Songs and Stories

April 6, 2026April 3, 2026 ~ Janet Dawson ~ 9 Comments

There was always music in our house.

Mom majored in music in college, until she dropped out during World War II to marry Dad. She played the piano and sang in the church choir. She also participated in a local singing group that sang standards and show tunes and performed around town.

Dad enjoyed the music of the forties, which was when he courted and married Mom. Sometimes he’d put a record on the hi fi, grab Mom, and they would dance around the family room.

I took piano lessons for many years. I bought a guitar once but couldn’t get my little fingers to fret properly, so I passed it along to my brother. He’s the musician in the family who plays with local bands and never travels without multiple guitars, just in case someone, somewhere, might want to jam.

I love listening to all kinds of music—rock, folk, jazz, country. I sing along. I first heard of the Beatles in 1963 (yes, I’m that old) and have been a fan ever since. The Rolling Stones, the Animals (Eric Burdon!), bring it on. Then there’s Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, and Gordon Lightfoot. I saw Lightfoot in concert twice, once at the University of Wyoming fieldhouse and the second time at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater.

My best memory of that venue is a concert in the 1970s. As the sunset hit those massive, tilted slabs of red sandstone, making them glow even redder, John Denver came out on stage singing “Rocky Mountain High.”

I like songs that tell stories. There are so many of them, in all the permutations. Think of the tales we heard on the radio: Wake Up, Little Susie by the Everly Brothers. House of the Rising Sun, and no one sings it like Eric Burdon. Dolly Parton’s Jolene, El Paso by Marty Robbins. Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry. Eleanor Rigby, the Beatles classic. Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. City of New Orleans, the Steve Goodman song that’s been covered by everyone from Guthrie to Willie Nelson. And of course, Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Songs that tell stories, yes. I had a fling with opera at one point, but my longest love affair is with musical theatre. I was raised on Broadway musicals, particularly those of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

A native Oklahoman, I spent my early years in that state. The state song is “Oklahoma!” Of course it would be, the title song of the groundbreaking R & H musical of the 1940s. I was about six years old when the movie version came out and spent my childhood hearing all those tunes.

So did lots of other people. I recently visited the Museum of Broadway in New York City. There’s a room in the three-story museum dedicated to Oklahoma! and I chuckled at the number of people who strolled through the exhibit singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

Before R & H came along, musicals were different. The Rodgers & Hammerstein website explains why.

The tradition . . . was largely a non-narrative one, i.e., revues and loosely constructed vehicles for singers, dancers and comedians.

Why was Oklahoma! groundbreaking? It was a narrative musical which:

. . . places a priority on telling a narrative – a story with a beginning, middle, and end. What made Oklahoma! groundbreaking as a narrative musical was not simply that it told a story (dozens of opera, operettas, and musical comedies had done that for decades), but the ruthless discretion that Rodgers, Hammerstein and their collaborators deployed towards dialogue, music, lyrics, staging, dances and décor in order to tell that story. Like Michelangelo chiseling away all the superfluous marble that wasn’t essential to his statue, the creative team was boldest in paring away all the obstacles that got in the way of their story.

We’re writing fiction, not musical theatre. But essentially, we writers are doing the same thing. We use every element at hand. First, we throw our plot, characters and story into the mix. Then we pick up that chisel and start working on that big slab of marble. Cut here, polish there. We eliminate everything that’s superfluous until we have the story we want to tell.

Grab your chisel and get to work. And sing along with your favorite show tune if the spirit moves.

Guest Blogger ~ Greta Boris

April 4, 2026March 25, 2026 ~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

The Lighter Side of Death

Greta Boris

It was March 19, 2020, and I was in San Diego at the Left Coast Crime Convention. I was just leaving my first (or maybe second) panel discussion when an announcement came over the loud speakers. The conference was being cancelled. The governor had just shut down the state. I grabbed my bags and headed for home.

During lockdown a lot of authors shut down just like the country. Their stories dried up. They were too distracted by the pandemic and all it’s accompanying fears to write.

Not me. Writing became my sanity.

There are two basic ways people deal with difficulties. Some are internal processors. They need to sit quietly and think things through. This is the kind of person I wish I was.

I am the second kind, however. I’m an external processor. Often, I don’t really know what I think about things until I get them out of my brain into the atmosphere.

Thankfully for my husband, I’m also a writer. Talking works, but so does writing. It’s saved our marriage. He can only handle so much of my mental meanderings.

Anyway, back to 2020. I was sure, like the rest of you, that this whole pandemic thing would be over in a hot minute. As the weeks of isolation dragged on, however, I realized I was going to have to do something with the growing fear within.

At the time, I was wrapping up book five or six of a seven book psychological suspense series now titled The Almost True Crime Series. It’s written as a if its a true crime podcast with each book representing one season of the show. My podcaster, Molly Shure, delves into the minds of the killers, trying to understand the “whys” behind the crimes. This is a topic that fascinates me, but it’s a little on the dark side.

In the middle of COVID, with all the darkness that it brought, I felt the need for something lighter and brighter. Being the kid that did NOT pull the covers over my head when something went bump in the night, I knew I had to tackle the current zeitgeist head on. I had to find the lighter side of death.

Coincidentally, my daughter had recently introduced me to a YouTube channel—The Ask a Mortician Show. Caitlin Doughty, an actual mortician, was funny and real and so, so interesting. She tackled topics like embalming procedures for people who’d died in various gruesome ways, strange burial rituals from around the globe, and why green burials were the wave of the future.

She, I thought, would make an excellent amateur sleuth. But how or why would a mortician be privy to things the authorities weren’t? By the time she got her hands on a corpse, medical and law enforcement professionals would have already investigated if an investigation was warranted.

Then, I remembered a conversation I’d had at the salon back in the good old days when we were allowed to groom ourselves. A stylist told me about another stylist who moonlighted in mortuaries doing hair for the dead.

What if my character got a request to style a deceased client for that client’s funeral? What if she discovered a hitherto unknown talent when she did? What if she could feel the final emotions or sensations of that person when she touched their hair? And what if the person demanded justice by haunting my main character until the murderer was exposed?

That had legs. I had an interesting protagonist with an interesting gift, a reason she would know things the police and coroner wouldn’t, and most importantly, a reason for her to encounter lots of dead people. No shade on Miss Marple, I love those stories, but the murder rate in St. Mary Meed was hard to swallow.

Thus To Dye For, book one in The Mortician Murders was born. I’m currently writing book nine in Imogene Lynch’s story. She’s found more than a gift and a slew of murderers. She’s found family, a legacy of power, an arch enemy in the Orange County Medical Examiner, and an evil cult she must ultimately confront. She’s also found love with Greener Pastures Mortuary’s hunky night watchman, Elmore Leonard Brown, who later in the series becomes an Orange County Sheriff.

The Mortician Murder world has been a respite for me from the tumult of the 2020s. The scary things Imogene has braved have helped me face my own fears during COVID and beyond. Through her, I’ve discovered a secret weapon—laughter. As hyperbolic as it might sound, writing this series has taught me that embracing the lighter side of death helps to diffuse the power of darkness.

Viva la Cozy Mystery!

To Dye For – A Ghostly Mortician Murder

Death is Permanent. Unless It’s Not.

Imogene’s client has an unusual request. The only problem? She’s dead.

Hairstylist Imogene Lynch agrees to do a simple, if creepy, favor—styling the hair of her favorite client for her funeral. Things take a chilling turn when the body refuses to stay still. Either Imogene is losing her mind, or something far more sinister is at play.

Determined to untangle the mystery, she joins forces with the mortuary’s infuriatingly handsome night watchman. What do they uncover? Turns out her client’s death, like her hair color, wasn’t exactly natural. And worse—she’s not the only victim.

Someone is thinning out the population of Liberty Grove, and if Imogene isn’t careful, she’ll be next.

For fans of reluctant heroes, ghostly mysteries, and murder with a side of dark humor.

Buy link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WG2SVDC

Greta Boris is the USA Today Bestselling author of The Mortician Murders, a ghostly mystery series, and The Almost True Crime series, stories of psychological suspense. She hails from sunny Southern California, where—based on her books, which are all set there—things are darker than you’d expect.

She’s also a popular workshop instructor with books and online courses on a variety of writing topics.

Author Links: http://gretaboris.com and https://www.facebook.com/greta.boris

Karan Made Me Do It!

April 1, 2026 ~ Nancy Lynn Jarvis ~ 3 Comments

For the longest time and in increasing numbers, people I meet at fairs and book shows have been asking if my books are available on Audible. I’m a paper book aficionado; I don’t enjoy reading on my iPad and would never dream of reading on a phone. Oh, I do listen to podcasts which are short and usually newsy regularly, but the only book I’ve ever listened to was “1776” read by its author, David McCullough. I found it mesmerizing, and even after a seven-hour drive home, I stayed in my car until almost midnight to hear the last few pages.

In the past year the pressure to make an audiobook has been increasing, but I still successfully avoided doing it. My neighbor Karan was the pushiest. “I listen to audiobooks every day,” she said. “Please, please, please do audiobooks.”

I’m a master at finding excuses for things that scare me. I’d say “I’m in the middle of writing another book and can’t think about audiobooks until it’s finished.” When a book was finished, I’d move on to, “I can’t do anything about an audiobook right now because I’m trying to promote my new book.” If I had free time I’d say “I’m a technophobe; I could never deal with audiobook production.” And, then there was always my personal favorite: “Hey, I’m just a poor writer who could never afford to pay Meryl Streep to read a book of mine.” (Not that she would anyway.)

On January 1st, I came dangerously close to running out of excuses. At a New Year’s Day brunch my daughter-in-law’s brother mentioned he had been setting up podcasts and book readings and said he would be happy to produce an audiobook of “The Glass House,” the first book in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series. Panic time. But then I remembered the getting a professional to record issue. Whew.

That final excuse soon fell, too. No, Meryl Streep didn’t agree to record a book for me, but I discovered listeners are often willing to let an author read their book to them. I learned a number of other things about audiobooks, too, things like what’s happening to their market share of books consumed each year. Statistics from 2024 stated there were 270 million audiobooks sold that year and 7.93 billion dollars in revenue was generated by eager listeners. The most shocking statistic was that listeners were increasing 15% per year. I’m not great at math, but even I understood the implications of numbers like that.

So, Karan, I don’t pretend to be an actress and the results of trying to do a male voice might be questionable, but per your demands, the book came out on March 13^th. Audible gave me a bunch of free codes and told me to give them to family, friends, fans, and anyone who would agree to listen to the book and promise to leave a review. The goal is to get fifty reviews; that’s evidently a magic number in Audible land.

If you are willing, please email me at nancylynnjarvis@gmail.com and I’ll send you one. At the very least, you can do more than read my posts. You can find out what I sound like.