Dear Daddy...

While I was sitting here wondering what to write for you this month my thoughts turned to "fathers in literature." Being a big reader and a movie buff I sometimes get them confused. Some of my favorite fathers though have been in the pages and on the screen both.

Atticus Finch in "To Kill A Mockingbird"is probably my all time favorite. Gregory Peck portrays the father in the story so well. He is perfect as the wise and kind father, with hidden strengths and obvious integrity. I never tire of that story or Gregory Peck, for that matter.

Mr. Bennet in "Pride & Prejudice" is another favorite, although not as inspiring as Atticus, he has a patience that is unmatched in that household of diverse women. Would that our own fathers could put up with such craziness? Mine certainly wouldn't. I love Mr. Bennet's wit, which doesn't spare anyone, including himself.

Now, as for some of the not-so-nice fathers. Mr. O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind" wasn't such a bad sort to start out with, but he went quite mad when his wife died and left his daughters to fend for themselves. Not good, dear old dad. I'm afraid I lost patience with him when he did that. Much like the father in "The Poisonwood Bible," who was a royal pain to not only his family, but to the Africans he ministered to. I disliked him immensely.

Mr. Craven in "Secret Garden" unfortunately started out just about as bad as Mr. O'Hara. Ignoring his son after his wife died, when he son needed him so desperately. Thankfully, dad came out of his funk when his ward, a difficult child at best, pulled his son out into the garden, where he grew stronger and she grew as lovely as the flowers they tended. I can appreciate a character who grows with the story and Mr. Craven did.

Who are your favorite fathers in literature or film?

--> A lifetime resident of the Midwest, B.D. Tharp graduated Magna Cum Laude from Wichita State University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Communications, Women/Minority Studies and Fine Arts.  Her award winning women’s fiction novel, Feisty Family Values, is available on her website, Watermark Books, Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Feisty Family Values was chosen one of the 150 Kansas Best Books, a finalist for the USA News Best Books of 2010, and winner of the J. Coffin Memorial Book Award for 2011. 

Reading with a Purpose

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reading for research. Most of the books are on technical matters, to help me recall terms I used to know but have mostly forgotten. Some of the more commonly used ones came back right away, but others still look a bit funny. This got me thinking about other purposes for reading.

When I began writing fiction I had to unlearn writing like an academic. I had written a novel and short fiction in college, and been published in student literary and humor magazines. I turned to scholarly work in graduate school, and focused on academic work for years. Returning to fiction meant unlearning one style of composing and recovering other ways of thinking on paper.

Of course I read a lot of crime fiction over the years and that certainly prepared me. I thought in terms of clues and characters, and laying things out in a pattern. But I found that I was terse in narrative passages. To overcome this I turned to writers who were almost prolix. I read classic mysteries such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, and A. Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. I also read Anne Perry’s mysteries for the leisurely way she sets a scene or builds up a location and setting.

For capturing character and the sinister feeling of a stranger I can think of no better writer to study than Edgar Allan Poe. He goes so deeply into his characters’ feelings and attitudes that I sometimes wonder if he was slowly driving himself mad. Ruth Rendell achieves much the same effect with her many novels. One of the best in my opinion is Judgment in Stone, which follows the inevitable path to murder of an illiterate housekeeper.

Other writers have taught me other skills. Some writers are strong in dialogue, and others can explain the technical working of anything. The latter is a skill no writer should fail to learn. Once I learned the sequence of steps in making a particular machine work, I could see other processes more clearly even if I wasn’t writing about them. I think of this as understanding the bone structure in a face while you are sculpting or painting a portrait.

Setting a story in a location not well known to all readers requires a judicious use of details, knowing what to include and what to omit. James Lee Burke is well known and admired for his rich depiction of Louisiana, and Dana Stabenow has made Alaska her own as well as a vivid location accessible to readers. Nevada Barr explores the natural world in various parks, and Agatha Christie has set novels in ancient Egypt and then contemporary Middle East. I have learned from all these writers how to make a location come alive and ground the mystery. I use India as the setting for the Anita Ray series, a country I for the first time visited in the 1970s.

All books teach us something but not the same thing. Writers have to read as widely as possible, especially in areas that don’t normally appeal to them, if they want to ensure that their work is as strong as it can be. I try to read against my interests to broaden myself. At present I’m reading about a certain sport. I’m not a sports enthusiast but I want to be sure that my descriptions are accurate and that my character’s behaviors are plausible.

Reading with a purpose, as a writer, is far more than reading good literature to expose ourselves to the best the written word has to offer. Reading with a purpose is a way to absorb the skills and abilities of other writers we do not ourselves possess.

Susan Oleksiw is the author of the Anita Ray Mystery series, featuring Indian American photographer Anita Ray, as well as the Melingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva. www.susanoleksiw.com 

Historical Introduction

May I introduce  the lovely young lady on this cover, Maria Onderdonk. She is waiting for her husband to be, Civil War surgeon, Henry Simms, to return from battle. Henry and Maria are the great, great grandparents of my Simms children.

Set in New York and Washington City, Four Summers Waiting  weaves a Civil War epic that emerges as a love story. Maria, daughter of a parominent Long Island widower, steps out of a dutiful-daughter role after a year of family mourning. Her best friend, Carolyn, involves her in an Abolitionist meeting where she meets medical student. Henry Simms. As the nation is swept closer to war, Henry courts Maria through letters. Strong parental sentiments and wartime incidents involving memorable characters weave conflict through the story as Maria struggles to balance her sentiments with her father's opposition to the war. When Henry is about to open a medical practice the War of The Rebellion begins.

I tell about the relationships of divided families in the "Author's Introductory Notes" at the beginning of Four Summers Waiting  introduced as the new, eBook third edition of my historical novel. Authentic diary excerpts and letters chronicle the struggles and hopes of Maria and Henry. I have tried to stay close to the real lives and the social milieu of the time, without losing the trauma of that tragic and terrible time in our nation's history.

The eBook is offered at Smashwords with a coupon code MJ28J until May 28, or you can find it at Amazon's Kindle store at a bargain price.

The story was my first writing success, published in first edition hard cover by Five Star/Gale, and second edtion in Large Print by Thorndike Press.

How to keep readers turning the page

How do you keep readers turning the page? When a story starts with tension and keeps the tension up at the end of each chapter, the reader wants to know what happens next. I've lost many hours sleep because something happened at the end of a chapter that leads into yet another issue or problem to be solved. But you've got to let the reader breathe. Resolve one issue before piling on another.

Well written dialog moves the story quickly, as well. Let's face it, we humans often speak in fragmented sentences. Best friends or spouses of many years can finish our sentences for us, because they know how we think. A little exposition mixed in helps set the stage, and action makes it real, so don't just have talking heads. This is hard for me, because often I hear the dialog in my head very clearly, but the scene is not as vivid - yet!

Readers now want to start right in the middle of the action. They get to know the character as they read how that character deals with the mess they are in.  In the case of a murder mystery, death has to happen in the first couple of pages, so the protagonist can start the hunt for the murderer. Along the way they will discover the who and why. The reader gets pulled into the mystery and wants to figure out who done it.

Avoid data dumps. This sounds like something we authors should all know, but it's tempting to set the stage, fill in the back story, then proceed to what's happening now. Readers won't stick around long enough to get to the story if the build up is too long. We live in a fast paced society and we go from one thing to another. It's no wonder ADHD is so common, we are jamming as much as possible into an eighteen hour day and we seldom stop to consider where we're going. We just know we've got to get there and fast! Mark it off the "to do" list and go on to the next one. Readers want to be  immersed in the story on the first page.

By making the main characters three-dimensional, flaws and all, we can give the reader someone to care about. Even the antagonist needs to have at least one redeemable quality, so he can be a character people will love to hate and maybe sympathize with - a little. If the reader doesn't care about your characters then they can put the book down and maybe not even finish it. The main character in FEISTY FAMILY VALUES is a conceited snob. BUT underneath she has a heart of mush melon. Few people like her, but many come to understand her. There's an itty bitty bitch in all of us. 

Surprises and emotion are vital! Don't make the story too easy to figure out, surprise the reader with twists they don't expect. And if they are going to care a lick about the characters we have to show how they feel. Readers find pieces of themselves or their lives in stories, commiseration for shared experiences, justification, validation, hope and even comfort. If Annabelle in FEISTY FAMILY VALUES can learn to fight back after years of abuse then maybe I can, too. Let the readers feel right along with your characters.

Make the reader a part of the story. Use all five of the senses, not just sight and sound. If the reader can relate to the wonderful smell of bread baking they will want more. If the creaky old house your characters live in is real to the author, it will be real to the reader. They will want to visit it, to smell the mustiness and touch the smooth bannisters where hands have slid hundreds of times.

And don't forget humor. Readers have to laugh as well as cry. 

Good stories with strong characters, vivid scenery and intense emotions keep me turning the pages. How about you?

--> A lifetime resident of the Midwest, B.D. Tharp graduated Magna Cum Laude from Wichita State University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Communications, Women/Minority Studies and Fine Arts.  Her award winning women’s fiction novel, Feisty Family Values, is available on her website, Watermark Books, Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Feisty Family Values was chosen one of the 150 Kansas Best Books, a finalist for the USA News Best Books of 2010, and winner of the J. Coffin Memorial Book Award for 2011. 

Interview with Author Judy Dailey by Jacqueline Seewald

Judy Dailey has an amazing resume. And no, I’m not exaggerating. Read on:

Award-winning author Judy Dailey grew up on an 80-acre organic farm in Indiana. Now she lives on a 1,200-square-foot urban farm in Seattle, Washington, with four chickens, a dog, and her husband. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Judy earned an MBA from the University of Washington and a certificate in compost management. She has been a pilot, skydiver, spelunker, bicyclist, skier, and night-time sailor. She managed a multi-million dollar grant fund for affordable housing. She handcrafts salami, beer, and ricotta cheese. But her greatest challenge is eradicating the gray garden slug. Animal, Vegetable, Murder is her first traditional mystery. You can follow Judy on Facebook or find a recipe for haggis and eggs at http://www.judydailey.com.

Judy, before we begin, I want to congratulate you on the excellent review your mystery novel received from BOOKLIST.

Question: What made you select the title and genre of your novel? 

Answer: Animal, Vegetable, Murder is a humorous cozy, but that’s not what I started out to write. After accumulating a stack of dark, edgy, blood-drenched manuscripts in the bottom drawer of my desk—and a slew of rejection slips, I realized the mysteries I enjoy are fast-moving and funny. So I decided to write something I would like to read. Well, duh! I’m embarrassed it took me five years to figure it out.

Question:   What inspired this novel? How did it come about?

Answer: After my daughter left home, I quit a pretty nice job to write full time—not a truly brilliant decision. To economize, my husband and I decided to grow as much of our food as we could. We live in the city, so we dug up our whole back yard and planted vegetables. Then Seattle legalized urban chickens. I ordered newborn chicks from a hatchery in Missouri and ended up with six really cute babies living in a box in my office while I dealt with the rejection slips for my latest gritty thriller. Then the chicks turned in to sullen adolescents with an attitude, who flapped out of their box and pecked the keys off my computer. I decided to move them to our guest bathroom while my husband built a henhouse. After they had been in the bathroom about five hours, I checked on them and discovered chicken poop everywhere—floor, walls, heater vent, toilet seat, and soap holder. At that very moment my sister, who is a published author, telephoned. I started whining about rejections, and she offered classic advice, “Write about what you know.” I said, “Right now, all I know about is chicken poop.” And she said, “Well . . .?” Thus, Animal, Vegetable, Murder was born.

Question:  Could you tell us a little bit about the heroine and/or hero of your latest novel?

Answer:  Sunny Day Burnett is 30-years old and a new widow. After growing up in the back of a station wagon with hippie, drug-dealing parents, she yearns to put down roots. She inherited her grandmother’s home in an exclusive Seattle neighborhood where she created an urban farm. Her wealthy neighbors scorn her vegetables and hate her hens. Then she finds the body of a Mercedes salesman in a patch of organic Swiss chard. Worse yet, he is clutching a picture that could rip her life apart.

Question:   Can you tell us about some of your other published novels or work?

Answer:  Five of my short stories have been published in magazines. My biggest thrill was selling a mystery to Women’s World, but they mixed up the layout and it was published under another person’s name.

Question:   What are you working on now?

Answer:  The Goat Cried Murder, which is the next book in my Urban Farm series. Sunny Day is a new mom with a big problem—she can’t nurse her infant daughter. She adds a goat to her urban farm so she can feed her baby organic milk. The goat discovers a murdered jogger, and then a masked man tries to strangle Sunny.

Question:   What made you start writing?

Answer: I’m one of those people who started writing stories as soon as they could hold a pencil. I am drawn to mysteries because my mother died under mysterious circumstances when I was five-years old. I’m always asking myself what really happened.

Question:   What advice would you offer to those who are currently writing novels?

Answer: One of the speakers at Left Coast Crime, whom I greatly admire, said she had written 17 novels before her first one was published. I started feeling like a success because I had written only eight before I sold Animal, Vegetable, Murder. My point is—writers keep writing.

Question:  Where and when will readers be able to obtain your novel?

Answer: Animal, Vegetable, Murder is available now from most independent booksellers and, of course, online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million. People who would like a signed copy can buy one directly from my website at http://www.judydailey.com. The first chapter of Animal, Vegetable, Murder is also posted on my website (http://www.judydailey.com)

Note: Judy is available to respond to comments and questions from readers and fellow authors.

One More Step in Making a Series Live

I don’t remember the first time I heard the admonition, Don’t judge a book by its cover. I have always felt I was open minded and tried not to be judgmental when evaluating an idea or meeting someone new. But when it comes to books, I think I do judge a book by its cover. And I’m not the only one.

I didn’t come to this conclusion until it was forced on me. There’s nothing like having someone point out the obvious for waking me up. And that’s what a friend did recently, when she pointed out that the covers for the Mellingham books don’t look like they’re part of a series. Really? Maybe that’s because someone who knows nothing about graphic arts designed some of them. Me.

I have had four publishers for the Mellingham series, four publishers with four different design groups designing covers in hard cover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, and large print. Coherence was not anyone’s goal, and it showed. Since I put the books up on Kindle and Nook, I had to produce covers for them, and these are the ones that have been hanging around for a couple of years. But no longer.

Thanks to a good friend and wonderful designer, the Mellingham series, two of which were published by Five Star, now have a set of covers that tell the reader/buyer that these books belong together, and in this order.

I have had to give up the belief that all readers are like me. If I want to read a book on a particular topic, or by a specific author, I don’t care what the cover looks like. But not everyone goes to the bookstore, or library, or on line, with a list of books to corral. But even I don’t do that all the time. I browse just like anyone else; I pull books off the shelves if I like the look of the cover.

A good cover tells the reader the kind of book to expect. No reader will find a buxom 1950s female form sprawled on the cover of a Mellingham book in the style of Mickey Spillane. Nor will a reader find what one editor called “the cookbook cover,” an array of little hints about clues, on one of my books. That isn’t me and that isn’t Mellingham. There is humor but it isn't the defining feature of the book. The stories move from light to dark and sometimes swing back and forth.

The new covers do exactly what a cover should do. The covers tell the reader that this is a traditional mystery story, set in a small New England town, with little blood or gore. It is not a thriller or a violent series. These are stories about place and the kind of people who live in small New England towns.

A good cover is the result of a designer who “gets” the story. My publishers have all had good designers who “got” the story, but after so many books and so many different designers, it was time to make the covers uniform as well as informative. And now they are, with grateful thanks to Kathleen Valentine and her many talents.

Presenting the covers here also brings me near to the end of a process that I've been documenting here on Author Expressions. The Mellingham series has offered me as a writer challenges--how to continue this series while developing a new one and writing other stories that are independent of both? How to keep the series alive without a publisher? How to promote a series in this new publishing world?

There are a few steps left, and I'll be reporting on those also on Author Expressions. But right now I'm enjoying the new look of the series and enjoying the feeling of a fresh start.

Legendary and Contemporary Thoughts on Writing and Characterization

Fellow author Terry Odell's blog recently recounted hearing Stephen Coonts quoting Mark Twain on Fenimore Cooper: The rules he spoke of hold true today.
 
"The rules governing literary art require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones."

How do we do that? As authors, we know that scenes are units of conflict lived through by character and reader. Characters must be three dimensional, living, breathing beings. As authors we must know the whole person before we place them into the story. We use experience, observation of others, inspiration and imagination to create them. We have to know what drives them and how they will react to different problems. We set imaginary goals for them. Goals help characters become motivated and moves your story along. Characters face adversity in a scene and in a sequel they decide what to do with it.

At a recent Book Talk I told about a lithograph of a woman tending a spinning frame in a cotton mill which metamorposed into my grandmother. She inspired a beloved continuing character in my Maine shore Chronicles series, created through inspiration and imagination.  My readers loved Tante Margaret and urged me to make her a main character with a story of her own.

As authors and readers we know  that characters leave lasting impressions. Nora Ephron captures the feeling  in her book: I Feel Bad About My Neck:And Other Thouhts About Being A Woman.

 

 “Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron,

 

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

WOW! May we seek the rapture of the deep with our reading. . . . Creating good characters may help!