Round Robin: The Books We Haven’t Written Yet, Part II

Turdus Migratorius, aka American Robin

Janet Dawson: Okay, fellow Perseverance Press bloggers – I know we’ve all got a million words percolating around in our heads.

What book would you like to write, but for one reason or another, you haven’t yet written said book? And why? Not enough time? Not the right time? Not a viable project? Needs more research than you’re willing to do right now? Is it likely we’ll see this project in the future? Or will it forever remain in the desk drawers of your brain? Here’s Part II!

Camille Minichino: I’ve been trying to write a dark book for several years, but can’t seem to manage it. Either my comic side comes through or the piece is pitifully cliche. I read dark — the Dexter books, Thomas H. Cook, for example — but can’t write dark, except for a couple of short stories. I’ve come up with a theory: reading about a dark character is one thing, but getting enough inside the head of a dark person to write over a long period of time, is another story. Also, inside my head is a dark memoir that will probably never see the light of print.

Shelley Singer: The one I want to write is third in line behind the book about coming of age in a corner grocery and a Jake Samson – or two – I’m dying to get to. It’s a historical novel, maybe a mystery, maybe a quest of sorts, set in medieval times. I’m fascinated by that era, both horrified and titillated by it. Knighthood. Dungeons. Fiefdoms. Really smelly people. Sends chills up my spine. But when I look back at how long it’s taking me, how much research and rewrite I’ve struggled through, to tell a story about life in the 1940s and ‘50s, I wonder about shouldering another five-year project. And I want to write Jakes, too. It seems unfair not to be able to lead at least three lives simultaneously.

Janet LaPierre: My most recent mystery novel, Run A Crooked Mile, was published almost three years ago. I’d enjoyed writing it, was pleased with it, but at the time I saw it as a stand-alone. So life went on, with many distractions and not much writing. But at times those characters, and that setting, wandered into my thoughts. Other characters occurred to me, particularly an odd little eight-year-old girl who came suddenly into the life of her aunt, middle-aged Rosemary Mendes, the central character in Run. And maybe another dog?

Eventually I had about six chapters of this story, and began to think of working on it seriously . . . and then hit the problem I’d  pretended didn’t bother me in the first book, a problem I’d avoided in all my other novels: I’d set the blasted thing in a real place!  Instead of a fictitious town in Mendocino County, Run happened in the Weaverville, the actual county seat of Trinity County and a place with its own distinct history and character. A town, I learned recently, that is one of 10 finalists in Budget Travel America’s Coolest Small Town contest. A town whose sheriff, a friendly man who’d helped me with details about law enforcement there, had retired and been replaced.

So I’m afraid this story may remain in my filing cabinet. Meanwhile, I’ll try to get back to learning some rudimentary Spanish for my other delayed project, a new Port Silva novel.

Sara Hoskinson Frommer: I’ve been thinking about this one, but what I have is the bare idea for a new mystery that’s nowhere near ready to talk about, not what I think you mean at all. Not sure it will ever be written. First I’ll have to work my way through some ethical minefields.

Taffy Cannon: For years now I’ve been collecting and reading books about women in the American West, with a vague notion that this material will eventually find its way into a novel set … somewhere. Sometime. Mining town? Prairie sod house? Gold Rush San Francisco? I still don’t know, but the pleasure is as much in the journey toward that ill-defined goal as it is in the actual execution. And bits and pieces from this have found their way already into both published and unpublished works. So I’d have to say that even though I can’t point specifically to one project, my Western Women shelf and I are comfortable with each other.

Sheila Simonson: I want to write the next Latouche County mystery. Just kidding. In the long term, I have an idea for a mystery set here in Vancouver in 1910 when Fort Vancouver was still a military installation and electric trolleys ran from the ferry across the Columbia out to the east county, where the landscape was just recovering from a terrible forest fire. It was the Progressive era, edgy and simultaneously innocent in a way we couldn’t be after World War I. A lot of things were happening in the arts and in technology and science, but most people still lived in a slow-moving rural milieu. Huh. I guess I have been thinking about all that.

Lora Roberts: It would be easier to tell you the books I have written rather than the ones I haven’t. But if I was going to write, which of the many books (thousands, really) that I haven’t written would I chose to write?
Well, the one that’s half done would be on the list—a follow-on to The Affair of the Incognito Tenant. But although I started that one, I haven’t been writing it.
I also haven’t written a seventh book with another character I like, Liz Sullivan. I’ve thought about a book with her niece Amy as viewpoint character. Amy’s attending Stanford’s biz school and seething with ambition until . . . well, I’m not writing that, so no point in going any farther.
I’m beginning to see a trend here.
My excuse for not writing is a day job herding other people’s words, leaving me with no energy for corralling my own. It’s no excuse, really, as I’m sure everyone knows. But I’m certainly not going to write a better one.

Round Robin: The Books We Haven’t Written Yet – Part I

Turdus Migratorius, aka American Robin

Janet Dawson: Okay, fellow Perseverance Press bloggers – I know we’ve all got a million words percolating around in our heads.

What book would you like to write, but for one reason or another, you haven’t yet written said book? And why? Not enough time? Not the right time? Not a viable project? Needs more research than you’re willing to do right now? Is it likely we’ll see this project in the future? Or will it forever remain in the desk drawers of your brain? Here’s Part I.

Lev Raphael: I’d like to write a WW II mystery with my late mother fictionalized as the sleuth, because my father told me recently that she had actually done some spy work at one point. Her sharp intellect and gift for languages would be perfect in that genre. The amount of research involved staggers me, and every time I think I might get to it, another book crops up, like my Gilded Age romance Rosedale in Love and my Austen mash-up Pride and Prejudice: the Jewess and the Gentile. Those took up several years and looking ahead, I have three other books I would like to write that will take less time: another mystery, another memoir, and a Regency-era mystery. Well, there’s always next decade . . .

Nancy Means Wright: In Mexico a number of years back, I saw a swarthy-skinned young man grab at a white-haired lady’s purse. She screamed, hit him on the head with the swinging purse – and he burst into tears. And then to my amazement, lady and thief embraced.

Why did she let him go? What was his/her backstory? Was there true remorse on his part? Did each change the other’s life in some way? Did he ultimately steal her money and harm her? Or was she a wacko? The story haunted me.

By the time my plane landed in Burlington, Vermont a week later, I had some fifty scribbled pages and three possible endings in my head. But then life interfered, along with myriad deadlines and a new grandchild. Years later I encountered a Mexican working on a local Vermont farm, and thought about that ill-matched pair again – but couldn’t find the pages and notes I’d scrawled. Until I began packing to move this past summer, and they came to light, half shredded by mice, in a box of old manuscripts. But again I had to put them aside.

I’m working on a new novel, and revising a YA manuscript under contract. I have to move on, I told myself, not back. I must meet my deadlines. And, alas, those don’t include an old lady embracing a thief! On the other hand, I might be able to at least work  that scene into the new mystery novel. One of my characters might hit this rogue on the head with the heel of her 18^th-century slipper and then . . .

Laura Crum: Many years ago I was very keen to write a non-fiction book about gardening (think Vita Sackville-West). Gardening interests me almost as much as my horses do, and I have done a great deal of research on the subject. I actually did write this book and my agent came very close to getting it published. But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, as they say. The ms is still lying around in some drawer or other, but as my passion for these garden books has somewhat worn itself out, I doubt I will revisit the project again. Every now and then someone asks me about it and I wonder a little . . . what if?

Jeanne Dams: I’ve had some books on the back burner for years, but I’ve never seemed to find the time to write them. One is a sort of David and Goliath story, not a mystery, but the story of a small-town’s fight to save its character, its very soul, from a faceless corporation, with a bittersweet ending. One is a thriller involving the Indiana State Penitentiary at Michigan City and a massive tornado. A third, which has taken a definite form in my mind only recently, is a book of meditations which I’ve thought of calling Musings About God and His People. One problem, of course, is that I need to find a publisher before I can devote a lot of time to a book, since my income is very small. I’ve written bits of all three books, and they keep nagging at me, but I don’t know if they’ll ever see the light of day.

Lea Wait: I have an area of my study devoted to unwritten (so far) books. Green, blue and yellow file folders marked with key words that mean nothing to anyone but me (it IS my study) hold notes, paragraphs, character studies, sources to check, and, in even, in some cases, notebooks full of research materials that have at some point fascinated me, and may someday again. Why have none of them become books?

Because another book was under contract. Because my agent said, “it’s not the right time,” for a certain subject. Because I started to fill out a plot and got so stuck I moved on to another idea. Another folder. Two books – one set in 1778 and one in 1848 – I’ve completed the research for, and even outlined. One was to be the sequel for a book that’s contract fell through and was never published. The other my agent had serious doubts about, so I didn’t write it. I want to. I still may. Maybe soon. But for now the brightly colored folders stand there, reminding me that there is always another book to write.

When the one I’m working on now is hitting a wall, sometimes I pick up one of those other folders and write a little, or do a little research, or a little plot thickening. Who knows? That might be the next book I write. In the meantime, it’s waiting for me. Always in the back of my mind. Just waiting.

Janet Dawson: I seem to have six or seven books in my head, wondering if I’ll ever have time to write them all. Several of these ideas are historical novels a’birthing. There’s one that takes place in New Mexico in the 1870s, at the time of the Lincoln County War. I’ve been thinking about it and doing research for quite some time. Then there’s the California Gold Rush plot, the Colorado plot.

I have an idea for a historical mystery that’s set in Alameda, the town where I live, taking place right at the end of World War I. Another idea is set in the Bay Area during World War II. I also have a plot, and a first chapter, coming from the 1970s, based on my experiences in the Navy on Guam. That book has echoes back to World War II. Hmm, war, conflict, mystery. I see a pattern here.

In addition to all of these, I have some contemporary plots in mind, one a standalone and another entry in the Jeri Howard series. Plus I’m having such fun writing the train book I might write another one.

* * *

Hey, there’s more. Check back tomorrow for Part II!

The Grand Elopement

Wendy Hornsby

I just don’t get Facebook.  Twice now I’ve hit the wrong button and sent messages that either weren’t what I intended or targeted someone I did not intend.

I admit that I haven’t put much time or effort into learning to love Facebook, or to becoming at all familiar or proficient with a tool that can help the writer “get oneself out there.”  For the same reason, I now have a webpage, http://www.wendyhornsby.com.  Knowing my limitations, I handed design and management of the webpage to a professional.  But Facebook – whatever happens there is all my fault.

I was simply adding stuff to my profile one day when I pushed a button that apparently sent the following message to everyone in theWestern Hemisphere:  “Wendy Hornsby has changed her marital status.”   I hadn’t changed anything except the Facebook profile; we’d been married for a while.

Congratulations started flowing in.  Among the well wishers was Harry, my editor at the Grunion Gazette, our local newspaper where my column, “No Mystery Here” runs every second Thursday (www.Gazettes.com).  When I told Harry that I wasn’t new to marriage but only new to Facebook commands, he suggested that there was a column in there.  Somewhere.

My husband, Paul, thinks there’s a book in there.  Not about Facebook, but about the circumstances that led us to, finally, change our marital status, i.e., get married.

I’ll skip the part about the night Paul got down on one knee.  Let’s just say that it was long ago enough that getting down on his knee wasn’t as big an issue at it might be today. 

We chose a date in fall and reserved the Church of St. Mary of  Aldermanbury on the campus of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.  The church has significance for our family – both his and mine – and that’s where we met.  Because the wedding was to be inMissouri, the event had to be in the fall – after the bugs and before the ice.

Before we announced our plans to anyone, Paul’s nephew Travis and his Dawn announced that they were getting married that fall, at St. Mary’s.  Travis, at that time an army captain, was deploying to Iraq at  Christmas.  Nothing should distract from their special event, we decided.  Certainly not a couple of oldsters toddling down the aisle.  We called the church and postponed for a year.

The next fall, my son Christopher married his lovely Cherylyn in a beautiful garden ceremony inFresno, where they live.   The following fall we went to Williamsburg, Virginiafor the wedding of another nephew.   By that point, we had given up on traipsing all the way toMissourifor our own nuptials and were looking for somewhere closer to home.  Before we made a decision about where and when that might happen, we got a save the date card from my cousin Douglas and his fiancée Rachel; in the fall we went toPlacerville.

Finally, five years after Paul got down on his knee, it was our turn.  Plans were made for family and a few close friends to join us on Thanksgiving weekend at a favorite resort on the Central Coast for a simple service on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. 

But, in September of that year, the day before my birthday, an old acquaintance dropped by and changed our plans, once again. 

I had gone to see the doctor a couple of weeks earlier about an infection.  Lymphedema, he thought, a less than lovely legacy of breast cancer treatment thirteen years before.  But, out of caution, he ordered some tests.  Each test led to another until finally I was sent for a biopsy.

I thought I had done my time with the Big C.  But there it was, caught on video, a brand new invasive tumor.  Good prognosis the surgeon told us.  Big surgery.

First thing the morning after we heard that bomb shell, after he wished me a happy birthday, Paul said, “Let’s get married today.”  And that’s what we did.

We got a license at the LAX courthouse, bought rings, and called my children with both pieces of news.  We all agreed to meet at my son’s house inFresno.  With my son officiating, we were married in his living room.  As fine an elopement as there could be.

Other than my kids and their spouses, the only witnesses were my grandogs, Fritz and Pelée, and various cats whose names I don’t keep straight.   After the ceremony, we went to lunch.  And there was cake, because I believe no big event is official until there’s cake. 

We went ahead with the Thanksgiving event as planned.  Before friends and family, on a bluff overlooking the ocean at sunset, we repeated our vows, and said thanks for bountiful blessings, including, again, good health. 

And then we had turkey.  And cake.  

What Does Your Cat Think of You? Animals in Our Books

                                                                                                      by Nancy Means Wright

     I’ve long been familiar with Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees, showing  them to be intelligent, social animals like ourselves. Or with scientists’ studies of grackles and crows who have learned to solve problems, use tools, and recognize faces (plot for a novel?) And I read with amazement the tale of the African Grey parrot, Alex, who could sound out words, add numbers, understand concepts, and whose last words to his teacher-companion were “You be good. I love you.” (His premature death at age 31 broke me up.)

     I was delighted then to see in a recent N.Y.Times article that animal studies have finally claimed a place in the college classroom. Dartmouth students can take a course in “Animals and Women in Western Lit: Nags, Bitches and Shrews” (how’s that for double entendre?).  N.Y.U. offers “Animals, People and Those in Between” (the In Between is anyone’s guess.)  And Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation  (1975), which argues against killing, eating, and experimenting on animals, will be on the reading list for both courses. For the animal question, according to Wesleyan philosophy professor, Lori Gruen, is now “right in the center of ethical discussion.”

Obviously a host of mystery novelists have been in the fictional vanguard of this movement. Consider Clea Simon’s cat Musetta, Carole Nelson Douglas’s PI Midnight Louie, Susan Conant’s parade of dogs, or Laura Crum’s western horses.  In the mid-nineties I began a series featuring dairy farmer Ruth Willmarth who names the thirty Holstein cows on her hardscrabble farm after real or literary females: Esmeralda, Jane Eyre, Oprah (who has not had me on her show though I named a cow after her). Each cow has her own peculiar personality, like ornery Zelda, named after Scott Fitzgerald’s irascible wife. In the fifth of the series, Zelda, under suspicion of Mad Cow disease, kicks a Fed who has come to quarantine the herd, and is shot.

     With her cows gone, Ruth loses more than her livelihood; she loses her beloved companions.  These big, clumsy field animals who carry the map of the world on their black-and-white flanks were mothers, milkers, keys to Ruth’s universe.  And to mine as well, for my whole series ended with Mad Cow Nightmare.  For a time I couldn’t write anything but poems or kids’ novels–until I went back a few centuries to enter the head and heart of real-life Mary Wollstonecraft, to whom an affable black cat brought comfort.  After watching Louis XVI ride by in revolutionary Paris to hear his sentence of death by guillotine, a lonely, saddened Mary cried out in a letter to her sister: “If only I had brought the cat with me!”

     Cows, cats, dogs, horses, parrots, crows, even llamas (I met one in my research who fell into a deep depression after the Feds euthanized the sheep she guarded) are more than background creatures in our books. They are characters in their own right, sidekicks for our protagonists, and an integral part of a book’s plot and setting. For setting, I feel, should be more than mere locale–it should be a reason for what happens in our stories. And that atmospheric field of cows (they lower my blood pressure just to look) was the raison d’etre for my series. 

                                                                                                            

     Our pets, outdoors or in, help as well with our crimesolving.  A criminal might talk or rant to his pet, and be overheard. (Did Shakespeare use this device for a confessional soliloquy?) Animal hair found at a crime scene, Sandra Parshall reminds us in a Poe’s Deadly Daughters blog  on “Animal Forensics,” can convict a perp when the hair is matched to his or her pet.  I myself, for instance, would never get away with a crime, for every item of clothing I own, including socks and pants, is a magnet for hair from my two Maine Coon cats. I leave furry shreds everywhere I go.

     Understandably then, it’s taboo in our books to deliberately harm an animal. For what animals think or have to tell us is something scholars have begun to take seriously.  In The Animal That Therefore I Am, The Times notes, philosopher Jacques Derrida considers not only what he thinks of his cat as it follows him into the bathroom one morning, “but what his cat thinks of him.”

     So as I sit writing this blog with a purring feline on my lap, I am listening to what she is telling me.  And it’s not about food–she has just had her mid-morning treat. It is more, I think, about love and connection. When I put a final period on this piece, I’m going to ask, “So, Amelia, how would you like to be in my next book? What part would you like to play?” 

Rescue! Or At Least Respite

Rescue! Or At Least Respite

 It occurs to me often these days that a  person—or a couple, or a family—should probably move house every ten years or so. But my husband and I live in a congenial   neighborhood of midsized, mostly-1930’s houses where people tend to stay put, with the occasional new roof or  maybe the addition of a room or two. Berkeley is a pleasant   place to live, with good schools, libraries, shops, even music and theater. So we raised our daughters here, and stayed. We retired, and stayed. When we wanted variety and a change of scene, we hitched up our trailer of the time and went east, or north, or south.  Eventually we noticed that we, and probably six other neighbors on this long, curving block, had been here for forty years, or near it.

And when one of these neighbors remarked one day, “My house is full!” I knew she wasn’t talking about people. My house is full, too. My husband, an engineer, throws away nothing that he feels might one day be useful, like jars of small, indiscriminate (to me) screws, or a big flat piece of plywood that once held up a child’s mattress, or the small portable generator that had been replaced by a larger, more efficient one. We have an attic, and what has proved to be storage space under the house, both of these more or less full. So we (he) recently added a storage shed in the back yard.

I have to add that I’m not guilt-free in this tendency to let things accumulate.  Another attractive cooking pot can be an addition instead of a replacement, and old but still useful bowls can be stacked higher in the cupboard when newer, pretty ones turn up. And wine glasses . . .? But my true hoarding instincts have a different, specific aim.

I have been a constant reader since age five, and after haunting libraries as a child, settled into adulthood by buying books—and buying books, and buying books. We moved into this house owning one three-shelf brick-and-pine-boards bookcase, and now we have five floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves and two tall free-standing bookcases.

So, guilt on both sides of the family. But recently, several circumstances caused me, at least, to change course. First, two of my favorite local bookstores folded, and I refuse upon principle to become a steady Amazon purchaser. Then my twice-a-week home-from-home, the Berkeley Public Library north branch, was closed for remodeling—for two years! A five-minutes drive away that was, with easy parking and a grassy lawn, a place to tie the dog and the liklihood of running into friends and neighbors.  The cavernous Berkeley main library is in the midst of the crowded downtown, with parking difficult if not impossible. Misery.

Add to this the fact that, as I mentioned in my last blog, crime fiction, my general entertainment standby, has recently become much bleaker and bloodier.  What to do? And then I looked, really looked, at my own bookshelves. I have mystery novels from Agatha Christie, Charlotte Armstrong, Margery Allingham, P. D. James; John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, K. C. Constantine, Colin Dexter, Tony Hillerman, John LeCarre. And many others. Add to that straight (?) novels from Thomas Pynchon, Anne Tyler, Shelby Hearon, Jane Austen, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Jim Harrison, John Updike. And many others of those, too. (Didn’t come across John Irving’s blockbuster, The World According to Garp. Perhaps I gave it away.)

And herewith a revelation. It turns out that a good book read maybe twenty years or so earlier can be very fresh.  I just finished, and enjoyed, Because of the Cats, by Nicholas Freeling, set in Amsterdam and published in 1963. I read—re-read—P. D. James’ Death of An Expert Witness, from 1977, and am now half-way through James’ Original Sin,  published in 1994. Really good stuff, and not much of it remembered. (Although I must say I find that James devotes more time to description of surroundings than I really enjoy.)

Add to all this the fact that my shelves contain a small but not insignificant number of  books that I’d bought over the years but had for whatever reason not yet read. Time to try those.

So – for a constant reader, life is again good.

 

The Case of the Flaming Fiat

When I write another Jake Samson book, I think I’ll give him a 1976 Fiat Spider Roadster.

I’m hoping it won’t be in memoriam.

I don’t know what I’ll do about his ’64 Ford Falcon. When I got tired of his ’53 Bel Air I had some fool steal it and wreck it. Jake is probably tired of his Falcon by now. Not much power or style.

Maybe I’ll have him find his Fiat like I found mine, on Craigslist. For sale very cheap by a group of Fiat enthusiasts operating out of a barn in Petaluma. A beautiful little convertible.  With a new top and tires and two new used front seats. And spare used door panel upholstery.  I’d been on my usual quest for a ’53 Studebaker Starlight Coupe. I had one in college and loved it. It once started after two winters in an unheated garage in Minnesota and carried me safely through a 400-mile blizzard all the way to Chicago. But reality kept getting in the way of that quest. I can no longer afford the wonderful car I paid $200 for in the Sixties.

And there was the Fiat. $1700. Of course it would need work. Thousands  of dollars later, it ran perfectly and was gorgeous on the inside. The outside, not so much. Badly in need of paint. I reupholstered the door panels myself, doing probably permanent damage to my too-damned-old-for-this right shoulder. I ignored the taunts of the fools who said Fiat stood for Fix It Again Tony.  I named her Fifi.

During the months in Bodega Bay I hardly drove it. Too cold out there most of the time for a convertible. And something went awry with its carburetor or possibly its accelerator. So I was eager to get it back to Petaluma. Get it fixed, get it painted, and drive around like I lived in Santa Barbara.

Then there was the move. Which despite the admittedly amateur mover’s estimate, took two days. Pure hell. And on the second day, he delivered the Fiat from Bodega Bay. I saw it coming down the street. Something looked odd.

He screeched to a stop in front of the house and leaped out screaming, “It’s on fire!”

Of course the garden hose hadn’t been unloaded yet. The movers threw open the trunk and  ran back and forth with pans of water until a neighbor showed up with a fire extinguisher. They filled the trunk with foam, and in their panic, dropped the keys in the trunk and closed it. I couldn’t find my spares. But that’s what locksmiths are for, right?

The problem was the muffler, breathing fire up poor Fifi’s back end.  With any luck, a new muffler and a scouring will take care of it. I’m proud of her for not exploding.

I think it she would be a perfect car for Jake.

Back Story Blues by Sheila Simonson (Buffalo Bill’s Defunct)

I tend to get interested in back story to the extent that I lose track of the main plot.  I do this both as a writer and as a reader, but it’s obviously more of a problem for me as a writer.  Right now I’m stuck in a novel in which back stories have overwhelmed the simple plot I had going and are taking that plot off in four directions at once.

The aggressive back story problem is solvable to some extent in a series that has recurring minor characters.  The bios those characters haul around with them can often provide the main plot of the next book.  All the same, the magnetic pull of assorted back stories can slow things down.  We are told that the reader needs a crisp, fast-paced narrative.  I don’t, but then I read too fast.

When I’m writing a novel, I think hard before I introduce a named character, because naming them seems to make them people, “rounds them out.”  Once my characters are named, they develop back stories almost by magic.  In Aspects of the Novel (old book), E.M. Forster talked about round characters and flat characters.  Round characters are like real people in that they always have the ability to surprise you by what they do and what they have done, whereas flat characters are utterly predictible.  Sometimes flat characters like Mr. Micawber can be summed up in a single phrase.  Dickens used flat characters very effectively, but, according to Forster, Jane Austen created nothing but round characters–always three-dimensional, always capable of surprising the reader.  Miss Bates in Emma, for instance, is as close to a cartoon character as Austen gets, but just when Miss B. seems to be summed up by her own silliness, she has a moment of great dignity that makes Emma (who is downright spherical) look bad.

Most mystery writers who do series novels lean heavily on back story.  Dorothy L. Sayers springs to mind.  In contrast, most of Dick Francis’s books have been stand-alones, and the back story didn’t carry from one book to the next.  Some series writers seem to have a template paragraph they pull up and insert to remind the reader of what went on in other books.  I find that clumsy, both as a writer and as a reader, so I try to avoid referring to my earlier books and to make each story readable on its own.  However, I’d welcome suggestions from anyone on how to handle the problem in other ways.

What should be done about bodacious back story?  Chop it out or let it develop?  A novel is a thought experiment, a virtual society.  As Benedick says in another context, the world must be peopled, and my feeling is that each new book in a series should introduce more new people than recurring people–not to mention fresh conflicts and ideas.  But the back story is always there.

A Virtual Ride

by Laura Crum

I probably never would have started writing were it not for my passion for horses. It was my desire to portray the western horse world that I loved so much, along with my admiration for the horse-themed mystery novels of Dick Francis, that set me on the path to writing mysteries about an equine veterinarian. Horses are still an enduring love of mine, and the other blog I write for, equestrianink blogspot, is all about people who own horses and write about horses. So all of my posts there are horse-themed.

Today, as I sat here facing the computer, considering what I should write for this blog, I wondered if I couldn’t write about horses. Writing about horses and the landscape is what I do best. But then I wondered if even one other person who reads this blog is interested in horses. Surely plenty of you are interested in beautiful landscapes, though? Maybe some of you would enjoy riding a horse through the lovely scenery of the Monterey Bay area, especially if you could do it “virtually?”

So today I thought I’d post a few photos showing my life with horses, and the landscapes I ride through (and write about). Take you on a little tour, as it were. What you see below is my inspiration to write, and without the love I’ve always had for horses and the natural world, I doubt I’d ever have become an author.

Lets embark on our virtual ride, shall we? Below you see our mount, Sunny. Doesn’t he look like every little girl’s dream pony come to life? And yes, this is really my horse, not a photo I stole off the internet. Sunny features in my two most recent books, and I think its easy to see what fun he’d be to write about—for someone who loves horses.

Sunny happens to be not just cute, but a very reliable, steady trail horse (this is actually the reason I bought him—the cuteness was an extra bonus). In the photo below “you” are on Sunny’s back, headed down the trail that leads from my front gate to my favorite view of the bay. The photo was taken in June, so things are green and leafy.

  

In the photo below my son and I have reached the place we call the “Lookout”, about a one hour ride from our home, and are gazing out at the Monterey Bay. Palomino Sunny and sorrel Henry are enjoying the view as well.

            And now, here we are riding on the beach, going towards Monterey. You can see Sunny’s fuzzy yellow ears in the foreground (this photo was taken in December, and the horses have their winter coats on), and my son on Henry and our friend Wally on his gray horse, Twister.

Here “you” are riding Sunny towards Santa Cruz through the sand dunes. Monterey Bay is on your left.

And now, for a change of scenery, we are riding through the redwood forest. Off to your left you see a canyon with Aptos Creek at the bottom. My son is on Henry ahead of us, following a friend on a black horse (hard to see in the shade). This photo was taken on the midwinter solstice—our weather this year has been really mild. It was all of sixty degrees that day.

Here we drop down to the bottom of the canyon and cross the creek. Sunny’s ears are in the foreground.

OK, now we’re home again and have turned Sunny loose to graze. I hope you enjoyed your virtual ride—and a little peek into the world I write about.

Puzzling it Through

by Taffy Cannon

             I can’t remember a time when I didn’t enjoy jigsaw puzzles, and my first specific memory is the satisfaction of correctly positioning all 48 states in their USA frame.  I also recall Wyoming being impossible to differentiate from Colorado and confess that to this day I can never  remember if Kansas sits on top of Nebraska or vice versa.

            My mother worked jigsaw puzzles on a card table in the sun room, and certain of her puzzles became old friends or sworn enemies.  I liked to sit and work these with her, though never for very long, and I took my greatest pleasure in meandering past and stopping just long enough to fill a significant gap or two.  It’s over forty years since my mother died, but I still have one of her puzzles from that era, Disks of Newton by the Bohemian painter Frantisek Kupta, an abstract artist who died in 1957 – but has two current Facebook pages.

            Springbok called him Frank, and I was stunned to realize that in all the years I’ve owned and worked this puzzle, I never once read his bio on the back of the box.  This makes me feel even more lowbrow than usual, but bless the Internet.  I was able to not only easily learn Kupta’s history, but also to find endless examples of his art, including many paintings from the Disks series and an actual picture of the very same puzzle box that I’ve moved thousands of miles around the country over the past four decades.

The1965 jigsaw features 360 pieces, each one different, and is fiendishly difficult, including several inches of border that don’t directly link at all.  I’ve worked it many times over the years, most recently between Christmas and New Year’s Day, and every time I am surprised at how much harder it is than I expect.  (A similarly sized and configured Jackson Pollock of my mother’s was all but impossible, and I got rid of it a long time ago.)

            Puzzles are not part of my normal routine, and most often I’ll work them when I am sick, specifically too sick to read.  Once I get started, I do them in spurts, running through several before suddenly hitting a personal wall (or feeling significantly better), at which point I pack them all up again, sometimes for years.

            In addition to their palliative powers, I’ve come to realize is that working jigsaws for me can be a way of analyzing complex issues while appearing to be at least marginally productive.  Sometimes these are related to writing and other times to more personal matters.  Occasionally, as in my recent dalliance with the Disks of Newton, the two coincide.

            I follow a general method for assembling a jigsaw puzzle, and I realize now that it’s much the same routine I use to plot a novel or structure a work of nonfiction.

            I start with the edges, the borders, the boundaries of what I hope to accomplish.  Only rarely will I assemble the entire border before I dash off on one or more tangents, piecing together some striking interior element, often because it taunts me with vivid color.  My favorite jigsaw puzzles usually contain a number of smaller puzzles, such as sections of a shadow box, or seed packets, or jungle parrots.

            I usually keep the cover of the puzzle box available as a visual aid, though purists would consider this cheating.  Knowing the general appearance of a puzzle can be useful and save some time, though part of the fun is always in seeing how and where the smaller sections – we’ll call them subplots – fit into the larger overview.

            As in plotting, perspective can make all the difference.  Sometimes I’ll find myself getting muzzy after a certain period of time, particularly if I was sick to start with.  At this point nothing is as useful as a change of perspective.  In life, in fiction, or in uniting several hundred small bits of cardboard, viewing a difficult scene from some other angle can often clarify matters with wondrous speed.

          At times the various parts of a jigsaw suddenly all come together.  I find this comparable to those wonderful moments in writing when all your various threads and strands and nuggets suddenly take on their own lives and produce a tapestry that may even be better than what you had in mind.  If only this could be counted on to happen every time.

          The final similarity between jigsaw puzzles and writing will be self-evident to many writers: my cats are absolutely certain that none of this could be accomplished without their assistance.

Welcome to Lea Wait’s Study ….

 Until about seven years ago I’d never had a “room of my own,” at least one designated just for writing, not for sleeping, eating,

Entrance to Lea's Study

watching TV, soothing fevered brows, or reading bedtime stories.

Of course, I’d dreamed about having one, and I’d planned one. And so when the oyster shell plaster walls in part of my 1774 home began to crumble and it was clear some changes needed to be made, I was certain what I wanted. Not another guest room.  (Although I do love having guests. Sometimes.) I wanted to re-do one small room into the study of my dreams.

Welcome!  (The letters are framed 19th century brass stencils.)

Two walls are covered by built-in bookcases. They hold the reference books I use most, plus materials I take with me for “show and tell” when I visit libraries and schools, and research materials for books I’ve written but which haven’t sold yet. (I’m always optimistic.)  Why file those papers and books away in the room (yes, an entire other room) I use for my books on Maine, American history, psychology, forensics, etc., when I could have the specific books I might need right here at hand?  By the way, that’s one of my favorite Winslow Homer prints hanging on the bookcase, bedecked by a Red Sox cap. All work and no play, you know.

There are two windows in my office.  I can see out both of them from my seat at the corner desk. One looks out over the river, reminding me how lucky I am to be in Maine. The other gives me a view of my driveway, letting me know if anyone has driven in. That’s for convenience and security. I live in the country.

On my right hand is a refrigerator for water and iced tea, and it’s topped by an electric kettle, and one of my favorite mugs from a local Maine potter,  so I don’t have to stop to go downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of tea in the middle of a chapter. Unless, of course,  I need an excuse to stop.  Then I can always be out of tea bags. (The NINK newsletter lying there is the monthly publication of Novelists, Incorporated:  one of the writers’ organizations I belong to. Wonderful group.)

On the shelf above the desk are a couple of my favorite dictionaries and thesauruses, including a 19th century one if I’m writing an historical. A  Word XP for Dummies. A Chicago Manual of Style. Books on prints.  A Zip Code directory. Basic tools of the trade that are used often.

The wonderful little stand with the green index cards in it has replaced the stacks of cards I used to have on my desk. It’s from Levenger’s, one of my favorite places.  Expensive, but a writer’s heaven. I write plot and character notes on the index cards and then stick them in the stand; as I incorporate the details in the book I’m writing the cards get discarded, or put in a folder to check later. I can switch them around, or tear them up, as necessary, and always see where I’ve been and where I’m going. I love that stand. Right now it’s holding cards for my next Maggie Summer Shadows mystery.  I’m writing about 10 pages a day, so it’s helping me keep on track.

Right Side of Desk

On the other side of the desk I keep my appointment calendar, the reference books and notes related to the book I’m writing now, my two-line telephone (one line for me; one for my husband,) and a pencil holder my daughter Elizabeth made in high school ceramics. (The orange flower a young fan gave me when I spoke at her school.)   Above the desk is my Agatha Nomination, family pictures, fun quotations, name tags from conferences I’ve spoken at,  and good luck tokens.

Left Hand Side of Desk

There’s also a nineteenth century oil portrait of Edgar Allan Poe that my husband bought at an auction before we were married to give me good luck.  Edgar oversees all my work.

I haven’t shown you the remaining, wall, although I do love it, too.  (I love all of this room!) It holds six file cabinets (Levengers, your catalog is dangerous!) and the 19th century wooden wardrobe which used to hold clothing in this room (homes built in 1774 weren’t equipped with closets) and which I’ve converted to a cabinet to hold my office supplies. That side of the study also holds my printer/scanner, open files for events I’m scheduled to do in the next 12 months, and ideas/tentative synopses for possible next books.

I spend 10-12 hours a day in this room.  I’m glad to have had you visit. But, sorry. Now I have to get back to work.  Thanks for coming!

Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe