It never rains but it pours

by Carola

Since December, only one month has passed without one of my Daisy Dalrymple mysteries staging a reappearance in one form or another. First came four new audiobooks, the 8th through 11th in the series. Last month it was a reissue of the second, The Winter Garden Mystery, in trade paperback, over 20 years after it first came out in hardcover--and with brand new art. These are some of the covers it's had over the years:

Yes, THREE German editions!

The latest, coming out in the UK on June 2nd, is the paperback edition of Daisy's most recent adventure, Superfluous Women.  (It won't be out in the US in paperback till September.)

So--NOTHING coming out in July or August? Unless the proposed Russian translations of the first three in the series unexpectedly materialize.

Then another 2 months until the fourth Cornish mystery, Buried in the Country, makes its first appearance in hardcover and Kindle--in both the US and UK--in December.

What a year!

Guest blog links

by Carola

I'm posting a couple of links today as I'm knee-deep in taxes AND having fits about my approaching deadline.

Here's a post about Zeitgeist--If you don't know what that is, click here http://bloodredpencil.blogspot.com/2014/03/zeitgeist.html?showComment=1394564077097#c181693304197194834

The Book People are a British bookseller who take a selection of books to workplaces. People can look at them and order what they want on the spot. Great idea! They asked me to answer some questions in connection with their promotion of one of my Regency trilogies, but they carry my mysteries too and my answers include both subjects.

http://www.thebookpeople.co.uk/blog/index.php/2014/02/25/an-interview-with-carola-dunn/

Meanwhile: 
The first Daisy Dalrymple mystery was picked as the February book for GoodReads' Cozy book group.

If you belong to Goodreads, do join in!
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1683000-daisy-dalrymple-death-at-wentwater-court---carola-dunn

 


What you might call "Death galore!"











And while I'm about it, the latest three Polish Daisy covers:

Mystery bird

by Carola Dunn

We had an amazing afternoon's birdwatching in my son's California garden. It's not huge about 1/3 acre, but it's a bit of a jungle. He's had a bees' nest under a shed for years. The bees are very busy pollinators, helping to produce wonderful harvests of avocados every year. Right now the avocado trees are smothered in blossom and his loquat tree is weighed down with fruit.

There's a dead palm tree that hasn't been cut down because a)something more urgent always turns up and b)a woodpecker has been busy trying to make a big enough hole for a nest. We went outside armed with binoculars and a bird book to try to work out what kind of woodpecker it is. It didn't take long to decide it's a Nuttall's. Now we're hoping it will succeed in nesting and bring up a family.

While we were watching the woodpecker we saw a pair of house finches, a common bird at my feeders in Oregon. A hummingbird zipped past. A phoebe, a small black and white flycatcher, perched on an overhead cable and darted out to catch flying insects, returning to its perch each time with its cry that sounds to some people like "Phoebe, phoebe," (more like Fifi, if you ask me).

Way high in the blue sky sailed two hawks, one pale, one dark, neither of which we managed to identify, though one came quite close before being driven off by crows. A mockingbird sang its beautiful, ever-varying song, until chased away by a rival.

Then we noticed a bird none of us had ever seen before. Several more of the same came to perch in a couple of palm trees. They were about the same size as the mockingbirds and had pale yellow undersides, darker backs. As we pored over the bird book, focused and refocused the binoculars, we realized that they were behaving like the phoebe, only instead of catching almost invisible bugs the intrepid creatures were picking off bees. The bees started to get angry and clouds of them buzzed up, not too close to us luckily. The birds were in a feeding frenzy. We still couldn't figure out what they were. It was a good half hour later that I flipped through the book one last time and happened to spot a photo that matched: the Western Kingbird.

What with one bird and another, they kept us amused half the afternoon.

Birds appear quite often in my books. In my Cornish mystery series, herring gulls are frequent visitors, as they're ubiquitous in Cornwall.  They're as much a part of the scenery as cliffs, moors, the ocean, and the wildflowers, adding to the sense of place. And then there are the buzzards, always on the lookout for dead bodies...

http://caroladunn.weebly.com/cornish-mysteries.html

Cornish mysteries on Amazon

Cornish mysteries at Barnes & Noble

(photos not taken by me--I'm hopeless at bird photography)

Water, Water Everywhere

By Beth Terrell

Last Wednesday, my husband, Mike, awoke at 5 A.M. with a blinding headache. As he stumbled blearily toward the bathroom, he heard a sound like running water coming from the kitchen. His first thought was that the air conditioning unit was malfunctioning. He went to investigate, rounded the corner, and found the water spewing from beneath our kitchen sink and the floor covered by an inch of water. A fitting under the sink had broken sometime during the night, and water had been gushing out of our pipes ever since.

Yikes.

I finally heard the commotion and hurried in to see what was happening. My first thought was, "Thank God it was water and not fire." My second was, "Wow. What are we going to do with all this?"

Finally, Mike managed to get the water turned off, and we took stock of the damage. Half of our living room carpet was soaked. Worse, water had drained down into our basement, where boxes full of books and games were stacked. Our hearts sank as we noted the wet stains on the boxes that held Mike's extensive comic book collection.

We both stayed home from work and spent the rest of the day sucking water out of the carpet with a Shop-Vac and filling our trash bins with soggy cardboard, magazines, and paperbacks. Then came the hardbacks, first editions some of them, their covers warped and their pages stuck together and beginning to crinkle. It soon became clear that, even with our neighbor's borrowed bins, they would not be enough.

On Saturday, we rented a 20-yard dumpster and spent the weekend filling it up. Some of what we dumped were things we'd been meaning to throw away for ages (in 23 years, you can amass a lot of junk), but every time I had to pitch a book onto the pile, I felt a little twinge in my heart.

Still, it was nice spending the weekend working so closely with Mike, neither of us having to rush off to do something else. We took pictures of the titles, so we could claim some of the losses; the basement feels a lot roomier these days; and we're getting new linoleum for the kitchen, courtesy of our insurance company. It could have been much, much worse. As it was, it felt a bit like God had tapped us on the shoulder and said, "Hey, you. It's about time you cleaned out this basement."

Sometimes my mind is a lot like our basement. It gets crowded with minutiae, insubstantial ideas, and outdated perceptions. As a writer, I sometimes need to sift through the soggy boxes in my brain, file away the useful scraps, polish up the tarnished ideas that still have merit, and sweep out the junk to make room for fresh, new stories. If you've ever read The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, you know about Morning Pages.
Morning Pages are a little bit like a Shop-Vac for the writer's mind. These are pages you write each morning about anything that strikes you. (Okay, I usually write mine at night, but still...) Morning pages get rid of the white noise in the brain and help tame the "monkey mind" by getting all the little distractions out of your head and onto paper. I do them whenever my writing feels unfocused, scattered, or stalled. After a few days, I find the ideas flowing smoothly again.

How about you? What do you do to clean out your metaphorical basement?

The Editor - a Writer's Best Friend

By Chester Campbell

I just received the edited manuscript for my fifth novel, The Surest Poison. Some writers might think that’s an appropriate title for a bunch of pages with red marks scattered about. I view it as an opportunity to make the story more exciting and more compelling for readers.

I’ll admit I was a bit intimidated back in 2002 when I got the edit of my first published book from the editor. It looked like the Wreck of the Hesperus, figuratively speaking. Some whole pages crossed out. Three pages of notes referencing various points. It took two more revisions before I got the all clear.

But I learned a lot in the process, and the edit marks showed up less and less in the next three books.

I’ll have to confess I’m not the best of editors, except when it comes to grammar and punctuation. I honed my craft in that phase as a copy editor on a newspaper. That part of the process involves mostly superficial stuff. It’s the more subtle aspects of character motivation and relationships that sometimes pass me by. I don’t read with a critical eye. As long as the plot is plausible and the story is entertaining, I’m not disturbed by characters who get a bit quirky at times. If they get overboard ridiculous, that’s different.

Some readers are as critical as editors, however. They are turned off by characters whose actions don’t fit the picture of them that has been drawn in earlier scenes. So I’m headed back to the drawing board (or laptop) to make a few actions appear more in line with the dictates of logic.

One thing my editor appreciates is words and phrases that paint vivid pictures. I try to use them wherever possible, though I occasionally find I’ve gotten a bit too flamboyant and wind up applying the old delete key. It’s easy to fall in love with a beautiful phrase, but chances are it will end up sounding a little too cute. When that happens, it’s ax time.

Another of the editor’s jobs is to look at the big picture and decide if the story flows properly from beginning to end. Sometimes switching a couple of scenes can heighten the tension. Occasionally, a chapter might be switched to another location.

With my first book, I was a bit intimidated by the editorial process. I had to admit the editor was right on nearly everything he suggested, but I wasn’t sure what to do when I strongly disagreed. I talked to the publisher and was told, “It’s your book. Do what you have to.”

On those few points, I had my way, but overall the book was infinitely better for the editing it received. My friend Chris Roerden’s books, Don’t Murder Your Mystery and the updated Don’t Sabotage Your Submission, give lots of good advice on self-editing, which has helped improve my writing in many respects. But it takes the unbiased eyes of an outside editor to get the story ready for the printer.

Thank God or good editors.

An Interview with Elmore Leonard

by Jean Henry Mead


Elmore “Dutch” Leonard has always been an avowed reader. “A bookworm, yes,” he said, “beginning with The Bobbsey Twins and The Book House volumes of abridged classics that included everything from Beowulf to Treasure Island. In the fifth grade I read most of All Quiet on the Western Front serialized in the Detroit Times, and I wrote a World War I play that was staged in the classroom, my first piece of writing.”

The first nine years of his life were spent south of the Mason-Dixon line. Born in New Orleans in 1925, the youngest of two children, he lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Memphis before moving to Detroit in 1934, during the World Series. Raised a Catholic, he graduated from Detroit High School and the University of Detroit, both Jesuit institutions where he majored in English and philosophy.

Leonard lusted for full-time writing, and remembered receiving a letter from his agent in 1951, trying to discourage him from quitting his advertising job to freelance. He had concentrated on truck advertising for Chevrolet and, by that time, had a tank full of writing catchy ads.

Getting out of bed each morning at five o’clock, he’d write two pages of fiction before going to work “with the rule that I couldn’t put the water on for coffee until I started writing. I’ve been a disciplined writer every since." While still working for the ad agency, he supplemented his early morning writings by placing a pad of paper in his desk drawer. With the drawer partially open, he’d write fiction on the job.

He first wrote western stories and novels because he liked western films. His novel, Hombre, evolved into a western film starring Paul Newman and earned him a modest $10,000. He then turned full attention to the other side of his genre coin and found that crime pays quite well. Stick and LaBrava made him an overnight sensation, earning him a lot of money, along with the film version of Stick, starring Burt Reynolds, a production he would rather not lay claim to.

“My humor is deadpan,” he said, “not slapstick.” The slightly-built, quiet-spoken novelist had written well all along, and his sudden popularity created some problems, the most serious of which was lack of time to write.

“It’s nice to get fan mail, a few letters a week, and being recognized on the street, but the interviews are wearing me out. I’m asked questions about writing, and about my purpose in the way I write that I’ve never thought of before. And I have to take time to think on the spot and come up with an answer. I’m learning quite a bit about what I do from recent interviews and getting answers too.”

When asked for advice to fledgling writers, he said, “The worst thing a novice can do is to try to sound like a writer. I guess the first thing you have to learn is how not to overwrite.” He also advised fledglings to “write. Don’t talk about it, do it. Read constantly, study the authors you like, pick one and imitate him the way a painter learns fine art by copying the masters. I studied Hemingway, as thousands of other writers have done. I feel that I learned to write westerns by rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

A portrait of Hemingway hangs on the wall of his den, reminding him that he studied the revered novelist’s work for “construction, for what you leave out as well as what you put in.”

Excerpted from my book, MaverickWriters. The rest of the interview may be read at my website: http://jeanhenrymead.com/elmore_leonard_interview.htm.