Sometimes it feels like the publishing process is changing daily, with information on new strategies and technologies flooding our email boxes, not to mention the bounty of scam offers to showcase our books in book clubs and on podcasts. Yet some things change slowly or not at all, especially the themes, tropes, and story lines in traditional or cozy mysteries. 

I’ve been thinking about this over the last year or so because of a mystery I wrote some years ago that was published by Midnight Ink and did reasonably well before the publisher dropped its mystery line. Felicity O’Brien is a farmer who is also a healer, and she treats this ability matter of factly—she has a skill, or a gift, if you prefer, to alleviate pain and heal where she isn’t in conflict with a greater power (the Deity). She grew out of my years of working with holistic practitioners treating men and women with HIV/AIDS before there were any treatments for the disease. The massage therapists, reiki practitioners, and others had a remarkable impact on many of the patients. And although we never tried to analyze it, those of us on the periphery recognized that some practitioners brought the patient to a greater level of health than would be expected. Felicity has the same capacity to induce health.

When I tried to interest a mass market paperback publisher in the series, the publisher who had happily published several of the Mellingham series and later the Anita Ray series said no, they didn’t do paranormal. They did send it out to one of their readers but I never heard about it again, and now accept that it has drowned in the slush pile.

The problem with this is that the mind-body connections seem too other-worldly, too unscientific, too far out there. And I too understand that. I grew up with the same perceptions that some things fell into a category that might be fun but couldn’t be taken seriously—ghosts, various forms of the paranormal and the like. Science was serious, the paranormal was not. But that’s no longer true. 

I like to read widely, and one of my interests is neuroscience. Only as an adult, long out of school, with the current emphasis on books on aspects of science for the general readership could I have come across some of the more interesting titles I’ve found, and one in particular astonished me. In Cerebral Entanglements by Allan J. Hamilton, the author, a neurosurgeon, talks about the current state of neuroscience including research into the mind-body connection.

In one chapter in particular he talks about experiments with individuals who (this one is called the viewer) could study an assigned image and send it mentally to another individual thousands of miles away (the receiver), to someone they didn’t know and who had no idea what the image was. The image was chosen at random at the last minute. As it turned out, “receivers could exhibit an uncanny ability to generate an accurate impression from the sender.” The author goes on to say that “the results have been replicated in dozens of laboratories by different researchers.” (p. 239)

Researchers have also produced the same results in tests of precognition—the receiver could draw the image even a day before it was to be sent and before the sender had received the image to be sent. 

Not every person has these skills or capacities, which is probably a good thing. But the abilities do exist in many of us and may be used for nothing more important than thinking hard on hurrying the person ahead of us in line at the coffee counter.

Mental telepathy, ESP, whatever it is called can hardly be called a fantasy trope in fiction if laboratories around the world are confirming its existence in replicable experiments. Skeptics can still reject the process out of hand, and for most people that would be correct. Not everyone can transmit mental images or receive them. But some people can.

So where does that leave Felicity O’Brien? I treated her healing powers and the insight that comes with them as fairly ordinary, a capacity passed down through the female line along with the advice to treat it carefully and respectfully. Otherwise, it was an ordinary trait not different from an ability to sing or pick up a new language easily.  Her capacity does not extend to saving the world, instigating spontaneous combustion to block a criminal’s flight, or anything else fantastic or magical. Her capacity is ordinary, just a part of her ordinary life on the farm.

It will take a while for literature to catch up with science—it’s usually the other way around. In the meanwhile I have to consider the next act for Felicity. Will she embroil herself in another suspicious death, or will she just try to keep her farm going and her father healthy in the nursing home? Do I have to wait for common knowledge to absorb new science on the paranormal before Felicity and her inherited talent can be taken seriously by publishers? That would probably require far greater change than what is typical for publishing. I wait but also ponder other options.

From January to the end of March, New England writers can submit stories for the annual Crime Spell Books anthology. We get a variety of stories from a diverse groups of writers, and often a new writer’s first story. Although each of the editors probably has a private set of expectations and standards, I know I’m going to be surprised more than once. I learned that lesson years ago.

In the 1990s I was invited to judge a short story contest sponsored by a local newspaper. I was one of three local writers who would judge the stories submitted to the editor of the arts and culture insert magazine. 

We were a dutiful trio, reading each story more than once, taking notes and evaluating each one according to whatever we considered the appropriate set of criteria. We knew of each other but didn’t know each other personally, though we all knew the editor. At the end of our period of private deliberations, we gathered an hour before the luncheon, where we’d announce the winners, who would be awarded certificates. This is where the surprise came in.

Each of us came with a different story that we ranked as number one. As I look back I’m amused by our passion for our chosen piece of fiction. We couldn’t understand how the other two hadn’t seen the perfection, the style and wit and wisdom in our perfect piece of prose. Of course we discussed our choices at length, certain we could persuade the other two because weren’t we all rational, professional writers?

One writer chose a story because it was a quiet meditation with a gorgeous nearly perfect sentence right in the middle. And it was a lovely arrangement of words expressing a gentle wisdom, but what about the rest of the work? The next judge picked a story that dawdled until the punchline, which I had to admit was effective. But neither judge had picked the story I chose, which to this day I’m convinced was the only true story—with a beginning, a middle, and an end, describing an experience that left the characters changed and the reader nodding in recognition and satisfaction. I’ll admit that the other two judges probably felt as strongly as I did and still do. How did we resolve this dilemma? We didn’t.

The newspaper was on a schedule. The program had to begin, but the editor was ready for us. Another writer gave a talk, the editor congratulated all the writers who had submitted stories, and then she announced that three stories had taken first place. Each judge got to present “their” choice, to the delight of three writers (and their families) in the audience.

I learned later that this is what happens every year. Three judges and three stories. We just can’t seem to agree on what makes something work, something worth reading a second time, something to share with friends and talk about in classes. The editor doesn’t try to persuade the guest judges to reach consensus. Wise move. Instead everyone learned the lesson of the world of publishing. Tastes will range, but every writer is encouraged to follow their own path, and every reader will find a work that resonates with them.

Each writer has a different way of getting started on the next book. Some prepare a story board, others keep pages of notes, some make an outline. I see a group of people moving around doing whatever it is they’re doing, which isn’t always clear in the beginning but I know it will be soon enough. Because location is especially important to me, I pull out photographs I’ve taken of the general location I’m focusing on. They aren’t usually of a specific place I have in mind for the plot, though they can be, but more of a way to get my brain thinking about what I’ve seen there, how people move through the space. Right now, that means India.

My current work in progress is an Anita Ray story, most of which usually takes place in the coastal resort of Kovalam, just south of the state capital Trivandrum. Even though such a story might begin in Hotel Delite, Auntie Meena’s business where Anita lives and helps out, the plot may take Anita away from the water and into a nearby city or inland village. She might go to Chalai, the main bazaar in the city, or to Connemara Market, where I often went to take pictures of fish or vegetables. (I love markets.)

In this mystery novel, Anita travels into the hills with a group of tourists staying at the hotel. They’ve heard about a particularly interesting chapel and want to visit. So, off they go. This gave me a chance to pull out images of the twisting roads rising up the Western Ghats, with homes built right along the verge and bougainvillea or other vines tumbling over trellises and brushed by a passing lorry. 

While I was sorting through images I came across one of groves of rubber trees. The hills can be a surprise to some foreigners who expect all of South India to be a jungle, huge climbing vines, thick bush, and bright flowers the size of basketballs. They don’t expect a small forest of deciduous trees.

Mature rubber trees look like saplings but they’re mature enough to produce the sap that is the basis for rubber, and farmers capture it the same way we capture sap for maple syrup. I lay the photograph out on my desk alongside two or three others, and let my thoughts drift. I needed a murder scene the reader could grasp in hindsight but nothing obvious, and this needed to be away from Hotel Delite and Kovalam. The rubber tree grove gave me plenty to work with.

With important scenes taking shape near the rubber plantation and a tea shop, I had some important questions resolved and now needed only a Catholic chapel, so I rummaged around and found a photograph of one set among the trees. It was the right size for what I had in mind, and its location gave me plenty of scope for the specific activities I was toying with.

It’s exciting at this point to look at the photographs arrayed in front of me and see more fully the progress of the story. The characters are there, they’re spreading out among the trees and the buildings, and their voices punctuate the sound of feet shuffling through leaves and forest debris. I can see them and follow them, and when I do their behavior begins to fill the plot. My story idea, initially vague, takes shape.

Every writer learns early or late that readers have views. We’re used to the views of paid or unpaid reviewers, and learn a way to respond to them—ignore the reviews, take them personally, or some response between the two. The views of ordinary readers, those not expecting to see their opinions in print, have come to be more important to me.

One of the first reader responses came in the form of a postcard. A reader in the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest wrote to tell me, in terse language, that she’d just finished reading Double Take and she wouldn’t kill for the motive I ascribed to the killer. My first reaction was something sarcastic, but then I thought she was telling me something—this reader wanted a motive she could relate to, which in turn meant she wanted a killer more complicated, as well as more relatable. This is fair, and a pretty good lesson for any writer, so I’ve kept it in mind.

I found an unusual report on OSHA about a home-heating device that filled a home with a kind of exhaust, depriving it of oxygen. A woman arrived at the summer cottage as expected and after a while felt ill. She tried to light a match to start a fire, but the match wouldn’t light; she gave up, and went out onto the porch, where the reception was better, to call her husband on her cell. An editor found the situation unbelievable, but I cited the OSHA report. That wasn’t enough, she said, because the reader wouldn’t be likely to know this technical point, so the story didn’t work overall. The lesson there is to fit the technical information into the story before it’s necessary, or at the point where it can counter the reader’s skepticism. I followed that lesson in another story that depended on the victim having technical knowledge not available to the villain to enable her to survive.

Conferences are a great opportunity to hear from readers, as we all know, and in my experience they tell me exactly what I’m overlooking. I treated Chief Joe Silva in the Mellingham series as an iconic figure—he literally appeared in the town square in an early chapter, and I liked his independence and unattached presence. Not only did he not have a lady friend, a partner, even an occasional visitor, he never mentioned his family. And my readers felt the absence. They wanted to know about Joe’s family. While I was populating the small town of Mellingham with all the quirky souls I loved, my fans were reading between the lines in search of hints about Joe’s parents and siblings, perhaps an ex-wife or two hiding somewhere. It took me a while, but in the end Joe’s family got two books, one for his birth family and one for his own, constructed family.

I’m not always sure what the best response is to some reactions. In Below the Tree Line, the first in a series about farmer Felicity O’Brien, the action revolves in part around timbering. As a former farm owner working with state and private foresters, I knew something about managing a forest for income (it’s not lucrative). But what we call timberingin New England is called logging in the West, and this difference surprised the reviewer. I read the reviewer’s own mystery, also about a woman who owned a farm, and even allowing for the license allowed a writer of a mystery novel, I was appalled at some of her behavior. I couldn’t see it happening in New England, at least not without consequences. Certain aspects of life are more geographically defined than I realized—and this goes well beyond local accents.

In the Felicity O’Brien series I was prepared for the concern some readers expressed about cats in mysteries, and made a point of feeding my cat, Miss Anthropy, on time and giving her attention, even though she was not one for cuddling. The rescue dog, however, brought out a lot of unexpected advice, most of it unnecessary but interesting. It was a reminder of the boundaries of our chosen genre, and the core decency of our readers. Violate the standards at your peril.

The last lesson comes more from watching readers react to changes in other series, reactions I’ve heeded as warnings. In the Mellingham series, Joe Silva can grow and change in relation to the world around him. Because he is who he is, a middle-aged police chief in his prime, without the handicap of a dark past, he’s expected to grow into relationships like any other normal person. And he does. In the Anita Ray series, Anita’s environment is the hotel with her beloved Auntie Meena, the desk clerk Ravi, and other staff members from the surrounding village. This is a light-hearted, static world, and somewhere along the line I understood she could not change without disrupting that world. New hotels might go up, tourists from newly independent countries might arrive, war might break out, but Anita and her compatriots would remain the same. Joe’s world is dynamic, as is Felicity’s, but Anita’s is not. 

The interaction between reader and writer in crime fiction is one of the best features of this genre—the community is so fully engaged that we as writers can only benefit. It may not always feel that way (So, exactly why did Felicity do that?), but in the end the readers are usually on to something, and I’m ready to listen.

A Pause

This Saturday straddles the holidays Christmas and New Year’s, a time washed with good will and optimism. Each holiday alone offers a topic relevant and pertinent in today’s world. I could talk about my gratitude for having close friends, or I could focus on the excitement of going into the year ahead. But I have nothing new to say about either one. Instead a friend and I talked this week about the word pause, and that’s the subject that feels most appropriate for me at this time.

We rush headlong from one activity to the next, some of us weary and some of us energized by how much we can get accomplish and what the season holds. I could do that but instead I want to take this time of being neither here nor there to step back and pause, to take a break thoughtfully, not because I feel I need it or want it. I’m taking a break, pausing, because this is something to treasure—a moment when I don’t have to move forward or back, rush ahead or finish up something left behind me, to clear my desk before covering it with the next task.

This isn’t as far removed from a writing life as one might think. Whenever I finish a story or novel I set it aside and stop thinking about it. This gives us as writers distance on our work, so we can come to it with a fresh pair of eyes after three or four weeks (or even a year). But it can do more than that. 

A pause in the work of creating something, a season, or any time of year, gives me an opportunity to come back to myself, to step away from the person whom I created in order to write the story, call her the narrator or protagonist or something else. Or in my day to day life, the person who gets things done, checking each item off on a real or imagined to-do list. 

A pause allows, even encourages me to step into another space, one that is walled off from the world in motion and complete in itself. This is not a moment of purpose, to wind down, lower my blood pressure or find the time to assess my upcoming tasks. The pause is its own purpose, to listen to random thought, to discover once again what it is to just be, to exist, to watch the world go by, to slow down enough to notice the world is going by, ever moving around us.

Perhaps this pause is a meditation without the Buddhist directive to “empty the mind,” ignore thoughts or feelings and keep the mind blank. My pause is a long moment to heighten the awareness that I exist. I am here in this place, touching the fabric of the seat of my desk chair, studying the color of the dyed leather desk top, hearing the occasional car pass my window.

When my mind tells me this moment has passed I know the lights will be brighter, the music will be sweeter, and I will enjoy them all more deeply. But I will also linger in the moment more often, knowing that life is truer when savored than gulped greedily. This weekend I straddle the holidays that define our year, and find a moment that is more, that is all of life held lightly in the palm, awakening me to all that is beyond accomplishment, goals, appearances, rushing thoughts. My moment as me entirely with the Universe sitting within my half-curled fingers.