Author: janispattersonmysteries

The Perils and Pleasures of a Book Signing

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by Janis Patterson

Last year three writer friends and I wrote an anthology called THE JULY FOURTH MURDERS. Four murders, each on July Fourth, but during different wars – Revolutionary War, WWI, WWII and Viet Nam. With a timely release and a lot of publicity last year it sold fairly well. So – we thought we’d do it again!

This year we held a signing at a local bookstore on July fifth. Let’s face it – on the Fourth itself the majority of people will be partying and visiting and not going to bookstores, so we set up on the fifth, thinking there would be more traffic. And we were right… sort of. The bookstore had fairly good traffic all afternoon, and most of them were buying books. Just not ours. Oh, we sold a fair amount, but not anywhere near what we had expected/hoped. We each also sold some of our individual books.

We had good traffic, and met some lovely people. As always, there were those who were fascinated to meet Real Authors (almost as if we were some sort of exotic zoo exhibit!) and others who wanted to know how to become authors and still others who liked to read. Some were just bored and looking for a new experience. Pretty much as normal.

There were darling babies who cooed and grinned… and slept. I don’t remember a single one who cried – unlike a four-ish little boy who must have been auditioning for an Imp from Hell. There was an amazing assortment of dogs (this bookstore is very advanced, thank you) from one no bigger than a powder puff to a mastiff who looked like he could wear a saddle with no trouble at all. He also liked to put his sizeable head in my lap while I scritched between his ears. No small feat, considering his head was just about the same size – and much heavier – than a basketball.

But sales… nope. Just a few – and I mean a VERY few. I handed out a lot of business cards and my book list. Maybe that will mean sales down the road, but I doubt it. I guess my style of writing is just not popular this week. Or maybe I just don’t look like the general idea of An Author, swathed in diamonds and pink feathers and drinking champagne. While I do have a diamond or two, I don’t have a pink feather to my name. I do love good champagne, though.

Still, it was a pleasant day. I like talking to people, and got to have a nice long chat with my co-writers. We’ve known each other literally for decades, but don’t get to spend enough time just being friends together. Usually when we do it’s in a writing group or teaching a class. I’m grateful for the sales we all got, but if I may sound a bit heretical, it’s about much more than sales.

It’s connecting with your tribe.

It’s about meeting people other than in writing groups.

It’s about being a human being instead of just A Writer.

Try it.

Travel for Fun and Location

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by Janis Patterson

Ah, the beginning of summer! The white hot skies, the unexpected rains, the siren call of pools and lakes… for some. For me summer means travel. (If I were to be honest I’d have to say that’s true of all seasons, but this is summer, so let’s leave it at that.) Travel is one of my greatest pleasures, and it influences me greatly.


And, being a writer, that means my writing is influenced as well. Back in my days of trad-publishing-only whenever I wanted to take a trip (I was much younger, single and fancy-free) and could afford it, off I went. Of course I kept every receipt and expense so the trip could be claimed as a business tax deduction. (One of the nicest things about being a writer is that with just a little creativity just about everything except your morning cereal can be claimed as a business tax deduction.) Then when I returned home just to legitimize my expenses I would write about 50 pages and a synopsis (which in those antique days we called a proposal) and send it to my editor. Silly practice, which accounted for me having to write a couple of books I really didn’t want to!


A location can be as compelling a character in your book as any human… sometimes more so, so you have to be accurate in describing it. And if you aren’t, believe me, there are lots of people out there who will take great delight in correcting you.


One of the mantras writers learn early is Research Research Research. This is doubly true when describing a setting. You have to be accurate, but also relatable, and you don’t dare let your descriptions grow so detailed that they clog the action. People don’t like great indigestible lumps of info dump. When I travel I take copious notes and photographs as well as picking up brochures and other information. When I can’t resist it I also buy books, which accounts for a large portion of my overweight baggage fees.


On the other hand, you have to be delicate about how much information you put in your story. While I recommend knowing as much as you can, that does not mean you have to put in everything you know. For example, suppose you are writing about a famed craft/art show. You don’t need to put down the square footage, or the miles of paths, or the opening hours… UNLESS any or all of these are clues or some other kind of vital information. Even if they are, be a little bit subtle about it. There’s nothing more annoying than a fact surrounded in neon that blinks “Here’s a clue – here’s a clue.” Let the reader take the sleuthing journey with you. Make them work just a little – don’t spoon feed them the clues in an obvious way.


But facts aren’t the only metrics or even usefulness of locations. There’s so much more than can evoke reactions in your readers. Sight is often the primary reference point, but smell and sound can convey so many levels of feeling. Use them to create exactly the reaction you want. What does the character hear? Traffic? Cowbells and mountain breezes? Rock music? What does the air feel like? Dry? Humid? Soft? What smells are there? Green growing things? Car exhaust? The smell of broiling meat from the food court? The only thing is, whatever you’re putting in your story has to be (reasonably) available in the actual location.


But this is so simple, I can hear you saying. How can you write about a place and not mention all that? Hate to tell you, but far too many writers do exactly that. Don’t be one of them. Take your reader with you and show the location as it is. Show it as you saw it. It’s almost as good as going again.

Words, Beautiful Words

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by Janis Patterson

Okay, I admit it. I spend much too much time wasting time on Facebook. It’s therapeutic. It fills my surface mind with trivialities so my deep mind can wrestle with the snarled complexities of my current WIP.

Or sometimes it’s just fun – sort of like a forbidden candy bar late in the afternoon even though you know it will spoil your dinner later.

And sometimes – distressingly often, in fact – it is infuriating. And depressing. And downright disgusting.

I’m not talking about some of the opinions held by the posters – though many of them do fit the above descriptions with a few even more damning pejoratives added, but that’s the subject of another angry column – but about the way they are expressed.

Over the years I’ve been swimming about in Facebook the use of language has not only deteriorated, but downright imploded. Rotted. Disintegrated.

And I don’t mean the fancy $3.00 words I personally prefer – I’m talking about the plain old four letter or less meat-and-potato words that are (or should be) the concrete basis of lingual communication. Staid old standbys like want and be and to and even and itself which magically morph into won’t and bee and two and end in such profusion that one does not have time to worry about comprehension but must instead go directly to translation. And at times even that doesn’t work, so the poor reader is left scratching his head in a total lack of comprehension at what the poster was trying to say. It even makes one wonder if the poster himself really knows what he was saying.

When did we become a country that so disregarded the basics of communication? Even our written language – an elegant simplicity of 26 discrete symbols which can be arranged at will to form an unending combination of words – is being seriously challenged by both a confusing and sometimes contradictory sub-language of initials-for-phrases, such as LOL, BFF, FAFO and the like. Which, one must admit, can provide handy circumlocutions for today’s ever-increasing vulgarity, but offer little in the way of nuance and precision.

Much more alarming is the regression of written language to an almost completely pictographic form of communication very similar to the antique Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs – the emoji. A seemingly endless variety of trite little sketches covering everything from facial expressions to individual depictions of food items, emojis have attracted a following who claim that using them is so much faster than having to sit down and type out a long list of alphanumeric symbols… a claim which I cry is thoroughly specious. By the time it takes to find the exact symbol you want, figure out how to transfer it to whatever it is you are writing (I did mention that I am a total techno-naif, didn’t I?), and keep your original line of thought going enough to go fishing for the next symbol I could have written at least a blog post on another, less-illustratable subject.  Still…

I await with grim acceptance the arrival of a novel written entirely in emojis.

So – what are we going to do about our slipping grip on language? I accept, however reluctantly and largely silently, that most people are not linguists nor do they have the appreciation I do for my favorite long, complex and occasionally obfuscatory $3.00 and $5.00 words. I refuse to accept that our population has become so stupid that their ability to learn the proper use of the basic building blocks of communication, that their cognitive abilities are devolving to the sub-human range, so it must be some external influence. Perhaps it is the startling decline of expectations in our educational system. Perhaps it is a shift of societal admiration from those who strive and achieve to those who subsist and border on parasitical. Or something else that has not quite yet jelled in our collective consciousness. It is real, though, and our communication skills are suffering because of it.

However, I must admit that other than writing angry little screeds like this and yelling fruitlessly at the ignoramii who populate Facebook I have no idea of what to do other than to keep putting the best language I know out there and praying that somewhere it resonates with another linguist, then another and another and eventually we can reclaim and expand the pure and unsullied beauty of language.

P. S. If you like my blog posts, Volumes 1 – 4 of 50 Blogs on Writing and the Writing Life are now available for just $.99 each on Amazon.

Writer… or Robot?

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by Janis Patterson

Computers can be wonderful things. You can change or cut lines or paragraphs, move copy around, pretty much do whatever you want to do and yet end up with a clean copy with no tiresome retyping of entire manuscripts. It is a tool without compare, but it is only as good (word-wise) as the person using it.


Or it used to be. Now there is a new plague – or savior, depending on one’s viewpoint – in the machine and people are very divided about it. Just to be very clear, I am on the anti- side.


This new creature is available in many places and formats and names, and all fall under the general umbrella of ‘assisted writing programs’ – in other words, AI programs that can do a lot of the work of writing (like putting the words down) for you in a sort of simulacrum of your writing voice and style.
Doesn’t anyone see the horror of this? These programs not only check spelling (which is good) and grammar (which is all too often not so good) but they actually do varying amounts of the writing, with mechanical ease turning out copy that is more like pre-digested word salad instead of genuine writing.


I see the difference as similar to ordering a house kit (as you used to be able to) with all the lumber pre-cut and numbered, ready to put together according to the directions like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, and then calling yourself an architect. You’re allowed to do the pretty bits – trim and paint and such, but the actual building is created miles away by a machine. Translate this to writing and you become a technician rather than a writer.


I don’t see why someone who calls themselves a writer or who hopes to become a writer using such a Frankenstein thing. Not only do they have to pay for it, and learn the probably Byzantine command structure, but they get a product that is at best only partially theirs. Instead of all this, why don’t they just learn the rules, learn the craft and learn to really write? It will serve them better longer than a computer program.


There’s a commercial on tv right now for one of these things, and one line strikes me as being particularly egregious – something about if you’re a copywriter and need a dynamite line… Having been a copywriter in one of my many wordsmith incarnations this makes me furious and appalled. In my opinion if you have to have a machine/program/whatever these things are do a great chunk of the writing for you, you aren’t any kind of a writer!


Are some people so desperate to put the word ‘writer’ or ‘author’ after their name that they will cheat with programs like these? I guess so. I personally believe if you can’t do it by yourself you shouldn’t be doing it at all.


Writers should write – not be a technician to a writing program.

Tempus Is A-Fugitin

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by Janis Patterson

My late father was not only a professional wordsmith (journalism, teacher, editor, advertising agent, writer) but he was a man who absolutely loved words. He would play with words with the joy of a child playing with toys. As I grew up he passed his love of words and language to me, so much so that with his nimble mind we came very close to creating our own language – much to my mother’s disgust.

And that is how the rather somber and stoic Latin warning “Tempus Fugit” (time passes) was ‘Daddy-ized’ into the warmer and much more lighthearted “tempus is a-fugitin’”.

So what does this cuddly little anecdote have to do with writing? Not much – yet still everything.

As writers words are our tools. Without words we are mute and pretty much useless. I am waiting with grim anticipation for someone to write a novel using nothing but emojis. Hopefully, though, that is not an immediate worry. At least, I hope so.

While there are other ways of communicating, some faster, some purely physical or emotional, some kind of untranslatable, words are and always have been the most dependable… when used properly. Part of the beauty of words is their fluidity on the seas of nuance. Often how a simple word is used either alone or in conjunction with other words can change the meaning in subtle or sometimes not so subtle ways. Also, the time period in which the word is used and even the social class of the speaker can affect the meaning.

Words are the main tool for defining our characters. Unless there is a darn good reason in the story for it, a duchess should not speak the same – word choice, inflections, nuance – as a dockworker. (Properly used, though, such language disparities can be a heck of a good clue, if that’s what your story needs.)

Also, word choice is one of your main weapons in the ongoing fight between show and tell. Now I am the first to say that properly used ‘tell’ is a viable tool in your writer’s workbox – I mean, who wants a step-by-step recitation of your hero’s morning routine before he leaves for work when it adds nothing to the story and the action can be covered in a simple sentence or two. Almost any writing shibboleth can be an asset if used properly.

And that is the word! Properly. Like good dishes, the sharp and the forbidden and unusual can be interesting if used properly. Imagine salsa made with nothing but jalapenos and a splash of water. The idea is horrifying, just as horrifying as would be salsa made with no hot peppers at all. The ideal is balance – each ingredient playing its part to create a harmonious whole.

But… always remember it begins with the words. So you must make friends with words. Play with words. Enjoy words. Don’t be afraid of making up a new word… if you do it understandably and (dare I say it?) properly.

So – your assignment is, go learn six new words this week. The best way is to take a print dictionary, then open to a page at random and with your eyes closed stab somewhere on the page. There’s your word. What does it mean? How does it feel in your mouth? What does it remind you of? Does it evoke any thoughts or memories or fantasies. Play with it as a fascinated child would with a new toy. Enjoy it. Make it yours.

It won’t happen immediately, but as you play as well as work with words your writing will change, become richer, deeper, more … more everything. You own the words. Use them in all their multi-faceted glory.

Now – go grab a word and begin! Never forget that tempus is a-fugitin!