I have a write on wipe-off board that I use to keep track of my “deadlines.” These are self-imposed deadlines, because I am a self-published or Indie author. But I take keeping to my deadlines a big thing. I HATE when I miss deadlines. I, being boss and employee, beat myself up over missing them and I have a hard time when a deadline passes and see it will be at least another month before a project will be finished.
That is what has been happening with Damning Firefly. Each month, I add another month to get it written and move the rest of the projects I set as goals for the year forward.
I’ve discovered that while I believe I have lots of time to write, I find I spend a lot of time researching and promoting. The book also had to go through a tweak which added more time to the finished project. But I am on the downhill side, which means I am wrapping up the clues, tightening the handcuffs on the suspect, and hoping the twist at the end leaves the reader going, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming” or “That was a good twist.”
I want to put this book up for pre-order but with as many times as I’ve extended the writing of the book, I’m afraid I’ll miss the date. But then, I am also anxious to see what readers think of the cover and the premise. It is darker and more controversial than my usual Gabriel Hawke book. But it was an idea that came from things my parents, who have now passed, said to me at different times. And I think it is something that people in small communities will sometimes hide.
Sales and reviews will tell me if the book was a hit or a miss. There are just times when I feel like there is a story that needs to be told. It’s something that burns in my gut and comes out through my fingertips. LOL that makes me think I should write paranormal. The visual is kind of funny!
I have tried to pair humor with a darker tale in Damning Firefly and tried to show the side of the victim’s and the woman who tried to help them.
Hopefully, by my next post I’ll have a pre-order and the book will have come back from my editor and soon to be released.
After two sweet, holiday romances, I decided to dip a toe into the world of cozy mysteries. As a long-time fan of the genre, I’ve enjoyed the thread of sweet romance that is often woven throughout the stories. For me, the genre is the best of both worlds. Readers’ heartstrings are tugged as they are swept along a twisting tale riddled with suspects, clues, and red herrings. They can expect suspense without graphic violence and a nice, tidy ending. Predictable? Maybe. But many genres follow a structure that appeals to a specific audience.
Similar to sweet romance, most cozy mysteries are set in small, close-knit towns. However, I find that I have more freedom to invoke a bit more humor and fun into the story. No character should ever be perfect. Flaws are much easier to relate to. But it often seems that most of the leading ladies in romance novels are gorgeous. My heroine/sleuth, Maeve Cleary, is never described as a great beauty. Much to her mother’s dismay, she’s in desperate need of a trip to the salon to touch up her highlights and lives in worn-to-death shorts and T-shirts. But she came home to mend a broken heart, not to enter The Miss Hampton Beach beauty pageant.
Maeve introduced herself right away. She’s a woman who speaks her mind and acts on instinct. Moving in with her polished and successful mother had all the makings of a critique-laden stay. I enjoy dissecting the dynamic of mother-daughter relationships and hope readers find their back-and-forth barbs entertaining.
A Sour Note also sent me hopping from fictional towns into the real setting of Hampton Beach, NH in July. One might think building a setting from the ground up with only your imagination to depend on would prove far easier than writing about a place you know well. However, when an author creates a story world, no one can dispute what is missing or inaccurate. Writing about a popular vacation destination is filled with pressure I didn’t anticipate. In the end, I chose to invoke a creative license when writing about restaurants and other locations within the town. Readers who know the area might enjoy guessing at which places inspired a few hot spots.
My family makes several trips to Hampton every summer. When the idea for A Sour Note took shape, I couldn’t imagine choosing another setting. The sights, food, entertainment, and people watching along one of the most popular boardwalks in the nation provide everything needed for an endless stream of writing ideas. The next book in the series will require a fair amount of research because it will occur during the off-season. I look forward to a few trips north for more insight into what the town looks like when tourist numbers dwindle and am confident an empty beach has quite a bit to offer to the cozy mystery genre.
A Sour Note (A Music Box Mystery)
When murder provides a welcome distraction…
On the heels of a public, broken engagement, Maeve Cleary returns to her childhood home in Hampton Beach, NH. When a dead body turns up behind her mother’s music school, three old friends land on the suspect list. Licking her wounds soon takes a back seat to outrunning the paparazzi who spin into a frenzy, casting her in a cloud of suspicion. Maeve juggles her high school sweetheart, a cousin with a touch of clairvoyance, a no-nonsense detective, and an apologetic, two-timing ex-fiancé. Will the negative publicity impact business at the Music Box— the very place she’d hoped to make a fresh start?
If anyone else had enough nerve to presume she owed them an explanation, she would respond with a solid mind your own business. Instead, the seventeen-year-old still inside her refused to tell him to get lost. “He was hiding money in his office.” This was one of those times when learning how to wait a few beats before blurting out inflammatory information would come in handy. Each second of passing silence decreased her ability to breathe in the confined space. She turned the ignition and switched on the air conditioner.
“How do you know?” His volume just above a whisper, each dragged-out word hung in the air.
“I found it.”
“When were you in his office?” He swiped at a bead of sweat trickling down the side of his face, then positioned a vent toward him.
“Last night.” When would she learn to bite her tongue? Finn’s switch from rapid-fire scolding to slow, deliberate questioning left her unable to swallow over the sandpaper lump in her throat.
“Where was Vic?”
She stared at the back of the building, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. “He’d left for the night.” If she averted her gaze, she could pretend his eyeballs weren’t bugging out of his head, and his jaw didn’t need a crane to haul it off his chest.
“You were at the town hall after hours? Did anyone see you?”
“A custodian opened his door for me.” She snuck a glance. Sure enough, features contorted in shock and horror replaced his boy-next-door good looks.
Jill Piscitello is a teacher, author, and an avid fan of multiple literary genres. Although she divides her reading hours among several books at a time, a lighthearted story offering an escape from the real world can always be found on her nightstand.
A native of New England, Jill lives with her family and three well-loved cats. When not planning lessons or reading and writing, she can be found spending time with her family, trying out new restaurants, traveling, and going on light hikes.
My latest WIP- Work In Progress-came about from two separate things my parents told me at different times. My mom was a nurse at a clinic. She commented that there were too many teenage pregnancies in the county. And years later my dad made the comment about a deacon of a church who cheated people and slept with other men’s wives.
Fast forward to now and my overactive imagination putting those two things together to come up with a murder mystery set in a small community where the pastor of a church “teaches” young women how to be good wives.
I have a secondary character whose point of view is shared in the book. She is a midwife who has brought the pastor’s offspring into the world after he sexually assaulted the teenagers and young women. The midwife tried to get the police to do something, but the charismatic pastor shined a bad light on her, and they wouldn’t listen. She is trying to keep the women’s names out of it knowing how many families and lives will be torn apart should it come out. At the same time, she wishes something would happen to the man.
And it does.
I am halfway through this book and my newest critique partner quit on me after saying the story was too dark and she didn’t like the way my main character Gabriel Hawke was acting.
Whoa!
The new CP thought I wrote cozy mystery like her. I never said I wrote cozy and had thought she would have looked up my books. I tried to look up hers, but she is a new writer. She has been giving me good thoughts and information coming into the series at book 11. But her last comments made me sit back and think about how the story is being portrayed. She said I was doing a good job with the midwife. She liked her attitude and how she was going about helping a suspect and keeping the victims from being brought public. But Hawke was too insensitive.
I have readers who say they love Hawke. I don’t want them to not like him after reading this book. Thinking long and hard about what she’d said, I realized, I was portraying the midwife how I would want someone hiding my secrets to be and I am portraying Hawke as a person out for revenge.
Stepping back, I roll things around in my head.
I know that the revenge comes from things that have happened in my past. Things I would love to have Rosa, the midwife, keep secret if she knew. But I’m instilling my revenge for being a victim into my Hawke character. While he does champion the underdog and will find justice even for a nasty piece of work as the victim, he needs to be more sensitive to the dead pastor’s victims.
And so, I spent all of last week with printed pages of my manuscript, going through and moving scenes, adding more scenes with Hawke learning from Rosa and his partner about how the victims of this man’s assaults have justice now that he is dead but need help to heal and not be put in the headlines of the local paper. Or brought in for questioning about something that can no longer be punished.
I have to override Hawke’s need to put the last piece of the puzzle in the right place. And my need for revenge.
And though I wish my CP was willing to keep working with me, she did me a major favor by telling me how she felt about the story and my characters.
I think most writers are worriers. Will the readers like the story? Did I have typos/mistakes? Does the plot make sense? Am I not offending the culture of the people I write about? Am I doing justice to the cause? Am I entertaining as well as educating?
Yes, all of these things go through my head as I write a book. I feel bad I can’t get to every book by every author in my genre- mystery/suspense/crime fiction. But I spend most of my time reading books to help me better understand my characters. Because I write Native American characters and I am not Indigenous myself, I feel I must read and learn all I can about the culture and dynamics of the tribe and people I write about.
I have some tribal members who respond to my questions, but I’ve yet to find someone to openly allow me into their world. Which makes me worry, I’m not portraying them as well as I should be. Every time I think about that, I get a knot in my stomach. I want to show them for the inventive, resilient, good-natured people that they are. I also want to show the dynamics that have made them who they are.
An author friend, Carmen Peone, who helped me with my Shandra Higheagle mystery series, that is partially set on the Colville Reservation where she lives, told me about a Choctaw woman author who has a workshop to help Native and non-Native writers better understand their characters. I spent all last week watching, listening, and taking notes. Then I picked up a book I purchased a month ago about a woman who grew up in the area near where my series, takes place and am learning more about the culture and family bonds within the culture I write about.
I have the two closest powwows written into my calendar to attend. I have attended both of them once before, years apart. This summer I will attend both and try to do what Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer suggested for attending a powwow. She had a lot of good insights even though her tribe is in Oklahoma, and I write about Oregon tribes.
One of the series that I work so hard to perfect the cultural dynamics is my Spotted Pony Casino mysteries set on the Umatilla Reservation outside of Pendleton, Oregon. Book 4 in the series released this month.
Lies, deceit, blackmail.
Murder ends it all.
Or does it?
When an employee at the Spotted Pony Casino is caught leaving early, Dela Alvaro, head of security confronts the woman. The lies the woman tells only piques Dela’s curiosity. After witnessing the employee threatening a man, she is found murdered in her car parked in the driveway of her home.
Upon learning the woman used her job at the casino to blackmail men, Dela feels compelled to solve the woman’s murder and teams up with Tribal Officer Heath Seaver. Not only does the duo have a death to solve, but there is also a mystery behind Dela’s dead father. Not to mention, her mom just announced she’s marrying a man Dela has never met.
I’ll leave you with something one of my readers sent me in an email. It made my day!
“Your characters are so full of life and personality, I find myself thinking they’re real folk! The sign of a great writer! I just finished the Squeeze. Loved it, love Dela! And when I get up your way, I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee. You are an inspiration for other NW authors and a marvelous advocate for our indigenous peoples. Please keep bringing up the issue of missing people…it needs to be kept alive or nothing will change. Thank you for all you and your posse do to make Oregon a better place. You have my support, 100%. And I’ll await your next book, whoever you choose to write about. I already know I’ll love it.”
My mind spins so many different directions when I’m “stewing and brewing” the next book or chapter. The other day, as browsed the email of free photos from Depositphotos a vector caught my attention. It is in this post. I thought could I use that for anything, and poof! the idea for this post came to mind.
Everyone has a unique to them fingerprint. It is theirs and theirs alone.
The same can be said for a writer’s voice. Not their speaking voice, their style of writing. Some writers use long, elaborate words or sentences. They spin their tales with sinewy prose, weaving the tale in between the actual words on the page. Then there are others who use precise words, short sentences, and graphic descriptions.
No matter what the writer writes there is a telltale “fingerprint” to their writing. Think about some of your favorite authors. Why do you read each one of their books? Is it how the story is worded? The characters? The plotting?
Characters? Plotting? How can that be voice? Again, think about your favorite authors. Do the characters seem similar even if they have different names, backgrounds, and ethnicity? Every author puts a little of themselves into their main and sometimes secondary characters. They can’t help it. Otherwise, how would they be able to describe feelings, emotions, and even the setting around them, if they didn’t allow a bit of themselves to slip into the characters.
And Plotting- You can give five authors the same basic theme for a book and each one would put their own spin on how that theme or plot played out. Again, they would each put their knowledge, feelings, and imagination into that story, making it their own with their unique voice.
I’ve always thought of my writing as simple and engaging- not really having a memorable voice. However, many readers tell me they enjoy the simplicity of my writing. They can see the story as it unfolds and not have to guess what words mean. I take that as a compliment to my style. Especially, when I’ve had several people also say that my books brought them back to reading.
My true voice, I think, is that all my stories are about justice. Not just the bad guy getting what he deserves but also showing the injustices that are in the world. I will throw in a cause here and there in my books to bring it to the attention of my readers. And thankfully, they understand that is what I’m doing. I don’t preach. I reveal the injustice and leave it up to the reader to do more digging if it intrigues them. That is my voice. As unique to me as my fingerprints.
Coming at the end of this month, book 10 in my Gabriel Hawke series, Bear Stalker.
Greed, misdirection, and murder has Hawke rushing to track his sister in the Montana wilderness before she becomes the next victim.
Oregon State Trooper Gabriel Hawke’s sister, Marion, is on a corporate retreat in Montana when she is suspected of murder. Running for her life from the real killer, she contacts Hawke for help.
Hawke heads to Montana to find his sister and prove she isn’t a murderer. He hasn’t seen Marion in over twenty years but he knows she wouldn’t kill the man she was about to marry.
As they dig into possible embezzlement, two more murders, and find themselves trying to outsmart a wilderness-wise kidnapper, Hawke realizes his sister needs to return home and immerse herself in their heritage. Grief is a journey that must be traveled and knowing her fiancé had wanted Marion to dance again, Hawke believes their culture would help her heal.
Ladies of Mystery 
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