Tag: #amwriting

First, Third, How do I choose?

~ 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!

Please, no, not another book idea!

~ patyjag ~ 6 Comments

I get asked all the time, “Where do you get your ideas or how do you come up with so many ideas for stories?”

Nia

I like to call it my superpower, but then something like this happens: My friend and I who sell books twice a year at an outdoor flea market enjoy watching all the dogs go by and try to figure out their breeds or crossbreeds. It’s just a fun game. Then, this past summer, I had my little dog Nia with me at one of the events. A woman came in to look at our books and, of course, asked to pet Nia. My little Chiweenie is a people dog. She loves kids, she loves anyone that isn’t wearing a hat and built large. The woman pet her and talked to her for several minutes then looked up at me and said, “You should use her as a therapy dog. She has the right temperament and look at that loving caring face.” The woman went on to tell me all the places I could take Nia to comfort people.

After she left, my friend and I were talking about it and instead of doing the humanitarian thing with this information, I flipped it and said that would make a great way to have an amateur sleuth get involved in all kinds of murders. (Yes, an idea for another series popped into my head and hasn’t left.)

Then someone was playing old time records on a record player as a means to bring in customers and sell the record player. The song Merry, Merry, Merry Christmas came on and as the song progressed, my mind went to what a great title for a book. Merry, Merry, Merry Murder. And make it set at Christmas. Now this stuck and has been brewing in my mind as the holidays are fast approaching. Too late for this year, but I will have a book with that title coming out next year.

But wait, how can I get this title to work with the two series I have right now? All the Gabriel Hawke series titles have animals in the titles. It would be out of sync with the rest of the series. Same goes with the Spotted Pony Casino Mystery series. Those titles all have to do with gambling terms. How can I use this title to write a Christmas murder mystery if I can’t make it fit the two series I already have going?

Pop back to the new shiny idea of the woman with therapy animals who travels to schools, hospitals, nursing homes, outreach centers, and so on. She could start her series with Merry, Merry, Merry Murder. Or I can make it a standalone Christmas Mystery.

But wait. This has all been spinning in my head for several months now and two days ago when I was finishing up sewing Christmas presents, I had Christmas music playing. Christmas Classics to be exact. The Jackson 5 were singing, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. There is a spot in the song where Michael stops singing and says he’s going to tell Daddy. He says it like he’s mad at his mom. And BAM! The whole idea for the murder and who is blamed and who really did it came flashing into my head. I had to leave the sewing machine to find a piece of paper and a pen to write down all the things that had come together to make the story work.

And now, I just have to decide if it will be a standalone book or the beginning of a new series… I really don’t want to juggle three series, but I also like the idea of the shorter cozy style mystery. Maybe one of those a year…. So I can keep putting out two books a year in the other two series. We’ll see!

If you’re looking for some great gifts for the readers on your Christmas list, check out the Ladies of Mystery Cavalcade of Books. An online place to find some of our books on sale and just some of our books. https://bodiebluebooks.com/ladiesofmystery/

Guest Blogger ~ Libby Fischer Hellmann

~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

The “What-if” Thriller Game

Most thriller writers are suckers for a good story. I’m one of them. And if the story is true, many of us start playing the “what-if” game. What if I took a character and imagined it happened to her? What if I set the story in Chicago? What if I created a backstory that explained the current situation?

“What-if’ing” is often the first step I take to suss out a new story or novel. In fact, I’m pretty sure I started writing historical thrillers because I “what-if”ed an ordinary person living through a period of extraordinary turmoil. What if a group of hippies lived together during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention? That became Set The Night on Fire. What if a young American woman got caught in the 1979 Iranian Revolution? A Bitter Veil. What if two Vietnamese sisters had to cope with the Vietnam War? A Bend in the River.

However, I didn’t have to “what-if” the circumstances of my recent thriller, Max’s War, published in April, 2024. My late father-in-law, Fred Hellmann, was an immigrant from Germany. He was “off the boat” in 1939. He’d grown up in affluence in Regensburg, a city that, as far back as the Middle Ages, was a center for trade and commerce. Growing up, Fred had his own horse and carriage. His father bred racehorses and owned a bicycle and wheel shop. They lived in the best part of town with plenty of household help.

All of that changed when Hitler came to power—the Hellmanns were Jewish. From 1933 on, the Nazi government tightened the noose on all German Jews by issuing laws that slowly, inexorably restricted their education, their ability to make a living, their social lives, and their freedom. Goebbels piled on with misinformation that depicted Jews as odious creatures who couldn’t be trusted. In the early 1930s Jews were encouraged to leave Germany. Or else.

Fred’s family heeded the warning and moved to Holland, which at the time, was a neutral country. The Netherlands had a history of tolerance. Jews assimilated and inter-married. For a couple of years things after they moved, life was peaceful. The Hellmanns even imagined returning to Germany after Hitler was thrown out of power.

Except they never did.

With the looming invasion of Holland a certainty, a relative in Philadelphia offered to sponsor Fred if he emigrated to the US. She couldn’t sponsor his parents, though. Only him. Fred’s family made a heartbreaking decision. Fred would go to America. His parents would remain in Holland. Leaving was problematic, however. It was no longer permitted. So, in 1939 Fred hid in a truck filled with coffins. He made it to the ship that brought him from Rotterdam to New York. From there he took a train to Philadelphia.

For two years he took odd jobs as a delivery boy and studied English. He learned he was the sole survivor of his family. Sometime after Pearl Harbor he was drafted into the US Army.

Because he was German and an immigrant, he was sent to Ontario, Canada, after Basic Training, where he was trained by the OSS to interrogate German POWs and to ferret out intel about German troop movements: where they were, where they were planning to go, and how well equipped they were.

Fred was sent back behind enemy lines at the end of 1943. He spent almost two years as an interrogator and a spy. In 1945 he was asked to remain with the OSS for another year. But he’d become engaged to a  lady in Philadelphia who said enough was enough. She couldn’t wait another year. So Fred came back to the States. He married Lucy, and their first son Mark was born in 1946. I married Mark in 1979.

While not as dramatic as the first part of his life, Fred’s post-war life was marked by what we now know as PTSD.  As far as we knew, he never talked about the war… not to his two sons or his friends. Once in a while, an anecdote leaked out. The coffin story… how he came to have a German knife and Lugar… how he impersonated a Wehrmacht officer to elicit information from German POWs. How his best OSS buddy substituted for him during a mission and was killed. I’ve included a fictionalization of those events in Max’s War. And added to them.

Still, those are just scattered remembrances. We tried to get his Army records so we’d know exactly where he was trained and deployed, but they were destroyed in a fire at the St. Louis Army record center shortly after it opened.

As a thriller writer who’s fascinated with spy-craft, I’ve wanted to write about his exploits for years. When I heard about the Ritchie Boys and how they did exactly what Fred did during the war, I wondered whether he trained with them. Long story short: We have no proof one way or the other. But I have since learned that the OSS and Ritchie Boys were kissing cousins during the war. They often shared training and missions. More than a few soldiers floated between the two organizations. In fact, an OSS camp lay just a few miles from Camp Ritchie in rural Maryland. So it’s entirely possible.

The great thing about fiction is that we can create stories that raise issues of extraordinary conflict, morality, and good vs. evil. While Fred’s story will always have a few loose ends, Max’s doesn’t. The plot of Max’s War emerged organically from Fred’s story. Where I didn’t know the facts, the “what-if” exercise helped me fashion what I hope are plausible events. In that respect, it is both the easiest and most difficult novel I’ve ever written. I hope you will agree.

 A sweeping World War 2 saga in which a young German Jew flees Europe, emigrates to America, and joins the Army to fight Nazis

Additional description (If you want it): As the Nazis conquer Europe, Jewish teen Max and his parents flee persecution in Germany for Holland, where Max finds true friends and a life-altering romance. But when Hitler invades in 1940, Max must escape to Chicago, leaving his parents and friends behind. When he learns of his parents’ deportation and murder, Max immediately enlists in the US Army. After basic training he is sent to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, where he is trained in interrogation and counterintelligence.


Deployed to the OSS as well, Max carries out dangerous missions in occupied countries. He also interrogates scores of German POWs, especially after D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, where, despite life-threatening conditions, he elicits critical information about German troop movements.

Post-war, he works for the Americans in the German denazification program, bringing him back to his Bavarian childhood home of Regensburg. Though the city avoided large-scale destruction, the Jewish community has been decimated. Max roams familiar yet strange streets, replaying memories of lives lost to unspeakable tragedy. While there, however, he reunites with someone from his past, who, like him, sought refuge abroad. Can they rebuild their lives… together?

Buy link:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CMBK15LM

Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago a long time ago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. She soon began writing historical fiction as well. Eighteen novels and twenty-five short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and crime writing community and has even won a few.

She has been a finalist twice for the Anthony and the Shamus; and four times for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. She has also been nominated for the Agatha, the Daphne, and she won the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year in 2021. She has won the IPPY, Foreword Magazine’s Indie Awards, and the Readers Choice Award multiple times.

Her latest novel is Max’s War: The Story of a Ritchie Boy, the little known group of German Jewish immigrants to the US who escaped Hitler and joined the Army to fight Nazis.

https://libbyhellmann.com/

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Libby-Fischer-Hellmann/author/B001HMMDZU

https://www.facebook.com/authorLibbyFischerHellmann

Life has made changes in my writing style.

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

When I started writing to get published over 30 years ago, I would sit down and knock out words for an hour or two a day. That was when the kids were in school and I’d finished all my outside and household chores. Back then I hadn’t attended more than a college class on fiction writing and a community Ed class on writing for hire.

I had one children’s story published in a parenting magazine and I was working as a freelance reporter for first the Redmond Spokesman and the the Bend Bulletin. These didn’t pay much but they showed me I could write.

The first novel I wrote was a murder mystery. I’d read the first three Kinsey Millhone Mysteries by Sue Grafton and felt I could write a mystery novel. I loved the main character and enjoyed writing about a divorced mother of two who made her living with freelance photography helping her ex-husband prove he didn’t kill someone. I used a book I’d heard about on a television talk show that would help you be your own detective. Great premise! I did my homework looking through the tombs of agents in the books you couldn’t take out of the library and thought I’d found the right one.

Back then I didn’t know you didn’t pay them to read your books. I was already working on the second book in the series when I received the rejection letter that said mystery books in first person didn’t sell. I stood open-mouthed as I read it. But the very books that had set my muse on fire were in first person and they were selling well. I changed the book into third person and resent it, without any money, and never heard back from the agent.

In the meantime, I’d heard on a television talk show ( this was back in the day when I watched television as I cleaned, folded clothes, and did all the household chores) that homemakers were writing romance books and making money. I started writing a historical romance. I attended what I realized, after the fact, was a literary writer’s event. The two workshops I wanted to take were reasonable and I could stay with my parents. I went to the first class and enjoyed learning more about writing. The second workshop was with an editor from New York. We were to read a section of our work to her. The first person started reading and I thought, wow, where is the plot in this? Then the second one read and I was completely lost. Then the third had the moon as the protagonist. I was clearly feeling like I didn’t belong in this group. Then it was my turn and I started reading from my historical romance. Everyone leaned back and stared at me. The agent stopped me and asked if I’d heard of RWA. I hadn’t and then she told me to come see her after the workshop.

From the RWA organization I learned the craft of writing. I learned to make my characters flawed and likeable. I learned how to use villains and tragedy to draw the reader in. I learned about suspense and crafting a good hook. During that time, I wrote every week day. I became published in historical Western romance. After I became published I wrote seven days a week, for three to four hours. I decided to make this a career.

Ten years ago I decided to get back to writing mystery books. That’s when I started writing the Shandra Higheagle Mystery series.

I have written at least 2-4 hours every day since I became a published author.

Until this year.

This year I decided to indulge in life more. Which had me not writing for days, weeks, even a month when I went on my Europe trip.

I take that back, I did write every day because I kept a journal of my trip. But I didn’t work or even think about the next book, which is unusual for me. I usually have two books in my head, the one I’m working on and the next one. I had neither for a whole month.

When I returned, I set a goal for myself. To finish Gabriel Hawke, book number 13, titled Wolverine Instincts, this month. The plan on my whiteboard is for it to publish in January. Right now I’m thinking late January and possibly early February. However, I am writing my 3k a day on this book since November 1st and my goal is to have it ready to go to critique partners and beta readers by the first of December.

This is the second book this year that I’ve given myself a month to get written. I was able to get that book written in the month, but there weren’t two book-selling events and a holiday during that month.

My character Dela Alvaro in the Spotted Pony Casino mysteries is a disabled veteran. The audiobook for Down and Dirty will soon be available. But today, on Veterans Day, you can download a free copy of Poker Face, book 1 in the series using this link from Bookfunnel. https://dl.bookfunnel.com/xlsrf57q4l

Thank you to all Veterans!

And don’t forget that starting November 15th through December the Ladies of Mystery have our Cavalcade of Books available for you to get deals or gift books to people on your Christmas list. Each of us is offering three books, some at special prices just for you! Ckick HERE to see what’s what, once again starting November 15th!

My Brain Is Taking a Break

~ Pamela Beason ~ 4 Comments

Ack! My post is scheduled for tomorrow, and my mind is blank. Not a single pithy idea is pinging around in my head. So, I’m just going to blather on about what’s going on while my creative brain is taking a vacation. I’ve finished the manuscript for my latest mystery, IF ONLY, which is a crossover novel between my Sam Westin Wilderness series and my Neema the Gorilla series, and trust me, it was not easy to mix those two very different settings and groups of characters, but I believe I pulled the blend off smoothly, although it took me a long time.

But then I ran into two snags. One, my editor is very busy and has been sick, so my manuscript has been held up in the final edit. Two, I planned for this book to be positioned in both the Sam Westin series and in the Neema series, cleverly eliminating the need to write another book for each series. But it turns out that Amazon will only allow me to place the book in one of my series, which then caused a need to make cover changes and dream up creative ways to make it clear that the book also fits in the other series.

I still have all the minutiae to complete after I make final manuscript changes: register ISBN numbers for both print and ebooks, make an ebook version for Amazon with links to my other books, make an ebook for Draft2Digital without those links, write the description for the book page, find appropriate keywords for the listing, etc., etc. Being a self-published author can be tedious, but at least I’m in control and making far more money than I did with a traditional publisher.

So, while I’m waiting for the final edit to arrive on my desk, I’ve been giving my brain a break with reading. I always read, and although I tend to prefer mysteries, I also read all sorts of other books, and I often read more than one at once. Right now, I’m reading two very different books, and they are both unusual picks for me. First, Jodi Taylor’s The Long and the Short of It, which is a collection of wacky humorous short stories. I rarely read short stories, and even more rarely read humorous stories, but these are much more entertaining to me than most, as the plots involve historians who travel back in time and accidentally muck up the details of historical events. Second, I’m reading Camp Zero, a post-apocalyptic story about groups of people who have been posted in the arctic for mysterious reasons having to do with discovering pristine air and livable places for humanity as the southern half of our planet devolves into climatic and political chaos. However, in Camp Zero, it’s clear that men, and not necessarily honorable men, are in charge of all these experiments, so it’s never clear what is going to happen next.

These make a great break from my normal reading. Lately I’ve been plowing through Sara Driscoll’s FBI K-9 series, which has great suspense and action as the protagonist works on life-and-death cases with her canine partner. I will definitely return to that series later. I adore stories that honor the abilities and intelligence of animals, although my cats often express the wish there were many more books that feature feline heroes.

Soon IF ONLY will be out, and my attention will then be diverted to marketing, which I am generally terrible at. But for now, my mind is having a great time in the virtual worlds created by other writers.