The Christmas Calf

My worst fears were not realized when we got plowed out and drove over to the pasture yesterday to see what had befallen the new calf. There was no sad frozen lump in the field, and the two visible cows (the new bull and Crooked Horn) were behind the barn, which must have meant that Maggie and her calf are in the barn. There was freezing rain and the road back to the field wasn't even plowed.

Significant Other is a saint for humoring me. Except for ice everywhere and wind from the arctic circle, the weather isn't too bad. Sun is out. How soon we adjust to winter. I gave the farmer's wife the calf pictures we had taken off and on. I do hope this little critter makes it. The calves are beyond sweet and so independent once they grow a bit.

Thisbe is asleep in front of my screen and Annie is on the rocking chair a few feet away. Every morning Thisbe goes into the (now) cold garage and sits on a mat in front of where the chipmunks broke into the bird seed this fall. Once she started chasing chipmunks, she seemed to realize that she was a cat, and now she obviously expects to find a chipmunk hiding out in the garage, a real live cat toy. There may be one for all I know, except the bird seed is secured in metal pails with tight lids, so no one is noshing on that except the birds.

The new suet feeder was raided a few nights ago, along with the old. Raccoons are not hibernating yet. A clever set of paws opened the latch and removed the suet. It's cold and icy and the birds will have to make do with yet the third feeder which no critter has figured out how to raid (yet).

I'm sending some pages of Festival Madness to an editor today, and the entire MS to another editor tomorrow. I've essentially given up on agents, sad to say. The Gather Contest was an unmitigated disaster, and I don't know what to do with Promiscuous Mode, my noir cosy.

Ah well, no work gets done in the next two weeks. More baking today, another new recipe, with meatloaf and baked potatoes tonight, comfort food for the arriving traveler. We agreed that the pot roast was wonderful comfort food. The winter solstice time brings with it a need for hearty warm fare, beefy fare truth be told, althought a piping hot chicken pie wouldn't be bad at all.

Warm thoughts to all the creatures who must survive in the cold this season.

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Tanked and Cratered

I just adore colorful slang, which I populate all my books with. Speaking of books, Promiscuous Mode pretty much tanked (or was it cratered) in the Gather Crime Novel Contest. Good comments, but not enough, and for some reason, it was rated VERY LOW the first few days, and never made it back up to nine plus. The gossip bird sings that the judges who pick the less popular but perhaps overlooked entries also overlooked or didn't like PM.

Reading the beginning again, I realize that although there is a murder and intimations of sexual misconduct and plenty of sleaze, along with internal conflict, it is still a rather quiet beginning, without a lot of hoo-hah. This obviously doesn't work these days, and I changed the beginning of Festival Madness, but I think it's going to have the same problem. The implication of violence to come. Well, duh, it's a crime novel, isn't it? And there are no LOL moments, either, just a bit of wry humor.

So I am left sucking it up again, and wondering if the Amazon contest will be the same old do-si-do. One would hope for less a popularity contest than Gather, where having lots of "friends" obviously helped. You could tell from the "awesome" and "excellent" comments without any backup, so to speak, that friends were voting. Other comments were insightful, and there were obviously many decent thoughtful writers on board, so perhaps the grapes are just sour. Fruit salad, anyone?

I have to admit that seldom is heard an encouraging word, except from denizens of this household and my writing group, and does that really count? I mean, the writing group loved the novel that cratered on Gather. And I haven't noticed any agents lapping it up, either.

Whatchagonnado?

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Amateur Sleuth - Forsooth!

I've been looking through the entries of the Gather/CourtTV/Borders Crime Fiction Contest. There's some pretty good first chapters, and some mediocre ones, as one would expect. I haven't seen anything that was actually bad, yet, but undoubtedly there are a few of those, too.

What has been instructive, is just how "lame" the amateur sleuth catagory really is. This is a bitch of a realization, because I actually write in that catagory. In case you're a newbie to crime fiction, amateur sleuth is one of the many sub-genres. There's police procedurals, private eye, romantic suspense, true crime, and amateur sleuth, in which the person solving the crime is not a professional crime-fighter. Think Miss Marple. Or Jessica Fletcher in "Murder She Wrote," a series that killed off just about everyone in Cabot Cove, forcing Jessica to travel far an wide solving crimes. Every writer knows what the "Cabot Cove" syndrom is.

Any novel forces a suspension of belief. After all, it is a book, a story, and needs to be larger than life, and certainly with a beginning, middle and end or story arc which life doesn't usually offer. But for a person off the street, so to speak, to be solving murders on her own (amatuer sleuths are usually but not always female), takes a big suspension of belief. And book after book, too, for the knitter, or book store owner or potter or herbalist or (fill in any cutesy occupation) to solve crime after crime requires a mega-suspension of belief.

The other disadvantage is that these stories have to be constructed in a certain way, and it's hard to start off with blood and guts or an explosion or car chase or whatever huge event happens in the small town that stymies the local constabulary but not the amateur, no sireee bob.

Many of these series are dropped by the publisher after half a dozen books, as they fail to build substantial readership. Others remain popular, book after book, but this is the exception.

And the genre gets no respect other than at Malice Domestic and from the women (mostly) who scarft down these books like they're popcorn. Ask Otto Penzler about the genre. He disses it big time. MWA seldom deigns to award the coveted "Edgar" to a woman writing about little villages and cats and nosy neighbors. Doesn't happen.

A sleuth who is a reporter, lawyer, repo man, bounty hunter, or some occupation where one might normally come into contact with bad guys is more realistic.

I have written five of these books, much edgier than the little village with cats, but let's face it, a sleuth solving computer crime isn't really going to come into personal contact with many violent guys. Bad yes, but where are the shoot-outs? The car chases? The explosions, for cryin' out loud? Doesn't one have to have explosions? Serial killers? Torture? Ugggh.

And of the five books, I've only sold one, and that was to an e-publisher who went belly up. First one had stupid plot and I put it on the shelf but it actually generated more interest than the others. Three and four haven't sold. Five I'm still tweaking. It has the best plot, but I don't think the little old ladies in Dubuque are going to go ga-ga over it, nor the guys who want blood and guts and mayhem. Note: I do have one explosion and lots of blood. These aren't cozies but my sleuth is definitely amateur when it comes to solving any crime but computer.

So what happens now? Wish I knew. Back to the Gather contest. The best stuff I've read isn't amateur sleuth and I don't think an A.S. will win. Probably won't win the Amazon contest, either. The prize isn't winning, but getting published, and that's seems to be a hard thing, for anyone without a "name" who isn't writing cozy-cozies or thrillers. Merde.

More sucking it up. Sucking it up really sucks, if you know what I mean.

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The Last Rose of Summer

Crisp cool late fall day with winter-blue skies and a brisk breeze that called us to leave the confines of the house and set forth.

We drove to Woods Hole, first stopping at Silver Stand beach to watch a para-sailor and a big group of seagulls who were just hanging out.

On to Woods Hole. The ancient drawbridge in the middle of downtown creaked up to let a sailboat pass. The crew, a man and a woman were togged out in down jackets with baseball caps. Looked to me like a cold sail with the wind whipping your face until your eyes watered. I recalled such a sail many years ago, 6 adults on a sailboat in Buzzard's Bay in mid-November. The coast guard actually stopped us to conduct a quote "life preserver check" unquote. We always thought it was a pretext to determine if we were drug runners, but we were just cold and suburban and offered the crew of the Coast Guard boat some brownies, but not the Alice B. Toklas kind.

En route to Landfall, our lunch destination we passed a rose bush that had a few blooms and beautiful pink buds. Indeed the last rose of summer.

At Landfall, we snared a table by the window with the sunlight sparkling on the harbor water and the ferries docking. We both had the broiled seafood plate with swordfish, shrimp and scallops, which was very fine, as was the Pinot Grigio. The placemat had a lovely quote by Joseph Conrad about "landfall," and I hope that sailors and landlubbers alike take the time to read it.

The Cape is nice this time of yeat with no wait for a table and just the locals around. The fall colors are still good, with plenty of deep red and yellow among the brown. I've never seen so many leaves this late in the season.

Back home with a stop by the supermarket to pick up Thanksgiving supplies. I'm making a pie with apples and dried cherries macerated in Scotch. From scratch crust for this occasion. Drooling slightly just thinking about it.

My Gather entry is an humiliating bust so there is plenty of sucking it up going on right now. So what else is new?

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Humbly with Hat in Hand

Any steady readers of this blog are invited to vote for my submissison to the First Chapters contest. You have to "join" Gather to vote, not an onerous task. My score seems to be plummeting, but no one, except for someone I know, has left a comment. The title is Promiscuous Mode.

Of course, if it really sucks, I'd like to know that, too, but editors and agents and my writing class have been generally enthusiastic about this novel. It all boils down to a question of taste. Read a few chapters last night on the site-some good, some amatuerish.

http://www.gather.com/

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977163566

of search for Promiscuous Mode - First chapter

Merci,

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Let the Fingernail Knawing Begin

The planets are converging or whatever it is that planets do! Entrants in the Amazon/Penguin novel contest are waiting to hear from Amazon today as to whether they qualified! Then the narrowing and winnowing begins. From what I gleaned from the chat group posts, some submissions will be very good and some very bad. The very bad will be very bad because some entrants submitted first drafts or raced to finish a draft or keyed a hand-written submission into the computer, or don't understand that memoir is not fiction--the usual kind of mistakes that call for the clue gun! Miss Snark where are you when we need you?

The contest accepted all kinds of genres except porn, and again, the message boards have provided some amusement. No kids, the F word does not constitue porn, nor does a sex scene or two, depending of course on the scene and the level of gratuity.

A fantastic amount of fantasy and a mega-blast of sci-fi were submitted, or maybe those folks are just more loquatious than the rest of us. What can one really tell from a message board? Some crime fiction found its way into the contest, of course. What I didn't see too much was plain old mainstream fiction or literary fiction. Maybe no one is writing it. Few mentions of chic lit either, but maybe those writers aren't the posting kind. My analytical mind never stops.

The Gather contest deadline was yesterday. Gather/Border/CourtTV contest was strictly Crime Fiction. Post the first chapter. Now I have to do a major suck up and ask friends to join Gather and vote for me. Same with Amazon should I qualify enough to get into the last 500 or 1000 or whatever BIGNUM it is. Hope I have some favors to call in. It is always so humiliating to ask for things like good reviews and 'vote for me.' I remember my shock in 5th grade to find out a girl had actually voted for herself in the class officer election.

Don't worry. I won't ask my blog readers to vote for me. Some things are sacred. BTW, Sarah Weinman talked about Blogging at the writing conference this weekend. She writes THE crime fiction blog with plenty of good links. Just Google Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. Cripes, hope I spelled it write. Suck It Up doesn't tax anyone's spelling ability.

More anon,

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