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

Simple Twists of Fate; a guest blog by Wendall Thomas

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Authors, unsurprisingly, tend to be a somewhat superstitious lot. Not, say, to the extent of the 2004 Red Sox players who refused to shave their increasingly shaggy beards in case it might bust the streak, but still... we have our rituals. We respect (and worry and fear) the mystery of being able to pull a whole novel out of thin air. And we're all very aware that at more than one time, we've been the recipients of luck. That weird idea you have about a Southern vampire mystery romantic comedy turns out to be a massive hit for HBO. Or, more commonly, you meet an agent at a cocktail party you almost didn't attend because you were tired, and she's the one who sells your new series for more money. 

Wendall Thomas is a big believer in luck. Or karma, or doom, to use the old Norse term. Why? Well, let's just say, "Luck plus preparation equals opportunity."

 

 

I believe in fate. 

 

There are so many times a chance meeting or a lucky accident has changed the course of my life or paid off, years later, in unexpected ways. Planning has never worked for me. I’m not just a “pantser” in writing, I’m a pantser in life. 

 

The spring I was due to graduate from The University of North Carolina, I’d managed to accumulate 2500 albums and planned on being a sound engineer. But when an all-male New England prep school called and offered to fly me up for an interview, I went. And got the job. I’ve been teaching, one way or another, ever since.  

 

 

I never planned on getting married. I just wanted to travel. So when I got a last minute job offer to lecture at a writing workshop in Ballygally, Northern Ireland, I took it. When one of the writers dropped out, an Englishman named James Bartlett took his place. At the final night party, James was too late to sit at his friends’ table and wound up next to me. Even though he was fourteen years younger and lived in Belfast, I took a chance and danced with him. That was twenty years ago. Not surprisingly, we got married in Vegas, no wedding planner required.

Wendall and James at the scene of the crime

In 1995, I wanted to go on a walking tour of the East End of London, but only had time to make it to the one in South Kensington. I couldn’t know that the inspiration for my third Cyd Redondo mystery, Fogged Off,  would come from that walk and my subsequent friendship with the wonderful guide, actress Emily Richard, and her husband, Edward Petherbridge—some of you might remember him as Lord Peter Wimsey in the 1987 BBC adaptation of the Dorothy L. Sayers’s novels.

They had met on the epic eight hour production of Nicholas Nickleby and were both trained in classical theatre. They not only gave me their guest room and endless cups of tea, they gave me an entrée into the dressing rooms, cast parties, disappointments, and gossip of the West End. From them, I also learned about the down and dirty “backstage” of the walking tour world, filled largely with out-of-work actors, and retired academics. I was fascinated by the drama behind the guides seen leading groups on every corner in the city. 

Walking (and being inspired) with Emily Richard

And I knew I’d never seen that world in a novel. So, when the pandemic demanded I write about  a place and a world I already knew well and which Cyd might find tough to navigate, I chose London and the “cutthroat” world of Jack the Ripper walking tours—highly fictionalized, of course. It was fate.

One of the last conversations I ever had with my Dad was about fate and opportunity. He’d grown up the youngest of six on a farm outside Charlotte, N.C., complete with outhouse (as a child, he was famous for locking neighbors in and making him sing to get out...). He told me that the whole trajectory of his life, which he thought he would spend as a minor league baseball player or a mechanic, came down to his willingness to veer off course and say yes to random opportunities. This “pantsing” resulted in achievements—a PhD, heading the Speech and Hearing Department at UNC, consulting for NASA—that a farm boy couldn’t have dreamed of. It was only in his later years that he saw the plan that had always been bigger than he was.

Fogged Off is dedicated to him—my role model and cheerleader for flying blind.

Are you a planner or a pantser in life? Do you believe in fate? Have you ever had a chance meeting that changed your life? Let me know, because I'm giving away a copy of Fogged Off to one lucky commenter!

 

FOGGED OFF: When travel agent Cyd Redondo’s client and Jack the Ripper expert Shep Helnikov is found dead in London, she navigates the cutthroat worlds of research librarians, unemployed actors, embassy underlings, rodent smugglers, and more to find his killer and bring his body back home.

 

Wendall Thomas teaches in the Graduate Film School at UCLA, lectures internationally on screenwriting, and has worked as an entertainment reporter, development executive, script consultant, and film and television writer. Her first Cyd Redondo novel, Lost Luggage, was nominated for the Lefty and Macavity Awards for Best Debut Mystery of 2017. Her second, Drowned Under, was nominated for a Lefty for Best Humorous Mystery of 2019 and an Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original. Her short fiction appears in the crime anthologies Ladies Night, Last Resort, and the Anthony-nominated Murder-A-Go-Go’s. You can find more at her website, like her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter as @EWendallThomas

“Laugh-out-loud, coffee-down-your-shirt, don’t-read-it-on-the-bus hilarious. . . Fogged Off is what the world needs right now.” Catriona McPherson, multi-award-winning author of the Last Ditch Motel series

“A screwball delight. . . If Preston Sturges and Janet Evanovich had a baby, she would be Cyd Redondo.” Haris Orkin, award-winning author of You Only Live Once