Category: mystery

Call Out the T-Rex!

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 4 Comments

by Janis Patterson

Whether a plotter or a pantser or anything in between, I’m sure every writer has reached a point in their current work where they despair. The characters aren’t behaving. An enormous and seemingly insoluble plothole has developed. The timeline makes no sense and crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. The whole project has turned into a dogs’ dinner of a mess and simply doesn’t make any kind of sense.

This kind of despair usually hits in the last few chapters, where the writer is desperately trying to wrap up all the plot threads and create a satisfying ending. Usually at this point the only thing that keeps you from tearing everything up is the sad knowledge that nothing new could be any better. This is why some writers drink. Others, like me, tend to wear out their hot tubs and wonder why they didn’t become a plumber.

Fortunately, though, professionals have learned how best to deal with the situation. I’m not going to say how, because the answer is different for every writer and sometimes for every book. What counts is the result, not the process.

When a writer is brainstorming trying to get past these obstructions, we sometimes have strange fancies. Not too long ago I was trying to finish up a novella that had given me trouble from the beginning. My stories are very character driven, meaning that after the initial set-up what transpires is the result of the characters and how they react/behave. (The opposite is called plot oriented, where the plot is fixed and, however illogically, the characters are required to behave in a way that forwards the pre-determined plot. Both versions have their reasons and their adherents.)

Well, I did have a skeletal story framework (it was an historical romance), but my characters rebelled. Instead of being a benevolent ringmaster guiding the characters through their logical paces, I had to become something between a dictator and a prison warden, forcing my recalcitrant and obstreperous characters to do what they were supposed to do to preserve the integrity of the story. It wasn’t a fault of the plot/story, because that worked out perfectly – in theory. The characters were just acting out and refusing to behave. Yes, for most writers the story develops to a point where the characters take over – and that’s a good thing, most of the time, because it means you have created real people, even if they do exist only in your head. (There is a reason writing has been called controlled schizophrenia for fun and profit…)

Anyway, I had been fighting this kind of rebellion for several days and the deadline was approaching with alarming speed. Had there been more time I just might have started over and locked this story away for a year or two, but that luxury wasn’t available. Finally I just sat back and decided that the best way to solve this was an unexpected ending – I would just have a T-Rex arise from the ornamental lake and gleefully eat all the characters. A nice, clean (except for the resultant and inevitable mess on the lawn) ending that resolved all problems.

Don’t worry – it remained a fantasy, but a most satisfying fantasy. I of course kept at it and finally figured out a way to resolve the problems, bring my recalcitrant characters back into line and end the story as planned. And I guess rather successfully, as the resulting book is one of my better sellers.

This ‘solution’ has been very beneficial, so much so that it has almost become standard in our house. As I near the end of a book The Husband has become canny enough to read my moods – and at certain times generally stay out of my way for his own safety! In these times he asks, “Is it time to call for the T-Rex?” If I say yes, he usually knows that it would be wise for him either to cook dinner or take me out. (I am so blessed to have him…)

As the word of this development spread through the family my nephew (who shares my somewhat skewed sense of humor) gave me a plastic T-Rex about six inches tall. This little gem resides in a small box decorated to look like a lake… until it is time to call him out; then he sits in proud glory on my desk, just waiting to devour any misbehaving characters.

Hey – it works for me, and no one ever said that writers have to be sane all the time!

Not Just a Pretty Face

~ patyjag ~ 8 Comments

I’ve been taking online workshops through the International Thrillerfest Online school. While a couple of topics are ones I’ve attended workshops on before, each presenter has their own unique spin they bring to it. Which means, I have picked up a few new tricks and things to try.

The first one was a workshop by Adam Hamdy on Pacing. While I had learned about most of what he talked about before, it was his discussion on how he went from a pantser (someone who just starts writing with no idea where they are headed) to someone who does plot out the book in a basic way. Not an outline or thorough scene by scene . He writes the tag line then expands that a bit, then expands that a bit more, until he has 5-7 lines for each chapter with the action or external plot of the story and maybe some of the internal plot that will play out.

I decided to try this for the latest book I’m working on. I’ve always known my beginning, a couple of plot points in the middle, and my end, but when he said by taking the time to do this step speeded up his writing process, I thought it was worth a try. And the last book I had so many interruptions, I’d repeated myself in several places- which was discovered by a beta reader.

It took me two days to discover what my book was about, write up my suspect list, and write the 5-7 sentences per chapter. This is just the investigation, or external plot, that will be brought up in each chapter. After starting the book, I added in a new secondary character who will help add more dimensions to my main character and also add more internal conflict in House Edge, book 2 in the Spotted Pony Casino Mysteries.

And you were wondering where the title of this post came from… A bonus workshop we received dealt with what mystery/suspense/thriller readers look for in a book cover. I found the information insightful. So much so, I sent an email to my cover designer to redesign the first three covers in the Spotted Pony Casino Mystery series. I have Poker Face published and available to the public but it is the first book. I decided it was best to get it and the next two I’d had made to get a consistency in the series from the beginning.

Here are the books I had made before the workshop:

These aren’t bad and convey a bit of the story. However, the survey taken by a marketing firm who works with all the big publishers and some of the larger writing organizations said that mystery/suspense/thriller readers don’t care if the image on the cover is anything like what’s in the book. They read the title first. They want a title that catches their imagination and is a play on words. Check- my titles do that. They don’t like people/faces on the books. They don’t mind shadowy figures and prefer covers that look like a puzzle. They want to see creepy, mysterious, or action depicted on the covers. And they prefer a description of the type of book: Mystery, Thriller, True Crime, Action Adventure, Suspense not A Novel.

And these are the new covers:

Simpler images, in-the-face title, and the word Mystery is easier to see than in the logo that sweetened the look of the books. These covers also leave more to the imagination.

I’m glad I had this workshop now and not a year from now when the fourth book would be coming out.

And I’m thankful I went with simple covers on the Gabriel Hawke books and I have a play on words for the titles.

It might be just a book cover, but it is the face of the book I want to draw readers into. So while pretty is nice, I want a cover that exudes mystery, intrigue, and a reader can’t pass without at least taking a peek inside.

What do you think of the change of cover?

On Reading Reviews by Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 6 Comments

Some authors never read their reviews. I am not one of those people. I don’t read reviews often, but I like to go in every now and then and see what’s going on. If I get several people giving the same criticism in their reviews, I check it out. Unless they’ve written I’m terrific. Then I leave it alone. But I have found when the same thing is said, like comments about editing or misspelling, it probably has validity. It doesn’t matter how many eyes have seen the manuscript, one or two things are bound to get by. And they are bound to catch the eye of a reader. Fortunately, these errors are easily correctable. And I correct them as soon as I can.

It’s the other stuff. The comments on research or incorrect details. This always sends me running to an encyclopedia, either online or from my bookshelf. I try to get things right, honestly. Nine times out of ten — and I have to say this — the reader is misinformed. For instance, in The Dagger Before Me, book one of the Persephone Cole Vintage Mysteries, I mention a small refrigerator. Mini-refrigerators have been around since the 1920’s, mostly for the rich, but there. So an affluent, Broadway producer having one in his office in 1942 is not out of line. There are a few other reviews where people simply cannot believe some things were invented way back when. Everything old is new again.

The criticism about the mini-fridge is one I came across only a few days ago and prompted this article. I had done my research at the time of writing the novel, but looked it up again to be sure I was right. I was. When the reader is wrong, I chalk it up to human nature. If they are right –which has happened upon occasion — I correct the error and silently thank the person for letting me know. Speaking of being wrong, one time in another book of the Percy Cole series, I mentioned the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade taking place in 1942. It didn’t. True, the parade has been around since 1924, but when the USA entered WWII, the parade was cancelled from 1942 to 1944. I had neglected to catch that. As it was only once sentence in the story, I simply eliminated the sentence altogether. And once again, silently thanked the reader for catching my error.

Recently, I got criticism in Casting Call for a Corpse, book seven of the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, because I .had called a Scottish policewoman’s hat a bowler. I’m just going to say that in pictures of their uniforms, one of the hat styles looked like a bowler to me. And still does. But not being a hatter, I bow to the reader’s knowledge. And because I had written the word ‘bowler’, the reader gave me only 3 stars and stated that was the reason. As I used the word only one time in the entire novel, I went in and changed ‘bowler’ to ‘hat’. Why? Because it makes no different to the story. Really, truly. If it had been integral in any way, I would have left it alone.

I have my standards. They may be low, but I have them. Deciding what to change, what not to change, when to capitulate, when not to, becomes something most of us writers get used to. For me, it’s just part of the game.

Guest Blogger ~ Sharon L. Dean

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

(Re)appearing Ladies

It’s Halloween. What better time to write about ghosts, real and imagined. I spent my academic career writing about the nineteenth-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. Woolson had her own family ghost story to tell about the haunting of the bedroom where her sister Emma died. A scholar I know claims she felt Woolson’s presence when she visited the apartment where Woolson leapt or fell to her death in Venice.

 I  felt no such presence there, but like so many scholars I know, once Woolson gets hold of us, we can’t let her go. She materialized for me in my second novel, Death of the Keynote Speaker, where I imagined her as a fictionalized Abigail Brewster in a setting on one of the Isles of Shoals off the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine. Woolson never visited those islands, but I drew on real life historical figures for an appearance in that novel: Celia Thaxter, who held a literary salon on Appledore Island; Karen and  Anethe Christensen who were murdered on Smuttynose Island in 1873; and abortionist Madame Restell, who was known as “The Wickedest Woman in New York.”

            After I published Death of the Keynote Speaker, I wasn’t finished with my ghosts. My newest novel, The Wicked Bible, reimagines Abigail Brewster and Madame Restell. How could I not reprise “The Wickedest Woman in New York” in a novel titled after an actual 1631 Bible dubbed “The Wicked Bible?”

            I’m not done with reappearances. The novel I’m working on now reprised a character I named Connie in Leaving Freedom. Woolson left her childhood home in Cleveland to accompany her mother to Florida and the beginnings of a writing career. My Connie also leaves her hometown in Freedom, Massachusetts, to care for her mother in Florida where she also finds success as a writer. My novel in progress is bringing Connie, now eighty years old, back to Freedom. It’s tentatively titled Finding Freedom. I don’t know yet what Connie will find, but I know that the ghost of Constance Fenimore Woolson has given me plenty of inspiration. I wonder what ghosts live for you, whether they be haunting or inspirational?

After a winter when she solved the cold case of a high school friend found dead in a barn, Deborah Strong needs a distraction. She joins a conference, “Libraries: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going?” that will be useful for her work as a librarian in the small town of Shelby. The setting at a picturesque college in New Hampshire should also be healing.

Deborah’s project for the week plunges her into a mystery that would delight most researchers. What are the connections between a Bible dubbed “The Wicked Bible,” a woman called “The Wickedest Woman in New York,” a book written by a nineteenth-century author, and a letter penned to the author? As she slowly unravels the connections, Deborah confronts an event from her own past and anticipates a future that could be as brilliant as New Hampshire’s September foliage.

Buy links: Amazon- https://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Bible-Deborah-Strong-Mystery/dp/1645992810

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/new/59432097-the-wicked-bible

Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived and taught in before moving to Oregon. Although she has given up writing scholarly books that require footnotes, she incorporates much of her academic research as background in her mysteries. She is the author of three Susan Warner mysteries and of a literary novel titled Leaving Freedom. Her new seriesfeatures librarian and reluctant sleuth Deborah Strong. In The Barn, Deborah solves a thirty-year-old cold case. The Wicked Bible, scheduled for an October 2021 release by Encircle Publications,brings Deborah to a college campus and a search for who stole a Bible and a letter from the library’s archives. The third in the series, Calderwood Cove, forthcoming in 2022, will bring her to the coast of Maine and a murder. She continues to write and research in the landscape she’s discovering the Northwest.

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Website: https://sharonldean.com/ Publisher: https://encirclepub.com/

The Paths through the Forest

~ dzchurch ~ 7 Comments

A storm is brewing out my windows, clouds dense with rain hang heavy over the hills. You can feel the damp in your bones, in the air you breathe, and the chill that falls at your feet. Depending on your perspective, the promise of a deep drenching rain either fills you with trepidation or joy. Joy for me…always.

Weather has been part of my being since I was a child, thanks to my father, who flew through it all. And though I spent my time in the Navy in weather, I never once dreamed of taking that path in my life. But my broad brush with it has enriched me and my writing. I look at the sky, read the signs, and assess how what I see will affect my world, real or imaginary. In my stories, rocks, dirt, and slush roil down hillsides, a dry roadway on a frosty night hides a bridge slick with black ice, and the ocean sucks life from the beaches depositing its victims with the tide.

I have an affinity for the muddy side!

Like all of us, I’ve stared down many forks in the road and chosen a path through the forest of opportunity, fear, and hope lying undefined before me. I reinvented myself time and again to succeed in male-dominated businesses. I bucked trends, bosses, been on bucking horses, driven sixty-thousand miles a year back and forth over two states in a station wagon filled with educational assessments, flown hundreds of thousands of miles in the same quest, set up on demand scoring facilities nationwide, and my husband wants me to add, ridden an elephant.

My point is this . . . one of the great joys of writing is the ability it presents to follow anew the paths not taken. Each plot is an opportunity to ask what if I had become an anthropologist, a minister, a professor of English literature, a Naval aviator, or taken the bigtime NY advertising agency job when it was offered. Maybe I should have apprenticed at Vogue like my great aunt wanted or started at the bottom at National Geographic and worked my way up? What if I had purchased the family farm and lived that dream?

How different would my life have been if I had grown up in the town we were born in, married my high school sweetheart, and lived there still. Who would I be? I know I would be mad as a hatter and ready for the brick sanitarium with barred windows that once overlooked a sharply manicured lawn in the town I consider home. I can imagine being that person, bound to a town, a husband, a job, children, and family. How does that me react to the current me when we meet head-on in a plot?

Each path we don’t take informs and colors us as much as the one we did. The curiosity that drove us toward that choice lingers inside us. What we learned before we turned away still piques our curiosity and benefits our knowledge base. Writing is our opportunity to find out through our characters what might have been. Of course, as ladies of mystery, we spice it all up with a dead body or two, a conspiracy, a disappearance, or perhaps just the evil that stalks the dark of night. Boo!

I chose to leave the Navy when the life of one of my division members was destroyed by an unethical decision, supported by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and three fearful men. What if I had chosen to stay in? I’ll never know. But the incident and my resulting decision rode my shoulder as I drafted the final book of the Cooper Quartet, my series about a military family in the Vietnam Era. Don’t Tell will be released November 11 and is already a Reedsy Must Read, noting, “This author is an expert at action-packed intrigue and mystery.” And just in, from Booklife, “In this military milieu, Church—a Vietnam-era Navy veteran herself—does a remarkable job of keeping multiple plotlines running with clarity and power. Church spins a lively tale where motives are unclear in a vividly realized hothouse naval environment. The engaging characters and their detailed histories make this a satisfying capstone to a wide-ranging epic.”

Don’t Tell will be available November 11 on Amazon as an ebook, paperback, or in hardcover. In the meantime here is a link to the Booklife Review: https://booklife.com/project/don-t-tell-59592