Selected Readings

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by Bethany Maines

This week I’m going to take part in a live reading event
called Noir at the Bar.  It’s a fun event
that focuses on crime tales and the forties pulp-fiction style.  I’m excited to participate, but as usual it
throws me into a tizzy of what to read. 
Short stories come in all shapes and sizes but reading for an audience
is quite different.  Not every story
translates well to an audience that’s slurping their way through cocktails and
appetizers. I would, of course, love an audience to hang breathless on my every
word, but even when an audience comes specifically to see an author it’s very
hard to get that level of studiously quiet audience participation. 
Through the variety of readings that I have experienced I’ve
developed the theory of “joke” short stories for readings.  Not that a reading has to be funny, but that
it should be constructed like a joke.
There is the set-up. 
A man walks into a bar
at the top of a rise building.  It’s a
swanky place, but there’s a guy in a suit and glasses slumped at the bar.

The tale. 
“I can’t believe this
view,” says the man, looking out the window.
“Yeah, but you’ve got
to look out for the cross-winds.  They’re
killer,” says the drunk guy, brushing a curl of dark hair off his forehead.
“What are you talking
about?” asks the man.
The drunk guy stumbles
off his bar stool.  “Here I’ll show
you.”  He opens the window and steps out,
but the winds sweep in and he simply hovers in air and then steps back into the
bar.
“Holy cow,” says the
man.  “I can’t believe that.”
“Give it a try,” says
the guy in glasses.

The pay-off.
The man steps off the
building and plummets to the ground.  The
bartender looks up from polishing the glasses as the drunk guy sits back
down.  “Jeez, Superman, you are mean when
you drink.”



The story has to have a pay-off or the audience sort of
stares at you like cows in a field.  It
doesn’t have to be a funny pay off, but there has to be some sort of solid finish
that gives an audience a feeling of conclusion.  Usually, it’s some sort of twist that reveals the truth or that gives the audience the
key to understanding the story. I’ll be reading a condensed version of a short story from my Shark Santoyo story.  Hopefully, Noir at the Bar enjoys what I’ve selected for
them.  Wish me luck!

Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie Mae Mystery Series, Tales
From the City of Destiny, San Juan
Islands Mysteries, Shark Santoyo
Crime Series, and numerous short stories. When she’s not traveling to
exotic lands, or kicking some serious butt with her fourth degree black belt in
karate, she can be found chasing her daughter or glued to the computer working
on her next novel. You can also catch up with her on YouTube,
Twitter and Facebook.

Down with–yes, down with–cell phones

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By AB Plum

Here goes another rant on a social phenomenon I dislike more than back-to-back TV commercials or politicians who lie to the public or the constant pop-up ads on Google, FB, AOL and everywhere else on the Internet.

Smart phones go to the top of my Bleh List every time.
Smart phones are ubiquitous.
Smart phones are addictive.
Smart phones may not cause brain cancer, but they impair the judgment of more and more users. A few examples:
·         walking in front of traffic with faces in phones,
·         going to the bathroom with phones,
·         going to bed with their phones,
·         texting while driving,
·         talking while driving,
·         checking the Internet or email while driving,
·         checking phone hundreds of time a day,
·         eating meals with friends/family while checking phones,
·         giving young children phones as gifts/rewards,
·         spending more time on the phone than with face-to-face people,
·         playing on-line games for more than an hour/day
·         using a smart phone for games during a memorial service

Uh-huh! I witnessed this last example two weeks ago at the funeral service for my long-time critique partner. In a standing-room only environment, one of the mourners clicked his “smart phone” throughout the service. From my vantage point, I’d swear he was playing games … but, admittedly, I am jaded.

And. Lest I seem like a total luddite, I’ll mention the ubiquitous presence of 
smart phones at a recent rally for reunifying immigrant families. Taking picture to capture the event for now and posterity seemed like a good use of smart phones. Giving those who couldn’t attend the rally seemed like a good use of smart phones. Sharing pictures and recordings on social media to get out the message seemed like a good use of smart phones.
So does the good judgment at the rally outweigh the bad judgment in the case of my friend’s funeral?

What do you think?
What would you have done at the funeral—before/during/after?
***AB Plum lives and writes in the heart of Silicon Valley. She owns a cell phone with no bells or whistles and uses it only in emergencies. Smart phones appear infrequently in The MisFit Series her dark, psychological thrillers. Writing as Barbara Plum in WEIRd MAgIC, her paranormal romance trilogy, witches and warlocks rely more on magic than smart phones.

What is funny?

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What is funny?
To me, funny is Tim Conway with Harvey Korman in a dentist’s
chair. Funny is physical and clever and the spectator at the US Open who
yelled, “Dilly, dilly!” when Dustin Johnson teed off.
Anyone who’s ever had a pet knows funny. Given enough time,
the disaster stories (chewed handbags and shoes, chewed drywall, chewed
couches) turn into comedy. That time the dog flooded the guest bathroom?
Hilarious. That time the dog had to go to the vet three times in one week because he kept raiding the snack cabinet?
Funniest story ever.
For Ellison, Max the dastardly dog brings the funny. An
excerpt from Shadow Dancing:
Max slipped through the opening and stood in the driveway laughing at
us. Ha! said his doggy smile. Just try and catch me.
I might—might—have been able to lure him inside with the promise of a
dog biscuit, that or a turkey club sandwich with extra bacon, but Max spotted a
squirrel.
Sadly, the squirrel did not spot Max.
Max’s jaws missed the squirrel’s tail by less than a quarter of an inch.
The panicked animal ran and Max followed.
“Max!”
Max ignored me.
The squirrel cut across my yard and ran into my neighbor’s lawn. My evil
neighbor’s lawn. Margaret Hamilton was a witch of the
flew-a-broomstick-at-midnight, stirred-a-cauldron, had-warts-on-her-chin (not
really) variety. And she did not like my dog.
“Max!”
Intent on the chase, he didn’t even turn his head.
And the squirrel? Why was it ignoring a perfectly good oak tree?
It was unfortunate (but not surprising) that Margaret chose that moment
to step outside. She possessed some kind of witchy internal radar that alerted
her when any member of my household so much as touched a blade of her grass.
It was even more unfortunate that, having made the decision to scowl at
me from her front steps, she didn’t close her door behind her.
Most unfortunate of all was the squirrel dashing between her legs and
into her house.
No. That’s wrong. MOST unfortunate was the fact that my dog followed the
squirrel—through Margaret’s legs and into her home.

Our own dastardly dog – the inspiration for Max





Julie
Mulhern is the USA Today bestselling author of The Country Club Murders and the
Poppy Fields Adventures. 

She is a Kansas City native who grew up on a
steady diet of Agatha Christie. She spends her spare time whipping up gourmet
meals for her family, working out at the gym and finding new ways to keep her
house spotlessly clean–and she’s got an active imagination. Truth is–she’s an
expert at calling for take-out, she grumbles about walking the dog and the dust
bunnies under the bed have grown into dust lions.

Action, adventure, mystery, and humor are the
things Julie loves when she’s reading. She loves them even more when she’s
writing!

Following a Character into a Book

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by Linda Rodriguez
Lately,
I’ve been intensely making notes for a new book in bits and pieces
of time left over from other commitments. That’s a fairly common
thing around here. Several times a year I follow a character into a
short story or book. After the first draft is finished, I still refer
to the much more I know about that character from writing that first
draft as I revise and edit and edit, still following those characters
as I chip away whatever doesn’t matter to them or what doesn’t
fit. In a way, you could say that I spend most of my professional
time chasing after characters, and you’d be correct.

Some
people have the idea that plot is the be-all and end-all of the
mystery writer, but I see it as story. I can write a book based on a
clever plot with all kinds of surprises and twists, but if the reader
doesn’t care about the characters or if the actions taking place
don’t ring true for the characters, it’s no good. And yes, I know
there are books like this that are published and sometimes very
successful, but I still think it’s really story we need in the
mystery, a story where the actions rise organically out of the
characters and their motivations, where we care about the characters
and what they’re trying to do because we know why it’s so
important to them to succeed in their attempts.

When
I’m looking for story, I start with character. As I start to know
that character better, she or he leads me directly into story. A nice
complex, twisty narrative with surprises and suspense comes from
following all the major characters as they lead me on their path
toward their goals in the story and come into conflict with each
other or help each other or, sometimes, both.

When
I run into problems with story as I’m writing a book, I go back to
the characters involved with the aspect of the story that’s giving
me a hard time. I sit down and have them write their situation,
feelings, and problems with the story’s direction in first person
as if they were writing diary entries or letters to me to tell me why
they won’t do what I think they should do. Always I find that
there’s something I’ve overlooked with that (those) character(s).
I’ve been trying to steer the plot in a direction that’s false to
the character(s), and I have to learn more about each character in
order to find out the direction the story needs to go.

I’ve
always been glad I take the time to do this, even as I whine about
taking that time in the middle of a book with a deadline facing me.
Often it leads to big changes—once I even had to change the villain
into a possible love interest—but it always makes for a stronger,
more vital story. And that’s what I’m after.

Right
now, I’m chasing another set of characters into a book that I’ve
tentatively set up to go one way, but I know that, as I get deeper
into this story following these characters, I may find we’ve gone a
different way into a whole different and much richer story. It’s
the ultimate adventure, following a character into a book.

Linda Rodriguez’s Dark Sister: Poems
has just been released. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel,
based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native
American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited,
were published to high praise in 2017. Every Family Doubt,
her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police chief,
Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will
be published in 2019. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every
Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last
Secret—and her books of
poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.


Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

We Just Want to Celebrate!

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by Sparkle Abbey

What did you do to celebrate Independence Day?

Here in the Midwest, there were small-town parades, fireworks, and cookouts. We decorated bikes, ate potato salad, and listened to Yankee Doodle Pops. Other parts of the country may celebrate in other ways. But whether you celebrate at the beach or in the backyard, poolside or at the park, it’s a chance to pause to commemorate our country’s Independence Day with family and friends. 
It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day of our busy lives that sometimes we forget to pause and celebrate. Holidays remind us to do that.
We’ve had a couple of months of celebrations. There have been birthdays, graduations, dance recitals and weddings. 
Milestones. It’s so important to pause and really celebrate those milestones. To take a moment and thoroughly enjoy them and tuck the memories into the corners of your heart.
Lately, we’ve also had some writing milestones. Book #9, Barking with the Stars, came out. this year and book #10, The Dogfather is slated for an August release. Wow. Book Ten. Of course, we’re crazy busy and working on more books and so we have to remind ourselves to pause and celebrate our Book #10 milestone.

What about you? What milestones big or small have you had recently? Did you take time to pause and enjoy the moment?

Clicking Our Heels: Shadowing Any Writer – Dead or Alive!

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Clicking Our Heels: Shadowing Any Writer –
Dead or Alive!
The Stiletto Gang members admire each other,
but for the fun of it, we all explained what writer (dead or alive) we’d want
to shadow and why.

Judy Penz Sheluk: Truman Capote when he
was researching In Cold Blood. It was
a different time, before 24/7 news cycles, and he paved the way for true crime.
I’ve seen the movie Capote a dozen
times.

T.K. Thorne: Shakespeare, to plum the
mysteries of his genius.

Bethany Maines: James Patterson maybe.
Just to see his marketing machine work. But in general, writing is pretty dang
boring. I think possibly “shadowing a writer” would turn out to be code for
staring at them while they type.

Shari Randall: Agatha Christie, of
course! I’d love to ask her for plotting tips and I imagine she’d always stop
writing at tea time, just like I do.

A.B.
Plum: Jane Austen strikes me as a woman who wrote despite the obstacles society
put in her way. Her acerbic view of her society spurs me to write about family
and place and love.

Dru Ann Love: Linda Castillo. She
writes about a group of people that I would never think would be as evil and
dangerous and she makes it believable.

Linda Rodriguez: Virginia Woolf would
be my choice because she wrote groundbreaking novels, crystalline nonfiction,
and wickedly funny letters and diaries and she knew all of the most fascinating
people of the time (though she and her husband were the most fascinating of all
of them).

J.M. Phillippe: Oooh. Probably
Shakespeare so I can finally put the debate about if he was real (and really
wrote everything he is attributed to writing) to rest.

Juliana Aragon Fatula: When I was a
teenager, Pearl S. Buck made me fall in love with Asian Culture, people, land,
language. I would love to tell her how much her writing inspired me and led me
to believe a woman could write and be published.

Sparkle Abbey:

Mary Lee Woods: This question is so
difficult! First, dead writers. I’d love to shadow Agatha Christie and I’d love
to have a conversation with Mark Twain. Such unique views of the world and
their views clearly influenced the stories they told. Secondly, living writers.
I’d love to spend a day shadowing Nora Roberts. She seems to have so many
stories in her head and works on multiple projects at one time. How does she do
it? I have many stoires in my head, but the ability to work on them at the same
time escapes me. I suspect it comes down to a brilliant brain, a love for
storytelling, and a solid work ethic. But… if there’s a secret…I’d love to know
what it is!

Anita Carter: That’s hard. Can I pick
two? Lisa Gardner because I struggle with plotting. She’s a master at it, and I’d
love to know her process. And Agatha Christie. From my understanding she’d
start with the murder, then move to the suspects. It’s very similar to how I
work, but I know there are ways I could improve my process.

Kay Kendall: Shakespeare. What a
fertile mind he had.

Debra H. Goldstein: Anne George. Not
only was she a wonderful humorous Agatha award winning mystery writer and the
Alabama poet laureate, she wrote one of my favorite literary works, This One and Magic Life. She also was
generous with her time bringing the beauty of words and writing to children.

Writing What You Know … Sort Of

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By Guest Author Loretta Wheeler
Thanks to Loretta for stepping up to fill my first Monday of the month spot. I’m away for most of July, sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time. Judy Penz Sheluk.

The phrase writing what you knowis almost a cliché for writers. But, I thought I’d address it a little differently this time, including a “sort of”in the title, since my stories in the Southern Breezes series have a ghost or two in them. I don’t really know any ghosts. I’ve had a couple of clairvoyants in my life that have, but I haven’t. Thank goodness. My ghosts in the Southern Breezes series are the friendly sort, but you know, they’re still ghosts. So, in being truthful, I really can’t say I know this side of things first hand, but I can say I’ve researched it well. And that’s where the“sort of”, comes in.


Now, on the natural plane, I’ve either been for a visit to the areas I write about, or I live near them. In the Southern Breezes series, I purposely set the stories in Galveston so I could drive down at the drop of a hat if I needed to see something for myself. And as writers know, it isn’t just the visual that helps us with our story; it’s the taste, touch, smell and sound. Especially in Galveston. How do you write something set there without the sigh of the waves as the backdrop? 
So, living nearby is a definite plus for me. Of course, then I battle the desire to stay, or possibly move there, because the call of the ocean and the furling of banana trees blowing in the wind really makes you want to go all Tommy Bahamas.
But, even though I live close, there are still a lot of things I keep discovering about Galveston. And the pearls of information I find, I incorporate into the stories. For instance, did you know that the storm of 1900 not only devastated the island, but left its own unique recovery problems of which few are aware? One of the buildings they were trying to raise kept tilting from side to side each time they tried to lift it. The crew on one side would tighten the jackscrews to raise the building, but the crew on the other side could never match them at exactly the same level at the same time. Frustrated and exhausted, one of them finally came up with the idea that a drum could be used, setting the pace to turn the ropes at the same rhythm. When I heard that, I could hear the drum in my mind. And of course, that opened the door for one of my characters to come thundering through, drawn by the sound of the drum’s beat. I tell myself my character knew that and was just waiting for me to discover it. 

Like forgotten drum beats and changes in the terrain, Galveston has a unique history, filled with tales of the past and of hauntings. You can find stories of hauntings almost everywhere on the island, (something I did know). And because of that, you can also find them in my Southern Breezesseries, along with a scruffy dog named Charmin’, and a clairvoyant who helps the people deal with these highly spirited beings. But, just to keep you feeling comfortable, I can promise you’re going to like the ghosts, along with the dog, and the group of women who’ve returned to the island. The women are at that age of knowing who they are and what they do and don’t want. So they knew their storylines well, or maybe I should say they know them well until they met the ghosts. 
Loretta Wheeler lives in the south along with her Australian husband, their cat Lil’ Dickens, and their dog, Jack. Both pets are rescued fur-persons who are very much loved. Most of Loretta’s writing is set in southern locales, whether in the thriller or romance genre. Find her at http://author.lorettawheeler.com