When You're in Pain

By June Shaw
I had planned to write a nice long blog today about writing. Because I wound up in major pain, I won’t write much. The creative well has dried.

I sat at my desk two days ago and reached over on the floor for a piece of paper holding into I wanted to use. That’s when it happened. The pull. The ache starting from my back and running down through my thigh and shin to my foot. Sciatica.

I’d pulled my sciatic nerve once when I was pregnant, and the doctor told me to lie on my opposite side for half an hour to get the baby’s weight off the nerve. That worked well.

No, though, I have no baby to shift away and need to improve a bulging disk. It hurts. All the way down my leg. The doctor told me not to sit anymore while it gets better. Right.

So I’m sitting in front of my computer (gave my laptop away years ago—didn’t like it) to write something here, and my leg has started to ache again. I need to lie down with a heating pad.

I’ll catch you later with lots of brilliant words : )

Getting Out of Bed Is the Hardest Part

by Jackie King

Once upon a time I could jump out of bed, slip into jeans and a T-shirt and be ready to go. I could even skip makeup if I wanted. But times have changed. Getting dressed in the morning has become a complicated thing. First of all I have to sit on the side of the bed and stare into space for a few minutes. I call this ruminating.

This ruminating, or pondering or musing or reflecting, can get out of hand, especially for a writer. Every fleeting thought about the past has a way of morphing into some sort of a story; and there’s so little time available to anyone at any age that careful selections have to be made.

Which idea would be most interesting to readers? Who should I choose for my protagonist (aka hero/heroine), I ask myself. And how could I bump off those folk who annoyed me most? Hummm?

For a young male protagonist I think of a boy I met one winter when my mother was teaching in Telluride, Colorado. That was back in the fifties (and yes, I am that old!). In an emotional moment my mother, who was a gifted teacher but had little patience with fools, had resigned her current position in a small railroad town in Oklahoma. This was where I had survived my junior high years and its stereotypical mean girls and boys. I was so ready to leave. So we traveled by bus to Colorado.

~~~~~

No one could help falling in love with Telluride. It was nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and you had to leave town on the same road you entered. I also fell in love with the people who lived there: miners mostly. My best friend’s dad was a chemist with a drinking problem. Once he came home at night and peed on their black, cast iron stove. It sat in the living room and heated most of the downstairs.

But I digress.

The boy was named Robert, and I thought he would make a great hero in my story. He was sort of a tall Harry Potter type, glasses and all, and I had a huge crush on him. Unhappily for me, he already had a girlfriend. His parents had more money than most and he got the first contacts I had ever heard about. That was back before the technology was perfected, and these were glass, cumbersome, and I was told, uncomfortable. The kids called him “Bubbles,” so he got embarrassed and ditched the expensive gadgets. I’ve always wanted to use him in a story.

I’d have a bit of trouble with the villain, though. I can’t think of anyone in Telluride in 1953 that I wanted to murder. Guess I’d have to transplant one of the mean boys from the railroad town we had left. I know just who it would be. An odious boy who raced past me in seventh grade, pausing a second to make a grab at my groin area. One of the most humiliating moments of my young life. Oh yes, he’d make a perfect antagonist. (i.e. bad guy). Or maybe I could even murder him on paper?

All of these thoughts passed through my mind before I slipped into my fuzzy slippers and trundled off to start my morning toilette. And people think us oldies live dull lives.

Little do they know.

This is the first time I’ve told anyone this tale. Not even my mother or my sister. Too embarrassed, I suppose. Sad isn’t it? That naughty boy was the one who should have been mortified.

~~~~~

Think back through your own growing up and tell me the secret humiliation that you’ve never shared with anyone. My readers and I will never tell.

Hugs,

Jackie

Shadow Selves

by Bill Kirton

This is another of those answers to ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ Many years ago, an anaesthetist friend said that if I ever wanted to do some research on surgical procedures and operations generally, he could arrange for me to visit an operating theatre and see how it all worked. My first thought was that I’d probably faint, be a nuisance and get in the way, but it was a great chance to do some real observing, so I said ‘yes please’. Just a few days later, I got the call and found myself in the theatre wearing all the stuff you see on hospital TV shows and being so fascinated by all that was going on that it never occurred to me to faint. In fact, the operation scene in my book Shadow Selves is a direct description of the experience and of the astonishing business of being prepared to dig around in someone’s thorax amongst all the lungs, heart and other stuff that’s packed and folded away there.

But back then, I wasn’t planning a book involving surgical things or anaesthetics, so the notes sat in the computer. For ages, though, I’d been toying with the idea of setting one of my books in a university context. I used to be a university lecturer and I’ve done writing fellowships at three others, so I knew something about the settings and what goes on there. The problem, however, came from something I’ve mentioned before – a lot of my thoughts of academia involved actual colleagues and students and fiction doesn’t work (for me, at least), if your head’s full of real people. If you find yourself thinking ‘Oh, this character’s like so-and-so’, the character can’t develop in his or her own right. The real person gets in the way.

So I had to work hard to take myself and my ex-colleagues out of my thinking and start from relationships rather than let the characters decide the relationships beforehand. In the end, they grabbed their independence and, since I didn’t know them and they weren’t based on any memories or specific realities, they had room to surprise me.

The reality which I didn’t change, and it’s one which has worsened rather than improved, is the significant transformation that took place in many institutes of higher education, beginning in the 80s, with Thatcher’s insistence on ‘leaner, fitter’ establishments. I know I’m generalising but, before then, education combined the close study of your chosen subjects and topics with the freedom to investigate beyond them, to develop a broader cultural awareness. It provoked and encouraged you to be intellectually curious about everything. Post Thatcher, it became a student-processing, goals-orientated, vocational experience with too many boxes to tick to spend time on thinking, reflection, broader investigations.

I’ve said it before, but academic life was marvellous – it involved sitting around with young, intelligent, interested people talking about books, and getting paid for it. And yet, beneath the urbane, learned surfaces of professors and lecturers, the most bizarre thinking sometimes went on and apparent intellectual giants behaved like schoolkids. My title, Shadow Selves, relates to this phenomenon. It’s from Carl Jung, who wrote ‘Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is’. So here, the lecturers, surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses – and, yes, the police too – all have these shadows, but it’s not necessarily the blacker ones that cause all the damage.

Out of Respect

By Mark W. Danielson

No doubt, the 9-11 attack on our World Trade Center permanently etched our brains.  While this unimaginable event left our nation in shock, years before another day shall forever live in infamy.  I cannot imagine the horror our Pearl Harbor survivors’ experienced as they watched World Trade Center fall.

I don’t fly to Hawaii as often as I used to, but during every Honolulu visit, I've made it a point to climb Diamond Head so I could peer into the distance and imagine the Japanese bombs pounding our ships and airfield.  Those who were stationed on Diamond Head helplessly watched, its guns meant to ward off a sea invasion, not an air attack.  But had it been better equipped, Diamond Head was still too far away from the attacking planes to have had any effect.  The guilt those observing the fight from Diamond Head must have been horrendous.  They probably re-lived that nightmare countless times during their lifetime. 

Oahu's Diamond Head may have had mystical qualities to the locals, but its strategic significance had the United States military transforming the crater into a military installation in 1905.  At the time, the United States was occupying foreign lands with gunboat diplomacy.  Military installations were set up in the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii to defend the nation during the Spanish American War.  Inside Diamond Head, trails were carved, tunnels dug, mortars and cannons capable of launching fifteen-inch diameter projectiles were placed.  Well before World War I, Oahu stood ready to defend itself, but no amount of guns could stop its post-war economic development.  In recent years, pineapple and sugar cane fields have succumbed to condos and resorts, cars pack its roads, buildings steadily rise, and yet this steady influx of tourists is what fuels Hawaii’s economy.  Thankfully, even on Oahu it is easy to escape the bustle of the city by driving a few miles.  Of all the places I've visited around the world, I still consider Hawaii paradise. 

While many criticize Hawaii’s development claiming the Untied States raped the island, it is worth noting that had the United States not militarized these islands, history may have been re-written.  Had the Japanese pursued their December 7th attack as an invasion rather than continuing their course for Australia, and had our carriers not set out to sea before the attack, the outcome of the War in the Pacific could have been different.  

For those visiting Oahu, I strongly recommend visiting the battleships Arizona and Missouri, then Punch Bowl Cemetery to study the Pacific battles depicted on its grand memorial walls.  Spend time reflecting on the endless rows of white crosses to remember our soldiers' ultimate sacrifice.  Finally, climb Diamond Head to observe Pearl Harbor in the distance so you can imagine what happened that fateful December seventh day in1941.  (You can now avoid the steep stairs by using the south wall bypass.) 

To all who have served and defended this country, particularly WWII veterans, I salute you.  In your honor, I shall climb Diamond Head on every visit so long as I’m able.

Wyoming Cold Cases Solved

As Wyoming lies beneath a thick blanket of snow, two chilling cold case murder mysteries have allegedly been solved. An elderly married couple accused of killing four people more than thirty years ago have admitted murdering their former spouses as well as two young boys.
 

I recall hearing about the disappearances of Virginia Uden and her two young sons, Reagan and Richard, while I was driving alone in Wyoming during the early 1980s, interviewing residents for my first book. I thought at the time that a serial killer was roaming the state’s highways because a fellow photojournalist also disappeared during that time period, his car found still running with the driver’s door open and one of his socks on the ground. As far as I know, that case has not been solved. 

The couple was arrested this week in rural Missouri, where Gerald Uden confessed that he had shot and killed his former wife and her two sons when his current wife, Alice Holtz-Uden, was arrested for the murder of her 25-year-old former husband. She allegedly tossed his body down an abandoned gold mine shaft during the mid-1970s after filing for divorce a few months after the wedding. Shooting him in the back of his head while he slept, she reportedly hid the body in a barrel until she later disposed of it in the mine.  

The two killers apparently didn’t know each other when they committed their crimes but later met and married. They then moved from Wyoming to Missouri where they raised two children and were respected members of the community.  Members of their local church, they’ve been described by neighbors as good people, “the kind of neighbors you leaned over the fence and talked about your chickens with," Allen Bishop said. “They were just the old neighbors next door."

Another neighbor told a local TV station: “I was in disbelief. They are old people. They don't do things like that." 

Now in their 70s, the couple is in custody in the Chadwick, Missouri jail, awaiting extradition to Wyoming. According to a law enforcement source, someone Alice Holtz had confided in 30 years ago about her husband’s death finally came forward to tell what had happened, Ronald Holtz’s remains were subsequently found. However, the whereabouts of the bodies of Virginia Uden and her sons has not been revealed.

This gruesome story may sound like a work of fiction but the truth is definitely stranger. And in this case, much colder than the average murder mystery.

~Jean Henry Mead

A COLOURFUL DEATH now in paperback

by Carola

My second Cornish mystery comes out in a paperback edition in the US on October 10th.

The Cornish mysteries are set in the late '60s/early '70s, in Cornwall, one of the most picturesque areas of Britain.

The coast is indented with rocky, cliff-bound coves providing harbours over the centuries for fishermen and smugglers alike. With small towns, built of local granite and roofed with local slate, and glorious scenery, Cornwall has long been a haunt of holiday-makers--and artists.

Large print

One such painter, Nick Gresham, is the next-door neighbour of my protagonist, Eleanor Trewynn, a widow in her 60s. Thanks to an introduction from Eleanor, Nick succeeds in placing a couple of paintings in a London art gallery. He returns triumphant from London only to find the pictures in his shop have been slashed to ribbons.

Nick is sure he knows the culprit, Geoffrey Monmouth, an envious fellow-painter. Vowing vengeance, he sets off to confront him, while Eleanor, hoping to avert violence, accompanies him to Padstow.

They arrive at Monmouth's gallery to find him lying dead, stabbed in the back, surrounded by a crimson pool...

Nick is arrested for murder. Eleanor is determined to exonerate him, and very soon finds that a great many people had good reason to hate Geoffrey Monmouth.

Reviews:

Bolstered by strong characters, the fast-moving plot builds to a satisfying conclusion. --Publishers Weekly on A Colourful Death

Eleanor is a wonderful, multifaceted heroine and Manna from Hades [first in the series] is a first-rate story.... Carola Dunn demonstrates the same smooth writing and seasoned storytelling that readers have come to expect from her. --Mystery News

UK edition

Seattle Mystery Bookshop
Mysterious Galaxy
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Colourful-Death-Cornish-Mystery/
http://www.amazon.com/Colourful-Death-Cornish-Mystery-Mysteries
Barnes&Noble
Waterstones

Freebie Book Promotion Followup

By Chester Campbell

It has been two weeks since my second Greg McKenzie mystery, Designed to Kill, had a three-day freebie book promotion with BookBub. The results are a mixed bag. There were 49,287 free downloads on Amazon. Bill Kirton said he didn't have such large numbers but sold 9,000 books. He's obviously in a different league from me. I've never sold 9,000 books under any circumstance.

I was disappointed with the sales of Designed to Kill, which have only numbered 35, plus six borrows, which pay about the same. But on the whole my books have sold much better than normally. The first and third books have each reached 111sales or borrows, while the fourth and fifth books in the series registered 47 and 30. In all, my ten books totaled 366 sales and 20 borrows. For a relatively unknown micropress author, that's not bad for a month.

Of course, the total result was no bonanza. I paid BookBub $240 for the promotion, which should leave a net return of about $435. If I did that every month for a year, it would be more than $5,000. Not a bad sum for somebody who doesn't depend on book revenue for his bread and butter. As I become better known with the publicity brought by the freebie promotions, hopefully sales will pick up for all my books.

One benefit of the recent BookBub coverage was a noticeable pickup in reviews on Amazon. Designed to Kill had 23 reviews before the promotion. Now it has 43 reviews, including 22 five stars and 12 four stars.

If I keep at it and learn more about the ways of ebook promotion, maybe I'll achieve the success of writers like Jinx Schwartz, author of the Hetta Coffey series. She knows how to do it right. Check out her article on the subject at the Blood Red Pencil blog at this link: http://bit.ly/18Ig8L4.

Visit  my website ChesterDCampbell.com