Tag Archive for 'writing'

What is Writing Like For You?

Published on July 8, 2011 in General News. 5 Comments Tags: authors, Darcia Helle, Jason McIntyre, meditation, writing, writing fiction.

My friend Darcia Helle invited me to continue a blog meme on the topic Writing is like…

Darcia was tagged by author Jason McIntyre to share her thoughts on this subject, and then Darcia asked me to continue the meme. For me, writing is like meditation.

When I’m working on my computer, writing a story or a novel, three hours feels like 20 minutes. I look at the clock and can’t believe how much time has passed. Writing fiction for me is sort of like those first few seconds after waking up in the morning, when you don’t remember any of your worries or problems, and you’re just away from your thoughts. When I’m writing fiction, it’s like one part of my brain takes a break and another part flicks on.

In fact, if I need to be somewhere, I have to set a timer so that it snaps me out of my trance. I’m kind of flaky when I’m deep in the middle of a book, and need to be sure to exercise and take walks to ground myself. (that’s the holistic, energy healer side of my personality talking.)

I used to be a newspaper reporter and still write articles from time to time on a freelance basis, for this blog, or once in awhile for another blog or web site. Although I’d much prefer writing articles to, say, doing math, that kind of writing is work for me. I don’t get that same meditative feeling of time slowing down.

Thanks to Darcia for posing the question. What is writing like for you?

My 7-Part Novelspot Series on the Writing Journey

Published on May 15, 2011 in General News. Closed Tags: Agatha Awards, agents, authors, Avon Books, books, Dark Before Dawn, Face-Off, hypothyroidism, Mainly Murder Press, Malice Domestic Grant, mystery authors, Novelspot, path to publication, selective mutism, shyness, Sink or swim, Twenty-five years ago today, writing, writing journey.

Novelspot, a neat web site for writers and readers, invited me to participate in one of their special features – Behind the Scenes, in which authors share their writing journeys in seven short installments. They publish one post each day for an entire week. I was really thrilled with how it turned out and invite you to check out this serialization that relates the ups and downs of my fiction-writing career. Intense shyness, my bout with hypothyroidism, rejection, teenage success, agents, hitting rock bottom with my novel career, winning the William F. Deeck Malice Domestic Grant, and finally breaking into the publishing game for keeps – I shared it all and I hope readers and writers will find my story inspiring.

You can start with Part 1 and then click Forward to read the rest of the posts.

Part 1: Childhood Roots – The focus is on my childhood and high school writing days – the role my painful shyness/selective mutism played and how I was very uncomfortable with the writer label in high school.

Part 2: Face-Off- An Early Success – I talk about getting my young adult novel Face-Off – written in high school study halls – published by Avon Books at age 18.

Part 3: The Long Drought – Unfortunately, getting Face-Off published didn’t help me in the least as far as selling a second book. I write about living (and writing) in the dorm and dealing with rejection as I struggled to find my niche.

Part 4: Finding Hope Then Hitting Rock Bottom – I became a journalist, started writing mystery novels and found an agent for my fiction, but three years later, the agency contract ran out and I was exhausted from undiagnosed hypothyroidism.

Part 5: The Malice Domestic Grant – I felt as if I’d hit rock-bottom with my novel-writing career, until I won the William F. Deeck Malice Domestic Grant presented at the Agatha Award ceremony.

Part 6: Back in the Game – Finally, three publishing contracts from Mainly Murder Press, a web site, and taking control of my career!

Part 7: Here to Stay – In conclusion, why did I choose to write as a child and why do I still write today as an adult?

25 Years Ago Today: Blues Mystery Author Peggy Ehrhart

Published on February 14, 2011 in 25 Years Ago Today. 4 Comments Tags: blues mystery, Elizabeth Maxx Maxwell, English professors, Got No Friend Anyhow, Greek mythology, Helen of Troy, medieval literature, music mysteries, mystery authors, Peggy Ehrhart, Sweet Man is Gone, The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature., Trojan War, writing.

I’d like to welcome my guest, fellow Sister in Crime Peggy Ehrhart. Peggy is a former English professor who lives in Leonia, New Jersey, where she writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. She holds a doctorate in Medieval Literature, and her publications include a prize-winning nonfiction book. Her short fiction has appeared in FMAM, Crime and Suspense, Flashing in the Gutters, Spinetingler, Crime Scene: New Jersey 2, Murder New York Style, and several other venues.

As a guitar player, she performs regularly with the Still Standing Band. Her blues mystery, Sweet Man Is Gone, was published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage in 2008. The sequel, Got No Friend Anyhow, was published in January 2011. I love Peggy’s story about what she was doing 25 years ago as it involves Greek mythology, which is one of the subplots of my own mystery novel Twenty-Five Years Ago Today. Here is Peggy’s anecdote:

PEGGY: When the call came, my mother-in-law grabbed the first thing she could find to write on: a paper bag. She was babysitting and she handed me the message when I got home from the market.

“The acquisitions editor called,” it read in her careful script. “They want your book. Call him.” And there was a number.

One of the happiest days of my life—and a huge relief. What if my ten years of work had gone for nothing? But no—my first book had found a home. The acquisitions editor who’d called was from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

An odd home for a mystery novel, you might be thinking. But my first published book wasn’t a mystery. It wasn’t even fiction. It was a weighty tome called The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature.

It dealt with the medieval retellings of the Judgment of Paris myth. Paris was the Trojan prince who stole Helen from her Greek husband Menelaus, thus launching the Trojan War. But his claim to Helen stemmed from an earlier episode. The goddesses Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera requested that he judge their beauty, awarding a golden apple to the winner. Aphrodite bribed him with the gift of Helen, he gave her the apple, and when he claimed his prize, the angry Greeks attacked Troy. Homer tells the rest of the story in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

That book was an unusual preamble to a career writing mysteries—but maybe not. The Judgment of Paris was so popular in the Middle Ages because it was interpreted as a story in which a young man chooses his destiny. Aphrodite stood for a life devoted to the senses, Athena for a life devoted to the mind, and Hera for a life devoted to possessions.

Shortly after my Judgment of Paris book appeared in 1987, I too chose my destiny. Academia was great and I’ll never be sorry I spent all those hours in the library. But it wasn’t enough. In 1989 I bought an electric guitar and formed a blues and rock band, and shortly after that I started work on my first Maxx Maxwell blues mystery.

Read more about Peggy on her web site. Check out Got No Friend Anyhow on Amazon. The book is the second adventure for blues-singer sleuth Elizabeth “Maxx” Maxwell. As Maxx pursues the killer of record-producer Rick Schneider, the reader is taken on a ride that keeps pages turning in classic whodunit style all the way to a dramatic and unexpected climax.

For newcomers: The 25 Years Ago Today column is a regular feature on the Mysteries, Murder & More blog, inspired by the novel Twenty-Five Years Ago Today.

Motherhoot Guest Post – What Kids Taught Me About Writing

Published on January 17, 2011 in General News. Closed Tags: Book marketing, Book promotion, classrooms, elementary school, Motherhoot, school author visits, writing.

I hope everyone has enjoyed their long weekend so far. Just a quick note to share that I have a special guest post running at the blog Motherhoot. If you haven’t discovered this great blog yet, it’s a place where you can find a lot of moaning, groaning and laughing about family life. My post recalls how visiting an elementary school classroom and helping the kids to create their own adjective books reminded me about the joys of writing. I’ve been so caught up in all the book promotion and marketing tasks lately, that I haven’t had much time to sit down and write my fiction. That will come later, when I catch up. For now, I need to continue getting the word out about the books that I have available for sale so that I can make my love of fiction-writing a long-term, profitable career.

Stop by to read the amusing account of 8-year-olds discovering the joys of using adjectives, and leave me a comment there to know you’ve visited. What adjective describes you today?

25 Years Ago Today: ‘Lead Poisoning’ Author J.E. Seymour

Published on November 11, 2010 in 25 Years Ago Today. 3 Comments Tags: anthologies, crime fiction, J.E. Seymour, Mainly Murder Press, Mystery Writers of America, Short Mystery Fiction Society, Sisters in Crime, writing.

I’d like to welcome my fellow Mainly Murder Press author J.E. Seymour. J.E. lives in a small town in seacoast NH and has had short stories published in three anthologies of crime fiction by New England writers – “Windchill,” “Deadfall,” and “Quarry,” in Thriller UK Magazine, and in numerous ezines, including Shots, Mouth Full of Bullets, Beat to a Pulp and Shred of Evidence. J.E.’s first novel, “Lead Poisoning” was released by Mainly Murder Press on November 1, 2010. J.E. is the markets coordinator for the Short Mystery Fiction Society and a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Here’s what J.E. was doing 25 years ago today.

J.E.: Twenty-five years ago I was running a horse farm. The long hours didn’t allow for much other than sleeping and eating along with the riding and teaching, but I started squeezing in time to write. I’d been secretly writing fiction for years, without showing it to anyone.

But that summer, twenty-five years ago, I showed one of my students a bit of a story I’d started, about an escaped prisoner hiding in a culvert under some railroad tracks. She loved it. I didn’t show anybody else my work, until five years later when I started taking writing courses at college. One of my professors encouraged me, and I submitted my first piece of fiction and got my first rejection.

It was another five years before I began submitting crime fiction, getting more rejections. But about that time, I finally finished the story that started with the escapee in the culvert. It became a novel, “Stress Fractures,” and I got an agent. She sent it out to publishers and got more rejections. The agent dropped me. I wrote another novel, with the same character. Got another agent. Finally sold my first short story to a webzine, although I didn’t get paid for it. Dumped my second agent.

Wrote another novel, same character, “Lead Poisoning.” Sold more short stories, getting actual money for some. I rewrote “Stress Fractures” and tried getting another agent. No luck. Went through the same process with “Frostbite.” Nothing. Still sending out short stories, I started working on the fourth and fifth in the series. I also garnered eighty rejections from agents on “Lead Poisoning.”

I decided to try small presses. I knew I didn’t want to self publish, but it didn’t look like my dream of hitting the big time was working out either. A small press looked like a good compromise. Mainly Murder Press picked up “Lead Poisoning” and it came out November 1st, twenty-five years after I first envisioned the character.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that you have to stick with it if you want to be a writer. It’s a slow process. It takes persistence and patience.

For more information about J.E.’s writing, visit her web site. Check out Lead Poisoning at Mainly Murder Press and on Amazon. Things go wrong when a fugitive mob troubleshooter retires to New Hampshire with his family.

25 Years Ago Today: Bogey Man Author Marja McGraw

Published on November 8, 2010 in 25 Years Ago Today. 8 Comments Tags: Bogey Man Mysteries, Humphrey Bogart, Marja McGraw, mystery authors, Nevada Department of Transportation, private investigators, Sandi Webster Mystery Series, tea rooms, writing.

I’d like to welcome my guest, author Marja McGraw. Marja is originally from Southern California, where she worked in both criminal and civil law enforcement for several years. After relocating to Northern Nevada, she worked for the Nevada Department of Transportation. Marja also did a stint in Oregon where she worked for the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office and owned her own business, a Tea Room and Antique store. After a brief stop in Wasilla, Alaska, she returned to Nevada.

Marja wrote a weekly column for a small newspaper in No. Nevada and she was the editor for the Sisters in Crime Internet Newsletter for a year and a half. She writes the Sandi Webster series and the Bogey Man series, and says that each of her mysteries contains a little humor, a little romance and a little murder. She currently resides in Arizona with her husband.

MARJA: Twenty-five years ago, I was living and working for the state transportation department in Nevada, and I was a divorced mother raising a stubborn, rebellious teenager. (Thankfully, my daughter grew into a lovely woman.)

The thought of writing a book hadn’t entered my head at that time. I kept a journal, but eventually read it over and decided it was way too silly so I threw it away, keeping a couple of pages that marked important events in my life. I suddenly realized what potential I had to become a Drama Queen, and that was a turning point in my life. I needed to turn things around and make better choices.

During that time I noticed how much importance I was placing on humor. It didn’t matter whether it was a television show or a funny book or a comment made by a friend or coworker. If it made me laugh, it was good. Humor is what kept me going, and what eventually led me to write murder mysteries that contain, hopefully, something to make the reader laugh.

I now have four books published in the Sandi Webster Mysteries series, and the first book in a new series, The Bogey Man Mysteries, will be released before the end of the year.

Overall, I wouldn’t change even one part of my past because it was a great classroom in which to learn about life and people. Well, I might change a couple of things.

Visit Marja on her web site. Check out The Bogey Man on Amazon. Sandi Webster, a young female P.I., spends a lot of time doing boring, tedious work. However, during the early morning hours, while she’s watching an unfaithful husband, her cover is blown and the man comes after her. Before she can say boo, Humphrey Bogart comes to her rescue. Really? He’s been gone for over fifty years. Sandi continues to have Bogey sightings but no one will believe her until a well-known model and actress is murdered at a costume party – and the Bogey Man walks out of the restroom, walking the walk and talking the talk.

Watch for the Bogey Man to return in his own series in the near future. Bogey Nights will keep you guessing when a 1940’s murder rears its ugly head.

Blast From The Past: Childhood Story “The Mysterious Relatives”

Published on November 3, 2010 in Blast From The Past. 5 Comments Tags: blast from the past, child writers, childhood, elementary school, mysteries, mystery stories, Stacy Juba, writing.

I found this short story from my childhood tucked away in a bright yellow folder, written in my careful script. I was probably about 11 when I wrote it. I hadn’t read it in years and expected to discover that The Mysterious Relatives was one of my Cathy Summers mysteries. As I flipped through it, though, I realized that it was actually a standalone about a young amateur sleuth named Amanda.

Here’s the opener: Amanda Ford, a willowy strawberry blonde quite tall for the tender age of fourteen, watched as her good friend Lavinia Blake, having aroused her curiosity, placed a small square of creamy butter and a spoonful of raspberry jam atop a golden slice of toast.

Lavinia wolfed down the snack hungrily and raised a clear crystal glass filled to the rim with thirst-quenching orange juice to her cherry red lips.

“What does your mother do? Starve you?” giggled Amanda, better known as Mandy.

Lavinia smiled also. “No, but she has us all on some new diet plan that her doctor recommended to her. Salad minus the dressing for dinner every night with a side dish of white bread.”

Mandy made a face. “Ugh! My mom sees to it that we have a full, three course dinner all-“

Lavinia shushed her pretty companion quietly and pointed an accusing finger at the front door. “Someone has been listening,” she confided in a whisper.

“Can’t be,” Mandy replied, shrugging the matter off as if she hadn’t a care in the world. “There isn’t anybody here but us.”

“Don’t you have a brother and two sisters? Mightn’t it be one of them?”

“I doubt it. Honey and Grace are taking their ballet lessons – Honey is wearing the cutest silk, rose frock…and…so what if there was somebody eavesdropping? We were only talking about your favorite subject – food.”

Lavinia mulled this over for a brief moment. Finally, she said, her wide hazel eyes widening even more in horror, “It…may have been a prowler. Maybe even an international spy wanted by the FBI.”
***
Did all the talk about food make you hungry? In case you’re wondering, Lavinia was right, a mysterious man was eavesdropping and ran off the property when chased.

Meanwhile, Mandy’s long lost cousin suddenly show up in trouble. It’s funny, I really have no memory of writing this story, but it is 33 pages so it must have taken me awhile. Check out some of my other excerpts:

The Mystery of the Stolen Art Treasure
The Fairview Treasure

25 Years Ago Today: ‘A Question of Fire’ Author Karen McCullough

Published on November 1, 2010 in 25 Years Ago Today. 6 Comments Tags: A Gift for Murder, Beneath A Christmas Moon, Eppie Award, fantasy authors, Karen McCullough, mystery authors, Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, romantic suspense, Vampire's Christmas Carol, writing.

I’d like to welcome my guest Karen McCullough. Karen has written and published nine novels in the romantic suspense, mystery, and fantasy genres and won numerous awards, including an Eppie Award for fantasy. She’s also been a four-time Eppie finalist, and a finalist in the Prism, Dream Realm, Rising Star, Lories, Scarlett Letter, and Vixen Awards contests. Her short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and numerous small press publications in the fantasy, science fiction, and romance genres.

Her most recent publication was a Christmas paranormal novella, VAMPIRE’S CHRISTMAS CAROL, published by Cerridwen Press in the anthology BENEATH A CHRISTMAS MOON. Forthcoming releases include a Gothic novella from Red Rose Publishing, which will be part of the SHADOWED HEARTS anthology, and a mystery novel, A GIFT FOR MURDER, from Five Star/Gale Group, with hardcover release scheduled for January 2011. A member of Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, and the Writers’ Group of the Triad, she is currently serving as president of the Southeast Chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

KAREN: Twenty-five years ago today, in 1985, I was learning how to write a novel. In fact, I was just finishing up the second novel I’d ever written, a romantic suspense story titled A QUESTION OF FIRE. I’d been writing short stories and nonfiction pieces for a while, but I’d only recently worked up the nerve to embark on writing my first novel. I did it, though, and I enjoyed it. But that first novel was a learning experience. Even I recognized that it had some… well, problems. Okay, to be perfectly honest…it sucked. It was really, seriously bad. That manuscript is now somewhere in a box in the attic with a sticky note on it saying, “Burn Me!”

I was pretty sure that I had a better idea how to do it with my second novel. It took me almost a year to write, and it was much better. Unfortunately ‘much better’ still meant I had a long way to go. I sent it out to editors and agents and collected a nice batch of rejections, although several of them did say encouraging things about my writing. A couple even said this was a “near miss” for them, but they didn’t think they could market a romantic mystery at the time.

Encouraged by the nicer rejections, I kept writing more novels, and submitting them, and worked through the depression of rejection after rejection, until I finally got THE CALL a few years later. It wasn’t for that second book. Or the third. The first book I sold was actually the sixth complete novel I had written. Persistence paid off.

Still, I knew I had a good story in A QUESTION OF FIRE, even though it had problems, so I rewrote. Then I rewrote it again. And again. After a couple more rewrites, the book actually sold and was published. Then after too short a period on the shelves it went out of print. I recently put it out in an electronic edition for the Kindle. More persistence paying off. In the immortal words of Jim Valvano: “Never give up. Don’t ever give up.”

Karen invites visitors to check out her web site. Also check out A QUESTION OF FIRE on Amazon. When Cathy Bennett agrees to attend an important party as a favor for her boss, she knows she won’t enjoy it. But she doesn’t expect to end up holding a dying man in her arms and becoming the recipient of his last message.

25 Years Ago Today: Visit With Monastery Murders Series Author Donna Fletcher Crow

Published on October 6, 2010 in 25 Years Ago Today. 6 Comments Tags: A Very Private Grave, Brandley's Search, british history, Christian England, Donna Fletcher Crow, England, gardening, Glastonbury, monasteries, Monastery murders, The Shadow of Reality, writing.

I’d like to welcome my guest Donna Fletcher Crow. Donna is the author of 35 books, mostly novels dealing with British history. The award-winning Glastonbury, The Novel of Christian England, is her best-known work, an Arthurian grail search epic covering 15 centuries of English history. A Very Private Grave, book 1 in the Monastery Murders series, is her reentry into publishing after a 10 year hiatus. The Shadow of Reality, a romantic intrigue, was also recently published.

Donna and her husband have 4 adult children and 10 grandchildren. She is an enthusiastic gardener and you can see pictures of her garden, watch the trailer for A Very Private Grave, and read her international blog at her web site.

Donna and Elizabeth having tea in a monastery garden on a research trip.

DONNA: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I’m not sure who said it, but that is certainly the perspective I have gained from writing historical novels. Thank you, Stacy, for giving me the opportunity to look back on my life 25 years ago. Could so much have happened since then? Could things really be so much the same?

Twenty-five years ago our daughter was looking forward to kindergarten and her three big brothers were in school. And I was working on the first book in a series of historical novels. Today our daughter’s daughter is looking forward to kindergarten and her big brother is in school. And I have published the first book in a series of mystery novels with strong historical backgrounds.

A whole lifetime has transpired in that time, but the research trip I took to England that summer has been foundational to so much of it. I had actually written Brandley’s Search, the first of my Cambridge Collection, but it had all been done from research here, 7000 miles away from that green and pleasant land where my historical characters lived and walked. I needed to visit their homes, read their letters collected in libraries, walk the halls of their colleges. . .

I was speaking at a writers’ conference on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington when I received notice that the publisher who had contracted to publish my book had gone out of business. I was stunned. Months— years— of work. And now I would have to start all over looking for a publisher. I blurted it all out to the editor sitting next to me.

“Send it to us,” she said.

“You don’t do fiction.” My reply has to be one of the all-time hard-sell lines.

“We’ve just started a line of historical fiction.”

All these years, and 35 published books, later I look back on that moment as the real launch of my career.

Within 3 months, I had an advance and I was on my way to England, to get the details right. I took our daughter and our youngest son with me and we even met my editor there for part of the research.

And that was the beginning of more than my career. I took Elizabeth with me on many successive research trips and she became so at home in England that she chose to study there, worked there, and married an Englishman. Whenever I would moan to friends about missing my daughter I would get a steely-eyed look and the inevitable question; “And who set her up for it?”

But it’s all circular. Felicity, the heroine of my Monastery Murders series is a young American woman who went to England to study, worked in London, and I suspect a few books down the road may marry her Englishman.

Thank you for joining us, Donna, and sharing your fascinating background. Check out A Very Private Grave on Amazon. Felicity Howard, a young American woman studying for the Anglican priesthood at the College of the Transfiguration in Yorkshire, is devastated when she finds her beloved Fr. Dominic brutally murdered and Fr. Antony, her church history lecturer, soaked in his blood. A Very Private Grave is a contemporary novel with a thoroughly modern heroine who must learn some ancient truths in order to solve the mystery and save her own life as she and Fr. Antony flee a murderer and follow clues that take them to out-of-the way sites in northern England and southern Scotland.

25 Years Ago Today: ‘And The Beat Goes On’ Author Tracy Krauss

Published on October 4, 2010 in 25 Years Ago Today. 5 Comments Tags: And the Beat Goes On, archeologist fiction, archeology discoveries, British Columbia, Canadian authors, dig sites, high school teachers, pregnancy, Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, suspense novels, Tracy Krauss, writing, Zimbabwe.

I’d like to welcome author Tracy Krauss today. Tracy is the author of And The Beat Goes On, the story of an archeologist whose remarkable discovery unleashes such controversy that his very life is in danger. Tracy grew up in small town Saskatchewan and has enjoyed writing numerous stories, plays, and novels for over twenty years. She received her Bachelor of Education degree in Saskatoon and has lived in many interesting places in northern Canada with her husband and four children. She is a full-time high school teacher of English, Drama, and Art and is also working on three other books. Tracy lives with her husband in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia.

Tracy, tell us what you were doing 25 years ago?

TRACY: Twenty five years ago today I was oh, so pregnant with my first child. She was due in about a month’s time, and I couldn’t wait for some relief! To be able to see my feet again – to breathe freely again – these were my desperate wishes as I hauled my forty pound overweight frame around. I had just finished my Bachelors Degree in Education and was working at a golf course clubhouse until ‘baby’ arrived, while busily clacking away in my spare time on the old typewriter I had borrowed from my mother.

These were the beginnings of my first novel, a very rough story I realize now, but nonetheless, something that I felt compelled to ‘get out’ and onto the paper. I can’t imagine now having to go through the agony of retyping every time a mistake was made or a revision was needed. I’m glad those good old days are gone forever! At the time, however, I was just glad to have a typewriter so that I didn’t have to write it all freehand! My how times have changed.

That first novel underwent many transformations so that in the end it was barely recognizable. (A very good thing in retrospect!) Play It Again took me sixteen years to write and rewrite to my own satisfaction, and although it has not yet made it into print, its sequel, And The Beat Goes On has. Funny how that works.

Check out Tracy’s book trailer on You Tube and visit her blog for more information on her novels.

Read about And The Beat Goes On at Amazon. The book is an action-packed romantic suspense that spans three continents and eons of time. Canadian-born archaeologist Mark Graham unearths a remarkable discovery while at a dig site in the mountains of Zimbabwe. Skepticism and sabotage delay Mark and his fellow archaeologists as the dig site is compromised, putting their discovery – as well as his very life – in grave danger.