Today being the 4th of July has caused me to reflect upon all the many, many 4ths I have enjoyed in the past. Like birthdays, most of the 4ths I have lived through blur together now, or are completely lost to memory, but one in particular stands out for me, and that is the Bicentennial.

Talk about a once-in-a-lifetime experience. (I suppose that a person could live through more than one centennial event, but could one remember both of them, that is the question?)
In 1976, I was newly married and living in Lubbock Texas. We went downtown on the day and joined the crowd for the Independence Day Parade. I love parades, anyway, to the extent that I almost always tear up when I hear the drums and first catch sight of the flag corps, and of course this parade was spectacular in that already-spectacular Texas fashion.

Several local businesses were giving away free cake and hotdogs. The crowd around the tables was rather like a monkey riot, what with people grabbing free food hand over fist, and Don ended up with one whole hot dog and one that had been ripped in half. Both were squashed, and just delicious.

This brings to mind other memorable anniversary dates. Many years ago, we returned to the Western Hemisphere on a Polish ocean liner, the Stefan Batory, after several months Europe. We sailed across the Atlantic and right up the Saint Laurence Seaway to Montreal and landed on Canada Day, July 1, for a wonderful welcome home.

Three days from today, on July 7, is the third anniversary of the launch of my first novel, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming. The joy of the occasion was dampened by the fact that my mother, who had been instrumental in the research for the book, had just died a few months earlier. Besides, I was so nervous that I practically had an out-of-body experience. I’ve launched two other books since then, and I have to say that thus far it hasn’t gotten a whole lot easier.

I always wanted to write novels, and I love the writing. I’ll tell you a secret, Dear Reader. Sometimes I wonder if the rest of it is worth the pain.

And now for the news : I’ve joined another writer’s blog, at least on a trial basis. It’s called Fatal Foodies (http://www.fatalfoodies.blogspot.com), and the bloggers are mystery authors whose novels feature food. I love the concept. I’m doing Saturdays, just as I do for the Type M 4 Murder blog. I figure I might as well get it all done on one day.

As mentioned in my last entry, I’ve decided to post excerpts from my novels. Thus far, I have posted excerpts from the beginnings of The Old Buzzard Had It Coming and from Hornswoggled. Click on the “About This Book” link under the cover images to the right.

This Sunday, July 6, I’m hosting Hannah Davidson on the Type M 4 Murder blog. She is witty as can be, which you might have guessed if you’ve read her wonderful novel A Vickie Hill Exclusive. Have a look.

It’s June and I’m in southern Arizona. It’s hot. It’s been over 110 for more than a week, and predicted to be 113 today, just like it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. I understand it’s supposed to cool down to 108 by early next week. We’re all looking forward to that.

But then again, we all choose to live here, I suppose, and shouldn’t complain. We’ll be laughing up our other sleeves come January. At least I’m not standing on top of a busted levy watching my house float away down the river.

One thing we have accomplished is that we finally got our front yard scraped and re-rocked. (Yay!) Yes, Dear Reader, like the majority of homeowners in the Phoenix area, our front yard consists of rocks instead of grass. Trying to grow grass when it’s this hot is water-wasteful in the extreme. For the past twenty years, our yard has been covered with pale gold half-inch granite and ever-more-encroaching weeds. Now, we are weed-free and covered with Apache pink half-inch granite. Good to go for another twenty years.

What with the heat and the price of gas, I’ve been housebound lately. This enables me to get a lot of writing down, but it’s not good for my mood. I have a lot of words done on the first draft of Book 5, but how many of them will end up in the finished product is anybody’s guess.

I have plans to upgrade my computer system in the near future, and subsequently to do some major overhauling on this website over the next few months. I’d like to add a few pages and features, and a picture album, as well. I’ve already begun adding a bit of content. I’ve been thinking for a while that it might behoove me to have some excerpts of my books on the site, so I am going to give that a try. Eventually, the excerpts will have their own pages, but for the moment, I’m putting them on the “About This Book” page, which you can click on to the left, under the pictures of the book covers. Thus far, I’ve added the first chapter of The Old Buzzard Had It Coming. If you haven’t read my books, Dear Reader, and would like to get an idea of what they’re like, you now have the chance. Of course, the books are copyrighted, so if you’d like to use any content from the excerpts, please contact me first.

An excerpt from Hornswoggled should be available any time. I hope you enjoy them.

Well, Dear Reader, I am finally deep in the writing mode again. Book Number Five has begun. Thus far, it consists of several disjointed scenes, but after having completed four other novels, I have a lot more faith that everything will magically come together - eventually. I have no idea how, but the Muses seem to have their ways, and who am I to question them?

I’ve done a lot of research leading up to the beginning of this book. So much, in fact, that ideas are leaking out my ears, and as I type along I’m muttering to myself, “too much… too much…” And it probably is too much, too. I had the same problem with Book Four (which upon birth was named The Sky Took Him and will be out in January 2009.) I did so much research, and was so enamoured of all the wonderful things I discovered, that I was really worried that I was getting entirely carried away with a bunch of interesting but superfluous material in the book. As it turned out, I had an attack of sense in the end and managed to take out most of the stuff that had nothing to do with the story, and ended up with a very nice novel. I have faith that I’ll be able to tell the difference between enough and too much for this book as well.

Book Five takes place at the beginning of World War I. In previous installments, Alafair has been desperately trying to ignore the war which has been going on in Europe in hopes that it’ll go away and not bother her and her family, but as you may guess, that will turn out to be a vain hope. I’m pretty well-versed in American history,and I knew the facts about American involvement in the war, but I am finding out all kinds of eye-popping information that I didn’t know about the home-front.

And speaking of The Sky Took Him, the press is ramping up for its publication right now, six months before release. This is the way it goes. The first thing they do is send me a giant questionnaire which takes me days to complete, though after having already filled it out three times before, some of the answers can be repeated - like my biography. I still was born in the same place I was born in when my first book came out. The questionnaire also asks for a list of special places and people I would like ARCs (advance reading copies) sent to, in addition to their regular list of reviewers. This is always a pain, even though I already have quite a list, because I feel I need to check every contact and address again to make sure there haven’t been changes since they reviewed my last book. It takes forever!

The book producer e-mailed me last week and said that we soon need to consult on cover ideas for The Sky Took Him. For the previous three books, I had some good pictures in hand that the cover artist was able to use, but I’m not going to be so lucky with this book, I fear. The Sky Took Him takes place in a different part of Oklahoma than the first three, in a much larger city than Boynton, and I don’t personally own any appropriate photos. So I’m going to be spending time looking through archives. It takes a lot of time. I should be grateful, though. Most authors by far have no say whatsoever in their covers. I not only have input, I’m very much involved in the process. If I weren’t so preoccupied with trying to write, I’d downright enjoy it.

I just returned from helping my friend Nan man a clan booth at the Prescott, AZ, Highland Games on Saturday. This is one of the few non-book-promotion events I’ve done over the past three years, since my first book came out, but as I recently wrote to another friend, even non-book events become promotional activities for me these days. I seem to have no shame any more.

Doing a Highland Game was a blast from the past for me, I’ll tell you. Once upon a time, I owned a Celtic gift shop in downtown Tempe, Arizona. I sold lots of tartan and Scottish clan accessories, and I attended many a Highland Game as a vendor over the years. My customers at both shop and games were often very interested in their own geneology, and I became quite adept at helping people look up information on their clans or septs or the origin of their names. After a while, I learned a frightening amount of clan and thus Scottish, Irish, and Welsh history and lore.

I must have worked 50 games over the 11 years I owned the shop. I felt it was a necessity, since I could earn as much over a two day games as I could in a week at the shop. However, vending at a game was brutal. You pay a boat-load of money for the privilege of packing up a shop-worth of goods, display furniture and tents into a van, driving to California/Utah/New Mexico/etc., setting it all up to look like a store on a wet field at 4:00 a.m. in a freezing drizzle, working your nether regions to a nub, and then packing it all up again so you can be off the field by 8:00 p.m. And you’re so busy that you don’t get to see anything of the games, either. When I gave up the shop after 11 years to become a mystery novelist, I didn’t care if I ever attended another Highland Game again.

Forward to 2008. My friend Nan, who works for my publisher, is also the Regent for the Western Region of the Clan MacLachlan and attends many of the games out here as her clan representative. When her son and usual helper couldn’t attend the Prescott games this year, she asked me if I would go with her and help set up and break down her tent and generally keep her company. Since she was in a bit of a spot, I agreed, and it turned out to be quite interesting and -dare I say it? - fun. It helped quite a bit that manning a clan booth is not nearly the ordeal that vending is. The clan tents are 10X10 affairs, standing in a long row down one side of the field, and each is manned by a clan representative who is very happy to tell you all about your heritage, give you some literature, show you your tartan, sign you up for the clan society, and sell you a tee-shirt with your clan badge on it.

Long shory shorter, the MacLachlan booth was pretty busy all day. Nan is quite the expert on Clan MacLachlan, which I am not, but I was amazed at how much I remembered about general Scottish and Irish names and lore, (Red Hand of Ulster, anyone?) and how I still seem to be able to identify a tartan at 50 paces. And at long last, I was able to take an occasional break and walk around to see the caber toss, the pipe bands and musicians, and the sheep-dog herding. There was Highland and Scottish Country dancing, too, but that venue was located up a long hill, and since Prescott is at a high elevation and I’m not as ambitious as I used to be, I found it too uphill for me. We were able to pack up and leave at about 5:00 p.m., and made the drive back to Tempe in a couple of hours. We were both pretty tired, but nothing like the verge of complete physical breakdown I had come to associate with games.

The timing of this trip was interesting, because I’m just beginning a fifth Alafair book that has a Scottish character in it, and as you know, Faithful Reader, Alafair is of Scottish descent herself. The Prescott Games re-activated some dormant parts of my brain that are going to come in pretty handy.

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).