Exploring for Ideas

~ susanoleksiw ~ 1 Comment

I began the Anita Ray series in 2010 with Under the Eye of Kali. Anita Ray now appears in five books and numerous short stories, and I’m currently working on book number six. In book five, In Sita’s Shadow, Anita is pulled into investigating a group of tourists who don’t seem to care about each other though they are traveling together and know each other from earlier encounters.

After living in India in the 1970s and again in the 1980s, and making numerous short trips since then, I’ve learned that nothing really stays the same in that country. Change is a constant, and at each return I’ve been surprised, intrigued, delighted, and confused by some of the changes. To help me think through the story line in a new short story or novel, I reread notes and spend a lot of time with my photographs. Some of them are leading to a new story that is still in the “idea” stage, based on an annual ritual.

Attukal Pongala, a ten-day religious festival, is held every year in Kerala, South India, drawing up to three million women for the ninth-day Pongala event. This is the largest gathering of women in the world, and they come from all over Kerala (and beyond). The state provides extra trains and busses to bring women devotees to the city. The movie theaters remain open all night, people open their courtyards to visiting devotees, and free tea is available in the morning. 

At a precise time, dictated by the stars, a fire is lit and the flame is passed along to assisting priests who spread throughout the city to start the three million fires. The women cook a porridge of rice, jaggery, coconut, and banana as an offering to the deity of the Attukal Bhagavati Temple throughout the morning. Free lunch buffets of rice and vegetables are set up throughout the city, provided by men, who may be associated with a temple, a place of business, a family, or a fraternal group. 

At the dictated time, in early afternoon, other priests spread throughout the city blessing each cooking pot and its porridge. Once this is done, the ritual is over for that participant, and the women pack up and head for home, hurrying to catch the bus or train. The city cleans up, collecting the bricks used for the hearth, and sweeping up the debris.

One of the features of this event that I only discovered by accident got me thinking about my new story. As a very visible foreigner wandering around the festival taking pictures and occasionally chatting with the women, people were eager to explain things to me or show me something. In one of these encounters a woman who spoke perfect English pointed out a side street with no cooking fires. This was curious, and I walked along with her until we arrived at a small bungalow with a car port. Inside the car port sat perhaps two dozen men and women scowling or looking bored. The woman explained that they were pickpockets and other petty thieves who were corralled for the duration of the festival, so the devotees could cook in peace and safety.

When I reviewed my photographs months later I noticed a couple with a small group of men and women seated in front of a closed shop with no cooking sites in front of them. A few men stood nearby. I’ve wondered if this is another group temporarily detained during the festival. As you can guess, the ideas for a story began to percolate and I’m now at the stage of working out the details before I begin writing. 

The Pongala festival is unique, and open to everyone. When the pot boils over (pongala), it signals abundance in the offering to Bhagavati, and the deity is pleased, suggesting good health and good life for the family in the coming year. This year’s Pongala will be held on February 25, 2024.

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Where Reading Leads: Misty of Chincoteague and Me

~ dzchurch ~ 5 Comments

I ask you to come along on a tale.

I first read Misty of Chincoteague when I was eight, which led me to consume Marguerite Henry’s books like a box of chocolates, one rich tale after another. Misty of Chincoteague; Stormy, Misty’s Foal; Sea Star; Misty’s Twilight. I moved right on like a vampire sucking the good bits out of each book. My older sister begged for horseback riding lessons, which later defined her life. We had plastic ponies. We were goners.

Of course, as my taste became more sophisticated, I moved on, my plastic pony forgotten on a shelf. I admit that my Skipper doll used it as a prop for a time. Fast forward, oh, say, thirty years.

I am in charge of a handscoring center in Maryland that employs 400 Maryland teachers and 50 staff from my company in California. We have two months to score multiple grades of student writing samples for all students in those grades. Each sample must be scored twice holistically, then analytically by multiple teams of scorers. I won’t go into further detail. Just know it was a colossal task.

Fast forward again. My second in command and I hadn’t had a break in weeks. We made it to our rented townhouse in Randallstown every night around eleven, drank wine, ate bread and butter pickles, cheese and crackers, and topped “dinner” off with ice cream. At six a.m., we drank coffee and then headed to Baltimore and the rented building that housed the scoring center.

After weeks of this, we had nothing to do one Sunday. On a lark, we went to the Double T Diner on Route 40, where ‘Diner’ was filmed. Over a Greek omelet, my coworker looks up at me, I at her, and our voices overlapping, as in what goes up a chimney, we both say, “Misty.”

We finished our omelets, got in our rental car and headed south for Assateague Island. No more thought. Well, we wondered why the bridge from Annapolis to the Eastern Shore was so crowded with cars going west. And once, as we turned onto a county two-lane, we saw a flashing sign. Something about a hurricane warning. A warning, nothing more.

The draw of Misty was such that we kept going, and going, until we crossed the bridge to the barrier island of Assateague. A 37-mile-long strip of land between Virginia and the Atlantic Ocean and home to Chincoteague ponies. The gates to the park were wide, and the booth unmanned. We did see signs explaining that the ponies were shy, and visitors often went home without sighting one.

Not us. Ponies were everywhere up the spine of the island. One was raiding a camper’s tent. Others stood in groups, foals between them, their backs to a growing wind. We tumbled out of the car in awe. Two well into their thirty-year-olds suddenly eight again, our mouths agape as illustrations from the books flashed by.

A park ranger pulled up next to us in his truck, and like eight-year-olds, we explained we were just looking. He shrugged, looked at his watch, and said, “The hurricane is due to make landfall in two hours. The park is closing. It looks like a bad one.”

The sky was slate. The wind whistled, clouds churned and boiled. It hit us then that we weren’t lucky to see the ponies; they sought high ground!

We got in the car, our hearts full of Misty, and drove like Hurricane Bob was on our tail. We took secondary roads, breaking into a long line of families evacuating, everything they cared about strapped to the top of their cars. It took hours, the wind increasing, the sky purple and dusk growing.

We crossed to Annapolis in a phalanx of cars, horns honking, a sight not unlike any disaster movie. We made US 97 north amid falling trees, downed power lines, and rain like none we had ever seen. It hit the earth and bounced five feet back into the air, drenching everything on the way down and back up. Leaves torn off trees, their stems intact, got stuck in our windshield wipers. We detoured around downed trees and wires until we made Randallstown. Soaked through to our very selves, we clambered into the townhouse, laughing.

A half-gallon of rocky road ice cream with chocolate syrup later, we were still laughing at the Thelma and Louis of it all and those ponies! Oh, my!

And that, my friends, is where the evil of reading can lead you. To joy, adventure, and beyond!

Merging Fact With Fiction by Karen Shughart

~ kshughart47 ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been a contributing blogger for Ladies of Mystery for roughly five years, and initially, at the beginning of each year, I made a list of the topics I wanted to write about for each month. But a year or two ago I decided to be a bit more flexible and instead of sticking to the script, so to speak, to write about what motivated me at the time.

When I began to think about what to write for this month’s blog, at first I came up with a blank–some months are easier than others–and after that I considered writing something about Valentine’s Day or Presidents’ Day. Somehow neither felt right, and I couldn’t think of anything original to say about the topics. Then I decided that because February is also Black History Month I’d write about the third book in my Edmund DeCleryk cozy mystery series, Murder at Freedom Hill, which is about the murder of the beloved, biracial mayor of the fictional village of Lighthouse Cove, NY, whose body is found on the path leading to the beach at a historical site called Freedom Hill on the south shore of Lake Ontario

Freedom Hill is a real historic site a short drive from our house where before and during the Civil War, through an intricate, dynamic and well-developed Underground Railroad system, escaping slaves fled down a path to boats that would transport them across the lake to freedom in Canada. At that same time Maxwell Settlement, upon which the fictional Macyville in the book is loosely based, was a thriving community of freed people of color who worked along side abolitionists to help those slaves escape.

In the book, when criminal consultant, Ed, is hired to investigate the mayor’s murder he wonders if the crime might be racially motivated and related to an exhibit the mayor had been working on with Ed’s wife, Annie, head of the local historical society and museum. The exhibit’s focus is on Macyville and the mayor’s ancestors, both Black and White, who lived there, but a critical piece of information the mayor had promised to provide is missing.

The historical society, with help from the mayor, has also obtained a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to restore Macyville, which had fallen into disrepair after its residents left for better opportunities after the Civil War, and a fire destroyed it in the 1920s (the real settlement remains in ruins, but there’s a historic marker designating the site). Annie is working with contractors to assure the project will be completed in time for July 4th weekend festivities, but she suspects that someone is trying to stop it from moving forward. Is the mayor’s death related, or is something else afoot?

I enjoyed doing the research for this book and merging fact with fiction- as I do with all the books in my series- but for some reason this particular period of history has always fascinated me. It was gratifying to learn how so many of our residents played a critical role in helping to shelter fleeing slaves from capture before transporting them to freedom.

Karen Shughart is the author of the Edmund DeCleryk cozy mystery series, published by Cozy Cat Press, including the award-winning book three, Murder at Freedom Hill.  All books are available in Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, paperback, and Audible. She is a member of CWA ( Crime Writers Association of the UK-North America Chapter) and F.L.A.R.E ( Finger Lakes Authors and Readers Experience).

Guest Blogger – Nev March

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

The Friend I Left Behind

Late night–no, was already morning. I read through an email when my gaze snagged on a name. I stared at it, incredulous. After forty years, I had found Zenia.

Zenia is not her real name. I’ve changed it to protect her privacy. When I was fifteen, I met her on her first day at school. A year older than me, she was a tall, statuesque teen with a well-developed figure and, as I discovered, a wild imagination. She was a “boarder”—a residential student; I was a day-student whose mother was also a teacher.

From almost the first minute, we became close friends. She was lovely, with long wavy hair. Plump and vivacious, she had travelled, and boy, could she talk. Her tales of dangerous train journeys enthralled me. Then, gradually details emerged. Some were shared in long, private conversations—I usually stayed after school to chat, and often rushed home an hour or two late.

As a teen, Zenia was full of imaginative stories. She dreamed. And she narrated those dreams in long, vivid tales of descriptions that would today be called ‘drone shots’. In turn I made up ghost stories to entertain her. We had our in-jokes too; we once disagreed about how to pronounce the word ‘obviously.’  She skipped the B entirely, while I stressed it! So, when one of us made a pronouncement, the other replied, “OVIOUSLY!” whereupon we dissolved into giggles.

She said her father had worked at Tata’s (a huge, respectable conglomerate) but that he had been unfairly accused of embezzlement. My father also worked in a subsidiary of the Tata Corporation. He said that Zenia’s father had been fired from his position. There was a protracted lawsuit, the outcome of which I never did learn.

Sighing, he also said that Zenia’s mother had committed suicide.

Separately Zenia revealed that she walked in on her parents one day while their legal issues were at their height. She must have been eight or nine years old. She said, “A bottle of pills was on the table between them. They were holding hands. They looked at me when I came in, and my mother said, ‘That’s why you have to stay.’” That phrase haunted Zenia. She repeated it over and over.

On our school’s parents’ day, I met Zenia’s father, a handsome, charming man with a boisterous manner. And I met Connie, an old, trusted friend who loved Zenia dearly. Connie had been close to Zenia’s parents for decades. A year later, she married Zenia’s father.

Then, in tenth grade (a crucial exam year in India), we broke up. I’d brought home a poor grade, and my mother was astonished. It hadn’t happened before. That night, she came to my room, sat by me on my bed, and asked me to stop spending so much time with Zenia.

I did; my grades skyrocketed. When Zenia asked why I didn’t stay late anymore, I begged off with excuses of homework. She got the message. I was sorry, but no harsh words were spoken and we both dived into exam prep.

Years after I’d migrated to the States, my mother mentioned that Zenia’s father had passed away. She must have had some common friend or acquaintance to know this. 

Decades later I looked for Zenia on Facebook and Instagram. She would have enjoyed these forums, full of color and variety. But I couldn’t find her. I checked LinkedIn; no sign of her there either. I assumed she had changed her name after marriage.

Now I know why she wasn’t on social media. That email said she had stage-2 respiratory failure. And Rheumatoid Arthritis, morbid obesity and a slew of other conditions. It was a community appeal to help with Zenia’s medical bills. She’d never married. Her stepmother Connie was caring for her.

That notice brought back a waterfall of memories. I wept for the girl with the big imagination, the gorgeous singing voice, who’d played a funny, eccentric Petruccio to my Katherina in our wacky adaptation of Taming of the Shrew. That girl had such big dreams, wanted an erudite, playful husband, and had plans to work in theatre. In the decade after school, I completed a master’s degree in economics, travelled to the States on a scholarship, married and had children. After my corporate career, I began to write novels about the wide spaces and colorful people of India, crime stories based on immigrants, and history.

Forty years ago, we were both at the starting point of our journeys. Then Zenia fell sick. Meanwhile, I was flying without the terrible weight she carried, the tragedies that had already shaped her at seventeen.

She was longwinded because she had no one else to talk with. She was loud, argumentative, because she imagined that other students were whispering behind her back. Now I wonder whether she was lonely because of a self-imposed exile from the other boarders.

And I wonder if they were cruel to her because she was so unlike them. Most boarders came from orthodox families in small villages and had rarely traveled beyond their own towns. Zenia had been abroad, read widely, loved Shakespeare and Mills and Boon novels. We shared so many interests, not least a penchant for short stories and poetry. What a writer she would have made!

These splinters of memory come alive as I write my novels. Faces from long ago return, embedding themselves into my chapters. Perhaps I’m trying to hold on to them, understand them, preserve the essence of who they were. In Murder in Old Bombay I built the Framji family based on people I’d known, and lost. Each book that follows contains fragments of me too.

Now regret escapes my eyelids, dropping wetly on my keyboard. Regret that I did not reconnect with Zenia when we were younger. Why didn’t I try to find her phone number? It didn’t occur to me. Youth can be stunningly self-absorbed. In the quiet past midnight, I mourn the friend I left behind.

The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret

In The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret, award-winning author Nev March explores the vivid nineteenth-century world of the transatlantic voyage, one passenger’s secret at a time.

Captain Jim Agnihotri and his wife Lady Diana Framji are embarking to England in the summer of 1894. Jim is hopeful the cruise will help Diana open up to him. Something is troubling her, and Jim is concerned.

On their first evening, Jim meets an intriguing Spaniard, a fellow soldier with whom he finds an instant kinship. But within twenty-four hours, Don Juan Nepomuceno is murdered, his body discovered shortly after he asks rather urgently to see Jim.

When the captain discovers that Jim is an investigator, he pleads with Jim to find the killer before they dock in Liverpool in six days, or there could be international consequences. Aboard the beleaguered luxury liner are a thousand suspects, but no witnesses to the locked-cabin crime. Jim would prefer to keep Diana safely out of his investigation, but he’s doubled over, seasick. Plus, Jim knows Diana can navigate the high society world of the ship’s first-class passengers in ways he cannot.

Together, using the tricks gleaned from their favorite fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, Jim and Diana must learn why one man’s life came to a murderous end.

Buy links:

https://a.co/d/2R21eMg

The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret

Nev March is the first Indian-born author to receive the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America Award in 2019. She is president of the NY chapter chair of MWA. Her debut novel, Murder in Old Bombay won an Audiofile award and was an Edgar and Anthony finalist. Her sequel Peril at the Exposition describes the gilded age which planted the seeds of today’s red-blue divide.

The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret she explores revenge for a real-world unresolved crime in the years before the Spanish American war over Cuba. Nev is presently working on book 4 of her Captain Jim and Lady Diana series. Her books deal with issues of identity, race and moral boundaries.

http://www.nevmarch.com

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A Novel Writer’s Travels: Inspiration or Distraction?

~ Pamela Beason ~ 1 Comment
Torres del Paine National Park, Chile

I recently spent nearly three weeks in the Patagonian regions of Argentina and Chile, on a tour with 13 wonderful people who are now all friends. We enjoyed a wide range of activities from learning to tango in Buenos Aires to hiking in spectacular Torres del Paine National Park in Chile.

Because I had explained I was a mystery author when we introduced ourselves at the preliminary meeting, my fellow travelers often asked me about how the trip would influence my writing. The most common question was “Are you getting a lot of great ideas for your next book?”

I usually answered that I needed to finish the mystery I’m currently working on before I could think about anything else. But hearing the question multiple times made me think about the way I deal with the information I gather during my trips. I do typically need to finish the novel I’m working on, so I tend to regard a trip in the middle of my book-writing process as mostly a “break” from sitting at my desk every day and planning and editing and marketing. Also, I typically travel to foreign countries, and my mysteries are generally set in the USA, and often in public lands and small towns there. I don’t feel that visiting a country as a tourist really gives me enough insight to use that country as a setting for a story. So, for me, these trips are mostly vacations and distractions from my writer’s life in Washington State.

An exception to this was my mystery Undercurrents, which takes place largely in the Galápagos  Islands of Ecuador. I was inspired by a trip there to write a novel about a tourist who doesn’t speak the language and was clueless about the political undercurrents in the Ecuadorian society there. I, like my fellow travelers, was mostly ignorant about the history and controversy that surrounds the islands, but unlike the others on my small tour boat, I can speak and read Spanish, so when I picked up a local newspaper, I read “Fishermen’s Union Threatens to Blow Up Tourist Boat.”

Interesting, was my first thought, especially as I was traveling on such a boat at the time. My second thought: what the hell? What was the Fishermen’s Union and why would they want to blow up a tour boat? Thanks to the internet, I soon discovered that Ecuadorian newspapers were online, allowing me to keep up with news from the islands, and later I connected with an environmental activist working in the Galápagos, who gave me valuable insights and great details for my book.

As a typical American tourist and nature film lover, I had a romanticized view of Darwin’s enchanting islands. They are a World Heritage Site, and biologists around the world consider the place a special reserve for scientific study, both in the marine reserve and on all the islands. So why wouldn’t all nature lovers want to explore this incredible place, and why wouldn’t Ecuador be oh so proud to host visitors from all nations?

In my research, I discovered many reasons why foreigners were not always welcome in the islands. So, I made my Sam Westin protagonist take up scuba diving (I’m a scuba diver, too) and jump on the chance to go to the Galápagos to participate in a marine survey, assuming that all biologists would be enthusiastically supported in their investigations there. She soon discovers that her assumptions do not mesh with reality, and unlike me, she doesn’t know Spanish and couldn’t easily uncover the reasons for the deadly hostility she encounters.

No, I’m not going to reveal all the twists and turns and revelations here. Get the book! But my point for this post is: while my tour of the Galápagos was mostly a distraction at the time I was vacationing there, the experience piqued my curiosity, and a lot of the material ended up in a book years later.

Dragon Bridge, Vietnam

And that’s probably how it’s likely to go with all my travels. I went to Vietnam in late 2022, and then, in 2023, to Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize) and Tanzania. In the future, I might use a lot of what I learned on those trips in a book or two. A tourist vanishing in crowded Hanoi or in a Central American steamy jungle or in endless grasslands of the Serengeti? Maybe.

Mayan Temple, Guatemala

I have used bits of my experiences in my adventure novella Call of the Jaguar, about a 40-year-old woman who goes to the Central American to find the archaeologist lover she didn’t choose (she married a rich jerk instead), in my romantic suspense Shaken, which has a half-Guatemalan protagonist, and in Race for Justice, the third book in my Run for your Life trilogy, in which my young protagonist competes in a perilous cross-country race in Zimbabwe, the birth country of her murdered mother.

Lioness, Tanzania

This time, while in Patagonia, we learned about Nazi war criminals hiding among the many European immigrants to the area, and about the history of the native peoples in relation to all the incoming strangers. As in the US, Argentina and Chile have challenges with both legal and illegal migrants from other countries. This made my thoughts return to my current work in progress, which has a theme of immigrants coming to the United States. It seems the entire world is concerned with migrations of people from other nations right now, so I guess I’d better speed up and finish my novel, as the theme is currently a topic of interest in so many circles.

So, are my travels inspiring for or distracting from my writing efforts? I guess I have to say they are both. Every learning experience is valuable, and it’s all fodder for the imagination, isn’t it?

Pamela Beason is the author of the Sam Westin Wilderness Mysteries, the Neema the Signing Gorilla Mysteries, the Run for Your Life adventure trilogy, and several romantic suspense novels. She is currently working on If Only, a crossover novel that will include the characters of both the Sam Westin mysteries and the Neema mysteries. Even when she’s working at her desk in Bellingham, Washington, her imagination is off on a trip somewhere else.