The New England Crime Bake

Haven't posted much about writing lately, but I'm down deep in the trenches with my 6th novel and half-way through a difficult short story.  Writing groups and conferences make the lonely life of a writer less so and can give one heart and inspiration after being rejected.  One such conference for crime writers is the The England Crime Bake.  Yours truly was on the first (and many subsequent) committees ten years ago when the event was born.  Check out Lindsay Down's  blog to  read first-hand how one of these events gets off the ground.  How The New England CrimeBake got started

We've been sold out for many moons, but check it out.  Great panels, guests, agents, editors and an entire weekend that's all about crime writing.  Yowza.  Official website of the New England Crimebake 

It's a fun weekend for old writing pros and beginners alike.  Very friendly and accessible.  

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Every Town Needs A Fully Functional Library

Significant Other and I have spent some time this week taking posters and flyers advertising The New English Crimebake, http://www.crimebake.org/ to local libraries. Sue Grafton is the guest of honor at our conference this year, and it unlike some writing conferences, we're actually ahead of last year with our enrollment. This year we even have a panel of librarians, all of whom took a poster and a handful of flyers.

This morning, before our weekly trip to the Norton Roche Brothers, we drove into town to drop off the materials at the Norton Library. Not having been theere for a year, I almost remembered where the building was. Suffice it to say, we missed the parking lot and parked on a side street and I had a short hike. A swap meet was the "happening" in front of the library, and I hurried on by.

Can you imagine my consternation to find the library closed at noon on a Saturday? The sign in the window stated they were open Monday thru Thursday and not very long hours either. They've been decertified due to loss of funding. So sad.

I read yesterday that traffic at libraries had increased from 10 - 30 % in the last year. So many towns in our area have had serious financial problems and voters have been swift to come to the polls and vote down everything. Short-sighted to be sure.

Support your local library, in all possible ways. I grew up in a little town with a Carnegie library, and I probably would have become a juvenile deliquent without the library.

Well, McAfee decided to some something to this machine and between AOL and using a very old Dell, I am about to set my hair on fire. Slower than molasses in January.

More anon!

Who's That Hiding Behind the Foster Grants?

Is it Iphegenia in Brooklyn? No! It's Grapeshot in Florida at the Sleuthfest Mystery Conference. What a fun way to spend a few days with mystery and mayhem and seafood dinners and good company.

http://www.mwa-florida.org/sleuthfest.htm

Lee Child is always a great guest of honor, accessible and fun and what a raconteur! He dispenses good writing advice as well. The writing team of PJ Parrish gave a great seminar, and the editors and agents were awesome, friendly, too.

Mystery writers are such wholesome types because they kill on paper and hence have fewer

"issues."

Onward. Lots of writing to do. I always come home "all fired up." Then there's the laundry, shopping, mail, etc. to deal with, but before the mood leaves, must write!

Today is cat blog day. Of course we've had to dispense extra affection after being away almost a week. Thisbe and Annie have settled down to the business of being spoiled companions of the feline persuasion again. Catnip has been offered generously, the old "smoking the peace pipe" routine.

Off to write.

Surgery Without Anesthesia

For the last two weeks, I'm been excising extraneous words from Promiscuous Mode, cutting it from 109,000 words to 105,000. This was after a prior session which had already resulted in cutting 5,000 words.

I find it amazing that one can go back again and again making corrections. I also fixed a bunch of passive sentences, awkward phrasing (how did that get left in there?) and routed out unnecessary sentences, adverbs (especially) and adjectives.

It's hard work, this paring, but the novel is always stronger, better, more readable. A good editor could probably find a few thousand other words. After all, I cut 16,000 words out of World of Mirrors.

Next week, we're travelling to Sleuthfest, in Deerfield Beach, FL, sponsored by the Florida chapter of Mystery Writer's of America. I'm meeting with an editor or an agent and also reading the first pages of Festival Madness to an audience. Tonight I'm practicing on my writer's group and Thursday on my Toastmaster's chapter. Practice makes perfect, etc.

I'm also going to send out another half-dozen queries for PM. This is my last year of crime fiction writing unless something breaks. Then it's on to literary fiction, commercial fiction, women's fiction, whatever. And then to the young adult that is screaming, "write me! write me!"

It's hard to admit failure after pounding away at a project for almost 15 years. 5 books, endless rewrites, queries, groups, meetings and finally rejection. A lot of sucking up, believe me. On the plus side, I have become a decent writer--no one gainsays the competent writing. Seems to be the stories. They're good stories, but they're perhaps a little "thinky" as one instructor noted.

Heaven knows, anyone who programmed computers for as long as I did is bound to be "thinky." That's what computer people are--have to be. Thinky. What a word. What a concept. And mystery readers are people-people and like their stories "Feely."

I tried to make the transition from Thinky-thinky to thinky-feely, but I am not a touchy-feely person. Sorry, can't help it.

It's not that thinkers are unfeeling, but first and foremost, they're thinkers. Vivaldi was a thinker. So was Bach. Thinkers can write thrillers, but I have no interest, and probably less talent in that genre. No ideas, either. So it goes.

Listen, if you need 4,000 words, mostly redundant sentences, adverbs and a few adjectives, I have them for sale cheap.

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Bouchercon Awards 2007 in Anchorage

Bouchercon is a HUGE mystery conference held every year. In 2007 it was in Anchorage, Alaska, and it must have been fun and exciting to be in the biggest state.

The envelope, please!

BEST NOVEL: NO GOOD DEEDS, Laura Lippman, (William Morrow)
BEST FIRST NOVEL:STILL LIFE, Louise Penny, (St. Martin's Minotaur)
BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL: ASHES AND BONES, Dana Cameron, (Avon)
BEST SHORT STORY:Simon Wood, "My Father's Secret" (Crimespree Magazine, B'con Special Issue 2006)
BEST CRITICAL NONFICTION:MYSTERY MUSES , Jim Huang & Austin Lugar, ed. (Crum Creek Press
SPECIAL SERVICES AWARD: Jim Huang

A hearty congrats to all the winners and especially to Dana Cameron, a member of our local Sisters in Crime and MWA chapters and a fun person, as well as an excellent writer. Yay, Dana!

Writing Down the Moans

O.K., bad pun. There's been a dust-up, almost a brouhaha on one of the writing listserves I monitor. Seems Left Coast Crime and Murder in the Midlands, two mystery conferences, have decided that only MWA approved publishers can sell books at these conferences, leaving out scores of self-published and small independents who for whatever reason aren't on MWA's list of "real" publishers. Lots of bad feelings and name-calling. Seems a bit Draconian that, for example, the Hilliard & Harris authors can't sell books at these conferences, or the Oceanside, and a lot of other presses. MWA now says a "real" publisher must have a book run of 500 or more, which leaves out the POD presses. Bear in mind POD is a print technology that says nothing about the quality of the writing. And said publisher also has to pay at least $1000.00 advance. Well, one would hope.

I was grandfathered into MWA when the rules were loosey-goosey, not that I didn't have a "real" publisher who assigned editors and cover artists and all that stuff. No money upfront from the authors. Generous payments (not the right word) for each book sold. However, it was a no-advance, POD outfitt, long gone belly up. So I slink and skulk and realize that I am not one of the chosen, and that it was authors like me who they changed the rules to keep out. Not a happy thought. Just one more reason to suck it up of which there are always many. So I have a great deal of sympathy for the writers with their noses pressed against the fence.

Rumor has it that Sisters In Crime is going to the "not all writers are equal" stance in order to promote the more traditionally published , but that's just a rumor. Well, I've sat through a lot of meeting where I have to shut up. Builds character. The haves and have-nots are in a deadly embrace that nobody is gonna win anytime soon. Horse manure at five paces anyone? That is what Abraham Lincoln reputedly said when challenged to a duel. One of my favorite quotes.

I've finished the third draft of Festival Madness, and now it has to lie fallow for a spell. A good friend from college days has done a line edit of Promiscuous Mode, and I can't thank her enough. So need to revisit that book a bit. Haven't sent it out as often as I could. It's my writing group's favorite book and it had a rocky start with an agent requesting the full manuscript and never responding to email, mail, phone, or anything. Off on the wrong foot.
But it's a traditional mystery, not a cozy, not a thriller, and there aren't any crafts or really loveable old ladies. Medium boiled? One cat, two murders, a little adultery. Some food, some fishing, a sleazy casino. Works for me. So one more pass and out into the world it goes again. Another one of my babies.

Lots of plans underfoot. The Information Systems memoir, the 1928 California book, and now a young adult that takes place in Germany in the last months of the war. And a web site class that will be the kick in the pants I need to redo my long neglected site. So stuff is happening. Short stories. The Meth House explosion. (The book, not the real thing. ) Horrors!

Better get busy. What do you think?

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