I met Canadian author Sharon Rowse at Bouchercon in Alaska last fall, before her first book, The Silk Train Murder was quite out. I liked her right away, so I got hold of the book when it hit the shelves, and enjoyed the heck out of it. So I asked Sharon if she’d do a guest blog for me, about the life of a newly-published author, and she graciously did. I think that you’ll hear a lot about Sharon in days to come, Dear Reader. Silk Train has gotten great reviews, and in fact is a finalist for the Aurthur Ellis Award as best first mystery. This Sunday, Sharon will be the very first guest blogger on www.typem4murder.blogspot.com. I have a link to Sharon’s own website on my “Links” page, above.

So without more adieu, here’s Sharon.

Donis was kind enough to ask me to write a guest blog, giving me carte blanche to write about anything relating to writing mysteries, but especially relating to promotion for newly published authors. Here goes:

So - the dream comes true. My first book’s been published - and in hardcover, yet. THE SILK TRAIN MURDER came out in January in the States and in February in Canada. (Sometimes I still can’t quite believe it.) Now what?

Well, there’s publicity. I thought I was prepared - the website was live, I had bookmarks. My publisher had done a great job - the cover was appealing and the book looked great. The publicist had sent review copies to a variety of media sources… and the rest was up to me.

I arranged some bookstore signings and readings - which went well - and a launch party (great fun!) I sent out postcards (not sure that worked.) I wandered into local bookstores, offering to sign copies. Some were excited to see me, others looked at me blankly, as if wondering where I’d come from. Note to self - talk to the manager ahead of time, rather than just showing up.

One of the best things I did, though, was signing up for first time for Left Coast Crime (this year in Denver, CO) and the Malice Domestic in Arlington, VA. LCC was in early March, Malice at the end of April - my first conferences as an actual published author. I arrived in Denver with great hopes and a bad case of nerves. First up was the new author breakfast - three minutes to pitch your book to a room full of mystery devotees.

Despite the early hour, I came away feeling charged up by the energy in the room. The whole conference went like that - it was a wonderful experience, talking with readers and my fellow writers. An entire weekend sharing a love of mystery. It was a nice size for a conference, small enough to really get to know people. For me, the LCC experience was about belonging.

I was so busy in the weeks leading up to Malice Domestic, I didn’t have time for nerves. The first morning was the New Author Go-Round - authors going from table to table, pitching their books and answering questions for 3 minutes, then moving on to the next table, and the next, and… I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction with so many readers. In the process I honed my pitch; the questions helped me focus on what readers were most interested in. By table 15 it went something like this:

“THE SILK TRAIN MURDER is an historical mystery set in Vancouver (BC) in 1899. The book opens with recovering gold-seeker John Lansdowne Granville taking a job guarding the silk trains that raced across the continent from Vancouver to New York. He finds a body on the docks, his friend is jailed for murder, and Granville has ten days to find the real killer and save his friend - with a lot of help from an emancipated young lady named Emily Turner.”

The following morning was the New Author Breakfast - here comes that pitch again - though this time as part of a 3 minute interview - plus a chance to talk with those at your table. Malice is a larger conference than LCC, and there’s a great sense of community - and continuity. People come year after year, and yet there’s a welcoming of new members to the community.

I’m realizing there’s no end to the publicity one could do - especially as a new author - except for those pesky time and money constraints. (My full-time job helps with one but severely limits the other!) It ends up being a balancing game - I’m slowly finding out what works best for my circumstances, which wouldn’t be the same for another author. Finding time and creative energy to write the next book - I’m working on the next book in the Granville/Emily series - adds another challenge. I’d encourage any new author to go to a conference or two, though. It’s well worth the investment of time and money.

I know that I’ve mentioned this in the last two posts, but I don’t want you to forget, Dear Reader, that Carolyn Hart and Hannah Dennison will be speaking all over the Phoenix area on May 1 and May 2. If you’re in the vicinity, it would be well worth the time to drop by one of their venues and check them out. Carolyn is the author of some 50 well-beloved mysteries, and Hannah had just had her first book published. She’s off to a bang up start with A Vickie Hill Exclusive, which features an enthusiastic cub reporter who is the daughter of a notorious jewel thief, a coven, hedge jumping, the town of Gipping-on-Pym, Devon, and a murder. On the first, they’ll be at Mesquite Library in Paradise Valley at 11:00 a.m., Tempe Public Library at 3:30 p.m., after which I will ferry them up to Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale for a gig at 7:00 p.m. On May 2, they’ll be doing Scottsdale Public Library at 11:00 a.m.

Speaking of which, I did Scottsdale Public Library yesterday at 11:00 myself. I had a nicely enthusiastic bunch show up to listen to me talk about why I write historical mysteries. I had to think about that one for a while. Why do some of us like certain types of books and others like something else? I always liked to travel to exotic places and see how people live, and imagine what it would be like if I had been born Italian, or Australian, or whatever. I think that the same desire to explore the unamiliar is what fascinates me about other eras. For me, reading historical fiction is time travel without having to remember where I put the time machine.

And if you are one of those who thinks that if it happened before you were born, it couldn’t be very relevant, I can only say au contraire, my young friend. The past isn’t over. I’m amazed at how the same things keep happening over and over again. We never learn.

I’m going to be out of town this weekend, so I’ll miss doing my Type M 4 Murder blog, but I hope to write more about this when I get the chance. I’ve been researching the beginning of World War I in the United States, and some of the parallels between then and now are pretty scary.

I had an absolutely wonderful time presenting my workshop down in Sierra Vista AZ on how to deconstruct a historical mystery novel. It was a lovely, intimate group, and we were really able to talk about how it’s done. Everyone was so enthusiastic, and asked such good questions, that the workshop went on for more than two hours and I hardly noticed. Except for the fact that I was so hoarse from talking that I practically had to maintain silence all the next day. Poor Don was bereft of my constant wit and wisdom, and was forced to think his own thoughts. He did seem to be in an unusally good mood, though.

My next gig is April 29 at 11 o’clock in the morning at Scottsdale Public Library. I’ll be talking about my books, and about the writing life, too. It all sounds very romantic to spend your days imagining and creating entire worlds on paper, but there’s a lot more to it than than that. Shameless promotion doesn’t suit most authors, who tend to be an introverted bunch, as a general rule. But the reality of the book business these days makes it an absolute necessity if you want anyone at all to read your work.

The thing I try to remember is something that novelist Charles Benoit wrote - he’s just constantly amazed that in spite of everything, he’s an actual published author. So come by Scottsdale PL on the 29rh if you’re in the area, Dear Reader. There will be dessert!

As I mentioned in my previous post, on May 1st, I’m going to see Carolyn Hart and newbie Hannah Dennison (author of the hilarious A Vickie Hill Exclusive!) at Tempe Public Library at 3:30, then I’m taking them to supper and chauffeuring them to Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, where I’m going to MC their talk at 7:00. My editor and PP Bookstore owner Barbara Peters asked me if I wanted to, and I jumped at it, since Carolyn has been so good to me. In her new book, Death Walks In, a watercolor picture of a scene from one of my books is hanging on the wall of Annie Darling’s bookstore in South Carolina!

And last, for anyone who’s ever written or tried to write a book, there is a very interesting discussion going on over at www.typem4murder.blogspot.com on the process. It’s fascinating to see how different authors go about it.

Did everyone get to listen to my Internet Voices Radio interview? (see previous entry). I’ve been told by various friends and relatives that it’s fun, and it’s still available for several more weeks. The ironic thing is that I haven’t heard it yet. Mercy, I hate to admit this, but I can’t get it to play. I click on the “play” button, and nothing happens. I’m such a computer idiot. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to let me know.

I notice that since I’ve been blogging over at www.typem4murder.blogspot.com every Saturday, my entries on this site seem to be getting shorter. It’s difficult to be regularly witty on one site, let alone two. But we persevere.

I’d like to write a little bit about mystery writing today, but before I do, I simply must mention that I picked up Carolyn Hart’s new book, Death Walked In, today. It’s another Annie Darling mystery, set on one of the South Carolina barrier islands, featuring mystery bookstore owner Annie and her husband Max. In each of these books, Annie hangs five paintings of scenes from mystery novels in her bookstore every month. Then at the end of the book, after Annie has solved her own mystery, she gives away copies of the novels depicted to whichever of her customers figures out what books the scenes are from. Imagine my delight when I saw that in Death Walked In, one of the paintings portrays a scene from one of my books! I’ll leave you, Dear Reader, to figure out which scene and which book. I love Carolyn Hart, both as an author and as a human being. She has really been good to me as I start out in this business. She’ll be here in the Phoenix area (Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale) on May 1, and I’m going to be privileged to introduce her and MC her appearance.

On April 12, I’ll be going down to Sierra Vista, AZ, (southeast of Tucson) to conduct a historical mystery workshop for their chapter of Sisters in Crime. Consequently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a good mystery novel. Of course, the point of a mystery is the puzzle - figuring out whodunnit. But the thing that makes a mystery novel different from an existential novel is that justice is done in the end. I think that is one of the reasons that fans like mystery novels, because unlike real life, things usually turn out the way they are supposed to. Of course, that doesn’t always mean that the killer is punished. Sometimes it’s more just when the killer gets away with it. Remember Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express? I did something similar in The Old Buzzard Had It Coming. The killer may or may not be punished, but justice was still done — when the victim was killed! Dorothy Sayers had Lord Peter allow the killer to take the gentleman’s way out on an occasion or two. Ellis Peters was very good at moral amibguity, which is one reason I love her books, especially the Brother Cadfael series. The resolutions of those novels are usually very clever and perhaps not what you might have suspected. One of my favorite resolutions was in her novel Monk’s Hood. The victim wasn’t a pleasant man, but he wasn’t evil and didn’t deserve to die the way he did. The killer shouldn’t have taken the action he did. Cadfael figures out who did it and why, and confronts the killer, but in the end … well, let me just say, I was taken aback by what happened. Was it justice? I think yes, and mercy, too.

And that’s the mark of a truly successful mystery. We don’t just find out who did it. We are given a just resolution that satisfies us right down to our toes.

I have something very interesting for you Dear Readers today. Last night I did an internet radio interview with fellow mystery author and Type M blogmate Vicki Delany (In the Shadow of the Glacier, and Scare the Light Away are two of her titles.) Vicki interviewed me about my books and my writing life for half an hour, and it felt to me just like two friends talking on the telephone. Vicki has a segment on the show in which she interviews a different mystery author every week. It’s fascinating to hear these people talk about their work, and Vicki is an excellent interviewer.

So if you’d like to hear what I sound like, go to www.internetvoicesradio.com, click on Archives from the list on the left, and look for Vicki Delany’s name. Vicki seems to think I have some sort of accent, but you can be the judge of that. It is interesting to hear the Canadian/Oklahoman juxtaposition here. Isn’t technology wonderful?

…not me. As I suspected when I didn’t get an e-mail right after the awards banquet. The winner of the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award for Fiction is Harpsong, by Rilla Askew. I just posted an entry over on www.typem4murder.blogspot.com that goes into more detail about the winner and a little about my lovely weekend, (even if I wasn’t awarded a book prize).

Yesterday, Saturday, I conducted a mystery-writing workshop at a book fair in Fountain Hills, which went very well, thanks for asking. I presented a technique for using good mystery novels as templates for learning to write a mystery of ones own, and among the many things we discussed were ways to create suspense.

Today has been a study in the technique of drawing out the resolution until the reader wants to scream. The awards banquet for the 2008 Oklahoma Book Awards was held last night in Oklahoma City, and as I may have mentioned once or twice on this blog and a couple of dozen others, The Drop Edge of Yonder was one of five finalists for the Fiction prize. Since I was unable to attend the ceremony, Glenda Carlile, Director of the Oklahoma Center for the Book, told me that she’d let me know the results, but as yet I haven’t heard anything. I surmise that that bodes ill for my chances. I know today is Sunday, but I suspect that if my book had won, she would have notified me right away. I checked the Oklahoma Department of Libraries’ website, and nothing is up yet, nor were the award results in today’s Oklahoma City paper. The Banquet ended too late to make the deadline, I expect. Of course, miracles have been known to happen, and you will know as soon as I do, Dear Reader, if this is one of those times.

Today, Don and I drove down to Tucson so that I could do a signing at a Borders Bookstore with part of what I call The Tucson Gang. There are several mystery writers who live in Tucson, and they all know one another well and do lots of events together. I’ve been fortunate to do some gigs with several of them, and today I was invited to join Elizabeth Gunn (Cool In Tucson), Susan Cummins Miller (Hoodoo), and Jane Candia Coleman (whose latest book of poetry, The White Dove, is currently nominated for a Pulitzer). It was once of the best bookstore signings I’ve done in a long while. The store CRM was really on the ball, which as anyone who has ever done a signing knows is not always the case, and having four authors there seemed to create a synergy. I sold a number of books that I’m sure I wouldn’t have if the others hadn’t been there.

As wonderful as both events were, they did entail making two long car trips in two days, and I’m sitting here typing, at 10:30 p.m., cross-eyed with fatigue, so I must leave you now and go to bed. Watch for more news tomorrow.

I’ll be conducting a workshop on how to learn to write a mystery novel this weekend, March 8, at the Fountain Hills Book Fair. So all of you aspiring mystery writers who are in the vicinity of Fountain Hills, Arizona, on Saturday at 1:00 p.m., be sure and join me in the conference room at the Fountain Hills Library, 12901 N. La Montana Drive in Fountain Hills. I’ll tell you how I learned to do it, and together we’ll try to figure out how you can do it, too. The workshop is free, but seating is limited, so it’s best to register by calling Mary at (480) 816-8737. Hope to see you there.

My friend and fellow Poisoned Pen Press author Betty Webb has just had her fifth Lena Jones book released, the amazing Desert Cut. Following is a conversation Betty and I had about Lena and Desert Cut, Betty’s upcoming series, and the writing life. Enjoy.

Donis: Your fifth Lena Jones mystery is quite an eye-opener. Tell us about it.

Betty: There’s been so much fuss about illegal immigration, very few people have bothered to take a look at the kinds of people we’re allowing into the U.S. legally. Some of these folks are from cultures very, very different from ours… cultures where it is legal to beat your wife and trade your 12-year-old daughter for a cow. Many of these cultures continue these practices in America, and to make a long story short, that’s what Desert Cut is all about.

Donis: When did the idea for Desert Cut begin to form in your mind?

Betty: I’d been reading some odd newspaper stories about child abuse cases across the country — odd because the specific type of abuse was never described. When I contacted journalist friends in those cities, they told me what had been left out of the story, and I was absolutely floored. That was around 4 years ago. Desert Cut has been percolating in my mind ever since.

Donis: In the book, Lena confronts a horrifying practice that has been perpetuated on children in some cultures for thousands of years, yet most Americans are totally unaware that it is going on right in this country. How were you able to research a topic that so many go to such lengths to keep hidden?

Betty: Again, many of my friends are journalists, and they told me what they’d been forced to leave out of their stories. They also directed me to organizations that had collected a lot of information about this practice. There really is a lot out there if you know where to look.

Donis: Your books concern socially relevant topics. You seem to have a well-developed social consciousness and like to shine a light on the darker corners of human behavior. In fact, you’ve actually seen your fiction contribute to social change. Tell us a little about what happened with your second book, Desert Wives. Are there as yet any indications of something similar with Desert Cut?

Betty: It’s a little early for Desert Cut to have an impact yet, since it’s only been out for two weeks. It took almost a year for Desert Wives to get a law written against polygamy.

Donis: Lena is an interesting character - a troubled former foster child who literally doesn’t know who she is. In each of your books, Lena finds out a little more about her past. Will she eventually find out her whole story? Do you intend to end the series when Lena learns what happened to her? And just for the sake of those of us who care about her, I hope you’ll let her love life take a nice turn for the better.

Betty: Yes, Lena will eventually find out her own back story in book number ten, Desert Redemption. And believe me, it’s a pip! I may or may not end the series there, though. When Lena finds out where she came from, and what really happened to her, she will face enormous problems. As to her love life, many readers don’t like Warren and still miss Dusty. That cowboy has a lot of women half in love with him. Maybe he’ll come back, maybe he won’t. As for Warren… at this point, the less said about his future in the series, the better.

Donis:You were and still are a journalist, a book reviewer, and a writing teacher. What made you decide to go over to the dark side and become a novelist yourself?

Betty: After reviewing novels for about 10 years, I finally said to myself, “Girl, you can write a better novel than half this slush you’re reading.” Easily said, not so easy to accomplish. But I gave it, and am still giving it, the old college try.

Donis: The Lena Jones series is quite intense, but I hear you have a second series in the works that is a complete change of pace for you. What do you have planned?

Betty: You must mean The Anteater of Death, my first attempt at writing a traditional mystery. The first of a series set in a coastal California zoo, it will be released by Poisoned Pen Press in March of 09. If the Lena Jones series is tales from the dark side, the zoo series could be called tales from the light side. The book was inspired by my volunteer work at the Phoenix Zoo, and I had almost as much fun writing it as I’ve had working in (don’t laugh) Monkey Village. Each book in the series will highlight a different animal. Obviously, a giant anteater from Belize leads off the first. In a way, the zoo is the Cabot Cove of zoos. People keep dying.

Donis: As a book reviewer, you must read innumerable books a year. Do you ever get the chance to read just what you want to read? Whose work do you particularly like? (present company excepted, of course)

Betty: I’m always swamped with books, and I do have my favorites. Leaving aside the mysteries (and possible political problems!), I tend to enjoy what is loosely called “literary fiction.” People like Carol Shields, the farther reaches of P.D. James, Wallace Stegner, John Updike… they’re my heroes. As for not being able to read what I want to read when I review, I’m very fortunate in my work for Mystery Scene magazine that they let me send in a list of people whose work I like, and they make sure I get their books… as well as books similar to theirs. Therefore, I am very seldom, if ever, put in the position of reviewing something I loathe.

Donis: You always ask the authors you interview if they have any advice for aspiring writers. I’ll ask you the same.

Betty: If you want to write good books, READ GOOD BOOKS. And a lot of them. In my writing class, the first thing I ask my students is how much they read and what they read. If they are not reading at least 5 books a month, their future as a writer is dim. And they should be reading RECENT books that have won prizes in the genre you want to write in. It’s all very well to read Dickens, but today’s reader is not a Victorian lady reclining on a chaise in the conservatory. She’s most probably a married (or divorced) woman with kids who holds down a full time job. She doesn’t have time for books that take 100 pages just to get off the ground — she wants action, and she wants it fast. Readers’ tastes have changed dramatically over the past 150 years, and publishers know that. Look at it this way: would you buy a car designed by an automotive engineer who had only studied and designed Model T’s? Of course not. Sad though it may seem, the same is true of writers. If you are writing from a 150-year-old (or even 20-year-old) paradigm, don’t expect to find a publisher. Writing is a business, just like everything else. Publishers aren’t in the field for “literary” or charitable reasons; they’re in it to make money. Period. Stay current in your reading, and write at least 3 hours every single day — it’ll take you that long just to write your way through the cliches. If you don’t have the discipline to write for hours every day, then choose an easier profession — like brain surgery.

Donis: My sentiments exactly. (”Brain surgery…” I love it!)

First, two bits of good news. I was notified on Saturday that The Drop Edge of Yonder is one of the finalists in the fiction category for the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award. I am thrilled. Unhappily, I won’t be able to go to the awards ceremony in Oklahoma City on March 8, due to a prior committment. I’m trying to strongarm a relative (any relative) to go in my place. Second, I finally sent the MS of the new book The Sky Took Him off to my editor. I haven’t heard back from her yet. So, those two things are pending, and I will be sure to inform the world about the outcomes.

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the recipe testing procedures for my books. My sister Carol, who lives in Missouri, sometimes helps me reconstruct old recipes from our childhood, especially dishes that our mother made regularly but neither of us use, anymore, since we care about our families’ arteries. Since Don and I keep a meatless house, Carol agreed to test on her brave family a recipe for beef tenderloin with natural gravy, surrounded by vegetables and tiny fried meatballs, that I want to use for The Sky Took Him. She did so, and the letter she sent me outlining the results was so wonderful that I copied it and am reproducing it in this post. My comments are in italics. This is a fabulous example of how I am graced with such support and help in attaining authenticity in my writing.
And by the way, if you’re in the mood for a treat, be my guest and try the dish yourself. Carol would be delighted, I’m sure.

Here it is:

Donis,
I finally cooked the meat I bought to try your recipe. We have a ton of left-overs because there were only 3 of us at dinner. We all concluded that … them old farm wives knew what they was a doin’ !

As I told you way back when, beef tenderloin is expensive and more of a holiday treat apparently…hard to find. I finally bought a cheaper cut of meat (eye of round roast?) that was shaped like a tenderloin. I decided to go for the hotter oven and shorter cooking time because Chris [her husband] and Abby [her daughter] like their beef less well done and that would give a nice outside color with some pink in the middle. I didn’t have any other lean meat and the roast was fairly large so I cut the end off and boiled that for the meatballs (it wasn’t very fatty at all). About two minutes after I put the meat in the hot oven, we lost power because of an ice storm. The oven is gas so I hoped it would still cook since it was lit before the power went out…but no such luck. We had no power for 2 hours, but I had started it so early that we decided to “go for it” after the lights were restored. I’m pretty sure that skewed the cooking time somewhat!

As near as I can tell, though, even with the oven at the hotter setting, it took more than an hour -15-20 minutes- to get it to medium-rare (meat keeps getting hotter after you remove it).

A tip from the “food network” is to let the meat “rest” for 10 minutes to redistribute the juices or when you cut it, the juice runs out and the meat is dry (who knew?). Abby was filling out an insurance form when the meat came out of the oven, so it really did sit for about 10 minutes. The meat that was in the oven was probably right at 4 lbs, and even tho Chris ate a gargantuan piece, we still have about half of it left. The carrots, celery, and potatoes (didn’t have a turnip…forgot to get one so I substituted another potato), were yummy but not nearly enough for the quantity of meat I cooked.

I followed the recipe and put 2 c water, the meat and the veggies in a 13×9 pan (all I had) and cooked it uncovered. The top of the meat was red enough I wondered if it was really cooked, but it was really really good! I guesstimated when to put the allspice and butter,and ended up cooking the whole thing about 30 extra minutes, and the “gravy” was very good.

I chopped the boiled meat about as fine as I could get it and chopped about 1/4 onion to about a pound (?) of meat with a 3 or 4 shakes of salt and 7 or 8 shakes of pepper (which we love) and no matter how much I squeezed, I could NOT get the meat concoction to stay in balls of any kind. I ended up adding about half a beaten egg to the mix since it was awaiting the “wash” process. It was still pretty dry, but did hold together enough to get it covered with the egg and dipped into cracker crumbs I crushed with the back of a spoon (they didn’t have food processors!) I fried them til dark brown in a bit of oil, even tho Alafair probably would’ve used lard of some description. I added a bit more egg to the last quarter of the meat and had trouble getting those meatballs to stay together because they were too wet. If I got them to fry enough on the first side I could kind of roll them over and get them to cook without falling apart, but the best were the ones with a little bit of egg in with the meat.

David [her son, who lives with his wife in the basement apartment. Still likes his ma’s cooking, I see] came in and had a bite of each part and thought it was one of the best meats he’d tasted, so it was a success. We also loved the flavor of the meatballs. I will admit that I used a meat thermometer when I first took the pan out of the oven because I thought it was raw. That’s when I ended up cooking it for another 10-15 minutes. I’m sure I will try the roast again, but know also that you’ve waited a long time to hear how it went! The veggies were cooked “just right” when the meat was done, so that may be a fair way to judge. The celery wasn’t mushy but the carrots were done - I cut them into chunks almost an inch long and the potatoes were in bite sized pieces.

There you have it…at least the inital diagnosis. If I do it again before your book is published, I will let you know!

Love you lots,
Carol

I love you, too. Donis