What We're Writing Week - Julia Tapdances

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We all know many writers are self described as pantsers - composing without outlines to guide them. I prefer the term writing organically, because that's how it feels to me: one character or event leads to another and so on and so forth until four years later soon you have a novel.

 

But whether one writes "like driving at night in the fog," as E.L. Doctrow said, or meticulously plans and plots every twist and tune in advance, every writer wrestles with the same weird and magical process: taking an idea and turning it into a story. 

 

Maybe the idea is the world's best logline: Jurassic Park, except with sharks (MEG, by Steve Alton.)

 

Maybe the idea is an amazing character: a confused teenager with Asperger's Syndrome (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.)

 

Maybe the idea is a totally out-of-the-world premise: What if people and literary characters could move in and out of books in a Great Britain still fighting the Crimean War in the 21st century? (The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde.)

 

 

 

Great ideas are all around us.  Heck, I've produced a dozen brilliant business ideas in the past decades that only fail because 1) I have no idea how to implement them and 2) I tend to forget them immediately after telling one of my kids about, say, a service that rents dogs to stressed people.

 

 

 

The jump between having an idea and having a story involves speculation, pushing and prodding the facts, research, stretching the idea like Silly Putty with a picture pressed into it, weighing what's interesting and will open up new avenues for exploration, and what, instead, is a dead end. For some writers, this messy process takes longer than actually producing the words that make up the manuscript.

 

So now I have to confess that I'm not, at the moment, talking about what I'm doing with AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY. What I'm talking about is Make Your Own Murder, an event I'm taking part in - right now, if you're reading this after 1pm EDT! - at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine campus in Portland. It's the baying crowd eager-to-learn attendees versus three mystery authors: me, Kate Flora, and Richard Cass. We'll be taking suggestions from the crowd for plot ideas, setting, and characters, and from that, we're supposed to spin out a story synopsis  - within two hours. 

 

Since we set our plows in different fields - I write traditional, Kate is doing the Joe Burgess police procedurals, and Dick is well-known for his noirish private eye series about jazzman Elder Darrow - it's going to be very interesting to see how we work when harnessed together. I'll let you all know how it went in the comments later this afternoon (how much later depends on whether we go out for drinks afterwards...)

 

Do you have experience spinning a single idea (or two) into story gold, dear readers? And have you ever seen/ participated in an "authors making $#%! up on the fly" event?

JULIA: I'm finally home at 5pm, and I'm utterly wiped out! Dick and Kate and I had so much fun, and the almost-overflowing crowd did as well, with lots and lots of great suggestions coming from the audience, back-and-forth about how and why authors make certain decisions about character, setting, motivation and plot lines, and (very flattering to the three of us) lots of book sales through Maine fave Kelly's Books To Go. 

We settled on, I think, several characters based on names and occupations the audience had written down. We drew names first, then settings, because we all agreed where the story was taking place was the next more important thing to who was in it. We decided on the Moosehead Lake region (featuring a foggy swamp) populated by an elegant antiques dealer, a judge, a new-age spiritual guru (and con man,) a wastewater plant supervisor, a clinical social worker, a Finnish-American pathologist and a Mi'kmac trout farmer/Maine guide. 

Over the course of two hours (less, really, with all the asides) we showed the audience how the sausage was made. We killed off the sewage treatment guy first, and then changed the social worker from the detective to the second victim. We decided the antiques dealer was in it with the "shaman," providing fake Indian relics to sell, and later decided she was married to the judge, and having an affair with her partner in crime.

The pathologist went from being a possible killer to the protagonist, as she tried to discover the parent who abandoned her when she was an infant. Surprise, it was the judge! The big action sequence at the end was when she saved the judge from the real killer...

his wife, the antiques dealer, who was trying to off him for his money. The only thing we didn't get to was what I would definitely put in: a burgeoning romance between the pathologist and the aquaculturist/ Maine guide. 

This doesn't begin to cover the various motives - everyone wanted someone dead! - or the discussion over frying pan versus antique rifle as the murder weapon. Honestly, it wasn't a bad start to a book - I'd tackle it if I wrote as fast as Jenn or Rhys!

It definitely got my creative juices flowing, and I can highly suggest going to any similar event if one turns up near you. (The OLLI director was so impressed, she wants to make it a regular offering every semester.) I wish you all could have been there with us!

Kate Flora writes... because we NEED heroes

HALLIE EPHRON: Kate Flora is one of those multi-talented writers who can write a police procedural one minute, switch to true crime, and then move on to one that's more traditional. She's probably the first mystery writer I met when I started to write, and she welcomed me into the amazing community of crime fiction writers. She's smart, generous, and multi-talented.

I caught up with Kate and asked her about her new books - she's got SEVERAL of them!
 

Kate Flora: Since the terrible events at the Squirrel Hill synagogue, I’ve been regularly checking the news, looking for a thoughtful and compassionate grownup to come forward and speak to us. Speak to the country. Say the words that we need to hear about who we are and why we are, and try to bring us together.

No such person has appeared. But looking for leadership, and courage, and decency and bravery has brought my thoughts around to crime writing. Why we do it, and why crime novels can play such an important part in the lives of our readers.

Some years ago, when Hallie was doing a book launch right after 9/11, she arrived shaken by an interviewer who had challenged her about whether it was right to write crime for entertainment when the world had just seen such criminal violence. Hallie’s response was perfect. She said we should all wish the world were more like the world of the crime novel, because in the world that we writers are creating, morality prevails and bad guys don’t. (My words, not hers. She likely said it better.)

In my books, I like to write heroes. Joe Burgess, in my police procedural series, is someone who gets justice for victims. Thea Kozak, in her series, describes herself as “Thea the Human Tow Truck.” She’s someone who has to stop and help the helpless, those who are broken down on the roadsides of life. I worry sometimes about whether my endings are too happy, but I like to end the books with a sense of crimes solved, order restored, and send my characters onward to fight another day.

The heroes and heroines in my new crime story collection, Careful What You Wish For: Stories of revenge, retribution, and the world made right, are a mixed bag. There are the victims’ teenaged children grappling with the mystery of their parents’ deaths. One is a teenaged soccer player forced to become the adult when her father’s death sends her mother to the bottle, who is determined to locate the car that struck her father down. There’s a confused son shocked to discover how much people disliked his lawyer dad. There’s the grieving wife, coached by her husband’s ghost, who searches for the sleazy gun dealer who sold the defective gun that killed him.

These heroines—and they are mostly women who star in these stories—are often dealing with difficult domestic situations. The man trying to poison his wife becomes his own victim. The sad new widow continues to set the traps her husband devised to keep her safe when he was on the road, and catches herself a pair of thieves. An abused wife who can’t take it any more finds a gun in an unlocked car.

Worms Crawl In, told from the viewpoint of a mother sitting in the trial of her daughter’s killer, was inspired by the real world courage shown by a murder victim’s mother I observed while writing the true crime, Finding Amy.

They may often be everyday people, dealing with the troubles in ordinary lives, but as is the case in my series mysteries, the characters in these stories become brave, become problem solvers, become inspired by the desire to do the right thing. I hope readers may find some comfort in the stories, may raise a fist and say, “Yes,” in these times when we are seeking courage and strength. All while being entertained.

HALLIE: Applauding Kate's sentiments... And wondering, despite the fact that crime fiction is about crime, are the books you read a source of comfort, courage, and strength... or is entertainment enough?

About Kate Flora:

Kate Flora’s fascination with people’s criminal tendencies began in the Maine attorney general’s office. Deadbeat dads, people who hurt their kids, and employers’ discrimination aroused her curiosity about human behavior. The author of twenty books and many short stories, Flora’s been a finalist for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Derringer awards. She won the Public Safety Writers Association award for nonfiction and twice won the Maine Literary Award for crime fiction. Death Warmed Over, her 8^th Thea Kozak mystery, was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award. Her 9th Thea Kozak mystery, Schooled in Death, was published in November. Her new crime story collection is Careful What You Wish For: Stories of revenge, retribution, and the world made right.

Flora’s nonfiction focuses on aspects of the public safety officers’ experience. Her two true crimes, Finding Amy: A true story of murder in Maine (with Joseph K. Loughlin) and Death Dealer: How cops and cadaver dogs brought a killer to justice, follow homicide investigations as the police conducted them. Her co-written memoir of retired Maine warden Roger Guay, A Good Man with a Dog: A Game Warden’s 25 Years in the Maine Woods, explores policing in a world of guns, misadventure, and the great outdoors. Her latest nonfiction is Shots Fired: The Misconceptions, Misunderstandings, and Myths about police shootings with retired Portland Assistant Chief Joseph K. Loughlin. Flora divides her time between Massachusetts and Maine.

Flying By Five Pairs of Pants

RHYS BOWEN: I have always thought it would be rather fun to be part of a serial novel (how about it, fellow Jungle Reds??) so when my friends Lise McClendon and Taffy Cannon told me about their project to write a mystery with Katy Munger, Gary Phillips and Kate Flora, I was dying to see the finished product and to know how they survived without murdering each other--I mean, Gary Phillips and Taffy Cannon writing the same book? Was that even possible?

But they did it and now BEAT, SLAY, LOVE is out and available (under the pen name of Thalia Gilbert) and an awful lot of fun.  So they stopped by Jungle Red today to tell us about it.

*****

Taffy Cannon: One thing that amazed me about this project is that almost everything was conducted via email. The five of us live all over the country: San Diego, LA, Montana, North Carolina and Maine.

Kate Flora: I didn’t know everyone well, just in passing, and frankly Gary has always terrified me a bit.

Gary Phillips: Me, terrifying? It’s just what I write … those characters scare me, too.

Lise McClendon:  We know you’re just a big teddy bear, Gary.

Katy Munger: Yeah, he’s a teddy bear until you play poker with him … and then he turns into a shark.

***

Kate: Any smart and seasoned writer knows that taking chances is the best way to grow, and that embracing fun is a great antidote to the swirling pot of anxiety we mostly simmer in. So of course when the suggestion went around that we write a group novel, I said, “YES!”  We’d already done a dress rehearsal in our short story collection, Dead of Winter.

Gary: We’d worked out bare bones aspects of the plot via emails and some in-person discussions so jumping into the story wasn’t that daunting. We knew were going to do a black comedy of sorts, gallows humor -- thrills and chills but with a wink to the reader. 

Taffy: Bare bones is putting it mildly. At the beginning, all we knew was that chefs were being killed by a youngish woman with weight and vengeance issues. No outline, no character sketches, nothing but an intention to let ‘er rip. We were flying by the seats of five different pairs of pants.

Katy: To me the experience was akin to that of being a playwright. I would write the bones of the story, but then the actors would bring so much more insight and value to the body of work that it astonished me. That’s exactly what happened here.

Kate: I’ve been thinking that it was like being in a TV show’s writing room, where everyone is bouncing ideas off each other. Except we did it on paper instead of talking it out.

Lise:  Our characters evolved as we wrote, over many months. At the end I had a moment where I thought I might have been the writer who did this scene or that, who even introduced one of them. But was I? Hmmm. It was all so meshed together I couldn’t actually tell.

Katy: I’m not sure this process would work with any group of writers – had there been a control freak among us, we would have been doomed – but it sure did work with this group. By the end, we had somehow divined what each other were thinking.

Taffy: In some ways, I think Katy had the biggest challenge in pulling everything together at the end. There were – how shall I put this? – a few unresolved questions, characters, issues, and problems. Okay, more than a few.

Katy: As I read and reread what everybody wrote, I realized that there were common threads that ran through all of our contributions. After that, everything fell into place.

Lise: It didn’t matter in the end. Not one bit. Because the whole really is bigger than its parts.

Gary: I think that knowing we wanted to have fun really comes through to the reader.

Taffy: The element of fun was probably the single most important part of this project for me. I had been working on some fairly grim nonfiction, and Beat Slay Love was a lovely change of pace.

Katy: There was a sort of anonymity in the process that I think freed us up to write things we would not write under our own name alone.

Taffy:  I very carefully toned down an early sex scene that I wrote, even though we knew from the outset that this was definitely not a cozy. Others sex scenes followed that left me in their dust. We won’t name names, but at least one remarkably raunchy scene ended up on the cutting room floor.

Lise: That was the point of collaboration. Our writing styles differed, sure. Some smoothing out was necessary at the end. But each of us contributed to building these characters. So much so, that it became impossible to figure out what I wrote, what she wrote, what he wrote.

Gary: I’ve written other stories with female protagonists and I do have to pause now and then when writing from a woman’s perspective, mostly checking myself on dialogue. Snippets of certain female characters in print and on screen flash in my mind or I’ll summon up conversations between my wife and our grown daughter as a kind of reality check.

Kate: That lovely moment when it was each of our turns, and the novel arrived again with new chapters, new adventures, new twists and turns, new food, and a new region of the country. It was like simultaneously reading and writing a good book.

Taffy: We called this a mystery in the beginning, but about two-thirds of the way through I realized that structurally we were actually working within a thriller format. The killer was revealed fairly early on and we knew much of what she planned. There were multiple points of view and far flung locations. And we picked up the pacing as the story progressed, moving to shorter chapters, scenes, and paragraphs.  Without even realizing it, we had invented a new subgenre: the culinary thriller.

Lise: Beat Slay Love is one big whole that I am so proud of. What a kick-ass ride it’s been!

Beat Slay Love is the world’s first culinary thriller, credited to “Thalia Filbert” but written by Lise McClendon, Katy Munger, Gary Phillips, Kate Flora, and Taffy Cannon. All are members of the Thalia Press Author Coop (TPAC). Somebody is killing the celebrity chefs of television all around the country, and a food blogger teams with an FBI agent to solve the crimes.

RHYS: And they'd love to give away a copy to someone who comments today! So don't be shy.

Too Many Cooks? (Never!) Kate Flora on BEAT, SLAY, LOVE

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I'm delighted to introduce the lovely Kate Flora. She's one of the five ( ! ) authors from the blog Views from the Muse, who together wrote the culinary thriller BEAT, SLAY LOVE: One Chef's Hunger for Delicious Revenge together. New York Times-bestselling author Charlaine Harris says:  "For anyone who’s ever watched CHOPPED or even stopped in at Williams Sonoma, “Beat Slay Love” is the perfect read. An incredibly sly mystery, it has everything you’d want when you bite into a dish: suspense, spice, and a new take on an old classic." 

Take it away, Kate!

KATE FLORA: When a group of the authors who blog together at Views from the Muse https://thaliapressauthors.wordpress.com decided to write a novel together, anything could have happened. How could five people who live in different parts of the country, don’t know each other well, and write wildly different types of books possibly do it? How would the process work? How would we even figure out what we’d write about?

There’s an old expression that goes “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” Definitely not true in this case. With over a hundred years of writing and publishing experience, and more than 75 books among us, we might be taking on something entirely new, but we all knew how to write, edit, discuss, and collaborate. We quickly agreed on our theme: a serial killer who was knocking off famous TV chefs. Without much more of a plan than that, we embarked on what came to be called, Beat, Slay, Love, a send-up of the journey toward self-discovery, and Americans’ obsessions with celebrity culture and food, by the imaginary Thalia Filbert.

The writers:

Gary Phillips writes hardboiled tales of flawed characters and their pursuit of hollow dreams.  In addition to being part of the Beat, Slay, Love crew, he is co-editor of Occupied Earth, an anthology of life and resistance under the boot heels of the alien Mahk-Ra. http://gdphillips.com

Katy Munger has written fifteen crime fiction novels, including series in the cozy, private eye, and modern noir genres. She was a co-founder of Tart Noir. http://katymunger.com

Lise McClendon writes mystery and suspense, celebrating 20 years in print last year. Her series include an art dealer in Jackson Hole, a private eye in Kansas City, and a lawyer with five sisters in France. She also writes thrillers as Rory Tate (PLAN X) and co-owns Thalia Press with Katy Munger. http://lisemcclendon.com

Taffy Cannon has written a mainstream novel, thirteen mysteries, an Academy Award-nominated short film, and The Baby Boomer's Guide to SibCare. http://taffycannon.com

Kate Flora writes two series—strong, amateur, female PI in her Thea Kozak series and cops in her Joe Burgess police procedurals. She’s published more than fifteen crime stories. She’s been a publisher at Level Best Books and teaches writing at Grub Street in Boston. http://kateflora.com

The process was simple: each of us would write a section, then pass the book along to the next author. Sometimes there was a pause while extra chapters were added in, or a discussion about the order of various events. Barbecue in Texas before or after lobsters in Maine? 

Sometimes different writer’s versions of the same character needed to be discussed and revised—was Jason Bainbridge a schlump or a hipster? Would he ever get together with the icy FBI agent? Or might she thaw? How hefty was our protagonist? Was it possible so many had done her wrong, and how had they done it? 

Still, even though it took a couple years, and involved a lot of work at the end to smooth it out and find just the right ending, it proved, as one writer observed, to be a lot more fun than we’d imagined.

The result? A book we’re all proud of. Read an excerpt here: http://wp.me/P2PnOF-2j

To celebrate we’ve put together a cookbook of party recipes called Thalia Filbert’s Killer Cocktail Party. To get a copy, send a quick note to Thalia (our pseudonymous five-person author) at thaliapress@gmail.com.

Beat Slay Love: One Chef’s Hunger for Delicious Revenge

by Thalia Filbert

Thalia Press     October 1, 2015

•    To order the book for Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015BQUZCK

•    To add it to your Goodreads shelf: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26258450-beat-slay-love

•    To request a paperback at your local independent bookstore: ask for ISBN: 978-0-9819442-1-0

•    To buy a paperback online: https://www.createspace.com/5737186

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you so much, Kate! Reds and lovely readers, do you think you could write a novel in collaboration with others? (I keep thinking of the phrase, "Plays well with others".... ) Do you do best solo or as part of a team? Please tell us in the comments!

Kate Flora juggles facts and fictions...

HALLIE EPHRON: The fall harvest of wonderful books includes a bounty from Kate Flora: two new books, one crime fiction and one true crime.

Kate, who struck gold with her Edgar nominated true crime Finding Amy, follows it up this month with Death Dealer. Then next month she follows her third Joe Burgess mystery, Redemption, which won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction, with a new entry in the series, And Grant You Peace. 

Crime fiction and true crime. I confess, I can more easily imagine juggling cats. Kate, how do you do it?

KATE FLORA: I can’t juggle. Tried to learn years ago, thinking it might help me draw a crowd at book signings, but every time I introduced the third ball, I hit myself in the head with it. Juggling being out, I went in search of other adventures, and while I was messing around trying to learn to write cops, true crime found me.

My first true crime, Finding Amy, I co-wrote to help out my friend Joe Loughlin, who was the lieutenant in charge of CID at the Portland, Maine police department when Amy disappeared. Research led me to meet Lt. Pat Dorian who headed search and rescue. At the launch party for Finding Amy, Pat said to me, “So, Kate, when you’re ready, I’ve got another one for you.” It turned out to be a murder in Miramachi, New Brunswick.

True crime takes twice as long to write as a novel, and I have to spend years with images of real crime victims in my head. On the flip side, the research gets me away from desk into a world that is fascinating.

The story seemed compelling to me. First, the suspect threatened to harm the investigators’ families when they pressed him about his lies. They hadn’t found the victim’s body, which turned out to have been hidden in the woods. And they had only a small window of opportunity to find it when it had thawed enough to give off scent that the dogs could work on, but before bear emerging from hibernation found the body and consumed it.

It took seven years to get justice for the victim in that case, and for me to have a final ending for Death Dealer.

HALLIE: Tell us about the process you went through to write Death Dealer.

KATE: I started out by getting introduced to investigators who gave me access to the case. I spent hours reading files and doing interviews and watching videos and sitting in courtrooms. I ate a lot of Miramichi salmon drove an ATV deep into the woods to see where the body was hidden. Learned all about training of search and rescue dogs and cadaver dogs. As always, I am amazed at the generosity and openness of the people I interviewed to write this book.

HALLIE: Is there a ‘hero’ of that true story, as there is with your Joe Burgess novels?

KATE: As Joe Burgess likes to say—he doesn’t do it, his team does. In Death Dealer, it was the team of investigators who worked the case; the wardens who organized and participated in that search; and MESARD volunteers.

And then there were the friends of the victim, Maria Tanasichuk, who were terrified of the suspect yet came forward to speak on behalf of their murdered friend. The code of friendship triumphing over any code of silence.

HALLIE: What are the special challenges of making it up versus hewing to the facts?

KATE: Well, I think the challenge of making it up, in a world where our readers are often well-informed by other writers, and real world news stories, is trying to get it right.

When I was working on And Grant You Peace, the new Joe Burgess book that’s out next month, Burgess and Terry Kyle watch a young man they recognized walking down the street toward a convenience store with a suspicious bulge in his pocket that tells them he’s got a gun. I knew they were going to be going into that store, and that it was a very dangerous situation, so I e-mailed two police officers I use as resources, and called a third, and had them walk me through the scene.

That’s the challenge. Writing cops who feel credible.

HALLIE: Does one kind of writing enrich the other?

KATE:  Absolutely. What I’ve learned from all of my time with cops informs my writing when I am writing fictional cops.

When you flip that question, all of the time I’ve spent learning to reveal character to a reader, in shaping story so that it has a dramatic arc, in finding the right voice and stance to tell the story—those things have been invaluable when I’m writing a true story.

HALLIE: My hat is off to you, Kate. Years of work and a commitment to justice. And meanwhile you’re spinning out novels.

Kate will be checking in today so feel free to pepper her with questions about how she manages this true juggling act.

ABOUT Death Dealer: How Cops and Cadaver Dogs Brought a Killer to Justice by Kate Flora

When the hunters become the hunted, life for law enforcement officials and their families in Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada, turns upside-down. It takes a months-long investigation by police, search and rescue dogs and their handlers to catch a suspected serial killer.

ABOUT And Grant You Peace by Kate Flora

This 4th book in the Joe Burgess mystery series finds Burgess pulled inadvertently into a case rife with religious tensions after finding a young mother and a baby locked in a closet inside a burning mosque. His search for answers leads him to an outlaw motorcycle gang, a fishing boat captain who may be supplementing his income with illegal activities, and an immigrant community suspicious of the police.

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.