Author: patyjag

Paty Jager is an award-winning author of 50 + novels, novellas, and short stories of murder mystery, western romance, and action adventure. All her work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters. Paty and her husband raise alfalfa hay in rural eastern Oregon. Riding horses and battling rattlesnakes, she not only writes the western lifestyle, she lives it.

Guest Blogger ~ Laura Kelly Robb

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The Audiobook Experience

Like nearly every writer I know, I proof my manuscripts by reading them out loud. With my finger poised over the delete button, I find unnecessary words that make a sentence sticky and verb tenses that don’t line up. The process turns up lines of dialogue that sound stilted, as well as gaps in meaning—those leaps in logic a reader would be unable to make without additional information.

My latest mystery, The Laguna Shores Research Club, published by TouchPoint Press in 2022, underwent the same process. The trade paperback version, further copyedited by editor Kimberly Coghlan, was praised for the readability of the prose. I was delighted when TouchPoint sold the audio rights to Tantor Media. The audiobook became available November 2023.

Listening to the audiobook taught me a few things about my editing process.  Something happens when one’s writing becomes performed sound. The story gets a new layer. All the characters gain an additional aspect through the voice the narrator chooses for each one. For instance, the character of the deceased friend, Billie, acquired a West Virginia accent, done very well by the narrator, Amanda Friday.  I had written Billie as having a slight drawl, but I meant only to alert the reader to the fact that she wasn’t a native of Washington, D.C. In Amanda’s narration, however, Billie’s soft, slow pronunciation serves to make her more vulnerable. When I first heard the full recording, Billie’s demise struck me as more tragic than in the written version.

During the process of proofing the manuscript out loud, I had not considered what a performer might add. Knowing what I know now, my instinct will be to give a potential audiobook creator more material to work with—more accents, more quirks of speech, or more variations of disposition that bubble up into the dialogue.

Another benefit that a recording can wring from the written word is to highlight the pacing. Feedback I received from some listeners pointed out that the plot began to gallop in the last quarter of the book and the ending left them breathless. Amanda anticipated the change in the rhythm of the story by speaking in the early chapters in a measured tone.  She saved her variations in intonation for the critical plot developments and final revelations. If I had realized the effect her techniques could have, I think I would have begun the suspense earlier in the book by spreading out the revelations and suspicions of the main character. I’ll be more likely in the future to take the listener as well as the reader into consideration as I structure a plot.

I found one downside to a vocal performance to be the treatment of the dialogue tags. Since we generally read faster than we listen, some repetition in a text is glossed over by the efficient reader. I often included dialogue tags for clarity on the assumption a few extra tags would not tire out most readers. In the audio, however, unnecessary repetitions can weigh down the performance. The narrator often indicates who is speaking through variations in tone and pitch, and the “he said” and “she said” tags become tiresome.  In future work, I will be more attuned to the tags and try to edit them more closely.

As audiobooks become more popular, writers may want to consider producing their own audio versions of their work. I am not familiar with the best ways to proceed, but I know more and more people are wading in. If you are interested, here’s my Mystery and Suspense magazine interview with Amanda Friday about the ins and outs of narration and her work with indie authors.

The Laguna Shores Research Club by Laura Kelly Robb

(ISBN 9781956851311; 328 pp, trade paperback)

Laila Harrow knows the best way to track down anything—or anybody—is to ask Billie Farmer. As the brains of the Laguna Shores Research Club, Billie teaches fellow members how to reach into the ether and pluck out facts.

Counting on Billie’s guidance, Laila promises the St. Augustine Museum a catalogue of Florida Highwaymen paintings that will catapult her standing in the art world. But when Billie dies suddenly, Laila is forced to pull herself out of the darkness and follow the facts. Her investigation turns up up one fact too many: Laila is at the center of a dangerous game.

You can find the audiobook of The Laguna Shores Research Club on Audiobooks.com, AudiobooksNow.com, GooglePlay, LibroFM.com, the free site that asks listeners to post reviews, AudioFreebies.com,and Audible, as well as other platforms such as Spotify. If you have time to take a listen, I would love to hear your thoughts. Reach me at Laura@LauraKellyRobb.com

After studying at the University of Toronto, Laura taught for five years in Spain. Returning to Seattle, she completed a three-week fiction class at Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and published short stories for Foliate Oak, The Nassau Review, and on the RTVE show, Nómadas. She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America. The Laguna Shores Research Club is her second novel.

Social Media Links

Website: https://www.laurakellyrobb.com/

X: @LauraKellyRobb

Instagram: @BookHardy

Learning and Sharing

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I have always been someone who likes to learn. In school even if I didn’t have homework, I would bring home a book from a subject I liked and read the parts in the book that I was most interested in. It was usually either my history book or my geography book. I loved learning about other cultures and areas of the world.

As an adult, I still am interested in those things and have used my interest in the local Native American tribes to share their customs and beliefs and to show they are still a strong people who continue to learn and keep their heritage alive.

Trips I’ve taken have ended up adding more locales and cultures into my books. I like that I can share what I learn with my readers.

In the Shandra Higheagle mysteries, my main character, Shandra Higheagle, is a potter. She uses clay from the mountain where she lives and purifies it to make a quality clay to make her vases out of. I spent an afternoon, learning about the process from an actual potter. I loved the idea of having a character who is part Native American using clay she digs up, cleans, and transforms into beautiful pieces of art. The process is talked about in a couple of the books.

Because I have Indigenous characters in my three mystery series, I try to put in bits about their culture that shows who they are and how their people came to be strong, but since I’m not Native American, I do my best to show and not tell, since it isn’t my culture. I have readers wanting more of the culture, but I only put in what I fell comfortable revealing.

I signed up to learn to make pine needle baskets from a Paiute Elder. Beverly Beers is a fun instructor. She gave us what we needed to know to start and then went around instructing each of us. I started out misinterpreting her instructions and ended up with a larger hole than it was supposed to be. She chuckled and said, “You have made your own pattern.” Which was a kind way of saying I didn’t follow the instructions. 😉

As I sat in the room with the other participants and we all were engrossed in what we were doing a peace came over me that felt good. Stitching each stitch to bind the needles together and adding each new bundle of needles was calming.

I don’t know if it was the tactile closeness to the needles and nature, or the rhythmic stitching, but it felt right and welcome.

Now I’m not saying my hands didn’t start aching from holding the needles tight to put the stitches in, but it was a good ache, if that makes sense. I knew that I was making something interesting and I thought of places I could go to get my own pine needles to try a basket on my own.

I also thought of my character in the Spotted Pony Casino mysteries. She’s a disable veteran who is head of the casino security. She has tragedy in her past and upheaval in her present. She could use a hobby that would perhaps put all her troubles to the back of her mind for short periods of time. As I sat there binding the rows of needles together, I realized this would be a good hobby for Dela. Her friend Rosie, a Umatilla tribal member, could show her how to make pine needle baskets. Dela would enjoy the process, and it would then give her an excuse to go into the Blue Mountains to look for pine needles. While there she could come across an abandoned cabin she’d visited once before and found a journal from the man she believes is her father.

It’s amazing how when your hands are busy and your mind is free your imagination can run amuck and add a secondary plot line to a story. 😉

I will not only share the art of making a pine needle basket, I’ll also move my story along and bring Dela closer to learning the truth about her father. Maybe.

Guest Blogger ~ Jacqueline Diamond

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I never thought of myself as a rule-breaker but…

One “rule” prescribed for novelists is to establish your “brand” and stick to it. Romantic comedies? Write a zillion! Medical-themed romances? Stick with that! Mysteries with a medical twist? Make that your one-and-only.

Although I have a good imagination, I can’t picture spending more than forty years writing basically the same type of book over and over. Or maybe it’s because I have a good imagination.

Since I sold my first romance (Lady in Disguise) in the early 1980s, I’ve published more than one hundred novels. They include mainstream mysteries and paranormal suspense, romantic comedies and contemporary romances.

Isn’t that enough for any writer? Well, no.

About ten years ago, after completing my Safe Harbor Medical romance series for Harlequin, I felt an urge to use that small-town hospital setting for mysteries. Since that type of novel didn’t align with Harlequin’s needs, I decided to venture into self-publishing.

I’d already begun reissuing some of my earlier books, including the mystery Danger Music, so I had a sense of the technical requirements. This turned out to be a rewarding creative decision that resulted in my Safe Harbor Medical mysteries, starting with The Case of the Questionable Quadruplet.

The four books in the series feature a young widowed doctor who solves murders in conjunction with his cranky, private investigator sister-in-law. Much as I enjoyed writing them, though, that series eventually reached what felt like a natural conclusion.

In the meantime, I’d become intrigued by cozy mysteries with talking cats, magical villages and mystical libraries. What I needed was a fresh, original take on the genre.

Coincidentally (or so I thought), with the end of the Covid lockdown, my husband and I seized the opportunity to travel to a place I’d always been intrigued by: Prague, in the Czech Republic. This turned out to be an inspired, and inspiring, choice.

Prague is a gorgeous city with an impressive literary history. We stayed at the Art Nouveau Palace Hotel, whose café was once a meeting place for artists and writers including Franz Kafka.

I’d heard tales of a golden age in Prague when Jewish intellectual life flourished. Since that’s my ancestry, I especially loved the stories of a magical rabbi who created an artificial man of clay, called a Golem, that acted as a protector for Jews.

Unfortunately, they needed one. The Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresa, a religious bigot (and mother of Marie Antoinette), expelled the Jews from Prague in December, 1744.

Don’t you wish you could right the wrongs of the past? Maybe I could… in fiction.

What emerged from my offbeat mind was a reimagined, alternate version of Prague, ruled by wizards. When an evil queen tried to seize their city, they pooled their powers and accomplished the near-impossible, shifting their land halfway around the world.

The disruption shook loose and redistributed their town’s intrinsic magick, with surprising results. One of these was to imbue humanlike speech into a breed of cats. Yes, talking cats!

In a realm isolated from their surroundings (the West Coast of what became the United States), their culture developed in a unique way. Nearly three hundred years later, a young woman, an orphan who has no idea she’s from this enchanted city, is “summoned” there to discover that she’s inherited the town’s ancient library from her grandmother, who’s been murdered.

To solve the mystery and bring justice for her grandmother, she has to awaken her hidden powers. Along the way, she finds a touch of a romance and realizes her longtime companion cat, Kafka, has the power of speech.

The writing process was fun and challenging, splashed with humor and danger as my heroine, Chess, and I explored this new world. The climax proved even more exciting than I’d hoped, with a dash of bravery by Kafka and his pals.

My favorite review came from National Book Award winner Neal Shusterman, who wrote, “Master storyteller Jacqueline Diamond draws you in to this magical feline mystery, enchanting you page after page. You’ll fall in love with Chess Vevoda, and the wild world she’s stumbled into!”

A Cat’s Garden of Secrets launches my Forgotten Village Magical Mystery series. It’s complete in itself—no cliffhanger endings in my novels.

Now, I’m happily writing the next book, A Cat’s Nose for Murder, with a storyline that gives Chess and her cat a new mystery to solve and a little more romance (for both of them).

A Cat’s Garden of Secrets is my 109th book. But in a sense, I feel like I’m just getting started!

A Cat’s Garden of Secrets

Awakening magical powers? Yes! Solving a murder, sure. But turning into a cat? Who, me?

On the weirdest day of my life, my cat starts talking, my car kidnaps me to a charming hidden village, and I inherit a mystical library. Plus, I discover I have superpowers!

As an orphan who grew up in foster care, I had no idea I came from an enchanted land full of furry shapeshifters, including—surprise!—me. Or that I had a gifted grandmother, who’s been murdered. Now it’s up to me, with the help of a handsome, otherworldly detective and my know-it-all cat, to uncover the truth… if someone doesn’t kill me first.

Enjoy cozy mysteries with talking animals? Love tales of awakening supernatural abilities and small-town bookstores and libraries? Discover why National Book Award winner Neal Shusterman wrote, “Master storyteller Jacqueline Diamond draws you in to this magical feline mystery, enchanting you page after page.”

Buy links:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CR4KYCM9

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-cats-garden-of-secrets-jacqueline-diamond/1144921034?ean=2940185636138

GooglePlay: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=Kcn9EAAAQBAJ

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/a-cat-s-garden-of-secrets

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1542627

Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/book/a-cats-garden-of-secrets/id6480234897

Audio https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CR5PBK9Y

USA Today bestselling author Jacqueline Diamond has sold more than 100 novels in popular genres from fantasy to mystery to medical romance to Regency. A former Associated Press reporter, Jackie has traveled widely, and currently lives in California. Among her honors are a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award and a Thomas Watson Foundation fellowship. A Cat’s Garden of Secrets launches her Forgotten Village Magical Mystery series. You’re welcome to learn more about her and her books on her website, Jacquelinediamond.net.

Guest Blogger ~ Laury A. Egan

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Creating Jack & I

Ever since reading The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil (a case later reported to be a sham), I’ve been fascinated with Multiple Personality Disorder, now named Dissociative Identity Disorder. After additional contemporary research, I decided to create a character who suffers from this disorder, featuring the “host” Jack’s narration in first person and the “alter” Jack’s narration in third person, interchanging the two in each short chapter. This twin structure allowed for more intimacy with the beleaguered host and a slight distance from his sociopathic alter. Since we all have dark impulses that we subjugate (or mostly do), the novel gives the reader the opportunity to experience what it would be like if we acted on our more sinister desires in a kind of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde manner all the while maintaining our moral selves.

Jack Kennett is a character who slowly emerged in my mind as I wrote, whereas his alter appeared with immediate presence. Sometimes, the “bad guy” characters are easier to imagine, but as the words accumulated, the host teenager evoked more sympathy because he was dealing with the usual issues: shyness, peer discomfort, and his frustrated feelings for a girl, but also was struggling with dire problems: Jack had experienced severe trauma in infancy (the cause of the personality split), lived in a series of foster homes with some foster parents who re-traumatized him, and dealt with an alter who subsumed Jack and committed crimes, engaged in sexual promiscuity and prostitution, and constantly undermined his attempts to be a normal sixteen-year old boy. In addition, whenever his alter takes over, the host experiences memory loss, though on occasion he can piece together what his alter has done. These blackout states are an intriguing literary device for a writer.

In interviews, I’m often asked why I set most of my novels in the 90s. Simple. By doing so, I’m able to avoid the pesky problems of technology since most people didn’t have internet service or use cell phones until later. These tools allow others to access a character and learn where he or she is and for people to do quick research and be in constant communication with the world, thus making a writer’s job more difficult, especially in a suspense story. In Jack & I, the absence of technology let me concentrate on the interaction between the two primary personalities and those who come into contact with them. This would have been an entirely different story if set in current times. For example, Jack (the host) would have learned about his psychological condition by researching his symptoms on the internet and wouldn’t have had to struggle with many of the mysteries that plagued him.

Another common question: why do I frequently write in the psychological suspense genre? One of my first literary influences was Patricia Highsmith, who loved to devise innocent characters who become victims, usually due to entrapment by an antisocial, manipulative person such as her brilliantly conceived Tom Ripley. Taking a page from Highsmith, Jack & I combines the innocent and the sociopath in one body. An economical structure allowing for dramatic contrasts in behavior, personality, emotions, and thoughts.

This novel was tricky to create in many ways. Keeping the host Jack semi-ignorant of his alter’s activities meant I needed to find strategies for him to become aware of these actions despite his amnesiac states. So, although the reader has the full picture of what’s happening, for Jack to understand the extent of his dire circumstances proved to be a constant challenge as he dips in and out of presence.

I hope readers will be intrigued by the book’s psychological complexity but also by the suspenseful plot. Will Jack and his alternate personalities ever fuse or fine a way to live together? I welcome comments or questions via my website or social media!

A psychological suspense novel about two teenage boys. The twist? They’re both named Jack and both inhabit the same body. “Mostly I was relieved to put distance between Jack and myself, although this wasn’t possible because I am Jack, too. And sort of not Jack. I am I, or rather, I am me.”

1994. Jack Kennett is sixteen and suffers from un-diagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder). Abandoned at age two, Jack has been in the New Jersey care system all of his life: foster homes and once placed for private adoption with the Kennetts, a family he adored, especially their daughter, Cara. As the divisive war between the two personalities escalates, Jack (the host) is in despair and feeling powerless as he experiences amnesiac events and must deal with his alter’s promiscuity, truancy, and illegal acts. How will the war between the personalities end?

Amazon link: https://mybook.to/jackandi

GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209445898-jack-i

Laury A. Egan is the author of fourteen novels, including suspense titles such as The Psychologist’s Shadow, Wave in D Minor, Doublecrossed, The Ungodly Hour, and Jenny Kidd as well as a collection, Fog and Other Stories. Four limited-edition poetry volumes have been published, and eighty-five of her stories and poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. She is a reviewer for The New York Journal of Books and a 2024 recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Award in prose.

Website: www.lauryaegan.com

LauryA.Egan@EganLaury

https://www.facebook.com/laury.egan

https://www.instagram.com/laurya.egan

Guest Blogger ~ Lois Winston

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The Importance of Character Arcs

Every book needs two elements—a plot and characters. Most writers understand that their story is comprised of a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is about the Call to Action or what makes the protagonist get involved in the story’s events. In the case of mysteries, this is a murder or another crime. The middle details the steps the protagonist takes on her way to figuring out whodunit. The end is all about how the protagonist solved the crime—the finale, where the perpetrator is caught, and the denouement, where all the various strands of the story are satisfactorily explained.

What many newer authors don’t understand, though, is that the characters in a book must also have their own arcs. This is especially true in series where reader follows various characters through the course of many books. Character growth is essential. No character should be in the same emotional and mental place at the start of either a single title book or a series. When that happens in a series, the author is merely writing the same book over and over with only the names, places, and crimes changing in each subsequent story.

All recurring characters in a series need arcs, not just the protagonist. However, the arc doesn’t have to be in the reader’s face. An arc can be subtle and develop over time as the series progresses.

In Sorry, Knot Sorry, the recently released thirteenth book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series, Anastasia’s relationship with Detective Sam Spader takes a major turn. Detective Spader was first introduced in Revenge of the Crafty Corpse, the third book in the series, when he suspected Anastasia’s communist mother-in-law Lucille of murdering her roommate at a rehabilitation center.

Readers of the series know there’s no love lost between Anastasia and Lucille. However, although Lucille has many flaws, Anastasia knows she’s all bark and no bite. So she sets out to find the real killer. Spader has continued to pop up in subsequent books in the series, and his relationship with Anastasia has grown from adversarial to one of grudging respect.

In this latest book, a man is gunned down in front of Anastasia’s home. There is little in the way of clues and no witnesses. The sheriff’s office is short-staffed due to vacations and a summer flu bug that has hit many county employees. Plus, there’s no money left in the annual budget to hire more officers. The detective admits he needs Anastasia’s help. He knows she has a way of seeing things that others often miss.

Over the course of eleven books, Spader has grown. He’s not the only one. The story arcs of many of the characters in the series have continued to develop. Some character growth has been for the better, some for the worse. But everyone changes in some way, making for a series that continues to grow beyond just the number of books.

Sorry, Knot Sorry

An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, Book 13

Magazine crafts editor Anastasia Pollack may finally be able to pay off the remaining debt she found herself saddled with when her duplicitous first husband dropped dead in a Las Vegas casino. But as Anastasia has discovered, nothing in her life is ever straightforward. Strings are always attached. Thanks to the success of an unauthorized true crime podcast, a television production company wants to option her life—warts and all—as a reluctant amateur sleuth.

Is such exposure worth a clean financial slate? Anastasia isn’t sure, but at the same time, rumors are flying about layoffs at the office. Whether she wants national exposure or not, Anastasia may be forced to sign on the dotted line to keep from standing in the unemployment line. But the dead bodies keep coming, and they’re not in the script.

Craft tips included.

Preorder Buy Links (releasing 6/4/24)

Amazon https://amzn.to/4a8JyVJ

Kobo https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/sorry-knot-sorry

Nook https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sorry-knot-sorry-lois-winston/1145047275?ean=2940186076698

Apple Books https://books.apple.com/us/book/sorry-knot-sorry/id6479363569

USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction under her own name and her Emma Carlyle pen name. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Learn more about Lois and her books at her website www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.