Dreaming, a guest post by Kate Flora

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Kate Flora is a tiny woman with a giant presence in the world of crime fiction. Kate turned to writing after a career in the Maine Attorney General's office. Her books include seven “strong woman” Thea Kozak mysteries and three gritty police procedurals in her star-reviewed Joe Burgess series. Her true crime, Finding Amy, has been optioned for a movie. She's a Goddess - a retired president of Sisters in Crime. She's one of the moving forces of the New England chapter of the Sisters in Crime. And she's a writer who continues to... dream.

 

When I was growing up on a chicken farm in a small Maine town, money was often tight. Bill collectors really did knock on the door, sometimes the phone got turned off, and there was a large hole in the bathroom floor waiting for the money to get it fixed. We stapled plastic over the windows to keep out the drafts. We grew our own food and budgeted things down to the last cent. Our refuge was books. Books and the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

When that enormous, thick book would arrive in the spring and the fall, I could let my child’s imagination run. What would my summer wardrobe be like? With my 4-H training, I knew about mixing and matching, and I would design the perfect combination of pants and shorts and tops. My wardrobe squared away, I could turn to furnishing my someday house. What thick, fluffy towels I would want. What color sheets. What my rugs and furniture would be like. Not having too much was likely a blessing. I didn’t get to waste my time shopping, except in my imagination. It is that imagination, tuned up as a mechanism for entertainment and escape, for imagining other worlds and other lives, that has led me, as an adult, to create the worlds of my fiction

I decided to set practicing law aside and try my hand at writing mysteries when my younger son, Max, was born and I decided to be a stay-at-home mom. I bought a computer and began writing a law school mystery, A Matter of the Will. This week, Max got engaged. Next week, he turns thirty. I spent the first ten years of his life, and the first ten of my dedicated writing career, in the unpublished writer’s corner. My early years of delayed gratification, spent imagining and enjoying the possibilities, and to keep forging ahead without reward, served me well during those years.

It’s nearly twenty years since my first Thea Kozak mystery, Chosen for Death, was published, and I am still finding that those early years of learning to enjoy the possibilities serve me well. In 2007, Finding Amy, the true crime book I co-wrote with Portland’s Deputy Chief Joseph K. Loughlin, was nominated for an Edgar. I woke to find my e-mail queue jammed with congratulations. It was a wonderful moment, and I got to have the months between learning of the nomination and the night of the Edgars to bask in the honor and enjoy the recognition of my peers. I never cared whether I won or lost, just like I really never cared whether I would get those clothes or that furniture from Sears. I got to enjoy the moments and feel the pleasure.

A week ago, I got an e-mail from my friend Lea Wait, congratulating me on being a finalist for the Maine Literary Awards. A few minutes later, I got the official notice. Redemption, the third book in my Portland, Maine police procedural series, was one of three finalists. Once again, I am enjoying the moment and appreciating the fact that my book has been recognized. I’m in very good company with fellow nominees Paul Doiron and Katherine Hall Page. Both of them my friends. Both excellent writers. But right now, I’m kind of wishing I could just skip the awards ceremony in Portland on May 30^th, because I am enjoying the here and now. I’m enjoying the possibilities. The maybe a new line in my bio. Maybe a sticker to slap on the book jacket.

I’m also enjoying the certainty—that a shy, bookish chicken farmer’s daughter from a small Maine town, who devoured books from the Vose Library and dreamed of being a writer, has become one.

 You can find out more about Kate and her books at her website. You can follow her on Twitter as @kateflora, and she also blogs at Maine Crime Writers.

Leap of Faith: a guest blog by Zoë Sharp

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Our friend Zoë Sharp is one of those writers who hardly needs an introduction. A prolific novelist and short-story author, Zoë has been shortlisted for almost every crime-fiction award out there, including the Edgar, the Anthony, the Macavity and the Shirt Story Dagger. Today, she's going to talk about one of the biggest decisions in a series-writer's career: to break away from the series and, perhaps...the genre.

There’s no doubt about it that continuing characters in fiction are very popular. Some of my favourite authors write series books and I open each new installment with a special sense of pleasure. Not only am I confident that the author is going to take me on an exciting journey but I have the added thrill of making that journey with old friends.

I’ve been taking people on that same journey myself with the ten books so far in my series featuring ex-Special Forces trainee turned bodyguard Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox. I’m constantly being emailed and messaged by people who’ve discovered the books and the character and are bemoaning the fact that I don’t write fast enough to satisfy them.

But having written the tenth book about Charlie, her troubled relationship with fellow bodyguard Sean Meyer, and her boss in the NYC close-protection agency she works for, Parker Armstrong, I had the urge to do something different.

I must be mad.

Crime and thrillers still have the strongest pull for me but I have quite a few ideas I’d like to explore that don’t sit comfortably within the boundaries of Charlie’s world. Plus they would be difficult stories to tell in a first-person narrative, which is how I’ve always written the series books. Or maybe the voice that comes to me to me as that of the main protagonist is simply somebody new.

It took me a while after Charlie introduced herself to me before I discovered her voice. I really want to write KILLER INSTINCT: Charlie Fox book one in third-person but she just wouldn’t talk to me that way and after ten books from her exclusive point-of-view I think it would be too much of a jolt for readers if I tried to change things. 

However, it’s harder to write a multi-strand novel from inside the head of only one character and when I had the idea for THE BLOOD WHISPERER—about a disgraced crime-scene investigator turned crime-scene cleaner who went to prison for a crime she can’t remember—I knew I needed a fresh start.

But it’s still a step into the unknown. The main protagonist of THE BLOOD WHISPERER—Kelly Jacks—is not Charlie Fox although there are similarities. Kelly can take care of herself but prison tends to do that to you pretty fast. She emerges from her experiences tougher, warier but with a lack of faith in herself and everyone she thought she could rely on. All she wants to do is get on with her life and forget the past. The past, it seems, does not want to forget her.

I don’t intend this to be the start of a new series except possibly in a very roundabout way. In between the Charlie Fox novels I’d like to tell the stories of other strong female protagonists, like Kelly. The only common feature apart from that would be that these are all people for whom calling in the cops at the first sign of trouble is not an option. In Kelly’s case this is because she rapidly becomes a suspect in another murder that eerily mirrors the one she was convicted of.

Still, I’m aware that it’s a step in the dark for me. A leap of faith. Will the fans of Charlie Fox jump with me, or will they wait instead for the next installment in that series? Fingers crossed!

I’ve read various series by my favourite authors but I know I tend to prefer one in particular. I loved Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but didn’t take to her travelling salesman sleuth Montague Egg at all. I read JD Robb’s IN DEATH futuristic cop series, but not her Nora Roberts romances. On the other hand I followed the late Robert B Parker across from crime fiction into Westerns and one about baseball player Jackie Robinson.

So, maybe if I want to stretch myself beyond Charlie Fox I might be better making it a long stretch and moving further away from crime? And with all the cross-genre novels currently abounding that’s more of a reality. Is this a good time to mention that I’ve also written a supernatural thriller (with slight crime overtones—there are murders and policemen in it) about a mysterious hitman who you summon with grief but pay with your soul …?

So my question is have you followed an author across different series and with what result? Or across genres? And if you’re an author are you tempted to write outside your current genre? Have you tried it already? And if not, what’s stopping you?

Any of you over in the UK for CrimeFest at the end of May, please stop by and say hello. I’m honoured to be on three panels—one on Thursday afternoon and two on Saturday morning. We’ll be covering topics of Forgotten Authors, Guns For Hire, and When Can You have Too Much Research. Be great to see you there if you’re going!

It’s always been my habit with blogs to have a Word of the Week. This week’s is concilliabule, meaning a secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot. Also concilliabules, secret plans.

You can find out more about Zoë and her work at her website. You can friend her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter as @authorzoesharp and see what she's reading on Goodreads.  Zoë was also one of the longest-standing contributors to the much-beloved Murderati blog.

Not The Good Twin Anymore: a guest blog by Gail Donovan

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I know a lot of writers who have become friends, but Maine author Gail Donovan may be the only person I know who is a friend who became a writer. Gail spent several years combining motherhood, librarianship and writing-for-hire for picture books. Then in 2009, she took the leap into her true love: middle grade fiction. Her first book for children, In Memory of Gorfman T. Frog, was named a New York Public Library "Best Books for Children." Her second; What's Bugging Bailey Blecker, was a Horn Book back-to-school recommended title. Now, coming out this August (just in time for back-to-school!), The Waffler.

Monty is a waffler–he can never make up his mind, which always gets him in trouble. But when each student in his fourth-grade class is assigned a kindergarten buddy, Monty takes some left-out kindergarteners under his wing, even though it’s against the rules to have more than one buddy. When his blended family and his teachers find out, they give him an ultimatum: choose just one buddy, or have none at all. That stinks! On top of that, his beloved pet rat escapes, and his twin sister stops speaking to him! Monty doesn’t want to cast away his new friends, but he needs to come to a decision before everything spins out of control.

 Did you catch the line about the twin? As it happens, Gail is a twin herself...

Writing fiction isn’t exactly like having a “do-over,” but it’s close. On a July night in 1982, the following things happened. I ate cauliflower at supper. I got a phone call in which the words “I’m getting married” were uttered. And then I spent the night throwing up.

 Some part of my brain mixed up the cause and effect. The cauliflower didn’t make me sick. The words did. Why did the words “I’m getting married” make me ill? Because they came from my twin sister, and at the time the very idea of her throwing in her lot with somebody else made me want to, well, puke.

 

It wasn’t until my third novel for young people that I had the urge to explore twinness fictionally. I realized that a subject with the power to make you—okay, enough said—let’s just say the subject of twins fascinates most people, me included. 

Even more than “regular” siblings, twins grow up together, side by side, step by step. They share friends, clothes, bedrooms, and even a name: the twins. So how is a twin supposed to untwine him or herself and forge their own identity?

Having adopted the role of “the good one” in my own family I decided my main character would not be “the good one.” From Monty’s point of view, that’s his twin sister, Sierra. She’s the one who makes up her mind quickly to do the things parents approve of, like playing soccer and getting good grades. He’s the one who can’t make up his mind to do anything. He’s The Waffler. 

At last! What fun not to be the good twin! 

And what’s the epilogue of the story in real life? In the end, my twin sister didn’t end up marrying that particular boyfriend, and by the time she did marry I was long married myself. I’m happy to report there were no gastrointestinal issues. But I still won’t touch cauliflower.

TheWaffler is dedicated to my twin sister. 

We have a copy of What's Bugging Bailey Blecker (which my then 11-year-old daughter praised as "Really funny and kind of gross, which makes it totally awesome.") for one lucky commenter and a copy of I Shall Not Want for another. To the backblog, Batman!

You can find out more about Gail Donovan and her books at her web site, and friend her on Facebook.

Wee Gail and her twin.