The Pot Thief

Review of NO BELLS by F. M. Meredith

2012-01-25T09:26:00.001-08:00

The Pot Thief Blog has been inactive since the end of the Murder We Write blog tour on December 9. After 14 days of posting blogs on other sites while simultaneously hosting other mystery writers for 14 days on this site, I couldn't bear to hear the word blog, much less do something on on. Then Lai and I left three days later for a month in our apartment in New York City. We enjoyed the Christmas displays in the big stores, saw the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Special, went to the museums and galleries, saw Billy Elliot, a great musical, visited with friends and relatives and lived the carefree life in our cozy pied-a-terre. Cozy? Try 350 square feet with a Murphy bed. Hey, we're lucky to have anything in Manhattan. If it were on the market today, we couldn't afford it.

We returned just in time for the start of the spring semester. Lai had to turn her attention to teaching, and I had to turn my attention to treating a head cold with the staying power of a triathlete. When I finally got well enough to read, I treated myself to a pre-publication copy of F. M. Meredith's latest. So I'm restarting the blog today with a review.

Fans of F. M. Meredith’s long-running Rocky Bluff Police Department mysteries will be happy to learn the newest book may be the best yet. In No Bells, Gordon Butler gets his first leading role in this clever ensemble series. Butler is like JoeBtfsplk, the cartoon character in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, a poor sap for whom things never quite work out. Meredith’s plot – her best yet – is a perfect fit for the character. Without giving away too much, he wins but he loses. It’s a very satisfying read, and the meaning of the title is not revealed until the end.No Bells is a tightly woven story. Just when you think you know “whodunit,” something happens to change your mind. Then you go back to your first guess. Then a different hunch arises. As always, every member of the Rocky Bluff PD and their family members has a speaking part as their personal lives and police issues give us another glimpse of a town we love to visit.

Murder We Write Blog Tour Wrap-up

2011-12-09T09:32:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was the last day of the Murder We Write Blog Tour. It was my first experience on a cyberbus, and I have to say I enjoyed it more than I expected to. A lot more, in fact. It was frantic having to write fourteen posts and host fourteen authors in fourteen days. Not to mention trying to read and comment on all the other people doing the same.

Taking one tour hardly qualifies me to make suggestions about the project, but when did that ever stop an author? I think blogs need to be left up for several days to give more people a chance to read and comment. I know they are archived, and all one need do is scroll down. But when someone lands on a blog, they are likely to read the current post and then move one.

The primary goal of a blog tour is marketing – getting more name recognition and selling more books. I don’t know how effective such tours are, but many writers claim they work. But even if they don’t result in many sales for me, it was worth it to get to know some of my colleagues better and to learn from them. I knew I might pick up a tidbit here and there, but I didn’t know that it would be the second best learning experience of my writing career. The first best – the actual experience of writing. You learn by slogging on, writing every day. And I learned that from Tim Hallinan.

Thanks to all my fellow MWW tour colleagues and to everyone who read the blogs.

I’m ready to do it again, but not in the next six months.

A Visit from Author Jinx Schwartz

2011-12-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

Too bad Scrabble doesn't allow proper nouns. You could score big with today's visitor's name.

Now .99 in ebook format (Smashwords and Kindle) Land of Mountains, Jinx' YA (but suitable from 8-108) mystery/adventure is a Finalist for the EPIC e-book 2012 Best YA novel. www.jinxschwartz.com

Raised in the jungles of Haiti and Thailand, with returns to Texas in-between, Jinx followed her father's steel-toed footsteps into the Construction and Engineering industry in hopes of building dams. Finding all the good rivers taken, she traveled the world defacing other landscapes with mega-projects in Alaska, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Jinx and her husband, Mad Dog Schwartz, opted over twenty years ago to become cash-poor cruisers rather than continue chasing the rat. They sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge, turned left, and headed for Mexico. Meaning to stay three months, they, much like the crew of the S.S. Minnow, never returned. They now divide their time between Arizona and Mexico's Sea of Cortez.

Links:

Buy link, Land of Mountains, http://amzn.to/r9QYuR

Jinx blog: http://bit.ly/qpLEeY

Jinx on Facebook http://on.fb.me/poP20Q

Jinx website: http://www.jinxschwartz.com

Land of Mountains trailer: http://bit.ly/qdv4Pv

Thanks Mike,

Since Land of Mountains is a finalist for EPIC's 2012 Best Young Adult Award, I thought I'd write on how the book came about.

It was so much fun to write because, even though it is a work of fiction, it brought back my childhood in Haiti.

I know what you're thinking: Haiti??? Yes, Haiti.

When we moved there in the early 50's, Haiti was already a mess. People were starving, and Doctor Duvallier (later a despotic dictator who took the country into the morass it is now) was making waves and terrorizing people with his goon squad, the Ton Ton Macout.

And how, you may ask, does all this conjure up fond childhood memories?

First off, we lived in a construction camp near the Dominican border, and with fifty or so other Texan families. With all of these homegrown transplants (two of whom were my grandmothers) Texas basically moved to Haiti. We were insulated from most of the problems, but not totally.

What made the place magical for me was, once my mother learned there were no poisonous snakes on the island, me and my friends were basically turned loose on an unsuspecting Haitian population.

We had horses, parrots, and freedom to roam jungle paths at will. If we got lost, there was a standing reward of a dollar for anyone who led us home. In a country where the annual income was under a hundred dollars, we kids were mighty popular.

Where we lived was a jungle perfect for Tarzan ropes. Now, the entire island has been exfoliated, the dense forests of mahogany and kapok long gone into cook fires.

We swam the rivers, swam our horses across those rivers, explored caves, knocked avocados from trees and dressed them with lime juice for lunch on the trail. Bananas grew wild, as did papaya. And tarantulas grew the size of dinner plates.

And we snooped. We sneaked out of camp at night to spy on voodoo meetings. The camp's bachelor's love lives were of great interest to us. On rainy days we read books, many way over our heads. We had no TV, or radio. We did get an occasional movie night at the clubhouse, but many were foreign films. We kids got sent home if they proved racy French numbers, but we doubled back and peeked in the windows.

Land of Mountains is a fictography, a word I blatantly lifted from the cover of John Grisham's A Painted House. He, like me, took his childhood memories and wrote a book, but he didn't have a zombie.

As for my other books, there is an historical novel; an epic tale of the thirty years leading up to the fall of the Alamo (The Texicans), and my Hetta Coffey Mystery Series featuring a woman with a yacht, and she's not afraid to use it. The first in this series, Just Add Water, won the EPPIE for Best Mystery, and the third, Just Add Trouble, was a finalist.

Another stand alone, Troubled Sea, is a boating adventure in the Sea of Cortez, and is my husband's favorite.

Writing, for me, came almost by accident. I never set out to be a writer, but a genealogical search lead to The Texicans, and after that I found I had something to say. Okay, so I always had something to say, I just began writing it all down.

If one of your blog readers wants to win a copy of any of my books in Kindle (or other e-book format) I'll pick one from their comments, and gift them a book. I will be glad to answer any questions from your blog readers at jinxschwartz@yahoo.com.

A Visit from Author Earl Staggs

2011-12-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

Derringer Award winning author Earl Staggs has seen many of his short stories published in magazines and anthologies. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine and as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. His novel MEMORY OF A MURDER earned thirteen Five Star reviews online at Amazon and B&N. His column “Write Tight” appears in the online magazine Apollo’s Lyre. He is also a contributing blog member of Murderous Musings and Make Mine Mystery. He hosts workshops for the Muse Online Writers Conference and the Catholic Writers Conference Online and is a frequent speaker at conferences and writers groups. Email: earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net Website: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com

Thanks for being here today, Earl. I know our visitors are going to love this humorous piece.

- Mike

HISTORY OF PUBLISHING

. . .according to Earl

Long, long ago, a bunch of us were sitting around the cave telling stories to each other and a guy we called Hiero came up with an idea.

“Hey,” he said, “we should preserve these stories on rocks.”

So Hiero came up with a bunch of symbols for animals and fish and birds and people and other things. We invented a hammer and chisel and started chiseling our stories on rocks using the symbols. Since Hiero made up the symbols, we called them Hieroglyphics.

I was just a kid then, but I studied hard and became a chiseler.

Then one of the women fell on a basket of grapes and squashed them into liquid and one guy said, “Hey, we can use that to draw our stories on the cave walls.” We took some hair from a mastodon’s leg, tied it to a stick, and used it as a brush. Soon we learned to drop women on other fruits and berries and came up with other liquids. We named it ink, and soon were drawing our symbols all over the cave walls.

That went fine for a while until some guy invented something he called paper. He said, “Hey, let’s paint our stories on paper.”

A guy over in the corner named Webster said, “Hey, that’s fine, but enough with the symbols. Let’s use words. I just made up a whole lot of them and someday everybody will be using them.”

So we invented pencils and pens and started drawing words on paper. That became very popular, once you got the hang of picking the right words.

Now, some people were better at picking which words to use. Webster came up with a word for what we were doing. He called it writing. The ones who were good at picking the best words became known as writers. I was tired of chiseling, so I became a writer. It was tedious work doing one page at a time, though.

A few months later -- and you’ll notice I’m condensing the time frame to make this move a little faster – a guy named Gutenberg invented a machine he called a printing press. What a boon that was! Put words in a flat plate, smear ink on it, and print thousands of pieces of paper. Oh, my. We were on a roll.

Then another guy had the idea of putting those pieces of paper in a pile and gluing them together. His name was Booker, so we called them books.

About the same time, a couple of guys named Royal and Underwood invented gadgets called typewriters. That made it a lot easier for writers to write the books.

That was great. Soon we had stacks and stacks of books. Remember Webster, the guy who came up with all those words? Even he got into the act. He gathered up all his words, put them in a book, and called it a dictionary.

But what to do with all those books? A guy named Barnes said, “Hey, I have an idea. I have a friend named Noble. We’ll go in together and open a store to sell the books.”

Before long, we had huge companies called publishers cranking out books, and we had bookstores all over the world selling them. The whole system needed more people to make it work, so editors, distributors, shippers, and warehousers were born. Another group of people said, “Hey, we’re agents. You writers send us your stuff, and we’ll sell it to the publishers.”

Yes, a lot of people were involved in the system, but it worked. Everybody was reading books.

Meanwhile, up in Seattle, a couple of kids named Jobs and Gates were putting things together called computers. Not the huge things big companies were using. These were small enough to sit on a desk, and soon everybody had one. This made it even easier for writers to write. These machines could even communicate with each other over a web that covered the whole wide world called the Internet. Wow! Talk about progress.

Things were about to change, though. A guy named Amazon started selling books over the Internet. You didn’t even have to go to the bookstore. Just order them through your computer, and they’d be shipped to your door. This Amazon guy went one step further. One day, he said, “Hey, look what I invented. I call it a Kindle. I don’t have to ship the book to you anymore. I’ll just send you the words and you read them on this thing. We’ll call them ebooks”

Remember those guys named Barnes and Noble? They said, “Hey, we have one of those, too. We call it a Nook. Soon, there was a bunch more of them. A lot of people weren’t reading printed books anymore. They were reading ebooks in the palm of their hands. Talk about change!

More changes were coming, though. A bunch of writers were sitting around one day and said, “Hey, we don’t need agents and publishers and distributors and all those people. Let’s publish our ebooks ourselves. Since all those other people won’t be getting any of the pie, we can sell them for only a couple bucks and still make more per book than before.”

And that’s how it all happened and that brings us to where we are today. We have a choice of going the traditional way through agents and publishers or we can publish our own ebooks.

No one knows what changes the future will bring. It could be the entire publishing industry will crumble, and we’ll go back to preserving our stories on rocks. If that happens, I’ll be okay. I still have my tools and I can be a chiseler again.

Now that you know everything I know about publishing, you’re invited to drop by my Blog/Website at: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com and visit with my special guest for the day.

While you're there, you can read Chapter One of MEMORY OF A MURDER, my first mystery novel, which earned thirteen Five Star reviews.

While you’re there, you can also read for free, “The Day I Almost Became a Great Writer,” which some say is the funniest story I’ve ever written. There’s also one called “White Hats and Happy Trails,” about the day I spent with Roy Rogers.

Also while you’re there, don't forget to sign up for the drawing on December 9. The first name drawn from those who leave a comment will receive a print copy of MEMORY OF A MURDER. The second name drawn will have a choice of an ebook or print copy of SHORT STORIES OF EARL STAGGS, a collection of sixteen of my best short stories.

A Visit from Author Anne K. Albert

2011-12-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

Anne K. Albert’s award winning stories chill the spine, warm the heart and soothe the soul…all with a delightful touch of humor. A member of Romance Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and married to her high school sweetheart for more than a quarter of a century, it's a given she'd write mystery and romantic suspense. When not writing she loves to travel, visit friends and family, and of course, read using ‘Threegio’ her cherished and much beloved Kindle 3G!

Now that you know a little about Anne, let's get on with the interview

Anne –Thanks for featuring me today, Mike. It’s hard to fathom it’s Day 12 of the second 2011 Mystery We Write Blog Tour.

Mike - Who is your favorite author?

Anne – Actually, I don’t have a favorite. All of the authors I read, however, tell stories I can’t put down. They have a way with language that inspires me. They include twists and turns that keep me guessing. More importantly, when I forget about analyzing their method of storytelling, when I no longer see carefully constructed transitions, skillful point-of-view changes, and get completely caught up in the story and cannot read fast enough to find out what happens next, that’s when I know I’m reading a work of art…and one of my favorite authors!

Mike - Do you have critique partners or beta readers?

Anne – I have four beta readers. I trust their opinions, and consider their input crucial. I’d be lost without them!

Mike - Do you use a pen name? If so, how did you come up with it?

Anne - Being an intensely private person, it was a given I’d use a pen name once published. Anne K. Albert is a combination of my daughter’s, mine, and husband’s middle names. That my pen name’s acronym just happens to spell AKA is a bonus. It makes me smile!

Mike – Tell us about book one of the Muriel Reeves Mysteries.

Anne - FRANK, INCENSE AND MURIEL is set the week before Christmas when the stress of the holidays is enough to frazzle anyone’s nerves. Tensions increase when a friend begs Muriel to team up with a sexy private investigator to find a missing woman. Forced to deal with an embezzler, kidnapper, and femme fatale is bad enough, but add Muriel’s zany yet loveable family to the mix and their desire to win the coveted D-DAY (Death Defying Act of the Year) Award, and the situation can only get worse. This cozy, comedic mystery is recipient of the prestigious 2011 Holt Medallion Award of Merit.

This is how it begins:

Imagine my surprise when Frankie Salerno showed up at my front door one cold, December, Monday morning. Displaying a set of dimples that could make a grown woman cry, he gave me a quick once over and let out a long, slow, wolf whistle. “You’re looking good, Brian. Real good.”

Being ogled at is one thing. Being called that ridiculous nickname after a fifteen-year hiatus another. I felt a knot form in the pit of my stomach as my thoughts traveled back to Ms. Traynor’s ninth English class when Frankie wrote me a note. I have no idea of its contents. Nor do I care. All I know is the teacher intercepted it. She read it, raised an eyebrow, and zeroed in on me.

“I believe Frankie had you in mind when he wrote this,” she said.

To my horror, she began to read the note aloud. She got as far as the salutation he’d printed on the outside of the folded sheet of three-ring notepaper.

“To the Brian.”

The class erupted into fits of laughter and Ms. Traynor, satisfied we’d suffered enough humiliation for one day, returned the note to Frankie and resumed her lesson. From that day forward, I was the girl named Brian, and Frankie became my sworn enemy.

From where I stood a decade and a half later, not much had changed except that I’d grudgingly accepted my fate. Having a few more brain cells than feminine curves had advantages. If Frankie thought otherwise, so be it. He was entitled to his opinion. But really, who needed it? Or him?

“I’d like to say it’s great to see you again,” I said, “but we both know I’d be lying. Let’s end this before it gets messy, shall we?”

“Aw, come on.” He pressed his large, square hand on the screen door. “Do you have any idea how many Reeves are in the phonebook? It took me more than an hour to find you. I had to check the listings in Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Lackawanna–”

I held up my hand to silence him. I’d lived in western New York state all of my life and did not need a geography lesson. What I needed was to get on with my life. Without him. Still, I could not resist getting in the last word.

“It would’ve been quicker if you’d looked under ‘M’ instead of ‘B’,” I said.

“I was kidding about the Brian part.”

“Then why’d you say it?”

“I dunno. I was a jerk back in high school and some things never change. Besides, it says a lot more about me than it ever did about you. I’m the one who couldn’t spell brain.”

To read more of Frank, Incense and Muriel click here: http://amzn.to/pg67sx.

Or visit my website http://www.AnneKAlbert.com/ and blogs http://anne-k-albert.blogspot.com/ and http://muriel-reeves-mysteries.blogspot.com. I’m also on Facebook www.facebook.com/annekalbert and Twitter www.twitter.com/AnneKAlbert.

Thanks for featuring me, Mike. I’d like to remind readers there are only two more days to enter my Comment-to-Win Contest.

CONTEST DETAILS: Three names will be selected at random from comments on all 14 of Anne’s Mystery We Write Blog Tour guest appearances. Winners will receive an e-copy of FRANK, INCENSE AND MURIEL, book one of the Muriel Reeves Mysteries. Visit http://tinyurl.com/3hzpqvv for her schedule and contest details. Good luck!

* * *

For those of you who want to buy Anne's book right this moment (and who wouldn't?) here is a buy link: http://www.amazon.com/Frank-Incense-and-Muriel-ebook/dp/B004CLYDRO/

A Visit from Author Beth Anderson

2011-12-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to Welcome Beth. You'll find she has a unique point of view.

Point of View

By Beth Anderson

So many times when I’m reading a scene a brand new writer has written, I pick up on her phrases, her way of speaking, and her way of thinking, all of which are entirely different than the current viewpoint person’s would be. This happens because first, the author doesn’t yet know the person she’s writing about well enough and second, the author doesn’t understand point of view.

You should be able to write what your character says in a way that will be unique to that person. The way you do that is to know your characters ahead of time so you’ll be able to write as he or she would think, given their individual backgrounds.

The person who came from a poor family deep in the country is going to think and see things a lot differently than a person raised through childhood in a hotel suite in Las Vegas or New York. The guy from Texas who was raised on a ranch and learned to eat his steaks blackened with plenty of hot sauce is always going to look at a beef dish differently than the gentleman from England whose beloved mother’s specialty was boiled beef. Think about it. Imagine how each man would describe his favorite cut of beef. They’re going to be totally different, aren’t they? Of course they are.

So the reason new writers have so much trouble with inner dialog as well as narrative is that they’re inserting their thoughts into their characters’ space. The way to work around that is to know your characters’ backgrounds well before you begin. Sit down and do a full analysis of your lead characters and I don’t mean one of those pre-printed fill in the blanks cheat sheets we all start out with. I’m talking about giving your character a clear, written past life that you can draw on while writing your book. So it takes a couple of extra days. Believe me, it’s worth the time. As an extra bonus, I would urge you to remember that these differences are going to naturally insert a fair amount of conflict in your book without you consciously having to worry about it. Different strokes, different views, built-in-conflict.

When you write a scene, any scene, be aware of the differences in your people and keep yourself and your differences completely out of it. As you’re seeing your next scene in your mind, make every effort to put yourself into your viewpoint character’s head and see what he would see, not what you see.

The differences in viewpoint are the main reason why witnesses to crimes so often tell different stories. They’re usually not doing it on purpose. They just see what they would normally see.

You might look at a beautiful buffet table and notice the way the light shoots out from all the different crystal cuts on the punch bowl, but chances are, the truck driver who just blew in from Omaha after driving ten hours without stopping is going to be looking at the food and that’s about it. You see the crystal, he sees the food. See it as your viewpoint character would see it. That’s point of view.

More illustrations: A mother looks at her antique family china on the dinner table and thinks about all the dishes she’s going to have to wash herself, because she won’t let anyone else touch her good china. Her nineteen year old football hero son sees the same antique china and thinks about how small the dinner plates look and he might cringe inside, remembering the time he broke one of his mother’s demitasse cups. And he wonders what dessert will be.

Her brand new, somewhat avaricious daughter-in-law sees the same antique china and wonders how long she and her husband will have to wait to inherit it. It’s all in the individual point of view. All three of these people enter the same room, and yet they see the family china three entirely different ways.

This is what gives your story life. Knowing whose point of view you have in every scene before you write it. That’s also what writing instructors mean when they say let your characters tell the story. They don’t really mean that you have to sit at your computer playing Solitaire while you wait to hear strange new voices in your head. It simply means keep your point of view out of the picture, and use the character’s instead. If you know them well enough, if you understand who they are, where they came from, what sort of life they’ve had up to this point and that those things determine how they think and speak and act today, their voices will come through loud and clear.

You won’t be able to stop them.

____________________________________________

Beth Anderson is a multi-published, award winning author in several genres including romance and mainstream crime fiction. A full time author, she now lives in Washington state. She has appeared on Chicago's WGN Morning Show, The ABC Evening News, as well as numerous other radio and cable television shows. She has guest lectured at Purdue University, Moraine Valley College, and many libraries and writers' conferences. She loves music, particularly jazz. Her website and blog are at http://www.bethanderson-hotclue.com .

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Book blurb:

RAVEN TALKS BACK by Beth Anderson

Krill Press, ISBN 978-0-9821443-9-8

Beautiful Valdez, Alaska. Home of twenty-three-inch snow in the wintertime, but in the summertime, gorgeous mountain scenery where the early morning fog rolls down the mountainside, bringing soft whispers of the past with it. And this year...murder.

Valdez Chief of Police Jack O'Banion's take:

Voices. Visions. A sadistic killer running around loose, a hysterical woman, two teenagers on the verge of home-grown terrorism, everybody including the Alaska State Troopers and out-of-town media driving him berserk twenty-four hours a day. And now Raven wants him to arrest someone, anyone, because she thinks her husband is about to be charged with murder and she just can’t face it.

Raven Morressey's take:

She knows nothing she's saying to Jack makes any sense to him because it doesn't to her, either. After all, it's not every day a newly murdered, tattooed, headless and handless body is dug up in your back yard and then you start hearing voices of your dead ancestors and seeing things that never happened--at least yet. She just wants to keep her home together--at first. She's not trying to butt in and solve the murders in Valdez. But she just can't help it.

======================================================

Links:

Website: http://www.bethanderson-hotclue.com

Blog: http://www.bethanderson-hotclue.com/blog

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/bethanderson43

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Beth-Anderson/e/B000APMRR4/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Barnes & Noble: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Raven-Talks-Back/Beth-Anderson/e/2940012515407/?itm=1&USRI=beth+anderson#MeetTheWriter

Also available at your favorite independent bookstores nationwide.

==================================================================

A Visit from Author Ron Benrey

2011-12-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Choosing Day-Jobs For Our Cozy Sleuths

By Ron Benrey

My wife, Janet, and I have written nine cozy mysteries in three series—which means that we’ve had repeated opportunities to think about the day jobs performed by our amateur sleuths when they aren’t tracking down murderers.

Over the years, the cozy sleuths of countless mystery novels have had callings ranging from abbesses to zookeepers. The only rule associated the protagonist’s day job is that his or her occupation must be integrated into the story. One the one hand, the vocation must fit the protagonist’s character traits. On the other hand, the sleuth must ultimately use his/her “special skills” solve the mystery. It’s also nice if a sleuth’s day job has a high “Walter Mitty” factor and is interesting to readers.

Pippa Hunnechurch, the heroine of our first mystery series, is a “headhunter” (more formally known as an executive recruiter). A headhunter earns his or her living by recruiting top-notch candidates for hard-to-fill corporate positions. Headhunting is an ideal occupation for an amateur sleuth, because a recruiter has to possess all sorts of detective-like skills, for example: the know-how to dig into candidates’ backgrounds, to spot when someone is lying (or exaggerating), and to catalog the essential requirements of a particular job. Pippa makes productive use of this third skill in every mystery: she comes up with a “job description” for the killer that helps her to identify the guilty party.

Our “Glory North Carolina Mysteries” feature an ensemble cast of characters, with a different protagonist/sleuth in each novel. We did this intentionally because it simplifies the chore of injecting “fresh blood” (in all meanings of the phrase) into subsequent stories. It also eliminates the “Murder She Wrote Syndrome,” wherein the heroine improbably keeps encountering murder victims. There is a common denominator that the various protagonists in the “Glory” series share: most are (or become) members of the same church choir.

Flick Adams and Nigel Owens—the chief protagonists of our “Royal Tunbridge Wells Mysteries”— are, respectively, a museum curator and a museum managing director (equivalent of general manager). They hold those posts because we developed this series by first imagining “The Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum.” The museum is itself a major “character” in the mysteries—at least as important as Flick and Nigel—and of course it needed a managerial staff. The series — which includes two novels: “Dead as a Scone” and “The Final Crumpet” (we’re currently working on a third title)—came about when an editor invited us to write the kind of mystery that Agatha Christie might have written. Dame Agatha often had co-protagonists and set several mysteries inside unusual organizations.

Here is the synopsis of “Dead as a Scone”:

Murder is afoot is the sedate English town of Royal Tunbridge Wells … and the crime may be brewing in a tea pot! Nigel Owen is having a rotten year. Downsized from a cushy management job at an insurance company in London, he is forced to accept a temporary post as managing director of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum. Alas, he regrets living in a small town in Kent, he prefers drinking coffee (with a vengeance), and he roundly dislikes Flick Adams, PhD, an American scientist recently named the museum’s curator. But then, the wildly unexpected happens. Dame Elspeth Hawker, the museum’s chief benefactor, keels over a board meeting—the apparent victim of a fatal heart attack. With the Dame’s demise, the museum’s world-famous collection is up for grabs, her cats, dog, and parrot are living at with Flick and Nigel—and the two prima donnas find themselves facing professional ruin. But Flick—who knows a thing or two about forensic science—is convinced that Dame Elspeth did not die a natural death. As Flick and Nigel follow the clues—including a cryptic Biblical citation—they discover that a crime perpetrated more than a century ago sowed the seeds for a contemporary murder.

Ron Benrey writes cozy mysteries with his wife Janet. Ron has been a writer forever—initially on magazines (his first real job was Electronics Editor at Popular Science Magazine), then in corporations (he wrote speeches for senior executives), and then as a novelist. Over the years, Ron has also authored ten non-fiction books, including the recently published “Know Your Rights — a Survival Guide for Non-Lawyers” (published by Sterling). Ron holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a juris doctor from the Duquesne University School of Law. He is a member of the Bar of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Buying Link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004Q9U18W

Website Link:

http://www.benrey.com

New Blog Link: (Will launch on 11/1)

http://blog.benrey.com

A Visit from Author Pat Browning

2011-12-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Pat has a very interesting post dealing with two books that she didn't write and topics she is passionate about. Let me just add that her own book, Absinthe of Malice, is one of my personal favorites. Here is the cover:

And here are the covers for the two books she discusses:

Certain books resonate with me not only because of ties to recent or historical events, but because they speak to the human heart. Life is about two things: love and loss. Writers who understand that will make a lasting connection with readers.

Let me revisit two of my favorite books: THE GIRL WITH BRAIDED HAIR by Margaret Coel, and THE HANGING GARDEN by Ian Rankin.

In July 2008, AIM (the American Indian Movement) led what they called “The Longest Walk 2” to Washington, D.C., an 8,200-mile walk starting from the San Francisco Bay area. It took place 30 years after the original Longest Walk to the nation’s capital. Along with representatives from more than 100 American Indian nations and other indigenous participants, such as Maori, non-indigenous supporters took part. Participants traveled on either the Northern Route or the Southern Route, crossing a total of 26 states.

The Northern Route was led by AIM veterans. The walkers used sacred staffs to represent its issues: protection of sacred sites of indigenous peoples, traditional tribal sovereignty, issues related to native prisoners, and protection of children. Walkers along the Southern Route focused on a hoped-for meeting with congressional leaders to discuss environmental issues and legal battles over mineral rights and ancestral lands.

While Indians were marching through Oklahoma that summer I was reading Margaret Coel’s THE GIRL WITH BRAIDED HAIR. Coel’s book is fiction, but it’s about a crime on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation where discovery of a skeleton stirs up old angers that lead to more murders. Quoting from my review still up on Amazon:

***

Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, 1973 -- The police shoot Brave Bird, a Lakota leader hiding out with the Arapahos after the ill-fated occupation at Wounded Knee.

Someone points a finger at Liz Plenty Horses. Ruth Yellow Bull tells her, "They're gonna put a snitch jacket on you." Panic-stricken, Liz takes her baby girl, Luna, and drives away from the rez in a desperate search for a place to hide.

Wind River Reservation, 35 years later – A couple of rock hunters find a shallow grave and an old skeleton with broken bones and a bullet hole in the back of the skull.

Prodded by a small group of Indians who want to give the skeleton a decent burial, and knowing that no rez Indian will talk to a white cop, Father John O’Malley and attorney Vicky Holden begin asking questions of anyone known to be on the rez in the early 1970s.

They hear differing opinions of AIM: ... city Indians not interested in rez culture ... Wounded Knee was all for nothing ... no justice came out of it ... AIM people had guts ... loved the marching and shouting ... we're Indians and proud of it ... Coel moves the story between past and present, bringing it to a surprising climax and a poignant conclusion.
***

You can read an excerpt at Google Books: http://tinyurl.com/3o4lelk

Meanwhile, as Indians marched on Washington, in Austria a 95-year-old man named Milivoj Asner created a public furor just by showing up at a soccer game. Asner was No. 4 on a list of most-wanted Nazi war crimes suspects, indicted for persecuting hundreds of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies in WWII-era Croatia, which was ruled by a Nazi puppet regime.

His defenders said he “should be allowed to live out his days in peace.” That’s just what happened. Asner, age 98, died this year in an Austrian nursing home. Shades of Inspector Rebus!

I re-read for the umpteenth time THE HANGING GARDEN, part of Scottish author Ian Rankin’s long-running Detective Inspector John Rebus series. In this book, Rebus pursues an accused war criminal who has lived a long and apparently blameless life in

England

. Rebus has misgivings about confronting the old man but another character says:

“You are not investigating the crimes of an old man, but those of a young man who now happens to be old. Focus your mind on that. There have been investigations before, half-hearted affairs. Governments wait for these men to die, rather than have to try them. But each investigation is an act of remembrance, and remembrance is never wasted. Remembrance is the only way we learn.”

You can read an excerpt of THE HANGING GARDEN at Google Books: http://tinyurl.com/42byheq

One more favorite quote, this one from a You Tube video by Robert Crais, author of the best-selling Elvis Cole mysteries, who says: “Books are a very, very personal art form. They’re a collaborative art form like no other. When you look at the book, it’s actually not a completed piece of art. The art isn’t completed until the reader reads it.”

My sentiments exactly!

Thanks, Mike, for hosting me today. I love talking about books, and hope some of your readers will be intrigued by the two favorites I revisited. Of course, I also recommend my own book, ABSINTHE OF MALICE, but that is another story.

________________________________________________

Pat Browning was born and raised in Oklahoma. A longtime resident of California's San Joaquin Valley before moving back to Oklahoma in 2005, her professional writing credits go back to the 1960s, when she was a stringer for The Fresno Bee while working full time in a Hanford law office.

Her globetrotting in the 1970s led her into the travel business, first as a travel agent, then as a correspondent for TravelAge West, a trade journal published in San Francisco. In the 1990s, she signed on fulltime as a newspaper reporter and columnist, first at The Selma Enterprise and then at The Hanford Sentinel.

Her first mystery, FULL CIRCLE, was set in a fictional version of Hanford, and published through iUniverse in 2001. It was revised and reissued as ABSINTHE 0F MALICE by Krill Press in 2008. An extensive excerpt can be read at Google Books --

http://tinyurl.com/23pojdm.

The second book in the series, METAPHOR FOR MURDER, is a work in progress. ABSINTHE takes place on a Labor Day weekend. METAPHOR picks up the story the week before Christmas. Log line: Small town reporter Penny Mackenzie tracks an offbeat Christmas story and finds herself in the middle of a murder and the mysterious desecration of an old Chinese cemetery.

Pat's articles on the writing life have appeared in The SouthWest Sage, the monthly journal of SouthWest Writers, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her web site at http://patbrowning.weebly.com is under construction.

ABSINTHE OF MALICE can be ordered through any bookstore or online from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Barnes and Noble, print and Nook

http://tinyurl.com/43lgk5u

Amazon, print and Kindle

http://tinyurl.com/3ry9gya

A Visit from Author John Daniel

2011-12-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to welcome John to my blog. He has a deft hand at combining important and serious issues with humor and plot.

Entertainment…and beyond

Let’s face it. Those of us who write mystery fiction have only one iron-clad obligation to our readers: to entertain them. To borrow a phrase from another medium, we play music they can dance to.

I pledge to do my best to do just that. No, I take that back. Not just that. I’ll do that (entertain), plus something else.

Most writers I know have something to say. Yes, our foremost duty is to repay the retail price of the book with thrills, chills, surprises and laughs; but we also have the time and space to sell our readers on a few subtle, or not-so-subtle, ideas on how to make this planet a better place for our fellow human beings, and while we’re at it, our fellow species.

That’s what crime fiction is all about, isn’t it? Right beats wrong? Come-uppance and just desserts? And why not throw in some other important ideas along the way?

That’s what I’ve tried to do all along with the Guy Mallon mystery series. Entertain first. Serve up generous helpings of love, laughs, gossip, thrills, danger, and resolution. But on top of that?

The Poet’s Funeral made fun of the way ego runs rampant throughout the publishing industry, and by extension throughout the arts. Okay that’s a bit high-tone, but I got to make my point—while I entertained.

Vanity Fire was a Faustian drama that exposed the sleeze of vanity publishing, cocaine traffic, and porn—while I entertained.

Now in the new one, Behind the Redwood Door, which can be read as a standalone, I go after a laundry list of monsters (small-town politics, family feuds, high-school hazing), bullying being the common ingredient. It’s my best book, and you don’t need to read the earlier novels to get it or to enjoy it.

Behind the Redwood Door makes a strong moral statement: bullying is wrong. But nobody would publish it or buy it or read it if all the book did were to preach something which most of us already agree about.

Behind the Redwood Door does something more important than preach: it entertains. In spite of its message about meanies (and in a sense a lot of crime fiction is about meanies), I promise that Behind the Redwood Door will keep you smiling while you sit on the edge of your chair, flipping pages. At least that’s my hope.

John M. Daniel was born in Minnesota, raised in Texas, and educated in Massachusetts and California. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University and a Writer in Residence at Wilbur Hot Springs. He has taught fiction writing at UCLA Extension and Santa Barbara Adult Education and was on the faculty of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference for nearly twenty years. He now teaches creative writing for Humboldt State University Extended Education.

John’s stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines. His thirteen published books include four mysteries: Play Melancholy Baby, The Poet’s Funeral, Vanity Fire, and Behind the Redwood Door, recently published by Oak Tree Press.

John has worked as a bookseller, a free-lance writer, an editor, an entertainer, a model, an innkeeper, and a teacher. He and his wife, Susan, live in Humboldt County, California, where they are small-press book publishers. Susan enjoys gardening, John enjoys writing, and they both enjoy living with their wondercat, Warren.

john@johnmdaniel.com

www.johnmdaniel.com

blog.johnmdaniel.com

amazon.johnmdaniel.com

facebook.johnmdaniel.com

Behind the Redwood Door is sold by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It can be ordered by your local independent bookseller, or bought directly from the publisher at http://www.oaktreebooks.com/. For an autographed copy, call John at 1-800-662-8351.

A Visit from Author Alice Duncan

2011-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

As you will see below, Alice is simultaneously engaging and disarming. She can describe her shopping list and make it sound fascinating. She is also modest. In addition to PECOS VALLEY REVIVAL getting a Booklist starred review, it was also chosen as a finalist for New Mexico Book of the Year. It would have won except for the fact that the contest moguls made me judge the non-fiction instead of fiction. Maybe because I was entered in fiction?

Mike was kind enough to enter my book, PECOS VALLEY REVIVAL, in the New Mexico Book of the Year awards contest (I didn’t even know there was such a thing until Mike won it last year), I decided I’d talk about my “Pecos Valley” books on this blog.

It all started this way . . .

In the late 1990s, I began experiencing glimpses of stories set in the 1920s, a fascinating era by anyone’s standards. I had visions of these books taking place in my home town of Pasadena, California. So I wrote a book called STRONG SPIRITS, set in Pasadena in 1920, which I’d hoped would be the beginning of a series of historical cozy mysteries. Silly me. The publisher (Kensington) liked the stories, but said they weren’t mysterious enough, told me to take out the dead bodies and add a subsidiary romance, since the heroine was already married, and they’d market them as romances. Therefore, I did, they did, and the books bombed. Talk about depressing. So I began a new series of historical cozy romances, this time set in Los Angeles in 1926. Nobody was interested in them either.

Then a friend of a friend started her own publishing house, New Age Dimensions, and asked if I’d like to write a book for them. She asked this because I have an impressive backlist. Never mind that nobody ever reads my books; I’ve had a lot of them published. So, since my Pasadena and L.A. books seemed to be languishing, I decided to write a short cozy mystery set in Roswell, New Mexico, where I now live (only I called it Rosedale in the book), set in 1923. Thus it was that PECOS VALLEY DIAMOND came to be published by NAD, which brought it out as a print-on-demand and e-book. I wrote a second book, PECOS VALLEY REVIVAL, for them, sent it in. And heard nothing. And more nothing.

Turns out the Great Hurricane Season of 2005 did so much damage to NAD, which was headquartered in Florida, that the publisher couldn’t recover. So I had this already-written, very short mystery novel hanging around doing nothing. By that time my agent had retired, and I couldn’t find an agent who wanted me, so I just let the book idle away. Poor book.

About then (2005ish, I guess) I started editing for Tekno Books, the book packager for Five Star, which prints books mainly for libraries. Since I’d already begun a third in my 1920’s Pasadena series, I sent it to Tekno, and Five Star bought it! Then they bought my 1926 Los Angeles book! I was on a roll here. It was then I bethought me of PECOS VALLEY REVIVAL and figured what the heck. So I sent it to Tekno. They liked it, but it wasn’t quite long enough for their requirements. Ergo, I went through the book and added bits and pieces. In doing so, I think I became a bit repetitive, but Mike says he doesn’t agree. On the other hand, Mike is a very nice man. Anyhow, Five Star bought PECOS VALLEY REVIVAL, and it was published in January of 2011, to mixed reviews. Booklist gave it a starred review. Kirkus hated it. What Kirkus didn’t understand, I suppose, is that I was so excited that Kirkus actually paid attention to my tiny little book, I didn’t care if they liked it or not. They reviewed it! My book! Sheesh. I’ve been publishing books since 1995, and Kirkus had never paid any attention to me before.

Anyhow, I figure that, what with Mike Orenduff and Booklist liking my book, and Kirkus paying any attention to it at all, I can’t lose.

Here’s a short bio of me, and links to the three books my publisher brought out this year (very unusual, but I can’t help it):

Award-winning author Alice Duncan lives with a herd of wild dachshunds (enriched from time to time with fosterees from New Mexico Dachshund Rescue) in Roswell, New Mexico. She's not a UFO enthusiast; she's in Roswell because her mother's family settled there fifty years before the aliens crashed. Alice no longer longs to return to California, although she still misses the food, not to mention her children, one of whom is there and the other of whom is in Nevada. Alice would love to hear from you at alice@aliceduncan.net. And be sure to visit her Web site at http//www@aliceduncan.net

· PECOS VALLEY REVIVAL (featuring Annabelle Blue, and set in Roswell, NM, in 1923): http://tinyurl.com/3uafvqg

· FALLEN ANGELS (featuring Mercedes Louise Allcutt, and set in Los Angeles, CA, in 1926): http://tinyurl.com/3wh2a6t

· GENTEEL SPIRITS (featuring Daisy Gumm Majesty, and set in Pasadena, CA, in 1922): http://tinyurl.com/3ndzcff

A Visit from Author Wendy Gager

2011-11-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

Today's guest is the creator of Mitch Malone, the newspaper reporter protagonist in her three (thus far) mysteries. Let's read what she has to say.

“I’ve fallen in love…”

Wait, isn’t this suppose to be a guest blog having to do with mystery? You are in the right place but I would like to talk about the bigger picture and how it relates to my mystery books. Prior to becoming an author and then a published author, I read voraciously. A book often hid my face. Books were stacked knee deep around my couch. I could read a dozen books in a week. I had my favorites that I would run out and buy like Kathleen Woodiwiss, Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, Agatha Christie, Catherine Coulter, and Stephen King. My tastes were eclectic and varied. I didn’t know how good I had it.

Then came marriage and children. I still read but focused on the books delivered through my Harlequin subscriptions. (I happily admit to being a Harlequin reader!) It was easy. No need to fight a screaming baby into a stroller or car seat to hike to the library. I could read these in less than two hours and disappear into far off places and fantasy men. I often daydreamed of writing my own romances, many of which I was sure would be better than some of the more formula-driven books that arrived on my doorstep.

As my children started to grow, my reading changed to listening to books on tape in the car. My selection again ranged from classics to contemporaries, memoirs to science fiction. Whatever the library had on its shelf. As I read I wondered if I could possible write anything someone else would want to read. During this period I discovered Dick Francis, Loren D. Estleman, John Sanford and J.K Rowling (who I read to my children). I didn’t mind if soccer practice ran long.

Then I was off on a medical leave for eight weeks. Couldn’t cook, clean or laundry and best of all I couldn’t drive. I was home by myself while the kids were in school. It was September and warm enough to be outside. My imagination bloomed with the changing color of the leaves. I started my first manuscript promising myself this one would not be forgotten like others had. I did finish it but have forgotten it. (It was that bad!)

I was looking through Good Reads the other day and saw one of my old favorite authors and remembered their favorite works with fondness. I wanted to run for the nearest copy but some of the joy of reading has gone. When I read now, I study the craft and figure out why each book worked instead of just enjoying the pleasure. Being a writer is a curse because the love that drove you to the pen now only writes in red to emphasis and dissect.

I still love books and run out to buy many more authors then mentioned above but for now, every minute is spent with Mitch Malone and his adventures. The latest is A Case of Hometown Blues and I would love to know what you think of him. Leave a comment here or on my blog during the blog tour for a chance to win A Case of Hometown Blues.

A recent review compared my books with Loren D. Estleman and that has been the highlight of my career so far. What a way to combine my love of both reading and writing!

Buy link: http://www.amazon.com/Case-Hometown-Blues-W-gager/dp/1610090179/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311040194&sr=1-1

Author Bio
W.S. Gager has lived in Michigan for most of her life except when she was interviewing race car drivers or professional woman's golfers. She enjoyed the fast-paced life of a newspaper reporter until deciding to settle down and realized babies didn't adapt well to running down story details on deadline. Since then she honed her skills on other forms of writing before deciding to do what she always wanted with her life and that was to write mystery novels. Her main character is Mitch Malone who is an edgy crime-beat reporter always on the hunt for the next Pulitzer and won't let anyone stop him, supposedly.

Reviews

"A Case of Hometown Blues" by Jackson author W.S. Gager (Oak Tree Press, $14.95) is the third in her series about Mitch Malone, who was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize Investigative Journalism Award. This oversized paperback is set in the small fictional town of Flatville, Mich., where Malone grew up. He's returned to give a seminar on investigative journalist techniques.The seminar is the same weekend as Malone's high school reunion, but he really doesn't want to participate. A classmate's body is found and Malone becomes the prime suspect.While Gager's highly entertaining tale wraps up a little too neatly, it's still solid escapism by a promising new talent.

Ray Walsh

owner of East Lansing's Curious Book Shop,

has reviewed crime novels and noir thrillers since 1987.

A Visit from Author M. M. Gornell

2011-11-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

Today's visitor is M.M. Gornell, known by her friends (a group I am proud to be in) as Madeline.

Thank you, Mike, for hosting me on your blog! Since you’ve given me free rein on topic, I thought I’d talk a little about my writing goals. The type of mystery and level of writing I want to someday master. And as a reader, what makes for me, the perfect novel!

I want to write novels where the characters “ring true” and quickly take you into their world. And once there, I want my reader to see, feel, hear, smell, taste—my fictional world through my characters’ senses. While reading An Axe to Grind, a F.M. (Marilyn) Meredith Rocky Bluff novel, I actually—if only for a moment—wanted to offer one of her characters, Gordon Butler, the use of my spare bedroom. That’s the kind of character-ringing-true I want to develop.

Indeed, I want to take the reader inside my characters’ heads—including all the supporting characters. That’s a balancing struggle with plot movement and action (thank goodness for my editors!) I want to write novels where point of view and character identification is strong. I love experiencing England through Adam Dagliesh’s eyes. (P.D. James)

I want to write novels where the reader knows where they are in the world, and are able through my writing to either emotionally like or dislike that location. For me, to be with Hamish McBeth as he tries to live out his life in the Scottish Highlands is wonderful! (M.C. Beaton (Marion Chesney))

I want to write novels where ordinary people (with quirks and interesting professions of course, love The Pot Thief, Hubert “Hubie” Schuze) are presented with extraordinary circumstances or events. For sure, one of those events I’m writing about must be a murder! But besides the murder mystery aspect, how my characters handle what’s happening to them, hopefully pulls the readers in—makes them care—even after the book is closed.

I want to write mystery plots that are tricky, interesting, and plausible. I want the reader to be guessing until the denouement, and then turn out wrong, but saying, “I should have known!” because the clues were there—just a matter of how you fit them together.

That’s what happens when you grow up reading Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters), Colin Dexter, Arthur Conan Doyle—the list goes on…

Finally, and this is a repeat from my visit with Jackie King, my most cherished hoped for goal is that when readers close one of my books, there’s a smile on their faces, and thoughts, questions, ideas beyond who the murderer was remain with them—at least for awhile.

Mike, thanks for letting me “spout off.” (hmmm, should that period be outside or inside the quote mark?) Think I’ll go read a good book…

Madeline (M.M.) Gornell has three published mystery novels—PSWA awarding winning Uncle Si’s Secret (2008), Death of a Perfect Man (2009), and her latest release, Reticence of Ravens (2010)—her first Route 66 mystery. Reticence of Ravens is a 2011 Eric Hoffer Fiction finalist and Honorary Mention winner, the da Vinci Eye finalist, and a Montaigne Medalist finalist.

She continues to be inspired by historic Route 66, and has recently completed Lies of Convenience, which hopefully will have a 2011 winter release date. It is a tale that fictionally connects murder, truths untold, and Chicago’s Lake Michigan with California’s high desert on the opposite end of The Mother Road. Madeline is also a potter with a fondness for stoneware and reduction firing. She lives with her husband and assorted canines in the Mojave in a town on internationally revered Route 66.

Madeline’s books are available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and Smashwords, in paper and e-book formats. You can visit her online at her website http://www.mmgornell.com, or her BLOG http://www.mmgornell.wordpress.com, or email her directly at mmgornell@earthlink.net

Buy link for Reticence of Ravens:

http://www.amazon.com/Reticence-Ravens-M-Gornell/dp/1608300390/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314747098&sr=8-1

A Visit from Author Tim Hallinan

2011-11-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

Tim is a great writer and a great guy. I think you'll enjoy his post. And I know you'll enjoy his books.

THE TROUBLE WITH SCENERY

As I write this, I'm on my last day in St. Louis, where I've been attending Bouchercon, perhaps the biggest mystery fan event in the world. As always, when one writes books that have an “exotic” location—mine is Bangkok—I was on a panel about “setting,” along with some wonderful writers with whom I share a sort of murder-as-geography website, Murder is Everywhere.

And, as always when talking about setting, the panel discussion drifted to scenery, which I believe some people confuse with setting. And the perpetual question emerged: How much scenery is enough? How much is too much?

I'll talk about the difference between setting and scenery at the end, but in the meantime, here's what I think about scenery itself, from a writer's viewpoint.

Scenery is nice. We travel to get to it. Trains go through it and planes fly over it. When we take a journey, we want to “see the sights.” We stop and take pictures of the best scenery and then we never look at them again, unless we want to use them as a slide show to torment our friends.

A few scenic details in a novel can help to establish a setting. More than that is usually dead weight. For one thing, additional scenic detail increases the chance the writer will make a mistake and receive the dreaded “There's no billboard at the corner of Fifth and Main” e-mail. For another, additional scenery doesn't move the story forward. When the sunset, however magnificent, bleeds into a second paragraph, I begin to think that the writer is treading water, trying to figure out where he or she wants to go.

Beyond what's necessary to reinforce the sense of place or tell the reader where we are, I think most scenery is dead weight, unless it somehow reflects the characters and tells us something about them. Here are two ways to handle scenery in a brief scene featuring a character named Dolores. (Spoiler alert: Do not expect this writing to be any good.)

First way to handle scenery: Riding uptown on the leather seat of the Lincoln town car, Dolores passed Tiffany and Prada and the toy emporium of FAO Schwartz.

Modestly interesting for shopaholics, I suppose, but it would be a lot more interesting to the rest of us if it had something to do with Dolores. For example . . .

Second way to handle scenery: Riding uptown in the Lincoln town car, Dolores allowed the smooth leather of the seat to calm her. She checked her fingernails as the car passed the glittering art deco spire of the Chrysler building but sat forward as Tiffany, Prada, and FAO Schwartz slid by.

We've now seen the scenery and we know that Dolores is upset about something, and that she's more interested in brand names than she is in great architecture. This isn't just Fifth Avenue, it's Dolores's Fifth Avenue, and that makes all the difference.

To put it broadly, scenery is an inert element unless it somehow reflects our characters' lives, tells us something about them, or is an actual element in the story. I would argue, in fact, that what we usually mean by “setting” is the relationship between the character and the scenery.

Back when I was teaching writing, I used to give my students this assignment. Write the following scenery in two ways: Two o'clock on a hot summer day at the beach, no wind, little heat-ripples above the road's surface, the sky and the water blue.

They were to write it, first, as it would be seen by someone whose longtime sweetheart has finally agreed to get married, and second, as it would be seen by someone who had just been told he has less than a year to live. In other words, same scenery, but a radically different setting.

One of the nice things about seeing it this way is that we can write more of the setting, if we'd like to, because we're actually telling the reader about our characters.

And characters, as I'm sure Mike would agree, are the only thing we really ever write about.

Biography:

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of the traditionally-published Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers (most recently THE QUEEN OF PATPONG), and the Junior Bender mysteries, which are ebook originals. The newest Junior book is LITTLE ELVISES. Earlier this year, Hallinan conceived and edited a volume of original short stories by twenty first-rate mystery writers, SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN, which is available for the Kindle at $3.99, with every penny of the price going to the 2011 Japan Relief Fund. (Please buy it.) He lives in Santa Monica and Southeast Asia, and he is lucky enough to be married to Munyin Choy. His website is www.timothyhallinan.com.

A Visit from Author Jackie King

2011-11-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

Today's guest is Jackie King, a writer with a great sense of humor.

Hello Mike and Readers,

It’s the 3^rd day of our exciting “Christmas Mystery Blog Tour” and I hope you’re all leaving comments to put you on the list for the 44 books that will be given away either during or after this cyber tour. Let’s take a brief respite from the hustle and bustle of the season and chat for a few minutes. There might even be a book (or two) by one of our Blog-Swap authors that would be a perfect gift for a favorite aunt, or even for you. (I always buy myself at least one Christmas present.)

Note: Read to the end of this blog where I tell how to sign up for a drawing to win a free book.*

Okay, commercial over and back to fun stuff. Mike said I could write about anything I wanted as long as it was rated PG, so here goes:

Writers Are a Different Breed of Cat

I never could color inside the lines, not even in kindergarten. Back then (in the dark ages) coloring within the lines was considered a status symbol by the mothers of my classmates. My mother thought my coloring was fine. She’d acquired a free spirit during her flapper days. (But that’s another story.) Therefore other people’s disapproval of my artistic skills confused me rather than scarred me. My older siblings however, delighted in taunting me about my coloring ineptitude. For that reason I tried to do better, but with little success.

As a teenager ‘coloring inside of the lines’ was still a problem for me. Teens have their own peculiar rules for ‘coloring inside the lines.’ Parents called this code of behavior rebellion, and I wasn’t very good at that, either. But I tried. (Oh the anguish of never quite fitting in.) I briefly experimented with smoking and tried drinking whatever booze my friends could steal from their parent’s cabinets. (Again, back then in the small town where I lived, no one had yet heard of pot.) Luckily enough, I never developed much interest in either vice.

Neither could I ‘color inside the lines’ as a young wife and mother. (And God help me. I did try.) Couldn’t stay slim enough to please my husband. Couldn’t keep the house tidy enough to suit him. (I still tend to organize my writing with ‘piles’ instead of ‘files.’) And I was a complete bust at Tupperware parties. I must have been the only woman in my neighborhood that could have cared less when that company designed a special lettuce holder and later on a green cheese grater/container.

When I was close to 50, my disappointed husband walked out the door of our house for good, leaving me shocked and devastated. Little did I realize that even though 70% of the family income left with him, he’d done me a great favor. I asked myself what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I knew that it wasn’t my day job of bean counting. Now, I would have time to pursue my long ago dream of writing stories.

And guess what? After a few years of hanging around with other writers, I learned that most of these folks couldn’t color within the lines any better than I could. Or maybe they just didn’t want to. I also learned that stories had been floating around in my head for years, only I didn’t recognize them as such. (That daydreaming stuff that I kept getting into trouble for at school was now paying off.) I also learned that all of the negative feelings that life tossed my way could be grist for my writer’s mill: grief, frustration, anger, as well as the good stuff, joy, pleasure and excitement.

Most important, in the process of getting acquainted with myself at middle age, I learned that my writing sometimes turned out to be funny.

When I wrote my first mystery (still unpublished as many first novels tend to be) I had a great time murdering my ex-husband. When I wrote my first novella FLIRTING AT FIFTY, published in the anthology CHIK~LIT FOR FOXY HENS, I talked about my divorce and made tongue-in-cheek fun of my ex. Everything in that story is absolutely true except for the romance. The writing was very cathartic.

In my cozy mystery THE INCONVENIENT CORPSE I write about the inner strength that women find somewhere deep inside themselves during hard times. This characteristic is woven into my mystery as the clues unfold.

And somewhere along the way I’ve learned not to worry about coloring inside the lines.

Another thanks to Mike and to everyone reading this article. I know that we live in a rushed world, and I really appreciate your time with me.

Cyber hugs all around,

Jackie

*Leave a comment and you’ll get your name into a drawing for a signed copy of THE INCONVENIENT CORPSE or a signed copy of THE FOXY HENS AND MURDER MOST FOWL!

Website: www.jacqking.com

Email: jackie@jacqking.com

Blogsite: Cozy Mysteries and Other Madness:

http://bnbmysteries.blogspot.com

THE INCONVENENT CORPSE is on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as available through all bookstores. Paper tradeback: $15.95. Kindle $2.99 http://amzn.to/gMv7CH

Nook $2.99 http://bit.ly/fovbLR

I’d love to have readers ‘friend’ me on Facebook where I’m listed as Jacqueline King

Bio

Jackie King loves books, words, and writing tall tales. She especially enjoys murdering the people she dislikes on paper. King is a full time writer who sometimes teaches writing at Tulsa Community College. Her latest novel, THE INCONVENIENT CORPSE is a traditional mystery. King has also written five novellas as co-author of the Foxy Hens Series. Warm Love on Cold Streets is her latest novella and is included in the anthology THE FOXY HENS MEET A ROMANTIC ADVENTURER. Her only nonfiction book is DEVOTED TO COOKING. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, Oklahoma Writers Federation, and Tulsa Night Writers.

A Visit from Author Jean Henry Mead

2011-11-26T08:33:00.000-08:00

Writing in Solitude

Now that I’m living on a mountaintop, I can call myself a solitary writer. Compared to my former life in Los Angeles, it’s like living on another planet, which I enjoy immensely.

Gregg Lavoy wrote in his book, This Business of Writing, that “solitude gives us our best connection to the world, since writing is the way we connect, and writing for most writers only happens in solitude. It is, in fact, the fountainhead of a writer’s creativity, the silence out of which the art is born.” Or as the poet Rainer Rilke once said, “Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.”

I wonder how that applies to those of us who write on the train while commuting to work or on a plane during an intercontinental flight. It doesn’t apply to news reporters who write to daily deadlines before the paper is put to bed. I can testify to that. I’ve always felt that journalists can write in the midst of a traffic jam, but how much would their work improve without newsroom chaos.

Andrew Storr wrote in his book, Solitude, “that for creative people their significant moments are those in which they attain some new insight, or make some new discovery, and those moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which they are alone.”

Some writers have created books while in prison. Sir Walter Raleigh, for example, penned his book, The History of the World, while imprisoned for twelve years in the Tower of London. But too much solitude can result in a disconnect with society at large. Writers need feedback and that doesn’t happen until someone reads their work, whether or not it’s published.

If a fledgling is unable to gain feedback from friends or family, Lavoy suggests they provide it themselves by placing the manuscript in a drawer for a week before reading it as though someone else had written it. “When you come back to it, with renewed objectivity, you can see where it leaks.” Good advice although I feel a month is even better.

The lonely writer has benefited greatly since the birth of the Internet although too many writers’ forums, blog sites and social networking can cut deeply into one’s writing time. Communication with other people who speak our language is important, if carefully scheduled.

An old Hebrew proverb says that God created people because He loves stories. He may even have created support groups because these stories can’t be told to just anyone. Support groups are comprised of people who can empathize and “swap juices” as Mark Twain once said. But, as Lavoy warns, “Make sure it’s your own work that emerges and not a group effort."

We've been snowed in here in the Laramie Mountains with an accumulation of two feet on the level, if you can find a flat area, and up to six feet of snowdrifts surrounding the house. I now know what novelist Loren Estleman meant when he said that he did his best writing when the snow was deepest around his old Michigan farmhouse. There are few distractions and solitude in nearly its purest form.

Bio:

Jean Henry Mead is the author of 15 books, half of them novels. She’s also an award-winning photojournalist and recent children’s author. Her Hamilton Kids’ series includes Mystery of Spider Mountain and Ghost of Crimson Dawn. Her Logan & Cafferty mystery/suspense series includes A Village Shattered, Diary of Murder and Murder on the Interstate. A number of her blog interviews from Mysterious Writers have also been published by Poisoned Pen Press.

website is: www.jeanhenrymead

buy link is http://tinyurl.com/cblb74e

A Visit from Author Marilyn Meredith

2011-11-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

It seems appropriate that the first ever visitor on my blog and the the first of Murder We Write Blog Tour is one of my favorite writers. Thanks for stopping by, Marilyn.

When Your Book First Comes Out

I’m not going to write about the promotion things you have been doing or are planning when your book first comes out. I want to share how I feel when I actually have the book in my hands.

With this latest book, Bears With Us, the publisher (Mundania Press) informed me that the publishing date was August 16. I knew from previous experience that didn’t mean I’d have actual possession of the books by then. First, under coming books, the cover, which I love, appeared on the publisher’s website. On the promised date, the cover was moved to new releases and had its own page too with all the ordering information. I quickly ordered 50 copies at my author’s discount.

The next thing I did was ask the publisher for an UPS tracking number. It took a few days to receive that and when I did I could see when the books had actually left the printer and stared on the journey. In the next couple of days I saw the expected arrival date was Thursday, September 1. And that’s exactly when they came.

Hubby opened the boxes for me and there it was, this beautiful book with the Indian symbol of the bear on the cover. It looked great. I heaved a sigh of relief. The books were here! Now I could start doing all the things I planned like sending them out for review.

Then the thought struck me, what if no one likes the book? Finding reviewers isn’t easy—but waiting for the reviews is downright scary.

I’m not a novice when it comes to waiting for book reviews—after all, I’ve had over thirty books published and they’ve all been reviewed, but it isn’t getting any easier.

There’s always these scary thoughts—“Maybe I missed the boat on this one.” “Maybe people are getting tired of Tempe.” “Maybe no one will like it.” “Maybe I’ve lost my touch.” And so on. You get the idea. Are authors ever completely secure about their work?

What I’ve always felt is that when I’m writing a story I want to see how it turns out—and I hope the reader will feel the same when he or she reads it. I keep writing about my Native American heroine, Deputy Tempe Crabtree, because she seems like a real person to me and I want to know what’s going to happen to her next. And I hope there are others out there who feel the same way.

Deputy Tempe Crabtree has her hands full when bears turn up in and around Bear Creek, a young teen commits suicide and his parents’ actions are suspicious, a prominent woman files a complaint against Tempe and her preacher husband Hutch, a love affair from long ago comes to light, and a woman suffering from dementia disappears.

You can get this book directly from the publisher as an e-book or trade paperback:

http://mundania.com/book.php?title=Bears+With+Us/

Or you can go to http://www.amazon.com/Bears-With-Us-ebook/dp/B005I56ZYM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314979431&sr=1-1/ for the Kindle version

Trade paperback http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Bears+With+Us+by+Marilyn+Meredith&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3ABears+With+Us+by+Marilyn+Meredith&ajr=0/

And other places.

So tell me, any of the rest of you feel nervous about how your book will be received by the reader and/or reviewer?

Marilyn

Bio: Marilyn Meredith is the author of over thirty published novels, including the award winning Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series, the latest Bears With Us from Mundania Press. Writing as F. M. Meredith, her latest Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novel is Angel Lost, the third from Oak Tree Press. Marilyn is a member of EPIC, Four chapters of Sisters in Crime, including the Central Coast chapter, Mystery Writers of America, and on the board of the Public Safety Writers of America. She loves to make appearances at libraries, book and craft fairs, as well as giving presentations to writers groups and conferences.

Visit her at http://fictionforyou.com and her blog at http://marilymeredith.blogspot.com/

2011-11-07T08:30:00.001-08:00

Blog Activity

2011-09-02T18:55:00.000-07:00

The last two posts to this blog have been explanations of the long gaps between posts. Starting in November, however, this will become a beehive of blogging, an appropriate metaphor for me considering the time I have spent in Utah.

I am excited to be hosting some of my favorite authors listed on the following schedule:

Nov. 25 – Marilyn Meredith

Nov. 26 – Jean Henry Mead

Nov. 27 – Jackie King

Nov. 28 – Timothy Hallinan

Nov. 29 – M. M. Gornell

Nov. 30 – Wendy Gager

Dec. 1 – Alice Duncan

Dec. 2 – John M. Daniel

Dec. 3 – Pat Browning

Dec. 4 – Ron Benrey

Dec. 5 – Beth Anderson

Dec. 6 – Anne K. Albert

Dec. 7 – Earl Staggs

Dec. 8 – Jinx Schwartz

On December 9^th there will be a recap by the last author standing.

But the Pot Thief blog will not be inactive between now and November 25. So check back and leave comments so that I know you are out there.

Hiatus Redux

2011-08-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

Another six-month hiatus. Maybe I’m just not cut out for blogging.

What has happened in my book life in the interim?

The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein won the Lefty at Left Coast Crime. Winning a major national award was the high-point of my writing career. Hearing my name called, walking up to the podium to thunderous applause, and giving an off-the-cuff and well-received acceptance speech were my fifteen minutes of fame. The afterglow lasted a few weeks. I admit I enjoyed the invitations to speak and do signings, the congratulatory emails and phone calls, and seeing my name bandied about on the Internet. But I was not saddened when the clamor died down. I enjoyed settling back into ordinary daily living. I went to New York to babysit while my daughter faced her dissertation defense. I helped her and my son-in-law find a house here in Valdosta. He is a new assistant professor of history here, and having them and my grandson end up living a mile away from us is an unlikely but welcome coincidence.

Perhaps inspired by the house hunting, I decided to remodel our hall bathroom. I ripped out the contractor-grade fiberglass tub/shower and decided to install a walk-in shower with Italian ceramic tile, a bench and frameless glass doors. This two-week project is now in its fourth month.

I excused my lack of writing with the excuse of being busy. But what could excuse the lack of urgency I felt about returning to my craft? That’s when I realized I had it. The Japanese call it ‘victory disease’, the tendency to slack off once a goal is accomplished, the enervating desire to enjoy the fruits of victory with no thought about the dedication that got you there.

One look at the long-dormant manuscript of The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence snapped me out of my lethargy. The thing needed work. I love editing even more than I love writing. So now the hall bathroom sits half-completed while I work on Pot Thief #5. My wife’s glances at me each time she passes the door to the hall bath tell me this is about to change. But Lawrence is now in the hands of my alpha readers. I’m ready to strap on the tools of ignorance – a trowel and a spirit level – and return to my tiling work. And this time, I intend to keep at it. After all, The Pot Thief Who Studied Lew Wallace beckons.

Hiatus

2011-02-01T21:08:00.001-08:00

After blogging every day last summer about my book signing tour, I took a break for a few days after returning home. Dozens of stops, months on the road, and ten thousand miles on the car. I was exhausted and rejuvenated at the same time. The break of a few days from blogging turned into six months. My last post was about being nominated for the New Mexico Book of the Year Award. So allow me to update. Since that blog on September 18 of last year:

I won the New Mexico Book of the Year Award (The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras in the mystery category).

The third pot thief book was released (The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein).

The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy was selected as a finalist for the "Eppie" (eBook award).

The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein was selected as a finalist for the Lefty (best humorous mystery of the year).

The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier (#4 in the series) is out in ARCs.

My grandson celebrated his first birthday. Actually, we celebrated. He had no idea it was his birthday, but he did cover his face with birthday cake icing.

I've been a busy boy.

Pythagoras a finalist

2010-09-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to let you all know that it was announced today that The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras is a finalist for the New Mexico Book of the Year Award in two categories, Mystery and First Book Published by the Author. Even if I don't win, it gives me an excuse for another trip to the Land of Enchantment for the awards ceremony in November.

Mike Orenduff

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Days 43-44

2010-06-29T19:23:00.000-07:00

The next-to-last signing was at Bookworks in Albuquerque, a great independent bookstore in the North Valley next to a Flying Star Café, a popular chain in the Duke City. I showed up early to check in and told the staff I’d be next door eating dinner and would be back by the start of the 7 PM event.

Halfway through my meal, a lady approached me hesitantly and thrust out a copy of one of my books. “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt your meal,” she said, “but the people next door told me you were here. Would you sign this copy of your book I just bought?”

Of course I did so and thanked her for buying it. The people at nearby tables heard this exchange, and I think a few of them showed up at the event. This is the sort of personal touch you get only at Indie stores.

The final event was at Tome on the Range in Las Vegas (the one in New Mexico), another Indie store in the home of New Mexico Highlands University. The manager, Michael, introduced me, and it was obvious from his description of my books that he had read them. I did a talk and a reading. Then there were cookies made by a woman from El Salvador whose baked goods have made her an important part of the community.

We spent the next day in Carlsbad where we descended 750 feet below the surface of the earth to do the hour-and-a-half walk around the Big Room of Carlsbad Caverns. We had intended to stick around for the bat flight at sundown when the evening sky is darkened by the thousands of bats emerging to feed. No wonder there are no mosquitoes in Carlsbad. But I was tired after the walk and perhaps also feeling the effects of too many days on the road, so we made an early night of it.

Today I stopped in to say hello to Julie at Front Street Books in Alpine, Texas because she had ordered some books a couple of weeks ago during the tour, and I wanted to say thanks. Also, I like her and her store, and Alpine was a convenient stopover. To my surprise, she wanted more books, and I left the last ones I had with her on consignment. I guess that marks the true end of the Pot Thief Tour for 2010. I’ll post one more time – a summary of the whole thing - after I get home and have time to organize my thoughts.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Days 40-42

2010-06-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

We left Los Wages, Nevada on Sunday with nothing to do until Thursday. As tourists, we enjoyed the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. Or maybe it was the painted forest and the petrified desert. Either way, it looked like the surface of one of the moons of Jupiter.

Then we went to Zuni, New Mexico which looked like the wrong side of the tracks on one of the moons of Jupiter. I’m not wise enough to know what our national policy should be regarding Native Americans, but I do know that the current policy is not working. The U.S. joined the rest of the world in condemning South Africa for their proposal to establish “homelands” for their indigenous people. But that is exactly what our reservations are. This is too big an issue for a short blog on my Pot Thief tour, but I think we need to rethink the reservation system

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Days 36-39

2010-06-21T20:59:00.000-07:00

We spent four days in Las Vegas, Nevada for the annual Public Safety Writers Association Conference. It was great fun because we knew most of the attendees from last year. I was on a panel dealing with promoting books despite the fact that I know little about the topic. That is part of the charm of the conference - beginners and pros share the stage. On my panel, Marilyn Meredith and Sunny Frazier were the pros.

We had a big-time writer as the keynote speaker. Simon Wood told us how to create suspense. I try to avoid suspense, so I didn’t find his talk useful. I did find it interesting, however. He is a bright and engaging guy.

If I were to rate the conference as a novel, I would say it was thin on plot, had a good setting, and great characters.

My favorite presentation was by Professor Lai Orenduff who talked about understanding visual images and how that applies to book covers. I confess to some bias, but the presentation was riveting.

The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy won first prize in Fiction Book category of the PSWA annual writing contest.

I managed not to lose a cent in the casino by using the foolproof method of not playing.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Days 34-35

2010-06-19T16:54:00.001-07:00

It took two days to drive from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, and the thing I noticed most was how much Arizona differs from New Mexico. They were one territory in the late nineteenth century, and they are both largely desert punctuated by mountain ranges with pine, spruce, aspen, and cool air. But when you cross the border just west of Gallup, the mesquite and juniper disappear. Only chamisa and sage remain, resulting in a prairie-like vista. Signs of human habitation are rare. In New Mexico, Interstate 40 passes through half a dozen Indian reservations, each dotted with small villages, a scattering of isolated houses in the countryside, and – unfortunately – several casinos along the way.

The Navajo Nation starts in New Mexico, but most of it is in Arizona, and it is huge. The Navajos have no casinos and their major population areas are not along I40. At one point west of Winslow, we could see a hundred miles in every direction and there was not a single man-made structure in sight.

When you leave the high desert and climb to Flagstaff, you enter a distinctly western town with wide streets, cowboys, and lumberjacks. There are Hispanic residents of course, but the city lacks the Hispanic flavor so obvious in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Still, it has a charm all its own, and the historic downtown remains a thriving center.

As you continue west, the drop from Flagstaff is precipitous. Runaway truck ramps are frequent, and we understood why when we saw a truck with smoking brake using low gear to try and make it down the mountain in one piece. The drop continues until you reach the Colorado River, only three hundred feet above sea level. We chose to cross at Bullhead City. Having spent three hours crossing Hover dam last year, we didn’t want to risk it again while the construction of a new road there continues.

Across from Bullhead City on the Nevada side sits Laughlin, a miniature Las Vegas with gleaming high-rise casino/hotels, their air conditioning, glitter and gaming machines powered by the electricity generated by the river they face. Two hundred miles downstream, the river shrivels to a saline trickle, robbing Mexico of the drinking water and agriculture the river once provided them.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 33

2010-06-16T06:45:00.001-07:00

Today we had a swat team in the motel with their pistols drawn yelling for people to get down on the ground and put their hands behind their backs. Maybe I need to rethink saving money by staying in cheap motels.

We leave today for Las Vegas, the one in Nevada, not the real town by the same name that is in New Mexico. I look forward to the drive across Arizona. My cell phone will be off, and I’ll try to avoid Interstate Highways.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 32

2010-06-16T06:41:00.001-07:00

The four-days, four-different-towns, four events blitz is over, so I had a chance to relax and get ready for my ride on the New Mexico Bookmobile. New Mexico is the only state that sponsors a rural bookmobile, three of them actually, that go to remote villages with no libraries. A reporter and photographer from New Mexico Magazine were supposed to ride along and do a feature story on me and my books which are in the bookmobile collection. If you noticed the subjunctive construction in that last sentence, then you have perhaps correctly inferred that the trip was cancelled. The bookmobile I was supposed to ride in blew its radiator, and there was no open date on my tour to re-schedule. NM Magazine reaches about a hundred thousand readers, so this is a major loss in terms of publicity. I though about getting one of those magnetic signs to stick on my car door, but Lai vetoed it on the grounds of good taste.

Mike Orenduff

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 31

2010-06-15T12:45:00.001-07:00

The final event of the four-days, four-different-towns, four events blitz, was at one of my favorite stops, The Black Cat Bookstore in Truth or Consequences. Who wouldn’t like a bookstore by that name in a town with that name? Rhonda runs the used bookstore at the north end of the historic downtown, serving coffee and pastries and hosting events like the poetry reading I attended and participated in. No, I’m not a poet, but they wanted me to read from one of my books. I saw a lot of faces from last year. When one man I recognized from last year said he wanted to buy the second book because he’d enjoyed the first, I asked him if he wanted me to sign it. He said he did, and I said, “John, right?” He almost fainted. What he didn’t know is that I had overheard Rhonda greet him when he came into the shop.

Mike Orenduff (putting my name here because Marilyn Meredith reminded me that the automatically added names are too small to read)

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 30

2010-06-15T12:33:00.001-07:00

The third event on the four-days, four-different-towns, four events blitz, was at Books, Etc. in Ruidoso, a great little bookstore on the main street of this tourist mecca. They even have a store cat, Samantha, who sat on my table and helped me sell books. I was also interviewed by Blog Interviewer today because my daily blogs on the Pot Thief Tour caught their attention. You can read the interview at: http://bloginterviewer.com/books/the-pot-thief-mike-orenduff

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 29

2010-06-12T18:40:00.001-07:00

Today was the second event in a four-days, four-different-towns, four events blitz, the second one of this year’s tour. On Thursday I gave a talk to the Book Club at the Mission Del Paso Campus of El Paso Community College. Today I was at Imaginary Books in Cloudcroft. Despite the name, the books there are real. Cloudcroft is 9,000 feet above sea level. Climbing the steps to the second floor bookstore winded me. In addition to the book signing, I did a talk for Boy Scouts working on their reading merit badges. I’m way to old to do this many event back-to-back, but I enjoyed them too much to stop.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 28

2010-06-11T11:33:00.001-07:00

I gave a talk to the Book Club at the Mission Del Paso Campus of El Paso Community College yesterday. EPCC has campuses all over El Paso County, and Mission Del Paso is the newest one, located in the growing town of Socorro. They had selected The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy as their book last month and were full of questions about it. After they realized the questions had gone on for two hours, they apologized, pointing out that their next book is Anna Karenina, and they won’t have anyone to answer questions about it. The most famous quote from Tolstoy’s work is probably the first sentence: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Another one I like is, “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”

Someone from the IT department had set up a PowerPoint presentation that ran automatically on a projection screen in the in the background. It had pictures from my website, of the books, and of some of the locations mentioned in the books. At one point I was asked where I was going next, and before I could remember, the screen had my next three events listed on it!

The Campus Dean, Santiago Rodriquez, and Lesley Pullen, the Librarian who heads the book club, were great hosts, providing all the attendees with a Chinese food lunch of hot and sour soup, roasted chicken, noodles, and an eggplant and basil stir-fry to die for. Even Lai liked it, and she usually hates Chinese food from restaurants.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 27

2010-06-09T19:22:00.000-07:00

I discovered an indie bookstore today called The Bookery. It’s in Socorro on the El Paso Mission Trail and housed in the Casa Ortiz, an old adobe that has an historical marker explaining that the building is perhaps 400 years old and was occupied by the Ortiz family all the way up until 1947. The Bookery carries only books with an El Paso or Southwestern theme and educational books for children. The owner, Margaret Barber, is a feisty woman in her seventies who thinks the public schools are failing, and she has made it her mission to turn them around. She’s enlisted the help of teachers and staff who believe in her cause, and I think she is making a difference. Many classes come to her store on field trips. They see puppet shows, hear readings, and get to spend time with books and educational toys. Margaret does well by doing good, selling supplies and books to the schools. The rest of her stock – books on El Paso and the Southwest – are a hobby because there aren’t many readers in the Lower Valley. Still, she bought six of my books, and I like having them on those dusty, ramshackle shelves above which you can see the handmade clay roof tiles resting on cedras that were hewn four centuries ago.

Pot Thief Tour 2010 - Day 26

2010-06-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

One of the most oft-quoted phrases in the English language is “You can’t go home again,” the title of a book by Thomas Wolfe. The protagonist is George Webber, who is basking in the success of a novel about his hometown until he returns home to discover that his family and friends are outraged by the way he has portrayed them to the world. What a lot of people forget about that book is that Webber does in fact eventually go home after initially fleeing his home town and even his country to search for his own identity.

Of course the home he returns to is different because he is different, so I have always seen the phrase as merely a restatement of the aphorism of Heraclitus that “You can't step twice into the same river.” It isn’t that you can’t return your foot to the water, it’s that in the time it takes you to do so, the river has changed, new waters have flowed in.

A torrent of new water has flowed into El Paso since I left in the sixties. It’s an inapt metaphor, of course, because El Paso is in the desert. Indeed, one of its prime challenges is supplying water to the nearly one million people who now live here.

I loved growing up here. The barren rock mountain that looms over the city seemed like the center of existence from which everything else spread out. The Rio Grande snaked along the mountain’s foot, dividing two countries. From the aptly named Scenic Drive, you could see a hundred miles into Mexico. Further west than Denver, slightly south of the Trinity Site, and the largest bilingual border town in the world, El Paso seemed to me a special place. Perhaps all children see their home towns as unique. Perhaps they all are.

I can’t go home to El Paso for the same reason that Heraclitus could not step twice into the same river. Too much that is new has flowed in. Too much that was familiar has flowed away.