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

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

Robin Hathaway's Short Story Tips

My guest today is Robin Hathaway, who writes the Dr. Fenimore mystery series and the Jo Banks mystery series. Both feature medical professional sleuths battling crime in South Jersey and the Philadelphia area. Robin is the winner of the Malice Domestic St. Martin's Press Contest and an Agatha Award for her novel The Doctor Digs a Grave. Besides her novels, Robin has had many short stories published and that's her topic today.  Visit her website at www.robinhathaway.com.

SHORT STORY TIPS

The following tips are just that. They are not rules, but suggestions.

1.  Know your ending before you start writing. This is not necessarily true when writing a novel, in which the ending may evolve gradually as you write. But with a short story, I usually write backward, with the ending clearly in mind from the beginning.

2.  Economy and precision. These two things should be foremost in your mind when you are writing a short story. You must choose your sentences carefully, making each one count. There is no room for lengthy descriptions of setting or characters. You must choose exact details that say what you mean, rather than generalizations. Be precise.

3.  Limit your characters to 3 or 4 at the most. A large cast of characters is unwieldy and confusing in a short story.

4.  Have your plot clearly in mind before you begin, if possible. If you know your ending this shouldn’t be too hard.

5.  Read some good short stories before you begin, by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, etc. and sample some contemporary authors in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines. Study how others succeed.

6.  Have fun!

Robin Hathaway

RETREAT? Or Charge Ahead?

I wrote this yesterday morning. I did take a walk this morning. We'll see how long that lasts.
___

I’m sitting here, on my last morning of summer camp.

One of the authors I know has a small house down near Delaware Bay, surrounded by preserved farmland and tiny villages that haven’t changed in over two hundred years. You can’t get a cell signal here, or connect to the Internet, or even tune in the Phillies games on the radio. The sound of a car on the road is rare. The chorus crickets and locusts, with an occasional by songbird or bullfrog solo, are often the only sounds for miles.

This friend invited me and another writer down to her place this past week for a sort of writers’ retreat. Most mornings, I got up with the sun and took a quiet walk down the road (nice and flat, with no tiring hills like my neighborhood). We all spent mornings and afternoons writing, getting our own breakfasts and lunches, then we’d cook supper together (no slackers we— for example, chicken with peppers and apricots one night, fresh ratatouille and lean grilled burgers another, and no dearth of yummy Jersey tomatoes and ice cream). Evenings usually meant another walk, or a chat out on the screened in porch, then more writing before bed.

I got loads of work done, easily ten times my usual output over 5 days. But now I’m about to go home.

I saw a item on the news a week or two ago about a drug rehab clinic in one of the worst neighborhoods of a city. The guy who ran the place said he noticed that when people from his neighborhood were sent away for rehab, most did fine until they came home again. Then they’d get in with the same crowd and revert to all their old bad habits. So he opened his clinic right in the middle of the neighborhood, to help his patients deal with every day life.

I was thinking this morning that this can apply to all sorts of other activities besides drug rehab. People used to go to spas to diet and improve their health, only to come home and get stressed all over again, and rip into Sara Lee cheesecakes for breakfast.

Me? Well, I’ll bring home a slew of good intentions to walk each morning and write for hours, but once the distractions start—phone, email, Internet, bills to pay, plumbing mishaps, family issues, etc.—how will I not revert to my old habits of reacting to life as it hits me rather than being at least somewhat in control of it?

So maybe a writers’ retreat right in my own home wouldn’t be a bad idea. Though don’t ask me how it would work.

Still, it was a lovely, lovely week.

Read Robin Hathaway's books. She deserves it, if only for playing host to me. (Although they ARE good books.)

Thanks, Robin.

Peace,
Elena