarette in the outstretched hand of the statue of Mary at the top of the stairs. As I reread and reread the tenth book the other children claimed their prizes.

My desire for a prize was desperate, but not so much that I would claim one. I was too shy. I had seen our teacher put one of the children on her lap. She must have been kind, must have delighted in giving prizes. But I couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear the attention.

The book was my shield. More books would shield me later. In a few years it would be determined that I was myopic and couldn’t make out what was written on the blackboard. Before problems with my eyesight were detected, books continued to be my shield and my comfort—not because of shyness but because I could see most clearly what was written on a page only inches from my face.

In elementary school it wouldn’t be long before I discovered what I call the romance of reading. That is, I read a book that captured my whole attention in a way I had never yet experienced. The book told a story about Robin Hood. At the end, Robin Hood dies. I had no idea. I was so immersed in the book during a silent reading period at school that when an arrow pierced Robin Hood’s heart I cried out with shock. I was too astonished to be embarrassed by my outburst. What I felt for that book: it was like a first romance, and I refused to be embarrassed or ashamed by my response. Ever since, I’ve refused to be embarrassed by anyone’s judgment about what I’m reading. Reading is a romance—and no one else’s judgment should apply.

The word “romance” is hard to explain, at least in the way I want to consider the word.

Years ago a Frenchman, a stranger, asked me what the word “romance” meant. That seemed odd—wouldn’t a Frenchman know the answer, if anyone does? For some reason we were looking at a barrel inside of which a big silver fish was swimming. I tried to answer, but I don’t think he understood what I meant and, anyway, I was distracted by the fish.

If I had to answer now I might say that romance is a willing agreement to engage in a fever dream that can happen in various circumstances, even between one person and one book. That is, reading can be a romance—heady, passionate, and consuming, full of uncertainty and, sometimes, comedy. Even if a story is read aloud to us, each of us in our own minds gives the story life—and what we read may change our sense of time and readjust our sense of the space we occupy. Such reading may even allow a secret undomesticated part of ourselves to flourish. When we are engaged in the romance of reading we are not escaping the confines of our life, not exactly. It’s more like entering a country that never before existed, a country we are helping to bring into being through a quality of attention that creates an intimate experience. It doesn’t feel lonely, although most often conducted in solitude.

My new novel, Wrongful, is a literary mystery in which a popular novelist apparently disappears at a festival where various writers are behaving badly. My primary character, Geneva Finch, is what I think of as an ideal reader, a tenacious reader who has felt deeply what it means to carry on a romance with a series of books. She is an avid admirer of the novels of the popular novelist Mira Wallacz, and she is haunted by the mystifying circumstances surrounding Wallacz’s last moments. She can be critical of what she reads, and she recognizes that her attitudes and behaviors have been shaped by books—and that she may need to adjust her expectations accordingly. Yet reading, for her, sometimes comes close to voluntary enchantment.

I’ve written before about the romance of reading. In “The Ideal Reader,” the opening story of my collection The Tao of Humiliation, a biographer attempts to solve a mystery about a famous writer’s abandonment of his writing—and of his own daughter, who is explicitly identified in the story as an ideal reader. Another story, “Night Walkers,” in my collection Visitations, is about the world’s laziest book club, whose members tend to avoid reading any books and whose main character must regain and newly strengthen her ability to read fiction after enduring her husband’s betrayal. In “Gods and Goddesses in Art and Legend” (Visitations) a woman comes to a realization about how her reading has contoured her expectations far too much: “What new pattern was she going to make for her life? Whatever it was, her life couldn’t be made only of books. Not only of books. Although partly of books, that was true.”

Although an ideally generous reader, Geneva Finch in Wrongful is not a faultless reader—she can jump to conclusions too readily, and she can be willfully naive about authors, at least initially—yet she enters into what she reads with generosity. She doesn’t suspend her judgment, but neither does she suspend her capacity to be changed by her reading, to dwell in the country of the imagination and meet its requirements. She is, in a sense, the perfect reader for Mira Wallacz’s novels, for at their deepest levels both Geneva and the novels’ author endure the lingering effects of loss and self-blame. Their encounter in the novel may be brief. Nevertheless, an unconscious recognition pervades their meeting.

The traces of an underground or inexplicable mystery animates the romance of reading and propels us through certain books. We feel the pull of sensations we may not quite understand. Reading may be an encounter, sometimes with something that we are hazily trying to remember and pursue. I think this is true for us as authors as well: an author writes another book in search of the answer to an inexplicable mystery. 

The dedication page of Wrongful is inscribed “to the rightful reader”—those readers for whom the book is right at this time in their lives, who will be sure of their right to imagine, to read close to the page or in the mirror ball of what we know of culture and history, to read to the end of the book, or to stop short and put the book down, or even to read to the end and start all over again.

I don’t think there can be one sort of ideal reader. Each book we read is its author’s attempt to find the right reader. And as readers we make the ultimate choice—will this be a book we can drop, without hurting anyone’s feelings (the author will never know) or a whirlwind romance, or a cherished encounter that we hate to see end? Will we return to reread the book, faithful year after year? Meanwhile, for readers and writers alike, when a book clicks for us, the romance of reading is ardent and head-turning—a new springtime.

WRONGFUL

When the famous novelist Mira Wallacz goes missing at the festival devoted to celebrating her work, the attendees assume the worst—and some hope for the worst. Ten years after the festival, Geneva Finch, an ideal reader, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to Mira Wallacz. A twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest, Wrongful explores the many ways we can get everything wrong, time and again, even after we’re certain we discovered the truth.

byuy link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1963846214

Lee Upton is the author of books of poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Her forthcoming literary mystery, WRONGFUL, in which writers behave badly at two literary festivals, is forthcoming in May 2025. Her comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, appeared in May 2024. Her seventh collection of poetry, THE DAY EVERY DAY IS, received the 2021 Saturnalia Prize and appeared in spring 2023. Her second short story collection, Visitations, was a recipient of the Kirkus star and was listed in “Best of the Indies 2017” and “Best Indie Books for December” by Kirkus. The collection was also a finalist in the short story collections category of the American Book Fest Best Book Awards

Facebook: facebook.com/uptonlee

Instagram: leeupton45

Lee Upton’s website: https://www.leeupton.com/

Publisher’s site with reviews and purchasing sites: https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/wrongful/

Bluesky: @leeupton.bsky.social

On X: @LeeUpto10998691

Hobby Me This

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 5 Comments

Some of you sharp-eyed readers will notice that this is an old blog, and you’re right. I apologize, but to be honest I’m not yet back up to my fighting weight after a pair of life-threatening surgeries and I didn’t want to desert you all completely. Please bear with me this month and next month I’ll have something fresh for you. Thank you.


by Janis Patterson


Mention hobbies/crafts and people generally think of needlecraft, or scrapbooking, or making things, or painting either on canvas or cloth or wood, or… the subject is endless, as everyone who has ever visited a Michael’s or Hobby Lobby knows.


I’m different. Still. My hobby is Ancient Egypt. Studying, visiting, crafting, writing about… anything that concerns Ancient Egypt. I’ve been that way since childhood. By the age of nine I had read every book the Dallas Public Library system had or could borrow on the subject of Egyptology. (Although in the interest of full disclosure I will admit that when I was nine there were a lot fewer books on Egyptology!) I met the man who would become my husband through Egyptology and it was in the moonlit English garden of the Mena House Hotel at the foot of the Pyramids (yes, those pyramids!) that he proposed to me. The North Texas Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt was founded in the den where I now sit. Through this mania I have been fortunate enough to meet almost every Egyptologist of note in the last 30 or so years and am blessed to call several of them dear personal friends.


So how does this little bit of personal history aid my writing? Aid? Reshape and re-form is more like it. On my first trip to Egypt back in ’92 (before I even met my husband-to-be) my mother and I took a cheap tour to Egypt. It was like returning to a place I loved, even though I had never been there before. I took conspicuous note and pictures and wrote several stories about Egypt then and now. Some didn’t sell (trad pubbing only back then, when others decided what writers should write) but one did – a big time-travel romance called PASSION’S CHOICE. Thanks to the dictates of my then publisher it was what was considered at the time a ‘dirty’ book. Nowadays – meh. Time came the rights finally came back to me and I wanted to rewrite and take out the naughty bits, but the story was so tightly constructed it couldn’t be done, so I left it the way it was. By then I was self-publishing and decided just to let it ride.


Fast forward a couple of years, a marriage to a man as Egypt-obsessed as I, a couple of trips over there and then in ’10 we were on a group tour with some others from our ARCE chapter and on the way back to Luxor from the quarry at Geb el-Silsila the bus stopped on a whim at the necropolis of El Kab.


Out of such tiny incidents all kinds of things grow.


The necropolis is huge, but the centerpiece are four beautifully decorated tombs. They have been open since the Middle Ages, but the colors are still vivid and the statues of the deceased ones still alarmingly lifelike. In one of the tombs there is a painted graffito in a language no one could identify. Two of the scholars on our tour put their heads together and decided it was a debased form of Ancient Phoenician. Cool! I actually knew people who could read Ancient Phoenician! (Actually, years later the late great Eugene Cruz-Uribe (I think) did translate it, as it was proved to be a dialect of Ancient Egypt written in a weird form of demotic.)


Anyway, those lovely tombs gave me an idea and after a while I was working on the story of THE EGYPTIAN FILE, a modern romantic adventure. The only thing was I couldn’t remember in which tomb the graffito was, so, as a member of the EEF listserv, I put the question out. There’s a saying that when you ask five Egyptologists a question, you get eight answers and a fistfight. Not quite that bad, but I did get some very passionate answers.


Two of them were super special. One was from Jane Akshar, an Egyptologist and hotelier, and the other was Dr. Dirk Huyge, Curator of the Art and History Collection of the Brussels Royal Museum and Director of the Belgian Archaeological Mission to El Kab. They were both very helpful and both of them became dear friends. I named them both as ‘researchers in residence’ in the acknowledgements, because there are all kinds of little details you can’t find on the internet, such as how long it takes to get from Beni Suef to Luxor by train.


And that started something. Jane and I corresponded regularly and she, in another life an IT specialist, became not only a dear friend but my web-maven and looked after my website. Dirk was fascinated by the process of writing – and totally tickled to being in a book – so one day in early January 2015 he and I were chatting by email and he said, we’re going to the dig in March, why don’t you and your husband join us?


My jaw dropped. Civilians never get to stay in dig houses. Never. I told him I’d talk to the hubby and let him know. We were in budget mode and trips to Egypt are expensive, so the rest of the afternoon I tried to anticipate his objections and how to counter them. Finally he came home from work and I said, “Dirk wants us to come stay at the dig house and I think…” I got no further, because he said, “When do we leave?” That was January 5th, and on March 15th we were in Egypt. We got to stay close to a week in the dig house, sandwiched in between our dear friend Dr. Salima Ikram and a BBC film crew.


The result was a lovely little murder mystery called A KILLING AT EL KAB. It’s still one of my favorite books. And last September we took a Nile cruise for two weeks. I was just going to enjoy… I wasn’t going to work or anything. The Husband laughed and bought me a (refurbished) MacBookAir for a travel computer so I could do a trip diary… which I did and you can find on my website if you dig a little. He does know me… I came home with about half a new book, A FIRSTCLASS KILLING, set on a luxurious Nile cruise boat. So far it’s great fun!


So perhaps Ancient Egypt isn’t a ‘classic’ hobby, but it’s mine. I do needlepoint some Ancient Egyptian design pillow covers, and at the moment am working on a broad collar necklace with colored beads and opaque cabochons, but it is the land and the time itself which are my real hobby. And I love it!


The thing I am trying to tell you is that you can never tell from where a story will come. I never thought to write a book set in Ancient Egypt… and now I’ve written several. Don’t ever overlook something you love as fodder for a book. Look at all the needlework/knitting/whatever books there are. Or baking. Or singing. Or… well, you get the idea. When you can combine two passions the outcome just has to be something special.

Stories – Imagination at its best

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

I’m in the middle of judging at county fairs with one today, and next week, judging at the Oregon State Fair. What could judging at county and state fairs have to do with writing? Let me tell you.

There is a plethora of people I work with when judging. From extension agents, volunteers, other judges, parents, and the kids. All of these give me fodder for characters in my books. I never truly learn all about the people, but I get descriptions, sometimes names, and characteristics that help me flesh out main or minor characters.

There are the items I judge. Why did that person use that color, make a dog coat, raise such exotic plants, or wish they could have brought in a poisonous plant? What people make or bring (there are some fairs that have collections as exhibits) to the fair to express who they are. So many times, I look at what a person has brought in and wonder what do they do when they aren’t crafting, sewing, or cooking.

I must say, my favorite thing to judge is the writing. Whether at the county or state level. 4-H members can now enter creative writing to be judged. When I read a good story and feel excited for the child who put this effort into telling a good story. I love seeing children expressing themselves in words and ideas on paper.

There have been stories that make me laugh, ones that make me sad, and ones that tear at my heart. One year, there were a lot of stories about death. That was hard to keep reading so many stories like that. But other years I’ve read about pirates, talking animals, fairies, ghosts, and even read a few mysteries.

I love that kids are learning to express themselves with words and sharing their imaginations with others. As a child, I wrote plays that my younger brother and I acted out with our stuffed animals. In junior high, two friends and I wrote an ongoing story that we passed around, adding to it. The story was an adventure set in the mountains where we lived.

Story has been a part of my life for as long as I started learning to read over my older brother’s shoulder. Words put together in a way to make someone want to read what I write is thrilling.

I will continue to write until my brain or my hands fail me. Because it is the best way I know to convey information to people in an entertaining way.

It’s early in the month but I have a Chirp Deal coming out on August 13th. If you want to listen to the first box set of my Gabriel Hawke Novels, it will be available for $2.99 from there from 8/13 – 9/10. You can find it here: https://www.chirpbooks.com/audiobooks/gabriel-hawke-box-set-1-3-by-paty-jager

    Join Oregon State Trooper Gabriel Hawke as he performs his duties with the Fish and Wildlife Division while finding a body with a wolf collar, tracking a lost child, and hunting down a poacher in the wilderness of Wallowa County.

    Books 1-3 in the Gabriel Hawke Novels

    Oregon State Trooper Gabriel Hawke is part of the Fish and Wildlife Division in Wallowa County. He not only upholds the law but also protects the land of his ancestors.

    Murder of Ravens

    Book 1

    State Trooper Gabriel Hawke is after poachers in the Wallowa Whitman National Forest. When he comes across a body wearing a wolf tracking collar, he follows the trail of clues.

    Mouse Trail Ends

    Book 2

    Dead bodies in the wilderness. A child is missing. Oregon State Trooper Hawke is an expert tracker, but he isn’t the only one looking for the child.

    Rattlesnake Brother

    Book 3

    State Trooper Gabriel Hawke encounters a hunter with an illegal tag. The name on the tag belongs to the Wallowa County District Attorney and the man holding the tag isn’t the public defender. 

    Words, Words, Words

    ~ Margaret Lucke ~ 4 Comments

    By Margaret Lucke

    The other day I fell down another internet rabbit hole. While working on a scene in my latest novel-in-progress, I was looking up some words to make sure I was using them correctly. I always like to catch these things, if I can, before the book is published and readers start pointing them out to me.

    A couple of hours later, I resurfaced, the sought-after definitions in hand along with quite a few more that were totally irrelevant to the scene in question.

    Doing the research can be more fun than doing the writing. It’s a great way to procrastinate while persuading myself that I’m actually working, just as much as if I were putting words on the page. Once I get started doing research like that, one interesting fact leads me to another, and to another. I’m especially fond of fun facts about words, writers, and literature. Here, for your amusement, are some of my discoveries:

    *    The longest word in the English-language dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis, which is a lung disease contracted from inhaling volcanic particles. It contains 45 letters (I counted so you wouldn’t have to). But its primacy is challenged by the chemical name of a giant protein known as titin, which has 189,819 letters and, it is estimated, would fill around 57 pages if printed in a typical book. A YouTube video of a man pronouncing the word runs almost as long as the film Gone with the Wind. No wonder the dictionary leaves it out.

    *    That long p-word disease isn’t much of a problem for writers, who are more likely to be afflicted with colygraphia, which sounds serious enough to earn us plenty of tea and sympathy. Most of us call this problem by its more common name — writer’s block.

    *    After you recover from your colygraphia, it’s time to get back to work. Before you know it, you may find yourself complaining about mogigraphia, or writer’s cramp

    *    Someone who probably suffered from mogigraphia was Peter Bales, who earned fame in Elizabethan England for his skill as a scribe and calligrapher. In 1590 Bales transcribed a complete copy of the Bible so tiny it could fit inside a walnut shell.

    *    Though Bales was known to engage in contests and rivalries, I don’t know if he produced his Bible to win a wager. But some have taken pen in hand in order to win a bet. For instance:

    >>   Editor and publisher Bennett Cerf bet Dr. Seuss $50 that he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words. Seuss responded by writing Green Eggs and Ham.

    >>   Ernest Hemingway famously won a bar bet when his drinking buddies each put $10 in the pot and challenged him to write a story using only six words. Hemingway scribbled these words on a napkin — “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” — and collected the cash. This has led to an entire genre of six-word stories, some of which can be found at http://www.sixwordstories.net/

    >>   Agatha Christie wrote her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, after her older sister bet her that she couldn’t write a mystery novel in which the reader couldn’t guess the murder even though given the same clues as the detective – who in this case is Hercule Poirot.

    *    Christie’s other famous sleuth is Miss Jane Marple. But Miss M. was far from the first female detective. That honor may belong to the heroine of a novella by E.T.A Hoffman that was published in 1819, more than a century before Miss Marple made her appearance. Both the sleuth and the novella are named Mademoiselle de Scudéri. That’s the same E.T.A. Hoffman, by the way, who wrote The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which formed the basis of Tchaikovsky’s Christmastime ballet.

    Who knew all these cool bits of trivia? Well, I know them, thanks to my research journey and the stops I made along the way. And now so do you. I’ll conclude this list with one final entry:

    * A literarian is someone who loves literature and is dedicated to sharing that love with others. In other words, me.

    What are some of the odder entries in your literary lexicon?