The Perils of Pantsing, a guest blog by Maddie Day/Edith Maxwell

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: What can I say about the Agatha-nominated, incredibly prolific Maddie Day, especially since, as Edith Maxwell, she's a long-time and well-loved member of our Jungle Red community. 

I always assumed Maddie/Edith was a disciplined outliner when it came to writing her books, since she routinely has several books out each year and her short stories are regularly featured in anthologies. Other highly productive authors I know are confirmed plotters, and to be frank, this makes me feel better, because it gives me an excuse for taking sooooo long to write my own books. Because I write by the seat of my pants.

Imagine my chagrin in discovering Maddie doesn't have a set plan when she sits down to write! Another rational gone by the wayside. Maddie, how could you do this to me?

 

 

Hi. My name is Maddie, and I’m a pantser. There, I said it.

 

But first, thank you to Julia for hosting me on the front side of the blog. It’s always an honor and a delight to flip onto the main page and be able to celebrate a new book – my twenty-seventh! – with the Reds and all my fellow regular commenters.

 

When I started writing my first book-length mystery back in 1994, I knew nothing. I’d never studied creative writing. Was clueless about point of view. Had no idea about pacing. And nobody ever told me I should plot out my book ahead of time. Anyway, the word “outline” would have conjured nightmares of high school and those nested Roman numerals and letters that were supposed to summarize an essay or article. I still shudder at the thought.

 

So I plunged in and began to write a mystery set on an organic farm, start to finish. Except I got about two-thirds through the story and realized I had no idea which of my suspects was the bad guy. I also didn’t know how to decide. I was reading exclusively mysteries at the time – by Sue Grafton, Katherine Hall Page, Sara Paretsky, Diane Mott Davidson, and others (sorry, Debs, your books weren’t on my radar until you joined this blog) – but I didn’t understand how to finish my own.

 

Life got in the way, and I didn’t return to that story until eighteen years later. I proposed the premise of the unfinished book as the first in my Local Foods Mysteries and landed a three-book contract with Kensington. A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die was my second published mystery in 2013. I guest-posted about the farming life – and writing full time – right here back in 2014.

 

Fast forward again to when I turned in No Grater Crime, the ninth Country Store Mystery, which released last summer (I was a guest here for that release, too). My editor at Kensington read the manuscript. Toward the end, police lieutenant Buck Bird casually mentions that his mother had been murdered when he was a teenager.

 

 

 

My editor said he assumed I added that bit because I would be addressing the old (and unsolved) murder in the following book.

 

“Yes, John, of course,” I wrote back. What? I hadn’t dropped that little bombshell on purpose. But this is what happens when, like me, you follow your characters around and write down what they do, say, and think.

 

And address it, I did. When your editor is the top dog at the publishing house, it’s prudent to heed his suggestion. In fact, it was a quite good one.

 

Also, I’m never going to be an outliner. Just saying.

 

Readers: What suggestion has someone given you that turned out well? Do you have advisors whom you smile at, say thank you, and disregard completely? Writers: Where do you fall on the pantser-plotter continuum?

 

I’d love to send two commenters a signed copy of Batter Off Dead, which came out two days ago.

 

In South Lick, Indiana, fine foods and classic cookware can be found at Robbie Jordan’s Pans ’N Pancakes. Unfortunately, her country store also seems to stock up on murder . . .

 

Robbie and her new husband Abe O’Neill are enjoying a summer evening in the park with fellow townsfolk excited for some Friday night fireworks. In attendance are senior residents from Jupiter Springs Assisted Living including Roy Bird, father to South Lick’s very own Police Lieutenant Buck Bird. Despite his blindness, Roy is a member of his group home’s knitting circle, spending quality time with some lovely ladies.

 

But when the lightshow ends, one of the knitters who sat with Roy is found dead, a puncture wound in her neck. The poor woman’s death echoes that of Buck’s mother and Roy’s wife—an unsolved homicide. To help find the killer, Robbie’s going to have to untangle the knotty relationships deep in the victim’s past . . .

 

Maddie Day pens the Country Store Mysteries and Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. As Agatha Award-winning author Edith Maxwell, she writes the Quaker Midwife Mysteries, the Local Foods Mysteries, and short crime fiction. Day/Maxwell lives with her beau north of Boston, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook. Find her at EdithMaxwell.com, wickedauthors.com, Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen, and on social media:

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Edith Maxwell: How in Heck Did We Get to Indiana? #BookGiveaway!

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HALLIE EPHRON: It's my pleasure to welcome back to the FRONT of the blog Edith Maxwell who is launching a new Country Store Mystery Series... yup, another series with a lovely new nom de plume Maddie Day. This time the setting is rural Indiana.  She explains how that happened.

EDITH MAXWELL/MADDIE DAY: I’m so delighted to be back here on the first blog I read every morning (seriously)! Thanks for hosting me, Hallie.

So how in heck did I come to write a mystery series set in hilly southern Indiana, you might ask? It was an easy choice for me when I was thinking about a second (well, third...okay, fourth) series. I was living in Japan after college when I decided to try my hand at a PhD. Not only did Indiana University have a linguistics program that seemed a good fit with my goals: exploring language, how women speak, and attitudes about women – yeah, tiny topic, right?

But IU and Bloomington were also a homecoming in a way, even though I’d never been there. All generations of Maxwells back to my great-great-grandfather have been associated with IU. In fact, Dr. David Hervey Maxwell was the person who successfully petitioned the Indiana state legislature in 1820 for funds to open the State Seminary, the progenitor of the university.

Pictures of my ancestors adorn the Student Union. My great-grandfather was the first dean of the IU medical school. My grandfather was the captain of the IU basketball team in 1916. Daddy was an undergrad there before he was drafted into WWII. The Maxwell Hall on campus is named for my branch of Maxwells. How could I not continue the lineage?

I was accepted to the program, came back from Japan, drove from California to Bloomington in the fall of 1977 (in a 1961 convertible VW bug with a soon-to-be-ex boyfriend), and dove into graduate school. It was a glorious and heady time. Everybody was there because they wanted to be. Edith Bedou from Togo became one of my good friends. Another was Marios from Greece. Jennifer had been in the Peace Corps in Niger. Janet had been in Barcelona. Katherine in Lesotho. We had weekly (often drunken) dance parties and skinny-dipped in the quarries, and our group of friends held monthly gourmet dinners. We also studied hard and finished our doctorates.

IU is in the southern third of the state. You might think of Indiana as part of the flat midwest (like where Hank grew up). But the glacier stopped south of Indianapolis, and the lower part is hilly and pretty, a lot like New England. Bloomington is a small town with a huge university, so it’s pretty, easy to walk and bike around in, and has easy access to neighboring scenic Brown County. And I realized the way people talk is more Kentucky than upper midwest.

One student in the linguistics program dropped out of the program and, with his girlfriend, bought a rundown general store in Brown county. They fixed it up into a breakfast restaurant and gave birth to a baby upstairs from the store. We all trooped out there for the store’s grand opening and toasted to their success  (they didn’t have any murders in the store, thank goodness).

The Story Inn is now under other management, but that was the inspiration for my series. And I love being back, even if only on the page, plus the annual visit to Brown County to refresh my stock of local phrases and scenery.

HALLIE: Thanks, Edith/Maddie - and she offers up these questions: How about a favorite dish Robbie Jordan can add to the breakfast menu with a great Midwestern flavor?

And Edith is giving away a copy of FLIPPED FOR MURDER to one lucky commenter.

Flipped for Murder: The first book in the Country Store Mysteries series features Robbie Jordan and Pans ‘N Pancakes, her country store restaurant in fictional South Lick, Indiana. When she remodels the store full of antique cookware and turns it into a local breakfast and lunch establishment, she doesn’t plan to have murder on the menu.

Edith Maxwell: Agatha-nominated and Amazon-bestselling author Edith Maxwell writes the Local Foods Mysteries series, the Lauren Rousseau mysteries (as Tace Baker), the Country Store Mysteries (as Maddie Day), and the Quaker Midwife Mysteries, as well as award-winning short crime fiction. Shel writes mystery fiction north of Boston in antique house where she lives with her beau and three cats. She blogs with the Wicked Cozy Authors.