A Deadly Dinner

By Beth Terrell

This past Saturday evening, Tony Burton of Wolfmont Press hosted A Deadly Dinner in Calhoun, Georgia. I was one of eight authors there to participate in something akin to speed dating for authors. Eight authors, eight tables. At each table were a group of guests who had, for a variety of reasons, paid to have dinner with us. Even though I'm not well known enough to draw a crowd like this all by myself, and even though the three-course meal may have been the main draw for several of the guests, it was a heady feeling.

The event was held at the Harris Art Center, where volunteers had set up round tables elegantly draped in white and labeled with a number from one to eight. My fellow authors and I were each given a "super-secret, highly confidential" number (mine was 5), and as Tony introduced each of us, we went to the table with the corresponding number. This is the part that always makes me nervous (What if they don't like me? What if I can't think of anything to say? What if nobody else can think of anything to say?), but of course, everyone was charming, kind, and generous. Every fifteen minutes, Tony would tap his wine glass, and the authors would switch tables (since I had 5, I went to 6 next, then 7, and so on). Interestingly, each table had a character of its own. Some groups were interested in the writing process, others in the journey to becoming a writer, and some in other topics altogether. At one table, we talked primarily about horses. At another, we talked about teaching and education. At one, we discussed our favorite authors (present company excepted, of course). I also got a chance to trot out my new pen name--Jaden E. Terrell--and felt gratified when the responses were favorable.

After each author had made a complete circuit, we signed books and chatted with individual guests. I bought a book from each of my neighbors, both cozies, which I don't usually read. I chose one because I loved the cover and the other because the protagonist is a guardian angel named Augusta. Since I had a great-aunt Augusta, and she was the closest thing to a saint I've ever known, I knew I couldn't leave without that one. Especially since the title included a Jabberwocky. How can you not buy a book called "The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders"?

I thought about that on the way home. I think of my book as appealing to people who like hardboiled PI novels, but just as I bought two books I wouldn't normally read for wholly personal reasons, there may be people who don't like PI novels, but who love Nashville-based stories or horses or children with Down Syndrome. Or modern-day cowboys or men named Jared. I've read that one of the first things you should do when coming up with a marketing plan is to go through your book and write down all the things that might appeal to a group of people other than your primary audience. Until I realized I had to buy Mignon Ballard's book because it reminded me of my great-aunt Augusta, I didn't really understand the power of those connections.

My fellow authors were Gerrie Ferris Finger (a former AJC writer and author of The End Game), Mignon Ballard (who writes the Augusta Goodnight mysteries and nine other novels, with Miss Dimple Disappears debuting in November), Randy Rawls (author of the Ace Edwards, Dallas PI series), Marion Moore Hill (author of the Scrappy Librarian Mysteries and the Deadly Past Mysteries), Mary Anna Evans (author of the Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries), Fran Stewart (author of the Biscuit McKee cozy mystery series), Kathleen Delaney (Author of And Murder for Dessert, Give First Place to Murder and Dying for a Change).

Of course, the roster would not be complete without Tony Burton, who worked tirelessly to bring it to fruition and make it special. Thanks, Tony. See you next year?

A Conversation With Gerrie Ferris Finger, Part 2

By Pat Browning



Yesterday Gerrie Ferris Finger talked about the Malice Domestic Contest and her 2009 winning entry, THE END GAME, to be published April 27. Today, the subject is her romantic suspense series with Desert Breeze Publishing.


Pat: Tell us about your Laura Kate Plantation Series. WHEN SERPENTS DIE is an interesting title. What is its significance?


Gerrie:
This book, the series actually, was written before The End Game. I call the series southern gothic romances. There's always death in southern gothics.

When Serpents Die is a novel of passion and greed that leads to the death of Royce Lee. The serpents in the tale are four people that form a romantic quadrangle. Two couples – long time friends – begin to hate each other when Royce steals his best friend's wife, then discards her for his own wife, then goes back to his best friend's wife. Think snakes in a barrel.


Pat: Desert Breeze Publishing (www.desertbreezepublishing.com) is a new and interesting publisher currently publishing only e-books, but with an eye on future print editions. Why did you decide to put your Laura Kate books with them?


Gerrie:
I had an agent who couldn't sell the Laura Kate series. There was interest, but no buyers. I put the manuscripts in a computer file and went to work on the Moriah Dru series. My agent and I parted company and I immersed myself in writing. I didn't submit any of the manuscripts to agents or publishers.


Then, I read Desert Breeze's call for manuscripts, I believe on DorothyL, the reader/writer/librarian forum that's a must-belong-to if you love books. I submitted to this new romance (no erotica) company and Serpents was accepted. The second in the series, Honored Daughters, came out in October 2009. According to my contract, I owe DB two more Laura Kates. The Desert Breeze people are a dream to work with, and I hope our ebooks will see print one day.


Pat: Amazon.com is promoting its Kindle version of the first two books? Have you downloaded the e-versions and if so, what do think of them?


Gerrie:
I have to confess I don't owe a Kindle or any other device onto which my books can be downloaded. In PDF form, they read like a book on a computer screen. (I prefer paper and ink). Desert Breeze does an excellent job with the conversions.


Pat: I read that you were born in St. Louis, Mo., now live in Georgia, and are married to Col Alan Jay Finger, USMC (Ret.) I’ve also read “once a Marine always a Marine.” Are you and your husband involved in any military organizations?


Gerrie:
Oh yes. My husband is a Charter Member of the Kings Bay Chapter of MOAA – which is the Military Officers Association of America. We support the commissaries, PXes and golf courses of every military base we live near and visit.


Pat: What brought you from St. Louis to Atlanta?


Gerrie:
To work in advertising. After The Atlanta Constitution lifted its hiring freeze I joined the staff. The newspapers weren't combined at that time.


Pat: One last question: Tell us three things about yourself that would surprise your readers.


Gerrie:
I don't like heights, but when I first started at the Constitution, I was persuaded to go up in a hot air balloon for a story. We were to land at the Chastain Golf Course, but we got blown off course and barely missed utility wires, landing in the yard of an editorial writer I barely knew, smashing his azaleas and impatiens. That writer and I got to be good friends. Remember that, Dick Williams?

I don't run 10Ks like my heroine, Dru, in The End Game.

I'm not a martial arts expert like my heroine, Laura Kate, in When Serpents Die and Honored Daughters.


Pat: Thank you so much for sharing your life and work with us. Best of luck with THE END GAME, and your LAURA KATE series.


***
Note: Gerrie Ferris Finger’s Laura Kate series:
WHEN SERPENTS DIE  - Book One in the Laura Kate Plantation Series - April 2009
HONORED DAUGHTERS - Book Two in the Laura KatePlantation Series - October 2009
WAGON DOGS  - Book Three in the Laura Kate Plantation Series - September 2010
Gerrie on the Web:
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.blogspot.com/
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com/
***
ABOUT Gerrie Ferris Finger’s colleague Lewis Grizzard. He wrote a syndicated column that appeared in some 450 newspapers and wrote 20 books. He had open-heart surgery in 1993, never quite recovered and died in 1994. The title THE LAST BUS TO ALBUQUERQUE is from Grizzard's reply to his doctor before his heart surgery. The doctor asked if he had any questions, and Grizzard answered: "Just one: When's the next bus to Albuquerque?"

Grizzard’s books are mostly out of print but still available through Amazon.com’s used book service. This title caught my eye: DON’T BEND OVER IN THE GARDEN, GRANNY, YOU KNOW THEM TATERS GOT EYES.


The editorial blurb says: “This time Lewis Grizzard has gone and done it--written a book about sex, as seen through his bespectacled, ironic squint. He tells us why Junior Leaguers don't do it in groups, why Baptists won't do it standing up, and why Richard Nixon never did it, among other things.”


I laugh just reading about it.

A Conversation With Gerrie Ferris Finger, Part 1

By Pat Browning

Gerrie Ferris Finger is a writer who writes, pointing her pen at anything and everything that interests her and everything required for a job, and she has more than one publisher. That may be unique! Let’s do a quick rundown.


She spent 20 years reporting on everything from soup to nuts at a major newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. After the death of colleague and mentor Lewis Grizzard she compiled his newspaper columns into two books, THE LAST BUS TO ALBUQUERQUE and SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD. She compiled her own best columns into Q&A ON THE NEWS. In 2000, she wrote a novel, LOOK AWAY FROM EVIL.


Fast forward now. Desert Breeze is publishing four romantic suspense novels in Finger’s Laura Kate Plantation series. The first, WHEN SERPENTS DIE came out in 2009. Finger signed a contract for two romance e-books with Desert Breeze Publishing AND – she won the Malice Domestic/St. Martin’s Minotaur Best First Traditional Novel Competition. Her entry, THE END GAME, will be out April 27.

Pat: First things first, Gerrie. The editorial review at Amazon.com says: “…The End Game features a strong new heroine in a vivid Southern setting. Gerrie Ferris Finger puts a new spin on the classic mystery novel.” Sounds great! Tell us what the book is about, and where the idea came from.


Gerrie:
Before I began The End Game, a sensational case in Atlanta ordained the plot. A preschool child went missing. He'd been in foster care since infancy, passing from foster family to foster family. How could the system lose a child? As far as I know, he was never found. About that same time, Atlanta police began busting massage parlors, finding ten-to-twelve-year-old foreign girls working in the back rooms, giving more than a traditional massage. The two sad cases combined to inspire The End Game.


Pat: I looked up the guidelines for the Malice Domestic Competition. Among other things, they say:
(quote)
*Murder or another serious crime is at the heart of the story, and emphasis is on the solution rather than the details of the crime.
*Whatever violence is necessarily involved should be neither excessive nor gratuitously detailed, nor is there to be explicit sex.
*The "detective" is an amateur, or, if a professional (private investigator, police officer) is not hardboiled and is as fully developed as the other characters.
*The detective may find him or herself in serious peril, but he or she does not get beaten up to any serious extent.
(end quote)


So squeamish readers won’t have to skip the scary parts?


Gerrie:


I'm laughing because skipping the scary parts would be skipping the murder of a human being, a must in most "murder" mysteries. Therefore, I shouldn't be laughing, should I?


My interpretation of the Malice/St. Martin's rules is that violence and sex should not be lurid. The murder should be off book, or if depicted in the pages, no gory details shown. Stab or shoot the guy and move on to solving the crime. If characters in the novel are lovers, the bedroom door should be firmly shut.


The Malice Domestic organization and St. Martin's Minotaur imprint sponsor the Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition. Malice Domestic is a mystery writers and readers convention that celebrates the traditional "cozy" genre. Among the venerated writers are Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Malice contest winners receive tea pot trophies, the tea pot being a trademark of the cozy mystery.


Cozy is a misunderstood genre. It's more than quirky old ladies and gentlemen – maybe throw in a precocious child as Christie liked to do – sitting around drinking tea and discussing the bizarre neighbors. It's more than talking cats and recipe mysteries. It can cross over and become part of another genre, say the thriller.

The End Game is not cozy. Let me quote Robin Agnew, of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, from her recent review: "… it’s (The End Game) hardly a cozy, though it gives a nod to the traditional mystery through the use of an actual locked room murder and some tricky stuff involving train whistles. Dorothy L. Sayers would be proud. But then she wasn’t really a cozy writer, either."


Robin goes on: "Ferris’ ethos …(is) fairly hard boiled, and so is the topic she’s chosen to write about: missing children. Her spare prose and unsentimental writing style get you through some of the hard stuff in the story. Her main character, Moriah Dru, runs an agency called Child Trace, Inc. She’s retired from the police force and often works with her ex-partner, Rick Lake , as she does in this book. Lake is also Dru’s lover, but none of that complicates the story too much. Like a runaway freight train, this novel is all about narrative drive."


The "hard stuff" Robin refers to is the research I did on pedophilia and the callous attitudes in some countries. I don't belabor what I discovered, but some perspective was necessary to the story. I'll say here, there is no overt depiction of child abuse. The girls are gone when the story opens. The point of view is first person so readers know (or should know) there won't be a point of view from the bad guy. It's a chase mystery. Dru and Lake must find the girls before the unknown abductors take them out of the country. There's a murder -- off book, of course -- in the aforementioned locked room.


Pat: I went to your web site and read the excerpt. Loved the voice and conversational style. How much of your book and your style come from your life at the Journal-Constitution? How long did you work on the book before entering it in that famous contest? And why did you decide to enter?


Gerrie:


Although I've always been a cut-to-the-chase writer -- wasn't it Elmore Leonard who said to leave out all the parts nobody reads anyway -- my style was honed on news stories. I wrote a lot of travel stories and other features, which allows a little more elaboration, but newspapers give you a "hole" for your story. If your editor says you have twenty inches, you must boil your story down to twenty inches -- and hope editors don't start cutting your story from the bottom.


I worked on The End Game for, gosh, hard to say with all the revisions, maybe four months on the first draft. It's not a long book. It takes place in a twenty-four hour span. The way I work is, after the first draft, I'd get an idea for another book. I'd put the draft aside and draft another story. During this drafting, I'd review older manuscripts, polishing and tinkering. I've never been finished with a manuscript. If I had my published works before me now, I'd fiddle with them.


Pat:  After you won and the contract was signed, how much to-ing and fro-ing took place? Were there lots of editing changes or is the book we’ll be reading basically the same book you submitted? How about the cover? It’s a great cover. Did you have any input or approval? Does it reflect the story’s theme or thrust?


Gerrie:


I'm delighted to say you'll be reading the book I wrote. There were no plot or theme changes.


Ruth Cavin is my editor. Last fall, her assistant e-mailed to say my book was queued next for Ruth to edit. I braced myself. Even though Ruth read it for the contest, now she was reading it to take it apart. Editors, in my experience, like to put their imprints on a work, but, to my surprise, Ruth's hand-written changes in the margins were few -- a word changed, a better phrase inserted, a typo corrected.


The copy editor made minor changes, too. I'm easy to get along with when it comes to editors. At the AJC, I got used to major changes in my copy. Pat, have you ever walked into your newsroom and saw the lede to your story completely rewritten? You get used to it, or you head out the door.


About the cover. I was asked what my ideas were. I said I loved trains, which I do. Trains have a prominent role in The End Game, but I pictured a different cover than they presented. The graphic designer saw something in the copy that I didn't and conveyed it on the cover. It's wonderful. I can say that with pride, because I didn't design it.


Pat: One more question before we leave the contest. Do you have any advice, warnings or tips for an author planning to enter the 2011 Malice Domestic contest?


Gerrie:


Advice: write from your heart and soul; buff the manuscript to perfection and send it off. You enter the contest in October, and, if you haven't heard by March 31, you haven't won. So, while it goes through the process of elimination, don't sit and wait, work on a sequel or another book.


The process starts with readers who receive manuscripts from all over the country. They choose the best in their estimation and send them to St. Martin's. I don't know how many manuscripts Ruth received, but she told me that she'd winnowed it down to four or five to choose from -- all very good -- but mine was the best. Thank you, Ruth.


Tomorrow: We’ll talk about Gerrie’s series with Desert Breeze Publishing, the Laura Kate Plantation Series.


(Photos from Gerrie’s blog and website)

Hillerman Country

By Pat Browning

Contest deadlines have come and gone – except for one of the best. The Tony Hillerman contest for best unpublished novel set in the Southwest is open until June 1. No entry fee, and a great prize – publication by St.Martin’s Press and a $10,000 advance. What’s not to like?


Thanks to Tony’s daughter, Anne Hillerman, the Tony Hillerman Writers Conference has been reformatted to a writers weekend and will go on in November. Conference details are at Anne Hillerman’s Word Harvest web site: http://wordharvest.com/

Here’s a quick look at rules for the novel contest.


Rules for the 2010 HILLERMAN MYSTERY COMPETITION
Sponsored by the Tony Hillerman Writers Conference (THWC) and St. Martin's Press, LLC
1. The Competition is open to any professional or non-professional writer, regardless of nationality, who has never been the author of a published mystery (as defined in subparagraph 2(a) below) and is not under contract with a publisher for publication of a mystery. Only one manuscript entry is permitted per writer.
2. All manuscripts submitted: a) must be original, previously unpublished works of book length (no less than 220 typewritten pages or approximately 60,000 words) written in the English language by the entrant; b) must not violate any right of any third party or be libelous; and c) must generally follow the guidelines below.
GUIDELINES
1. Murder or another serious crime or crimes is at the heart of the story and emphasis is on the solution rather than the details of the crime.
2. The story's primary setting is the Southwestern United States, including at least one of the following states: Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Southern California and/or Utah.
3. Nominees will be selected by judges chosen by the editorial staff of St. Martin's Press, with the assistance of organizers of the THWC, and the winner will be chosen by St. Martin's editors. The decision of the editors as to the winner of the Competition will be final. St. Martin's reserves the right not to select any winner if, in the sole opinion of the editors, none of the manuscripts submitted are of publishable quality.
4. An attempt will be made to notify the Competition winner, if any, no later than October 31, 2010.
5. If a winner is selected, St. Martin's Press will offer to enter into its standard form author's agreement with the entrant for publication of the winning manuscript. After execution of the standard form authors' agreement by both parties, the winner will receive an advance against future royalties of $10,000.
6. All entries must be received or postmarked no later than June 1, 2010 …


Detailed rules and an entry blank can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/yju83f7

No winner was chosen in 2009, but Roy Chaney won in 2008 for THE RAGGED END OF NOWHERE, set in Las Vegas, and now available.


Here’s part of Chaney’s acceptance speech. (The full speech is at the Word Harvest web site)


***Quote***
The Ragged End of Nowhere is set in Las Vegas, and the great beauty of Las Vegas lies in its inherent absurdity. The most obvious example of this is the simple fact that this glittering city that never sleeps has been plunked down in the middle of one of the most inhospitable desert landscapes in the United States.


The idea of building a couple of dozen casino hotels with a hundred thousand or so guest rooms in the middle of a barren desert where the average rain fall is negligible and the only major source of water is a river that has to be shared with six other states is not a shining example of good reasoning. And the notion that an entire city with a metropolitan population of nearly two million people might take root in such a place is nothing short of preposterous or it would be, if it hadn't already happened.


… Not only are Las Vegans aware of the absurdity that surrounds them, they actually seem to embrace it. As just one example, the mayor of Las Vegas is a former mob lawyer who has the habit of showing up at official functions surrounded by sequined showgirls in feathered tiaras. He considers himself a doctor of mixology and when the mood strikes him he teaches classes to all and sundry on the proper construction of a martini. If any other mayor in the country displayed this kind of joie de vivre he would be rousted out of city hall so fast it would make his head spin, but in Las Vegas it's just another day at the office.
***End Quote***


And speaking of contests:
Next week I’ll have
A Conversation with
Gerrie Ferris Finger,
a prolific writer whose mystery novel,
THE END GAME, will be released on April 27.
The novel won the Malice Domestic/St. Martin's Minotaur competition for
Best First Traditional Mystery Novel in 2009.
..........................................Stay tuned!


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Photo of Window Rock from web site of OETA, Oklahoma’s PBS station.