Have a Clue?

It could be a groan, or it might be great. For the sanctity of my own memories, how I hope it will not suck like a cyclonic-action Hoover.

A new CLUE movie has been announced, directed by Gore Verbinski.

The pictured cards are from the 1972 game version, the vintage I grew up with. This is the one I had and played. Another writer friend, Michael, runs theartofmurder website, at which you can see pictures from the many, many editions of Clue, Cluedo, and all the spin offs. Clue's actually had over $1 billion in sales over the years, not to mention inspiring an earlier movie, the cinematic masterpiece of camp from 1985.

That's a lot of history and a lot of fans to please. We'll see.

The Power of Personalized Promotion

Mary Buckham knows the power of P2P promotion. No, not B2B. P2P--person to person.

Mary is giving one of her more popular classes in March. It's the only time she's giving that class this year and she wanted to let potential students know that. WritersU, which is sponsoring the class, sent out one of its standard promotional emails about two weeks ago, but Mary kicked it up a notch. She followed up with a personal email to many, if not all, of her former students from that class asking them to pass the word.

Did it work? You betcha! Pretty much every one of the fiction-writing loops to which I subscribe had at least one person write in and say, "Mary Buckham wrote to me and asked me to tell you about her class." Each of those messages included a rave review and prompted others on each loop to add their own positive reviews. How much better can it get?

Has the class filled up? I have no idea. But if you'd like some help with pacing, try registering for it. It's a great class. Yes, I'm one of those very satisfied former students now passing on the word.

"Pacing: How to Create a Page-Turning Manuscript" is an online class running from March 1 to 31. In the class, which costs $30, Mary examines what makes a book intriguing enough to cause readers to turn the pages and not set it down. She analyzes how one author's books can keep readers riveted while another author's books can leave them feeling ho-hum. The specific topics include:

• The ingredients of a page-turner
• What hooks are and how to maximize them
• The power of effective scenes--common pacing pitfalls to avoid
• The ten elements of strong pacing
• How to use subplots and secondary characters
• How to avoid a sagging middle
• What a beat is and how to use it
• Great beginnings and endings that leave your readers wanting more

To register for the class, go to www.WriterUniv.com. For more information about Mary, including about her upcoming writer's guide, Break into Fiction, due for release in June, visit www.MaryBuckham.com or www.BreakIntoFiction.com.

*Little guy glued to book courtesy of Jericho Middle School.

Friday Fun - February 27, 2009

Thanks to www.legal-forms-kit.com:

Louisiana: A man walked into a Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter and asked for change.

When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided.

The man took the cash from the clerk and fled-- leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer? Fifteen dollars.

Thaaaaat’s all, pals!
Thanks for the laughs, Uncle Jimmy!

Some Books Are Selling

Given the constant bad news coming out of the publishing industry these days, it's nice to see some good news. Even if they are not in the particular genre in which you write, the fact that some books continue to do well means that people are still reading and there's a future for readers and writers. It is worth noting, however, that the publisher in question--Harlequin--has their fingers in everything. They're working on Manga and thrillers and ebooks. And they do paperbacks, both trade and mass market, but not hardcovers. (Or, they may do an occasional hardcover; I'm willing to be corrected on that point, but I can't think of any of their imprints that I've seen in hardcover.)

From Publisher's Weekly:

Harlequin was a bright spot for parent company Torstar in 2008. Revenue at the romance publisher rose 2.2%, to C$472.9 million ($379 million), while operating profit increased 11.2% to C$67.4 million. [...]

Torstar president Robert Prichard praised Harlequin’s performance, noting 2008 was “the third year in a row of business growth for Harlequin which is making important gains in both print and digital products.” In the North America retail segment, sales were up in both series and single title formats, while the bottomline benefitted from a decline in returns. [...] The company also saw higher sales of print and digital books over the Internet. A highlight in the Overseas market was Harlequin’s deal with the Japanese SoftBank Corp. to distribute digital magna content on cell phones and Internet distribution sites. Sales from this operation countered a drop in sales of traditional books.

Announcements with Gratitude and Malice

Blogpal (and fabgal) Meredith Cole has just released her debut mystery, Posed for Murder. This manuscript is about a quirky art photographer, Lydia McKenzie, who captures life and death in Willamsburg, Brooklyn. It won St. Martin's Minotaur first novel award at a previous Malice Domestic convention, and has finally made it through the process into real-live print so the rest of us can enjoy it, too. Meredith also shares her adventures as a deb author at The Debutante Ball.

Oh, but the malicious announcements abound. Malice Domestic has issued its nominees for 2008's Agatha awards. (Link to see them all) People are often confused about the type of work that qualifies here, and I think the committee's done a great job of defining it with enough breathing room.

The Agatha Awards honor the "traditional mystery." That is to say, books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well as others. For our purposes, the genre is loosely defined as mysteries that:

• contain no explicit sex
• contain no excessive gore or gratuitous violence
• usually feature an amateur detective
• take place in a confined setting and contain characters who know one another

Novels and stories featuring police officers and private detectives may qualify for the awards, but materials generally classified as "hard-boiled" are not appropriate.

On a personal note, I want especially to congratulate Rosemary Harris, Chris Grabenstein, and Sarah Atwell for their Agatha nods. Swell folks, great news!

Strangest Titles Shortlist

Via the Telegraph, I learned that The Bookseller Magazine has issued its prestigious shortlist of strangest book titles for 2008. The following are up for public vote at the second link.


Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth (University of Chicago Press)

Curbside Consultation of the Colon by Brooks D Cash (SLACK Incorporated)

The Large Sieve and its Applications by Emmanuel Kowalski (Cambridge University Press)

Strip and Knit with Style by Mark Hordyszynski (C&T)

Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring by Lietai Yang (Woodhead)

The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Professor Philip M Parker (Icon Group International)

I don't know, between curbside consultations and baboons, I'm torn. You?

Tuesday Twosome: Weird Thrills

I got the Weird Thrills comic at NYCC, and just got around to reading it.

I really enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek, pulpy quality of this adventure with a fin-de-siecle, Lovecraftian vibe. Retired and confined occult Professor Cyril Finch is amusingly ascetic and volatile, and occasionally addresses readers through the page like we're an imaginary friend, another symptom of his decline. Fun! The second part of the comic, an illustrated adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat, is just plain dark, a beautifully depicted downward spiral.

Here are two sentences from Kingdom of the Vampires: Is it mad to sense the existence of a spectral world no one else can perceive? Such madness has saved my life many times.

As to what I'm writing- Mystery Writers of America is doing its annual short story anthology (examples here), and slots are open for judged submissions by any members in good standing, regardless of publication status. Yearly, less-known or absolutely unknown writers' stories are selected to appear side-by-side with other terrific and bestselling MWA member authors who are commissioned to write stories. This makes for a strong and interesting collection, but also a wonderful opportunity. This year's anthology-- as I think of it since I'm submitting in this year-- will be published in 2010. It's being edited by the prolific Charlaine Harris, and will have a supernatural theme.

The fantastic elements are relatively open to writer interpretation, as long as the stories play fair with the reader and real detecting occurs. As you may know, the weird is always in my wheelhouse, but I'm writing a combination of mild deduction and pastiche. We'll see how it goes, but it feels better to fail big right now. Six copies of the best story ever are due to MWA by March 15th, where they'll be stripped of writer identity before a panel of 5 MWA authors judges them. Unlike most of my tightly tweaked and shaved final copy, this one's loose, slangriffic, and in the first person POV of a geeky slacker in NYC. It helps the thing get written briskly, but I don't know how they'll like it. Then again, I never do. Here are two:

In addition to creative curses, Sorry and Excuse Me are as ubiquitous as sushi places, insincere expressions of remorse that make us imagine ourselves civilized, a vital feature if you’re not going to plotz while living ass-to-elbow. So, I look back over my shoulder to receive my well-earned crust of apology, and the ragbag is actually smiling at me.

I'm working away. Let us know in the comments what's thrilling you to read and write this week.

UPDATE: David Cranmer shares essentially Western Randisi and some unnecessary modesty.
Crystal Phares offers up flinches and Darkness.
Barbara Martin gives us cliffhanging description.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Warwick, NY is a small town. Small enough that everybody is on a first name basis with the mayor. Small enough that we grieve over the demise of a village shop. Our cozy library schedules fireside chats. We had one last week, with guest speaker Peggy Ehrhart, author of “Sweet Man is Gone.”

There are enough mystery writers in Warwick to start a Sisters-in-Crime outpost. Along with friends and a few mystery-loving strangers, we clustered around Peggy. At this gathering, the number of people greeting one another didn't surprise those of us who live here, but it surprised Peggy, who hails from Leonia, NJ. When we went out, afterward, to celebrate at the historic Landmark Inn, Peggy seemed enchanted by our small-town connections. For example, tucked into a back booth was the secretary at a vocational school where I once taught. Attending our table was a waitress, once a second grader in Anita’s class. Across the room was a colleague from a local environmental organization. You get the idea. (The Landmark Inn, by the way, has its own, well documented, ghost story. Writer friend Donna Reis has compiled a collection of tales about more than sixty local hauntings in her Schiffer Press publication, “Seeking Ghosts in the Warwick Valley.")

Back to Peggy's presentation. She guided an audience of enthusiastic fans on a tour of mysteries by - or about - musicians and music lovers. This was a unique way to introduce a novel that features a blues singer. She pointed out that a fascination with jazz and blues serves to quickly tag a sleuth, in a reader’s mind, as an edgy outsider. To illustrate, she introduced us to a bunch of crime novels with a bar-music theme.

We writers were quite taken by the thematic presentation of her novel, and by the reminder that a character's lifestyle choices help to illustrate her nature. We plan to adopt Peggy's approach once we’ve got published novels of our own to promote. We were, however, at a bit of a loss as to how to find niche mystery titles, as Peggy had done. Then fellow-Warwickian Anita Page (of "Murder New York Style fame") discovered the website: Stop, You're Killing Me.

This site covers 2,700 authors and over 30,000 titles, both series and non. It lists award nominees, new releases, and offers reviews and a bi-weekly newsletter. Sure, you can look up authors and titles...with sequential series titles. (Yes!!!) But the remarkable thing about the site is the way it’s indexed. You can find mystery novels set in New Zealand; those set in 16th century England; series character’s with careers as bail bondsmen (trust me, the list goes well beyond Evanovitch); those who are gypsies; those who are vampires; as well as author and category read-alikes. If you liked ... you might like ....

Thanks to Stop, You're Killing Me, I’m gearing up for wilderness reads (I found eighteen series characters under "wildlife and environment"). A friend will be pleased at a few based in West Africa. We haven’t yet found ‘Guru’ in the job index, but the list grows quickly. It’s only a matter of time.

Thanks, Peggy, for the Warwick fireside chat. Your unique presentation, as well as the wonderful book you introduced, greatly inspired your fellow crime writers.

Visit the My Town Monday founder Travis Erwin's blog for links to more.

- Lois

Drum Roll Please . . .

Rat-ta-tat-tat.
Rat-ta-tat-tat.
Rat-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat.


The Independent Mystery Book Sellers Association (IMBA) has released its 2008 Annual Best Seller List. Click here for link.

Tony Burton, publisher of Wolfmont Press, is pleased to announce that the anthology, Dying in a Winter Wonderland, Wolfmont’s fundraiser for the Marine Corp Reserve Toys for Tots Program, is number eight on the IMBA soft cover list. Not bad for a book that was released just this past October.

My story, “Just Call Me Nick,” was published in Dying in a Winter Wonderland. I am honored to be in the gracious and talented company of Tony Burton and the other contributing authors. I give a special thanks to all of you who bought DIWW, and particularly to everyone who bought the anthology in an Independent Mystery Bookstore.

Over at In Reference to Murder, BV Lawson talks about some of the newly released MWA and Akashic anthologies and opines that having one anthology on the Best Seller list bodes well for the mystery short story market. I think she's right.

So, thanks to all who bought the anthology, helped market the anthology and supported the project in a variety of ways. Not only did we raise more than $3,300 for the kids, we got a little street cred in the bargain. It doesn’t get any better than that.




Smurf and Drum image found here.

Terrie

Vendetta by Ed Gorman

Although I spent my childhood watching western movies and televisions shows, I must confess that I have not read many novels with a western setting. Of the few I have read, I had great praise for The Virginian in a Forgotten Book Friday post.

Recently, I was in a second-hand bookstore and a name jumped off the shelves. Ed Gorman. I grabbed the book, expecting a mystery, and was a bit disappointed when the novel Vendetta turned out to be a western. Well, since Ed wrote it, I knew it would be worth reading, so I bought it.

The main character is a priest who, in relentlessly trying to prevent one vendetta, becomes enmeshed in several other vendettas, each one ending in a surprisingly different way. Ed has painted the suspense in this story like a watercolor done with a very fine brush. Layer upon layer. As the layers interweave, the reader gets to the end of the book and then there is something more. The final vendetta.

Now I’ll be adding Ed’s other western titles to my fast growing to-be-read pile.

For hot leads to other Forgotten Book posts, click on over to Patti Abbott’s blog.

Terrie

Friday Fun - February 20, 2009

Thanks to www.legal-forms-kit.com:

Michigan: Drug possession defendant Christopher Jansen, on trial in March in Pontiac, Michigan, said he had been searched without a warrant. The prosecutor said the officer didn't need a warrant because a "bulge" in Christopher's jacket could have been a gun. Nonsense, said Christopher, who happened to be wearing the same jacket that day in court. He handed it over so the judge could see it. The judge discovered a packet of cocaine in the pocket and laughed so hard he required a five-minute recess to compose himself.

Thaaaaat’s all, pals!
Thanks for the laughs, Uncle Jimmy!

The Next Generation of Readers

Last year, Travis Erwin alerted his blog readers to a wonderful organization called Donors Choose. Donors Choose allows teachers to request specific items they need, and then people can donate to the individual "projects" they want to fund. (And yes, I know it's pathetic that teachers have to resort to this, but there you go.)

One of the projects I helped to fund was "big books," in which a teacher had requested money to buy large sized books so that her students could all see the words at once. I chose this project for a couple of reasons--it was close to being fully funded, so I didn't have to donate all that much to make a really big impact, and it was specifically targeted toward helping kids read. Not making them read, but getting them excited about words.

Today I got my packet of thank you letters from the students. (I've blurred out the name of the student on the picture at left.) Some were clear, some were not, but they all showed the same thing--the students were happy to have something to read and enjoyed the "big book" sessions.

In today's economy, no one can afford to give to every cause they want to. So many people need help. But I encourage anyone who wants to help themselves feel good by helping others (and contribute to their own possible future earnings by creating new readers at the same time!) to check out Donors Choose. I know these notes were by far the nicest thing in my mailbox today.

Black and White, but Read?

This lush personage is Melvina Prince Allen, my imaginary ideal of a matron of the arts. Though she needs a magic wand.

On her blog, Jennifer Weiner (author of several novels including Good in Bed), shares some ideas about what the troubled newspaper industry's book review sections could be doing differently. First, take money from authors like her, and start making changes.

...As matron of the arts, here are some things I don’t want to read about: new books by Philip Roth (I prefer the old ones, which were funny). New books by Cormac McCarthy. New books by any male writer prone to complaining about the indignities of old age, either general or prostate-specific, or or having his male protagonists do the same.

New short-story collection by Alice Munro. Instead of wasting eight hundred words, just say it’s every bit as wrenching and finely wrought as the last short-story collection by Alice Munro, and be done with it. Chances are, I’ve already read most of the stories in The New Yorker, and I know that they are wrenching and finely-wrought (unless, of course, the new collection gets a ridiculously tarty cover, in which case, you can make fun of that for eight hundred words).

In fact, no more reviews of books by any of the dour, humorless, literary lady-writers. Let them peddle their arid tales of marital angst, suburban anomie, dead or drug-addicted children and their husbands’ enlarged prostates to Oprah magazine.

No more considerations of gross-out memoirs by middle-aged male journalists detailing their debauchery, drug buys, masturbatory predilections or intestinal outrages. This is not because I’m not interested, but because these books are guaranteed lots of attention elsewhere, and I probably know about them already...

Here are some things I do want to read about: new books by Stephen King and Susan Isaacs, Nicholas Christopher and Peter Straub, Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercey. Pretty much anything in the horror/fantasy genre, like Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand and Margo Lanagan. Thrillers and mysteries and romance.

Contemporary women’s fiction (duh!) reviewed by people who do not think that contemporary women’s fiction and/or contemporary women themselves represent a pox upon the land. Reviews of books people are actually reading, instead of the ones the critics think we should be reading...

Despite my hefty excerpt, she posted even more interesting suggestions that I like in return for her financial patronage. What do you think?

The Big C Scare

About 3 weeks ago I went to get my annual mammogram. Now I know to book a sonogram as well since they always think they've found something since my breasts are very dense so I was a little surprised to get a call asking me to come in early for my sonogram–they wanted to take 2 more pictures. This had never happened before. After the nurse takes the very painful and cold photographs, she leads me over to an X-ray on the wall to show me what they're concerned about. And that's when I see it-a small solid shape in the midst of this beautiful universe of a balloon filled with stars, my left breast.

I'm so fascinated by what I'm looking at that I feel no fear.

I get the sonogram. I'm told while I'm lying there on the table that it looks borderline, it could e a cyst, it could be more, they won't know until they put a needle in. If the needle comes out with liquid in it, it's a cyst, if not, well... (You know the rest.)

I have to wait a week for the procedure.

That week was interesting. Anyone who has gone through it knows what I mean. I go in for the biopsy. Everyone is so nice. The doctor comes in and she looks young, too young. Now I know I am of the age where most doctors will be younger than me but come on, she looks like she's 12. I breathe.

She does her work, it's a cyst, everyone relaxes.

I tell myself, 'One down, one to go,' because I'm not done with this 'C' scare journey. I had gone in for a colonoscopy and for some reason, God bless him, the doctor gave me a script for an ultrasound of my pelvis since he was handing me one for my abdomen anyway. The ultrasound report stated that they found an abnormal growth in my ovary and strongly suggested me getting a MRI. I'm thinking, 'it's a cyst, the MRI will show that.'

I was wrong.

After the MRI, I'm told to see an oncologist. A few days later, I'm sitting in his office and the oncologist lays it all out for me. If my blood work comes back this Monday saying I have cancer, it's a total hysterectomy no question and he'll do a staging. Interesting word, I'm thinking,'staging'. He explains it. They open you up to see if/where the cancer has spread, lymph nodes, etc. I try not to panic. I concentrate on the sound of his voice and his manner. He's handsome with an interesting accent and he reminds me of a flirtatiously light French husband I know, but yet he is Hasidic and claims to be from the Midwest. A car siren is blaring outside and he had said, 'Where I come from that sound means to go to the basement, there's a tornado coming.' Maybe he is from there, maybe he isn't. Why don't I believe him? What does this say about me? About him? I tell him I write murder mysteries. He is pleasantly amused.

Then he gives me more scenarios. 'If the blood work is okay, we have to take out the ovary anyway and while you're on the operating table, it goes to the hospital lab and they do what's called a 'frozen'-a partial biopsy, if it comes back irregular, it's a hysterectomy.

My mind flits back and forth to the two women working in his office. One, a trim, pretty woman with a bad fitting wig the color a blonde that doesn't even exist and the other, a sweet, short, slightly off balanced brunette who handles the phones. What's his story? Is he married to either one of them? Is he having an affair with either one of them? Do they compete for his attention/affections?

But I am digressing into the world of fiction. And I know it. I breathe.

At home now, waiting for the blood test results, I find I'm not drawn to writing right now. But that's okay. I'm busy making mandalas, like the one on my profile page, to sell at an auction on the 26th for a Tibetan orphanage that's dear to my heart.

It's very calming, the beadwork, the sewing.

All the while though, I'm thinking, who knew my life could be so suspenseful?

Two Sentence Tuesday

Ah, Tuesday. Hard to believe another week has passed. I really need to get off my rear and work! But I do have some sentences to contribute for the week.

Two that I wrote:

She’d lost her virginity to him at seventeen, when her father had been working in Trento in northern Italy. Dark hair, dark skin and a fabulous physique had temporarily blinded her to his lack of brains.

Two that I read, from Jordan Dane's Evil Without a Face:

As Jess crossed the street with Baker's laptop slung on her shoulder, she squinted into the late afternoon sun, unable to shake the image of Baker's angry face. Even in broad daylight the man triggered a deeply rooted jumble of rage and degrading fear in her--an all too vivid taste of her past.

And you? What's been on your reading list? What have you been writing? Post it in the comments or let us know where to find it and we'll update this post.

------

• Crystal Phares has a couple of sentences up about, well, a couple!
• Barbara Martin has three dark fantasy sentences over on her blog.
  

Not Just My Town, My Very Basement

Late yesterday afternoon, the lower reaches of our Larchmont, New York estate acquired an incomparable new water feature in honor of President Valentine's weekend.


The helpful gent above has just upgraded to the 100-foot drain snake.


Be grateful blogs aren't scratch-n-sniff.

Web Presence

A brief question for Sunday. Most of our readers are writers. But you can't assume, when your book gets published, that its readers will be writers. So you want your web presence, when you set it up, to attract readers, not writers.

What do you like in websites for the authors you visit, if you visit any? What do you want to know about them? And, as important (if not more so), what don't you want to know?

My Bloodiest Valentine for You

Image source here.

As I haven't been nearly shy about discussing, recently I've been reading and writing in the urban fantasy/paranormal category with some overlap into the romance genre as well.

Since that genre isn't 100% in our criminal wheelhouse here at WoM, and not everyone will be transfixed, more extensive coverage and reviews of that specific type of thang will be posted at BookSpot Central under columns titled The Occasional eClare.

I'll be linking those articles pithily here, and you can hop over there if you'd like to check them out. Because the WoM domain is part of my identity at BCS, we may enjoy more fans of the fantastic dipping their toes over here, too. Anyway, on with the cross-pollination.

While I was at New York's Comic Con last weekend, I attended a panel of 5 authors called Kick-Ass Female Authors and their Killer Heroines. If you like your sexiness and action plied by the magical and undead, please to accept my detailed write-up with this flaming pectoral heart as my bloodiest Valentine for you.

Keen On Kiwis

I’m fresh back from a New Zealand holiday and a month of writing research. If you’ve never flown halfway around the bloody earth, I’m here to tell you the nineteen hour trek from New York is grim. Yeah, rough as guts. I’ve done it twice now, to better understand my protagonist’s early years.

She’s an expatriate Kiwi, and for her sake I decided to give the second trip a go - gratis my best friend. It worked a treat. The manuscript (it was finished, too!) needed a touch more authenticity, so it’s a good job I went.

I’m doing a brilliant job slinging Kiwi phrases around, eh? (The name to the mountain above is Mt. Cook, the highest point in New Zealand. And yeah, that's how some Kiwis say it....) You can check out more photos in my web albums but please come right back to Women of Mystery....

My characters grew up on a Merino farm in the South Island’s Central Otago region. The land is fertile, but it’s dry there, with grim winters and extreme heat in the summer. Blokes like my protagonist’s dad, who have toughed out the climate extremes for decades, are forlorn and crusty types. (So far I've avoided Central Otago winters, but as far as I was concerned the January-February heat was a treat. Especially when a friend in Warwick emailed about New York’s single digit temperatures. “Do you remember ice?” she asked bleakly.)

Here's a bit of research so you can see how I got on: The driver of a scenic coach that took us from Queenstown to Mt. Cook said that Merinos need space...somewhere around eight acres each. In winter, they survive on the high mountains because they eat so little. Every spring they’re brought down from the heights for shearing.

I’ve lived in Canada, visited England once and New Zealand twice, chatted with Aussies, and hosted a South African. So the best bit, for me, was to have another go at distinguishing between all the accents...usage and slang as well. If I had the job of raising kids to do over again I would tell them, after tea, to get the muck off their plucks.

Clare reminds me it's Friday the 13th, so I realized I'd better put in some kind of crime warning. Here's to you loose units who bend the rules a bit...better not park your van along Wellington beaches today...some bloke is bound to catch you out and dob you in.

Be well, mates. No worries.

- Lois

Friday Fun - February 13, 2009

Which is dumber? You're welcomed to vote!

Texas: A man convicted of robbery worked out a deal to pay $9600 in damages rather than serve a prison sentence. For payment, he provided the court a check -- a forged check.
He got 10 years.

(Location Unknown): A man went into a drug store, pulled a gun, announced a robbery, and pulled a garbage bag over his head -- and then realized that he'd forgotten to cut eye-holes in the mask.

Thanks to www.legal-forms-kit.com.

Thaaaaat’s all, pals!
Thanks for the laughs, Uncle Jimmy!

Ten Commandments for Detective Novelists

Image courtesy of
www.liquidmatrix.org.

New writers, and even some seasoned pros, are always on the lookout for guidance on constructing a story. In flipping through Writing Crime & Suspense Fiction and Getting Published by Lesley Grant-Adamson a few days ago, I came across the following wonderful list of ten commandments for detective novelists written by Ronald Knox. The list was originally a set of by-laws for the Detection Club, whose members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton. The list was included in the introduction Knox wrote for The Best Detective Stories of 1928, published by Horace Liveright in 1929.

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long explanation at the end.
5. No person of Asian descent* must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The Stupid Friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

*The original word seemed derogatory to me, so I chose to use this close but not perfect substitute.

A place to rest

Okay, I'm going to the city again today. This time for a book signing of Rosemary Harris's latest book, The Big Dirt Nap. But I just can't go in for that alone, can I? I have to run errands don't I? In the biggest strip mall in the country?

This is what I do every time I go in a few hours earlier. If I'm lucky a friend can meet me for coffee in between my errands, but most of the time everyone is busy living their own lives, working, etc. and I'm left to my own devices to find a place to sit down and rest before hitting the pavement again.

Some of my best places to crash are Starbucks on 8th and 23rd near the Sisters in Crime meeting place and the Rubin Museum on 7th and 17th. It finally dawned on me to join the Rubin. They have a great cafe and great peaceful vibes. Love that place.

But what I'm most excited about is my discovery that Whole Foods on Union Square has an upstairs dining area where you can bring their prepared food to eat and stay forever. No one bothers you and there's even a coffee shop off to the side. It evens offers an open view of the sky and the Empire State Building.

Now I've shared these 3 gems in good faith. I expect you to ante up a few of your own. Don't disappoint. Oh, that's right, you didn't ask me to share. Sorry.

Here a Story . . . There a Story

Since I whine incessantly, by now you all know I am in Florida in a rented manufactured home a few miles from my daughter and her family. My winter pilgrimage to Florida became an annual tradition in 2002 the year my daughter gave birth to her first child and I retired a few weeks later.

A couple of years ago, my daughter moved from the east coast of Florida to the west coast of Florida. She now lives in Lee County, which has the distinction of having the highest home foreclosure rate in the nation, and is wracked with double-digit unemployment that has a stranglehold on the entire county and spirals outward to surrounding counties as well. Trouble grows by the day, and the exodus of residents to states both north and west is starting to remind me of the Okies of the Depression/Dust Bowl era.

Lee County has been steadfastly Republican for decades. John McCain walloped Barack Obama here by a margin of 56% to 44% just a few short months ago. Apparently he doesn’t hold a grudge, because yesterday President Barack Obama held a Town Hall Meeting in the Harborside Center in Fort Myers, just across the Caloosahatchee River from my tiny rental.

As a New Yorker, I have always considered Presidential visits a nuisance—frozen traffic zones, subways skipping stops, no one can get anywhere from anywhere else. When the City of New York hears that the President is coming to town, we emit a collective groan and start to plan alternate routes. Not so Lee County. People lined the streets just to see the Presidential motorcade whiz by.

Tickets for the Tuesday visit were to be distributed at 9 AM on Monday morning, so my daughter and I got up at 4 AM and joined the massive line of people hoping for tickets. Some had been on line since Sunday morning, all had a story to tell, and as you well know, we writers love a story. The lady standing right in front of me on line lost her job last autumn. She is grateful her husband is still working, and in between taking care of the kids and looking for work, she still finds time to volunteer in her church’s food pantry a couple of times a month. The only time I saw a sign of discouragement in her eyes was when she talked about running out of provisions at the food pantry, something that never happened until a few months ago and now happens every day because past donors are now recipients. I couldn’t fathom turning away hungry people but what else can you do when there is no food left?

Then we met the community organizer from Immokalee, a town south of here, towards Naples. As an old community organizer myself, I knew the look even before the guy presented his petition. What I didn’t know is how badly the farm workers are being treated in the tomato fields of Immokalee. So we didn’t solve everything with the lettuce boycott all those years ago. I guess there’s still some work to do.

Well, long story short, (as if I can ever do that) my daughter and I didn’t get tickets. We were much to late. The last guy to get a ticket camped out at 10:30 on Sunday night. I know this because he got to ask the President a question, and thus, was interviewed by one of the local news channels.

I watched the entire event on television. I cried when a woman close to my age talked about how she’s been living in her car since she lost her job and then was evicted from her rental. I cradled my head in my hands when local folks talked about failed businesses, massive job loss, and the need to renovate and upgrade the schools.

When everyone was done talking and the President left the podium, I turned off the television and remembered that earlier in the day the congress member who represents these fine people was on a morning news show telling all who would listen that a further cut of the capital gains tax was a sure cure for what ails us. And I couldn't figure out why I hadn’t put my foot through the TV while he was talking. Then I remembered. It’s a rental.

Terrie

Two For Tuesday: Still Miscellaneous

If you can't get enough of the spectacle, many more wonders like this giant, walking hulk can be seen in the NYCC galleries at BookSpotCentral.

I received a raft of free books- yay!- from Comic Con. Besides books on sale, ARCs also get signed and distributed free. But I haven't started that pile yet. I've begun reading Deborah LeBlanc's Water Witch. The following two are from page 1:

After soaking his father with three gallons of gasoline, Olm lit a match and tossed it onto the old man's body... Soon the pop and sizzle of burning flesh outsang the chorus of nocturnal swamp life that had deafened him for the last two hours-- clicks, whines, buzzes from insects too vast in species and number to count, the croaks and whomps from frogs and alligators, snakes with bodies wider than the circumference of a man's arm.

The latest thing I've written isn't my own fiction, but notes from the con, and I have much more panel info and many interviews to process. Below are scrawled observations I won't use elsewhere. I was hunting a new graphic novel to love, but nothing grabbed me by the lapels. Not that there wasn't excellent stuff, but by late Sunday afternoon, my sensibilities were like an over-rung bell.

Looking for something to pierce the clutter. Like eating sauerkraut with a cold- what you eat when you can't smell anything else.

In the comments, share 2 sentences you've read and written this week, or tell us where to link to them. Do it! Or Hulk get mad.

Update: David Cranmer has the PB and J of fiction, death and Dostoevsky.
Crystal Phares advances the action, and if ever got chain letters like these, I'd forward them to myself. Again and again...
Karin Huddleston (aka huddlekay ) is all about the seabirds and snoring. Rainy afternoons get me, too.
Barbara Martin explores the complications of romance, from time travel to interspecies snorgling.

MTM: New York Comic Con

I was a participant in this weekend's candy-colored mayhem. (Click any photo to enlarge.) This east coast extravanganza is bigger and better every year, and I have the blisters to prove it. It's a gi-freakin-gundous sea of sights and sounds, and I find my sanity-preserver is having goals for who and what I want to see. On display here are comics in single issue and graphic novels, loads of art and their artists, fantastic fiction, games of all description, mucho character merchandise, plus the mondo-popular sneak previews of movies and television shows. There are hand-on workshops and panel discussions across several overlapping industries and interest groups. It's got something for lots of folks, but I'll give you just a taste. Later posts here, plus the coverage I'll be linking to at BookSpotCentral, will focus on publishing, because the big names all had booths and authors present.

One aisle of the hangar.

Some of the costumed were booth employees, but the Vast Majority of the costumed were avid fans enjoying the opportunity to strut their stuff in a welcoming venue. From Marvel/DC Superheroes and Mexican wrestlers to Tolkien creations and Star Wars characters, there are so many costumes streaming past, you stop noticing them. Many of the less flamboyant showed their boosterism with their favorite character logos or buttons, more like club flair than costumes. Even the apparently unaffiliated often sported personal funkiness. The squares look like oddballs here.

Sunday was Kids Day, and there was loads of face paint or even elaborately detailed ensembles, constructed by their parents (no doubt) who lugged the heavy headpieces and robot arms behind them when the novelty weighed them down. You haven't lived until you've dodged strollers equipped with light sabers.



Who else you gonna call?

The many artists in attendance have learned to work amongst the scrum. In between autographs, sales, or questions, they sketch or ink in their own worlds while enthusiastic crowds throng around them.
Media were absolutely everywhere, blocking the aisles with their impromptu filming. Lots of podcasting in addition to national or regional coverage.


These light sabers, as I mentioned, were big hits this year. In addition to being bumped by rolled posters/art in cardboard tubes (frequently slung across the back like quivers), these mini-weapons for show were some of the most frequent pokers of my person.

On the other hand, the katanas above are real, the merchandise of one of the exotic weapons dealers. The applicable regs were posted clearly, the salespeople professional, and they were doing good business. One thing about cons like this, though the crowd is frequently armed with blunt weapons at the very least (wands, scepters, bows, plastic swords), it is a very pleasant, peaceable crowd. Cheerful people saying excuse me, please, and thank you, who are generally careful and considerate of their fellow attendees. A libertarian paradise of sorts.


Even stormtroopers need action figures.

I know zombies have resurged in popularity, but Tofu the Vegan Zombie? I'm lost for words. And with that...

Sa-weeeeet

As you may remember, back when Amazon first launched the Kindle, I gave it a shot. For the most part, I liked it. Unfortunately the things that drove me crazy drove me really, really crazy, so I had to send it back. A few days ago Amazon announced that they'd be holding a press conference on Monday, and it was no secret that they planned to announce Kindle 2.0.

Well, the pictures are out, as is the release date--February 24--and I have to say it looks as if they've solved at least a couple of my major complaints with the original. It's also prettier, for those who care about those things, and slightly cheaper than the original, though not enough to buy it if you hoped to save money by buying ebooks instead of print books in the future.

You can find more pictures and details over on the MobileRead forum, where I got this picture.

Friday Fun - February 6, 2009

Thanks to www.legal-forms-kit.com

>Arizona: A company called "Guns For Hire" stages gunfights for Western movies, etc. One day, they received a call from a 47-year- old woman, who wanted to have her husband killed. She got 4-1/2 years in jail.

Thaaaaat’s all, pals!

Thanks for the laughs, Uncle Jimmy!

With Thanks to Jules Renard

The older I get, the more obsessed I am with retaining what Poirot calls my "little gray cells." A couple of days ago, I was on the cash register line at the Publix Supermarket over on Del Prado Boulevard and saw a puzzle book called Brain Games, subtitled Fun Ways to Lower Your Brain Age in Minutes a Day. Naturally, I bought it, and naturally, I didn't follow the orderly progression from the "warm up" section to the "cross-train your brain" section. Instead I jumped around looking for puzzles that I knew I'd enjoy. I jumped on the first acrostic anagram I saw. (page 11) The puzzle solution is a quote from Jules Renard. Who? I didn't know. I didn't care. But once I finished the puzzle, I looked him right up. Here's a tiny bio.

Jules Renard (1864-1910) was a French writer of novels and plays. He is recognized today as a minor classic, probably because of novels such as Histoires Naturelles (1896), which was illustrated by the artist Toulouse-Lautrec and set to music by Ravel.

And here's the acrostic anagram quote that sent me scurrying to find out about old Jules:

"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money."

In 2008, my writing earned just about enough money to treat three generations of my family to a fabulous pizza dinner complete with salad, soda and beer. Fortunately, no one drinks wine or I would have had to borrow against future earnings. So I'm grateful for Jules Renard's reminder that I am, in fact, a pro.

Terrie

Hammett Award Nominees Announced

Image source AP.

While Gail got us thinking about the Chandler era, we can't forget this suave rascal, and he's memorialized not only in his words, but in the crime writing award that bears his name. The complete press release is here, with more about the man here.

-- The North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers is pleased to announce nominees for their annual HAMMETT PRIZE for a work of literary excellence in the field of crime writing by a US or Canadian author. The nominees are as follows:

Heywood Gould, Leading Lady (Five Star)
Colin Harrison, The Finder: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
David Levien, City of the Sun: A Novel (Doubleday)
George Pelecanos, The Turnaround (Little, Brown)
Abraham Rodriguez, South by South Bronx (Akashic)

If you've read any of these, please share your thoughts in the comments. If not, get crackin' spines. The ceremony's coming up in October.

Now, That's a Book

I find this book absolutely fascinating. It's a Victorian decoupaged/collaged book that was found in the collection of Evelyn Waugh. It's part of the collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Here's a clip from what their website says about it:

This large, oblong decoupage book contains over 40 collages consisting of carefully cut out and assembled engravings from books. The decoupage has been embellished with hand-colored drops of "blood" and handwritten religious commentaries. The emphasis throughout is on images of the Crucifixion, birds, and snakes, all dripping with blood.

The album, familiarly known to us as the "Victorian Blood Book," has been an object of fascination, horror, and mystery since it arrived with the rest of the Evelyn Waugh library in 1967. Some time ago we discovered that it was commissioned by a Victorian businessman and statesman named John Bingley Garland (ca. 1790–1875), an Englishman who was one of the founding fathers of Newfoundland, and was given to his daughter Amy in 1854 as a wedding present.

Now, that's a wedding present! It's also art, and literature, and a sample of a culture that was radically unlike ours, no matter how similar it might have appeared on the surface.

[Hat tip: Dinosaurs and Robots]

Lush Life (Two Sentence Tuesday)

Whenever I read anything by Raymond Chandler I get writer's block. It can last anywhere from a day to a whole week, I think he's that good. His plots aren't that great but I don't care–it's his style and the way he sees things that blows me away. Therefore, I am always nervous to read any book whose writer is compared to him. Lush Life was reviewed as a cross between Chandler and Saul Bellow. Sections of it did remind me of Chandler, yet because the work seemed so more accessible, I was left feeling hopeful that maybe if I worked hard enough on my craft I also could write the following, beautifully streamlined prose someday.

He lived in one and a half rooms with his wife, the half tub in the kitchen covered with a wooden board to double as a dining table.

Again Matty and Yolanda stepped off to let Fenton do the talking. Ming Lam's wife, a small woman the exact size and shape of her husband, reluctantly offering them seats on a bedsheet-covered couch half-piled with Chinese newspapers.

Richard Price- 8 novels published

Despite the fact that he seemed to be in shock, Neary had a lean, edgy look about him that was accented by his short spiked, dark hair. He was dressed in a long sleeved, dark navy, jogging shirt with matching pants and black sneakers, his white iPod tucked in his armband.

Gail Stockton 'The Trail'

What have you been reading? Writing? Post your links in the comments and we'll update this post as the day goes on!

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• Kay Huddleston has two sentences on her blog about satisfaction and strength.
• David Cranmer has been reading this week and gave us two Edgar-nominated sentences he read.
• Crystal Phares has a couple sentences worth of road rage on her blog.
• Scott Parker has sentences about statues and symbols this week.
  

Rodeo Cheerleading in Their Town: Atlanta, GA

This MTM isn't quite about a town, but events I attended during a recent trip to Atlanta. Click to enlarge any of my pictures. My niece and nephew who live in Georgia are 8 year-old twins who I don't get to see often enough. After a long time, the stars finally aligned for me to visit and take them each on a special outing like I've done for my nearer nieces.

It's lucky that Atlanta Metro is so huge, because when the cool Legends car race I'd planned for my nephew was rained out on Saturday morning, it turned out there was also a rodeo in town that night. If I'd known that, I might have even picked it first. And, the rodeo was a 5-mile drive, not 70. Bonus!

(This is only one of the many reasons I've learned never to tell them anything- Not A Thing- about their surprises until we get to the doors and they can figure it out themselves. My 3 nieces and 1 nephew are all within a 2-year age range, and since about 6 years-old, their expectations and the development of opinions on everything can wind them up to breaking tension about what they think they may or may not like. It drives them nuts not to know in advance, but me less so.)

Actually, the rodeo was being filmed as an episode of a new reality show, conceived by Survivor's Mark Burnett, called World's Toughest Cowboy. Now I think we all know that private title belongs to the Bag Lady's Rancher, but for show, these guys were plenty tough. The litany of injuries from recent concussions to bruised and battered extremities was reason enough for Willie Nelson to tell mamas not to let their babies try this at home. However, even my warm human empathy for every impact couldn't dilute the stone-cold kick-assness. One of the competitors was riding while having to hold aloft a twelve-pound cast on his already broken arm. That's Canadian cowpuncher tough.

The 12 cowboys were competing in bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, and bull riding to earn points over the season toward winning their own ranch. Because of that, there was lots of super-hoopla as in the pic above which shows the competitors' intros on platforms while silhouetted by bursts of flame. There was also band, Whiskey Falls, performing an opening acoustic set on stools in the dirt, and scheduled for a fully wired-up concert after the riding concluded. Not staying through all that with the nipper, I can only really judge them by their national anthem, but it was a smooth, a capella, four-part harmony from guys with facial hair, taking my crusty self way back to the Oakridge Boys.


The competition was great and exciting. My nephew was absolutely captivated. The cake batter ice cream didn't hurt either. He'd never been to anything like it, which I knew, even though, as we finally entered the arena and he noticed the prepondeerance of cowboy hats, he said, "I sure hope this isn't a rodeo, because those are sooo boring." Classic. See long parenthetical above. However, his informed review the next day was "awesome!"

Also rating an A+ "awesome!" was the cheerleading competition to which I toted my niece the next day. She's been in tons of dance classes, is currently heavy into gymnastics, and I thought it would be fun for her to see older kids doing the kinds of things she's growing into. I'm informed that the tumbling technique, for example, isn't quite as precise, but the hairbows are way bigger. Cheersport was held in the Georgia Dome. They had different configurations of teams starting from 9am and continuing through 8pm, youngest classes earliest. We arrived in the afternoon to see older kids, and stayed as long as my niece wanted to watch. Two and a half hours as it happened.

All the teams got a little stage fog as they entered and the music and lighting were slick and professional. Each team had three minutes to perform and clear the stage. Hidden behind the tall stage curtain, the back half of the dome's floor was used for team warm-ups, the on-deck staging area, and ongoing awards presentations as each category closed out. There were some very talented and entertaining teams with lively music and creative choreography. Great for the short attention-span set, if you (ahem) know anyone like that.


I'm not sure every dad would love the costumes that some of the programs wore. They were all within a normal cheerleader theme, but I felt weird about the shiny-tight, non-pleated skirts and belly shirts on the under-14 crowd where I saw them. Still, overall, modesty reigned, and at least this cheering provides teamwork and athleticism along with the glitter bows.

This whole event was synchonized like precision clockwork itself, exactly per the printed program which must have listed close to 200 teams and their time slots. I'm making up the names, but it read like ABC Allstars 4:10, Elite Titanium Allstars 4:13. Elite Force Eagles 4:16... I have no idea why the team nomenclature involves so many allstars and elites and forces, but it does. The show never stopped, got behind, or flagged for a moment. Pretty amazing bit of organization. No ice cream for the niece, though. Sticky cotton candy was her choice of poison.

So, not my town. But much, much fun was had, and that was what visiting their town was all about. Visit the My Town Monday founder Travis Erwin's blog for links to more. It's good to have him back in the saddle.