3 Free Kindle Short Stories

2 DAYS ONLY!

On Sunday, November 30 and Monday December 1, these short stories from my Twins Mystery Series will be FREE on Kindle. Click on the titles to link to the page.

Mirror, Mirror - A man sees premonitions of serial murders but no one believes him, until psychologist Sara Ziegler is sure that her twin sister Gen is the next victim.

Ring of Truth - Sara and Gen Ziegler suspect a neighbor of domestic violence, but what does that have to do with the ring Gen finds in her vegetable garden or the bunny that's eating the lettuce?

Rapid-Eye Murder - During a week of dream research, psychologists Gen and Sara Ziegler uncover evil hidden deep in the realm of Morpheus.



Happy Holidays!

Cactus For Christmas?

DOUBLE CROSS was just released in paperback. This is the third novel in my Twins Mystery Series and the second one where both Gen and Sara play equal parts in the solution. It's one of those novels I drafted ages ago, but only finally figured out how it should work a few years back.

I was traveling a lot back then, and most of my vacation destinations were in the U.S. desert Southwest. I fell in love with the Southwest when I first visited there 30 years ago, before I even considered a career as a writer. Even before I read my first Tony Hillerman novel. The sky is almost always a deep, deep blue and the scenery is breathtaking. The nights are usually crowded with stars. The play of light and shadows on the canyons changes hourly. Rainbows seem to be a weekly occurrence. You can experience nearly absolute silence. Wildflowers pop up in the most uninhabitable places. Likewise wildlife. And ancient petroglyphs.

I traveled mostly in spring and fall, so the days were warm, though on more than one trip, we encountered unexpected snow, too. I remember a snowball fight I had with my dad in Cedar Breaks, Utah. The temperature was 70F, but there was 4 feet of snow on either side of the road. The nights are cold at that time of year. You start out in the morning with in jeans, 4 layers up top, and your hands in your pockets. By mid-afternoon, you're in shorts and a t-shirt, and drinking at least a quart of water for every 3 miles hiked.

Still, a big attraction for me was that the Southwest felt more dangerous than home. I never saw a rattlesnake on the trails, but I heard them plenty of times, behind rocks or inside hollow logs. I got the worst sunburns of my life in Arches National Park, even though I was wearing a 30 sunblock. I learned to hike in long sleeves even on hot days. I discovered that higher altitude is something to reckon with if you've ever had lung problems (mine was a case of pneumonia way back in 9th grade). I discovered just how bad my vertigo could get on some of those cliff trails. When I see photos of Delicate Arch, the main thing I remember is getting dizzy in a very precarious place.

If you see a car broken down along the side of the road, here in the East most people would just speed by. Out there everyone stops to make sure the people involved have water to drink while they wait for help. You could die from not carrying enough water.

Yet another big pull was the local culture, especially the folklore and legends of the indigenous tribes. I'm always a sucker for a great story.

So after I finished TWO-FACED, and at the end of that novel had the need to move Gen Ziegler from Arizona to Pennsylvania, I knew the twins' next adventure together would take place out in the desert. Since her move needed to happen during the winter semester break, a novel set at the Yuletide was a foregone conclusion.

A Christmas mystery set in the desert? This is where the time lag helped. At first, as I was able to travel less and less, I thought I wouldn't be able to do the research. But in the last decade, Mexican immigrants have settled in my hometown. I learned about Our Lady of Guadalupe and Las Posadas and other traditions. I've been able to taste the foods. I even learned to sing in Spanish with Mexican pronunciation.

So I hope you'll read and enjoy DOUBLE CROSS. If you do and want an extra puzzle, I've hidden the names of some of my favorite classic mystery novel characters throughout the novel. See if you can find them.

Link for Paperback.
Link for Kindle version. 

SHORT CUTS TO MAYHEM is Released!

I KNOW a lot of people who won't read short stories. They seem to believe that if a tale takes less than 70,000 words to tell, it somehow isn't worthy. Me? I love shorts stories. I can devour one in a quick sitting when I don't have much time. Like a lovely bite of chocolate between meals.

I've been reading shorts as long as I can remember. My love for the form was especially cemented in place by the short mysteries and supernatural tales of Agatha Christie. I branched out from there to read other classic mystery authors' anthologies, like Dorothy L. Sayers and, of course, all of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Then modern authors who excel in this form, like Lawrence Block, Margaret Maron, Robin Hathaway and others.

As an author, I found that I loved writing short mysteries and ghost tales. 19 of mine were published individually in periodicals, though most without a wide distribution. That was the last I thought the world would see of my stories. However, the advent of electronic books allowed me to make the tales available to Kindle users.

Still, not everyone has a Kindle. Non-Kindle readers were seeing that these stories existed and started asking me for print versions of them. So I decided to put together an anthology of my own. I'm happy to announce that SHORT CUTS TO MAYHEM was released this week, which includes these 16 titles:

Mrs. Fanaglio and The Body On The Beach
Mirror, Mirror
REM Murder
Ring of Truth
Kill...with Personality
Ginseng Tea
True To His Country
Cliff-Hanger
Showdown At Sundae Gulch
Favorite Haunt
Who Tempt The Dangerous Way
Swan Song
Ultimate Layoff
Rocky Road To Murder
Who Ate Billy Penn?
Here's Blood In Your Rye

4 of the stories feature Gen and Sara Ziegler, from my Twins Mystery series. The Mrs. Fanaglio tale came out in Death Knell V last year and so it's NOT available on Kindle. Plus I've added an introduction to each story, for those of you who like to know where authors get their ideas.

You can find SHORT CUTS TO MAYHEM on Amazon right now. It should be available to other distribution channels within the next week or two. The ISBN is 978-1500662240 if you want to order it though your favorite bookstore.

If you want to whet your appetite for short stories, there's a free one on my website: "Job Interview."  Enjoy. And thanks for reading.

Profound Thought, and a Free Book Offer

I don't have profound thoughts often, so this might not be up to the standards of those who think profoundly for a living. But it occurred to me that, since language is a development of intelligence,  making a typo--missing a comma, misspelling a word, using a homonym by accident, forgetting the "ed" at the end of a past tense verb, whatever--will always make the person doing the writing look stupid.

Professional writers are not those people who construct language perfectly, but those who've learned to live with the embarrassment of looking stupid on a regular basis.

I thought of this after my brother scanned galleys for the first of my Twins Mystery novels, TWO-FACED, an ebook which will be out in print soon. He found a HUGE Freudian slip of a typo. Not only that, but I made the error 3 times. The editor and 3 proofreaders missed them. I haven't been contacted about it by anyone who read the novel on Kindle or Nook, though it's been on sale for 2 years.

So now I'm admitting my stupidity and doing penance by offering a free copy of any book I have in print to the first 3 people who can describe the typo to me by May 15th.. If you've read the book, go skim through it to see if you can find the mistake. If you want to read the book before the deadline, it's available on Kindle or Nook.

Send your answer to missmaggietests@gmail.com .

Piece...I mean, peace,
Elena

The Horse Sense of Literature

I heard that the U.S. might soon authorize a horsemeat packing plant in New Mexico, despite recent news stories about alarm bells being raised because horsemeat was found in IKEA's Swedish meatballs and sausage. Americans, it seems, are less adverse to pink slime in their fast food than equine protein.

An NPR interviewee was asked why Americans are so against the thought of eating horsemeat. He gave kind of a lame response, saying, more or less, that we think of horses as pets.

Avid readers know it's more than that. Horses have always been an essential part of our most heroic and romantic stories. In our fantasies, princes come riding in on horses, not on cows or pigs.  The Charge of the Light Brigade would have been pretty silly on chickens.

There's a good reason no one ever wrote novels with these titles:

The Black Sirloin

My Friend Filet

The Red Pork

War Heifer

Sea Bovine

Porgy of Chincoteague

Black Beefy

The Holstein Whisperer

National Vealchop

So, New Mexico, why not consider packing some other kind of meat? You have rattlesnakes, don't you? I'd eat that.

Peace,
Elena

Remembering Robin

My best friend in the mystery writing world, author Robin Hathaway, died last Saturday. I'm going to skip her professional resume here--you can find it on her website or Amazon author page if you're interested.

Robin and I met twenty years ago at a Mid-Atlantic Mystery Convention, at the founding meeting of the Delaware Valley Chapter of Sisters in Crime. We spent the majority of our friendship, I think, in a car or train. At first we traveled to New York City for MWA dinners and Edgar week activities, then we carpooled together to Malice Domestic in the Washington, DC area each year.

When her first novel won the St. Martin's Best Traditional Mystery award in 1997, she phoned, shouting, "I won! I won!" It took a few minutes to get her to calm down enough to tell exactly what she'd won. When she nabbed an Agatha for the book the next year, the first thing she said to me was "You're next." (I did get an Agatha nod the year after, so she was half right, but I had to wait until 2009 before I brought home a teapot myself.) But my point is, amidst her Agatha exhilaration, she thought of me first. She was that kind of person.

Once we both had publications to hawk, our joint book tours began. My favorite was our madcap drive down the Jersey coast, starting with a talk at the Ocean City Library and stopping at every bookstore between there and Cape May in two days, with a short break to collect shells and dip our feet into the Atlantic in Strathmere. And when my second novel came out, we walked all over New York City, fifty blocks to the Upper West Side, twenty-five down to Greenwich Village.

The Caroline half of the Charles Todd team joined us for our next long tour (the southeastern quarter of Pennsylvania) and our trio became known as The Three Witches. We did signings, library talks and conventions, including an epic 15-hour trek to and from Indianpolis for Bouchercon, with Robin lustily singing "Mairzy Doats" to keep me awake while I was driving.

The three of us also got together for week-long writing retreats in the backwoods of South Jersey. We'd write in separate rooms all day, getting our own breakfasts and lunches, then cook a common dinner together at night (gourmet meals they were, too -- Moroccan chicken one night, pork chops with an apple glaze another -- and always moose tracks ice cream for dessert). Afterward, we'd sit out on the screened porch, listening to MP3s of old radio plays. Then more writing before bed.

Really, what I remember most of those twenty years was the conversation. Robin and I never ran out of things to talk about--writing and books, of course, but also history, food, politics, great ghost stories, arts, science, nature, you name it. It wasn't so much common interests that sustained these conversations as it was mutual curiosity.

That's what I'll miss most, that sharing of what we'd learned about the world with each other. But I'm very grateful for having enjoyed two decades in Robin's company.

Elena

Gunshot Wounds: What The NRA Won't Show You

At the beginning of this month, I heard that doctors had been asked to weigh in on the gun control debate. That's the last I heard about it. Some representative of the NRA or  other gun advocate is on the news at least once a day, but nothing more from the medical world. We hear all about guns--how different ones work, etc.--and, in an abstract way, about gun victims, yet nothing about gunshot wounds.

As a mystery writer, I'd be pretty poor at my job if I only researched various types of guns for my novels, without also researching what the bullets from those guns do when they enter a human body.

In a way, I agree that part of our nation's gun problem is the way Hollywood and video games depict gun violence, though my thinking is that the depictions aren't violent enough. No fictional video shooting depicts what really happens when a person is shot. If they did, a lot of Americans wouldn't rush to defend gun laws. They'd be too grossed out. I can't even post crime scene and autopsy photos here because, frankly, I can't stand to look at them for more than a moment myself. I won't make my readers look at them without warning. I'll include links at the end of this blog so those of you brave enough can go click on them. I'm guessing it won't be the gun proponents who look.

Suffice it to say that a bullet will put a hole in you slightly bigger than the diameter of the ammo. Once the skin is pierced, though, the wound fans out. The exit wound is bigger than the entrance wound. Depending on the power of the gun and size of the ammo, the exit wound can be huge. In the case of President Kennedy, for example, the entrance wound was very small (photo here).  The bullet then blew off much of his skull, taking most of his brain out with it. Film footage shows the First Lady freaking out, not simply because her husband had been shot, but because she witnessed the insides of his head getting splattered all over the backseat of convertible.

Short of being close to a bomb going off, a gunshot is probably the worst violation the human body can suffer. Lots of people who buy guns to defend their homes and families only imagine what they've seen on TV, or those neat round holes in firing range targets. Unless they've been to war or served as a law enforcement professionals, they don't understand what will happen if they point their guns at people and pull the trigger. No policeman I know is against sensible gun control. Not one.

This subject's close to my heart because since late October, my town has had two gun murders, several injuries, and reports of gunfire in the streets at least once a week.  Between living in what feels like a war zone and the 7 mass shootings last year alone, I'm tired of hearing that nothing can be done.

If you took a high school driver ed. course, you no doubt were shown gory movies about what happens to the human body in a fatal car accident. Maybe we should start by requiring would-be gun owners to view photos of real gunshot victims. Maybe we should put photos of gunshot wounds on the packaging of firearms designed strictly for the shooting of human beings, like we do on cigarette packs.

As disgusted as I hope you are,
Elena

Links:
Forensic article on gunshot wounds. Click on blue highlighted words to see photos.
Patterns of Tissue Injury. Collection of gunshot wound photos.

Beth Ann's Blog for Eco-Geeks

You might have noticed that I haven't posted here since August. I think I've exhausted the subject of writing, so I've been rethinking what to do with this space. Meantime, Beth Ann (teen science whiz and costar of my Possessed Mystery Series), asked if she could use my blog to save the earth. Could I say no? Here's her first entry.

Wind Energy Turned On Its Side
by Beth Ann Lee

Last summer, London's Olympic Park included 7 vertical axis wind turbines. Here's a photo.

They look pretty classy, don't they? Less offensive than a lot of cables strung all over a city.

A vertical axis turbine can catch wind from any direction. They're more efficient than a standard wind turbine because they don't require a minimum wind speed or power to start. They're also quieter. These could easily be used on roadways to offset or fulfill the power needs of streetlamps and  traffic lights, and on bridges for a de-icing grid. One turbine can provide up to 7500 kWh per year, making them a viable power source for home rooftops.

You can read more about London's turbines here.

Turbines in Olympic Park

Another type of vertical axis turbine

Confessions of a Teenage Republican

Deep, dark secret that only one or two folks know about me: I was a Teenage Republican.

Not that I had much choice. Our high school didn't have a Teenage Democrat Club. Back then in our town, Democrats were encouraged to leave. Or stay behind closed doors, preferably on election days. You couldn't get a job at the courthouse if you weren't registered with the GOP.

So my choice was to join or not to join the Teenage Republicans. The mom of one of my best friends was a councilwoman, making said friend interested in politics. She didn't want to go to the meetings alone, and my social life being what it was (ie, no different than now), I joined the acned version of the Grand Ol' Party.

To tell the truth, I don't remember a thing about the club. I don't recall actually doing anything. Yet I think it did me some good in that I started following the issues, and have voted in every election from the moment I reached voting age. And if you pay attention to politics, you can't help noticing that politicians have traits that lend themselves nicely to certain characters in mystery novels.

I was always a lousy liar, I think because I grew up around science geeks. Yes, truth has gray areas, but certain facts can't be denied. The sun rises over different points on the horizon, but always in the eastern sky. So I'm fascinated by people who can bend the truth like they're pulling taffy. A skillful politician, if it suits his agenda, might tell you this month that the sun rises in the north. It's before the fall equinox, so he'd be right. Northeast sky. Doesn't matter if, in a month's time, the sun will rise in the southeast. He's scored his point, having convinced you today. When he draws you further from the facts next time, you're more likely to trust him.

Take a villain in a mystery, or any characters with secrets to hide (and really, every suspect worth his alibi will have a secret). Give those characters some ability to spin the truth and you'll fool the reader every time.

I like to think I learned from the best, since Richard Nixon was president when I was a Teenage Republican.

I must say, though, that the current batch of GOP politicians is disappointing. They just lie. No finessing the truth at all. They don't start from fact and pull you into their scam from there. Too lazy. They merely pick their own alternate reality and stick to it, repeating untruths ad nauseum in interviews, until they sound like scratched CDs and look ridiculous. I mean, seriously, you can admire a great con man. He's a pro. But do we really want to elect people so inept that they can't even lie convincingly?

If you're thinking of running for public office, do the fiction writers of this world a favor and master the basics of verbal manipulation. We're depending on you for inspiration.

For everyone else, make sure you're registered to vote. If you're in one of states (like I am) that insist on trying to suppress your vote, make sure you have the proper ID. And don't be, as Mr. Lincoln said, one of those people who can be fooled all or even some of the time.

Elena

Pat Montella Is Laughing At Me

Pat's the protagonist in my Possessed Mystery Series. When I was developing her character, she needed a hobby. Cooking, I decided--the kind of necessary but creative past time someone doing drudge work for corporate America could delve into at the end of a frustrating workday.

This wasn't a matter of write-what-you-know. When I penned the first book, By Blood Possessed, my repertoire in the kitchen consisted of brewing tea, nuking frozen dinners, and frying up the occasional French toast.

My mom had been the quintessential Italian cook. So was her mother before her. My brother Tom not only took after them, but figured out the art of great homemade bread. They weren't gourmets, mind you, but I grew up well fed. I never needed to learn to cook. For Pat's gastronomic creations, I had my family recipes to draw on.

In 2008, I was diagnosed with a gluten intolerance. All of a sudden, my diet had to be cleared of wheat, barley and rye products, and of anything else processed with those grains. I lost my major food groups: pizza, pasta and Italian rolls. My brother's bread was taboo. No more cake, donuts or other baked goods. No more of my usual breakfast cereals. Nothing breaded. No beef or turkey gravy. No Philly cheesesteaks or hoagies.

After a frantic couple of months wondering what I could safely put down my gullet, I made my mind up to learn how to cook and, especially, bake without gluten. At first it seemed like alchemy--like I was trying to make gold from inferior metals. Slowly, though, I learned about flours made from other grains: rice, tapioca, etc. I learned to mix them to make a better baking flour than wheat. I learned to change the mix or add specialty flours like buckwheat (not a wheat grain) for really great new tastes. I even learned to use xanthan gum, which Pat had actually made fun of in the first book.

I found out that I love cooking and baking. Oh, I still have a lot to learn. I haven't mastered yeast bread yet, for instance. But I can happily spend an hour throwing together quick breads or cookies or biscuits, and my gluten tolerant friends tell me they're better than most wheat baked goods. Last month, I made my first cake from scratch, something my mom was a whiz at and I thought I'd never do. I've even posted a bunch of my gluten-free recipes at Sparkrecipes.

The main reason Pat's laughing at me is that this month I'll be teaching cooking classes. Me, who five years ago couldn't do much more than boil water. If you're interested and are in my area, classes will be August 20th and 27th. For more info, go to the Really Cooking With Robin website

And look for Pat to be learning gluten-free cooking herself soon. I can't let her have the last laugh.

Buon appetito!
Elena

ENNUI

I feel today like I haven't a creative bone in my body. Or I suppose "cell in my brain" is closer to anatomically correct. But I also don't have a critical bone in my body today, so correctness isn't a high priority either.

The highlight of my existence right now is harvesting herbs. Not an event I'll be talking about for weeks to come. I keep thinking a real writer would already be tossing around ideas for a mystery titled Death By Dill or Poisoned By Pesto, yet nothing occurs to me.

My car went through its annual state inspection and oil change last week. Did that inspire Inspector Tierod and the Corpse in the Corolla? No.

The trash container that I use for overflow from my rain barrel sprung a leak after an epic thunderstorm. The Mildew At The Bottom Of the Can? Be Worried In The Rain? The Perp in the Puddle? Nope. Sigh.

Cole Porter's "I Get A Kick Out of You" was the first time I encountered the word "ennui." Leave it to the French to make being bored and listless sound romantic. Too cool a word for such a horrible case of the blahs.

Writers need brain stimulation. So next week, I've decided to go find some. Going to load up my car trunk with it, bring it home, freeze it. That way, I can thaw a package of stimulation when I need it during my winter doldrums next January.

Meantime, I'm leaving the A/C off. Maybe I can work out a plot to Witness For The Perspiration.

Peace,
Elena

Seeds

Purple peppers, one of this year's experiments.

I think I mentioned before that my Santangelo granddad was a farmer. He was also did shoe repair and, at the end of his life, owned a little neighborhood grocery store, but he still kept a vegetable patch in his backyard and considered himself, first and foremost, a farmer.

Most of grandpop's children also grew food of some sort in their yards, though only one son became a farmer. Two of that uncle's sons also followed the family vocation. One of them became a professor of agriculture.

About 90 square feet of my small yard is devoted to growing vegetables each year, with another 15 reserved for herbs. Each year as I till the soil, I wonder how many more years I'll be able to handle the physical torture involved. I wonder if it's worth it. A month or so later, I taste the first lettuce, then around July 1st, the string beans. This past week, I've had the first bell peppers and tomatoes. It's worth it.

But beyond the obvious gastronomic rewards, I enjoy a kind of scientific fascination with the process of growing. I experiment with different soil additives, different growing techniques (like putting screens over my lettuce to keep the plants cooler), different seeds. I'll plant more than one variety of tomatoes and peppers, observing which grows better in my conditions and which produces more. If I find great tasting veggies or herbs, I try to dry the seeds for next year. Sometimes my experiments work, sometimes not, but the learning process is fun. Farming is never boring.

All good farmers do likewise. You can't farm exactly the same way each year. It's not good for the earth or the food supply. You have to constantly adjust. For centuries farmers have been sharing what works and what doesn't, and even sharing plants and seeds. In my family alone, many of the plants in my garden originated as cuttings from the gardens of my aunts and uncles.

I heard yesterday that Monsanto is now trying to patent seeds. They claim that they've genetically modified them, so they've therefore "invented" them.

Consumers hear the words "genetically modified" and panic, but that's not what's scary here. Mankind has been genetically modifying crops since we switched from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. That's why there are 7500 varieties of apples worldwide instead of only the wild apple that originated in west Asia (the Garden of Eden, whichever you prefer).

The scary part is the thought of seeds as intellectual property, that any one entity can claim ownership to the very root (so to speak) of our food supply. Monsanto isn't about to share what they've learned, plus, if you dry the next generation of seeds produced, they could sue you (despite the fact that the next generation would again be genetically modified, simply because pollinators like bees aren't fussy about what pollen is stuck to their butts, and because natural mutations occur).

The thing is, the genetic makeup must keep changing for healthy crops. Adaptability is how life works.

If you want a writing analogy, free seeds, flowing among writers without restriction, is also necessary for the creative process. Imagine if someone had slapped a copyright on "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" back when it was first used as a plot.

So, I'm going to keep farming as long as I can, and supporting my local farmers. I don't want corporations owning my food supply and saying what I can and can't grow.

Peace,
Elena

Night Lights

Night sky over Devil's Tower, Wyoming

When I was a kid, my mom used to leave our 15 watt hall light on at night (so none of us would take a header down the stairs en route to the bathroom). Since I was afraid of the dark, I'd sleep with my bedroom door open to let in all the luminescence I could from that dim bulb.

I created a character who's afraid of the dark for my Twins series. In researching it, I found that achluophobia is defined as a fear of the dark severe enough to be pathological. That implies that lesser fears of the dark are considered by society to be normal. Makes sense. We're taught from an early age to associate light with goodness, security and clarity. Darkness is seen as dangerous and evil. When we enter a dark room, even if it's a familiar space that we know with eyes closed, our first instinct is to turn on a light.

I recently heard an NPR program called "Lost in 'The City Dark'" about light pollution and the loss of the night sky. These days streetlamps, digital billboards, and flood-lit buildings and bridges have made it impossible to see stars in cities around the world.

My dad, brother and I used to stargaze a lot. From our backyard on very clear nights, you could see a faint, fuzzy Milky Way crossing the sky over our house. My brother had a small telescope, so we could check out the craters of the moon, rings of Saturn, moons of Jupiter, the Andromeda galaxy and the teeny nebulae of Orion. I bought a Scholastic book about constellations and learned to identify every one I could see from my yard. We'd stay up late for meteor showers, lunar eclipses, and the occasional comet visitation.

My current neighbors all have big spotlights. The streetlamps have brighter bulbs. The shopping malls on either side of town create a permanent glow on the horizon. All but the brightest stars are now veiled.

I just heard about an exhibit at a large botanical garden not far from me. They've set up colored lighting fixtures--I guess you could say light sculptures, in some cases--all over the grounds for night tours. A few of my friends have oohed and aahed about it, but my first thought was to morn the fact that no one will be able to see the lightning bugs, or moonlight on the blossoms, or, of course, the stars.

I've gotten over my fear of the dark. In fact, I like it. Darkness is energy-efficient. And as Charles Dickens said, it's cheap--always welcome in this economy. Yet we overdo lighting--we keep wasting fuel to keep our childhood fears away.

When I evoke memories of the most memorable night lighting displays I've seen, I think of the starry sky over the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and over Badlands, and over the little out-of-the-way-town of State Line, PA. I remember the first time the sky was so clear I could see individual stars of the Milky Way, at Kiwanis Girl Scout Camp. I remember my first night hike, when I found, to my surprise, that starlight was all I needed to see the trail after my eyes adjusted.

As filmmaker Ian Cheney on NPR program said, we don't raise our heads and look up anymore. We look down, at our phones, at our artificial lights. Cheney makes the case that "in losing the night sky, we're not only losing something beautiful, we're losing this reference point, a sense of perspective. And to think that most kids now will grow up without that perspective, without a sense of our place in space."

If you've got kids, please take them stargazing, and often.

Peace,
Elena (who still has and uses that Scholastic book)

What Did the Comma Ever Do To You?

Last week I was musing aloud about blog ideas in front of my brother. He told me to write about commas--about why you don't see them much anymore, and about why, at times, you NEED to see them more.

My thought was "Been done." Everyone gripes about the sad state of what amounts to bad editing of the published word.

Then I visited Lubriderm's website, to send them a note asking why their "Fragrance Free" lotion smells. I tried to be informative about the problem, explain that the scent wasn't as strong as the regular lotion. I asked if this was an error in the batch or if they'd changed their formula. I had a limit of 500 words to use in my complaint, and I said what I had to say, politely I thought, in less than 100. I hit "SEND."

A little red warning came up: "Illegal character used in comments."

Huh? I checked my wording to make sure I hadn't mistakenly inserted "&" or "#" or "}." No, everything looked fine. To be sure, I took out the one contraction I'd used, in case the apostrophe was the problem. Hit "SEND" again. Same message.

Then it occurred to me that they might mean commas. I went into denial. How could a comma be called an illegal character? Who wrote that law?

Yet, sure enough, when I went back and ethnically-cleansed the comments of commas, retyping them in short sentences that sounded as if they'd been written by 4 year-old, the complaint was accepted.

You must to be kidding, Lubriderm.

Or I suppose, to get through to them, I'd have to say "You must be kidding Lubriderm."

Which means something completely different.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,!
Elena

Give Me A Nice Locked Room

After the last week, a padded, soundproof cell sounds heavenly.  But actually, this blog is about locked room mysteries.

Mystery fans know I mean the kind of story where the corpse is found alone in a room with limited access, and that access has been cut off from the outside with a lock or other means. The fun of solving this kind of enigma is figuring out how the murderer got in and back out again.

Back in the 5th century, Herodotus told of a headless robber whose body was found in a sealed chamber. What we think of as the first "modern" detective story came from the pen of Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders in The Rue Morgue, published in 1841. This was also a locked room mystery and no doubt inspired variations on the plot that followed--Collins' The Moonstone, Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and several Sherlock Holmes tales such as The Sign of Four and "The Speckled Band."

During the Golden Age of detective fiction, locked room mysteries were some of the most popular, and it seems like nearly every author of the genre tried their hand at this kind of plot. Dorothy Sayers set one outdoors--a recent corpse found in the middle of a wet beach, yet with no footprints in sight (Have His
Carcase). Agatha Christie used a whole island as her locked room (And Then There Were None). Christie used the technique in other works as well. One of my favorites is her short story, "The Blue Geranium."

Authors are still writing locked room mysteries, but they're hard to find these days. Maybe the pressure put on authors to churn out novels in a hurry discourages the creation of intricate plots. Or perhaps the trend toward action-oriented thrillers discourages plots based on mental puzzles. It seems a shame, now that we have all kinds of technology--surveillance cameras, motion detectors, ID card, fingerprint and retina-scan door openers--that could make for the ultimate locked room.

So, to kick off the next locked-room renaissance, I wrote the novel TWO-FACED (available only (for now) on Kindle and Nook). Any authors out there wiling to give it a try?

Do you have a favorite locked room mystery?

Peace,
Elena

Getting Cozy with Poisons

Anytime a group of mystery fiction lovers get together eventually the discussion will get around to hard-boiled vs. cozy novels.

The former is the grittier type of novel, taking place on mean city streets, as told by policemen or private detectives. The novels have more physical action, more violence, and more gore. The bad guys tend to be organized crime, serial killers, even terrorists.

Cozy mysteries are named after the tea cozy, used for keeping a pot of tea warm. These stories usually take place in small towns, with bodies often found already dead, and not too messy. The protagonists tend to be amateur sleuths (though not always--think of Christie's Poirot). The bad guys are usually amateurs as well--cases involving domestic murder, embezzlement, secrets that need to be kept quiet.

In hard-boiled mysteries, you'll likely find guns, bombs, knives, and blunt instruments like lead pipes. The bigger the weapons, the better, so big powerful cars are also to be expected. No one in a hard-boiled drives a Smart Car or a Mini Cooper.

Cozy murder victims typically succumb to more genteel methods. Oh, guns aren't out of the question, but they won't be assault rifles or police specials. Maybe an antique musket, or a lady's derringer (I used a Brownie in my last book). A blunt force weapon is more apt to be a fireplace poker or a bust of George Bernard Shaw. If the victim is drowned, it's in the garden pond instead of the East River.

Poisons, though, have always had their place in classic cozy mysteries. One of the experiences that shaped Agatha Christie's career was learning about toxins when she worked in a medical dispensary during World War I. The traditional mysteries are chock full of arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide.

I love garden settings: all someone has to do is mention the foxgloves or oleander in the yard and you know Cousin Horace isn't long for this earth. And certainly the shed out back contains a container or two of rat poison or pesticide.

Like food? Beware of the mushrooms or special herbs Aunt Betsy added to the soup. Or the berries in the tart. Or even certain shellfish harvested in the wrong month.

And let's not forget the exotic poisons--the venom of certain snakes and spiders, the excretions of certain frogs, even poisonous gases that leave no trace. And everyone's favorite, the untraceable poison discovered by a primitive tribe somewhere in the Amazon.

Poisons, somehow, aren't seen as macho enough for tough guys in hard-boiled crime novels. I'm not sure why. The Borgias were the Sopranos of the Italian Renaissance. No one called them wimpy for using poisons. Not to their faces, at least.

So give me a nice un-gritty mystery any day, where you never know what might have been added to the liquid in that pot under the cozy.

Cheers,
Elena

Memorial Day Isn't Just For Citizens

I've put a bit of this story on Facebook the last week, so if you've already read some, I apologize. But here's more of the story.

My mom's father was named Guiseppe Ciccocioppo. A mouthful, right? He immigrated here from Abruzzi, Italy in 1912. In five short years, he was a private in the U.S. Army and his messmates were calling him Joe Chicco.

After his training, he was on a train slowly traveling through the south, at one point through a watermelon patch. Joe jumped off the train, grabbed a watermelon under each arm and let his buddies pull him back aboard. The incident earned him the name Watermelon Joe.

The army must have been impressed with his food procurement skills, because they made him a cook in the 154th Depot Brigade of the 2nd Training Battalion. Joe was sent to a new base built as a training facility, Fort Meade. No one ever remembers the regular soldiers who do the work at boot camps. In this case, the new recruits who went through Ft. Meade in 1917 ended up in the trenches of France. One of them, at least, remembered Joe Chicco afterward. His name was James Ronca.

After the war, James Ronca was at home when his younger sister brought home a prospective beau. James took one look at him and exclaimed, "That's Watermelon Joe!" Which apparently made the approval process go smoothly.

But the point of this blog is that Joe only became a citizen of the United States after the war, when he legally changed his name to Chicco and married Jenny Ronca. During his time as a soldier, he was still an immigrant.

Twenty plus years later, during World War II, Joe's two sons and most of his nephews were in the armed forces. One of his nieces, too, as an Army nurse. Joe walked the five blocks to the train station every day that he could, to welcome any military personnel coming home on leave. If they were from his neighborhood, he'd walk them home, carrying their duffels for them.

When Joe died in 1948, the VA provided a footstone for him with a flag holder attached to the side. For more than 60 years, that stone stood 4 inches above ground and every Memorial Day a flag was placed in the holder. This year, the cemetery decided to sink all footstones to ground level, so they could get riding mowers over them. They buried Joe's flag holder.

I contacted the VA to get a new one. They asked if I had Joe's discharge papers and death certificate. I didn't, but I took a photo of the footstone, and that was accepted as proof of his service and death. So today, I'll put the new WWI flag holder and flag on my grandpop's grave.

Occasionally, PBS reads off the names of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of those names are Latino. They are perhaps recent immigrants, or at least, the sons and daughters of immigrants. Their families deserve better than random traffic stops asking them to show proof of citizenship and other harassments.

American immigrants quite often do the work no one else wants to do, including fighting our wars. We need to remember that.

Happy Memorial Day,
Elena

Slipper Lust

My Favorite Moccasins

Go to Pinterest.com and search on the words "shoe lust" and you'll get pages of photos of footwear, 99.9% of which are women's shoes with heels so high your ankle has to bend backward at an anatomically impossible angle for you to be able to stand straight in them. I traced a few photos to their web sources and the average prices for most of pairs seem to be around $750.

I've never quite understood this footwear fetish some women have. It's a relatively new phenomenon, I think. Oh, styles of women's shoes have come and gone forever, but I don't ever remember hearing about footwear obsessions before 1986, when Imelda Marcos, on fleeing the Philippino Presidential Palace during their revolution, was found to have left behind something like 2700 pairs of shoes. Sort of like Marie Antoinette, except the message here was "They can't afford platforms? Let 'em wear pumps."

After that, all of a sudden, you couldn't have a female character on TV or in movies and novels, who didn't salivate at the thought of a new pair of shoes. The characters eventually seemed to morph into a stereotype with the message: If a women doesn't crave shoe shopping, or wear outlandishly high heels (even when  chasing down criminals or lounging around her house), she isn't a real woman. Or at least, not a sexy, desirable one. I'm not dissing my friends who like shoes, but I'm kind of fed up with the stereotype. We've all admitted that Barbie's body measurements are a dangerously unattainable goal for our daughters to strive for, but we've never really let go of those oddly misshapen plastic feet of hers.

Okay, maybe this is no more than the grouse of an old fogey. My formative years were spent back when barefootedness was the summer norm for every young person, and when "in" foot coverings included earth shoes, desert boots and flat leather sandals that molded perfectly to your sole. My favorite shoes now are
slippers. Maybe I'm not sexy and desirable, but my feet totally love me and I'll stay faithful to them.

Not romantic, you say? I disagree. Here's the first draft of a poem by none other than Lord Byron. (He changed it slightly before publication, to read "She walks in beauty like the night....")

She walks in booties late at night,
In soleless shoes that have no ties;
All comfy warm and not too tight
Due to the slightly larger size;
Thus mellow'd more than in daylight
When dressy heels do agonize.

Upon those feet, and under go,
So soft, so warm, so excellent;
She smiles as she sips her cocoa,
Forgetting hours of groaning spent,
Her toes all crushed in stiletto--
In booties now, she's so content.

Ahhhh...
Elena

Eagle-Eye View

When I was in grad school studying music composition, my teacher, Alice Parker, told us that beginning a new piece like being an eagle circling high above the earth. The metaphor works for writing as well.

At the outset of a project, your idea seems very far away. Your mental image is something like a blurry aerial photo. Then as you work on the piece, you circle lower, picking out details, seeing how parts of the landscape relate to other parts. At last you reach a point where you can identify buildings and cars and maybe even people, but you're still far enough away to see the big picture. You see how everything in that aerial photo makes sense together. Most importantly, you understand why that photo exists and why you need to share it with others. You start writing.

The problem is, in order to write it, you need to zero in on details and get them right. You circle lower and never see that big picture again. You have to rely on the memories of that snapshot to keep you true to your original vision. If you don't, you're likely to forget that first epiphany that got you inspired and excited enough to start writing the work in the first place.

I began a children's novel more than a year ago. The project was a departure from my usual mystery stories. Great fun at first, but I quickly became hopelessly stuck. I simply couldn't seem to make it work. I talked through the story with my brother and one of my writer friends. I changed some major plot points, but that only made things worse. Last fall I finally surrendered and moved on to other projects.

This week I was staying with a non-writer friend who I don't see very often. She asked what I was writing, and instead of telling her about my current work-in-progress, I found myself talking about the kid's book I didn't talk through the plot as I had before, but only gave her the basics. Sort of an elevator pitch, assuming
the lift was slow and headed for the penthouse of a skyscraper.

As I described the story, I found myself getting more excited about it than I'd been since last summer. Somehow, I'd recreated that "big picture" snapshot. Now I've got a better feel for what details and tangents led me away from my original vision.

So, back to work.

Peace,
Elena

Multiple Author Syndrome

I attended the Malice Domestic conference last weekend. Malice is for mystery fans who love the "traditional" mystery, the kinds penned in the style of authors like Agatha Christie, usually with non-cop sleuths and small town settings. I've been to more than a dozen Malice weekends over the years. Probably a lot more. I've lost count.

This year they had a tribute to Barbara Mertz, who writes under the pen names Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels. I'm a big fan of all of her works. Her paranormal Barbara Michaels suspense novels certainly were a major influence on my Possessed Mystery series. Among the authors presenting the tribute to Barbara were Joan Hess, Dorothy Cannell and Margaret Maron.

Watching them, I remembered the first time I'd seen them together in the same room. The four of them plus Charlotte MacLeod and Sharyn McCrumb had come to my local independent bookstore for a signing. I was a yet unpublished writer, and here were some of my favorite authors, so I'd taken a long lunch hour from work to go see them.

I was struck immediately by the fact that these women weren't simply writers traveling together on a book tour. They were good friends.

Since then, I've done signings of my own. My book tour buddies are most often Robin Hathaway and Caroline (Charles) Todd. And yes, we're good friends. When you share hotel rooms and meals and long hours on the road, as well as a love of good books, it's inevitable. I have other writer friends, too, with  whom I've done local mystery panels and presentations. We all support each other's work, and we love to get together and talk shop, which is important in a profession that requires you to be home alone most of the time. The friendships writers develop while hawking books in unison are precious, and as Barbara, Joan and Dorothy reminded me last weekend, often lifelong.

In the last 15 years or so, I've noticed a definite decrease in multiple author events at bookstores. Some stores seem less willing these days to deal directly with authors, but only want to set up events through the publisher. And some publishers seem to keep a fairly tight rein on their authors' promotional activities, insisting they go through their publicists, discouraging their writers from appearing with authors from other publishing houses.

For many authors, especially new ones, it never seems to occur to them to try to schedule signings with other writers. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake. More than one author at an event can generate larger audiences and more excitement. Fans attending to see one author are more likely to take a chance on the others. I've always sold more books at multiple author signings. And I can't name one big name author, on having to share space with a newbie, who has complained that his or her sales suffered.

At that signing years ago with Barbara Michaels, Joan Hess and the rest, I bought six books. One was the first novel I'd read by Margaret Maron. I've since read all in her Deborah Knott series. If only one author had been in the store that day, I might not have bought more than one novel, and possibly never discovered Margaret's work.

Happy fans, happy writers, happy bookstores.

Happy reading,
Elena