A Mix Bag of Topics

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Do you have auto buys? I do. I have so many; there are not enough fingers and toes to count them all. But, there are only two long-running series (and I’m talking over 20 books) that I do not hesitate in buying when their release is imminent and they are J.D. Robb and Janet Evanovich and I buy the hardcover edition but on discount. I also get the J.D. Robb book on my kindle as well. What can I say? I’m a big fan of hers and one of the items on my bucket list is to meet the fabulous Nora Roberts.

Back in the day, before I got involved with social media, the only way an author knew if I liked their book was the fan letter I wrote them. If I received a letter from them, it told me they cared to write me back and that meant all the world to me. It could a few words or sentences and sometimes I had a question about what I read and when they answered my question, again I was in heaven. With social media, it’s more about writing reviews and posting on various sites. I’ve tried, but I can’t write one for all the books I read because it would take away my reading pleasure. However, I still write that occasional fan letter to an author and still smile when they respond. I have kept all 539 fan letter responses that I’ve received. The fan letter to the right is from September 2006.

Do you have any auto-buys?

Do you write fan letters to an author after you’ve read their book?

Follow dru’s book musing on Facebook for book giveaways, contests, posting about discounted books and some of my reading musings.

Sharing Words + Evoking Emotions = Writer’s Joy

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by Debra H. Goldstein

Starving artists, writers, and other creators of the arts often share the sentiment that personal satisfaction is enough.  The claim is that it doesn’t matter whether or not an audience exists for the work.  As many writers explain, “I write because I have to.”  For those of you who feel that way, I tip my hat and salute you.  I am not as noble as you are.

I want an audience!  To me, a writer’s joy comes from sharing words that evoke an emotional response. Lest you think me selfish, understand the listener can be the universe of readers, a room of people, my neighbor’s pet dog, or my almost one-year-old granddaughter.  She thinks anything I write, as long as I read it with weird voices while making funny faces, is fantastic.

My Best Audience

Not all of my writing is fantastic.  A lot of my efforts aren’t even good.  Hopefully, I am the only audience for those pieces.  But, I want reaction to the ones I believe have some merit.  I want to know if I touch someone or if something in the piece doesn’t work.  Feedback is what gives me the tools to revise, to think deeper, and to grow my ability to write.

It’s truly a joy when my work hits a homerun, but as a writer I get joy even from a critique.  Perhaps I do write because I must or perhaps it simply is the way I share my feelings in a manner that connects to those around me.  What about you?

Readers Review!

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By Bethany Maines

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Help
a starving author – leave reviews for the books you read today!
There’s a lot of talk these days
about shopping local with the goal of supporting actual people instead of
massive corporations.  Well, you
can’t get much more small, local, and actual than author.  Reviews really do help authors. It’s
through reviews that their books percolate through the great Google and Amazon
algorithms and get recommended to other readers.  And new readers means new buyers, which translates directly
to an author’s pocket book.
That being said, I don’t often
leave reviews for books. An author, I know that harsh reviews can be
devastating to writers.  I also
think that after working on the craft of writing for more than a few years,
that I’m pickier than the average reader and that can make for some rather
negative reviews.  But since I
truly value an honest review I have adopted a “If I can’t say anything nice,
then I don’t say anything at all” policy when it comes to reviews.  Which means that my reviews on Goodreads are further
a part as my life becomes busier with less time for reading, and I find it
harder to find a book that I love with the same passion I did when I was
younger.  Hopefully, that means
that if you see a review from me, you’ll know that I truly enjoyed the
book. 
So keep on leaving reviews, try
not to be too mean, and definitely, definitely keep on reading. 
Bethany Maines is the author of
the Carrie Mae Mystery series and Tales from the City of Destiny. You can also view the Carrie Mae youtube
video or catch up with her on Twitter and
Facebook.

Guidebook to Murder Releases April 17th

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And I’m celebrating.

What’s it like to be an author? What wild and crazy things do we do when one of our books is finally out into the world?

Wild authors at the Michael Hauge workshop-St. Louis

April 17th is a Thursday. So I’ll be getting up at 5am, working out for 30 minutes, playing around on the computer for another 30 minutes, then getting ready for work.

The 30-45 minute drive is made tolerable with an audio book playing in the cd player. Probably a mystery. Or a romance. Maybe I can find a Heather Graham mix up for the week.

Then I do my thing for 8 hours at a local leasing company. And, no, I won’t pick you up.

Drive home – more story. Whoever invented the audio book, I’d like to buy you a beer. Or two.

Walk the dogs, make dinner, write 1000 words on my WIP, and play on social media for a few hours, including checking out my blog tour posts.

And, since I’ll still be on Lent, I’ll dream of chocolate peanut butter eggs and eating bunny ears.

Lynn

How do you celebrate a special day?

In the gentle coastal town of South Cove, California, all
Jill Gardner wants is to keep her store–Coffee, Books, and More–open and
running. So why is she caught up in the business of murder?

When Jill’s elderly friend, Miss Emily, calls in a fit of
pique, she already knows the city council is trying to force Emily to sell her
dilapidated old house. But Emily’s gumption goes for naught when she dies
unexpectedly and leaves the house to Jill–along with all of her problems. .
.and her enemies. Convinced her friend was murdered, Jill is finding the list
of suspects longer than the list of repairs needed on the house. But Jill is
determined to uncover the culprit–especially if it gets her closer to South
Cove’s finest, Detective Greg King. Problem is, the killer knows she’s on the
case–and is determined to close the book on Jill permanently. . .

Lynn Cahoon’s a multi-published author. An Idaho native, her
stories focus around the depth and experience of small town life and love.
Lynn’s published in Chicken Soup anthologies, explored controversial stories
for the confessional magazines, short stories in Women’s World, and
contemporary romantic fiction. Currently, she’s living in a small historic town
on the banks of the Mississippi river where her imagination tends to wander.
She lives with her husband and four fur babies.

We Have a Jewish Lawn, But Where Are the Diamonds?

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by Linda Rodriguez
  

People who have been reading my posts on my own blog, here
at Stiletto, and on my other group blog, Writers Who Kill, know that I have had
to battle disapproving neighbors and the city about my front yard, which is
planted in native, drought-hardy plants for the most part. The neighbors and
the city both would prefer that my husband and I have only bluegrass in my
yard, and they’d like to force us to do that. Fortunately, we’ve been able to
fight it for the past seven or eight years.
Now, along comes Pat Robertson, that ancient, uber-wealthy
televangelist, to give us just the excuse we needed to stand up to the
neighbors and the city. On March 31, Robertson said on his television show on
the Christian Broadcasting Network that you never saw Jews tinkering under
their cars or mowing their lawns because they were too busy polishing their
diamonds. 
My husband, who’s Jewish, sent me the link to the video.  
He included a subject line in his email that read, “We Have
a Jewish Lawn,” referring, of course, to the problems with the city.
I watched the video with the poor confused old man and
emailed my husband back. “You’re right. We do. But where are the diamonds?”
And I’m still waiting, darn it!

 

REPLY TO COMMENTS (because Blogger still won’t let me reply 🙁

Marilyn, yes, it is sad, but no more than we can expect from Robertson anymore. It’s a shame that he puts himself forth as representing Christianity, which is something very different and much better than what he shows the world. I would say he’s irrelevant, but he has millions of viewers. I can’t understand why people and cities all over the country are so insistent on the bluegrass yards when they require so much water and chemicals to survive. Yards like yours and mine are much more sustainable and eco-sensible (I think I just made up that word, but we needed one like that, didn’t we?).

Mad Men, Baby Meerkats & 1969

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 by Kay Kendall

In my head
these days, I’m living in 1969. I call up memories from that time period—yes, I
was a sentient being back then—as I write my W.I.P. (work in progress), a
historical mystery.
I call my books
“historical” because, even if it’s a time period some of us can remember, that
world is so long gone that it is the dead
past. Sure, it has ripples into the present, but it is just plain gone.
The award-winning
television series MAD MEN has helped bring this era back to fictional life. The seventh
and final season of this show has begun, and the year is now 1969. The very one
that I’m imagining daily in my head.
Media pundits already
privileged to view the closing episodes note that 1969 brought a sour end to a
decade that had begun with such bright hopes. President Kennedy’s Camelot is
replaced by death at Chappaquiddick. Peace and love at Woodstock progresses to
death at Altamont. Campus radicals morph into the Weather Underground . . . and
even more death. The year 1969 is also when the My Lai massacre comes to light.
(And Nixon becomes President. Enough said.)

Only one thing slowly
gets better as the decade progresses—better opportunities for women. As luck has it, women’s liberation provides the background of my W.I.P.—murder comes
to women’s lib groups in the rain-soaked cities of Vancouver and
Seattle. Hence the title of my second mystery is RAINY DAY WOMEN.

Participating
in the women’s movement was a salient point in my life. I remember
conversations and episodes clearly from that time and can inject them
into my fiction. This adds authenticity to the historical detail.
There’s just
one problem. A few people don’t believe how sexist that era was. For example, one
man in my writing critique group keeps protesting that males just weren’t that
awful back then. He won’t believe me when I assure him that I know what I’m
talking about. A twenty-something female gasped when a passage was read aloud
that showed a husband ordering around his wife in a preemptory fashion. She
said, “I wouldn’t have put up with s**t like that.” In that case, had she lived
back then, she would have been a rare bird indeed.
Now I can give people
like them—doubting Thomases and Thomasinas—an assignment. I’ll suggest they watch
episodes of MAD MEN. Perhaps they will believe the television show when they don’t
agree that my writing is historically accurate. (Often an outside source is
handy to validate what one knows to be true. I learned that in my corporate career.)

So, where do
baby meerkats enter into this—as you might wonder from the title of this post? Please
bear with me as I explain. 
I’m a fairly
serious person. My fiction writing and my social media posts reflect that.
While I admire writers who can routinely toss off witty or humorous comments, I’m
not inclined in that direction. Just look at the content of this blog!
I have noticed,
however, that people who post darling photos of puppies and kittens develop a
devoted following online. Therefore, lately I’ve been experimenting. I salt my
Facebook pages with cute photos of baby animals, and these have garnered raves.
My favorite shows a wildlife photographer who had become so much a part of some
baby meerkats’ life in Botswana that they happily crawled all over him and his
long telephoto lens. The money shot is of a baby meerkat standing atop the man’s
head in that precious pose so beloved of all us meerkat fanciers.
My hope is that
the baby animals on my Facebook pages will draw people in, and then they may
stick around to read my more serious musings. That seems to be happening.
But in
addition, there has been an unexpected payoff.
As I increasingly dabble in the small pleasures provided by
baby meerkats, puppies, and the like, there’s been an uptick in the quality of my
life. It’s great to smile more, even as I dwell mentally in that fraught
year of 1969.
Here for your delight are the photos and video of baby
meerkats, mentioned above. The video is especially recommended:  http://www.buzzfeed.com/chelseamarshall/this-unexpected-friendship-between-meerkats-and-a-photograph?sub=3152218_2755903

*******
Kay Kendall is an international award-winning public relations
executive who lives in Texas with her husband, five house rabbits, and spaniel
Wills. A fan of historical mysteries, she wants to do for the 1960s what
novelist Alan Furst does for Europe in the 1930s during Hitler’s rise to
power–write atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit of the age.


Discover more about her at


http://www.KayKendallAuthor.com


Some Tidbits About My Ongoing Blog Tour

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No one ever said doing a blog tour on your own would be easy. I’ve done it enough to know how much work it is.

Now that I’m in the middle of it, it should be easy, but it’s not.

When I sent the requested blog posts out, I asked for a reply that they’d received the material–everyone let me know they did. But, guess what? At least three people said I never sent them anything. I quickly resent.

Even though I sent reminders out to everyone the day before the tour began, a couple have forgotten.
What I don’t understand is why, when someone gets the material, they don’t set everything up with the proper date and time right then? If they did, they wouldn’t have to rush to do it on the day or forget about it all together.

I’m not thrilled the codes that people have to read and copy–like the ones we have on this blog–but it is a necessary evil for those who get a lot of spam. Some of them are not so bad, but when I have to write the code three times to get it right and post, I know that some people will not bother to comment when it’s so difficult.

Worse are the bloggers who insist on moderating every comment before it’s posted. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad if the comments were moderated often, but when you are on a tour you need to reply to questions and at least acknowledge people who leave comments which is not easy to do when the comments don’t show up for hours.

I know that this discourages people from commenting. One of the moderated posts had way fewer comments that any of the rest of the blogs I’ve visited so far.

On the whole though, things have gone well. At this point in my tour I’ve had nearly 60 unique commenters. Many have commented multiple times–trying for my contest, I’m sure. (The person who comments on the most blogs has the opportunity to have a character named after him/her in my next book.)

Here are the rest of the stops on my tour for Murder in the Worst Degree:

How Rocky
Bluff P.D. Became a Series
How I Get
My Titles
Review
How
Romance Plays a Part in the Book
Review
Several Romances
Review
Social Issues
How I Do My Research
Not a Hard-Boiled Police Procedure Nor a Cozy
Ways I’ve Murdered People
Review
Choosing Names for Characters
and
How My Books Have Changed
My Experience with Killers
Hoping for the remainder to go smoothly.
Marilyn aka F. M. Meredith

Murder They Wrote

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By Evelyn David

A few weeks ago the Internet – and the Southern half of Evelyn David – exploded when The Good Wife killed off Will Gardner. Interviews with the producers, as well as with Josh Charles who played Will Gardner, have made it clear that the actor wanted out of the series. The departure would have inevitably met with viewer disappointment because many loved the romantic storyline of Will and Alicia. But the decision to kill off Will is what enraged – or engaged – much of the audience. The producers claim that they didn’t feel like they could simply ship Will off-stage, perhaps to prison, perhaps to that island where the producers shipped ER heartthrob George Clooney when he opted out of network television. But some viewers, the Southern half among them, think that the decision to kill Will cheated the audience who had supported the show and the relationship through thick and thin.

As the Southern half explained to me in an email: I do know I felt shocked, angry, emotionally manipulated because in the last couple of episodes it seemed the romance might not be done for good. In hindsight it seems the writers did that to ratchet up the angst of his death. I guess I’m more upset that after all these years we never got the “happy at least for now” scenes for that couple. Yes, they got “together” a few times – even a make-out scene in an elevator, but they never were “happy.” That’s the payoff for me – they never reached “happy as a couple” before it fell apart.
I happen to like happy endings in books/movies. Not realistic, but I go on the assumption that I have to deal with enough problems in real life. My fantasy life should be one where the good guys win, the one true couple ends up together. As I’ve said before, it’s why I write and read cozy mysteries. I can’t control what happens in the world, but I can control what I read/watch for enjoyment.
I accept that authors can do what they want with their characters – and conversely, readers/viewers can also choose to stop reading/watching if they’re unhappy with the choice. Arthur Conan Doyle despised his creation of Sherlock Holmes and summarily killed him off in “The Final Problem.” Public pressure and the lack of interest in any of his other writing, had Doyle bring his hero back to life. Frustrating for the author; but delightful for his audience.
Are there books, TV shows, or movies where you believe the writers manipulated your emotions? Did it affect whether you read/watched the writers again?
Marian, the Northern half of Evelyn David

Leaving Lottawatah
Leaving Lottawatah by Evelyn David is the eleventh book in the Brianna Sullivan Mysteries series. A novella-length story, Leaving Lottawatah continues the spooky, yet funny saga of reluctant psychic Brianna Sullivan who planned to travel the country in her motor home looking for adventure, but unexpectedly ended up in a small town in Oklahoma.
Things are messy in Paradise. The happily engaged couple of Brianna Sullivan and Cooper Jackson are anything but. Angry words set Brianna and Leon, her bulldog companion, off on a road trip, but it’s hard to run away from home if everyone wants to come with you. Before she can leave town, Brianna is unexpectedly joined on her travels by Sassy Jackson, her maybe ex-future mother-in-law, plus Beverly Heyman and daughter Sophia, both still grieving over a death in the family. Destination: A Psychic convention in America’s most haunted hotel. But they haven’t reached their destination before Brianna is confronted by two ghosts demanding help in capturing the serial killer who murdered them decades earlier. Even more worrisome, another young woman has gone missing. It’s up to Brianna and her road crew to stop the serial killer from striking again. Brianna has hard questions for the spirits surrounding her, and for herself. Does she want to marry Cooper? Is it time to hit the open road again and leave Lottawatah behind? Or will the ghosts of her past continue to haunt her wherever she goes?

Kindle 
Nook 
Smashwords 
Trade Paperback

We’re also delighted to announce that A HAUNTING IN LOTTAWATAH, the fifth book in the Brianna Sullivan series, is now available as an audiobook. Once again narrated by the fantastic Wendy Tremont King, A HAUNTING IN LOTTAWATAH proves that ghost hunting can be deadly.

  
A HAUNTING IN LOTTAWATAH
Nook 

Juggling by Debra H. Goldstein

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I’m not a writer’s writer.  If I could claim that distinction, I would follow a schedule – perhaps coffee, exercise and writing before and after a short lunch until so many words or pages are completed.  I marvel at writers who live a pre-ordained lifestyle that produces a specified number of words or pages stopping only when “The End” is typed.  Me, I’m a juggler.

Jugglers balance balls, oranges, bowling pins, or whatever comes up in life in the air.  When we watch a juggler, we hold our breath hoping nothing breaks the cycle by falling.  Invariably, at some point, there is a miss, but the juggler grins or grimaces and tries again.

My writing is exactly like the juggler’s act.  Sometimes things go smoothly and the words flow in an easy timely manner, but more often, I add one more ball and my rhythm gets out of kilter.  This week was going to be simple:  two blogs to prepare, a rewrite of the book I am working on, a couple of contest entries if I had spare time, and the beginning of a two week online course with daily homework.  A piece of cake.  That is, until I lost a few hours to a medical appointment, an old friend called to catch up for an hour plus, my husband had the audacity to want to have dinner and conversation, all of the kids checked in, I had to spend hours on the computer and phone purchasing airline tickets for some upcoming trips and wrangling with the television, TV, and internet provider because my bill took a funny jump.  My goals for the week all came tumbling down.

Frustrated, I prioritized.  1) Get homework for class done; 2) smile…this is a guest blogger week on “It’s Not Always a Mystery” and Paula Benson sent me a great piece for Monday, April 14, explaining “What the Bar Exam Taught Me About Writing” (why didn’t I think of that?); 3) Do more class homework; 4) rewrite two pages; 5) write my Stiletto Gang blog; and take a deep breath so that easing in a few extra balls marked as the distractions of life didn’t cause me to drop anything.  Will I finish all the words and pages I hoped for this week?  No.  The contest stuff may have to wait until closer to deadline, the book rewrite may take an extra week, but I’m sure managing to successfully keep a lot of balls in the air and I’m grateful for that.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Debra H. Goldstein is the author of 2012 IPPY Award winning Maze in Blue, a mystery set on the University of Michigan’s campus in the 1970’s.  Her most recent short stories, “Who Dat? Dat the Indian Chief!” and “Early Frost” can be found in the anthology Mardi Gras Murder (2014) and in The Birmingham Arts Journal (April 2014).  Contact Debra through her website www.DebraHGoldstein.com or through her personal blog, “It’s Not Always a Mystery,” http://debrahgoldstein.wordpress.com.