Gumshoes Online

If tackling your WIP feels like slogging through a bog in lead boots, you might try online sleuthing. I’m no gamer, but I’m interested in trying these out, not only for the escape value but for the possibilities they offer mystery writers in the scriptwriting department.

There are freebies of varying quality, and popular sites that allow an hour or so of trial game time. I can’t list them all, and I can’t yet give you the inside scoop on these (wait a few months!).

Update: Please note the comments attached to this post, as Clare2e and Pretzel offer reams of game reviews and advice.

So...next time you’re procrastinating, check out:

• My Dark Secret by Dark Secret Software: scripted role playing games...and btw, they’re looking for mystery writers.
• Sleuth: Noir is one of the most popular role playing detective games, and its new counterpart Sleuth: Shades of Mystery is seeing a lot of online activity.
• Mystery in London takes you – as a collector of antique books – on a journey to track Jack the Ripper.
• In Hidden Expedition you can travel the Amazon, the summit of Everest, and go back in time to the Titanic.
• Blogspot’s Online Mystery Games lists a bunch of favorites, including several by Big Fish Games. See Mystery Case Files: Madame Kate and the popular Ravenhearst.
• Even PBS has gotten into the act. For three Shockwave mystery games click here.

So pack a Berretta and wander those mean streets, neither tarnished nor afraid.

- Lois

The Feminine Fonts of Mystery

This is one of four portraits composed by artist Matt Sutter, wherein he limited himself to using the characters from one particular font at a time.

In addition to our guest of honor above, see Sister Baskerville, Lady Bernhard Modern, and Goodwife Avenir courtesy of the Telegraph.

To me, they're all beauties and authentic women of literary mystery, if I do say so.

Two Sentence Tuesday

Welcome back!

I was feeling perky after hitting 70k words, so I popped a line to my agent asking whether I should be aiming for 80-90k for the romantic suspense. I've never done one before, but 85k seemed about where I thought I should be headed. Imagine my dismay when she said I should be looking at 100k! A bit more writing yet to do...oy...

Anyway, here are two sentences from Armed and Glamorous, the latest of Ellen Byerrum's Crime of Fashion mysteries. I love these books. They're some of the only truly cozy cozies I read. I chose these two sentences because they reminded me of things my friends and I say to each other.

"You two were on the Stubby Special Ed Bus To Love for so long I was beginning to think you'd never get there. Lord only knows when you'll take the plunge."

My own work is decidedly less than cozy this week.

They had abandoned Nash's main office for the seventh floor, and a room that literally hummed with technology. The low buzz of the computers and the cooling systems didn’t interfere with conversation, but added an urgent undercurrent to everything.

As always, let us know where we can find two sentences you read and/or wrote this week, and we'll list it in the post! The various Women of Mystery put their two bits in the comments, even when our reading and writing is limited to "See Spot run" and "don't forget to pick up ice cream on the way home tonight."

• Pretzel has two sentences from Tami Hoag this week, along with some heart warming--and heart warning--sentences of her own.
• Travis, that tease, has posted the final two sentences of his manuscript in the comments.
• Patti Abbott has two intriguing sentences from her current work in progress in the comments.
  

My (Son's) Home Town, Oshkosh, Wisconsin

I love Oshkosh. As of today, July 28th, to Sunday August 3rd, aeronautical aficionados are swarming over Oshkosh. The annual Experimental Aircraft Association Convention in Oshkosh brings out all the planeomaniacs. The town turns into a city and the sky is full of every type of aero-vehicle imaginable. Harrison Ford and John Travolta will be flying in for the action. Our kids are there right now and I wish I could be, too.

This Oshkosh EAA gathering is the world's largest general aviation get-together. 700,000 annual attendees, more than 10,000 airplanes (including 2,500 showplanes).

Forums and workshops and over 700 exhibitors keep visitors busy, as well as the daily afternoon air shows. Events start at 8:00 a.m. Folks who fly in often set up a tent alongside their plane or curl up under a wing at bedtime. Must be fun to find your way back to your plane - one of 10,000 - after visiting one of the batteries of potties in the middle of the night!

Our son-in-law's cheeks must be tired from all the grinning - he's a private pilot who rebuilt his one-man airplane from the sparkplugs up. I'm betting he gets invited to sleep under a spare wing before midnight tomorrow!

For more info, go to http://www.eaa.org/
To see a video: http://www.airventure.org/2008/about/spirit_video.html

For those of us who prefer broomstick rides, we unfortunately missed last year's Oshkosh celebration of the publication of the last Harry Potter book, HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS. Backed by the local library, book store, mayor, and merchants, the excitement began early with announced plans to turn Main Street into Diagon Alley. Businesses converted their signs to Potter-related establishments. Costumed children frolicked at library events and Potter-related projects, soon to be joined by their robe-wearing parents.

Pottermania took over the outlying communities as the Oshkosh library provided free bus transportation to three rural towns so they could join in the fun. Families lined up to be sorted into their proper Hogwarts house. The sorting hat (to the right) appointed my son to HufflePuff, he having arrived too late to claim a chair at the Gryffindor table.

Costumed actors - including a dastardly Snape - traipsed through Oshkosh, never stepping out of character. THE DAILY PROPHET was distributed, full of news events not known by the muggles amongst us. On the last day, at the magic hour of midnight, Harry Potter's books flew out of the cases so quickly they nearly collided with Dumbledore.

Oshkosh is an amazing place.

Sometimes it's not the landscape of a community, it's the magic it brews and the wonders that come in on the breeze that keep our hearts happy. That's why we're glad our son settled down in Oshkosh, even though it's a long way from our Long Island home.

Thanks to our pal Travis Erwin for instigating this exchange of world-views.

(Apologies for the blurry photos - figured it's better with them than without. I'll work on clarity of images one of these days!)

Write On!
Nan

Excellent Book List

I know that some of you have been wandering around the blogosphere following links to the Friday’s Forgotten Books posts, and I know from personal experience that it is a very haphazard trip.

Patti Abbott has come to our rescue by listing all the books that have been mentioned in the Friday’s Forgotten Books series over the past thirteen weeks in a recent blog post. You can find them here.

It might be fun to check the list and see if someone else’s old favorite could become one of your favorite summer reads this year.

Terrie

When It Works, It's Not Work

What's the difference between a hobby and a job? A job and a career? And where does a calling fit in? Is it a matter of a paycheck? If so, how large? Job satisfaction? Goals? Recognition in your field?

These questions might sound like navel gazing (not nearly as much fun as Naval gazing on Fleet Week), but they're valid and important to people who blog. On Monday, over on GalleyCat, Ron posed the question, "What If The Blogosphere Decides To Pack It In?" He points to a few blogging reviewers who have been so overwhelmed by ARCs and review requests that what started as a fun hobby has become a chore.

I know this feeling. Before I started any of my businesses (all of which, by the way, started as hobbies before they became jobs), I should have read Seth Godin's The Dip. Instead, I got lucky for the most part. Godin says that despite the old adage about winners and quitters, the truth is that winners quit frequently, and without guilt. They do it when they realize that they are in a "cul-de-sac", where powering through will only leave them running in circles, rather than just in a true dip, where powering through will lead to "mastery."

Guy Kawasaki has a great interview with Godin on his blog that gives you the "Dip" philosophy.

It’s time to quit when you secretly realize you’ve been settling for mediocrity all along. It’s time to quit when the things you’re measuring aren’t improving, and you can’t find anything better to measure.

Smart quitters understand the idea of opportunity cost. The work you’re doing on project X right now is keeping you from pushing through the Dip on project Y.

...What’s the worst time to quit? When the pain is the greatest. Decisions made during great pain are rarely good decisions.

But back to blogging and books.... Publishers, according to Galleycat, among others, are leaning heavily on the Internet for low-cost advertising and reviewing, especially now that the traditional means and methods are either gone or very expensive. Can't send your authors on tour? They can go on a blog tour. Can't find a hardcopy reviewer any longer? Go for a bookblog with a substantial following.

But it's not just reviewers who find some aspects of this strategy tiresome. I hear from authors that they don't want to take the time out of their schedules to blog. I hear from bloggers that they're sick of being the "next stop on the self-promotion express," even for people they generally like. (And from blog readers, I hear that they're sick of seeing the same person "guest posting" on every blog they read.) I hear from forum and listserv members that they feel as if authors are taking advantage of them by popping up out of nowhere to promote their work.

"New media" may be changing the way publishers and authors market themselves and their work (and, yeah, they're tied together), but I don't think we've gotten through The Dip yet. I suspect there's a lot more change before things stabilize. At least I hope so, because I fall into more than one of the above categories myself. It's a long slog through the change, but if you're willing to do what's necessary, there may be a brighter future at the other end.

And then, over at Dear Author, Jane has a post about the things publishers could do to make it easier for genre readers--unlike those Jonathan Karp assumes will disappear--to find the books they want, buy them, read them. None of them are expensive, either. In direct opposition to Karp's assumptions, the Janes believe genre readers will continue to be a viable market, even after The Dip, and that publishers, if they work at it, can come out even stronger on the other side stronger than they are now.

Friday Fun - July 25, 2008

True Crime Story:

South Carolina: A man walked into a police station, dropped a bag of cocaine on the counter, informed the desk sergeant that it was substandard cut, and insisted that the person who sold it to him be arrested immediately.

Dead Body Count

One of my mystery writing buddies raised a good question about how long you can wait until the second dead body shows up. Is it dumb to say that it depends upon when your killer decides to make it happen? If it's going to happen at all?

I'm keen on writing one-murder mysteries. Can you tell I don't write suspense novels? (Not yet, anyway.) I don't mind throwing in a cold case into my ms to add zip to the protagonist's challenge. I like characters with a questionable past.

Pacing does not have to depend solely upon the primary plot, right? Disaster in a related subplot is capable of bringing the protag to her knees, yes? Isn't the trick to drive your protag up a tree and throw rocks at her? The rocks don't all have to be chunks of granite. A well-placed limestone hit has the same potential to do irreparable harm.

Our protags can't live lives of quiet desperation. But what if they have a hair-trigger response to certain stimuli that tends to make them self-destructive? What if the crusty old cop protag is fine when he's not drinking, but drinking is provoked by his gambling addiction, and his gambling addiction is caused by his gambling debts...

Maybe that's going way too far beyond your story line, but in my BB stories one of her self-destructive habits comes in the form of her addiction to chocolate pills (M&Ms) as stress relievers. The bigger the problem, the more chocolate pills she needs to pop. However, adding inches to her waist will diminish the allure of her assets. The assets which keep her and a lot of other people solvent. Maybe our stories could use more lose-lose situations in the subplots: frying pan to fire on the home front can perk the plot instead of inserting another dead body.

I'm aiming for help from my subplots. I love hyperbole. There's nothing better than read about absurd events derailing the protag's search for a killer. I love riotous dialogue as the relentless underpinning of the plot's pace. Wish I could do that! That would be my choice every time the pace slowed. I prefer laughing more than feeling scared. Yes, I'd love to channel Janet Evanovich or Elaine Viets, but that's not happening.

When it comes to questions of when/if a second body should show up, you gotta trust your gut. Use your writing assets. Try not to manipulate your story to match today's industry standards. Try not to over-think your story. Industry standards get moldy fast. If the advice of the pros sounds reasonable, go for it. Just don't mistake my babblings to be sage advice - I'm only pondering my own plot line entanglements. I wonder what your muses have to say about maintaining your pace using only single dead bodies in a mystery.

Write ON!
Nan

Fictional Characters For The Taking

No question. Writers borrow. We’re encouraged to do so by masters of the profession. Take Lee Child, who at an MWA-NY dinner meeting last fall, described his thriller hero as the product of ancient myth. As I said in meeting notes for the chapter's newsletter, The Noose, “Who knew that Ian Flemming's James Bond was a knock-off of a Plutarch hero, a reinvention of the three-thousand year old legend of Theseus and the Minotaur? Or that the ball of string Theseus used to find his way out of the labyrinth is the analogue of Bond's technological gadgets, his means - thanks to Q - of escaping death in countless emergencies?”

But what about borrowing characters without changing their names? The other day, over crunchy granola at a local café, I chatted with writer friends about Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes series. We wondered how come authors had the balls to use other peoples’ characters, appropriate celebrities into their works, use characters in satire, and sometimes rewrite history. Alice Randall, who wrote The Wind Done Gone (love that title) as a parody of Gone With the Wind’s depiction of slavery in the South’s antebellum period, convinced the courts that her appropriation of characters, plot, and scenes were not copies, but instead protected under Fair Use.

Copyright’s a strange animal. Fair use may or may not cover the zillions of fan fiction writers who create works based on characters they admire. And there’s the delicate question of fan fiction that doesn’t hesitate to portray living rock stars in erotic scenarios (see the Utne Reader’s “Slasher Girls”). These writers have garnered protective muscle by forming the Organization for Transformative Works.

Charmed, in my formative years, by my mother’s readings of the 1697 fairytale—which in turn was gleaned from classical works from the first century B.C.—I groan over Disney’s sappy Cinderella and Snow White. The strong arm of Disney pushes both ways. They went for blood, and won their suit, over a comic book's satirical depictions of Disney characters.

People play fast and loose with Shakespeare's characters. Take Romeo and Juliet. I just saw a modern adaptation with a happy ending, by the Mark Morris dance company based on Prokofiev’s original score. Since Shakespeare’s in the public domain, however, his characters and stories are fair game. If you’re looking for fodder, check out Wikipedia’s page on Public Domain Characters.

If nothing else, recycled characters are proof they live and breathe beyond the confines of their hard—or soft—covers. Got some favorite adaptations? Have at it.

- Lois

Two Sentence Tuesday

Another week has rolled around! This weekend we are having our annual summer bash. Y'all are invited. In honor of the moment, two sentences from Nancy Baggett's The All-American Cookie Book:

Monster cookies came into fashion in the late 1980s and have been populare with the young--and the hungry--ever since. The idea is to turn out single cookies that pack a four- or five-cookie wallop, perhaps to save people the time previously spent going back for seconds, or perhaps so they can claim they ate only one.

I love to bake, and if you need one, fabulous, beautiful cookie cookbook, this is the one I recommend. (You can read my review here.)

Two sentences of my own from this week:

The red light turned right. It dimmed, blinked, then went out entirely.

(As usual, if you let us know where your two sentences are posted, we'll put a link at the bottom of the blog post...or you can just put your two bits in the comment section!)

• Pretzel has some thoughts on forgiveness...and bee stings...this week.
  

MTM: The Empire State Building

Welcome to an international icon that has been visited by more than one hundred seventeen million people over the past seventy-seven years. On every one of the three hundred sixty five days each year, there is a long line of tourists waiting to ride the elevators to the observatory made famous as a romantic icon in the movies An Affair to Remember and Sleepless in Seattle.

The Empire State Building (ESB) is the stuff of legend. One hundred two stories high, the building was the tallest building in the world from 1931 until 1972 when it was surpassed by One World Trade Center. From the observatory on the 86th floor, there is a clear view for approximately eighty miles in every direction.

Hello New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and the southwest tip of Massachusetts.

Click here for the official site that can tell you everything you want to know about the building and don’t forget to scroll down to near the bottom center of the main page and click on the virtual tour. Click on the list running down the left side of the box and you will find magnificent pictures of the building, the lobby and ten splendid views from the observation deck.

To a kid growing up in New York City in the 1950s the ESB was one of those places we looked at from the street. Many a time we tried to worm our way into the not-so-soft-hearts of the security staff, hoping for a free pass to the observatory. We were always getting chased out of the lobby.

“We’re just looking for a bathroom, Mister.”

“Aw, go to Macy’s.”

We usually hung around for a while. We’d stand on Fifth Avenue and look straight up, until our necks hurt. Eventually we’d realize that none of the passersby were going to take pity on us and throw some money our way for a trip to the top. So we'd settle for chipping in our pennies and nickels, and maybe a quarter when we had one, for hot dogs and orange drinks at Nedicks on Thirty-Fourth Street. The OLD Nedicks. The REAL Nedicks.

After a while, I figured I would never actually get to the top of the ESB until I graduated high school and got a real job, but when I was sixteen a boy took me there on a date.

It was like standing on top of the First Wonder of the World. It was night. The sky was dark but it seemed as though every light in the city was shining just for me. The Chrysler Building. Rockefeller Center. The Woolworth Building.

A block south of the Bronx apartment building where I lived, there was a furniture store that had a big neon sign on the roof, with a large pink Q. (Only in the Bronx!) Not only could we see the sign perfectly but we could see for miles and miles past it. Outside the city, the lights were fewer and farther apart, but I could follow the roads I might one day travel.

All these years later, whenever I walk by the ESB, I smile at the tourists lined up to see what they can see. They remind me of a night, all those years ago, when I could see my block, my building, my entire world.

As always, you can find links to My Town Monday posts from all around the world when you visit MTM creator Travis Erwin.

Terrie

A HELLUVA PARTY

As the daughter and granddaughter of New York City Firefighters, I have spent many fun-filled hours in firehouses, which is why I will be delighted to attend the book launch for Chris Grabenstein’s latest Ceepak and Danny novel, Hell Hole.

Hell Hole’s launch, known to one and all as A Helluva Party, is next Tuesday July 22nd. You want to know where? I’ll tell you where. In an FDNY firehouse! Engine Company 23 is inviting everyone to their house, 215 west 58th Street, Manhattan, at 7 PM for fun, food and a reading of a snippet of Hell Hole by the author himself.

The most excellent part of the entire evening (better even than the Deep Fried Oreo Cookies) is that Chris and his publisher, St. Martin's Minotaur, are donating all proceeds from the evening to The New York Firefighters Burn Center.

So if you are going to be in New York on Tuesday, come on over to Engine 23. All my childhood memories of fire house antics have come flooding back to me, so I can guarantee you will have a fantastic time, with the opportunity to buy a great book and support an extremely worthy cause. It doesn’t get any better than that. Well, it could. They might let you clang the bell on the fire truck.

Terrie

Friday Fun - July 18, 2008

True Crime Time:

(Location unknown) A man successfully broke into a bank's basement through the street-level window, cutting himself pretty badly in the process. He then realized that (1) he could not get to the bank's money from where he was, (2) he could not climb back out the window through which he had entered, and (3) he was bleeding pretty badly. What did he do next?

He pulled out his phone and dialed "911" for help.

Feeling Poorly?

Image Peter de Seve Sketchbook via NHS doc blog.

I've heard Jonathan Karp speak on panels before, and I've been impressed by his candor. I'd never suggest that he isn't super-sharp or doesn't know the world of books well, and given the very positive responses to this article in the Washington Post, lots of other folks are similarly persuaded by his publishing acumen. If you haven't yet, and you'd like to read it before we get to the thorny patch, I'll wait... The something Karp predicts without preamble or explanation must seem perfectly sensible to other people, because feathers weren't ruffled and craws weren't stuck on it that I read anywhere else. But I didn't quite get it:

Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it's hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

I suppose if I think of old-fashioned as being the last 30 years, he's right. I think genre publishing in e-forms and otherwise will change its face, but I doubt seriously that it or its fans will all conveniently die off to cleanse the slate once again for the higher-quality fiction that humanity needs. I'm not accusing Karp of implying exactly this, he doesn't, but I hear this kind of implication echoed by lots of industry folks while I'm standing around eavesdropping, and so it caught my eye as provocative.

If I think of genre specifically as stories that can be grouped by a certain setting or premise, say the Greek plays of comedy or tragedy, epic poems of battle, romantic sonnets or the adventures of Dumas, it's plain that genre is what lasts when delivery systems change. As of last summer, you could get an adaptation of Beowulf in convenient 3D IMAX form!

Here's another example which Karp even mentions, the media tie-in novel. Some booksellers consider this its own kind of subgenre, shelving them together so fans of popular franchises can find them easily. And yet, other than Star Trek novels which have been written for decades, the growing abundance and importance of this group is a recent phenomenon. There's Monk, CSI, Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comic and novel forms. There are others and more on the way. The movie tie-in book's become a bigger deal, too, meaning the ones written after the successful film, not providing the basis for one. I even know people who are not regular "old-fashioned" genre readers who enjoy a television series, and therefore, try the books for more of what they enjoy. Why's this happening?

People like fresh experiences within the context of ones they've previously enjoyed. People like genres. However, I'd say another part of the reason is because people don't completely trust publishers to give them the experience they want or themselves to be able to find it among the sea of similar-seeming, golden-hyped, vaguely-described titles. I can blindfold you and ask you to eat something I swear will be wonderful, but you might not want to open wide without a bigger hint. Is it something you already know you hate? Is it prepared in a way that you're allergic to? Is my idea of wonderful and beneficial different than yours? What if I just tell you it's a chocolate-covered strawberry? You'll know if you're in for that. And how is that so terrible? Well, it means you'll have a right to be peeved if it turns out to be dog kibble.

If a better job were done of describing the kind of experience to be expected between the covers, there'd be a lot fewer disappointed readers, I think. And frankly, I'm hearing a spate of that from other readers recently. I think that's why people are gun-shy about trying new authors and why they're heading toward series that have at least some foundations they know they'll like. When people like a premise, they'll give another creative type a try at creating a version they'll enjoy, even if its in a different format. Sure, I like lasagna. Lay your recipe on me. Premise IS genre, and the emotional, transporting experience of fiction for most people is about the STORIES, not the delivery systems.

These are some related simmerings, addressed to the general you. If this isn't You, please ignore.
1) It isn't necessary, in fact it's condescending as hell, to try tricking people into reading what you think's good for them, like sneaking castor oil down their throats.

2) It isn't the bleakness of the ending or the body count or the explicitness of the torture that gives street cred or denotes quality. Even happening to fake people, extended or graphic cruelty where it's not purposeful can make an author seem to readers to be less, not more, in touch with the sorrows of being human.

3) If you've come to hate your series and characters so much that you're suddenly compelled to mistreat them horribly or dramatically deform their personas, take a vacation or start a new series instead. Otherwise, expect loyal readers to find it a jerky move, not the product of innovative risk-taking. If you'd done it in Book One, there wouldn't be loyal readers.

4) You don't have to hope for genre readers' mass die-off to give you a new crack at higher-minded folks. Frankly, the young comic readers should disabuse anyone of that notion, and good for them! Find ways to share great stories in the coin of the realm.

5) Almost all of what we now consider classic fiction is a combination of mystery/suspense or romance/adventure. Current bestsellers and award-winners are, too.

6) Genre lives because great characters and storytelling hang in there, defying reports of their demise like ivory-billed woodpeckers. Our most beloved classics of the last couple centuries were often considered low-brow or rabble-rousing crapola in their times. Genuine crapola was also considered crapola. It wasn't the premise that decided the difference, but the execution.

Fishy Fissures

I just had lunch. Or, well, whatever meal it is you at four in the afternoon when breakfast was at 9 and you ate a bag of chips at 1. And I got to thinking about two things:

1) Does food actually taste different today than it used to, or am I imagining it?

2) I don't keep track of what my characters eat (or don't) nearly well enough.

Lunch (or whatever) today was sardines. It's been years since I ate sardines, and I am not sure why I stopped. I liked them when I was young. In fact, they were some of the first fish I would eat, which is fairly strange considering how much I disliked fish for most of my early life.

But whatever the reason, I stopped eating sardines. And then, recently, I came across one of those "food lists" of foods you may not think about, but are really good for you. Here's the link. I'd just finished pickling some beets, so I was happy to see beets on it. Then I realized that with the exception of turmeric, which I dislike intensely, and chard, which isn't always easy to get your hands on around here, I eat everything on that list all the time. Except sardines. Somehow, sardines had fallen off my radar.

So the last time I was in the supermarket, I picked up some sardines in olive oil because I remembered the sardines I used to eat had been packed in oil.

First off, no key. What are sardines without a key to roll the tin can top back? Sheesh. But, okay, I'll go with it. When I'd opened the can with its pop top, there was hardly any smell--far less than a can of tuna, for example. That seemed odd. In my memory, sardines smelled. As the smell, so the taste. They weren't bad, but they weren't good, either. All in all, just not very exciting.

It occurs to me that what I used to eat were probably sardines packed in sardine oil, but I didn't see any of those at the supermarket. Ah, well.

This never happens to my characters. They eat what I put in front of them. But it suddenly occurs to me that I need to check and make sure they're eating regularly. Because I have a sneaking suspicion they aren't. How often are they drinking? I know when they sleep, and when they don't, but I somehow suspect the rest of their needs aren't being met. And their preferences may not be being honored.

Past Exploratory to Exhaustive

After posting early tidbits here, my extensive report on the launch party for Charles Ardai and Naomi Novik's latest books is up at Mystery/Horror/Comic/Scifi/Fantasy BookSpot. Besides having lots more photos of the fascinating place and people, you'll discover the new face of pulp adventure, the Royal Scottish Quadrille, and what's wrong with crime fiction covers.

Two Sentence Tuesday

I've been having conversations with folks recently about re-reading. I've never been one to read a book twice unless, of course, I've forgotten reading it the first time. Part of the reason is that "discovery" is at the heart of most books for me. And not just crime novels, either. The discovery of how a book is put together, how the details add up to a portrait, are part of what fascinates me.

Unsurprisingly--at least to me--romance readers re-read more often than do mystery readers. They know the end before they begin, and are reading for the ride more than for the puzzle. And when I look at the books I will occasionally re-read, they generally aren't mysteries, either.

Anyway, that's what's been on my mind lately. What we read, why we read it, and how often we're willing or able to read the same thing and still get the same sense of satisfaction.

My two sentences come out of one of the few books I've read a number of times over the years. In fact, when I taught middle school, I designed a curriculum around it. Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. There's a brief prologue, but this is the first paragraph of the first chapter.

The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.

And my own from this week:

Two men sat, smoking, in a dimly lit office. Their association was an old one. No one considered it peculiar when they met in public places, but tonight’s conversation was not for public consumption.

How about you? What are you reading? Have you read it before? And what are you writing? Let us know, and we'll put up a link to wherever you post it.

• The other Women of Mystery are posting in the comments.
• Pretzel's got some sentences up her blog.

My Town Monday: Setauket, New York

Recognize the state?

Do you see that island sticking off the south eastern end? It looks like a fish being reeled in from the Atlantic by New York City. I live on that island, called Long Island. Looks pretty fishy to me.

It's an island full of suburbanites and more 7-11s than Starbucks. Two car garages are common sights, with cars parked in the driveway to make room for all our motorized toys and projects in progress. The town we live in, Setauket, is a lovely old town with a fondness for colonial times.

The local Strong family played an important role in a spy ring during the Revolutionary War. My favorite was Nancy Strong who hung her laundry out to dry, arranging it as a code of British comings and goings by sea routes, keeping our supply ships from being captured.

Back in 1900, a man named (John) Ward Melville arrived in the area with his wife and a bundle of money. He’s the man who donated land on which to build Stony Brook University. His taste in an environment reflecting an American Age of Enlightenment brought the colonial tone to the area. Ward M. gets extra points from me for supporting the Black community already living in the area. He deeded them property rights that guaranteed them a place to live without worry of losing their homes. He was a man who left a powerful legacy.

Here's a picture of the elementary school just down the street from my home. It says a lot about how much we prize education and our part in colonial history. Read more about Ward Melville’s doings at "Building a Village, Providing for a University."

-- And this is where I have to stop and remember that folks like Travis Erwin, who initiated this wonderful My Town Monday topic, lives in a land without any British or French colonial history! While the Revolutionary War was being fought out in the areas I tromp through, Texas was part of the great Spanish territory, with a whole different variety of Natives encamped on the land. Don't forget to stop over to visit Travis Erwin who keeps a list of MTM posts from all over the world.

But all this colonial focus gives us no idea of what this island looked like when the Europeans first arrived, looking for bargain real estate. (How'd you like to trade Manhattan for $25 worth of trinkets?) I've read that the scent of our abundant pine trees reached the mariner's olfactories before land came in sight. Back then 13 tribes populated the area now known as Long Island.

Having come from upstate New York, I'm keen on Native Americans and am totally addicted to the Mohawks and the other tribes (Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida) in the original Haudenosaune (Iroquois) Confederacy. I taught about the upstate natives and should know all about the Setalcotts, our local tribe, but I don't.

This past weekend I got to talk with some Setalcott Indians. They came to our elementary school's playground in trailers full of crafts and exotic costumes. They brought friends from other Native Nations. It was a small, comfortable assemblage. Not like the huge Pow Wows full of shining beads and wild colors. That's the mark of more western, horse based tribes. Natives around here were less aggressive, or so I'm told.

Our Setalcotts, like the other Eastern Woodlands natives, wore clothing which allowed them to disappear into the woods. They used birch bark canoes. One of the elder statesmen at the Pow Wow told me that the Setalcotts made numerous raids on tribes in Connecticut and stole their women. Guess those quiet canoes did their job! Want to know more? Go to: longislandgenealogy.com/indians.html

The PowWow reminded me of just how diverse our modern population is. I saw and heard about the strong relationship between the Native Community and former slaves. Dark skinned Natives were proud to talk of the intermixing of Native and African-American histories and bloodlines.

They asked one poignant question: in recent years the African-Americans have looked to their African roots and generic Americans have looked to their genealogical trees, but how many of us have considered the Native blood we might have in our veins? The more they spoke, the more it was clear: across the ages and across the miles the Native Americans have become the forgotten Americans.

The Pow Wow reminded me that Setalcotts live around me, invisible when not in their feathers and deerskin regalia. I’m glad they’re willing to share this land with me and accept me as a neighbor-come-lately. I hope to recognize them as they blend into the scene. I look forward to next year’s PowWow on our shared land.

Great News About People We Like

One of my favorite members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, Michael Bracken has announced a great professional achievement this week. Michael has published at least one piece of short fiction every single month for the last FIVE YEARS. Here’s the announcement direct from his blog.

Mega congratulations to Michael and we look forward to years and years of an unbroken line of his short fiction.

And over at A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing my old friend Joe Konrath has announced completion of the long anticipated The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. (Notice the pronoun nuance.) Joe and Rob Siders have been working on organizing Joe’s blog tips for what seems like forever and the result is a 750 page document that covers everything from “Breaking In” to “Motivation.” The link to Joe’s blog post telling all about it is here.

I took a browse. "The" Newbie's Guide is absolutely stuffed with the stuff you want to know. Best of all it is free for the taking.

If I did this correctly, here is the Adobe link

So, hop on over and take a look. Print out a a lot of pages or only a few. Either way, you will learn and enjoy.

Terrie

Friday Fun - July 11, 2008

An escaped convict broke into a house and tied up a young couple who had been sleeping in the bedroom.

As soon as he had a chance, the husband turned to his voluptuous young wife, bound up on the bed in a skimpy nightgown, and whispered, "Honey, this guy hasn't seen a woman in years. Just cooperate with anything he wants. If he wants to have sex with you, just go along with it and pretend you like it. Our lives depend on it."

"Dear," the wife hissed, spitting out her gag, "I'm so relieved you feel that way because he just said he thinks you're really cute!"

(Ta-Da! Rim shot, please!)

Fun with Webster

If you’re a writer, you probably enjoy words. And if you enjoy words, you need to check out Merriam-Webster’s website.

I first found this website several years ago when I bought the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the dictionary of choice of a substantial number of trade book publishers. Not only can you look up the definitions and correct spellings of words, but you can listen to mini-podcasts to learn their correct pronunciations, get a leg up on new words being added to the dictionary, learn English if you’re not a native speaker, learn regional and unusual words and terms submitted by readers, and play a variety of word games. You can also subscribe to premium services for writers and editors and browse the online store.

In addition, you can sign up to have the “Word of the Day” delivered to your inbox. I’ve been getting this daily email for several years now and often find myself learning new words or new (or correct) definitions of old words. As an editor, I’ve found this daily email very helpful and can highly recommend it.

Since Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries are the dictionaries so many trade book publishers follow, if you write commercial fiction (such as mystery, romance, or fantasy), regularly checking this website would not be a waste of time. And it’s fun!

Exploratory Tidbits

Mary Alice Ladd is wearing a reconstruction of an evening gown made from a sari.

Last night, I attended a terrific book launch party. I would like to report I was as elegantly turned-out as the lovely woman above, a member of the Elegant Arts Society. (Sadly, I was not. Being from the South, such indignities rankle, as I always prefer to be overdressed, but circumstances, etc. The dazzle of the event did distract me from my pettiness, however.)

The celebration was in honor of the release of the fifth book in Naomi Novik's Temeraire historic fantasy series, Victory of Eagles, but also feted the 50th book to be published in the Hard Case Crime line, editor Charles Ardai's own Fifty-to-One. Sensing a theme for your lottery picks? The venue was the exceptional Explorers Club on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

This event represents the kind of genre-straddling I adore, since I read and write across the shelves. Naomi Novik's books are written from Britain's perspective, during the era of Napoleonic aggression, with just one addition to the national armories: dragon corps that function like fighter jets or flying battleships. The books are straight-up adventures, immersed in the factual realities of those times and places, which is why, I think, the inclusion of the fantastic element works so well. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has acquired the rights to Temeraire's early adventures, and I can't wait to see what they'll look like.

Hard Case Crime specializes in pulp noir paperbacks, tawdry tales sporting wonderfully lurid covers by contemporary artists. These aren't law enforcement stories or even necessarily mysteries as such, but there's always crime and loss, occasionally even love and rough justice in environments where "cynicism is justified," as I've heard Ardai describe noir. He's a founder and editor of the HCC line as well as a periodic contributor.

Charles Ardai and Naomi Novik are also married, to each other, which is a little too much achievement for one household, I think. Between the party's glorious location and the Regency ton and dames and sharpies in attendance, I was fascinated (and outclassed) from every angle. I'll do an exhaustive write-up with more interviews and lots more pictures for the genre-loving hydra known as Mystery/Scifi/Horror/Comic/FantasyBookSpot.

A quick aside for Short Fiction Writers and Readers: If you weren't aware of these 2 markets, please investigate FBS's magazines, Heliotrope for sff, and the newly-acquired crime and suspense mag, Spinetingler. These are quality publications, attracting great authors, seeking emerging writers, and paying real magazine rates. Through them, you'll get wonderful credits, keep fantastic company, and be eligible for awards.

That aside aside, I'm always interested in hearing about trends and tastes from people who know, so I've squirreled away a few genrelicious market-wise tidbits for here at WoM first. Even if these experts are outside genres you specifically read or write, I hope you'll notice, as I always do, how common run the threads.

1) The fabulous Liz French, managing editor of Romantic Times, told me that paranormal romance shows no sign of slowing in releases or in popularity. Even a couple of years ago, I wondered how much more readers would want before saturation. Her answer: apparently lots and lots. RT also puts some review space aside for more crime-y, thriller-y titles as well, and romantic suspense continues to be an under-served niche. (So do you have a love interest in your crime novel, even if there isn't explicit sex? Romantic suspense may be a way to pitch it where there's a real hunger for content and an industry-wide eagerness to find new authors.) French also said that there is a digital divide in romantic readership between older readers who really savor the physical object of the book in their hands and younger readers, who we all hope to reach and grow, who are more open and enthusiastic about things like e-readers and new forms of content delivery. Looks like we'll have to try to serve them all, and for a book-lovin' circuit-hound like me, that's my favorite option.

2) Also present was Teresa Nielsen Hayden, eminent scifi-fantasy editor, observer of online inclinations, and blogress of the panoramic Making Light. I'd seen her previously speak on a panel at NYC's Comic-Con about getting genre fiction published (also with Naomi Novik, and summarized for Fantasy BookSpot here- the info's still pretty solid!). Since it's been a couple of years, I wondered whether Space Opera were still in demand. Always, she replied, and went on to say that what's forever desired is work that's "fun, fast-moving, and that doesn't insult a reader's intelligence." She reaffirmed what I've heard before, from her even, that flaws in craft are much less noticeable and damning in writing with great movement and storytelling. As was noted in her previous panel, genre readers are not typically looking first for a "sensitive new voice in fiction." They want a good time. Give it to 'em. Easier said, huh?

3) I asked Charles Ardai about the success of Hard Case's subscription model. That is, you can sign up for a pristine copy of each pulpy masterpiece to be mailed to you upon release, though they're widely available in bookstores, too. Mills & Boon, the parent company of Harlequin, has recently launched a crime category line in the UK, called Black Star Crime. Now that HCC is five years and fifty titles wiser, I wondered whether crime fans were attracted to the subscription idea like romance fans. They are! Because Ardai and fellow founder Max Phillips decided to really focus on this genre niche and to do it well, they have many readers, like other "category readers", who want every title. (Category fiction represents all those paperbacks grouped by publisher and story setting or type rather than by author name. From Westerns to Regency-period romances, category readers like what they like and are happy to find publishers and authors to dependably scratch that itch.) While subscribers do remain a minority of Hard Case's readers, they number in the thousands. That offers a loyal base and steady revenue stream that allows Ardai and Co. to keep investing in new fiction and cover art while acquiring lost pulp treasures for publication or long-overdue reprint.

So, where's the cozy mystery line? I know Berkeley and Midnight Ink, but I mean a real category-length line with subscriptions to classically-structured mysteries. I know so many people who love them and the markets for them seem to be ever-dwindling, but the readership's only frustrated, not extinct!

Can you believe those are only the tidbits? I'll post the link to the FBS coverage when I get it written. Meanwhile, if you have any opinions or further questions, or if I've horribly misquoted or misunderstood, let me know in the comments.