A Community of Writers

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  It is my great pleasure today to bring you my friend Gigi Sherrell Norwood. She is my multi-talented neighbor, my long-time writing buddy, and she has a terrific new novelette out this week, DEEP ELLUM BLUES.

 

 

If I have encouraged (enabled!) her to buy cars and houses, she's set me on the road to addiction to fountain pens, journals, pottery, and quilts. I call it a fair trade. And she's always there for a cup of tea, a chat, a story critique, or a bit of baking. I call that priceless.

GIGI SHERRELL NORWOOD: What would I ever have done without the members of my writing community? I get up every morning to savor my tea as I read Jungle Red Writers. I call my panel of experts with questions about medicine, police procedure, and sports. I turn to them for encouragement, or a swift kick in the pants whenever I need it. It seems like every day I learn something new and interesting from at least one of them.

 They are my beta readers, when I need to know if a new story has succeeded or failed.

They are my street team when I release a new story, as I did on Wednesday with my latest e-read novelette, Deep Ellum Blues.

They are my tribe. They understand me. Even if they don’t like the genre I’m writing in, they know what I’m going through as I struggle to bring a new story into the world.

Most importantly, they are my critique partners—those trusted friends I know I can turn to when I need good, sound advice about my writing, or my life.

 

(Gigi and Debs, dates for a gala.)

My critique partners—particularly Jungle Red Writers’ own Deborah Crombie—have been there with support at many critical turning points in my life. Picture these actual scenarios, and see if you can draw some critique partner wisdom and encouragement from them, too.

Writer: I’m thinking about reviving a novel I wrote 15 years ago. Things have changed so much. It probably won’t work. I dunno . . .

Critique Partner: I always loved that story. I’m glad you came back to it.

 

Writer: It’s crap! It’s all crap! It’s the crappiest book I’ve ever wasted paper and toner on. I know this to my bones. Will you please read it?

Critique partner: (15 minutes later, after reading it) It’s not crap.

 

Writer: I just finished my chapter. Do you want to read it?

Critique Partner: (15 minutes later, after reading it) You bitch! How could you leave me hanging like that? Where’s the next chapter? And, by the way, great hook!

 

Writer: I need help brainstorming my new story.

Critique Partner: I have wine.

 

(Gigi and Debs' joint effort Christmas trifle.)

A good critique partner can be equally helpful when the writer is facing a life crisis of the non-writing variety. Take these actual situations, for instance:

 

Writer: I need to drive 500 miles north on yet another frustrating quest to settle an elderly family member’s estate.

Critique Partner: Road Trip! I call shotgun!

 

Writer: Where will I go? What will I do? I can’t live in this god-forsaken backwater any longer!

Critique Partner: Come spend the weekend with me. You might like my town. (And she did.)

 

Writer: Where will I go? What will I do? I can’t go back home for the holidays this year!

Critique Partner: Come have holiday dinner with us! Bring pie. And tequila.

(Gigi's pie for Debs' Thanksgiving.)
 

Writer: I HATE my car! It doesn’t even fit me.

Critique Partner: Oh, go on. Try the Mustang GT. What can it hurt?

(NOTE: The Writer has now paid off her second Mustang GT.)

 Writer: Oh, my God, I’m such a neurotic mess! I’ll never find a house, and everybody will hate me for whining so much about it.

Critique Partner: Yes, I know you’re a neurotic mess, but I love you anyway.

 

Probably my favorite example of my critique partners coming through for me in a crisis happened on my 18^th wedding anniversary. It was the first wedding anniversary I faced without my husband, who had died eight months earlier. Anniversaries are hard on me—particularly those private ones that don’t mean much to anyone else, but were deeply meaningful to Warren and me. Without Warren, our wedding anniversary kicked me into a deep depression. The only reason I brushed my hair and crawled out of the house that day was to meet with my critique group. They didn’t know the day was significant to me until they asked me how I was doing, at which point I burst into tears and explained my situation. These are the responses I got:

Critique Partner 1: It will be okay.

Critique Partner 2: You’re strong.

Critique Partner 3: We all miss him.

Critique Partner 4: You’re taking notes, aren’t you, so you can use this in some future novel?

 

I loved them all, but Critique Partner 4 really saved the day, because she made me laugh for the first time in ages. I laughed because she was right. In some part of my brain, I was taking notes, even though I still haven’t written that novel yet.

If any of these situations sound familiar, tell your critique partner how much you cherish him or her. And tell us your own fun, funny, wonderful critique partner stories!

 

Gigi with Gift, her kitten adopted after last year's Bouchercon.

Gigi Norwood was more or less doomed to a life as an arts professional. Her mother was an art teacher and her father taught drafting and design. She was listening to classical music in the
womb, and spent her summer vacations roaming art museums the way other kids went to Disneyland. She took her first stab at storytelling when she was four, and turned pro when she was twenty-six. Since then she has written political speeches, press releases, brochure copy, radio commercials, and feature stories for a major regional newspaper. After a stint in corporate healthcare, she fled home to the arts. She is currently the Director of Concert Operations for the Dallas Winds. Her first published fiction, Deep Ellum Pawn, was released in 2019. The sequel, Deep Ellum Blues, was released this week. 

More about DEEP ELLUM BLUES: 

"People have the right to make their own hideous, life-altering mistakes.”

 As the genius loci of Deep Ellum, Ms. Eddy Weeks is a hands-off goddess who won’t micro-manage human affairs.  She’d rather sit on the sidelines and enjoy the show.

 But a young blues musician named Mudcat Randall is flirting with disaster.  Eddy’s old adversary wants Mudcat to sign a tempting management contract.  Eddy knows there are deadly strings attached.  Can she afford to stand back when a third force enters the fray, and everything Mudcat has ever prayed for is suddenly on the line?

 

G.S. Norwood--Everyday Magic

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Here on Jungle Red Writers we have few bigger thrills than introducing a friend to our readers. So it is my great pleasure today to bring you G.S. Norwood--or, as our regular readers know her, Gigi Norwood! Gigi and I have not only been writing buddies for many a year, we share a love of urban fantasy as well as mystery. And although she writes in both genres, DEEP ELLUM PAWN hits all my favorite urban fantasy notes. Here's Gigi to introduce you to Ms. Eddy Weekes and a bit of magic.

GIGI NORWOOD: I believe in magic.  Not the David Copperfield, big stage illusion kind.  Not the Harry Potter wave-a-wand-and-say-the-right-words kind.  I believe in the natural kind that arises from the energy shared by people who gather around a common belief.

You’ve probably felt that energy yourself, humming through a crowd of grandparents, parents, grand and great-grandchildren at the start of last movie in the Star Wars triple trilogy.  If you gasped along with the little ones as the snowflakes began to fall at the end of the first act of The Nutcracker, you have felt it.  It’s the energy that whispers amazing things are possible, and Tinkerbell will survive, if only we believe.

To write urban fantasy, as I do, you have to believe that kind of life-force energy hums just under the surface of even the grittiest city.  You have to peel back the layers of concrete and asphalt right down to the dirt, then call on the folklore and fairy tales, old songs and old wives’ tales that have grown up around a place. You weave in history and legend until the story has one foot in reality, and one foot in fantasy.

My novelette, Deep Ellum Pawn, began with that mix of practicality and possibility.  I had an old Charlie Daniels song stuck in my mind.  The Devil Went Down to Georgia is catchy, but I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would want a fiddle made of gold.  Gold is a dense metal, heavy to hold, and not very resonant.  A golden fiddle—particularly one from the Devil himself—would likely sound less than musical.  So, what do you do with it?  Melt it down? Take it to a pawn shop?

The moment that thought popped into my mind a character followed.  That’s how I met Ms. Eddy Weekes, owner of Deep Ellum Pawn.  It’s a dusty pawn shop in one of Dallas’ oldest neighborhoods, but there’s more going on behind the façade than anyone might suspect.

The story flowed quickly, and I began to wonder if I’d made it up, or if some force beyond my imagination was prompting me to write it all down the way it “really” happened.  Every time I paused to research a new plot point, I found not only the answer I was looking for, but reams of additional information that made the whole idea even richer and deeper.

For example, hellhounds make an appearance in the story.  And why not?  The dance halls and street corners of Deep Ellum gave many American blues legends an early career boost.  The district is only a few short blocks away from the building where bluesman Robert Johnson recorded his song, Hellhound on My Trail.  Johnson himself gave me my first clue about how to manage hellhounds when his lyrics mentioned hotfoot powder—a folk charm used to harden the threshold of a home against supernatural invaders.  A bit further down the hellhound trail I learned that to look one in the eye three times means death.  Great stuff for an urban fantasist.

When different ideas, drawn from history, folklore, and my own imagination, all fall together to make a coherent and entertaining whole, that feels like magic to me.

So what about you, Reds and Readers?  Have you ever had a project come together “as if by magic”?  Have you felt the energy that moves through a crowd to make magic seem real?  Do you believe?

 

Deep Ellum Pawn cover art © 2019 by Chaz Kemp

Amazon Kindle Edition Link: https://amzn.to/36Z8GNT

Dance of the Snowflakes credited to the Royal Ballet

Author photo: Marcy Weiske Jordan

G. S. Norwood is the younger of two sisters behind the independent publishing company, Weird Sisters Publishing.  She has spent the past thirty-seven years getting paid to put words on paper, including work as a reporter, feature writer, and composer of program and liner notes for the Dallas Winds.  Deep Ellum Pawn is her first published fiction. 

Dana Cameron and the Cliffhanger Ending

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Writer Dana Cameron is one of our favorite guests on JRW. She's as funny, interesting, and multi-talented as her heroines. (She is, like two of her heroines, an archeologist, but she is NOT a werewolf. Or so she says...) She is also the mistress of the cliffhanger ending, a subject dear to my heart.

DANA CAMERON:  Recently, I encountered something I'd always hoped to avoid:  an angry dental hygienist. 
    I had showed up, early, for my regular checkup, and she, the DH, came out to the waiting room, not quite swinging, but definitely riled.
    “You get in there, and you sit down!” DH said.  “I'm so mad at you!”
    She's usually really pleasant and, like I said, I visit the dentist twice a year and get there early, so I couldn't imagine what I'd done that was so bad.  I got very nervous when I saw the tray of sharp, shiny tools next to the dental chair; they looked even more sinister than usual.  I didn't like to think what the DH was capable of doing with them.
    “What's up?” I started to say, but she laid into me before I got the second syllable out.
    “How could you do that?  How could you leave Zoe hanging like that?  At the end?”
    This slowed me down, because I have a cat named Zoe (for the character in “Firefly”), and as far as I knew, hadn't left her hanging anywhere. It took me a minute to realize the DH meant my character Zoe Miller, the archaeologist (and occasional werewolf) in my first two urban fantasy novels, Seven Kinds of Hell  and Pack of Strays . At the end of Strays, I'd left Zoe in the middle of a very bad spot, surrounded by enemies who want to destroy her Fangborn Family, and then suddenly, threw a monkey wrench into the works.  I finished that book with a cliffhanger.

 I didn't undertake a cliffhanger intentionally, and certainly didn't decide to keep it lightly.  I once stood up in bed and screamed, having reached the end of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, not realizing the book is unfinished.  I knew there had to be a HEA, but to read all that and not have a wedding?  It wasn't even a matter of waiting for a sequel, because Gaskell had died before finishing the book, a century before I was born.  So I understand Narrative Interruptus.  My husband, Mr. G, still regularly asks me if the book I'm enjoying is finished, and whether the author is still alive. He was traumatized by that book too, mostly because my screaming woke him up.
    As a reader, I remember how I felt when I reached the end of Tolkien's The Two Towers and couldn't get to the library fast enough to find out what happened to Sam and Frodo.  I was lucky, coming to the Hunger Games books late, just before the third one, so I didn't have too long to wait.  I remembering wondering what could be right with the world when The Empire Strikes Back ended the way it did.  With the third episode of every season of Sherlock, I'm left wondering how I'll make it another year (or two or three!) I won't be able to bear it.  And yet, there is a deliciousness in being so involved in a story, and then so surprised by an ending that isn't exactly...complete.
    But as a writer, I want that kind of engagement.  I want a reader to be involved and be going through, at some level, what my protagonist is experiencing.  I also know that there has to be an end to a book.  As I was finishing Strays, I'd written what ended up being the first chapter of Hellbender before I realized I'd started a whole new book.  I had to leave some of the ending's resolution for the next book.  If I could have found a way to end with less drama, would I?  I don't think so.  The second book in an arc has to have tension in it.  You need that suspense. 
    Finally, I was able to reassure the DH that Hellbender was being written and that she would have her answers.  And with the launch of Hellbender last week, I hope she is pleased with how I got Zoe out of the bind and initiated the chaos of I-Day, or the “identification” of the Fangborn to the rest of the world, which is probably not ready to learn that vampires, werewolves, and oracles walk among them.
    So readers, do you have a favorite cliffhanger?  Or do you simply hate them, craving immediate closure?  Writers, to you avoid them or embrace them in a series? 
  
Whether writing colonial noir, thriller, urban fantasy, or traditional mystery, Dana Cameron draws from her expertise in archaeology.  Her fiction has earned multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards and an Edgar Award nomination.  Hellbender, the third Fangborn urban fantasy novel, is available now from 47North, and her Sherlockian pastiche, "The Curious Case of Miss Amelia Vernet," was published in 2014.  Dana lives in Massachusetts with her husband and benevolent feline overlords.


DEBS: Dana, we are obviously kindred souls! Firefly AND Elizabeth Gaskill? AND The Lord of the Rings?? (And yes, I do like cliffhangers. You might have guessed...)