Mining Trivia Night for Story Gold by Lucy Burdette

 LUCY BURDETTE: Happy New Year Reds! May it be a great year full of good friends, good health, good food, good books...

Holidays aside, it's been a busy time! I received the copy edits for A DELICIOUS DECEPTION in December, so they took first priority once they landed. This time I learned that I insert "that" into many more sentences than need it. I will try to remember that lesson in the future! Meanwhile I finished two projects, a Key Lime murder mystery for the Friends of the Key West Library, and a short story for the upcoming anthology Key West Noir (which will be part of the Akashic Noir series.)  I find short stories so challenging! The writer has a short time (duh) do everything normally done in a long book—develop characters, present a perfect jewel of a plot, and produce a satisfying conclusion. Plus, the story had to be noir, as in dark. (I tried!)

We had to tell the editors ahead of time what part of Key West we were featuring, so the stories wouldn't overlap too much. I chose Mallory Square and the new Key West cooking school. I wrote it from Nathan Bransford’s point of view in the third person. He's Hayley’s husband and he often gets overshadowed by her and the other characters, especially Miss Gloria. To get the proper background, I convinced six friends to go with me to the Cooking School’s Monday trivia night. We did not win any prizes, but it was tons of fun, and I got good photos and took lots of notes. I’ll show you a few of those and then post a snippet of the story, now called A NOT SO TRIVIAL MURDER. 

they were good sports

isn't it gorgeous?

waiting for snacks, or inspiration?

the tally

Mallory Square, home of the nightly sunset over the Gulf celebration with its patchwork of street performers and purveyors of food and drink, was mostly dark and silent. Across the expanse of stone dotted with palms, he saw a brightly colored umbrella, lit up by the glow of a soft yellow lamp on a card table covered with a deep blue cloth. Lorenzo, a friend of his wife’s, was bent over a spread of tarot cards, explaining something to the client in front of him. Bransford headed in that direction, flashing his Maglite along the walls of the buildings lining the square, greeting a couple of the regular homeless types. Though this square wasn’t a hotbed of crime after sundown, the chief believed that a regular and reasonably friendly police presence functioned as a retaining wall between order and chaos. 

The woman sitting with Lorenzo leaned across his table to squeeze his hands and then got up to leave. Bransford figured he would check in. Though he wasn’t certain the fortune teller had access to a deeper understanding of the universe than most, he was an acute observer of human behavior. If trouble was brewing, Lorenzo would know. He approached the table and waved hello. “You’re working late.”

“I don’t like to rush my clients,” Lorenzo said earnestly. “They come in psychic pain and it’s my job to honor that.” 

Bransford hardly knew what to say, but in some happy twist of fate, his radio crackled before he had to answer. The police department dispatcher, usually unflappable, reported a problem at the Key West cooking school in a breathless voice. “EMTs have been dispatched to the scene. You’d better check in. The bartender was hysterical, so not clear whether someone is dead or dead drunk.” 

Sometimes in this town, it was hard to tell the difference. “I’m on it,” said Bransford. “Have a good night,” he told the tarot card reader and jogged off toward the redbrick building at the far end of the square.

He paused at the entrance to the school, which was located up the only escalator in Old Town on the second floor of the US Coast Guard building, now called the Shops at Mallory Square. The developers had spent a bloody fortune renovating the cooking school space, which he had not yet visited. Despite his own wife’s connection to food and the food world, he was an eat to live guy, not live to eat. Other than investigating a possible crime on the premises, he was not the kind of man who would attend a cooking school or even a single demonstration. Hard pass.

We’ll see how well I did with this—the anthology will be comprised of talented Key West and Key West adjacent writers (including SA Cosby, king of noir!) Of course I had that in my mind the whole time I was writing, which may or may not have helped. By the way, here's a photo of the winners, which became an important plot point.

Reds, do you read and enjoy short stories? Why or why not? How about trivia, want to join a team?

Rhys on Being in Limbo.

 RHYS BOWEN:  Best laid plans of mice and men etc... 

I had plans for the last week of the year. My Christmas company departed on Sunday morning. I had planned to work with Clare to do the final polish on Molly 24, so that we turn it in on at the beginning of the year.

Actually I had planned to work with Clare while she was with us for a week. But the day before the family arrived I came down with a horrible respiratory infection. Not Covid. Not flu or RSV. But coughing my head off and fatigue. It was all I could do to show up and look joyful all week.  John, meanwhile had been battling his own respiratory thing. We got through the holidays. My family was wonderful and did everything. Then on the day they left John ran a fever of 102.  I rushed him to emergency and he has pneumonia in both lungs. He's in hospital, having IV antibiotics, breathing treatments etc. And I'm siting in a cold hospital room, not able to do much.

So that's where I am. I have time. I have quet. I could be working more. I have to do final edits on the next Royal Spyness book, but I don't seem to have the energy.  So I thought I'd start my new stand-alone, which I've been looking forward to tackling. Then I had to make the decision: do I start it in the present, which is the main story line, or do I put in a teaser from the past, which will give clues to what we are discovering in the present?

The story is about an expert in atiquarian books who has been hired to value a library of an English stately home. She finds a book printed in 1460 which seems to have been written by a nun at the priory which stood on the land of the current house.  So we are seeing stories unfold in the present and in 1460.

So how do I write this? Write the whole of the 1460 story and then the other one, which is what I did for the Tuscan Child, or let both unfold as we go, which is what I did for the Venice Sketchbook?

I am asking for feedback. when you start a new book do you like to get a teaser, as I have just done for my upcoming stand alone, which is now called THE CASTLE IN THE GLEN.  

OR....

Do you like to plunge straight into the main story and get going with the characters we are going to follow?

Let me know.

And to remind you, this is how the Castle in the Glen begins...

From The Wild Girl, Inspector Melrose’s First Case.

By Iris Blackburn.

 The Isle of Skye, autumn 1932

 Flora was the name her mother had given her at birth, but her mother had died before the child reached five years, a wee scrap of a bairn, and in the village of Dun Akyn she was known only as The Wild Girl. Her father was a fisherman, out at sea long hours at a time and Flora learned quickly how to fend for herself. She helped herself to eggs from those who kept chickens. She begged a roll or two from the baker. The kind folk in the village left a bowl of soup out for her and their own children’s outgrown clothing. She went to school when she felt like it but was most often seen running barefoot across the heather, or splashing in the tide pools, communing with the wild creatures from seals to roe deer. It was whispered that Angus MacLeod was not her father at all, but that it was one of the fairy folk, or even a storm kelpie. Whatever was true in this regard she stayed clear of the well-meaning village women who tried to take her in hand, made no friends among the village children, and could seemingly vanish in the blink of an eye like the fairy folk.

                Either way she was destined to come to a bad end.

And then we move to a young woman in London in 1965.

Both stories unfold throughout the book.  Fun but challenging to write as for half the book I'm writing in the style of another writer, and what's more it's not her normal style.

Ah well.  Back to work. And please spare a thought for John who is gradually getting over the worst ( and for me).

And I've just realized: it's New Year's Eve. I'd completely lost track of days.

So wishing you all a very happy, healthy New Year!

Rhys

What Hank's Trying to Write--the very hardest thing!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: You know what I’m doing, you all? I am trying to write a synopsis. This is the worst possible project for an author. Especially someone like me who doesn’t really plan or outline or look very far ahead when I’m writing a novel.  It is horrible. A complete slog. 

(How do I know what's going to happen until it happens? And it doesn't happen until I write it in the book.  (And this is a photo of me from a million years  ago, and from the look on my face, I definitely think I am trying to write a synopsis.  Even though I am on obvs on vacation, lookit that tan.)

ANYWAY. But the consensus seems to be that it would be good for me  to have a full idea of the story of my next  novel. And so be it. I am completely certain that it'll be worth it.

But the journey is arduous.

 I have talked to my colleague Sophie Hannah about this, what a genius she is, and she had such a brilliant insight. 

She said she used to feel the same way, that she was “the kind of person who could not write a synopsis. " And then at one point she thought "wait-- if I can think that, why don’t I start thinking about myself as a person who can write a synopsis!" And go from there. 

Her theory was if she tried to do something that she was not comfortable doing, and it didn’t work perfectly, well, at least she made a start, and was getting experience, and was figuring out how to do it. And certainly she was better off when she started, since she had taken the chance to do something new and different.  

And wow, what if it worked? 

So there, Reds and Readers, is where I am now. I am pushing pushing and pushing. And I have to tell you that every day I tell myself: all I need is one more good idea. Just one idea.  

I am telling myself--I can write a synopsis.

I have tried all kinds of things to make myself do this. What seems to be the most successful is I make an appointment with myself. Like: "At 1 PM, I will work for one hour, and come up with one good idea." That’s all I need. And so far, that’s kind of working. I have to be finished by this time next week. 

And what this does, interestingly, is making me think about things I don’t want to put in my novel.

For instance, my husband – – who has recently come to understand that if you don’t like a book you don’t have to finish it, this is my tutelage, and I wonder what you all think about that? But anyway, he closed a book after a few chapters and said "There are way too many characters in this novel, and I can’t keep them straight."

Good point! I said. That's always annoying. 

I remember in my first book, PRIME TIME, in the first draft I had a TV news photographer named Walt, and another news photographer named, I don’t know, let’s say Jimmy, and a third news photographer named let’s say Stan. 

My editor said why do you need three different photographers? Why don’t you make them all one person?  That will make that one character bigger and more solid and more important.  And wow, she was right. And Walt the photographer became a pivotal main character for the entire series. 

And, Jonathan went on to say, there are too many points of view. And multiple timelines. It was all way too complicated.

Yes, that's another synopsis question that must be faced.  A single point of view? Multiple point of view? One timeline, or a dual timeline? I think about the books I love, and there’s no real pattern – – a well-written book with multiple timelines and multiple points of view can be absolutely fabulous! 

As I tell my student students, “Anything can work. You just have to do it well. "

Which sounds really great, and empowering, until you are the one writing the synopsis.  

So while I claw my way through this synopsis, what are your pet peeves? What are the things that will make you put a book down? Or do you slog through to the end no matter what? 

For instance--I know, anything can work. But a prologue all in italics kind of stops me. 

Or a prologue that is completely different in every way from Chapter 1. 

Or when the person I assume is the main character because it is written in their point of view dies at the end of the prologue or chapter one. What a ripoff. 

Or when a character does not ask the question that ANY reasonable person would ask. (Clearly because the author thinks that's suspenseful. It isn't.)

Pages and pages in italics, my brain wants to skip them.

How about you, Reds and Readers? What are your pet peeves? What would make you put a book down?