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:

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

Edith Maxwell & Mulch Ado... about cats and family secrets #bookgiveaway

HALLIEEPHRON:  We’re alwyas happy to be hosting Edith Maxwell, this time with her new (#5) Local Foods Mystery, Mulch Ado About Murder. Edith writes smart, twisty whodunnits, and this one's got her pondering family and their secrets, my personal favorite vein to mine.

Welcome, Edith!

EDITHMAXWELL: I’m delighted to be back on my favorite blog again. Thanks for inviting me back, Hallie, and congratulations on your new release!

I’m happy to give away a signed hardcover of my own new mystery to one commenter here today.

My fifth Local Foods Mystery, Mulch Ado About Murder, came out recently. In the series, organic farmer Cam Flaherty occasionally thinks about her distant – physically as well as emotionally – academic parents. It isn’t until this book that they come to visit. Her dad, William, is an awkward, funny, entirely unhandy man who finally shows how much he cares about his only child. Her mom? Deb becomes a suspect in the murder in the first scene. Cam learns all kinds of things about her mom’s past during the course of the book, and they eventually grow closer.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about family. Right now I’m sitting with a very ill kitty, keeping vigil to see if he’ll make it through or not. Birdy is the junior member of our family of cats, despite being fourteen, and we never thought he’d go before his older “siblings.” He was one of two felines I brought to the family of Hugh and me when we combined households over a decade ago. Birdy is also the cat in my (that is Maddie Day’s) Country Store Mysteries and has been on every cover.

Our former senior cat, my lovely and neurotic Athena, died in 2012, only a month before my mother also passed away. Hugh already had Preston, now famous as the farm cat in the Local Foods mysteries (and an artist’s version of which graces the cover of Mulch Ado About Murder), and Cristabel, who has ended up the kitchen cat in my Quaker Midwife Mysteries.

Birth families are the ones we usually think of when we mention the word family. In my case my parents were married for twenty-five years and had us four kids all less than two years apart before they were thirty. A few years after the divorce we acquired a stepfather and stepmother, and liked both of them very much. My sisters and I remain close, although we all live far apart, and my quirky brother is in the mix, too. What is it they say about family – the ones who have to take you in? We’re all so different from each other, but that shared past means a lot, and I know they have my back.

A good friend recently heard from his 44-year-old birth son for the first time, so that’s another kind of family. The son was happily adopted as a newborn, but reached out via ancestry.com to my friend, who now looks forward to meeting him.

Yet a different shape of family is the one we form with our partner, whether spouse or not, and their family. Half a year after I met Hugh, he took me to New Jersey for the first time to meet his parents, both retired schoolteachers. My father, who died too young in 1985, had also taught high school. When I walked into Bette and Roy’s apartment, she was working on the NYT Sunday crossword. He was ranting about the latest Republican shenanigans. A dictionary was open on the coffee table, and I thought, “I fit in this family!”

Then there is the family I created when I had children. My two adult sons, Allan and JD, are truly joys – self-supporting, funny, smart, handsome, both happy with women they love, and both staying in close contact with me. All I lack are some grandkids, and I have every confidence they’ll be along one of these years.

I often thank my Quaker family in my book acknowledgements. For almost three decades the members of my faith community have supported, nourished, and challenged me. Unconditional love from a group like that is an amazing gift.

So I believe we make families where we find them, and we find family where we need it. What about you, dear readers and back- blog regulars? What shapes do your families take? Have you learned any family secrets lately?

HALLIE: Edith, love your question and looking forward to reading today's comments. Remember, a book giveaway to one lucky commenter.

EDITH MAXWELL: 2017 double Agatha-nominated and national best-selling author Edith Maxwell writes the Local Foods Mysteries and the Quaker Midwife Mysteries; as Maddie Day she writes the Country Store Mysteries and the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. Her award-winning short crime fiction has appeared in many juried anthologies and journals, and she serves as President of Sisters in Crime New England.

A fourth-generation Californian and former tech writer, farmer, and doula, Maxwell now writes, cooks, gardens (and wastes time as a Facebook addict) north of Boston with her beau and three cats. She blogs at WickedCozyAuthors.com, Killer Characters, and with the Midnight Ink authors. Find her on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Instagram.

ABOUT MULCH ADO ABOUT MURDER: It’s been a hot, dry spring in Westbury, Massachusetts. As organic farmer Cam Flaherty waits for much-needed rain, storm clouds of mystery begin to gather. Once again, it’s time to put away her sun hat and put on her sleuthing cap when a fellow farmer is found dead in a vat of hydroponic slurry—clutching a set of rosary beads. Showers may be scarce this spring, but there’s no shortage of suspects, including the dead woman’s embittered ex-husband, the Other Man whose affair ruined their marriage, and Cam’s own visiting mother. Lucky for Cam, her nerdy academic father turns out to have a knack for sleuthing. Will he and Cam be able to clear her mom’s name before the killer strikes again?