Weather and Murder

We have over a foot of fresh snow on the ground, with more falling. We've had blizzard conditions (defined as "Less than 1/4 mile visibility and winds at more than 35 mph for three hours") overnight. It's beautiful, transformative, and dangerous. Later, when the sun comes out and we shovel the walks and driveway, it will invite sledding, snowball fights, cross-country skiing. But for now it's still frigid. The biting wind threatens exposed skin. Wires are at risk of collapsing and leaving people without power.

One of the 'rules' of writing is Don't Begin with the Weather. But conditions like this just beckon for a crime story. I'm particularly in mind of winter murder since finishing Louise Penny's Dead Cold recently. It takes place in small-town Quebec, a setting I am well familiar with. I have visited my sister Jannie in exactly that setting frequently over the decades. Penny describes the weather and the cold, snowy setting almost as a character. Because she's such a good writer, you don't realize it, but after you finish reading the book, the mind-pictures of the ice and bitter temperatures remain vivid.

I have set stories in every season except deep winter, and I haven't written a murder story involving blizzard conditions yet. This weather just might kick-start a few ideas. How would you stage a snowy murder?

Moving Beyond Rejection

Great news from a couple of fellow writers who have recently landed agents. In particular from Pat Brown, who just posted this on an online group we are both members of:

"So, after sending out 281 queries, getting 185 rejections, sending 17 partials or fulls, leaving 79 who never responded, I have signed with The Literary Group International."

Now that's perserverance! She's a faithful contributor to the group, a fellow member of Sisters in Crime, and a valuable supporter of the rest of who are looking for agents. Plus she writes about Los Angeles, my home town. (This is Pat's picture of the LAPD.)

I'm starting to do avoidance behavior on my Writing Fridays. I'm working on new short stories, and feeling lured back to Book Two (which is about one-fifth written) instead of doing what I need to do first: target agents, find the ones who already represent the kind of writing I do, look up their exact query requirements for what they want to see -- one page, a synopsis, the first chapter, the first five pages, whatever -- and then send the query packet to five or ten agents per week.

After that, sure, I can get back to the fun stuff: writing new material. That certainly isn't fun all the time. It's a lot more fun than the looking-for-an-agent part, though. But part of the draw of of creative writing is wanting to get it out into the reading public's hands. That's called publication. If it also involves a little income and a little fame, well, all good!

Flash fiction

As promised, here's the flash fiction story I wrote for the Crime Bake contest this year. The assignment was to use 10 of the following 20 words from Charlaine Harris' titles:

Bedroom, Bone, Club, Corpse, Counselor, Dark, Dead, Family, Fool, Grave, Heels, Ice, Landlord, Living, Pick, Scene, Secret, Surprise, Trollop, Worse.

I used all 20. Enjoy!

A Fool's Grave

His grave still smells of the dead. The family gathers around it. The corpse, my landlord and occasional patient, Pete Hellas, won't give up the secret now. He was a stingy, slovenly, diabetic fool. His stupid son, Spiro, and his trollop of a wife are even worse. The dark-haired son I wouldn't dare pick a fight with. The daughter? President of the Bonehead Club. A pitiful bunch.

I slip away from the scene, careful of my heels on the new ice. They'll be surprised when Counselor Adams reads my name in the will. Seducing Pete in his bedroom and persuading him to leave me the apartment building was worth touching his disgusting body. I'm done working as an underpaid nurse. I'll evict the family and the renters, condo-ize the units, and sell off all but mine. So I gave him a little extra insulin. It's my turn for living.

Author Event Report

We had a great author event the other night. Susan Oleksiw, Leslie Wheeler, Mark Ammons, and I talked about short-story writing, answered questions, and read the first page of our stories from the Thin Ice anthology. We had a good turnout, good snacks, and great hosts at Rivers Edge Gifts and Books in Ipswich.

If you missed the event, Rivers Edge has some signed copies on the shelf for sale, and Level Best Books has free shipping for another week or too. And I am the featured author there this week.

This is exciting stuff, and I was grateful for the chance to be the "featured author, Ipswich's own," as our host Meg kept saying. And I felt blessed to have so many friends and family members show up in support and interest.

Now it's time to get writing again. Final revisions are still demanding attention, and then I need to immerse myself in the agent-query process. But what I really want to do is start a new short story and continue on beyond the 12000 words I already wrote in book Two of the Speaking of Mystery series.

Reading, Signing, and Talking About Writing

Several authors (including me...) and editors from the Thin Ice anthology by Level Best Books will be talking about writing, both short and novel-length, as well as reading from our short stories and signing copies of the anthology this Thursday, December 2, at 6 pm at:

River's Edge Fine Gifts & Home Accents/Ipswich Party Shop
15 Market Street
Ipswich, MA, 01938
Phone:978-356-2363

Join us! Wine, cheese, and other refreshments will provide preprandial sustenance. I can vouch for every story being a good read, despite each being very different from the next.

Bouillabaise. What do you think of? A rich fish soup? Something involving bouillon cubes? Lots of small portions of very expensive fish and shellfish? ("I'd like a pound of the local haddock, and one of the wild salmon. And two pounds of the mussels. Those are cherrystone clams? OK, two pounds of that, too. That comes to WHAT?") A broth that is more like a stew, featuring garlic, home-grown tomatoes, red wine, shrimp stock, saffron, olive oil, and more?

Well, I created this Sunday dinner treat for two friends we'd invited over for the first time. Patience and Phillip: world travelers, fellow Democrats, word mavens, very fun conversationalists. Managed to pull off the dinner, which included garlic-sauteed green beans, local salad, crusty bread. Got compliments. Finished with Patience's apple crisp (ooh, she peels her apples...) and ice cream.

But what was I thinking when I was savoring the very rich, thick, flavorful soup base? Hmm, you could hide some poison among the poisson. Nobody would ever know. Oh, these mystery writers! Better look for that soup in one of my next books or stories. In the meantime, here's an approximation of my recipe, adapted from both Julia Child and the New Basics cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins.

Max's Bouillabaise (serves 8)

1. Scrub and rinse 2 lbs each mussels and clams. Skin and cut 2-3 lbs fresh fish (different kinds) into 2-inch chunks. Keep all seafood cool.
2. In olive oil, saute 5 chopped leeks, 2 peeled and chopped carrots, and 2 chopped celery stalks until wilted.
3. Add 5 cloves minced garlic and saute for 1 minutes
4. Add 3 c chopped tomatoes, chopped canned whole tomatoes, or frozen local tomatoes, along with 1 qt fish stock, 1 c red wine, 1 bay leaf, 1 tsp dry thyme leaves, ground black pepper, a pinch of saffron.
5. Simmer 20 minutes. Let it cool a little, and then food process until roughly blended (not pureed).
6. Reheat the broth, add the shellfish, and cook covered 10-12 minutes until the shells open. Transfer the shellfish to a warm platter and keep warm.
7. Add 2-3 lbs fresh fish and a pound of scallops.
8. Cook just a few minutes until the fish and scallops are opaque, and transfer fish to the platter.
9. Serve a portion of seafood into each large individual bowl, and then top with the soup, fresh chopped parsley, a piece of toasted French bread spread with al pesto sauce, and a dollop of red pepper rouille.

And did you know the name comes from the Occitan language? Wikipedia tells us, "Occitan is a Romance language spoken in Southern France, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, Monaco, and in Val d'Aran in Catalonia, Spain, the regions sometimes known informally as Occitania. It is also spoken in the linguistic enclave of Guardia Piemontese (Calabria, Italy). It is an official language in Catalonia (known as Aranese in Val d'Aran).Modern Occitan is the closest relative of Catalan." I bet Lauren Rousseau knows that.

What's your favorite dish to hide poison in, fictionally speaking, of course?

Crime Bake 2010

Crime Bake was better than ever this year. Hundreds of writers (and readers) listened to authors talk about the craft. We attended master classes, seminars, author breakfasts, networking sessions at the bar, and even the Vampire Ball.

We Thin Ice authors did a group signing of the anthology as lots of fans passed their copies down the line.

I caught up with old friends and made new ones, even meeting another author, David Carkeet, who has written about a Linguistics professor and who went to the same grad school as I did (IU at Bloomington).

Dennis Lehane inspired us with something along the lines of, "Of the writers who started out when I did, the ones who succeeded did not whine, did not complain. They were determined to make it, and they did." I took that to heart, even though the agent I pitched to was not overly enthusiastic ("It's not really grabbing me. Send me five pages when you can...").

Now it's back to the revision job. I have some ideas for making Lauren's life more conflicted, darker. Should help.