Dog days and holidays

A week by the sea – not a thought spared for writing, even emails – and there’s a curious lightness to my being, a certain liberty from all things cerebral that is enlightening and emancipating.

A more enterprising would-be writer would count a holiday as a break to really get down to some serious writing. Not me. I’d rather relish the things that live and play outside my head, rather than the characters that inhabit it daily, crying out for dialogue, action, plot.

So, I’ve come home. They haven’t. They’ve been away, too, God knows where, and at this point I don’t really care. It’s hot, the AC isn’t strong enough, my desk sits in direct sunlight. An added fan brings some relief, yet still my hot brain doesn’t want to write. I’m still on a beach. My toes are in the sand, my head under a straw hat. My heart is still cooling itself in the ocean. I no more want to sweat it out with a passel of words that need re-arranging and rewriting than do the proverbial flight to the moon.

My characters all live in England. It’s November there, it’s rainy a lot of the time, and there’s angst and a few murders to be solved. They’re all wearing wool suits and good stout shoes and it’s cold. There’s fog, drizzle and each home, office or building they enter and inhabit is damp, moldy, and without central heat. All in all, it’s a world away from our hot summer. A bit of cold damp is highly appealing right now, but how to get there? How to recapture the presence and personalities of those characters that were carefully produced and assembled in my head? I’ve missed their foibles and strengths, curiosity and courage, but I’m reluctant, in these dog days of our brief summer, to plunge into their world again.

Those experts are right: One must write every single day, otherwise you risk losing your momentum, your flow, your initiative. Seems mine went out with the tide and didn’t return.

But write I must, heat or no heat. The people in my head seem to be returning, even as I plunk away here at the keyboard, and they’re beginning to hammer at the door to my overheated creativity. They want out again. They want to get back to work. They tell me they were at the seaside, too, walking the beach, dining out, gazing at stars, breathing that energizing sea air. They enjoyed the break from the November rain, they say. Now it’s time to get back to solving those appalling murders. Fun is fun, but justice is far more important, they say. So get over it and get back to it.

The dog days, at least for now, seem to be over. So are my holidays.

Seat of Pants to Chair for Long Periods of Time

The question circulated amongst us here of how we keep ourselves motivated to write during the summer. As a Canadian, now living in the mountains in Central California, the end of winter lifts the heart. It's cold and it snows here. That surprises people.

When summer comes, doors and windows fly open. We move laptops out to the deck and shed clothes until we're down to only one layer.

Much of the last few months as summer settled in with one nice day after another, I've been working with Jodie Renner, an editor specializing in mystery and thriller fiction, whom I met at the Left Coast Crime Conference in Santa Fe this March.

We engaged to work with one another over my second murder mystery, Rip-Off, featuring Detective Dave Mason of the Santa Monica Police Department.

I've worked as a free lance editor over my years of wordsmithing. When anyone hands you their precious manuscript, there is the hope that you will hand it back, gushing, "Oh, it's perfect. I've alerted the awards committee. I wouldn't change a single word. You genius, you."

I admit it. Me too. And, of course, it wasn't perfect, and she suggested many changes. I bristled at some, sulked for half a day, and then did what she suggested.

I've kept at it while my friends went swimming, picked cherries, had picnics and parties, organized expeditions driving into Los Angeles to concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and the Santa Monica Pier.

I kept at it even when it felt like picking over the bones of road kill because, first of all, I was paying her. She asked questions that made me think. She was encouraging just enough to drive me through a second and third revision of a chapter. Occasional compliments made me preen with self-satisfaction, until the next page when she wanted to delete a section. I thought of offering her a knife to chisel the words from my breast instead.

It became a collaboration. So much time is spent alone, seat of pants pressed to chair for long periods of time. I've had a partner, someone who knew my story as well as I did.

Now our partnership has come to an end, and my manuscript is immeasurably improved. As you all know, it's only the beginning of the next phase.

And it's still August.

The difficulty of creation/ease of destruction and grants

Today on National Public Radio's Morning Edition
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition
there was a story about the cliff-high Buddha statues in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban. A group funded by the UN is trying to piece them back together. Destroying them took moments, rebuilding them will take years (and skill, and patience, and hard work). Destruction is cheap. I thank God for people who stand against it by creating (and re-creating...)

Creating is expensive, especially in terms of time and hard work! In response to Janet's challenge I went web-searching for financial support to sustain writers as they work at creation. I have never applied for these grants, so I can't say much about the process.

For the search I simply went to Google and searched "grants writing .gov". I found that the primary support from the Federal Government for writing is through funding from the National Endowment for the Arts: http://www.nea.gov/grants/apply/Lit.html. So I looked for "regrants" on a more local level via Google: "grants writing California" (since I'm in California). There were a few interesting items in the results. One was "Women Arts" http://www.womenarts.org/fund/FundingSourcesforLiteraryArtists.htm.

I ran a new search, replacing "writers" with "literary" to get away from the many grant writing sites, Google: ".gov california grants literary" led me to the California Arts Council Site:
http://www.cac.ca.gov/opportunities/main.php.

So, there are grants out there. Go forth and create!

Mystery Grants

This year, I’ve become aware of some of the writing grants available for mystery writers.

Grants do not have to be repaid. They may come from the government, schools or non-profit agencies. They may provide money for publishing, courses, retreats, attending conferences, research, and to support minorities.

As I’m in Canada, I’ll use two Canadian examples.

The Canada Council for the Arts is probably the most visible supporter. Many mysteries I’ve seen in the last year have included thanks to this institution. They provide support for the creation, translation, publication and promotion of Canadian literature, the Writing and Publishing Section funds author residencies, literary readings and festivals. They have provided funding regularly to Bloody Words, and on the BW 2010 site, it is shown that they invested over $20 million dollars in writing and publishing in Canada. http://www.canadacouncil.ca/writing/

The Toronto Arts Council, is very regionally specific funding. They have Writers grants for individual artists, and Project Grants. They will not invest in publishing, but they do support many aspects of the writing life. http://www.torontoartscouncil.org/Grant-programs/Literary

The paperwork can be a little intimidating, but if this helps you to pursue your dream, I think you can work your way through it quite adeptly.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: post on the blog a brief description, of any writing funding for which mystery writers could be eligible.

Norway and the Truest Sentence You Can Write

This was supposed to be a lighthearted blog on things that can kick-start our brains for writing: running, movies, crosswords…

But the world has intruded. The Norway shootings, the Somalia famine, grip us, inspire pity and fear. What if it was my kid at summer camp when the maniac opened up? Or what if I was that hungry mother or father in Somalia dragging myself and my starving little ones hundreds of miles in search of food and a dirty bit of tent to sleep under?

Fleeing war and famine or right-wing lunatics -- who would have time to daydream characters and situations, plot and setting? Is it even right to be so involved in our little fictional worlds when the real one needs help?

Let’s look at Prableen Kaur: As a deputy leader of Norway’s Labour party’s youth wing she was trying in her own way to make the world a better place before Friday’s massacre. Instead she ran for her life along with hundreds of other youth persecuted by a madman. But in the middle of the most terrible event that had ever happened to her she prayed, and then, updated her face book and Twitter accounts and after her rescue blogged her first person story. She was reaching out, making contact and telling the truth she saw. That blog will probably form part of the case against the attacker, Anders Breivik when it comes to court. Apart from surviving, it was the most important thing she could do.

So my question is, is it enough to witness to what’s going on and write the truest sentence that we know as Anne Lamott says in her tough and funny memoir, Bird by Bird? Or should we be actively engaged in making the world a better place? Or both? And if we can only do one of then which should it be?

The Game's Afoot

Summertime - a great time to catch up on reading. Or writing. Not a great time for watching television.

Not that I watch a lot of that, of course. Who does? (wink wink) Still, there are new episodes of Murdoch Mystery to see and the new series of Sherlock on DVD to watch again. This week both have reminded me of the joy and challenge of a constructing a really good puzzle.

Unlike reality, a good mystery has to have all the pieces laid out for the reader - the true detective. While real cops have to muddle along with messy real crimes, a whodunit needs to present the clues - not in plain sight but not too obscured with extraneous information. Also unlike reality, not only does it have to make sense, it has to be engaging too. Not easy.

It wasn’t until I had to plot out the action plan for a climactic battle that I got a handle on how I could pull off a decent murder... mystery. In order to keep everyone straight, I had to make maps of the battle field, diagrams of the actions with “with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one” to quote Arlo Guthry’s Alice’s Restaurant.

The most useful part of the process, from a writing point of view, was the timeline. This told me who was fighting who, when, and why. I slotted the motivations and outcomes into a table, but the timeline kept everything straight.

It was the same principle as a detective’s evidence board. When I finally had a crime to commit (to paper), it was like a murder investigation in reverse. I started with all the facts, worked out some of the critical misdirections, then decided how the information would be revealed in the course of the story.

I was on the third draft of Under A Texas Star when I started using this method of organization. Though the murder investigation is the B plot of the story, I wanted it to stand up in court (the one where my readers are the jurors). I created a timeline, a table of suspects and list of clues that would lead to the murderer plus a few red herrings that would point to the other suspects. Marly and Jase’s detective work - separately and together - further the investigation, their character development and their relationship. I kept it all straight with my timeline...“with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.”

It becomes a kind of game. The puzzle has to be challenging enough to be interesting, but not so complicated that you annoy your reader. Above all, the puzzle must further the story, not replace it.

When I plot out a mystery, the game’s afoot.




Of your favourite authors, who creates the best puzzle for you to solve?