One of My Favorite Things About Writing

February 10, 2025February 5, 2025 ~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

My favorite part about writing is learning. When I wrote historical western romance, I enjoyed visiting museums and libraries in the areas where the books were set to learn local history and to find maps of the towns. I read newspapers on microfiche to get a feel for the setting and the people. The small-town newspapers back in the 1800’s were as much gossip columns as they were filled with political news.

Writing historicals, I had to learn a lot, and I loved every minute of it. I was a nerd in school. I’d take my history, geography, and social science textbooks home even if my work was finished so I could read ahead and learn more.

Writing contemporary books, I always come across occupations or places I don’t know anything about and spend hours learning. Even if all that learning may only end up as one paragraph in the whole book.

When I write mysteries, I have to research causes of death, how law enforcement works, occupations, and settings. My horizons are always expanded when I start a new book. I’m currently researching for the next Spotted Pony Casino book, Crap Shoot. I know it will deal with MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) I have three articles that I’ve set aside until now to help me determine how I want to handle the subject and whether the character will be just missing or murdered. Whether it will be domestic or a stranger. So many possibilities and the research I’m doing will help me to see the direction of the story.

I’m also attending an event called- Winter Fishtrap: What is the West? Fishtrap is a gathering of writers from the West. The organization puts on several events throughout the year in the county where I grew up and where my Hawke books are set. This Winter Fishtrap has some great topics and many of the speakers are Indigenous. I’m hoping to get a better sense of that it means for them to be in Wallowa County and telling their stories from this event. To hopefully help me better articulate my character Gabriel Hawke and my character Heath Seaver from the Spotted Pony Casino Mysteries.

I first attended a Fishtrap event back in the 1980’s and quickly discovered it was more about literary writing than genre writing. that was the only multi-day event I attended. I have been in the county visiting family when they had readings and attended those with a family member, This will be the first multiday event since the 80s. I’m hoping it will be as good as it sounds.

Speaking of my Gabriel Hawke series… Wolverine Instincts is now available.

In the heart of the wilderness, the hunter becomes the hunted.

Gunshots shatter the quiet of Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness, drawing Oregon State Trooper Gabriel Hawke into action. Following the sound, he stumbles upon a shredded cage, the sharp musk of a wolverine, and a dead hiker.

Tracking footprints through the rugged terrain, Hawke uncovers a second victim. It’s clear—he’s hunting a killer who’s hunting humans.

With Dog by his side, Hawke’s search leads to two brothers, one gravely injured. Enlisting the help of pilot Dani Singer, he gets the injured man to safety before returning to the wilderness.

Teaming up with a reclusive, disabled veteran who knows the Eagle Cap as well as he does, Hawke pieces together the killer’s twisted game. They suspect a poacher—one as ruthless and elusive as the wolverine he’s still chasing.

In a deadly wilderness where survival is the only rule, Hawke must outsmart a predator who knows no bounds.

Universal buy link: https://books2read.com/u/m2yARG

OR Purchase direct from the author in ebook and print from these links:

ebook link – https://www.patyjager.net/product/wolverine-instincts-ebook/

print link- https://www.patyjager.net/product/wolverine-instincts/

Guest Blogger ~ Claudia Riess

January 30, 2025January 9, 2025 ~ patyjag ~ 9 Comments

Choosing to write an art history mystery series came relatively late in my career, but the seed was planted very early in childhood, and was as much a part of the natural course of events as learning to read and being read to—Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, Alice in Wonderland—and being told laugh-out-loud stories, ad-libbed by my father, about a little girl named Jeanie, clearly my alias, and her adventures with her anonymous daddy, clearly my own. And like bedtime stories, my introduction to art—my association with art—was, and is, bound up with family, adventure, safe harbor.

It began with outings to museums. We lived in Brooklyn, and a couple of the great ones were a short subway ride away. The Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick, the Brooklyn Museum. Typically, these outings were followed by take-out Chinese food and talks around the kitchen table about what we had seen that day. We talked about the different ways painters saw the world; debated about which perspective better described the real world—and what the real world really was. Color and light? Shape and dimension? And what about imagination? Created imagery. Distorted reality. Ideas about the relative nature of beauty and truth were woven into these conversations, and all the while we were savoring our chicken chow mein and fried rice with lobster sauce.

It stands to reason that my idea of the art world was a romanticized one, but by the time I’d written a few rom-com-like novels and murder mysteries and was considering writing an art suspense novel, I’d learned a lot more about its seamier side. How the price of art is virtually uncontrolled, dependent on the whims of collectors and dealers and the transient tastes and fads of the times. How art is ransomed, forged, used to launder money, stolen then sold on the black market. In short, that the art world is where the most sublime of human instincts collide with its basest. What a great amalgam for fiction!

I pitched the idea of my writing an art suspense novel to my brother, Jonathan, an art history professor at the University of Cincinnati, and he off-handedly suggested, “What about finding a lost study of Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina?” As he enlarged on the subject, a conversation I’d had years ago popped into mind. It was my first week at Vassar College, and I was out of my social depth, trying to hold my own with one of my classmates, a seasoned debutant. I suppose the incident remained etched in memory because our life experiences were so disparate. Especially vivid was the story of how her father’s sugar plantation in Cuba had been confiscated by Fidel Castro’s government. It was this historical nugget that instantly dovetailed with my brother’s suggestion. In that moment, the American sugar plantation owner became an art collector, and as he and a freshly materialized plantation manager and a lovely cook’s assistant hid out in a basement storeroom, the art collection was being hauled off by a band of wannabe Castro rebels looking to raise money to buy arms.

The imagekicked off the prologue to Stolen Light, Book 1 of my art history mystery series. I’m a stickler for historical accuracy, and as a rule I take off from it, filling the gap with events that conform to its character, and therefore might have been. Then, in a butterfly-effect maneuver, I fast-forward to the present and drop a pair of resourceful lovers into the challenging set of circumstances that has developed—multiple murders included—and see if the sleuthing duo can sort it out.

For example, the impetus for Knight Light, Book 3 in the series, came from two quotes. From the painter Marcel Duchamp: “Not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists.” From World Chess Champion, Alexander Alekhine: “Chess for me is not a game, but an art.” From there, I discovered that the two had actually been team-mates on the French chess team in the 1933 Chess Olympiad. And that furthermore, Alekhine’s death in 1946 has been considered a cold case to this day. My fiction, integrated with the facts, took off from there.

Dying for Monet, Book 5 and the most recent in the series, is structured with the same criteria, except this time a crucial plot-twisting component hog-ties me to a bare-boned blurb. I’ve never felt more in danger of giving away the spoiler. I’m okay discussing Claude Monet and the Impressionists; Paul Ruand-Durell, the renowned art dealer based in Paris, carrying on in London during the Franco-Prussian War; the art museums in London; the disappearance of a still life painting; a brutal murder. Even the End Notes, where I mention books that were part of the research phase, omits a critical one whose title would blow it. Luckily, I’ve got my two sleuthing protagonists, Erika and Harrison, about whose ever-evolving love story I could go on forever.

Book 6, the last in the series, is in the works. Its plot is powered by the subject of artificial intelligence, boon and curse of the art world, depending on your definition of art or stake in its profits. My fascination was doubly sparked by an episode of CNN’s “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper,” which focused on the Dead End Gallery in Amsterdam, the world’s first art gallery dealing solely in art generated by AI, and the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of Harold Cohen’s AARON, the world’s first AI program for art-making. These experiences raised questions regarding the genesis of inspiration, the act of creation, and the boundaries of ownership, all of which are potential harbingers of conflict, including the most deadly.

Dying for Monet

A gala evening auction at Laszlo’s, an upstart auction house in New York City, is in progress. Without notice, a much sought-after Impressionist painting is withdrawn from the block. Moments later, its broker is found dead at the foot of an imposing statue in Laszlo’s courtyard.

Amateur sleuths Erika Shawn, art magazine editor, and Harrison Wheatley, art history professor, are once again drawn into an investigation involving an art-related homicide, this time sharing an unnerving coincidence with violent crimes occurring abroad.

As Harrison searches for clues in the archives at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Erika is on a stakeout in Brooklyn Heights gathering information on the owner of the hijacked still life. After Harrison experiences a disastrous encounter in London, he returns home, where he and Erika, along with a few of their usual cohorts, find themselves ever more deeply at odds with the movers and shakers on the dark side of fine arts commerce.

https://www.amazon.com/Dying-Monet-Art-History-Mystery/dp/1685126545

Claudia Riess is an award-winning author who has worked in the editorial departments of The New Yorker and Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and has edited several art history monographs. Stolen Light, the first book in her art history mystery series, was chosen by Vassar’s Latin American history professor for distribution to the college’s people-to-people trips to Cuba. To Kingdom Come, the fourth, will be added to the syllabus of a survey course on West and Central African Art at a prominent Midwestern university. Claudia has written articles for Mystery Readers Journal, Women’s National Book Association, the Sisters in Crime Bloodletter, and Mystery Scene magazine. She has been featured on a variety of podcasts, blogs and Zoom events.

claudiariessbooks.com.

https://www.facebook.com/ClaudiaRiessBooks

Guest Blogger ~ M.E. Proctor

January 18, 2025December 27, 2024 ~ patyjag ~ 6 Comments

The Detective Comes Calling

When I start working on a short story I never know much about the characters. I might have a place in mind—a bar on a beach, a path in the forest, an iced-over parking lot—or a line of text I woke up with, like this one that I used recently, curious to see where it would take me: Innocence doesn’t do it for me. Spoiler alert: somebody dies.

Most of my pieces unspool that way. Characters walk on stage, I get to know them, and things happen. Or nothing happens and the story goes asleep on my laptop, for a while or forever. That loose process works well for me, for short fiction.

A book is a very different animal.

If you write yourself in a corner in a short story the damage is minimal. You can shelve the draft, revisit it later and either find a solution or scrap it entirely. It’s disappointing but at worst you’ve only lost a few weeks. On the other hand, if you’re fifty thousand words into a book and hit a wall or run out of juice, it really hurts. The investment in time and the emotional commitment are substantial. Of course you can try to rescue the project. As Chandler said: In doubt, send in a guy with a gun. Sometimes it works, other times … Raise your hand if like me you’ve read books that feel like they’re limping to the finish line.

The pitfalls of winging it were very much in the back of my mind when I decided to sink my teeth into a crime novel. The problem is that I’m not a plotter. Detailing every beat of a story before sitting down to write it feels too much like a straitjacket. It sucks all the fun out of the project. Why bother to write it if I know everything, no surprises, from the get go? Still, I wanted to be better organized than usual. Start with an idea and develop a rough outline that could go the distance.

It was an excellent resolution.

It didn’t happen.

Because Declan Shaw threw me for a spin.

I was on the back porch, engaged in the creative exercise known as woolgathering, when a name popped into my head. Out of nowhere. Insistent. I’d never written anything, book or short story, that used the name of a character as a prompt. I was intrigued. Who the hell was this guy pitching a tent in my subconscious?

Names aren’t neutral. In life, we’re passive recipients—a gift from our parents. In fiction, the writers are in control. They can play with the mental images a name creates (Dickens mastered it). What does the name suggest about the character’s past, family, or cultural background? Smith evokes 1984 or The Matrix, Cadogan-Smith comes with horses and country estates, Smith-Underfoot might be a familyliving in Hobbiton.

Declan Shaw. What does it bring to mind? Irish heritage. He probably drinks whiskey and can tell a tale. Yes, I know, it’s a cliché. But seriously, with a name like that, what does he do for a living? I love antiheroes but I didn’t feel like spending an entire book with a hitman, Ken Follett did it so well in The Day of the Jackal, and, more recently, Rob Hart in Assassins Anonymous. So what? Reporter. I could see the byline, front page, above the fold. Then an insidious voice in my head whispered: Can you build a series around a journalist, how many cases can he cover, without stretching credibility? A series? The inner voice had to be kidding, there was no book #1 yet. It was ludicrous. But, but … I could smell the possibilities.

And that‘s how, right there, on my porch, Declan Shaw became a private detective.

The first scene I wrote had nothing to do with investigating. I pictured him as an eleven-year-old boy, standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs, looking up at his intimidating grandmother. She was a black-clad villain straight out of a comic book. I imagined the events that brought the kid to her place and the disastrous consequences that ensued. Readers won’t find any of that in Love You Till Tuesday, the first book in the series. Declan’s back story is in my back pocket and won’t come out until the time is right.

I forgot my resolution to outline and gave myself permission to improvise. The plan was to learn who my character was by writing him. It took a lot longer than I expected, three years, three manuscripts, a thousand pages, multiple false starts. None of that work made it into the book, but the effort was worth it. I knew Declan inside out. We were both ready to tackle Love You Till Tuesday. In some sort of orderly fashion.

My plot document looked like the output from a chaotic brainstorming session, a jumble of character sketches, a rough timeline, cryptic notes, dead ends and side stories. It was an unstructured and messy pseudo synopsis, with plenty of freedom between the lines to change almost everything. As I typed away, things changed indeed, and changed again after input from editors and beta readers, cuts and tightening up, but the original bones of the story remained. Until finally Declan Shaw made his official debut with his cigarillos, his cowboy boots, his good and flawed impulses, and his ironic take on the world. He’s good company. I’m keeping him.

Love You Till Tuesday – A Declan Shaw Mystery

The murder of jazz singer April Easton makes no sense, and yet she appears to have been targeted. Who ordered the hit and why? Steve Robledo, the Houston cop in charge of the investigation, has nothing to work with. Local P.I. Declan Shaw who spent the night with April has little to contribute. He’d just met her and she was asleep when he left.

The case seems doomed to remain unsolved, forever open, and quickly erased from the headlines. And it would be if Declan’s accidental connection with the murder didn’t have unexpected consequences.

The men responsible for April’s death are worried. Declan is known to be stubborn and resourceful. He must be watched. He might have to be stopped. He’s a risk the killers cannot afford. The stakes are high: a major trial with the death penalty written all over it.

Buy Links:

Love You Till Tuesday is available in eBook and paperback.

Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Love-You-Till-Tuesday-Proctor/dp/1956957707

From reviews:

If you think the crime fiction market has enough PIs, think again. Declan Shaw is the kind of PI this genre has been waiting for. Declan is a well-developed, complex and nuanced character, wrestling with his own internal conflicts as he investigates the murder of April Easton. Sharp, witty dialogue and a fast-pace make Love You Till Tuesday an engaging read—one of those books you can’t put down and keep reading late into the night. It is a fun, intense read from beginning to end and M.E. Proctor displays her incredible talent at creating a well-written and beautifully crafted book.

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. The first book in her Declan Shaw PI series, Love You Till Tuesday, is out from Shotgun Honey with a follow up scheduled for 2025. She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments. Her fiction has appeared in various crime anthologies and magazines like Vautrin, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly.

Social Links

Author Website: www.shawmystery.com

On Substack: https://meproctor.substack.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/martine.proctor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEProctor3 BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/meproctor.bsky.social

First, Third, How do I choose?

January 13, 2025January 13, 2025 ~ patyjag ~ 10 Comments

I spent way too much time trying to decide if this new series should be written in first or third person. A lot of the cozy mysteries I’ve read are in first person. They stay in the main character’s point of view (POV) throughout the book.

In my other mystery books, I stay in third person for all the series. But the main character’s POV all the time in the Spotted Pony Casino books. Sometimes I add another POV character in my Gabriel Hawke books because the story needs that added POV. In my Shandra Higheagle Mysteries, I use Shandra and Ryan’s POV’s both.

This new series, I went back and forth between first person and third. So far the book has stayed in my main character’s POV. And I think I’ll keep it that way. It’s how most cozy mysteries are. But as I write, I find myself typing “I” and writing some sentences in first person. This makes me wonder if I need to go back to the beginning and start over, writing from the first-person POV.

Which do you feel is stronger?

Third Person

Andi Clark parked her van in front of the Auburn City Park where the first Christmas event of the year would kick off in an hour. People bustled around putting the finishing touches on craft and food booths. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving and the whole county was excited to move from the doldrums of a rainy fall into preparations for Christmas.

She never arrived more than an hour before an event. Any earlier her crew of cuddles became bored and got into trouble. The committee had asked her to set up a small petting zoo where people would enter the event. She’d parked as close as she could get with the inflatable decorations and roped-off areas making the attendees follow a specific path through all the booths and over to where Santa would listen to children’s Christmas wishes.

“Come on, Cocoa, I can use your help carrying things.” Andi unbuckled her brown and white border collie from the seatbelt harness and listened to Lulu whine. Andi scratched the Chiweenie’s dapple head and black, long furry ears. “You’re too small to help me right now. You keep Athena company.” She patted the Golden Retriever/Pyrenees cross dog’s blonde head and followed Cocoa to the trailer behind the van.

Lucky for her all her animals were small except for Athena. The large breed cross was larger than her mini donkey and pygmy goat. Andi pointed to the bucket full of the pins that held the panels together. Cocoa grabbed the handle in her mouth. Andi gathered the top two panels and carried them to the area with a sign, Cuddle Farm Animals.

First Person

Parking my van in front of the Auburn City Park, I watched people bustling around getting food and craft booths ready for the first Christmas event of the year to kick off in an hour. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving and the whole county was excited to move from the doldrums of a rainy fall into preparations for Christmas and the possibility of snow.

I never arrive more than an hour before an event. Any earlier my crew of cuddles become bored and get into trouble. The committee asked me to set up a small petting zoo at the entrance to the event. I made my way by the inflatable decorations and roped-off areas funneling attendees down a specific path through all the booths and over to where Santa would listen to children’s Christmas wishes.

“Come on, Cocoa, I can use your help carrying things.” I unbuckled my brown and white border collie from the seatbelt harness and listened to Lulu whine. Scratching the dapple head and soft, black, long furry ears of my Chiweenie, I said, “You’re too small to help me right now. You keep Athena company.” I patted Athena, my Golden Retriever/Pyrenees’, blonde head and followed Cocoa to the trailer behind the van.

Lucky for me, all my animals are small, except for Athena, and fairly easy to handle. Athena was larger than both my mini donkey and pygmy goat. At the trailer loaded with panels to set up a small pen, I pointed to the bucket full of pins that held the panels together. Cocoa grabbed the handle in her mouth and I gathered the top two panels and carried them to the area with a sign, Cuddle Farm Animals.

Which version makes you want to continue reading?

When I wrote my first mystery 30 years ago, it was in first person. then an agent I sent it to, told me that no one bought mystery books in first person. Which floored me because I had just read the first three Sue Grafton books that were in first person. Anyway, I moved from first person to third and on to a different genre. Now that I’m back writing mysteries, I wonder if I also need to switch to first person for this series. I encourage all thoughts and responses to this dilemma.

A fun new adventure for me, besides trying to decide which tense to use in this new series, is having my books available to readers and listeners from my website. Yes! You can now purchase my ebooks, audiobooks, and print books from my website.

The ebooks are the same price as at other vendors but if you are a subscriber to my newsletter you will be able to purchase my new releases in ebook format from my website for a $1 less and get it before it publishes to other vendors. So if you want to get my new releases at a reduced price and before they release anywhere else, you need to subscribe to my newsletter. https://bit.ly/2IhmWcm

Also available from my website are my audiobooks, which ARE priced lower than at other audiobook vendors. Because I don’t have to pay a middleman to get my audiobooks to you, you get the reward of a lower cost. Also watch my newsletter and website for audiobook deals. As part of the IAD- Independent Authors Direct- group, I will have specials on my audiobooks every two weeks.

My print books have been for sale on my website for a year now. If you purchase a print book directly from me, you get it autographed, some swag, and free shipping. You can’t beat that!

Happy New Year everyone!

Guest Blogger ~ June Trop

January 4, 2025August 11, 2024 ~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

Meet Miriam bat Isaac

I’ve modeled my heroine, Miriam bat Isaac, on the woman known as Maria Hebrea, who probably lived in Roman-occupied Alexandria (Egypt) during the first century CE. I encountered her work when taking a course on the Historical Development of Concepts in Chemistry.

Ordinarily chemistry is taught from the perspective of what we know now without delving into how the concepts evolved over the millennia. So, when the professor assigned a paper on a historically significant concept, I had no idea of a topic. That is, until in desperation, I went to the university library to roam the stacks.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened—did I bump into a bookcase while looking to the heavens for inspiration?—but a moment later, a weighty tome fell on my toe and opened to a page about Maria Hebrea. And so, I began to wonder how a Jewish woman from Ancient Alexandria became the legendary founder of Western alchemy and held her place for 1500 years as the most celebrated woman of the Western World.

Sixteenth Century Depiction of Maria Hebrea

In the alchemical literature, Maria Hebrea is also referred to as Mary the Jewess or Miriam the Prophetess, sister of Moses. Like her, all alchemists wrote under the name of a deity, prophet, or philosopher from an earlier time to enhance the authenticity of their claims or shield themselves from persecution. Although the tradition among all the crafts and mystical cults was to guard the secrecy of their work, persecution was a real risk for alchemists, who could be accused of and summarily executed for conspiring to debase the emperor’s currency.

Accordingly, Maria Hebrea worked anonymously. Hundreds of years later, however, another alchemist, Zozimos of Panopolis, celebrated her contributions. And so, with just a little tweaking, I had enough information to resurrect the once famous Maria Hebrea and create Miriam bat Isaac, my sleuth extraordinaire.

Miriam bat Isaac’s Adventures

Published in paperback and e-book by Level Best Books in February 2024

Miriam bat Isaac has recorded her nail-biting adventures in novels, novelettes, and short stories. Her most recent volume, The Deadliest Returns, is a book of three novelettes about returning, whether it means going back or giving back. In the first, “The Bodyguard”, Miriam’s brother, a renowned gladiator, returns from the dead to serve as a bodyguard back home when his employer retires Alexandria.

In the second, “The Beggar”, an old man disguised as a matronly beggar, returns to Alexandria to learn the fate of the lovechild he was forced to leave behind to escape the wrath of Roman law. And in the third, “The Black Pearl,” Miriam, having come into possession of the cache of jewels heisted from the Temple of Artemis, sails to Ephesus to return the treasure. The prized gem, however, a uniquely lustrous black pearl, disappears. With the power to heal the brokenhearted and restore the health of the one possessing it, could the pearl’s mystical properties be the motive for murder?

If, like Miriam, you thrive on uncovering the guilty longings, secrets, lies, and evil deeds of others, then as Miriam’s deputy, you will have ample opportunity to indulge your fancies. So, escape the monotony of everyday life and plunge into that rousing world of adventure in three of her most daring exploits.

To purchase The Deadliest Returns from Amazon

For the e-book, click here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV4TTX3T

For the paperback, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Deadliest-Returns-Collection-Miriam-Novelettes/dp/1685125859

As an award-winning middle school science teacher, June used storytelling to capture her students’ imagination and interest in scientific concepts. Years later as a professor of teacher education, she focused her research on the practical knowledge teachers construct and communicate through storytelling. Her first book, From Lesson Plans to Power Struggles (Corwin Press, 2009), is based on new teachers’ stories about their first classroom experiences.

Now associate professor emerita at the State University of New York, June devotes her time to writing The Miriam bat Isaac Mystery Series. Consisting of short stories, novelettes, and several books, some have won modest recognition, such as being named a finalist for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award.

June, an active member of the Mystery Writers of America, lives with her husband Paul Zuckerman, where she is breathlessly recording her plucky heroine’s next life-or-death exploit. She’d love a visit at www.JuneTrop.com or on her Facebook page, June Trop Author, https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044318365389, where she publishes a blog every Tuesday afternoon about writing, the history of science, or life in Roman Alexandria.