KN Magazine: Articles
Live From Bangalore: A Book's Journey
It’s no secret that the world is shrinking; globalization, social media, and widespread availability of the internet has made the exchange of information between distant locales easier and faster than ever before. But what effect does this brave new world have on publishing.
Author and Bangalore-based businessman Vasudev Murthy recounts his own publishing experiences and how this global market has allowed his works to take minds, and journies, of their own.
A Book's Journey
By Vasudev Murthy
They say that every book finds its reader. In 2016, that could well mean someone in a tiny town in Brazil or in Seoul in Korea.
I live in Bangalore, a city in southern India. I write on a variety of subjects—Music, Crime, Humour, Management . . . I have a lot to say and I shall keep writing. I’ve been published by Rupa, Sage, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Poisoned Pen Press and a few more. I realize that I’ve been very fortunate.
But this is not about my fortune but the interesting experience of suddenly finding my books being read in far-away places. Much happens by serendipity as I shall show.
I wrote Sherlock Holmes in Japan in 2012-13. It was published by HarperCollins India and was then showcased by them at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Robert Rosenwald, the CEO of Poisoned Pen Press bumped into someone at the HarperCollins stall and decided to acquire the US rights. PPP renamed the book Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Japan and did an additional round of editing and launched it in the US in March 2015 with a gorgeous cover.
Things became even more interesting. Shortly thereafter, HarperCollins sold the Portuguese language rights to Editora Vestigio in Brazil. It was translated with a great deal of finesse by Ana Oliviera and appears to have become very popular. The book’s production was quite wonderful and the cover design daring and different. What a pity I can’t read the language!
I developed a positive relationship with PPP (in distant Arizona) and worked with them on planning my next book. And soon, I signed a contract with PPP for Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Timbuktu. The book was published in January 2016.
Meanwhile, a Korean publisher called Gamesman reached out to HarperCollins and acquired the Korean language rights. Their particular speciality is the sale of one e-chapter at a time; Korea has apparently adopted e-Books in a very big way. Along with that has come new business models which allows readers to decide on moving ahead chapter by chapter; that’s pressure on a writer to keep things interesting throughout or lose the reader!
A friend in Japan introduced a major publisher Kokusho-Kankokai to HarperCollins India which resulted in the sale of the Japanese language rights, something that I was hoping for at the back of my mind.
But what has all this taught me?
One: the world is truly shrinking. Deals are made faster than ever before and publishers are unafraid of placing their bets on a relatively unknown writer if the theme is compelling enough.
Two: the book you write has a life of its own. I can no longer control its destination and I have no way of knowing how true the translation is. It’s a risk worth taking. One never knows what may happen. For instance, a reader in Brazil made a video about it!
Three: your neighbour in Bangalore does not know who you are, except as the guy with the barking dogs, but people in tiny towns in Brazil and the US do and often write in. I find it slightly surreal. The books have made me an international citizen in a way.
Four: it’s very exhilarating working with publishers and editors overseas and seeing how they think. It’s enriching for the writing process. For example, Timbuktu needed a great deal of research. The publisher worked with me from concept to completion. That’s a wonderful example of how the writing process need not be solitary in this age, and can call upon well-wishers from across vast distances.
Five: speed and responsiveness is king. The quick exchange of information, photographs and graphics ensures that a book is out faster than ever before. That means both publishers and writers need to have a great sense of urgency. And communication needs to be crisp and clear.
Six: Marketing has changed. Book launches don’t happen for me because it’s not possible to travel vast distances. I have to support my publisher in whichever way they think best, which these days may include video interviews or blog submissions. I am fairly active on twitter and that does help.
Seven: you may write for a certain audience and include unusual cultural references; the reader is liberal and prepared to find out what you mean. However, there is an additional responsibility placed on us to be rigorous in our research or risk criticism. And what about the poor translator who must be so precise in conveying the syntax as well as the nuance?
This is the journey my book has taken. I hope you find it self-explanatory. Who knows how this picture will look after the Timbuktu book gathers steam?
Vasudev Murthy has authored books on a variety of subjects including music, crime, management and humor. His publishers include Sage, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Poisoned Pen Press, Editora Vestigio, Gamesman, LiFi, Kokusho-Kankokai and Rupa, and his book Sherlock Holmes in Japan (Harper Collins, India) has been translated into Portuguese, Korean and Japanese.
Vasudev lives in Bangalore, India where he runs a consulting firm. When he's not knee deep in researching or writing his next book, he can be found teaching, conducting animal welfare seminars, playing the violin, or twisting his aging body into improbable yoga asanas. He has been rescued by six dogs who highly recommend his books as an excellent source of dietary fiber.
Live From Bangalore: A Book's Journey
It’s no secret that the world is shrinking; globalization, social media, and widespread availability of the internet has made the exchange of information between distant locales easier and faster than ever before. But what effect does this brave new world have on publishing.
Author and Bangalore-based businessman Vasudev Murthy recounts his own publishing experiences and how this global market has allowed his works to take minds, and journies, of their own.
A Book's Journey
By Vasudev Murthy
They say that every book finds its reader. In 2016, that could well mean someone in a tiny town in Brazil or in Seoul in Korea.
I live in Bangalore, a city in southern India. I write on a variety of subjects—Music, Crime, Humour, Management . . . I have a lot to say and I shall keep writing. I’ve been published by Rupa, Sage, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Poisoned Pen Press and a few more. I realize that I’ve been very fortunate.
But this is not about my fortune but the interesting experience of suddenly finding my books being read in far-away places. Much happens by serendipity as I shall show.
I wrote Sherlock Holmes in Japan in 2012-13. It was published by HarperCollins India and was then showcased by them at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Robert Rosenwald, the CEO of Poisoned Pen Press bumped into someone at the HarperCollins stall and decided to acquire the US rights. PPP renamed the book Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Japan and did an additional round of editing and launched it in the US in March 2015 with a gorgeous cover.
Things became even more interesting. Shortly thereafter, HarperCollins sold the Portuguese language rights to Editora Vestigio in Brazil. It was translated with a great deal of finesse by Ana Oliviera and appears to have become very popular. The book’s production was quite wonderful and the cover design daring and different. What a pity I can’t read the language!
I developed a positive relationship with PPP (in distant Arizona) and worked with them on planning my next book. And soon, I signed a contract with PPP for Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Timbuktu. The book was published in January 2016.
Meanwhile, a Korean publisher called Gamesman reached out to HarperCollins and acquired the Korean language rights. Their particular speciality is the sale of one e-chapter at a time; Korea has apparently adopted e-Books in a very big way. Along with that has come new business models which allows readers to decide on moving ahead chapter by chapter; that’s pressure on a writer to keep things interesting throughout or lose the reader!
A friend in Japan introduced a major publisher Kokusho-Kankokai to HarperCollins India which resulted in the sale of the Japanese language rights, something that I was hoping for at the back of my mind.
But what has all this taught me?
One: the world is truly shrinking. Deals are made faster than ever before and publishers are unafraid of placing their bets on a relatively unknown writer if the theme is compelling enough.
Two: the book you write has a life of its own. I can no longer control its destination and I have no way of knowing how true the translation is. It’s a risk worth taking. One never knows what may happen. For instance, a reader in Brazil made a video about it!
Three: your neighbour in Bangalore does not know who you are, except as the guy with the barking dogs, but people in tiny towns in Brazil and the US do and often write in. I find it slightly surreal. The books have made me an international citizen in a way.
Four: it’s very exhilarating working with publishers and editors overseas and seeing how they think. It’s enriching for the writing process. For example, Timbuktu needed a great deal of research. The publisher worked with me from concept to completion. That’s a wonderful example of how the writing process need not be solitary in this age, and can call upon well-wishers from across vast distances.
Five: speed and responsiveness is king. The quick exchange of information, photographs and graphics ensures that a book is out faster than ever before. That means both publishers and writers need to have a great sense of urgency. And communication needs to be crisp and clear.
Six: Marketing has changed. Book launches don’t happen for me because it’s not possible to travel vast distances. I have to support my publisher in whichever way they think best, which these days may include video interviews or blog submissions. I am fairly active on twitter and that does help.
Seven: you may write for a certain audience and include unusual cultural references; the reader is liberal and prepared to find out what you mean. However, there is an additional responsibility placed on us to be rigorous in our research or risk criticism. And what about the poor translator who must be so precise in conveying the syntax as well as the nuance?
This is the journey my book has taken. I hope you find it self-explanatory. Who knows how this picture will look after the Timbuktu book gathers steam?
Vasudev Murthy has authored books on a variety of subjects including music, crime, management and humor. His publishers include Sage, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Poisoned Pen Press, Editora Vestigio, Gamesman, LiFi, Kokusho-Kankokai and Rupa, and his book Sherlock Holmes in Japan (Harper Collins, India) has been translated into Portuguese, Korean and Japanese.
Vasudev lives in Bangalore, India where he runs a consulting firm. When he's not knee deep in researching or writing his next book, he can be found teaching, conducting animal welfare seminars, playing the violin, or twisting his aging body into improbable yoga asanas. He has been rescued by six dogs who highly recommend his books as an excellent source of dietary fiber.
Speed Writing To Keep Up With Speed Readers / John Hegenberger
The immediacy of the Internet has conditioned us to expect instant gratification. We’re so far past the days of dial-up that if a page takes more than two seconds to load, we check to see if our Wi-Fi is down. This gets us in trouble when we have to face a long-term project as ponderous as traditional publishing can be. What if I want my book to be available now? This week’s guest blogger John Hegenberger has used both self-publishing and traditional publishing to get his stories out there, and shares on the perks and pitfalls of each.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Speed Writing To Keep Up With Speed Readers
By John Hegenberger
The book publishing process is changing and accelerating.
A reader once asked me, “How long does it take to publish a book?”
Thirty years? Three years? Three months? Three days? Three hours?
For me, when I recently published Cross Examinations, a collection of short private eye stories, the answer was all the above.
I wrote the first draft back in 1988, which is still the setting for the tales today. Not long after, I encountered a series of personal needs involving my family and friends and found it best to put the manuscript into a drawer and build a career that assured us all a steady income. It all worked out beautifully, because about 27 years later with a career completed and three children grown, I was nearing retirement and it was time to reopen that drawer.
Thus, in 2012, I entered a whole new world of electronic publishing. The book went through a rewrite, along with several other manuscripts. And I began writing daily again and created another book; a novel, this time. And then an additional novel for a whole new PI series that I wanted to have published.
After approximately three months of searching, I found a publisher for the first novel. Ah, but then I was faced with the prospect of waiting another eight to ten-months while the editing and publishing process advanced. That seemed like forever.
I wanted to do something progressive in the meantime. So, having heard about this thing called self-publishing, I decided to give it a try with the short story collection while I waited for the novel to come out.
Again, I worked through three weeks of rewrites and polishes to create the content of Cross Examinations.
But then came the daunting task of learning to properly format and post an eBook. After another three days of poking around, reading up, and watching various videos, I pressed the Send button and launched my book into the world.
Next came the agonizing three-hour wait before the book became fully available on the website.
Finally, success was mine!
So, as you can see, the process contains many stages, but at each step along the way, I knew I was getting closer to the fulfillment of my dream. Looking back, it doesn’t seem to have been all that long, after all. I’m happy I took the time and I learned a lot from the process and quite a bit about marketing, too.
In fact, I now have two sequels out for Cross Examinations: Crossfire and Tripl3 Cross. Crossfire was completed last December, edited by the publisher, Rough Edges Press, over the holidays, and launched in January 2016.
Oh, and that first novel finally came out in November 2015. It’s titled Spyfall and is part of a second series of private eye novels, featuring a different detective, Stan Wade, LAPI. Spyfall was also written and sold early last year and saw print in November 2015. The second volume in this series, Starfall, will come out in February 2016, with several additional entries later in the year.
In both cases, the books have been fully edited and packaged by the publishers. The main difference is the speed of delivery to the readers. In this era of “binge-watching” TV series, it appears that readers want more of an immersive reading experience.
By the time Killer Nashville 2016 rolls around, I should have a good handle on which publication cycle the readers prefer. Perhaps it doesn’t matter so much how long it takes to get a book written, as how quickly the book can be offered for public enjoyment.
Born and raised in the heart of the heartland, Columbus, Ohio, John Hegenberger is the author of several series: Stan Wade LAPI in 1959, Eliot Cross Columbus-based PI in 1988, and Ace Hart, western gambler in Arizona in 1873. He’s a father of three, tennis enthusiast, collector of silent films and OTR, hiker, Francophile, B.A. Comparative Lit., pop culture author, ex-Navy, ex-marketing exec at Exxon, AT&T, and IBM, and happily married for 45 years and counting. He is also an active member of SFWA, PWA and ITW. Find more of John’s work at www.johnhegenberger.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Speed Writing To Keep Up With Speed Readers / John Hegenberger
The immediacy of the Internet has conditioned us to expect instant gratification. We’re so far past the days of dial-up that if a page takes more than two seconds to load, we check to see if our Wi-Fi is down. This gets us in trouble when we have to face a long-term project as ponderous as traditional publishing can be. What if I want my book to be available now? This week’s guest blogger John Hegenberger has used both self-publishing and traditional publishing to get his stories out there, and shares on the perks and pitfalls of each.Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Speed Writing To Keep Up With Speed Readers
By John Hegenberger
The book publishing process is changing and accelerating.
A reader once asked me, “How long does it take to publish a book?”
Thirty years? Three years? Three months? Three days? Three hours?
For me, when I recently published Cross Examinations, a collection of short private eye stories, the answer was all the above.
I wrote the first draft back in 1988, which is still the setting for the tales today. Not long after, I encountered a series of personal needs involving my family and friends and found it best to put the manuscript into a drawer and build a career that assured us all a steady income. It all worked out beautifully, because about 27 years later with a career completed and three children grown, I was nearing retirement and it was time to reopen that drawer.
Thus, in 2012, I entered a whole new world of electronic publishing. The book went through a rewrite, along with several other manuscripts. And I began writing daily again and created another book; a novel, this time. And then an additional novel for a whole new PI series that I wanted to have published.
After approximately three months of searching, I found a publisher for the first novel. Ah, but then I was faced with the prospect of waiting another eight to ten-months while the editing and publishing process advanced. That seemed like forever.
I wanted to do something progressive in the meantime. So, having heard about this thing called self-publishing, I decided to give it a try with the short story collection while I waited for the novel to come out.
Again, I worked through three weeks of rewrites and polishes to create the content of Cross Examinations.
But then came the daunting task of learning to properly format and post an eBook. After another three days of poking around, reading up, and watching various videos, I pressed the Send button and launched my book into the world.
Next came the agonizing three-hour wait before the book became fully available on the website.
Finally, success was mine!
So, as you can see, the process contains many stages, but at each step along the way, I knew I was getting closer to the fulfillment of my dream. Looking back, it doesn’t seem to have been all that long, after all. I’m happy I took the time and I learned a lot from the process and quite a bit about marketing, too.
In fact, I now have two sequels out for Cross Examinations: Crossfire and Tripl3 Cross. Crossfire was completed last December, edited by the publisher, Rough Edges Press, over the holidays, and launched in January 2016.
Oh, and that first novel finally came out in November 2015. It’s titled Spyfall and is part of a second series of private eye novels, featuring a different detective, Stan Wade, LAPI. Spyfall was also written and sold early last year and saw print in November 2015. The second volume in this series, Starfall, will come out in February 2016, with several additional entries later in the year.
In both cases, the books have been fully edited and packaged by the publishers. The main difference is the speed of delivery to the readers. In this era of “binge-watching” TV series, it appears that readers want more of an immersive reading experience.
By the time Killer Nashville 2016 rolls around, I should have a good handle on which publication cycle the readers prefer. Perhaps it doesn’t matter so much how long it takes to get a book written, as how quickly the book can be offered for public enjoyment.
Born and raised in the heart of the heartland, Columbus, Ohio, John Hegenberger is the author of several series: Stan Wade LAPI in 1959, Eliot Cross Columbus-based PI in 1988, and Ace Hart, western gambler in Arizona in 1873. He’s a father of three, tennis enthusiast, collector of silent films and OTR, hiker, Francophile, B.A. Comparative Lit., pop culture author, ex-Navy, ex-marketing exec at Exxon, AT&T, and IBM, and happily married for 45 years and counting. He is also an active member of SFWA, PWA and ITW. Find more of John’s work at www.johnhegenberger.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Speed Writing To Keep Up With Speed Readers / John Hegenberger
The immediacy of the Internet has conditioned us to expect instant gratification. We’re so far past the days of dial-up that if a page takes more than two seconds to load, we check to see if our Wi-Fi is down. This gets us in trouble when we have to face a long-term project as ponderous as traditional publishing can be. What if I want my book to be available now? This week’s guest blogger John Hegenberger has used both self-publishing and traditional publishing to get his stories out there, and shares on the perks and pitfalls of each.Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Speed Writing To Keep Up With Speed Readers
By John Hegenberger
The book publishing process is changing and accelerating.
A reader once asked me, “How long does it take to publish a book?”
Thirty years? Three years? Three months? Three days? Three hours?
For me, when I recently published Cross Examinations, a collection of short private eye stories, the answer was all the above.
I wrote the first draft back in 1988, which is still the setting for the tales today. Not long after, I encountered a series of personal needs involving my family and friends and found it best to put the manuscript into a drawer and build a career that assured us all a steady income. It all worked out beautifully, because about 27 years later with a career completed and three children grown, I was nearing retirement and it was time to reopen that drawer.
Thus, in 2012, I entered a whole new world of electronic publishing. The book went through a rewrite, along with several other manuscripts. And I began writing daily again and created another book; a novel, this time. And then an additional novel for a whole new PI series that I wanted to have published.
After approximately three months of searching, I found a publisher for the first novel. Ah, but then I was faced with the prospect of waiting another eight to ten-months while the editing and publishing process advanced. That seemed like forever.
I wanted to do something progressive in the meantime. So, having heard about this thing called self-publishing, I decided to give it a try with the short story collection while I waited for the novel to come out.
Again, I worked through three weeks of rewrites and polishes to create the content of Cross Examinations.
But then came the daunting task of learning to properly format and post an eBook. After another three days of poking around, reading up, and watching various videos, I pressed the Send button and launched my book into the world.
Next came the agonizing three-hour wait before the book became fully available on the website.
Finally, success was mine!
So, as you can see, the process contains many stages, but at each step along the way, I knew I was getting closer to the fulfillment of my dream. Looking back, it doesn’t seem to have been all that long, after all. I’m happy I took the time and I learned a lot from the process and quite a bit about marketing, too.
In fact, I now have two sequels out for Cross Examinations: Crossfire and Tripl3 Cross. Crossfire was completed last December, edited by the publisher, Rough Edges Press, over the holidays, and launched in January 2016.
Oh, and that first novel finally came out in November 2015. It’s titled Spyfall and is part of a second series of private eye novels, featuring a different detective, Stan Wade, LAPI. Spyfall was also written and sold early last year and saw print in November 2015. The second volume in this series, Starfall, will come out in February 2016, with several additional entries later in the year.
In both cases, the books have been fully edited and packaged by the publishers. The main difference is the speed of delivery to the readers. In this era of “binge-watching” TV series, it appears that readers want more of an immersive reading experience.
By the time Killer Nashville 2016 rolls around, I should have a good handle on which publication cycle the readers prefer. Perhaps it doesn’t matter so much how long it takes to get a book written, as how quickly the book can be offered for public enjoyment.
Born and raised in the heart of the heartland, Columbus, Ohio, John Hegenberger is the author of several series: Stan Wade LAPI in 1959, Eliot Cross Columbus-based PI in 1988, and Ace Hart, western gambler in Arizona in 1873. He’s a father of three, tennis enthusiast, collector of silent films and OTR, hiker, Francophile, B.A. Comparative Lit., pop culture author, ex-Navy, ex-marketing exec at Exxon, AT&T, and IBM, and happily married for 45 years and counting. He is also an active member of SFWA, PWA and ITW. Find more of John’s work at www.johnhegenberger.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
A Shrink with Ink / Ellen Kirschman
It’s important as readers and writers that the fictional world we enter seems real. We don’t know why, necessarily, but we can’t invest ourselves in a story that doesn’t somehow feel true. In this week’s guest blog, writer and psychologist Ellen Kirschman divulges some of her methods for creating a police procedural thriller or mystery that gives the audience that elusive, essential foundation of believability.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
A Shrink With Ink
By Ellen Kirschman
I’m a police psychologist and the author of three non-fiction books. A few years ago, I decided to try writing fiction. As an avid reader and mystery fan, I have often felt that novelists come closer to the truth of human experience than many psychologists do. And, to be frank, I was tired of doing research. I actually thought it would be easier to make stuff up.
I was, as I soon found out, delusional.
The challenge of writing non-fiction is getting the facts right and presenting them in an understandable, readable package. Fiction requires the writer to capture the reader’s imagination. Get her to care so much about the story and the characters that she’ll bare her teeth at anyone, or anything, that interrupts her before she finishes the book. Non-fiction readers can and do pick up a book and put it down again at will.
My first “aha” moment as a fledging novelist came when I changed from third to first person point of view. My protagonist, Dr. Dot Meyerhoff, is also a police psychologist, though she is thinner and younger than I am. (And in possession of skills I never developed, such as breaking and entering, and assault with a deadly weapon.) Once I put myself in Dot’s shoes, as a woman and a civilian working in a male-dominated profession, where both are sometimes treated as second-class citizens, I was in familiar territory.
My goal is to write mysteries that both capture the imagination and reveal something I know to be true about psychology and about police work. For example, my first mystery, Burying Ben, looks at police suicide. Most people don’t know that cops are two to three times as likely to kill themselves as they are to be killed in the line of duty. I’ve always wondered how I would feel if one of my clients took his own life. Or how much worse it would be if, as it happens to Dot, the officer left a note blaming me.
My second book, The Right Wrong Thing(October 2015), drills down into the contemporary debate over police community relations. A young officer shoots and kills an unarmed, pregnant teenager. The officer, who suffers from PTSD, is determined to apologize to the dead girl’s family, despite everyone’s efforts to stop her. The results are catastrophic. Dot, ignoring orders from the police chief to back off, enlists some unlikely allies and unconventional undercover work to expose the tangled path of her client’s disastrous journey.
Readers ask me if my books are inspired by actual events. The answer is yes and no. There is truth in both my mysteries, real things that happened to real people. But the stories are embellished, disguised, and blended so that they are unrecognizable to the people who lived them. For years I’ve been keeping a file folder of the funny, off-the-wall things cops say. Officer Eddie Rimbauer, Dot’s occasional and troubled ally, is a composite of many people I know. He sounds so real, though, that there was an online pool of cops competing to guess his real identity.
If you’re writing fiction and want to get the details right, you don’t have to have a Ph.D or spend thirty years counseling cops. You could attend a citizens’ police academy at your local PD for hands-on experience, for example.
Go on a ride-along. After all these years I still learn something new every time I do. Learn about guns. Practice on the range. Try your hand at a firearms training simulator (FATS).
If you're qualified and have the time to invest, think about becoming a reserve officer. Whatever you do, don’t watch cop shows on television. Most are so over the top, real cops can only laugh at them.
Read widely. My books I Love a Cop,I Love a Fire Fighter, and Counseling Cops all contain real-life scenarios that can enhance your stories and deepen your characters, as does Sergeant Adam Plantinga’s highly readable book, 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman (2015 Silver Falchion Award winner for Best Nonfiction Crime Reference).
Ellen Kirschman, Ph.D, is a clinical psychologist in independent practice. She is a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Society for the Study of Police and Criminal Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the International Association of Women in Law Enforcement. She is the recipient of the California Psychological Association’s 2014 award for distinguished contribution to psychology as well as the American Psychological Association’s 2010 award for outstanding contribution to the practice of police and public safety psychology.
Ellen is the author of the award-winning I Love a Cop: What Police Families Need to Know, I Love a Fire Fighter: What the Family Needs to Know, and lead author of Counseling Cops: What Clinicians Need to Know (2013). Her debut novel, Burying Ben: A Dot Meyerhoff Mystery (2013) is about police suicide told from the perspective of the psychologist. Ellen and her husband live in Redwood City, Calif. Reach her at ellenkirschman.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
A Shrink with Ink / Ellen Kirschman
It’s important as readers and writers that the fictional world we enter seems real. We don’t know why, necessarily, but we can’t invest ourselves in a story that doesn’t somehow feel true. In this week’s guest blog, writer and psychologist Ellen Kirschman divulges some of her methods for creating a police procedural thriller or mystery that gives the audience that elusive, essential foundation of believability.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
A Shrink With Ink
By Ellen Kirschman
I’m a police psychologist and the author of three non-fiction books. A few years ago, I decided to try writing fiction. As an avid reader and mystery fan, I have often felt that novelists come closer to the truth of human experience than many psychologists do. And, to be frank, I was tired of doing research. I actually thought it would be easier to make stuff up.
I was, as I soon found out, delusional.
The challenge of writing non-fiction is getting the facts right and presenting them in an understandable, readable package. Fiction requires the writer to capture the reader’s imagination. Get her to care so much about the story and the characters that she’ll bare her teeth at anyone, or anything, that interrupts her before she finishes the book. Non-fiction readers can and do pick up a book and put it down again at will.
My first “aha” moment as a fledging novelist came when I changed from third to first person point of view. My protagonist, Dr. Dot Meyerhoff, is also a police psychologist, though she is thinner and younger than I am. (And in possession of skills I never developed, such as breaking and entering, and assault with a deadly weapon.) Once I put myself in Dot’s shoes, as a woman and a civilian working in a male-dominated profession, where both are sometimes treated as second-class citizens, I was in familiar territory.
My goal is to write mysteries that both capture the imagination and reveal something I know to be true about psychology and about police work. For example, my first mystery, Burying Ben, looks at police suicide. Most people don’t know that cops are two to three times as likely to kill themselves as they are to be killed in the line of duty. I’ve always wondered how I would feel if one of my clients took his own life. Or how much worse it would be if, as it happens to Dot, the officer left a note blaming me.
My second book, The Right Wrong Thing (October 2015), drills down into the contemporary debate over police community relations. A young officer shoots and kills an unarmed, pregnant teenager. The officer, who suffers from PTSD, is determined to apologize to the dead girl’s family, despite everyone’s efforts to stop her. The results are catastrophic. Dot, ignoring orders from the police chief to back off, enlists some unlikely allies and unconventional undercover work to expose the tangled path of her client’s disastrous journey.
Readers ask me if my books are inspired by actual events. The answer is yes and no. There is truth in both my mysteries, real things that happened to real people. But the stories are embellished, disguised, and blended so that they are unrecognizable to the people who lived them. For years I’ve been keeping a file folder of the funny, off-the-wall things cops say. Officer Eddie Rimbauer, Dot’s occasional and troubled ally, is a composite of many people I know. He sounds so real, though, that there was an online pool of cops competing to guess his real identity.
If you’re writing fiction and want to get the details right, you don’t have to have a Ph.D or spend thirty years counseling cops. You could attend a citizens’ police academy at your local PD for hands-on experience, for example.
Go on a ride-along. After all these years I still learn something new every time I do. Learn about guns. Practice on the range. Try your hand at a firearms training simulator (FATS).
If you're qualified and have the time to invest, think about becoming a reserve officer. Whatever you do, don’t watch cop shows on television. Most are so over the top, real cops can only laugh at them.
Read widely. My books I Love a Cop, I Love a Fire Fighter, and Counseling Cops all contain real-life scenarios that can enhance your stories and deepen your characters, as does Sergeant Adam Plantinga’s highly readable book, 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman (2015 Silver Falchion Award winner for Best Nonfiction Crime Reference).
Ellen Kirschman, Ph.D, is a clinical psychologist in independent practice. She is a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Society for the Study of Police and Criminal Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the International Association of Women in Law Enforcement. She is the recipient of the California Psychological Association’s 2014 award for distinguished contribution to psychology as well as the American Psychological Association’s 2010 award for outstanding contribution to the practice of police and public safety psychology.
Ellen is the author of the award-winning I Love a Cop: What Police Families Need to Know, I Love a Fire Fighter: What the Family Needs to Know, and lead author of Counseling Cops: What Clinicians Need to Know (2013). Her debut novel, Burying Ben: A Dot Meyerhoff Mystery (2013) is about police suicide told from the perspective of the psychologist. Ellen and her husband live in Redwood City, Calif. Reach her at ellenkirschman.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
A Shrink with Ink / Ellen Kirschman
It’s important as readers and writers that the fictional world we enter seems real. We don’t know why, necessarily, but we can’t invest ourselves in a story that doesn’t somehow feel true. In this week’s guest blog, writer and psychologist Ellen Kirschman divulges some of her methods for creating a police procedural thriller or mystery that gives the audience that elusive, essential foundation of believability.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
A Shrink With Ink
By Ellen Kirschman
I’m a police psychologist and the author of three non-fiction books. A few years ago, I decided to try writing fiction. As an avid reader and mystery fan, I have often felt that novelists come closer to the truth of human experience than many psychologists do. And, to be frank, I was tired of doing research. I actually thought it would be easier to make stuff up.
I was, as I soon found out, delusional.
The challenge of writing non-fiction is getting the facts right and presenting them in an understandable, readable package. Fiction requires the writer to capture the reader’s imagination. Get her to care so much about the story and the characters that she’ll bare her teeth at anyone, or anything, that interrupts her before she finishes the book. Non-fiction readers can and do pick up a book and put it down again at will.
My first “aha” moment as a fledging novelist came when I changed from third to first person point of view. My protagonist, Dr. Dot Meyerhoff, is also a police psychologist, though she is thinner and younger than I am. (And in possession of skills I never developed, such as breaking and entering, and assault with a deadly weapon.) Once I put myself in Dot’s shoes, as a woman and a civilian working in a male-dominated profession, where both are sometimes treated as second-class citizens, I was in familiar territory.
My goal is to write mysteries that both capture the imagination and reveal something I know to be true about psychology and about police work. For example, my first mystery, Burying Ben, looks at police suicide. Most people don’t know that cops are two to three times as likely to kill themselves as they are to be killed in the line of duty. I’ve always wondered how I would feel if one of my clients took his own life. Or how much worse it would be if, as it happens to Dot, the officer left a note blaming me.
My second book, The Right Wrong Thing (October 2015), drills down into the contemporary debate over police community relations. A young officer shoots and kills an unarmed, pregnant teenager. The officer, who suffers from PTSD, is determined to apologize to the dead girl’s family, despite everyone’s efforts to stop her. The results are catastrophic. Dot, ignoring orders from the police chief to back off, enlists some unlikely allies and unconventional undercover work to expose the tangled path of her client’s disastrous journey.
Readers ask me if my books are inspired by actual events. The answer is yes and no. There is truth in both my mysteries, real things that happened to real people. But the stories are embellished, disguised, and blended so that they are unrecognizable to the people who lived them. For years I’ve been keeping a file folder of the funny, off-the-wall things cops say. Officer Eddie Rimbauer, Dot’s occasional and troubled ally, is a composite of many people I know. He sounds so real, though, that there was an online pool of cops competing to guess his real identity.
If you’re writing fiction and want to get the details right, you don’t have to have a Ph.D or spend thirty years counseling cops. You could attend a citizens’ police academy at your local PD for hands-on experience, for example.
Go on a ride-along. After all these years I still learn something new every time I do. Learn about guns. Practice on the range. Try your hand at a firearms training simulator (FATS).
If you're qualified and have the time to invest, think about becoming a reserve officer. Whatever you do, don’t watch cop shows on television. Most are so over the top, real cops can only laugh at them.
Read widely. My books I Love a Cop, I Love a Fire Fighter, and Counseling Cops all contain real-life scenarios that can enhance your stories and deepen your characters, as does Sergeant Adam Plantinga’s highly readable book, 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman (2015 Silver Falchion Award winner for Best Nonfiction Crime Reference).
Ellen Kirschman, Ph.D, is a clinical psychologist in independent practice. She is a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Society for the Study of Police and Criminal Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the International Association of Women in Law Enforcement. She is the recipient of the California Psychological Association’s 2014 award for distinguished contribution to psychology as well as the American Psychological Association’s 2010 award for outstanding contribution to the practice of police and public safety psychology.
Ellen is the author of the award-winning I Love a Cop: What Police Families Need to Know, I Love a Fire Fighter: What the Family Needs to Know, and lead author of Counseling Cops: What Clinicians Need to Know (2013). Her debut novel, Burying Ben: A Dot Meyerhoff Mystery (2013) is about police suicide told from the perspective of the psychologist. Ellen and her husband live in Redwood City, Calif. Reach her at ellenkirschman.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Herding Cats for Fun and Profit: Lessons Learned from Producing a Multi-Author Book / Michael Guillebeau
Every enterprise is fraught with uncertainty, and for most of us, that means some level of anxiety. This week’s guest blogger, Michael Guillebeau, faced significant trepidation before (and during) the creation of his new anthology, as he mentions below. But the more he pushed through his fear, the more delighted he was by the results, which seems to be a common theme in success stories. Who knows? Take his advice to heart, and you just may have words of wisdom to share with the Killer Nashville family one of these days, too.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Herding Cats for Fun and Profit: Lessons Learned from Producing a Multi-Author Book
By Michael Guillebeau
First off, I’ve got to apologize for this piece not being funnier than it is. You can blame my writers. When I started Eight Mystery Writers You Should be Reading Now, I thought I’d have a mess of funny stories by now. I mean, writers are notoriously independent (I expected at least one chorus of “I know you said you wanted mystery stories, but I thought my unicorn story would be better”), late (“If I have my section done by Christmas, will that meet your October deadline?”) and even bizarre (“I do all my writing in Japanese. My editor has to fix it”).
Not my writers. Not only are they all great writers whom you really should be reading now, but they were also the best team of people I’ve ever worked with. Thank you, Lisa Alber, Kathleen Cosgrove, Chris Knopf, Jessie Bishop Powell, Larissa Reinhart, Jaden Terrell, and Lisa Wysocky. And thanks from all of us to Hank Phillippi Ryan for giving us a wonderful foreword. And to the amazing Stacy Pethel for editing contributions from nine separate writers for no pay or glory, and no reason other than her love for words. I’d work with you all again on anything.
So, I didn’t get any funny stories to tell. Sometimes, life gives you lemons and you have to make lemonade. Sometimes, a team of waiters shows up at your table to make you a perfect Porch Crawler, and thanks you for the privilege. (I’m a writer; we know how to deal with disappointments involving alcohol...)
I didn’t get any funny stories, but I do have a few pointers on how a multi-author project can be more fun and successful than you can possibly imagine.
1. Don’t say no to the idea.
This is always the hardest and most important lesson, isn’t it? Like most of us, I was frustrated by the problem of asking readers to select my writing based on blurbs when I really wanted them to see… my writing. Handouts and free days help but have their limits.
I reflected on how I picked my own reading material: mostly through recommendations from people I trust. What could be a higher recommendation than inclusion in a book with writers that people already trust?
2. Find a clear vision, and the right people to buy into it.
So now I was excited, but scared. I have trouble asking a waiter for a refill of iced tea. Now, I had to refine my ideas and go up to people I was in awe of and ask them to play with me. But I set that aside and thought: What if they said yes? Who would I want?
There are lots of anthologies focused on a certain style or sub-genre. I didn’t want that. I wanted this to be a book of discovery for readers. I wanted eight writers who were each so different that most people who loved one of them would never have heard of the others—but might discover something new that they wouldn’t otherwise look at.
I also had to have quality. I expected readers to dislike at least one writer because it wasn’t the style they wanted, but if they read even one writer who seemed amateurish, they’d put the whole book down.
So I had to find people whose work I admired, and make sure they were all different. I needed people to buy into a project that was to be largely promotional (we’d rather give away a thousand of these than sell a hundred), but that would still require their best. And the kind of people I wanted were already up to their armpits in better projects than mine.
Jesus.
3. Even big people love to be asked to help, particularly if it helps them, too.
So you’ve heard the saying about leap and the net will appear? After downing antacids and adult fortifications, I started approaching some of these semi-giants. Felt like Dorothy approaching the Wizard, without even a lion or scarecrow or a tin man.
I was rewarded with some of the best experiences of my life, as faces lit up and people I admired thanked me for the opportunity to be a part of this.
4. If you keep your request small, people will deliver big.
I pitched Eight as a low-impact project to the other writers, but none of them treated it that way. All I asked for was a sample chapter, a previously written story, and an interview. I got all that, on time (barely in some cases, but on time), and so much more. Jessie Powell made us a book trailer, and had to be restrained from doing a print ad. Kathleen Cosgrove found us a cover artist (her son Charlie Wetherington) who delivered a killer cover for next to nothing. Chris Knopf sent our press release to his many contacts. And… well, everybody went over and above.
5. Actually producing the book is the easy part.
There are lots of materials out there on how to self-pub a book. I won’t add to them except to say that pulling together a book is just a lot of fussy little time-consuming tasks, but nothing to be scared of.
6. Multiple writers multiply the quality of the book and the power of the marketing.
I really think that each person roughly doubled the value of this project. What a joy.
So now my little-bitty scary idea has become the book that I may be the most proud of, the one that will probably get the most attention, and the one that was the most fun to work on.
Without me having to do all that messy writing stuff.
Michael Guillebeau’s first book, Josh Whoever (Five Star Mysteries, 2013) was a finalist for the 2014 Silver Falchion Award for Best First Novel: Literary Suspense, received a starred review in Library Journal, and was named a Debut Mystery of the Month by Library Journal. His second book, A Study In Detail (Five Star Mysteries, 2015) received the following praise from the Midwest Book Review: “fresh, original and witty.” Guillebeau has published over twenty short stories, including three in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Michael Guillebeau lives in Madison, Alabama, and Panama City Beach, Florida. For more information, see www.michaelguillebeau.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Herding Cats for Fun and Profit: Lessons Learned from Producing a Multi-Author Book / Michael Guillebeau
Every enterprise is fraught with uncertainty, and for most of us, that means some level of anxiety. This week’s guest blogger, Michael Guillebeau, faced significant trepidation before (and during) the creation of his new anthology, as he mentions below. But the more he pushed through his fear, the more delighted he was by the results, which seems to be a common theme in success stories. Who knows? Take his advice to heart, and you just may have words of wisdom to share with the Killer Nashville family one of these days, too.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Herding Cats for Fun and Profit: Lessons Learned from Producing a Multi-Author Book
By Michael Guillebeau
First off, I’ve got to apologize for this piece not being funnier than it is. You can blame my writers. When I started Eight Mystery Writers You Should be Reading Now, I thought I’d have a mess of funny stories by now. I mean, writers are notoriously independent (I expected at least one chorus of “I know you said you wanted mystery stories, but I thought my unicorn story would be better”), late (“If I have my section done by Christmas, will that meet your October deadline?”) and even bizarre (“I do all my writing in Japanese. My editor has to fix it”).
Not my writers. Not only are they all great writers whom you really should be reading now, but they were also the best team of people I’ve ever worked with. Thank you, Lisa Alber, Kathleen Cosgrove, Chris Knopf, Jessie Bishop Powell, Larissa Reinhart, Jaden Terrell, and Lisa Wysocky. And thanks from all of us to Hank Phillippi Ryan for giving us a wonderful foreword. And to the amazing Stacy Pethel for editing contributions from nine separate writers for no pay or glory, and no reason other than her love for words. I’d work with you all again on anything.
So, I didn’t get any funny stories to tell. Sometimes, life gives you lemons and you have to make lemonade. Sometimes, a team of waiters shows up at your table to make you a perfect Porch Crawler, and thanks you for the privilege. (I’m a writer; we know how to deal with disappointments involving alcohol...)
I didn’t get any funny stories, but I do have a few pointers on how a multi-author project can be more fun and successful than you can possibly imagine.
1. Don’t say no to the idea.
This is always the hardest and most important lesson, isn’t it? Like most of us, I was frustrated by the problem of asking readers to select my writing based on blurbs when I really wanted them to see… my writing. Handouts and free days help but have their limits.
I reflected on how I picked my own reading material: mostly through recommendations from people I trust. What could be a higher recommendation than inclusion in a book with writers that people already trust?
2. Find a clear vision, and the right people to buy into it.
So now I was excited, but scared. I have trouble asking a waiter for a refill of iced tea. Now, I had to refine my ideas and go up to people I was in awe of and ask them to play with me. But I set that aside and thought: What if they said yes? Who would I want?
There are lots of anthologies focused on a certain style or sub-genre. I didn’t want that. I wanted this to be a book of discovery for readers. I wanted eight writers who were each so different that most people who loved one of them would never have heard of the others—but might discover something new that they wouldn’t otherwise look at.
I also had to have quality. I expected readers to dislike at least one writer because it wasn’t the style they wanted, but if they read even one writer who seemed amateurish, they’d put the whole book down.
So I had to find people whose work I admired, and make sure they were all different. I needed people to buy into a project that was to be largely promotional (we’d rather give away a thousand of these than sell a hundred), but that would still require their best. And the kind of people I wanted were already up to their armpits in better projects than mine.
Jesus.
3. Even big people love to be asked to help, particularly if it helps them, too.
So you’ve heard the saying about leap and the net will appear? After downing antacids and adult fortifications, I started approaching some of these semi-giants. Felt like Dorothy approaching the Wizard, without even a lion or scarecrow or a tin man.
I was rewarded with some of the best experiences of my life, as faces lit up and people I admired thanked me for the opportunity to be a part of this.
4. If you keep your request small, people will deliver big.
I pitched Eight as a low-impact project to the other writers, but none of them treated it that way. All I asked for was a sample chapter, a previously written story, and an interview. I got all that, on time (barely in some cases, but on time), and so much more. Jessie Powell made us a book trailer, and had to be restrained from doing a print ad. Kathleen Cosgrove found us a cover artist (her son Charlie Wetherington) who delivered a killer cover for next to nothing. Chris Knopf sent our press release to his many contacts. And… well, everybody went over and above.
5. Actually producing the book is the easy part.
There are lots of materials out there on how to self-pub a book. I won’t add to them except to say that pulling together a book is just a lot of fussy little time-consuming tasks, but nothing to be scared of.
6. Multiple writers multiply the quality of the book and the power of the marketing.
I really think that each person roughly doubled the value of this project. What a joy.
So now my little-bitty scary idea has become the book that I may be the most proud of, the one that will probably get the most attention, and the one that was the most fun to work on.
Without me having to do all that messy writing stuff.
Michael Guillebeau’s first book, Josh Whoever (Five Star Mysteries, 2013) was a finalist for the 2014 Silver Falchion Award for Best First Novel: Literary Suspense, received a starred review in Library Journal, and was named a Debut Mystery of the Month by Library Journal. His second book, A Study In Detail (Five Star Mysteries, 2015) received the following praise from the Midwest Book Review: “fresh, original and witty.” Guillebeau has published over twenty short stories, including three in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Michael Guillebeau lives in Madison, Alabama, and Panama City Beach, Florida. For more information, see www.michaelguillebeau.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Herding Cats for Fun and Profit: Lessons Learned from Producing a Multi-Author Book / Michael Guillebeau
Every enterprise is fraught with uncertainty, and for most of us, that means some level of anxiety. This week’s guest blogger, Michael Guillebeau, faced significant trepidation before (and during) the creation of his new anthology, as he mentions below. But the more he pushed through his fear, the more delighted he was by the results, which seems to be a common theme in success stories. Who knows? Take his advice to heart, and you just may have words of wisdom to share with the Killer Nashville family one of these days, too.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Herding Cats for Fun and Profit: Lessons Learned from Producing a Multi-Author Book
By Michael Guillebeau
First off, I’ve got to apologize for this piece not being funnier than it is. You can blame my writers. When I started Eight Mystery Writers You Should be Reading Now, I thought I’d have a mess of funny stories by now. I mean, writers are notoriously independent (I expected at least one chorus of “I know you said you wanted mystery stories, but I thought my unicorn story would be better”), late (“If I have my section done by Christmas, will that meet your October deadline?”) and even bizarre (“I do all my writing in Japanese. My editor has to fix it”).
Not my writers. Not only are they all great writers whom you really should be reading now, but they were also the best team of people I’ve ever worked with. Thank you, Lisa Alber, Kathleen Cosgrove, Chris Knopf, Jessie Bishop Powell, Larissa Reinhart, Jaden Terrell, and Lisa Wysocky. And thanks from all of us to Hank Phillippi Ryan for giving us a wonderful foreword. And to the amazing Stacy Pethel for editing contributions from nine separate writers for no pay or glory, and no reason other than her love for words. I’d work with you all again on anything.
So, I didn’t get any funny stories to tell. Sometimes, life gives you lemons and you have to make lemonade. Sometimes, a team of waiters shows up at your table to make you a perfect Porch Crawler, and thanks you for the privilege. (I’m a writer; we know how to deal with disappointments involving alcohol...)
I didn’t get any funny stories, but I do have a few pointers on how a multi-author project can be more fun and successful than you can possibly imagine.
1. Don’t say no to the idea.
This is always the hardest and most important lesson, isn’t it? Like most of us, I was frustrated by the problem of asking readers to select my writing based on blurbs when I really wanted them to see… my writing. Handouts and free days help but have their limits.
I reflected on how I picked my own reading material: mostly through recommendations from people I trust. What could be a higher recommendation than inclusion in a book with writers that people already trust?
2. Find a clear vision, and the right people to buy into it.
So now I was excited, but scared. I have trouble asking a waiter for a refill of iced tea. Now, I had to refine my ideas and go up to people I was in awe of and ask them to play with me. But I set that aside and thought: What if they said yes? Who would I want?
There are lots of anthologies focused on a certain style or sub-genre. I didn’t want that. I wanted this to be a book of discovery for readers. I wanted eight writers who were each so different that most people who loved one of them would never have heard of the others—but might discover something new that they wouldn’t otherwise look at.
I also had to have quality. I expected readers to dislike at least one writer because it wasn’t the style they wanted, but if they read even one writer who seemed amateurish, they’d put the whole book down.
So I had to find people whose work I admired, and make sure they were all different. I needed people to buy into a project that was to be largely promotional (we’d rather give away a thousand of these than sell a hundred), but that would still require their best. And the kind of people I wanted were already up to their armpits in better projects than mine.
Jesus.
3. Even big people love to be asked to help, particularly if it helps them, too.
So you’ve heard the saying about leap and the net will appear? After downing antacids and adult fortifications, I started approaching some of these semi-giants. Felt like Dorothy approaching the Wizard, without even a lion or scarecrow or a tin man.
I was rewarded with some of the best experiences of my life, as faces lit up and people I admired thanked me for the opportunity to be a part of this.
4. If you keep your request small, people will deliver big.
I pitched Eight as a low-impact project to the other writers, but none of them treated it that way. All I asked for was a sample chapter, a previously written story, and an interview. I got all that, on time (barely in some cases, but on time), and so much more. Jessie Powell made us a book trailer, and had to be restrained from doing a print ad. Kathleen Cosgrove found us a cover artist (her son Charlie Wetherington) who delivered a killer cover for next to nothing. Chris Knopf sent our press release to his many contacts. And… well, everybody went over and above.
5. Actually producing the book is the easy part.
There are lots of materials out there on how to self-pub a book. I won’t add to them except to say that pulling together a book is just a lot of fussy little time-consuming tasks, but nothing to be scared of.
6. Multiple writers multiply the quality of the book and the power of the marketing.
I really think that each person roughly doubled the value of this project. What a joy.
So now my little-bitty scary idea has become the book that I may be the most proud of, the one that will probably get the most attention, and the one that was the most fun to work on.
Without me having to do all that messy writing stuff.
Michael Guillebeau’s first book, Josh Whoever (Five Star Mysteries, 2013) was a finalist for the 2014 Silver Falchion Award for Best First Novel: Literary Suspense, received a starred review in Library Journal, and was named a Debut Mystery of the Month by Library Journal. His second book, A Study In Detail (Five Star Mysteries, 2015) received the following praise from the Midwest Book Review: “fresh, original and witty.” Guillebeau has published over twenty short stories, including three in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Michael Guillebeau lives in Madison, Alabama, and Panama City Beach, Florida. For more information, see www.michaelguillebeau.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Challenging Clichés / Sharon Woods Hopkins
There’s a dangerous mental laziness inherent in the use of clichés that, if unchecked, can lead us, and our readers, to a limited worldview—particularly when those clichés are stereotypes. In this week’s guest blog, author Sharon Woods Hopkins shares anecdotal examples from her own endeavors to eschew stereotypes in favor of increased imagination and creativity.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Challenging Clichés
By Sharon Woods Hopkins
I was told a long time ago that clichés are weak writing.
So are stereotypes, which are a form of clichés, about groups of people. If you write about bikers, don’t make them leather jacket thugs. For example, I know a great group of Christian bikers, and let’s not forget the Freedom Guard riders. Even if your biker, protagonist or antagonist, isn’t the church-going type, write him or her with an unexpected characteristic. Maybe he or she is a dog lover and carries a miniature poodle in a backpack.
If you write about a group of people, make them unique, different, and most of all, interesting.
I had stereotypes to avoid in Killerground, my fourth Rhetta McCarter mystery. Like the first three, this story is set in rural Southeast Missouri. That, in itself, could give rise to the Ozark hillbilly stereotype. Instead, my protagonist is a businesswoman who drives a resto-mod 1979 Camaro with a Corvette engine.
At the heart of the trouble are unusual deaths of members of a Native American tribe whose land borders that of a mysterious group that call their compound the Righteous Rewards Retreat.
The challenge to the stereotype of a cult compound here was to make the Righteous Reward compound something other than a religious group. It would have been easy to make them ultra-conservative and right wing, and that scenario has been done a lot. The leader, or Teacher as he’s called, is a billionaire from Oklahoma who believes in lay lines and the mystical powers they hold. There is no worshipping involved.
The conflict between his followers and the neighboring Native American tribe is over a natural spring that sits directly on a lay line that Teacher feels has magical power, but which belongs to the Native American tribe.
I enjoyed creating the character of Chief Ed Silver Fox, who strongly resembles a dear friend, Chief Paul White Eagle, whose help was invaluable in this story. At the same time, it was a challenge not to stereotype the chief, too. In many stories, Native Americans live on reservations, are poor, and suffer many addictions. The Native Americans in this story are not a recognized tribe by the US Government, and live on land they own independently. The chief is a talented, widowed artist determined to build a historical museum to tell the story of his dwindling tribe. He is calm, charismatic, and very wise. He is, however, distrustful of most non-Native people.
Another issue particular to the writing of this book was changing the occupation of the character and building a new world for her that was different from the one she had had for three books. I had to create a whole new occupation for Rhetta, while maintaining her circle of supporting characters. They needed different jobs, so it was a challenge to figure out what they would all do, and how they would mesh and be relevant in the new story. I did that by having my protagonist form a charitable foundation and hire her friends to work for her.
Her first project was to help the Chief build the museum. That put her in a position to be involved with the Chief, and by extension, the Righteous Rewards Retreat, and the mysterious deaths, one of which she witnessed.
As always, I strive to make Rhetta, who is just a normal woman thrown into extraordinary circumstances, smart, funny, and too nosy for her own good.
Keep clichés for conversation, like the next time your neighbor is as drunk as a skunk.
Sharon Woods Hopkins, author of the award-winning Rhetta McCarter mysteries, is retired from banking and spends her time writing and volunteering. She owns the original Cami, a restored ’79 Camaro who appears as a character in her books. Her hobbies include restoring muscle cars and painting. Her first book, Killerwatt, placed as a finalist in the 2012 Indie Excellence Awards. Her second, Killerfind, won first place in the 2013 Missouri Writers’ Guild Show-me Best Book Awards and placed as a finalist in the 2013 Indie Excellence Awards.
The third in the series,Killertrust, was a finalist in the 2014 Indie Excellence Awards.
Her newest in the series, Killerground, was released in 2015. Her award-winning short story, “Rear View Mirror”, was published in That Mysterious Woman anthology in 2014.
She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Guppies, International Thriller Writers, Missouri Writers Guild, Southeast Missouri Writers Guild, and Heartland Writers. You can find Sharon at the website she shares with her husband and fellow author, Bill Hopkins, the other half of The Deadly Duo, at www.deadlyduo.net, on Twitter @sharonwhopkins, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sharonwoodshopkins.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Challenging Clichés / Sharon Woods Hopkins
There’s a dangerous mental laziness inherent in the use of clichés that, if unchecked, can lead us, and our readers, to a limited worldview—particularly when those clichés are stereotypes. In this week’s guest blog, author Sharon Woods Hopkins shares anecdotal examples from her own endeavors to eschew stereotypes in favor of increased imagination and creativity.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Challenging Clichés
By Sharon Woods Hopkins
I was told a long time ago that clichés are weak writing.
So are stereotypes, which are a form of clichés, about groups of people. If you write about bikers, don’t make them leather jacket thugs. For example, I know a great group of Christian bikers, and let’s not forget the Freedom Guard riders. Even if your biker, protagonist or antagonist, isn’t the church-going type, write him or her with an unexpected characteristic. Maybe he or she is a dog lover and carries a miniature poodle in a backpack.
If you write about a group of people, make them unique, different, and most of all, interesting.
I had stereotypes to avoid in Killerground, my fourth Rhetta McCarter mystery. Like the first three, this story is set in rural Southeast Missouri. That, in itself, could give rise to the Ozark hillbilly stereotype. Instead, my protagonist is a businesswoman who drives a resto-mod 1979 Camaro with a Corvette engine.
At the heart of the trouble are unusual deaths of members of a Native American tribe whose land borders that of a mysterious group that call their compound the Righteous Rewards Retreat.
The challenge to the stereotype of a cult compound here was to make the Righteous Reward compound something other than a religious group. It would have been easy to make them ultra-conservative and right wing, and that scenario has been done a lot. The leader, or Teacher as he’s called, is a billionaire from Oklahoma who believes in lay lines and the mystical powers they hold. There is no worshipping involved.
The conflict between his followers and the neighboring Native American tribe is over a natural spring that sits directly on a lay line that Teacher feels has magical power, but which belongs to the Native American tribe.
I enjoyed creating the character of Chief Ed Silver Fox, who strongly resembles a dear friend, Chief Paul White Eagle, whose help was invaluable in this story. At the same time, it was a challenge not to stereotype the chief, too. In many stories, Native Americans live on reservations, are poor, and suffer many addictions. The Native Americans in this story are not a recognized tribe by the US Government, and live on land they own independently. The chief is a talented, widowed artist determined to build a historical museum to tell the story of his dwindling tribe. He is calm, charismatic, and very wise. He is, however, distrustful of most non-Native people.
Another issue particular to the writing of this book was changing the occupation of the character and building a new world for her that was different from the one she had had for three books. I had to create a whole new occupation for Rhetta, while maintaining her circle of supporting characters. They needed different jobs, so it was a challenge to figure out what they would all do, and how they would mesh and be relevant in the new story. I did that by having my protagonist form a charitable foundation and hire her friends to work for her.
Her first project was to help the Chief build the museum. That put her in a position to be involved with the Chief, and by extension, the Righteous Rewards Retreat, and the mysterious deaths, one of which she witnessed.
As always, I strive to make Rhetta, who is just a normal woman thrown into extraordinary circumstances, smart, funny, and too nosy for her own good.
Keep clichés for conversation, like the next time your neighbor is as drunk as a skunk.
Sharon Woods Hopkins, author of the award-winning Rhetta McCarter mysteries, is retired from banking and spends her time writing and volunteering. She owns the original Cami, a restored ’79 Camaro who appears as a character in her books. Her hobbies include restoring muscle cars and painting. Her first book, Killerwatt, placed as a finalist in the 2012 Indie Excellence Awards. Her second, Killerfind, won first place in the 2013 Missouri Writers’ Guild Show-me Best Book Awards and placed as a finalist in the 2013 Indie Excellence Awards.
The third in the series, Killertrust, was a finalist in the 2014 Indie Excellence Awards.
Her newest in the series, Killerground, was released in 2015. Her award-winning short story, “Rear View Mirror”, was published in That Mysterious Woman anthology in 2014.
She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Guppies, International Thriller Writers, Missouri Writers Guild, Southeast Missouri Writers Guild, and Heartland Writers. You can find Sharon at the website she shares with her husband and fellow author, Bill Hopkins, the other half of The Deadly Duo, at www.deadlyduo.net, on Twitter @sharonwhopkins, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sharonwoodshopkins.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Challenging Clichés / Sharon Woods Hopkins
There’s a dangerous mental laziness inherent in the use of clichés that, if unchecked, can lead us, and our readers, to a limited worldview—particularly when those clichés are stereotypes. In this week’s guest blog, author Sharon Woods Hopkins shares anecdotal examples from her own endeavors to eschew stereotypes in favor of increased imagination and creativity.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Challenging Clichés
By Sharon Woods Hopkins
I was told a long time ago that clichés are weak writing.
So are stereotypes, which are a form of clichés, about groups of people. If you write about bikers, don’t make them leather jacket thugs. For example, I know a great group of Christian bikers, and let’s not forget the Freedom Guard riders. Even if your biker, protagonist or antagonist, isn’t the church-going type, write him or her with an unexpected characteristic. Maybe he or she is a dog lover and carries a miniature poodle in a backpack.
If you write about a group of people, make them unique, different, and most of all, interesting.
I had stereotypes to avoid in Killerground, my fourth Rhetta McCarter mystery. Like the first three, this story is set in rural Southeast Missouri. That, in itself, could give rise to the Ozark hillbilly stereotype. Instead, my protagonist is a businesswoman who drives a resto-mod 1979 Camaro with a Corvette engine.
At the heart of the trouble are unusual deaths of members of a Native American tribe whose land borders that of a mysterious group that call their compound the Righteous Rewards Retreat.
The challenge to the stereotype of a cult compound here was to make the Righteous Reward compound something other than a religious group. It would have been easy to make them ultra-conservative and right wing, and that scenario has been done a lot. The leader, or Teacher as he’s called, is a billionaire from Oklahoma who believes in lay lines and the mystical powers they hold. There is no worshipping involved.
The conflict between his followers and the neighboring Native American tribe is over a natural spring that sits directly on a lay line that Teacher feels has magical power, but which belongs to the Native American tribe.
I enjoyed creating the character of Chief Ed Silver Fox, who strongly resembles a dear friend, Chief Paul White Eagle, whose help was invaluable in this story. At the same time, it was a challenge not to stereotype the chief, too. In many stories, Native Americans live on reservations, are poor, and suffer many addictions. The Native Americans in this story are not a recognized tribe by the US Government, and live on land they own independently. The chief is a talented, widowed artist determined to build a historical museum to tell the story of his dwindling tribe. He is calm, charismatic, and very wise. He is, however, distrustful of most non-Native people.
Another issue particular to the writing of this book was changing the occupation of the character and building a new world for her that was different from the one she had had for three books. I had to create a whole new occupation for Rhetta, while maintaining her circle of supporting characters. They needed different jobs, so it was a challenge to figure out what they would all do, and how they would mesh and be relevant in the new story. I did that by having my protagonist form a charitable foundation and hire her friends to work for her.
Her first project was to help the Chief build the museum. That put her in a position to be involved with the Chief, and by extension, the Righteous Rewards Retreat, and the mysterious deaths, one of which she witnessed.
As always, I strive to make Rhetta, who is just a normal woman thrown into extraordinary circumstances, smart, funny, and too nosy for her own good.
Keep clichés for conversation, like the next time your neighbor is as drunk as a skunk.
Sharon Woods Hopkins, author of the award-winning Rhetta McCarter mysteries, is retired from banking and spends her time writing and volunteering. She owns the original Cami, a restored ’79 Camaro who appears as a character in her books. Her hobbies include restoring muscle cars and painting. Her first book, Killerwatt, placed as a finalist in the 2012 Indie Excellence Awards. Her second, Killerfind, won first place in the 2013 Missouri Writers’ Guild Show-me Best Book Awards and placed as a finalist in the 2013 Indie Excellence Awards.
The third in the series, Killertrust, was a finalist in the 2014 Indie Excellence Awards.
Her newest in the series, Killerground, was released in 2015. Her award-winning short story, “Rear View Mirror”, was published in That Mysterious Woman anthology in 2014.
She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Guppies, International Thriller Writers, Missouri Writers Guild, Southeast Missouri Writers Guild, and Heartland Writers. You can find Sharon at the website she shares with her husband and fellow author, Bill Hopkins, the other half of The Deadly Duo, at www.deadlyduo.net, on Twitter @sharonwhopkins, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sharonwoodshopkins.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Believability—How Much Can We Stretch Reality and Get Away With It? / Caroline Fardig
Part of the fun of fiction is escaping the constraints of normality. Although readers value consistency and authenticity in the worlds we construct, we have to be careful not to allow these concerns to squelch our creativity. This week’s guest blogger Caroline Fardig offers advice on walking that tightrope, drawn from her experience as an author of both cozy and forensic procedural mysteries.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Believability—How Much Can We Stretch Reality and Get Away With It?
By Caroline Fardig
My agent, Ethan Ellenberg, once told me that if you can get the reader sucked into a good story, it’s okay for believability to take a backseat. I agree wholeheartedly, and in my writing I’m always stretching the limits of what “real” people would actually do in a given situation. That said, you can’t exactly introduce a family of sparkly, angsty vampires into your psychological thriller and expect your readers to go along with it. Yes, writing fiction gives us certain liberties, but you still have to play by the rules of your genre.
In any genre, you want to create characters who come to life for your readers. They should have faults as well as redeeming qualities, and you can exaggerate those traits, but only up to a certain point. For example, maybe your main character is a curmudgeonly, hard-nosed cop, never passing a chance to offer up a gruff comment or a fiery retort. You can play that to the hilt. However, he has to have a softer side; otherwise, he won’t seem real (or likeable).
Humans are complex, and characters with layers to their personalities are much more lifelike than one-dimensional caricatures, and thus believable. If your character seems dependable and real, you can stretch the boundaries of what they are able to do, like when the fate of the world hangs in the balance and only one person has the power to save it.
With mysteries, it depends on your specific genre as to how much of a stickler you need to be for accurate investigational procedure and forensics. In cozies, you’re never going to have a decomposing body lying in a pool of bodily waste with blowflies circling it. It’s just not done.
On the flip side, in a more hard-boiled detective novel, you’re not going to find dead Aunt Martha posed peacefully in her favorite chair and still smelling like roses after being dead for a day or two.
Case in point, in my upcoming humorous cozy, Mug Shot, the heroine lands herself in jail for a minor infraction. She’s thrown in the drunk tank, which is co-ed, and hilarity ensues. Do men and women ever get locked up together in the same cell in real life? Not likely. But when I asked my friend Rick Reed (a detective-turned-author and yearly Killer Nashville presenter) if he thought it was too unbelievable, he said I should go for it.
Rick assured me that it wasn’t too terribly far-fetched for a cozy and it sounded like a fun scene. Would I do the same thing in the forensic procedural I’m currently writing? Heck, no!
In fact, I am so intent that my grittier mystery series is believable, I’ve taken two criminology classes at my local college. My forensics professor also works as a firearms and tool mark specialist for the Indiana State Police Crime Lab, so for one of the class sessions, we got to tour the local lab facility and speak with all of the criminologists on staff. Both classes had a lot of guest speakers, so I was able to make connections with law enforcement officials who have been more than willing to answer my questions and explain the ins and outs of crime solving.
Did I go that far in researching for my cozies? Again… heck, no! In preparing to write my cozy Java Jive series (Death Before Decaf and Mug Shot), the most rigorous “research” I did was going on a couple of weekend trips to check out coffeehouses in Nashville.
Don’t scoff too much at that, though. If you’re writing a story based in a real area, you need to actually go to the area and get a feel for the place. I’ve either walked or driven down nearly every street in the Midtown area of Nashville, which is just south of downtown between the campuses of Vanderbilt and Belmont Universities, because I want the setting to be as true-to-life as possible, even if the situations the characters get themselves into are not!
If you’ve followed all the rules and are still worried that something doesn’t quite sound believable, fess up to it! At the end of Joyland, Stephen King admits to making up some of the carny slang he uses throughout the book. He basically said that we readers should get over it, and he very kindly let us know we could save our hate mail, because after all … it’s FICTION!
Caroline Fardig is the author of the Java Jive Mysteries series and the Lizzie Hart Mysteries series. Suspense Magazine recently named Fardig’s Bad Medicine as one of the Best Books of 2015. She worked as a schoolteacher, church organist, insurance agent, funeral parlor associate, and stay-at-home mom before she realized that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. Born and raised in a small town in Indiana, Fardig still lives in that same town with an understanding husband, two sweet kids, two energetic dogs, and one malevolent cat. Find Caroline on the web at www.carolinefardig.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Believability—How Much Can We Stretch Reality and Get Away With It? / Caroline Fardig
Part of the fun of fiction is escaping the constraints of normality. Although readers value consistency and authenticity in the worlds we construct, we have to be careful not to allow these concerns to squelch our creativity. This week’s guest blogger Caroline Fardig offers advice on walking that tightrope, drawn from her experience as an author of both cozy and forensic procedural mysteries.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Believability—How Much Can We Stretch Reality and Get Away With It?
By Caroline Fardig
My agent, Ethan Ellenberg, once told me that if you can get the reader sucked into a good story, it’s okay for believability to take a backseat. I agree wholeheartedly, and in my writing I’m always stretching the limits of what “real” people would actually do in a given situation. That said, you can’t exactly introduce a family of sparkly, angsty vampires into your psychological thriller and expect your readers to go along with it. Yes, writing fiction gives us certain liberties, but you still have to play by the rules of your genre.
In any genre, you want to create characters who come to life for your readers. They should have faults as well as redeeming qualities, and you can exaggerate those traits, but only up to a certain point. For example, maybe your main character is a curmudgeonly, hard-nosed cop, never passing a chance to offer up a gruff comment or a fiery retort. You can play that to the hilt. However, he has to have a softer side; otherwise, he won’t seem real (or likeable).
Humans are complex, and characters with layers to their personalities are much more lifelike than one-dimensional caricatures, and thus believable. If your character seems dependable and real, you can stretch the boundaries of what they are able to do, like when the fate of the world hangs in the balance and only one person has the power to save it.
With mysteries, it depends on your specific genre as to how much of a stickler you need to be for accurate investigational procedure and forensics. In cozies, you’re never going to have a decomposing body lying in a pool of bodily waste with blowflies circling it. It’s just not done.
On the flip side, in a more hard-boiled detective novel, you’re not going to find dead Aunt Martha posed peacefully in her favorite chair and still smelling like roses after being dead for a day or two.
Case in point, in my upcoming humorous cozy, Mug Shot, the heroine lands herself in jail for a minor infraction. She’s thrown in the drunk tank, which is co-ed, and hilarity ensues. Do men and women ever get locked up together in the same cell in real life? Not likely. But when I asked my friend Rick Reed (a detective-turned-author and yearly Killer Nashville presenter) if he thought it was too unbelievable, he said I should go for it.
Rick assured me that it wasn’t too terribly far-fetched for a cozy and it sounded like a fun scene. Would I do the same thing in the forensic procedural I’m currently writing? Heck, no!
In fact, I am so intent that my grittier mystery series is believable, I’ve taken two criminology classes at my local college. My forensics professor also works as a firearms and tool mark specialist for the Indiana State Police Crime Lab, so for one of the class sessions, we got to tour the local lab facility and speak with all of the criminologists on staff. Both classes had a lot of guest speakers, so I was able to make connections with law enforcement officials who have been more than willing to answer my questions and explain the ins and outs of crime solving.
Did I go that far in researching for my cozies? Again… heck, no! In preparing to write my cozy Java Jive series (Death Before Decaf and Mug Shot), the most rigorous “research” I did was going on a couple of weekend trips to check out coffeehouses in Nashville.
Don’t scoff too much at that, though. If you’re writing a story based in a real area, you need to actually go to the area and get a feel for the place. I’ve either walked or driven down nearly every street in the Midtown area of Nashville, which is just south of downtown between the campuses of Vanderbilt and Belmont Universities, because I want the setting to be as true-to-life as possible, even if the situations the characters get themselves into are not!
If you’ve followed all the rules and are still worried that something doesn’t quite sound believable, fess up to it! At the end of Joyland, Stephen King admits to making up some of the carny slang he uses throughout the book. He basically said that we readers should get over it, and he very kindly let us know we could save our hate mail, because after all … it’s FICTION!
Caroline Fardig is the author of the Java Jive Mysteries series and the Lizzie Hart Mysteries series. Suspense Magazine recently named Fardig’s Bad Medicine as one of the Best Books of 2015. She worked as a schoolteacher, church organist, insurance agent, funeral parlor associate, and stay-at-home mom before she realized that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. Born and raised in a small town in Indiana, Fardig still lives in that same town with an understanding husband, two sweet kids, two energetic dogs, and one malevolent cat. Find Caroline on the web at www.carolinefardig.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Believability—How Much Can We Stretch Reality and Get Away With It? / Caroline Fardig
Part of the fun of fiction is escaping the constraints of normality. Although readers value consistency and authenticity in the worlds we construct, we have to be careful not to allow these concerns to squelch our creativity. This week’s guest blogger Caroline Fardig offers advice on walking that tightrope, drawn from her experience as an author of both cozy and forensic procedural mysteries.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Believability—How Much Can We Stretch Reality and Get Away With It?
By Caroline Fardig
My agent, Ethan Ellenberg, once told me that if you can get the reader sucked into a good story, it’s okay for believability to take a backseat. I agree wholeheartedly, and in my writing I’m always stretching the limits of what “real” people would actually do in a given situation. That said, you can’t exactly introduce a family of sparkly, angsty vampires into your psychological thriller and expect your readers to go along with it. Yes, writing fiction gives us certain liberties, but you still have to play by the rules of your genre.
In any genre, you want to create characters who come to life for your readers. They should have faults as well as redeeming qualities, and you can exaggerate those traits, but only up to a certain point. For example, maybe your main character is a curmudgeonly, hard-nosed cop, never passing a chance to offer up a gruff comment or a fiery retort. You can play that to the hilt. However, he has to have a softer side; otherwise, he won’t seem real (or likeable).
Humans are complex, and characters with layers to their personalities are much more lifelike than one-dimensional caricatures, and thus believable. If your character seems dependable and real, you can stretch the boundaries of what they are able to do, like when the fate of the world hangs in the balance and only one person has the power to save it.
With mysteries, it depends on your specific genre as to how much of a stickler you need to be for accurate investigational procedure and forensics. In cozies, you’re never going to have a decomposing body lying in a pool of bodily waste with blowflies circling it. It’s just not done.
On the flip side, in a more hard-boiled detective novel, you’re not going to find dead Aunt Martha posed peacefully in her favorite chair and still smelling like roses after being dead for a day or two.
Case in point, in my upcoming humorous cozy, Mug Shot, the heroine lands herself in jail for a minor infraction. She’s thrown in the drunk tank, which is co-ed, and hilarity ensues. Do men and women ever get locked up together in the same cell in real life? Not likely. But when I asked my friend Rick Reed (a detective-turned-author and yearly Killer Nashville presenter) if he thought it was too unbelievable, he said I should go for it.
Rick assured me that it wasn’t too terribly far-fetched for a cozy and it sounded like a fun scene. Would I do the same thing in the forensic procedural I’m currently writing? Heck, no!
In fact, I am so intent that my grittier mystery series is believable, I’ve taken two criminology classes at my local college. My forensics professor also works as a firearms and tool mark specialist for the Indiana State Police Crime Lab, so for one of the class sessions, we got to tour the local lab facility and speak with all of the criminologists on staff. Both classes had a lot of guest speakers, so I was able to make connections with law enforcement officials who have been more than willing to answer my questions and explain the ins and outs of crime solving.
Did I go that far in researching for my cozies? Again… heck, no! In preparing to write my cozy Java Jive series (Death Before Decaf and Mug Shot), the most rigorous “research” I did was going on a couple of weekend trips to check out coffeehouses in Nashville.
Don’t scoff too much at that, though. If you’re writing a story based in a real area, you need to actually go to the area and get a feel for the place. I’ve either walked or driven down nearly every street in the Midtown area of Nashville, which is just south of downtown between the campuses of Vanderbilt and Belmont Universities, because I want the setting to be as true-to-life as possible, even if the situations the characters get themselves into are not!
If you’ve followed all the rules and are still worried that something doesn’t quite sound believable, fess up to it! At the end of Joyland, Stephen King admits to making up some of the carny slang he uses throughout the book. He basically said that we readers should get over it, and he very kindly let us know we could save our hate mail, because after all … it’s FICTION!
Caroline Fardig is the author of the Java Jive Mysteries series and the Lizzie Hart Mysteries series. Suspense Magazine recently named Fardig’s Bad Medicine as one of the Best Books of 2015. She worked as a schoolteacher, church organist, insurance agent, funeral parlor associate, and stay-at-home mom before she realized that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. Born and raised in a small town in Indiana, Fardig still lives in that same town with an understanding husband, two sweet kids, two energetic dogs, and one malevolent cat. Find Caroline on the web at www.carolinefardig.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Thinking Like a Horse / Lisa Wysocky
As a well-rounded adult member of society, you have more interests and areas of expertise than just the all-important writing world. (Right? …If not, well, I hate to say it, but you’re missing out.) Sometimes, viewing an aspect of writing through that seemingly incongruous lens offers you perspective, and can help you approach problems with new insight. In this week’s guest blog, equestrian mystery writer Lisa Wysocky applies her lifelong love of horses to decrypting the relationship between writers and readers.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Thinking Like a Horse
By Lisa Wysocky
From the time I was very young, I have written about horses, and as I have gotten older I find that my most important lessons have come from the world of horses—including lessons about reading and writing (and about readers and writers).
Every “horse person” knows that humans are predators and horses are prey. Obviously, this is a fundamental difference between species, and as a result, each acts accordingly. Horses look to those around them for leadership. If their human partner does not display an ability to lead via business-like body posture, competent facial expression, calm voice, and sensible decisions, the horse will lose respect for the human and call them on their error by misbehaving.
What, you might ask, does this have to do with reading or writing a mystery? Everything, actually, as horses and humans are not the only ones to have differences. Authors and readers can also be very different, in terms of their roles. Authors, for instance, “lead” the reader into the story, just as a human might lead a horse into a new adventure on the trail. If the writer’s story is not engaging and exquisitely crafted, then, just like a horse, the reader will lose respect.
Mystery authors sometimes live with their characters long enough that it becomes difficult to find perspective in giving out needed details of character and plot. If they get it wrong, a reader will call an author on it every time. In this way, the horse/human relationship and the author/reader relationship are not so very different.
Horse lovers also try to impose human experiences onto horses, and that is an impossible task. From the way horses process thought, to how they see and process touch, theirs is a world apart from the human experience. It is the same with readers and writers. When I write, I try to think like my readers, even though I know my characters and the story inside and out, while the reader is at the mercy of the information I choose to deliver.
That’s why I am always conscious of how the typical mystery reader might interpret a scene, or the last line of a chapter. Will my description of a round pen, for example, make sense to a person who does not know about horses, yet not be too elementary for those who do? As a reader, I know that I would much rather have the comfort of a concise, accurate description of an object or a process, than have a “Huh?” experience. As an author, however, that balance can be hard to find.
I have been fortunate to have my nonfiction books about horses diligently edited by people who are seasoned horse people, because those are the only readers who will be interested in that kind of book. On the other hand, I am equally as fortunate to have a woman who knows little about horses edit my Cat Enright equestrian mystery series, including The Fame Equation (2015). Even though I try to think like my readers when I write, I sometimes forget that not everyone knows, for example, what a fetlock is. My editor calls me on those lapses every time.
What is relevant information? What description adds to the story? What words advance the plot? How much is too much? Authors must lead the reader ably into, through, and out of the story in such a way that the reader wants to come back for more. Horse lovers want their horses engaged with them. Authors want to engage readers. Both, in a way, are done through leadership.
That’s why I try to think like a horse when I write. Scientists’ best guess is that horses think in pictures, much as people on the autism spectrum do, and every writer wants to be visual. Horses are also quite literal. If they don’t like something, you know it immediately with the pinning of an ear or a swish of a tail. As a writer, I know pretty quickly if a reader doesn’t like something, as one is sure to speak up.
Whether it is through reading or writing, we all love to immerse ourselves in a new mystery. That focus and attention is also very horse-like, so whether you realize it or not, you have something in common with the horsiest of horses.
Lisa Wysocky is a registered level PATH International instructor and also holds a certification as a Mentor and Equine Specialist in Mental Health and Learning. The September 2011 publication of the four-time award winning Cat Enright equestrian mystery, The Opium Equation, marked Lisa's debut fiction effort. The follow up, The Magnum Equation, takes place at an all breed horse show and won best book at the American Horse Publications awards, the first fiction book ever to earn this honor. The Fame Equation was published in 2015 and the series has recently been optioned for film and television. Lisa is also one of the authors included in the best-selling anthology, Eight Mystery Writers You Should Be Reading Now, with a Foreword by Hank Phillippi Ryan. She splits her time between Tennessee and Minnesota. Find her at LisaWysocky.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Thinking Like a Horse / Lisa Wysocky
As a well-rounded adult member of society, you have more interests and areas of expertise than just the all-important writing world. (Right? …If not, well, I hate to say it, but you’re missing out.) Sometimes, viewing an aspect of writing through that seemingly incongruous lens offers you perspective, and can help you approach problems with new insight. In this week’s guest blog, equestrian mystery writer Lisa Wysocky applies her lifelong love of horses to decrypting the relationship between writers and readers.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Thinking Like a Horse
By Lisa Wysocky
From the time I was very young, I have written about horses, and as I have gotten older I find that my most important lessons have come from the world of horses—including lessons about reading and writing (and about readers and writers).
Every “horse person” knows that humans are predators and horses are prey. Obviously, this is a fundamental difference between species, and as a result, each acts accordingly. Horses look to those around them for leadership. If their human partner does not display an ability to lead via business-like body posture, competent facial expression, calm voice, and sensible decisions, the horse will lose respect for the human and call them on their error by misbehaving.
What, you might ask, does this have to do with reading or writing a mystery? Everything, actually, as horses and humans are not the only ones to have differences. Authors and readers can also be very different, in terms of their roles. Authors, for instance, “lead” the reader into the story, just as a human might lead a horse into a new adventure on the trail. If the writer’s story is not engaging and exquisitely crafted, then, just like a horse, the reader will lose respect.
Mystery authors sometimes live with their characters long enough that it becomes difficult to find perspective in giving out needed details of character and plot. If they get it wrong, a reader will call an author on it every time. In this way, the horse/human relationship and the author/reader relationship are not so very different.
Horse lovers also try to impose human experiences onto horses, and that is an impossible task. From the way horses process thought, to how they see and process touch, theirs is a world apart from the human experience. It is the same with readers and writers. When I write, I try to think like my readers, even though I know my characters and the story inside and out, while the reader is at the mercy of the information I choose to deliver.
That’s why I am always conscious of how the typical mystery reader might interpret a scene, or the last line of a chapter. Will my description of a round pen, for example, make sense to a person who does not know about horses, yet not be too elementary for those who do? As a reader, I know that I would much rather have the comfort of a concise, accurate description of an object or a process, than have a “Huh?” experience. As an author, however, that balance can be hard to find.
I have been fortunate to have my nonfiction books about horses diligently edited by people who are seasoned horse people, because those are the only readers who will be interested in that kind of book. On the other hand, I am equally as fortunate to have a woman who knows little about horses edit my Cat Enright equestrian mystery series, including The Fame Equation (2015). Even though I try to think like my readers when I write, I sometimes forget that not everyone knows, for example, what a fetlock is. My editor calls me on those lapses every time.
What is relevant information? What description adds to the story? What words advance the plot? How much is too much? Authors must lead the reader ably into, through, and out of the story in such a way that the reader wants to come back for more. Horse lovers want their horses engaged with them. Authors want to engage readers. Both, in a way, are done through leadership.
That’s why I try to think like a horse when I write. Scientists’ best guess is that horses think in pictures, much as people on the autism spectrum do, and every writer wants to be visual. Horses are also quite literal. If they don’t like something, you know it immediately with the pinning of an ear or a swish of a tail. As a writer, I know pretty quickly if a reader doesn’t like something, as one is sure to speak up.
Whether it is through reading or writing, we all love to immerse ourselves in a new mystery. That focus and attention is also very horse-like, so whether you realize it or not, you have something in common with the horsiest of horses.
Lisa Wysocky is a registered level PATH International instructor and also holds a certification as a Mentor and Equine Specialist in Mental Health and Learning. The September 2011 publication of the four-time award winning Cat Enright equestrian mystery, The Opium Equation, marked Lisa's debut fiction effort. The follow up, The Magnum Equation, takes place at an all breed horse show and won best book at the American Horse Publications awards, the first fiction book ever to earn this honor. The Fame Equation was published in 2015 and the series has recently been optioned for film and television. Lisa is also one of the authors included in the best-selling anthology, Eight Mystery Writers You Should Be Reading Now, with a Foreword by Hank Phillippi Ryan. She splits her time between Tennessee and Minnesota. Find her at LisaWysocky.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Thinking Like a Horse / Lisa Wysocky
As a well-rounded adult member of society, you have more interests and areas of expertise than just the all-important writing world. (Right? …If not, well, I hate to say it, but you’re missing out.) Sometimes, viewing an aspect of writing through that seemingly incongruous lens offers you perspective, and can help you approach problems with new insight. In this week’s guest blog, equestrian mystery writer Lisa Wysocky applies her lifelong love of horses to decrypting the relationship between writers and readers.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Thinking Like a Horse
By Lisa Wysocky
From the time I was very young, I have written about horses, and as I have gotten older I find that my most important lessons have come from the world of horses—including lessons about reading and writing (and about readers and writers).
Every “horse person” knows that humans are predators and horses are prey. Obviously, this is a fundamental difference between species, and as a result, each acts accordingly. Horses look to those around them for leadership. If their human partner does not display an ability to lead via business-like body posture, competent facial expression, calm voice, and sensible decisions, the horse will lose respect for the human and call them on their error by misbehaving.
What, you might ask, does this have to do with reading or writing a mystery? Everything, actually, as horses and humans are not the only ones to have differences. Authors and readers can also be very different, in terms of their roles. Authors, for instance, “lead” the reader into the story, just as a human might lead a horse into a new adventure on the trail. If the writer’s story is not engaging and exquisitely crafted, then, just like a horse, the reader will lose respect.
Mystery authors sometimes live with their characters long enough that it becomes difficult to find perspective in giving out needed details of character and plot. If they get it wrong, a reader will call an author on it every time. In this way, the horse/human relationship and the author/reader relationship are not so very different.
Horse lovers also try to impose human experiences onto horses, and that is an impossible task. From the way horses process thought, to how they see and process touch, theirs is a world apart from the human experience. It is the same with readers and writers. When I write, I try to think like my readers, even though I know my characters and the story inside and out, while the reader is at the mercy of the information I choose to deliver.
That’s why I am always conscious of how the typical mystery reader might interpret a scene, or the last line of a chapter. Will my description of a round pen, for example, make sense to a person who does not know about horses, yet not be too elementary for those who do? As a reader, I know that I would much rather have the comfort of a concise, accurate description of an object or a process, than have a “Huh?” experience. As an author, however, that balance can be hard to find.
I have been fortunate to have my nonfiction books about horses diligently edited by people who are seasoned horse people, because those are the only readers who will be interested in that kind of book. On the other hand, I am equally as fortunate to have a woman who knows little about horses edit my Cat Enright equestrian mystery series, including The Fame Equation (2015). Even though I try to think like my readers when I write, I sometimes forget that not everyone knows, for example, what a fetlock is. My editor calls me on those lapses every time.
What is relevant information? What description adds to the story? What words advance the plot? How much is too much? Authors must lead the reader ably into, through, and out of the story in such a way that the reader wants to come back for more. Horse lovers want their horses engaged with them. Authors want to engage readers. Both, in a way, are done through leadership.
That’s why I try to think like a horse when I write. Scientists’ best guess is that horses think in pictures, much as people on the autism spectrum do, and every writer wants to be visual. Horses are also quite literal. If they don’t like something, you know it immediately with the pinning of an ear or a swish of a tail. As a writer, I know pretty quickly if a reader doesn’t like something, as one is sure to speak up.
Whether it is through reading or writing, we all love to immerse ourselves in a new mystery. That focus and attention is also very horse-like, so whether you realize it or not, you have something in common with the horsiest of horses.
Lisa Wysocky is a registered level PATH International instructor and also holds a certification as a Mentor and Equine Specialist in Mental Health and Learning. The September 2011 publication of the four-time award winning Cat Enright equestrian mystery, The Opium Equation, marked Lisa's debut fiction effort. The follow up, The Magnum Equation, takes place at an all breed horse show and won best book at the American Horse Publications awards, the first fiction book ever to earn this honor. The Fame Equation was published in 2015 and the series has recently been optioned for film and television. Lisa is also one of the authors included in the best-selling anthology, Eight Mystery Writers You Should Be Reading Now, with a Foreword by Hank Phillippi Ryan. She splits her time between Tennessee and Minnesota. Find her at LisaWysocky.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
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