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Goodreads Giveway:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

'Til Dirt Do Us Part

by Edith Maxwell

Giveaway ends March 30, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Event News:

I am delighted to have three San Francisco Bay area author events scheduled in a couple of weeks and would love to see you at any of them:

• Friday March 14 at Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, 7 PM.
• Sunday March 16 at Borderlands in San Francisco, 1 PM
• Monday March 17 at Books Inc in Berkeley, 7 PM

I'll be talking about my local foods mystery series and my life as a writer, will read a bit, and will take as many questions as you have. I'm a fourth-generation Californian living north of Boston and am looking forward to being back! Thanks.



'Til Dirt Do Us Part releases May 27. Pre-order it here or here. The very first review is up and it's a five star! 

The produce is local - and so is the crime - when long-simmering tensions lead to murder following a festive dinner on Cam Flaherty's farm. It'll take a sleuth who knows the lay of the land to catch this killer. But no one ever said Cam wasn't willing to get her hands dirty...

Autumn has descended on Westbury, Massachusetts, but the mood at the Farm-to-Table Dinner in Cam's newly built barn is unseasonably chilly. Local entrepreneur Irene Burr made a lot of enemies with her plan to buy Westbury's Old Town Hall and replace it with a textile museum-enough enemies to fill out a list of suspects when the wealthy widow turns up dead on a neighboring farm.

Even an amateur detective like Cam can figure out that one of the resident locavores went loco - at least temporarily - and settled a score with Irene. But which one? With the Fall harvest upon her, Cam must sift through a bushelful of possible killers that includes Irene's estranged stepson, her disgruntled auto mechanic, and a fellow CSA subscriber who seems suspiciously happy to have the dead woman out of the way.


The closer she gets to weeding out the culprit, the more Cam feels like someone is out to cut her harvest short. But to keep her own body out of the compost pile, she'll have to wrap this case up quickly.

A High Compliment

A story I wrote a couple of years ago, "Just Desserts for Johnny," was published in the online Kings River Life Magazine a few days ago. It was a satisfying story to write, about revenge exacted on a literary thief. The essence of the story came from a bad experience I had with a fraudulent press a few years ago. The details, of course, are fictional. It's set in the San Francisco bay area, where I have many friends and family.

But equally delightful was the comment that a very esteemed editor and writer made after she

read it. Chris Roerden won an Agatha award for Best Non-Fiction work. She has helped countless authors with her books Don't Murder Your Mystery and Don't Sabotage Your Submission, among others. I've met her at conferences and she's a really sweet person.

So when I read what she had to say about my story, I was over the moon!

"Just Desserts for Johnny" by Edith Maxwell is a model short story, from the perfect opening line to the satisfying, twist end. Love it!

Thanks, Chris. I'm glad you liked it. I hope others will, too.

Today's the Day!

It's finally here. A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die has launched! 

The book I started writing twenty years ago. The concept of Cam Flaherty and her organic farm that I dusted off a year and a half ago and started writing again from scratch. The first book in a Local Foods Mysteries series from Kensington Publishing, a big press with a wide reach. My first hardcover book. My first reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. 

Am I thrilled? YES! I have so many books to write, so many ideas crowding my imagination, but this one is done. It's now released into the world and it's very, very exciting. It's already in libraries, brick-and-mortar bookstores (including Barnes and Noble), and online sites (see those big buttons on the right?), including UK Amazon.

I owe so much to so many, and hope I thanked them all in the Acknowledgements in the book. Mostly I am grateful for readers, for people who  love to sit down and get lost in a good mystery. I'd love to hear from you, Gentle Reader, and hope you enjoy the story!

I'm also happy to have a lovely updated web site here, due to the talents of Kathleen Valentine, who can not only write great books herself but also design stuff. Thank you, Kathleen!

On Self-Publishing

I went on a new adventure last week. It occurred to me that two of my short stories that were published in the last ten years included some dark back story for two of the main characters in Speaking of Murder.

My story "Reduction in Force" describes revenge after corporate layoff and was published in Thin Ice, an anthology of mystery and crime fiction, by Level Best Books, 2010. The main character is Lauren Rousseau's sister, Jackie, who is an important secondary character in Speaking of Murder.

"Obake for Lance" was a short story about murderous revenge published in Riptide, an anthology of mystery and crime fiction, by Level Best Books, 2004. This story describes a dark incident in the past of Lauren's best friend, Elise, who plays a pivotal role in Speaking of Murder.

The rights to both stories reverted to me a year after publication. People who read Speaking of Murder have asked me when the next Lauren Rousseau book is coming out. It won't be out anytime soon, despite being mostly written, because I need to keep writing and promoting the Local Foods mysteries around the demands of my day job and daily life.

But it occurred to me that these two stories are directly related to Lauren and might satisfy some of the hunger of readers. So I read my writing colleague Kaye George's booklet The Road to Self-Publishing and cleaned up the formatting.

With the help of Kaye's booklet, I figured out how to publish the stories for most formats through Smashwords and for Kindle through Amazon. And while it requires some careful attention (that is, don't start doing it at night if you're a morning person), it really isn't that hard.

Through the unfailingly helpful Guppies I found a cover artist, Stanzalone Design, who uses open-source stock photographs and adds the lettering, which makes her covers very affordable, so I commissioned a cover for each. Which I love!

I also realized that Obake was the wrong word to use in that story. The real name of the triangular rice-dough pastry filled with sweet bean paste is Yatsuhashi, so the newly published story is called "Yatsuhashi for Lance."  It's up on Amazon and is already #25 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > Asia > Japan and #77 in Books > Travel > Asia > Japan > General. Cool! (We won't worry about the fact that it isn't nonfiction...) It should be up for Nook, Kobo, and Apple formats before the end of January. 


I also liked the cover for "Reduction in Force" since it takes places in a software company and tea plays a critical role in the revenge. It's up on Amazon, too. 

This exercise gave me confidence in the world of self publishing, even though I have "non-me" publishers for all my books so far. I can track sales and let people who ask know that there is more of my writing out there they can read. For a mere ninety-nine cents! I'm not expecting to get rich on a couple of short stories but I like having them available. And you never know...

Have you self published anything? Do you order short stories for your ereader?  If you don't have an ereader and a story isn't available in paper, would you buy it and read it on your PC?

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, dear readers. It's been an amazing year for me as a writer.

My first mystery novel, Speaking of Murder, was published by Barking Rain Press in September. I did as much promotion as I could--dozens of guest blogs and a half-dozen speaking events--but haven't seen any earthshaking sales or important reviews. 

I signed a deal with an agent, John Talbot, and then a three-book contract with Kensington Publishing. I wrote the first Local Foods mystery and sent it in, and have 30k written on the second one (a few thousand words more by tonight, I hope!). 

I had a short story, "Stonecutter," accepted for publication in an anthology, and two other stories were published in the Burning Bridges anthology where all proceeds went to charity.


I decided to self e-publish two previously published short stories whose rights have reverted to me, because they are actually the backstory to two important characters in Speaking of Murder, and I have formatted them for Smashwords and gotten covers done (by StanzAloneDesign - aren't they cool?). They'll be available for all ereaders sometime in the next month.

I attended a dynamite Donald Maass writing workshop, the Writers' Police Academy, and New England Crime Bake and learned so much from each event. I even plunged into the world of smart phones and Kindles.

All this went on while I was working full time writing software manuals, exercising most days, selling and buying a house and moving, and sitting with my mother while she died in April. Whew!

I'd like to thank all of you who stopped by to see what was up all year long and especially to those who commented and who read my writing. It means so much to me.

May you have a happy, healthy, harmonious new year filled with lots and lots of reading!

Avid Newsletter Article

Cool. The following interview just appeared in my former employer's employee newsletter! Along with my picture and the book cover. Thanks, Avid! 

Avid Solutions Help Solve the Crime in Speaking of Murder From a former Avid technical writer to a successful author, Edith Maxwell has been making a name for herself in the publishing world with her recent book, Speaking of Murder. The mystery novel is about the murder of a student at a small New England college and follows the plight of the heroine as she strives to solve the murder with help from Avid solutions. Maxwell, who goes by the pen name “Tace Baker” for Speaking of Murder, worked at Avid from November 1994 to October 2008, and while she was here, she wrote the Xpress Pro documentation and the Interplay Assist book, among others. We had the opportunity to ask Maxwell a few questions aboutSpeaking of Murder, why she included Avid solutions in her book and if she plans to write more books in the future. What inspired you to write Speaking of Murder? Ever since I heard about the dTective application by Ocean Systems, which works with Avid Media Composer, I wanted to use it for crime solving in a mystery novel or short story. dTective is used by police departments to clarify surveillance video, add height markers, and much more in the pursuit of bad guys. Speaking of Murder also features Lauren Rousseau, a linguistics professor, as the amateur sleuth, and I earned a PhD in linguistics in 1981, so I am well acquainted with academia and the field of linguistics. I put those together in my book and went from there. Can you provide examples of how you included Avid’s solutions in your novel and explain why? I reference Avid several times. Lauren's boyfriend, Zac, is a video forensics expert who uses the dTective application in his work for the local police department. He explains it to Lauren and demonstrates it to her on his laptop in one important scene. Lauren's mother is a retired technical writer who wrote user documentation for Avid and we see her talking to Zac about that. I also show Avid NewsCutter being used in a news truck at the scene of a fire. It's all just part of the story, but I enjoyed working those real-life references in. Do you plan to write more books and will you reference Avid solutions in future books? Of course I am writing more books! The sequel to Speaking of Murder is about two-thirds written, but it doesn't feature Avid software. I'm sure I'll get back to it in a future book, though. To learn more about Speaking of Murder and to see what other books Maxwell is working on, go to:www.edithmaxwell.com and www.tacebaker.com.

Two Years of Blogging

I'm a little late with this. I somehow missed the two-year anniversary of this blog, which was August 7. I got a little closer last year with One Year in the Blogosphere. 

My goal when I started was one post per week. I pretty much stuck to it: 106 posts over two years. I let up a bit on frequency this summer. Hmm, think moving and getting two books out had anything to do with it? Plus I've been blogging every few weeks over at the Sisters in Crime New England group blog, Pen, Ink, and Crimes, which sometimes uses up all my available blogging energy.

A post I wrote about doing research on the Crane Estate in Ipswich has gotten a lot of steady traffic. But besides that, the top three posts have to do with finding the space to write: Retreating to Write, my report on Wellspring House, and Gathering to Write, about a four-writer retreat I was part of in June. I guess most of my readers here are writers (or would-be writers longing for retreat). Total comments for the two years is 519. Average of 5 per post? Seems high, but then those count my replies to all you kindly (and MUCH appreciated) readers who leave a comment.

One interesting stat: the first year more readers viewed the blog on Firefox than on Internet Explorer. That flipped this year, with a new fourteen percent on Chrome (what I use exclusively). More people continue to use Windows than Mac, although one percent read it on an iPhone. Other mobile devices are still under one percent. 

At the end of last year's anniversary post, I noted that I would "continue blogging on topics relating to Speaking of Murder (book One), Murder on the Beach (book Two), and, of course, writing and publishing." At the time I didn't have a publisher for Speaking of Murder, and now it's coming out in print (under a pen name) from a reputable small press, Barking Rain, in less than a month. See Tace Baker's web site for details, or preorder it!

And the Local Foods Mysteries series wasn't even a gleam in Kensington Publishing's eye at the time. Now it's a three-book contract signed, sealed, and delivered, and I'm about to send the completed and many-times-revised manuscript of A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die off to the editor this Friday! Watch for that release next June

That's a big change in a year's time.  I wonder what will happen in the next year. Despite several articles that foretell "Blogging is dead," I plan to continue for at least one more year. 

I thank each and every one of you for being a faithful or even occasional reader, and I'll randomly pick one commenter from today's post and send him or her a signed copy of Speaking of Murder, so be sure to leave a valid email address if you think I don't know how to find you otherwise.

Finally, do you think blogging is worth it? Do you read blogs regularly? Still write posts alone or with others, or has Facebook taken over that role? What do you think is next on the horizon?

Speaking of Murder!

My alter-ego, Tace Baker, has a book coming out! 

The pre-order page for  Speaking of Murder  by Tace Baker on Amazon is now live. You can also sign up for a free preview of the first four chapters on www.TaceBaker.com. 

This is very, very exciting news. I started writing this book in the winter of 2009. I finished the first draft a year later, and then took a year to polish it. I started trying to find an agent in winter of 2011 with no luck. 

Those of you following this blog know that we had a couple of close calls with small presses before Barking Rain Press decided to take a chance with Tace. We've been through a full editing pass and this morning the editor, Betty Dobson, and I received the page proofs (as a PDF) from the publisher, Sheri Gormley. Whee! We have a cover, ISBNs, and more. It's finally real.

 I've set up a book launch party and invited all my 936 Facebook friends both near and far as well as a dozen more local friends. Come on down to the Book Rack in Newburyport on September 27 at 7 pm and help us celebrate. 

The Quaker book catalog has agreed to list Speaking of Murder, and my new local bookstore in Amesbury, Bertram and Oliver's, will stock it, too. I'm even arranging to have an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana stock it, since it features a linguist and I hold a PhD from IU in linguistics. I'll be out there two weeks after the book comes out to help market it.

Now it's back to final polishing on A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die, and then I need to get started on the detailed synopsis for Till Dirt Do Us Part, all mixed in with promotional activities and a full-time job. Who needs sleep?!

Forensic Linguistics - What?

I picked up my New Yorker magazine this week and browsed the table of contents. Whoa! An article from the "Department of Linguistics" titled "Words on Trial." Really? (Note: you might have to be a subscriber to read the whole article.)

How cool is that? Solving crimes with linguistics. But wait, that's what my alter-ego's first mystery revolves around! Tace Baker's Speaking of Murder will be out from Barking Rain Press on September 18. It features a Quaker linguistics professor who...well, let's just quote her web site: 

"The murder of a talented student at a small New England college thrusts linguistics professor Lauren Rousseau into the search for the killer. Lauren is a determined Quaker with an ear for accents. Her investigation exposes small town intrigues, academic blackmail and a clandestine drug cartel that now has its sights set on her."

So I drilled deeper into the article. I knew this from prior research, but it was cool to be reminded of how linguists can solve crimes by analyzing consistent patterns in text messages, voice mail message, or written notes. 

For example, Professor Robert Leonard matched certain elements in the emails of an accused murderer with the text scrawled on the wall at the murder scene. Things like using "U" for "you," which is commonly seen in text messages but not in emails, and misplaced apostrophes in words like "doesnt'" and "cant'." (Oh, be still for a moment, you Pet Peevers, you...) This case had no physical evidence, and the accused was condemned to three life terms in prison based on the forensic linguistic evidence.

I encourage you to read the entire well-researched and well-written article. It's given me more than one idea for Book Three in Tace Baker's Speaking of Mystery series. In Speaking of Murder, Lauren Rousseau uses spoken accents, both domestic and foreign, to identify and eliminate suspects. But she's fully capable of doing text analysis or of determining, as Leonard did, that the suspect used contractions only in negative statement ("I can't") but not in positive ones ("I am"), evidence that resulted in conviction. 

Have you read mysteries solved by a linguist or investigator with linguistic prowess? Or heard of crimes with language-related evidence?

Thoughts of Murder and Mayhem

I'm immersed in a whirlwind of selling a house and renting an apartment while we find the right next house to buy. The gale force slams me with decisions about what to shed, what minimal possessions to bring, and what to store. The relocation storm also forces me to make sure precious items are packed with care. How do I cushion the stone Buddha in the garden so  he isn't chipped by moving from here to there and then to where I want him to land? Will my mother's lovely china really survive the move?

Of course, being a crime writer, the possibilities for murderous mayhem alert me at every turn. What if someone rented one of those temporary storage containers, as we have, and the first item she carried in was a body in a cedar chest? She might then fill the pod with the rest of their boxes of books, her fine china, her garden statuary, her momentarily excess bookshelves, the extra couch. 


The pod gets carted off to the warehouse, which is temperature and humidity controlled. No one notices. 


You get the picture. But how, you might ask, did the victim meet his or her demise?

I recently ordered Dr. D.P. Lyle's amazing resource, Murder and Mayhem: A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic Questions for Mystery Writers. 


Ooh. Ooh! Dr. Lyle regularly blogs answering these kinds of questions and I don't always make time to read his posts. (He also writes the Dub Walker thrillers and the Samantha Cody series.) But having Murder and Mayhem on my desk makes it hard to concentrate on anything else. A brief sample from the table of contents:

• Does alcohol intake prevent death from freezing?
• What structures must be injured to make a stab wound in the back lethal?
• Can a bee sting kit be altered to result in the death of the user?

You see what I mean. I'd like to take a couple of vacation days just to read this book cover to cover. In lieu of that, what's your favorite nefarious and unusual way to kill off a (fictional) victim? Have you perused Dr. Lyle's books?

Busy, Busy, Busy

I am so busy right now I am not making posting here a priority. I apologize, dear readers.


The bright side is that you're going to have a much better book to read next spring, when A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die comes out. I have a bookstore pub date of May 28, in fact! It will be out in hardcover and eformats at the same time. I'm working hard to polish up the prose, tie up the loose ends, ramp up the tension, ante up the stakes. It's due September 1 to the publisher.


Soon I'll get the edits back for Speaking of Murder, too, and will have a few weeks to incorporate those. You'll be able to buy that book in trade paperback on September 15 (remember, it's under the name Tace Baker) and in eformats a month later. I've hired on a publicist and we're busy scheduling readings, thinking about getting the word out, brainstorming ideas to make these books a success.

On top of all that, I have a full-time demanding job, and oh, did I mention we've sold our lovely antique house in Ipswich and have to move by August 1? Whee! Which also includes finding the next place, whether it's our landing destination in Amesbury or a temporary apartment while we find the perfect downsizer with a sunny yard on a quiet street. 


Life is good, life is full. In the meantime, I do post every couple of weeks over at the Sisters in Crime New England blog, Pen, Ink, and Crimes. I also post regularly on Facebook at  www.facebook.com/EdithMaxwellAuthor and www.facebook.com/TaceBaker.

Did You Know?

I finished the first draft of A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die! That's a big milestone. The deadline for turning the manuscript in is September 1. Sounds like I'm way ahead, right?

Wrong. Those little words "first draft" are significant. That means, in the words of writer Anne Lamott, from her book Bird by Bird, that I was able to finish the "shitty" first draft. Now the real work begins.


When I write the first draft, I occasionally type [CHECK THIS] or [CAN A GUN SHOOT OFF A LOCK?]. It's so I don't pause in the creative flow to go exploring the internets or books in search of an answer. I might not be back for an hour if I start that kind of process.


Now's the time to catch up with all those. I spent Saturday morning making a note of all those comments in square brackets on a piece of paper. No, on two pieces of paper. I have more than 40 items to check out. Groan. I started by ticking off the easy ones: Make the chief of police more suspicious at the farmers' market. Does Lucinda know about the sabotage? Make Kryzanski have a slight accent. Give Cam a chipped left incisor. What do you call a wooden plank lock on a barn door?

The hard ones remain. I made some progress on one of them, and now need to rewrite one of the most important scenes in the book. Did you know that gasoline is no good as an accelerent for arson? Did you know you can't shoot a lock off with a handgun? Yep, nope. Things are not as they appear in the movies. Mix that gas with motor oil or diesel and, sure, you can drizzle it around an old barn and light it on fire. Get a hunting rifle and a deer slug and, sure, you can break a padlock or shoot out a bolt lock. 


And then there's the advice we got from Donald Maass at the workshop in mid-April. One of the big takeaways I got was, "What's the one thing your protagonist has always feared would happen? Make it happen. Then make it worse. Then make it worse again." So I'm working on that. Once you keep that mantra in the back of your mind, you start to write differently. Even that scene I need to rewrite based on the advice I got from a long-time firefighter and arson specialist -- I wrote that after the workshop and had already worked in some of that "make it worse" approach.


After all those changes are in, I'll let the book sit fallow for a few weeks. Then it's time to jump in and look at pacing, at the timing of suspense scenes, at the logic (for example, "No! She can't suspect the chef BEFORE he drops that clue..."). Solicit a read from a few sharp-eyed fellow writer-editors. Revise some more. Print it out and read it aloud. Do my own edit. Hone the first sentence and the last sentence.


Because I want to deliver the very best book I can to the actual editor at the publishing company. I want to give this book, the first in the series, my best effort. 


If you hear me running around screaming toward the end of August, not to worry!


Writers, what's your post-first-draft process? Readers, can you tell when a book hasn't gone through the whole process?