Tag: writing

The Problems of Being Dumfungled

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 3 Comments


by Janis Patterson

Dumfungled is a Scots word that means to be physically and mentally worn out, which is as good a definition of burn out as I’ve ever heard.


Burn out. It’s an ugly word, and an uglier truth, and right now I’m feeling like a charred match.


It’s been a tough year. On the personal front, I lost three long-time friends to Death, two of whom were younger than I. Now that The Husband is retired we have been traveling more, including a recent expedition to dig for diamonds in Arkansas. Yes, Arkansas. It seems that at a rough estimate 25% of the world’s surface diamonds are in the 40 +/- acres of the Crater of Diamonds State Park. Not that we found any – the only things I found were a couple of muscles I didn’t know I had. Ouch!


On a professional front, in case you’ve been living under a rock this year and missed my continual updates, I republished 22 reverted books – each freshly edited, freshly formatted and most with new covers – one every other Wednesday beginning on 15 January and the last one released 25 October.


That’s a lot of work, and a lot harder than you’d think, and because of it I only wrote two new books this year instead of my normal four or five. Oh, and just in case I get bored four dear friends and I are putting out our own anthology in the spring. (Follow this blog for more information…)


I’m tired.


I have a book that I would like to finish, a book I really like, but when I sit down to write it always seems that suddenly there is something else that absolutely demands to be done at that exact moment, like cleaning the dishwasher’s gasket or paste waxing the top of the dining table. I know, I know… escapism.


However, I’m proud of what I have accomplished. Those books are out there, and they will be there for as long as I want them to be.


And to reward myself, I am taking the rest of the year off. My kitchen and office both need excavating, my wardrobe desperately needs some attention and as I sorely need a distraction The Husband is taking us to Germany in December to see the Christmas Markets. He says I need to see something outside the parameters of my computer screen. I didn’t argue!


So this is my last blog for 2023. I’ll be back in January, probably with lots of tales about Germany, and hopefully with a couple of ideas for new books… and the enthusiasm to actually write them!
Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2024!

Before I Begin Writing

~ susanoleksiw ~ 9 Comments

During a recent panel discussion at a nearby bookstore, a member of the audience asked the usual question about how we began our books. The three of us answered in various ways, but all of them were what you might call writerly replies. We began with a character or a scene. I said I began with a situation, a scene that came to me that made me curious about the people in it. My beginning is a little more complicated than that in the case of the Anita Ray mysteries.

I first went to India in 1976, for a year, with thirteen return visits since then, but the last one was in 2014. That seems like a very long time, and it is, even though I stay in touch with friends. Family issues have kept me from returning since then, but I’ve kept writing the Anita Ray series. The fifth in the book has come out in trade paperback and Harlequin will publish the mass market paperback soon. Right now I’m working on the sixth book in the series. So, how do I begin a new mystery set in India after not having visited for so many years? Before I begin with a situation, I look at photographs, to get a feel of the country I love and the area I think I know well. The city of Trivandrum has changed enormously over the years, and I notice large and small changes during every visit. Sitting with images of places I know well—certain shady lanes, small corner temples, old traditional doorways—evoke the ways of living that are so different from how I live here in the States and that may play a role in the story I’m working on.

Many of the photographs suggest story ideas, such as the shop selling as well as exporting homeopathic medicines located on a busy street just at the end of the lane where I lived for a year in the 1980s. Every time I return I walk down Statue Road, and there it is, the homeo shop, near the end, and the elementary school diagonally across the street from it.

One of my favorite photographs is of the laundry hanging among the coconut palms. There is a saying in India. If you’ve only been to a city in North India, you haven’t seen India. If you haven’t been to South India, you haven’t seen India. And if you haven’t been to a village, you haven’t seen India. There is truth in this. The village is the heartbeat of the country, a place encompassing great beauty and unconcealable poverty. Cities of India have on display vast wealth, just like other countries, and unimaginable poverty just around the corner. But in the part of the country I write about, old traditions still live. I learn more about a house and its inhabitants by how the gateway is decorated than I can from any of the nameplates we put on our mailboxes in the States. 

These are some of the details I pull together from some of my photographs to get myself back into the setting of my story. When I write, I want to feel I’m there, and I want the writer to feel she is there with me, so I review my pictures, think about the layout of the city, and imagine my characters walking through a village or resort or the capital of the state. A story I’m working on now is based on a festival held in India in late winter. Pongala has been called the largest gathering of women in the world. Over three million women descend on Trivandrum to make an offering to their deity, to bring good health to the family for the coming year. My photographs of this festival will be on display in the Beverly Public Library in February 2024, while I’m working on the story.

In the fifth book in the series, In Sita’s Shadow, Hotel Delite welcomes a tour from the United States, five guests instead of the six expected. Auntie Meena is soon fussing over them, determined to see them happy while in her hotel though she’s a bit confused by their non-touristy conduct. When the tour leader is found dead in his room, poor Auntie Meena is terrified that his spirit will haunt the hotel, and calls her astrologer at once. Anita calls the police, as is expected, and then begins to worry the death is unnatural. Trying to break the news to the members of the tour proves harder than expected. But one tour member seems uninterested in the death, and rarely uses his room in the hotel. This is not what Auntie Mean expects from a proper guest.

Auntie Meena throws herself into the investigation into the tour leader’s death, to Anita’s dismay, in a determined effort to protect one of her guests from the danger Meena is certain is lurking just around the next corner. Nothing good can come from a young male student sparking a friendship with an older foreign woman. Anita, however, is more concerned about the odd behavior of one of the hotel’s suppliers, a woman who makes airy delicious pastries.

https://www.susanoleksiw.com

October by Karen Shughart

~ kshughart47 ~ 2 Comments

October is without a doubt my favorite month, filled with a bounty of richness and color that I embrace before the landscape turns into subtle shades of brown and beige. Here in the northern part of New York state, on the shores of Lake Ontario, there are breathtakingly beautiful days this time of year: cloudless cerulean skies; a Caribbean green lake with meandering white caps, perfumed like the ocean without the brine; a piercing lemon-colored sun that warms the coolness in the air, and crisp nights with a carpet of stars winking and blinking in an ink-stained sky.

By now many leaves have turned bright with shades of yellow, gold, deep rust and red, but until our first frost, the lawns will remain green.  The sea grasses in our backyard, almost as tall as our house, have feathery, burgundy tassels and, when the wind blows in from the northwest, sound like the gentle ebb and flow of waves on the water. Stately pine trees, red-berried evergreens and hollies provide contrast, reminding us that life continues, even in winter.

Burnap’s Farm Market – Sodus, NY

The farmstands, with domes of potted mums for sale in a riot of colors, will remain open for the rest of this month and into the holiday season. Berries, peaches and plums, lettuces, cucumbers, and zucchini, have been replaced with other fruits and vegetables that can be stored for longer periods of time and will warm our bellies on cold nights: local apples of every variety; hearty winter squashes; purple-green kale; cabbages; potatoes, and multi-hued varieties cauliflower.

In October I replace the summer cushions and pillows on the wicker furniture on our front porch with ones more representative of the season. Halloween is big here, so some of the pillows are patterned with pale green, orange, and white pumpkins with deep green and purple leaves and vines. Instead of sitting on our deck for our late afternoon happy hour, my husband and I move to the porch, drinking wine and welcoming friends who stroll by and then stop for a drink and to chat.

November is just around the corner, and there will be plenty to celebrate then, too, but for now I’ll rejoice in this beautiful month of October.

Karen Shughart is the author of the Edmund DeCleryk cozy mystery series, published by Cozy Cat Press. Her third book, Murder at Freedom Hill, recently was awarded first place in the mystery category and third place in fiction in the International Firebird Book Award competition. She is currently working on book four, Murder at Chimney Bluffs.

The End Is Nigh

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 5 Comments

by Janis Patterson

For every beginning there is an ending… and conversely, for every ending there is a beginning… and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.


This year has been a landmark year for me – it’s been one of the lowest output years for me in well over a decade (only two books as opposed to the four or five I usually do) and yet I’ve been busier than I ever have.
In case you have been living under a rock and not heard about my republishing blitz I’m going to give you a quick précis…


During the covid crazies I got very lazy. The Husband was home – and even retired during this time – s0 we had things to do and my writing business came in a distant second to being with him. I knew that rights on previously published books were coming back to me, but being distracted by other things I just let the reversion letters pile up on my computer.


Until January of this year. Life was returning to a semblance of normal and I realized I wasn’t getting any younger (are any of us?) and if I wanted to get back into this writing thing I had to get busy, so a good start would be republishing those reverted books through my own company. A quick wander through my hard drive shocked me, because there were 26 (yes, TWENTY SIX) of the little beasties. Gulp.


A quick perusal decided me that for various reasons four of them were going permanently ‘under the bed,’ hopefully never to be seen again. That left 22 to be republished. As I am lazy, doing that could possibly take a couple of years, years which I might not have. As I was raised in advertising and journalism, the fact that deadlines are sacred is bred into my blood and bones. My father taught me that (to use his words) “There is only one excuse for you to miss a deadline, and that is death. Yours.”


So I set myself a deadline – I would release a book freshly edited, freshly formatted and most with new covers every other Wednesday until all were out, starting on January 15. MISTLETOE MAGIC, the last book, comes out October 25.
22 books released every other Wednesday, each on schedule, each reworked as promised and all without missing a single release day. (Actually, there were 24 released – one through one of my publishers and the other as an outlier which appeared suddenly through a set of circumstances too complex to go in to… neither of which I counted as part of the blitz.)


I’m exhausted. I would love to take a few weeks off away from the computer, but I have deadlines… one for a July 4th mystery anthology, one for my new Flora Melkiot book and one for a summer Regency romance anthology. Sigh. Even though we spend our days pretty much in the same room (the den) The Husband says I spend more time with the computer and my invisible friends than with him and lately he’s been right. I’ve taken my computer along on every trip we’ve made this year – and it saved my sometimes tenuous sanity the days we were holed up in a motel in Mississippi when he fell ill on our way home from NINC!


Anyway, the blitz is now over and the encroaching deadlines await. It doesn’t get any easier, people. It really doesn’t.

And now for some good news! EXERCISE IS MURDER is now available in audio from Audible! (The ebook is available from Amazon and will hopefully be available in paperback before too long… it is the first appearance of the redoubtable Flora Melkiot!)

The Writer’s Retreat

~ susanoleksiw ~ 2 Comments

Last evening I attended a small theater production on the grounds of what had once been a dairy farm and is now a location for modern dance and other events, owned by the late Ida Hahn, an “icon of the modern dance world.” The setting of Windhover, her Performing Arts Center that grew from a summer program for girls in the arts into a well-known center for modern dance and other mediums. After Ida Hahn’s death in 2016, her daughter, Lisa, has carried on the work.

I’m thinking about this now, despite many visits to Windhover over the years, because my companion and I both had the same thought. The scattering of small shingled buildings in a rocky pasture surrounded by woods and only a short walk from the ocean would be the perfect location for a writers’ retreat. The buildings are rustic, but their lights glow through the windows in the late summer evenings as artists and dancers wind down from the day. This is the time for creatives to get together to talk about their work and plans for the day.

The idea found a warm reception in both our minds, since we had both attended writers’ retreats in the past. My friend had experienced more than I have, but our feelings about them are the same. A good retreat lets the writer set aside the usual thoughts about managing life during the day and focus solely on work that too often gets shunted aside for more pressing, usually mundane matters.

In a short memoir about spending a week in a Provincetown dune shake, Thalassa (Haley’s, Athol MA, 2011), the author Allen Young describes his week in an isolated, rustic shack, his preparations and plans for coping and how he spent his days. I’ve long been intrigued by the dune shacks and the idea of spending a week in one, but the National Park Service recently announced that it was no longer going to allow this, and so memoirs like Young’s will be an historical record rather than a call to others for adventure. (The eight historic dune shacks are now being leased for a ten-year period, with the lessee responsible for all care and maintenance. I don’t know if subleasing is allowed; if it is, the dune shack experience may remain an option for others.)

Another writer invited to MacDowell went with his new, incomplete manuscript, eager to work and write what he assumed would be pages and pages every day. Instead, he found the hours alone with his WIP opening up doors he hadn’t expected, doors into rethinking his entire project and its direction. He shuffled pages, rewrote outlines, and although he would have felt this a poor use of his time at home he reported feeling he had come away with something fresh and new. I remember this story so well because he could have ignored the ideas and doubts taking form in the back of his mind and continued on with a perfectly acceptable story for an editor already interested in his work. 

We gain different things from a writer’s retreat. For some it’s the essential time to write. But for others it can be the opportunity to sit quietly with ourselves and listen to inchoate thoughts take form and gain clarity, leading us in a new more fruitful direction. And sometimes, it’s just the experience of being with like-minded people that can give us the energy we need to continue with a novel that is challenging. 

The season is ending in October for Windhover. The buildings lack central heat, so there’s no chance of gathering writers there this year. But I plan to write the director, Lisa, and invite her to consider adding this opportunity for writers to her schedule for the coming year or beyond. And I’ll continue to visit Windhover to enjoy other creative productions.