Reds on Writing: Debs on the Tortoise and the Hare

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  Seventeen (almost, more on that in a minute) novels, and I'm still looking for the Magic Bullet. I know, of course, that there is no such thing, and when I speak to writers' groups I always emphasize that. But... Here's where it gets sticky.

I am admittedly slow. But this book has been a bear. On the first of July, it will be two years since I turned in the manuscript for TO DWELL IN DARKNESS. TWO. Now, that's bad. Even for me. Although there has been a book that took longer. (I'm looking at it, stacked on my desk, and the one that came after, which was half the length and took half the time.)

Dear hubby says that I lack project management skills. And that I procrastinate. Both are probably true. I SAY that multiple view point, multiple story line, and sometimes multiple time line novels are HARD. And I am a plotter and a planner, a writer who has to work out who all these characters are and how everything fits together in the intimate history of the setting... At least those are my excuses, and I'm the first to admit they probably are excuses.

BUT, I say. Surely there is a way to do it better, and faster, and that I'll get the next book finished in LESS than a year. My agent, after twenty-three years (Yikes!) just laughs.

And I'm now in what I think of as the Chute. The book--GARDEN OF LAMENTATIONS-- is in the publisher's schedule. (February, 2017!) It has a cover. It's up on my website, and doesn't it look gorgeous?  

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A big chunk of the manuscript has gone to the illustrator, wonderful Laura Maestro, so that she can start on the accompanying map.  And I have to finish the last...(mumble, mumble) pages in the next two weeks. (This is my new downstairs library table/desk that was pristine two weeks ago. It's now a mess of multiple outlines and notes and books--and cat. Imagine what it will look like two weeks from now...)

I think this makes me the Hare.

The good news is that I know how it all fits together now. (Chapter/scene outline done all the way the way to the end!) I have to get to a certain point before I can do this, but once I do, it rocks.

REDS and writer friends, I want to know. Do you write a regular, set amount, from beginning to end? Or do you find that books reach a tipping point where it all comes together and you blast through to the last page? 

And what about other big, long term projects, everyone? Are you tortoises or hares?

What We're Writing--Debs Does Scrivener

LOOKING FOR WINNERS!

Celia Fowler, are you there? You were a winner of WHAT YOU SEE! Email me soon at h ryan at whdh dot com …or we’lI have to award it to someone else..

AND THE WINNER OF Linda Fairstein's DEVILS BRIDGE IS: Jennifer Gray!

And the winner of Terminal City is: skkorman

Please contact me a h ryan at whdh dot com with your address by today, please, or we’ll pick other winners!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We started out our writing week here at JRW (thanks, Hallie and Hank!) talking about timelines and how we keep track of time and characters and what on earth we are doing in a complicated novel--especially if you're working with multiple viewpoints or multiple timelines.

This used to just absolutely drive me nuts, let me tell you. Well, it still drives me nuts, but I'm working on my third novel using the writing software Scrivener, and it has made a huge difference.

I used to do a chapter/scene outline in Word. (I still do a bit of that, but not nearly as much, and I use it more for brainstorming than for keeping up with where I am.) So, say for example, I had a scene with Duncan in Chapter 4 of a book, and Duncan doesn't show up again until Chapter 6. In order to keep track of exactly what happened in the last scene so that it synced with the new one, I could either look at my chapter/scene outline (not very accurate because scenes seldom play out exactly the way I've outlined them beforehand) or I could scroll back through pages of text or manuscript trying to find where the heck I was. (Are you cross-eyed?)

Now, the cool thing about Scrivener is this. Let's start with the whole screen. This is your Binder, which is your project, or in our case, your book. (This is To Dwell in Darkness, so don't worry, no spoilers for #17.)

See the outline pane on the left hand side in the photo below? 

(This is a snippet from Kincaid/James #17, by the way. I always write in chapter/scenes, but this part can be organized any way you like.) When I mouse over scenes that are already written, or even scenes that I have just outlined on the index cards (see the right hand side of the screen) the little index card synopsis pops up and tells me exactly what was in that scene.

Now, see the little index card at the top right? (It's called the Inspector. I have no idea why.) This is where you put your synopsis, and this is what shows up when you mouse over the left hand side. Once a scene is written, I can change that synopsis to make sure the action matches what actually happened in that scene. This makes it so easy to keep track of the characters and the action! (My index cards always start with the day, time of day, and the viewpoint.)

You can put lots of things in your Binder besides Chapter/Scenes (or however you organize your material. See in the photo below, you can make a place for characters, research, timelines, notes...the possibilities are endless.

 You can also put your index cards in a cork board format and rearrange them, and all sorts of other neat things, but that's enough info for now.

Scrivener is a powerful program that can be used for many kinds of projects other than writing novels, so I highly recommend David Hewson's Writing a Novel with Scrivener. This little e-book gave me the courage to dive into Scrivener, and I'm so glad I took the plunge.

(Scrivener was originally designed for Macs but works fine with PCs, too.)

So, dear REDS, what do you think? (Clear as mud?) Would it work for you? It really is so easy once you get the hang of it.

And READERS, when you're reading, do you wonder how writers keep up with what's going on in their stories?

Judging a Book by its Cover

RHYS BOWEN: Since we're celebrating Hank's new book this week, I've been thinking how powerful I find her covers. Just right for her subject matter. Eye catching. I'd buy the book without knowing anything Hank or the subject.
But
You can’t judge a book by its cover.  Or can you?

I’m always interested in how important a cover is in selling the book. Some covers are wonderfully apt and evocative. My favorite of Hank’s covers so far is The Other Woman with that one red coat making such a bold statement.

                Actually a cover can make or break a book. If it’s too cozy for a dark subject, or too bleak for a cozy it will not attract the right readers and turn off those who bought it. I remember a friend who wrote fast paced legal thrillers was horrified to find a spaniel on her cover—for the simple reason that the art director had a spaniel herself. No, it wasn’t a doggy book in any way.

                Of course we all know that animals on covers sell books. Cat especially. Write a book on Jack the Ripper and have a couple of cute felines in the back streets of London and the book will sell.
I experienced this myself when I was writing the Constable Evans mysteries. The paperback covers all had sheep/goats/sheepdogs on them, prominently front and center. Even though my stories hardly ever mentioned sheep and never goats. I once told an audience that I had been awarded the Old MacDonald Award. When they clapped I said it was for most farm animals on covers!

 It’s interesting what aspects of a cover really do sell books. My Molly Murphy mystery The Family Way outsold its predecessors by a lot. And my agent’s comment was that it had a pregnant Molly on the cover. Apparently pregnant women sell books. Who knew?

                It’s very gratifying for a writer when their covers turn into a brand. Look at Debs’s books. Only a hint of background but the name and title taking up the whole cover. This says clearly, “We don’t need to hook you with a cat or a pregnant woman. We know the hook will be Deborah Crombie’s name.”

                I’ve been pleased with both sets of covers. The Royal Spyness books are fun, playful and easily identifiable as a book in the series. My most recent Molly books have had gorgeous covers—soft colors, heroine at the front, and an evocative scene behind her. 

 Recently my agent has commented that “Molly” covers seem to be popping up all over the place. I don't know if I can claim that my books started a trend. Perhaps this kind of cover is in the air at the moment. Perhaps it's found to be what works for historical novels. Or maybe other publishers use the same artist, but there are distinct similarities, don’t you think?

               

So how much do covers influence you in the buying of your books?  Are there any covers that have really stood out for you recently?
And Reds and writers—how much input do you have into your covers? Are you happy with them? Wish they were different?

Deborah Crombie's To Dwell in Darkness: A stunner!

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HALLIE EPHRON: FANFARE!! Our very own Deborah Crombie's new Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James novel, TO DWELL IN DARKNESS, is out today(!) and it's a stunner. I read the last page and just sat there, literally gasping for breath. And came away loaded with questions for Debs to answer.

Starting with... At the start of this book, almost every one of your returning characters is out of his (or her) element and profoundly uncomfortable or in scary new situations. Especially Duncan Kincaid. Challenging for you, having to create a whole new setting and supporting cast, but also fertile ground, yes?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Yes, very challenging, but fun. I particularly liked getting to create a new team for Duncan at Camden’s Holborn Police Station.

HALLIE: Duncan Kincaid has a new foil, DI Jasmine Sidana — 35, single, smart, fiercely ambitious, prickly, starched, judgmental, complex… a teetotaler (do Brits use that word?)--if not the un-Duncan, certainly the un-Gemma. She is an inspired choice, so I’m wondering what inspired you to create her?

 DEBS: Ah, Jasmine. Duncan has always been a bit of a charmer. He’s used to everyone liking him. And as I wanted to throw him even more off balance, I thought why not give him a prickly female colleague who not only resents him taking what she thinks should have been her job, but just plain doesn’t like him, and see how he responds to that? And I liked the idea of a smart, ambitious female officer who didn’t fit into the “one of the blokes” mold. I don’t usually physically model my book characters on real people, but with Jasmine I was thinking of the British actress Parminder Nagra. Oh, I would love to see her play Jasmine Sidana!

HALLIE: The plot has some fantastic twists that I will not reveal, multiple narrators, and yet you manage to play fair with the reader. Do you know all the twists in advance, or do you come upon them as you write, and does that mean you have to go back and revise all the time (the way I do!)

DEBS: I did know most of the twists from the beginning, but I wasn’t sure how I could make them work. But instead of doing a lot of revising, I wrote REALLY SLOWLY, trying to figure out how to structure things.

 HALLIE: What was the hardest thing about this book to pull off… what was the easiest?

DEBS: The family scenes are always fun to write. I think there were too many difficult things to list! I had given Gemma a case with the idea that she would be able to make a parallel between the personality of the murderer in her case and the murderer in Duncan’s case, even though the crimes were quite different. And then I realized she actually had to solve what seemed an unsolvable case!

The compressed timeline was a monster, too. Most of my books take place in a fairly short time period, but I realized once I got into this book that this one was going to be very short. Everything happens over four days, which meant that every single scene had to count.  In the final revision I cut about forty pages, the most I’ve ever had to axe.

And then there was the continuing crime storyline—the one that is NOT resolved in this book—which is giving me fits as I’m working on the next book…

HALLIE: There’s a lovely subplot in the book about a cat and kittens that Duncan’s and Gemma’s children rescue. And knowing what an animal lover you are, I’m wondering if this echoes anything that happened to you in real life?

DEBS: Yes, actually, something like this happened to us in real life, but it didn’t have a happy ending. We had a female cat turn up on our front porch, literally starving. But she was very tame and very, very sweet, so we brought her in (isolated from the dogs and other cats) fed her and looked after her.

After a few days we decided we should have her checked over by our vet. He scanned her and she was chipped. The owner lived a few blocks from us. We had to surrender the cat to the vet for the owner to reclaim. We were devastated, but happy that she was back with her family. Then we learned a few weeks later that they’d let her out again and she’d been hit by a car and killed.

So I wrote a happy ending for Xena—and yes, I had named the real cat Xena.

HALLIE: I am dying to know, did you know how the novel would end when you started, and if not, where in the process of writing the book did you find it, because it’s a stunner?

DEBS: I did know from the very beginning. I knew, in fact, when I was writing the previous book how this book would end.  Sometimes I write the end of books part way through, if it comes to me. But this time, even though I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t let the scene play out in my head until I actually got to it. And then I wrote it almost without stopping to breathe, and I didn’t change a word.

HALLIE: Wow. I love this picture of Debs because she's got that mischievous look, like she knows something we don't. Like she's got more plot twists already up her sleeve.

So now we'll open it up for questions... Cats, kittens, continuing timelines, prickly sidekicks, and taking your characters OUT of their elements. Let 'er rip!

What We're #Writing: @deborahcrombie On Tour

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Okay, confession time. I am NOT writing. Or at least at the moment I am only writing in my head, snitches and fragments of scenes and dialogue, but I'm not managing to put things on paper, because--

My new book, TO DWELL IN DARKNESS, comes out next Tuesday, 9/23/14. But the kick-off to the five-week-plus book tour is today, with an appearance on our Dallas/Fort Worth morning TV show, Good Morning Texas. 

Then Sunday I take to the skies, although there will be sporadic returns home for signings and the occasional "rest" day (um, make that laundry, chores, restocking travel stuff...)

So this is what I'm doing.

And this.

And answering emails and doing blog posts and social media and making scheduling decisions--and trying to remember what on earth my book is about so that I can talk to people about it.  

Earlier this week I was so frazzled I gave one poor dog both dogs' dose of anti-itch medication. Major panic, dog thankfully okay.  So to make myself feel a little less stressed I treated myself to some pre-book-tour roses from the supermarket.  

And a lovely dinner with my daughter last night in downtown Dallas, with this gorgeous view of the skyline (above.)

I will set off on Sunday, hopefully well-packed and organized, with my laptop and my notebook, hoping for hotel and airport writing time on Kincaid/James #17.

So, dear REDS and readers, how do you manage to juggle too many things at one time?

What We're Writing Week--Deborah Crombie, TO DWELL IN DARKNESS, At Last!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm in roughly the same place in the book process as our Jungle  Red Lucy Burdette. Only, her new Haley Snow, Death with All the Trimmings, comes out in December, and Kincaid/James #16, To Dwell in Darkness, comes out September 23rd! What this tells you is that I was very slow and that the book is now in a crunch production schedule. This isn't fun for anyone, writer or publisher. Note to self: WRITE FASTER. Stick copies of note on keyboard and mirrors... BIG NOTE!

This also means I barely drew a breath between turning in the last chapter of the manuscript and starting my own and my editor's revisions, and that I had more editorial revisions sandwiched in with the copy edit.  A terrifying combination!  Much writerly angst!  "Will everyone hate it? What will I do then???"

Fortunately, that didn't turn out to be the case. (Or at least if my copy editor hated it, she didn't say so.) My editor is quite happy with it, I think. WHEW. 

That's my copy-edited manuscript above. The actual edit is done these days in Word Track Changes, but I ask for a printed copy as well. Everybody goes about this differently--would love to hear how REDS and other authors do it--but I do a first read-through of the digital copy, addressing the copy editor's comments that don't require much decision making. Then I curl up somewhere cozy with the printed pages, flags, and a pen, and make notes as I read, because I catch things in print that I never see on screen.  After that, I put my changes, and more changes suggested by my editor, into the digital copy. I am thrilled when I get an editor Smiley, and shudder when I see the dreaded Show, Don't Tell. (And yes, I still get those, after sixteen books...)


And now, tomorrow, just over a week after I turned in the copy edit, I will get page proofs. For non-writers out there, these are the type-set pages. You are only reading for little errors that might have slipped through the copy edit, or errors in type-setting or transcription. It's very expensive to make big changes at this stage and very much frowned upon.

Unlike the terrifying copy edit, I love reading the page proofs. It's the first time that an author gets to experience what they've written as a real BOOK. Not only have all the editing changes been incorporated, but you see the design of the book (font, chapter heads, etc.) for the first time.

The book comes to life!  In a few weeks, the ARCs (Advanced Readers Copies, or what we old fogies still call "galleys") go out, and then, in a little less than two months, TO DWELL IN DARKNESS will be on the shelves (or your e-reader.)

So what's next? I'm plotting Kincaid/James #17. I have a working title, which my editor and my agent both like, but I'm not quite sure I'm ready to share it. I have a start date for writing actual pages written in RED on my calendar. August 4th.

So hold me to it.

Here's a smidgen from TO DWELL IN DARKNESS, Chapter 1:

London was miserably cold for mid-March. There were a few hardy crocuses showing their heads in the parks and private gardens, but hard frost had nipped the daffodils and turned the early blossoms on the fruit trees crystalline.

Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid walked to Southhampton Row from Holborn tube station, his coat collar turned up, neck swaddled in a wool scarf, gloved hands shoved deep in his overcoat pockets. The sky was as dark as gunmetal, and when he turned east into Theobald’s Road, a blast of wind almost pushed him off his feet. Lowering his head, he trudged on. The weather boffins said the wind was blowing from the Siberian steppes—he wondered if he should consider one of those Russian hats with the earflaps. At least he now understood why the Russians wore the silly-looking things.

He quickened his pace as the concrete bulk of Holborn Police Station came into view. Although its architectural design might have come straight from the Gulag, it at least promised warmth.

Holborn station. His home away from home for more than two weeks now, yet he still felt as displaced as he had on his first awkward day. And as angry.

Returning to Scotland Yard from paternity leave in mid-February, he’d found his office empty. He’d been transferred from his longtime job as head of a homicide liaison team at the Yard to an area major-incident team based here in Holborn. It was a demotion, although he had kept his rank. There had been no warning and no explanation.

His immediate superior, Chief Superintendent Denis Childs, had been called out-of-the-country on a family emergency. That had added a second worry atop the first, as Kincaid and his family had been letting Childs’s sister Liz’s home in Notting Hill while her husband worked a five year contract in Singapore.

Kincaid had come to like Liz Davies, although they had only communicated via email. He hoped that the out-of-country emergency didn’t include her.

With Kincaid’s transfer to Holborn, Doug Cullen, Kincaid’s detective sergeant, had been moved into a data-entry job at the Yard, ostensibly to accommodate his recovery from a broken ankle. Now, Kincaid faced adjusting to a new job without Cullen’s capable, nerdy presence. Losing a good detective sergeant—a partner with whom you spent more hours than you did with your spouse—ranked, in his opinion, close to divorce on the scale of life disruptions, and there’d been no compensating honeymoon with his new team.

As if conjured up by his thoughts, he glimpsed his new detective constable, George Sweeney, trotting down the steps of the LA fitness gym across the street from the police station. Fresh from his morning workout, Sweeney wore a three-piece suit that was too expensive for a constable’s salary, and no overcoat. His short hair was still damp and trendily spiked, his cheeks red from his healthy exertion.

 “Morning, Guv’nor,” Sweeney said, overly hearty, as they both reached the station entrance. “You look like death warmed over,” he added, squinting at Kincaid. “A little too much partying?” Sweeney added with a wink and what came much too close to a nudge. By God, the man was irritating.

“Sick child,” Kincaid said shortly. Their three-year-old foster daughter, Charlotte, had a bad cough, and he and Gemma had taken turns to sit up with her.

“Oh, well.” Sweeney shrugged. “That means the day can only get better, right, Guv?” 

Kincaid felt a sting on his cheek, and then another. The lowering sky had begun to spit sleet.

And just for the record, I failed the compound word test. Almost every single decision I made turned out to be wrong. How do my fellow REDS fare on the compound word challenge?

Or should it be "compound-word"?  

 

What Debs is Writing--Just Make It Up

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I think I want to be Harlan Coben. Incredibly talented and successful. A really nice person. Tall. (Well, maybe as tall as Harlan would be stretching it a wee bit...) And there is the gender thing, which might be a slight issue.  All minor adjustments, I'm sure, none of which would be nearly as difficult as becoming the writer who says (as we mentioned earlier this week,) "Research? I just make things up."

Here I confess to being THE neurotic researcher. I have to check every single detail, and if I can't find something out, I will tie myself in emotional (and physical--just ask my back) knots trying to figure out what MIGHT be right.

You would think that after fifteen books, it would get easier. But Kincaid/James #16, To Dwell in Darkness, has been (excuse my British) a real bugger. In some moment of madness, I decided I wanted to set off a bomb--well, actually an incendiary grenade--in the beautifully restored St. Pancras International Railway Station, which is now the Eurostar terminal, in the King's Cross area of central London. Why, you may ask? 

Because I was, and still am, smitten with St. Pancras. The original railway station was one of the marvels of Victorian design and engineering, and the station, and the accompanying hotel, are steeped in London history. After a long decline, St. Pancras came near to falling to the developers' bulldozers. But wiser, and probably more cash-savvy, heads prevailed, and the restoration is a thing of beauty and Gothic glory, teeming with human life and traffic. 

So why not murder? (You know all crime writers are a little warped, right?)

And then came the sticky stuff. Jurisdiction, procedure, all those little nit-picky technical details. (Do you know what happens to the British rail system nation-wide when you shut down a major terminus for even an hour???) Not to mention a very complicated plot that I could have set anywhere in central London, but chose to plop in the middle of St. Pancras. 

So, after months of reading and worrying, and multiple viewings of one of my favorite episodes of MI5 (that counts as research! Rupert Penry-Jones as Adam Carter, sigh...) in which there is a bomb threat in a major London railway station, I finally pretty much decided to... DO A HARLAN. I wrote what seemed logical, and to me, reasonable, considering what I'd learned AND the constraints of fiction. (Because nobody really wants to read about two-hundred detectives and all the tedious things that they do...)

Did this cure me of obsessive researching? Uh, no. Here is a little snippet from the beginning of Chapter Eleven of To Dwell in Darkness:

He left the dark blue Ford in the car park at Didcot Parkway Railway Station sometime before dawn. You weren’t likely to be noticed coming or going from a railway station car park at odd hours, nor was the car likely to be thought abandoned if left for a few days.

A few days… Who was he kidding, after what had happened at St. Pancras? Maybe forever. But he couldn’t think about that, not yet, and at least in a railway station car park it would be some time before the car was tagged and towed, and even then nothing in it should link to him.

After a quick check to assure there was no one else about, he stowed the supplies from the boot in his big pack. Then he wiped down everything he’d touched with a clean cloth, locked the car and pocketed the key.

He stood for a moment, adjusting the weight of his heavy pack on his shoulders, gazing at the deserted station platform. Even in the dark he could see the towers of nearby Didcot Power Station. Ironic, that, as he’d participated in the protests that had got Didcot A shut down. And what had it mattered, in the end?

A train horn hooted in the distance, the sound carried on the bitter wind. He shuddered. He couldn’t bear trains now.

He turned east, towards the Thames, and began to walk.

Is there really a Didcot Parkway Railway Station? You bet. I've been through it many times, but have never stopped. But I knew where I needed my mysterious unnamed character to be, in order to walk to where he is going, and Didcot was the perfect spot. Here is where Google maps becomes your

friend. And Google Earth. Is there really a Didcot Power Station? Yes, there is. And you can see it from the railway station. And Didcot A was shut down, in part because of the demonstrations of eco-protesters. It was one of the worst polluting coal-fired power stations in Britain. Didcot B is scheduled to close in the next few years.

So, readers, what level of verisimilitude do you expect from authors? Are you willing to go with "Learn as much as you can, and then make up what makes sense and keeps the story moving?"