A Parody That's Good For The Heart

Time for a break from my usual yawp about writing.

My protagonist, Pat Montella, loves to cook. Since so many other authors have food-related blogs, I feel obligated to add my voice to the cacophony.

Here's something Miss Maggie likes to sing while Pat's whipping up a batch of fagiole. The song is from that famous movie Gentlemen Prefer Beans:

A beet in the pan may be quite continental
But legumes are a cook's best friend.
A beet may be canned but it won't taste like lentil
in a three-bean soup,
Or navies in brown sugar goop.

Meat goes cold and meals grow old,
Even cheese will grow mold in the end.
But lima or kidney, from Stockholm to Sydney,
Legumes are a cook's best friend.

Peace,
Elena

Don't

Last question:

4. Any advice for someone wanting to write a mystery for today's market.

My advice is DON'T. Never, ever, ever, ever write for today's market. Chances are good that today's market will change long before you're done your first draft. Maybe even before you're done your first chapter.

Instead, write something you're passionate about. Tell whatever story is in your heart and soul. Write the kind of mystery you love to read.

Writing for the market is like being a cubicle slave for a mega-corporation who doesn't know your name and doesn't care. And writing pays worse, with no benefits and no 401k. Writing for the market will never bring you job satisfaction.

If you hone your craft until you can communicate well, and if you believe wholeheartedly in the story you want to tell, you have all you need to produce a book people will want to read.

You're a writer. Be your own boss. Don't let anyone else try to tell you what to write. Writers and readers ought to shape the market, not vise versa.

Peace,
Elena

For the Insomniac

As stated in the last 2 posts, this month I'm answering a friend's questions:

3. If you couldn't sleep, which author's books would you read and why?

Actually, when I can't sleep, I read non-fiction. Something like Science News magazine. It puts interesting facts into my brain while lulling me into slumber. I don't read exciting fiction or I'll be up all night.

If I can change the question to, what author do I enjoy reading at bedtime? I can't pick just one. I almost never read two books in a row by the same author. But if I could pick a few, I'd say Dorothy Gilman, Agatha Christie, Barbara Michaels, Alan Bradley, Robin Hathaway, Polly Whitney, Gillian Roberts, Irene Fleming, Dianne Day...Have I gone over my "few" allotment? I could name at least a dozen more.

Why? These authors write well. They're great storytellers. They're entertaining. They're intelligent and so are their characters. They don't waste my time.

Right now I'm reading Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha by Dorothy Gilman. I should also add that I'm a very poor bedtime reader. A couple paragraphs and I'm out. I'm more of an afternoon reader.

The only fiction I won't read at bedtime is horror and ghost stories. Then I REALLY wouldn't be able to sleep.

Sweet dreams,
Elena

Let Me Check My Crystal Ball

As I said last week, I'm answering some questions from a friend of mine. Here's her second question:

2. If you could see into the future, where do you see women's mysteries going in the next 10/20 years?

Depends where the mystery book industry goes. Technology and buying habits are changing so fast, it's anyone's guess. The cost of traditional publishing is skyrocketing. Probably less people are buying paper books. I say probably because some folks vehemently deny this is true. The publishing industry is more secretive about their business than the Pentagon. My opinion? I see less people in bookstores. And less mysteries on the shelves.

More people have electronic readers like Kindle and the prices of those are expected to come down until electronic readers are as ubiquitous as cell phones. That said, if you go anywhere people are waiting (train terminal, doctor's office) or relaxing (beach, cruise ship, lunch hour), books made of paper are still the pastime of choice.

Given the pace of Western society these days, readers may very well move toward shorter novels. More and more writers will likely jump on the self-publishing bandwagon, though probably only for a book or two before they find out how hard it is and how fast it drains their bank accounts. The more the big publishers merge and remain rooted in their 19th century ways, the more small presses will spring up to siphon their markets. A fraction of those small presses will avoid bankruptcy and they'll print some truly great mysteries.

I'd love to see more authors take their out-of-print short stories and put them up on the Internet in Kindle format for downloading. Maybe we can start a short mystery Renaissance.

If you mean content, my answer is "Who knows?" Ten years ago, no one was publishing vampire mysteries, now they're everywhere. New York will barely touch a cozy mystery these days, but at least 50% of mystery readers actively seek them out. When my novel BY BLOOD POSSESSED came out in 1999, no one heard of a cross-genre mystery, combining paranormal, history, or what have you. Now they're the big thing. (Note: I did it first. HA!)

My opinion? Predicting trends 10-20 years out is impossible. Trends can change every 6 months. If you're a writer, trends should be the last thing you think about. Writers ought to concentrate on writing good stories and nothing else.

Peace,
Elena

The Case of the Missing Mystery

A friend of mine is writing a thesis titled "The Shifting Trends in Women's Mysteries in the Last Eighty Years" and she sent me some questions. I'm going to answer them one at a time here on the blog over the next few weeks.

1. What would you like to see more of in today's mysteries?

I want to see more mystery.

I noticed at 2 writers conferences this past month that the term "crime writer" is becoming more prevalent than "mystery writer." A lot of books I've come across the last five years have a body on page one, a straightforward (bordering on boring) investigation, and a solution in the last chapter. They're crime novels, yes, but they don't have much mystery in them. No intriguing clues, no seemingly impossible puzzles. Not even very much in the way of mysterious settings or moods. Danger, perhaps, but too often predictable danger.

I've been told (as an explanation) that these are character-driven novels. I'm not sure what that means, other than that I seem to have to plow through usually too many scenes about the main character's love/sex life or cats or drinking problems or financial woes or dysfunctional family sagas between scant paragraphs pertaining to the crime story.

Think back to all the times Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot found an apparently inconsequential clue: for instance, rye grain in a deadman's pocket. The police ignore it. Yet, that kind of clue is so intriguing that I'll keep turning pages to find out how it fits in.

I've actually heard authors scoff at putting what I think of as "mystery" back into mystery novels. The feeling seems to be that the genre has now matured and that grown-ups don't want silly clues like that in their books. Grown-ups only want violence and sex and gritty reality.

Bunk. Reality neither stimulates my brain nor entertains me. I read to escape reality. If that means I'm not mature, I don't ever want to be.

Peace,
Elena (still a "mystery" writer)

Perception of Truth

This past week I took a photography tour of the Bay of Fundy. Many of you know I'm a musician as well as a writer. Few know of my truly dismal talents in the visual arts. I can't even draw a convincing stick figure.

Still, I've been taking vacation photos since the age of six when my Dad gave me a Kodak Brownie. After college I bought myself a Minolta SLR, adding different lenses as I could afford them. I used that camera for 20 years, until they stopped making the light meter battery. Right now I've got a very unfancy Olympus digital whose limits are finally forcing me learn something about visual composition.

I took the tour mainly because it promised to visit all the kinds of natural places I love, not because I'm a serious amateur photog. Yet I did pick up some great tips from our guide, Lance Timmons (check out his cool portfolio at timmonsphotography.com). Beyond that though, he talked a bit about the perception of truth in a photo, which got me thinking how that applies to writing.

People assume photos are truthful little moments frozen in time. Or at least, snapshots used to be truthful, before Photoshop, right? Well, no. Photographers have always shown us only their interpretation of scenes. Before digital technology, they could manipulate photos in the darkroom during processing, or by posing what ends up looking like a spontaneous shot, or even simply by cropping out details so the viewer sees only what the photographer wants them to see. Regardless of the technology, a good photographer can sway the viewer's sympathies to each photo.

When I write historical fiction, I do my best to make the history factual, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not showing everything. For one thing, I'd have to do a decade of research for each chapter. Writers don't have that kind of luxury of time. Even if I did, I don't want to show that many details. Like a good photographer, I need to zoom in on the subject and crop everything else. Too many historical writers spend too many words showing off their research. Do we really need a minute description of 1860s ladies' undergarments in a book about the Civil War? No. It stops the story. Only show what's necessary to bring the era and the story to life.

Also like a photographer, the details I do show ought to sway the sympathy of the audience. In BY BLOOD POSSESSED, my goal wasn't to present the Civil War from a North or South point of view. I wanted to show how war, any war, effects families. In HANG MY HEAD AND CRY, I was aiming for a perspective of Reconstruction through the eyes of a nine year-old freed slave.

The above applies to any kind of writing, not just historicals. You have to look through a viewfinder at the world you're writing about. Move around, back up, zoom in, until you have in the frame only what the reader needs to understand the story. And even after you write it, chances are you'll need to do further cropping.

The photos with this blog are from my trip, taken with my dippy little Olympus digital (the rubber ducky is my first mate, Smee).

So maybe I learned something.

Peace,
Elena

Discouragement, Then & Now

I was at a writer's conference last weekend and I noticed a few things.

Fifteen years ago, unpublished writers could either keep sending out queries to agents and editors until somebody gave them a break and published something, or until the writers died, or they paid vanity presses to publish their books. Young writers were warned and warned about vanity presses, the way little kids are warned not to take candy from strangers. Writers who go with vanity presses, we were told, lost all their money, ended up with a garage full of unsellable books, and were never heard from again. This was usually true, except some of the writers never got the books they paid for. I saw one contract's small print that stated the press wasn't obligated to ever put the manuscript in print.

Then again, we were also told that getting a legit book contract had worse odds than winning the state lottery (which I think was about 1 in 100,000). Easier to win a million in the lottery and buy a small publishing house for yourself.

These days writers are still querying agents. Most editors no longer accept non-agented mystery fiction submissions. Publishing houses have merged, so less of them exist. Writers are warned and warned about self-publishing--you spend your savings and never break even, you end up with a garage full of books, and you never have a chance at a real writing career because no one will take you seriously.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Except that self-published writers using a legitimate press can be reasonably assured of receiving books with which to fill their garages. I haven't heard the current odds of getting a novel published, but it's still worse than winning a lottery. My guess is that now that lottery is Powerball (1 in 5,138,133 last I heard).

Oh, and one more thing I heard this weekend. Less books are being sold than fifteen years ago. (Legal recorded sales, I mean. This does not include under-the-table deals done in the street outside authors' garages.) Even if you do get a contract, your book will likely be out of print fairly soon. No guarantee you'll ever sell another manuscript. An author used to be considered "established" after four published books. No more. You can become a has-been overnight.

At the conference last weekend, between regular rose-colored-glasses sessions on how to improve your writing and get it into publishable shape, all these extremely depressing topics were thrashed out in detail. You could feel the frustration.

Yet, out of the hundreds of writers at that conference, how many will actually throw in the towel? Surprisingly few. For most of us, despite the fact that we know our works probably won't be bestsellers--that they may not even pay for a month's worth of bills each year--that they may never even be published after the months and years we spend on them--despite all that, we're still writers.

Writing's a calling. An obsession. An addiction.

We can't stop.

And so, my fellow writers, keep writing. And keep playing the lottery. First one of us who wins a million buys the small press and publishes the rest of us.

Peace,
Elena