LET ME SHOW YOU MY COLLECTION

by James Lincoln Warren

When I was in college (lo these many, many years ago), my girlfriend took me to a cocktail party hosted by her dance teacher. It was a new experience for me, attending an adult cocktail party as a guest (my previous attendance at like celebrations had been confined to serving wine), and I did my best to be charming and engaging and deft at the sort of small talk required by such affairs. Rather predictably, I asked a man I had just met what business he was in. It turned out that he was in the commercial recycling (i.e., dumpster) line—no, he wasn’t anything like a gangster. He was a modest bald-headed businessman, frankly rather on the dull side, who was there because he was a patron of the arts. To be polite, I said something along the lines of how his business was one that looked forward to the future, thus expressing a sense of interest in the trash collection business I didn’t really feel.

Big mistake.

Sensing an opportunity to engage on a subject that was clearly a passion, he skewered me to the wall and held me captive for a quarter of an hour while he rhapsodically shared every detail of his fascinating life as a high-end garbage man with me. I was eventually and most mercifully rescued by my girlfriend, who snagged me away to meet the hostess (whom I had already met, but the garbage man didn’t know that) and then spent the rest of the evening avoiding my new acquaintance.

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as Too Much Information.

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a manuscript with a request that I look it over to make suggestions for its improvement. One of the things he is most concerned about is whether he is inserting too much extraneous information on the non-mystery related subject that forms the background for the work, a subject on which he is an acknowledged expert. He’s afraid that he will bore the reader, like the garbage collector at the party. He told me he had already surgically removed vast amounts of expertise that didn’t relate directly to his plot, but still thought maybe he was overdoing it. He knows there is a natural but delusional sentiment on most people’s parts to assume that any sensitive and intelligent person must feel the same gravitational pull of a topic for which one harbors an abiding passion oneself.

I’ve written before about falling so in love with one’s research that one fails to realize when it’s become a vice rather than a virtue, comparing research to underwear. Authorial aside: Here on CB, Rob has also mentioned the excruciating experience of being compelled to listen to the interminable rants of experts from whom one has sought the answer to a straightforward question, which for some reason I can’t find. To show how easily falling into this particular seductive trap is, I confess that not too long ago I subjected him to such a blast myself, when he asked me a very simple question about the Navy which I answered with a multipartite treatise, the vast majority of which was completely irrelevant to his purpose. No, I tell a lie. All of it was completely irrelevant to his purpose except for the short answer to his very simple question. Oops.

But sliding back to the case at hand, the Gentle Reader will be pleased to learn that the friend who sent me his story needn’t worry about overdoing it, because the expertise imbuing his manuscript consistently relates to his story, either by limning his characters or by contributing to the plot, all the while providing a lot of very interesting and novel insights that will entertain as well as educate. Even so, his concern is well placed. I’ve always said that the main thing I want a reader to feel after he’s finished a story under my byline is that he didn’t waste his time reading it. That implies that I’ve made some sort of contribution, however slight, to the reader’s life.

That contribution may be as simple as giving the reader a break from reality. But deep in every writer’s marrow, what we really want to do is enrich the reader in some way, of making an impact that lasts beyond the time it took to read the work. Providing a little education is an excellent way to do this, because it plays on something every reader of mystery fiction (and most other fiction) craves: a sense of discovery.

The example of doing this right that I most often point out is Dorothy L. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise (1933). Wimsey is at his most charming, even to the point of dressing up as a mysterious Harlequin and posing as his own (invented) cousin, but the thing that really makes the story work is the look under the hood at an advertising agency in the early 1930s. Sayers herself was an ad copywriter from 1922 until 1931 (she’s been credited with coining the phrase, “It pays to advertise”), and so her bona fides in taking on the subject is nonpareil. In fact, without the ad agency setting, the story would collapse—the central crime is a baroque and wholly incredible drug-smuggling conspiracy. The usual elements associated with Lord Peter’s investigations are all there in evidence to give the reader what is expected: his faculty in code-breaking, his deceptive upper-class idiocy, his partnership with reliable old Parker-bird. But it is the setting that really lifts the story from the mundane, the wholly novel portrait of the private workings of public relations. I might mention that Sayers repeated the formula with her masterpiece, Gaudy Night, replacing the advertising game with the (in those days) isolated halls of female academia, another world which Sayers knew intimately.

In neither case did she provide more than the reader could swallow. So it is with my friend’s story.

And there’s a good lesson there to anybody who writes a story based on personal experience. It isn’t enough to display facts; one must show how those facts breathe life into the characters and convey direction to the story.

As long as it isn’t about collecting garbage.

CRIMINAL ELEMENT

by Leigh Lundin

When Terrie Moran introduced readers to Criminal Element some weeks back, I harbored the suspicion secret dark depths lay beneath the surface of this felonious theme park. Thus I asked our good friend Terrie to give CB readers a crime-ridden tour, treading the dark alleyways, sidestepping the blood and slime, and giving us a peek into this villainous world. Please take small children by the hand…

Criminal Element Grand Tour

by Terrie Farley Moran

Thank you, Leigh, for inviting me to talk about Criminal Element (http://www.criminalelement.com/), a publisher-neutral site with lots of great material written by crime/mystery fans especially for crime/mystery fans. So now we have a place for fans to gather, share news and information, banter with other fans or roam the links and investigate on their own. There is no limit to subgenre, era, or medium. Criminal Element covers dark noir to light, comedic cozies and everything in between. It’s boiled to your taste.

In a recent email exchange, Leigh mentioned that although he spends time at Criminal Element, he feels that he may only be scratching the surface of what is available to site users. Naturally, I volunteered to do a guided tour and I invite you all to come along.

I must admit that at first glance, I, too, wondered how I’d ever find anything. After a very few visits, I became extremely comfortable flitting from page to page. I recommend that you register for a log in the first time you visit. (The LOGIN is on the extreme right of the yellow crime scene tape that spans the top of every page.) It makes life much simpler when you want to read exclusive excerpts or make a comment. Believe me, you will want to comment– it’s the nature of the site. I’ve been registered since the end of April and I can attest there is no “borrowing” your email addy to hawk anyone’s wares. Every week, I get a very short newsletter with the most recent highlights. If I haven’t had a chance to scan the site recently, the newsletter keeps me “in the know.”

Perp Walk

Of course, the extreme left of the crime scene tape will always take you HOME. Next to HOME is the STORIES menu, a wonderful lead-in to plenty of fresh, new crime writing. Here you’ll find original shorts and nice, chunky excerpts from the latest in crime stories. When you click on the STORIES menu the newest entries are right up on top.

The FEATURES menu will open to the latest posts that are in any Featured collection, followed by a scroll of posts that fall in those specific categories. Clicking on the red sub-title of any feature area will get you to that feature’s home page with all of its relative content. As a few examples, The BOND HOTLINE is your connection to all things James Bond, SHERLOCKIANA explains itself, and WRITING THE WORLD welcomes you to international locales for both authors and crime stories. MORNING COFFEE, usually funny and always brief, is a great way to start your day. (And yes, I do pour my coffee before I open the site.) 

The easiest way to search by subgenre is to pull down the CATEGORIES menu from the yellow crime tape. There are sections for Detective/Procedural, Traditional/Cozy, Thriller/Noir, Historical/Western, and True Crime/Nonfiction. We may be talking about the unexpected turn of events in recent episodes of a popular television show, or the relevance of a mystery novel turned to film seventy years ago, or perhaps the popularity of the Phryne Fisher mystery series set in 1920s Australia. Take a look at Bill Crider’s post about Private Eyes and Westerns and you will see the crisp, clear connection between those subgenres.

Front Page News

The most exciting thing about Criminal Element is that the front page changes constantly, so anytime you need a break from the stress of your day, there is always something new to read.

The next crime tape link, the COMMUNITY menu, will show you who’s commenting and about which topics. Current conversations are listed by blog topic, blog author and last comment. The center-right side of every page has two columns Comments and Bloggers. Each column has ‘show all’ at the end of the list. You can click on any comment and it will bring you back to the original post with all comments, or you can click on a blogger’s name and read all the posts that have been published on Criminal Element by that blogger. 

Finally on the crime tape, you have the trusty RSS feed to which you can subscribe to have all the new posts delivered to your RSS reader as they happen.

You can also connect with the site on social media: Criminal Element on Facebook or on Twitter under CrimeHQ. Besides sharing links to the site’s new posts, some pretty terrific crime-community gadabouts you may already know– Laura K. Curtis, Jen Forbus, and Hilary Davidson– carry on conversations with crime fans and share lots more news from the mystery community at-large. Okay, so by now I’m sure you have thrown your hands in the air and screamed, “TMI, TMI. Make her stop.”

Criminal Fiction

So we’ll take a break from content while I tell the mystery writers among you that Criminal Element is a well-paying, open market actively seeking original short crime fiction in the 6,000 to 15,000 word range. Just scroll to the ABOUT section at the bottom of every page and click on SUBMISSIONS for full details. I understand that a huge pile of submissions arrived after launch, and so, new stories will soon be following behind the ones available by Steve Hamilton and Luis Alberto Urrea.

And if anyone is interested in blogging for cash on Criminal Element, you may wish to join the more than sixty bloggers, including readers, librarians, writers, historians, etc., all of whom gather ideas and data about everything the genre has to offer and package them into entertaining and informational posts with a point of view. Traditional reviews, author interviews, or “the writer’s life” posts don’t fit their needs, but Criminal Element is always looking for attention-grabbing content that can be critically substantial or trendy and sassy. If you think you would like to contribute blog posts, please email Clare Toohey (clare.toohey.contractor (at) macmillan.com). Clare is the Community Manager for Crime, and I’m sure she’d love to hear your ideas.

Before I go, I want to tell you that Criminal Element has had a couple of contests already, giving away books and audiobooks to lucky readers. Keep an eye peeled for the next giveaway. 

So, Leigh, I hope I have eased your confusion and made the site more familiar.

Finally, I’d like to say that Criminal Element lives up to its name and also to its subtitle: Murder Mystery Mayhem— boiled daily.

I’m giving up my Saturday slot today so we can include a guest column by my friend Fran Rizer, who joins Leigh and me in the current issue of the online magazine Pages of Stories. As you might already know, Fran is the South Carolina author of the delightful Callie Parrish mysteries, and (thank goodness) a frequent visitor to and commentor on Criminal Brief. Please join me in welcoming Fran!

—John Floyd

SPEAKING OF THREE

by Fran Rizer

When I was a young girl, my daddy told me, “Ladies don’t talk about three things—sex , politics and religion.” I figured if ladies don’t speak of such things, they don’t write about them either. So far I’ve managed to avoid those subjects in four mysteries, though an interviewer told me, “Writing about Callie’s underwear doesn’t seem to bother you.” My answer is the only thing that my daddy ever said to me about underwear was “You’ve gotta stop holding up your skirt to show off your ruffled panties.” I did quit that habit before I started to kindergarten, but the family nickname Fancy Pants lasted through third grade.

Daddy was full of advice and, my being an only child, most of it was directed to me. He was an avid reader who wrote text books published by the University of Texas in Austin, but he was also the biggest movie fan I’ve ever known. One of his favorite stars was Mae West, who certainly did NOT live up to his criteria for a lady’s conversation. Then again, with that accent, Mae wasn’t a southerner. Mae West is quoted as saying, “I’m a woman of few words, but lots of action.” With a fifth novel on the way (BTW, not a Callie), I like to think of myself as a woman of many words. As a Southern lady, I’ll say no more.

When I began writing, my father said, “If you look hard enough, you’ll find the right word.” Sometimes I do a lot of looking for just the right word. Last week, the e-mail inviting me to guest blog sent me looking for a word meaning three. No, ménage à trois definitely didn’t work! Triplets, triangle, tricycle, triad, tripod, and trio were just as far off. In Sunday’s CB, Leigh used tricoteuses, which was new to me.

Wikipedia offered trinity as in Holy Trinity—the Christians’ belief in God as three—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That wouldn’t do at all. I Googled trinity and came up with trinity of cuisine, which consists of chopped onion, bell pepper, and celery, usually in a ratio of 1:2:3. Good info, but I wasn’t writing a cook book.

I abandoned the Dell and turned to my big fat red Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a gift from David Smoak, proofreader extraordinaire for several major publishers. David swears this red book is THE FINAL WORD for writers. I tried trilogy. It wouldn’t work because I planned to write about three individual literary works, and trilogies have to be three closely related with a single theme. I checked triptych, but that specified three parts or sections of a whole. Just as I decided to quit my search, I found my word—triumvirate. My first thought was this word related to politics, which, as I hope you recall, I neither talk, nor write, about, but the third meaning is “a group or association of three.”

* * *

Now I can begin. Greetings, Saturday readers! Today’s topic is a triumvirate that consists of my gracious host who donated his space to me today—John Floyd; Sunday blogger Leigh Lundin; and myself, Fran Rizer.

What’s the relationship? Each of us is associated with Criminal Brief. Both John and Leigh are Criminal Brief weekly writers. I’ve been a previous guest blogger, winner of the Pages of Stories comment contest, and I remain a faithful reader.

Another connection is that the three of us are all southern writers. Elaine August described John’s style as “easy as a Mississippi day filled with the murmur of magnolia trees and a lemonade pitcher at his writing table.” Since retiring from IBM and his world-wide travels, John lives in Mississippi. His Saturday Criminal Brief essay is entitled “Mississippi Mud.” As we all know, it’s not possible to be more Southern than that!

When Leigh Lundin answers his telephone with “Good morning,” “good afternoon,” or “good evening,” his genteel southern accent belies the fact that he wasn’t born in the south. He’s lived in Florida so long that he has the manners of a southern gentleman, and I fully expect to one day see him strolling through an azalea garden in a white linen suit and carrying a cane.

The only thing I know about John and Leigh that isn’t southern is neither of them likes grits. That’s okay because I love grits enough for all of us!

A native South Carolinian, I write about the South. Walter Edgar—Walter Edgar’s Journal, SCETV Radio—kindly blurbed my last book with, “Fran Rizer’s stories about Callie Parrish and St. Mary, SC, are as southern as fried chicken and iced tea—and just as delightful.”

So here we are, three southern writers associated with Criminal Brief. What makes us a triumvirate? Each of us has a story in the July issue of Pages of Stories. It’s a quarterly magazine published and edited by Darlene Poier in Alberta, Canada. I learned about Pages of Stories through the CB contest, and after reading an issue and discovering the variety and quality of the stories, I followed Leigh’s suggestion to submit “Emily’s Ghost Story.”

Ms. Poier is once again generous enough to donate prizes for CB readers. Today’s two most clever or interesting comments will receive complimentary spring issues of April’s Special First Anniversary Edition of Pages of Stories. Neither John, Leigh, nor I are eligible to win or judge, so please don’t send bribes—openly.

Now, a few words about the stories. A retired teacher, I tend to alphabetize everything by last name, so we’ll start with John. He’s had hundreds of short stories and fillers in publications like Strand Magazine, Grit, Woman’s World, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

John’s story in this issue of Pages of Stories is “Turtle Bay.” It opens with the narrator visiting Madame Zelda, the Sarcastic Fortuneteller. His miseries include a wealthy wife who gives him an ultimatum: “Stop drinking and fooling around with other women or I’ll divorce you.” His career is not only falling apart, it’s likely to soon be nonexistent. There are several solutions to his dilemma, but he must be careful not to make a choice that leaves him in a worse predicament.

Here’s my comment on “Turtle Bay.”

The reader is quickly pulled into the story by the cleverly painted characters such as Dim Wit Dimmit. As usual with John’s stories, the narrative voice is clear and appealing. “Turtle Bay” is one of my favorite kinds of stories—a murder mystery that made me laugh. I hardly ever have a shortage of words, and I could praise this story indefinitely. What one thing can I say about it that will let you know how much I like it? This story is so good it makes me wish I’d written it!

Leigh Lundin’s first published short story won the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. As a matter of fact, he was in New York to accept that recognition when I met him. He’s also had short stories published in both Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

“Untenable” will be published as a three-part serial. Demetrius despises his wealthy brother, so he’s surprised when his brother leaves everything to him, but there’s a catch. Demetrius cannot sell or dispose of any properties because they revert to his brother’s children when Demetrius dies. E-mail death threats and a “safe room” lead the reader into a fascinating mystery.

John’s comment on Leigh’s story:

I loved “Untenable!” An engaging mystery that starts off fast and builds steadily throughout. I’m one of those fans who think crime stories should, like all fiction, have memorable and believable characters, and this one does—but I also think crime stories should be loaded with action and suspense. “Untenable” fills the bill. What an outstanding tale!

My piece, “Emily’s Ghost Story,” begins as a love story in a country church yard in the South Carolina coastal low country. Problems arise when Emily’s husband insists they move to Greenville, SC, to be close to the museum that houses the world’s largest collection of the work of his idol—artist Andrew Wyeth. Leigh suggested that I send the story to Pages of Stories, and he wanted to comment on it.

He wrote:

“Emily’s Ghost Story” is a classic of the literature, more subtle than de Maupassant and Lovecraft, rather in the style of Oliver Onions and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a story destined to be handed down generation to generation. It’s possibly my favorite of the genre and one I haven’t succeeded in forgetting.

Pardon me while I blush!

The three stories share a few common factors. All are mysteries with murders. (Daddy never said ladies don’t talk about killin’s.) Each story packs some big surprises.

Officially, Criminal Brief is the Mystery Short Story Weblog Project. In closing, I confess that my previous guest blogs were under false pretenses. The many magazine publications I had before writing Callie Parrish were all non-fiction features. “Emily’s Ghost Story” is my first published short story.

Forget the lemonade and iced tea. I’m having a glass of champagne, maybe even three of ’em. My daddy would be so proud to have me among the likes of John Floyd and Leigh Lundin!

ROAD TRIP (part three)

by Steven Steinbock

It’s been almost three weeks since Nate and I completed our cross-country drive from Portland, Maine to Seattle, Washington. It already feels like a lifetime. After we arrived in Seattle, we were joined by my younger son, Sam, and his buddy who flew out from Maine. Sam’s friend had never been to Seattle before, so it was a treat taking him to Pike Place Market where they play catch with thirty-pound Salmon, to Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project with its vast collection of rock-and-roll and science fiction memorabilia, and up the Space Needle. Sam’s friend had his first taste of Bubble Tea, conveyer-belt Sushi, and during a day trip over Steven’s Pass, multiple samples of Turkish Delight at the Aplets and Cotlets factory.

All three boys flew back to Maine earlier this week. I admit I was glad to see them go. Three weeks in the constant company of teenage boys was trying. But now I’m sitting alone in my private writer’s retreat and I’m unable to write. It’s almost too quiet, now.

But write I must. It is, after all, what writers do.

So, in rapid succession, on to the final few legs of the cross-country trip.

Thursday, June 23

After crossing the state border from South Dakota to Wyoming, we took a detour to Devil’s Tower National Monument. I was impressed, but I think Nate just wanted to be on the road. As we were driving away from Devil’s Tower, however, Nate stopped to look at a field where hundreds of prairie dogs were frolicking.

Two hours later we broke away from I-90 and took Highway 14 which cut through the Bighorn mountain range. I don’t know how high we climbed, but it was well over 9,000 feet. Our ears popped and the Subaru’s engine choked for oxygen. But it was beautiful. The vistas were spectacular. At one point there were walls of snow on either side of us.

We dropped down to about 5,000 feet and continued west through Cody, Wyoming. And then we climbed the Rockies and were in Yellowstone National Park in time for sunset.

Friday, June 24

After sleeping in a lodge in Grant’s Village, on the western thumb of Yellowstone Lake, we chose a path out of the park that would take us by Old Faithful and various other geothermal curiousities. My favorites were the Grand Prismatic Spring with its vast, unearthly colors, and the Fountain Paint Pots with its pits of boiling mud.

We crossed into Montana and spent the night in Missoula at an Econo-lodge where the electric outlets too loose to hold a plug (I resist the temptation to make crude analogies because this is a family friendly blog) and ancient truckers were muttering in hallways and lobby.

Saturday, June 25

For our final day of travel, we were in Washington State by late morning, and met an old high school friend of mine for lunch in Spokane.

It’s ironic, since so much of our trip followed Interstate 90, and since I so strongly associate that freeway with Washington State, that we parted from I-90 again after leaving Spokane and traversed the rest of the state along State Route 2. We arrived in Lake Chelan in time for dinner with my sister, who was vacationing there with her family and a number of friends.

Around seven pm we headed west again, crossing the Cascade Mountains at Stevens Pass, and arriving at our place in Seattle in time for bed.

There it is. I feel a little like John Steinbeck rushing through the final chapters of Travels with Charley. I apologize if I let my column deteriorate into a travelog. I’ll be back next week with something new.

FICTIONAL GIFTS

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

Talking about short stories never bores me. The elements are pared down to what is really important and nothing more or less. There is no time to meander about someone’s intricate background. Yes, it may be interesting, but no, it may not really matter all that much by the end of the tale.

We don’t have to know why Sherlock Holmes plays the violin or succumbs to cocaine. In fact, it is the skillfulness of the author to make us wonder, but not enough to make us stop reading the story to ponder Holmes’ reasons. Although, Holmes is quite observant, he’s certainly not perfect. Maybe it’s due to that smarter brother that may have stolen too much limelight from the parents. It doesn’t matter. The characters and plot do. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used words to convey Sherlock is human by showing him perform less than heroic acts. I doubt we would like him so much if he didn’t possess a few flaws.

If we retold the story of Psycho, we probably would mention Norman had an overbearing mother—because that really does matter in this story. As the story progresses, we can guess how Norman was raised, but there’s no need to bog us down with details of a miserable childhood. The real question is who stabbed Marion Crane in the infamous shower scene—and why.

I like that Edward D. Hoch’s Nick Velvet only hires himself out to recover objects of negotiable worth. Of course, “recover” isn’t as much what Velvet does as thievery, but it soothes his soul to think of it that way. I think it makes us like a burglar when on first thought we wouldn’t. I like if even more when we find out even worthless objects mean something to someone, and definitely enough to pay to have removed from its current owner’s possession.

Short stories provide entertainment in a way a novel or a film can’t. Naturally, it’s concise, tied up in a little package like a remembrance gift from a loved one. They usually make me smile, whether from their final sentence or the whole of the story sitting in my mind like a memory of a savory meal with a good friend.

The best part of reading a good story in the discovery and the gift of sharing with other fiction aficionados.

Do you remember the last story you couldn’t wait to share? I bet you didn’t tell the ending in hopes your friend would want to find out for himself. When someone tells us about a story whether read in a magazine, an anthology or online, it’s like giving a gift for no special occasion from one reader to another. When it’s good, we don’t want to keep it to ourselves. I love that about short story lovers. What a gift!

Although he is the author of several books—including the young adult romance Just in Time for Love and the hardboiled private eye novel All White Girls—Michael Bracken is better known as the author of almost 900 short stories in various genres. He began writing professionally while still a teenager and has been a full-time freelance writer/editor since April 1, 2003. Learn more at www.CrimeFictionWriter.com and CrimeFictionWriter.blogspot.com.

—Rob Lopresti

IN PRAISE OF TECHNICIANS

by Michael Bracken

When we discuss writers, we often place them on a continuum somewhere between pure storyteller and pure stylist. The pure storyteller has such innovative ideas and such a strong grasp of plot that readers are willing to forgive infodumps and clunky dialog in their rush to learn what happens next. The pure stylist has such a wonderful command of language that readers are swept along by the flow of words and may not realize until later that what they read has no substance.

There’s a third type of writer whose skill set overlaps both storytellers and stylists, but whose existence remained largely hidden by publishing’s gatekeepers until the recent self-publishing boom exposed their paucity: The technician.

The technician is equal parts grammarian, who comprehends the difference between a dependent clause and an independent clause and the difference between “insure” and “ensure”; typographer, who comprehends the difference between a hyphen, an en dash, an em dash, and the even more esoteric 2-em dash and 3-em dash; and techno geek who knows at least three different ways to indent a paragraph in Microsoft Word and comprehends why all three methods should not be used in the same manuscript.

While the technician’s manuscripts can be put into production with little or no effort, the process of traditional publishing masked the paucity of technicians because copyeditors ran interference between the writer and the reader, cleaning up as much as possible given whatever time and budget constraints they faced. Now, with many small presses and self-publishing writers failing to hire copyeditors, it has become quite easy to tell which writers are and which writers are not technicians.

Does it matter to the average reader whether a writer knows the difference between an apostrophe and a single opening quotation mark? Apparently not. Many readers also don’t know the difference.

But it does matter.

Repeated exposure to raw manuscripts—both fiction and non-fiction—leads to the inescapable conclusion that the best technicians are often the best writers. Why? A technician’s skills are all learnable, and a writer who takes the time to master grammar, typography, and word processing software is a writer dedicated to mastering the tools of his trade, and anyone in any trade who masters his tools will be a superior craftsman.

They might even become an artist.

So, whether you are a storyteller or a stylist, whether you desire to impress an editor or you choose to approach readers directly through self-publishing, whether you’re just beginning a writing career or are already several years into one, it behooves you to become a technician.

Copyeditors will love you and your readers will appreciate it.

THRILLERFEST

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Joe Finder, David Morrell, Melodie Johnson Howe

I just got back from New York where I attended Thrillerfest. Sleep deprived, I am writing this column from memory with no notes or programs to help my recollection. So it’s very sketchy.

For the first two days of the convention they have Thrillercraft, where such writers as Steve Barry, John Lescroart, Gayle Lynds (one of the co-founders of Thrillerfest), Jim Rollins, Jeffery Deaver (alas, I did not hear him speak), and many others teach the nuts and bolts of the writing craft to aspiring writers. Gayle was great in deconstructing the thriller so the audience could see how a writer using story, mood, and dialogue builds the structure of the novel.

David Morell gave the best advice: Follow your passion. Don’t chase the trends in the market, because you’ll always be chasing them down not up. His talk was a kind of verbal graphic of the peaks and many valleys of his career. The audience did not seem to want to hear this. They were all looking for a hook they could grab hold of and swing into the Number One position on the NY Times best seller list

His words reaffirmed what I have always stubbornly lived and written by. I wouldn’t be as good as I am if I had not stuck to writing about what fascinates me, what hits me in the gut. The mother/daughter theme weaves in out of my novels and short stories. It’s disguised in many ways, but it’s there and gives the work a depth that it probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Interestingly, it’s there even when I try to avoid it.

One of my favorite moments of the convention was chatting with the writer John Lescroart, a charming and gracious man. But when he quoted my genius detective, Claire Conrad, (The Mother Shadow) to me, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he said, “You wrote that.” And I, with woman-of the-world aplomb, screamed, “I did????”

Kathleen Sharp and I roomed together. She’s a non-fiction writer and investigative reporter. Her new book, Blood Feud, will be out in the fall and is getting a big push. She rolled her hair up every night in huge rollers, then wrapped a bandana around her head. Being tall, slim, and white, she looked like a Klansman’s dream of the perfect mammy. In the morning she would wake up and say, “I’m having trouble sleeping. Are you?” And this is the hard-hitting reporter who is taking Johnson & Johnson on in her book. This why I love writers. What we do is all in our head and heart.

Sans rollers, Kathleen interviewed Joe McGinniss, who was receiving the lifetime achievement award for non-fiction.

I was on a panel titled something like “Reel Screenwriting.” Having never written a screenplay in my life, I informed our moderator (called “panel master” at Thrillerfest), Jon Land, that he might want to ask me some question from the actors point of view. Jon turned out to be a delight and a great moderator. Sorry, master.

Sitting behind my name plaque, I found myself squeezed in between some heavy Hollywood writers. Immediately I felt the masculine tension—the jockeying for the best parking space, the deadly seriousness of their profession, and the “I’m working, you’re not attitude” pressing in on me. Flipping my blonde hair from my face (how many years have I’ve been doing that?), I straightened my shoulders and fended off the testosterone by talking about screenwriting from the actor’s point of view. Lots of fun for me since I rarely get to do that on panels. Modesty forbids me say that I was told I was the star of the panel. But modesty doesn’t forbid me to write it.

By the way, at the awards banquet the best short story of the year came from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Of course I can’t remember the writer or the title of the story. I do remember that Gayle Lynds wore a beautiful black Vera Wang evening gown. Okay my priories may be a little out of whack, but what can I say. I’m going to sleep.