The Blog That Became a Book

I get by with a little help from my friends. This time, it's Jean Henry Mead, who started me doing this blogging stuff in the first place. A while ago, I said that Jean was welcome to contribute a guest blog any time and, with me still skulking about and failing to produce the goods and Jean's latest book just out, the time seemed perfect. So, Jean, it's all yours.

When I first began interviewing mystery novelists for my blog site, Mysterious People, I had no idea they would wind up in a book, although I had published three other books of interviews with Western and Hollywood screen writers, politicians, artists and ordinary people who had accomplished extraordinary things.

So it made sense that a book about mystery writers was in order, but who would publish interviews that had already appeared online? Bestselling novelists such as Carolyn Hart, Jeffrey Deaver, Louise Penny and John Gilstrap undoubtedly sold the book. Three publishers were interested and I decided to go with Poisoned Pen Press, the number two mystery publisher in the U.S. Coincidentally, quite a few of PPP’s authors had already been interviewed.

Because mysteries appear in a variety of subgenres, I divided the writers according to their specialties: the traditional mystery or cozy, historicals, suspense and thriller novels, crime, police procedurals, private eyes and senior sleuths (sometimes called “geezer lit”). There are also medical thrillers, romantic suspense as well as science fiction mysteries and the niche novels which cover endless subjects. I had no idea there was such diversity until I started categorizing them.

Those I’d interviewed had fortunately written articles about various aspects of publishing, including writing tips, marketing and promotional advice, and their opinions on the current state of the publishing industry, among other topics. So the book is a good read for aspiring mystery writers as well as readers. I can say that objectively because I didn’t write the book, I just asked the questions.

Carolyn Hart, bestselling author of the Henrie O and Death on Demand series, talks about her new protagonist, Bailey Ruth Raeburn, who returns to earth as a ghost to anonymously unravel complicated mysteries. John Gilstrap explains why a bestselling novelist still holds down a fulltime job and international bestseller Rick Mofina provides sixteen great tips for writing thriller novels as well as discussing his struggle to the top of the charts.

A number of Canadian and UK authors share their publishing views as well as comparing books from their countries with those of the US. Suspense novelist Paul Johnston writes from his native Scotland as well as his home in Greece while Tim Hallinan divides his time between Thailand and southern California, writing much of his work in Bangkok cafes. Gillian Phillip writes YA mystery novels from Barbados and her native Scottish highlands, and international airline pilot Mark W. Danielson composes his suspense novels during layovers in various parts of the world. One of my favorite interviews was with Bill Kirton, whose humor and compassion led to an Internet friendship. I also enjoy his writing.

Another English native, Carola Dunn, writes historical mysteries about her countrymen as does Rhys Bowen, who lives and writes in California about historical English royals. Other historical novelists include Larry Karp, who writes about Ragtime music and the people who made the genre popular during its heyday. And Beverle Graves Myers, who brings operatic mysteries to life from eighteen century Venice.

Jeff Cohen, Tim Maleeny, Morgan St. James, Phillice Bradner and Carl Brookins add humor to their mysterious plots, so prepare to laugh when you pick up their books. There are police procedurals, medical thrillers and romantic suspense novelists represented here as well as niche mysteries designed for readers who love dogs, scrapbooking, zoos, the Arizona desert, space shuttles, weight loss clinics, actors, designer gift baskets and other specialty subjects.
Nonfiction books about the mystery genre round out this eclectic collection with Edgar winner E.J. Warner, Agatha winner Chris Roerden, Lee Lofland, Jeffrey Marks, and small press publishers Vivian Zabel and Tony Burton. So there’s something for everyone who enjoys some or all the mysterious subgenres.

The book is currently only available on Kindle at: http://tiny.cc/zsgsl as well as Barnes & Noble and Sony readers.

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Cop-out blog number three

I'm still spending all my time on these two new books and feeling guilty about not writing proper postings. Also, the publisher who liked my sci-fi/fantasy stories wants to go ahead with them but has suggested a slightly different approach (which I think is right). Which means that I'll be starting that when the present job's finished (i.e. in the Autumn). So, with The Figurehead due out any minute now, I thought I'd give you a taste of it so that you can decide whether to bother getting your local library to order two or three hundred copies. You can, of course, read more of it free if you send a blank email to figurehead@virtualtales.com. Anyway, here's the opening.

Bessie Rennie was on her usual Sunday morning beach trawl. It was the one day of the week when she could comb the sands in peace. Most of the other residents of Aberdeen were either tucked up in their granite villas, curled in blankets and sacks in the poorer areas of town or lying about the alleys and closes around the Mercat Cross, sleeping off the mayhem of a normal Saturday night. The prostitutes in Mason’s Court were having a well earned rest and none of the Castle Street traders would be setting up their stalls on the Sabbath. The yards hung motionless on the masts of the ships in the harbor, some of them with sails still bent on them and gathered up into tight bunches. The decks were empty and the quays deserted, echoing back the clicks and rustles of the rigging in the quiet air. Any citizens who were up and about would be getting ready for church. Bessie was safe to forage.

She was looking for whatever she could get but hoping, as usual, that one of the frequent wrecks along the north east coast would send her a body or two, their pockets still holding purses, watches or anything that might persuade a pawnbroker to part with a couple of shillings. So far, she’d been wasting her time. With a half moon still bright in the sky, she’d started near the river Don and worked her way south towards the Dee, collecting just three bottles which might fetch some pennies in Ma Cameron’s public house and a waistcoat which was so far gone that not even she would think of wearing it. Her habitual muttering to herself was becoming progressively more blasphemous as she castigated the citizens of Aberdeen for being so sparing with corpses on their beach.

She’d almost reached the pier at the end of the harbor when she saw the sort of bundle she’d been hoping for. It was high on the beach near the wall which ran along the north east edge of the village of Footdee, protecting it from the sea, the sands and the big easterlies that snarled in from Scandinavia. She peered hard as she climbed through the soft sand towards the dark shape, fearing that it might be just another tangle of tarred ropes or seaweed that the tide had flung ashore. But her breath came faster and a smile cracked her leathery features as she saw that the long dark cylinder stretching out from the side of the bundle had a hand on the end of it, and that the twisted material at its seaward end was indeed a pair of trousers which clearly still had legs in them.

As she came closer, her smile developed into a little cackle of secret delight that her patience had been rewarded. It was a man. But he was dressed not in the rags of a sailor or the tatters of a wrecked mariner who’d been floating a long while in hard seas, but in a pair of woolen broadfall trousers with a cravat at his throat and a full jacket. Over this was a heavy overcoat and, hanging loosely around his neck, a light-colored scarf. From Bessie’s perspective, more items of clothing meant more pockets. Then, as she stopped beside the body and bent to begin her search, her excitement was stilled as quickly as it had been generated. This man came from no shipwreck. His hair, still wet, was plastered across most of his face but she recognized him at once. It was Jimmie Crombie, the shipwright from Waterloo Quay. His sodden clothes were not the ones he would wear to work but the sort of thing he’d put on for a night out.

Bessie could guess what had brought him here. It was a familiar story. Too much Saturday drink, a staggering walk home along Regent and Waterloo Quays and, in the darkness before the moon had appeared, a stumble over the edge into the harbor. The river would then quickly grab him and drag him along the channel beside the north pier, slamming him against the rocks that regularly claimed ships trying to make their way in or out of the harbor mouth, and then twirling him round the corner onto the beach. It had happened to so many over the months and years that, at last, there was talk of erecting pillars and chains to guard the quay’s edge. They would be too late for Jimmie, though. His jacket and shirt had been torn open on the top left hand side of his chest and Bessie saw the scrapings and batterings he’d suffered as the river had bounced him along its rocky banks and down into its depths. The flesh of his face, shoulder and chest was raw, shining silver and black in the growing light, the skin peeling back from it here and there and the cuts and grazes stretching down out of sight inside his shirt.

For Bessie, it was a dilemma. If he’d fallen in after a night’s drinking, the odds were that he’d still be carrying some money. But this was not just some strange soul who’d tumbled from the deck of a passing barque; it was one of her own. And everyone knew she never missed a Sunday morning on the beach so she would have to tell someone that she’d found him. She stood looking at the watch chain that stretched across his belly and wondered what to do.

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Cop-out blog number two

I owe what will no doubt be the best bits of this blog to various pupils at unidentified schools and to whomever collected the examples I’ll be giving. I don’t know any of their names but I’d like to acknowledge their genius from the start. They’re all actual images used by the pupils in their essays. Most of all, they’re delicious examples of the wonderful effects of even the simplest words.

Critics like to categorise literature and identify movements and schools such as Symbolism, Romanticism, Dadaism and so on, so I’ve grouped them artificially in a pretence that they’re classifiable. It also allows me to pretend that I’m actually writing a blog that makes some sense (whereas I know I’m not). So I’m suggesting that the first three belong to the school of Balzac and Zola, the Realists.

• His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a tumble dryer.
• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55 mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

You see? Factual, undeniable truths. And the next three, drawing their similes from the natural world are just as undeniably Naturalists.

• He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
• She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
• The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamppost.

Then come some budding social commentators, again with similes, this time anchoring their work in the gritty sociology of kitchen sink truths.

• It was a working class tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with their power tools.
• The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

And finally, three writers who are clearly placing themselves in the tradition of the great Raymond Chandler.

• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a paper bag filled with vegetable soup.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

This is just a selection – I don’t think my imagination would ever be able to match them, so back to work.

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Cop-out blog number one

Since this is the beginning of a busy time, I'll be casting around for blogs to satisfy the hunger which continues to drive you here. This first one is a recording of a song I wrote and sang at the Edinburgh Festival several centuries ago. There's no actual video. The images are there to provide the means to lay down the sound track. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible

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Luck and laziness

I’ve often referred to my laziness and some of you have suggested I’m not really lazy at all. But I am, and yet what I’m going to write about will seem to contradict that. Let’s deal with all that first.

It’s been one of those weeks that make being a writer very satisfying. I at last made myself stop researching the sequel to The Figurehead and decided to start writing it. Then came the good news I wrote about in the last blog – the publisher’s interest in my sci-fi/fantasy short stories and the arrival of the proofs of The Figurehead. Next, on Thursday evening, the reading went well and, if I’d had copies available, I’d have sold several. But, that aside, it’s always nice to be at events which feature readers and celebrate the activity of reading.

This brought me neatly to Friday morning – the day I was due to set off for Glasgow for the weekend of my grandson’s 5th birthday. Just before I left, a parcel arrived. There were a couple of things I was expecting, neither relating to writing, so I was surprised and delighted to find it contained my author’s copies of Brilliant Study Skills – a classy, beautifully presented book which, to people who don’t know me, might convey an impression of respectability and gravitas. I barely had time to glance at it before going to get the train.

After a relaxing, sunny day in Glasgow, I checked emails and, to ratchet up the delight another notch, there was one from the publishers of Brilliant Study Skills with a commission to write two more books in the series – on writing essays and dissertations. I’d discussed this with them before so it wasn’t a surprise but, coming on top of the other things, it had a ‘too good to be true’ quality to it. I have to deliver them by the end of September, so that prevents me indulging in my usual procrastination.

My two grandsons aren’t impressed by any of this; their critical evaluation of me as a writer depends upon whether I can make them laugh when they come into my bed in the mornings. Needless to say, their laughter isn’t provoked by elegant turns of phrase or subtly nuanced linguistic and thematic juxtapositions but by me doing funny voices and creating characters who live inside walls or have two mouths so that they can talk and eat simultaneously. (This particular detail involved an interesting sub-plot about the anatomical separation of vocal chords and alimentary canal and, if the listeners had had their way, would also have necessitated an exploration of what happened at the rectal end of the process.)

So it’s been a lovely week followed by a happy, relaxing weekend.

Now, after such a long introduction which looks suspiciously like boasting, what’s the connection with laziness? Simple. Laziness for me is avoiding things I don’t want to do. Writing is a pleasure, even when it’s challenging. I actually enjoy it so I don’t seek to avoid it. Writing commercial stuff is different – that’s something I do to earn money. I do it conscientiously but without enthusiasm and when the work dries up in the lean periods, I’m actually pleased.

But there’s a wider, less solipsistic point to this, too. When lots of ‘results’ of this sort come together, it feels like (and in part it is) luck. But it has to be put in the context of the many weeks or months of ‘lucklessness’ which preceded it. We get pleasure out of writing, we work at it, cut, edit, polish, to make it as good as we can, and we send it away hoping that it reaches someone who appreciates it and recognises its quality. So when we get the usual rejection slip or, worse, no acknowledgement at all, we’re deflated, and it’s easy to start wondering whether we’re deluding ourselves and should maybe start a paper round or a window cleaning business.

No. Keep writing, keep submitting material. Rework it, resubmit it because, yes, in the present market you need luck but (cliché alert) you make your own. If you stop writing and submitting you’ll never get lucky. I know, that’s so obvious it’s hardly worth stating, but it’s too easy to start thinking it’s all a waste of time. It isn’t. Look back over material you may have forgotten, look at it critically, amend it if necessary, and start sending it away again. All the frustrations vanish when you get that letter of interest or acceptance, or you hold that precious book.

Only one way for me to end this, isn’t there?

Good luck.

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Me and the Chaffinch

I feel so guilty at the thought of the tens of thousands of people who’ve been sitting at their computers for days now, waiting for a new blog to get posted here. They may occasionally click over to Facebook, Twitter, or their own emails just to check but they rush back here as soon as they can, desperate for more wisdom, enlightenment and the perpetual reassurance that life is worth living. (Oh, and for the occasional word to top up their vocabulary – this week it’s 'rebarbative'. I love that word – it sounds exactly right for what it means.)

What makes it worse is that, while you've all been suffering, I’ve had a few of those days which are happy, positive, life-affirming. To begin with, this week came the news from the publishers of The Figurehead that it’s just about ready. The editor and I have been proof-reading the text again and got rid of the 14 typos that were still there. (What’s the betting that plenty more turn up when it’s actually been published?) The techie people are now deciding on such arcane features as ‘spacing and drop characters’, ‘wrap adjustments’ and ‘kerning’. All of which means that I’ll soon be clutching a copy of my latest baby in my grubby palm. Not, sadly, in time for the talk/reading I’m giving about it tomorrow evening, but there’ll no doubt be compensation for that when Stephen Spielberg rings me next week to beg me for the movie rights.

Then, yesterday, an email from another publisher saying she liked a proposal about a collection of short stories which I’d sent, together with some samples. She’s asked to see the whole manuscript. This time it’s not crime but some fantasy/sci-fi type things which I wrote after spending some time looking at Second Life. They’re supposed to be funny and they’re all about the interface between reality and the virtual online worlds. The small problem is that the ones I’ve written so far add up to some 16,000 words and, while that’s fine for ebooks, a paperback needs at least 40,000. So I’ll be spending lots of spare time adding to the collection. But, once again, it’s a great feeling.

And I also need to tell you about the chaffinch.

I sit here with my view of the garden, and my carved gargoyle and eagle just outside. Most of the time, though, I’m looking at the screen or the keyboard, so it always startles me when that bloody chaffinch decides to attack the top of my window. I hear a small bang and there he is, still flying but bashing his beak against the glass. And he does it again and again. I’ve just been outside to take a photo of what he must see when he makes his assault. That's it at the top. I took it from ground level because he always flies up from there for his attack, bashing against the pane at the very top. OK, I'm not a chaffinch, but I see nothing there that would fool me into thinking it’s a good place to nest, so what’s he doing it for?

Maybe the soul of a critic has transmigrated into his body and he hates writers. Maybe he’s practising some arcane act for the next Simon Cowell show – ‘Nature’s Got Talent’ or something. Maybe he’s a chaffinch philosopher and he’s just proving that life is an illusion and ultimate satisfaction is unattainable. Whatever it is, after all his clattering against the glass, he must go home every night and say to his wife ‘My beak’s killing me’.

Anyway, my own busy-ness is likely to go on for a while so why not re-read all the previous blogs and tease out the almost infinite layers of meaning which are folded into them? Remember, feel the swan in your blood.

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Welcome blog joggers

Thanks for dropping by on blogjogday. I hope you’ll have a look round while you’re here. When you’re through, jog on to www.tinaroberts.ning.com or, if you fancy a different blog, go to http://blogjogday.blogspot.com.

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