The LadyKillers

LadyKillers at Left Coast Crime

Another in the series of dispatches from Left Coast Crime. Next year it's in Colorado, at a small hotel, so if you want to go after reading about it this week, sign up soon! I'm hoping to have sold my novel and be at the debut author's breakfast next year. Wish me luck!!!!

Why go to a conference if you are a reader? Well, you can see your favorite author speaking at a panel, or hitting the booze or club soda. Our bartender was kind enough not to roll her eyes when 8 of the 10 of us ordered club sodas at the bar. Hey, Friday was a working day! I was lucky enough to be hanging with Diana Orgain, Sophie Littlefield, Juliet Blackwell, Rebecca Cantrell, Boyd Morrison, Susan Shea, Kelli Stanley, and Diana Chambers, and that was just one happy hour! You can also pick up free books, get your favorite author to sign a book, and my favorite thing, find new authors to read. I found Craig Johnson just before he went Hollywood last year, and this year I found Russell Hill.

Why go to a conference if you are a writer? Attending panels can remind you that while publishing is changing, people's thirst for the written word is not. You can catch up with your friends, who may have moved far away but are never far from your thoughts. And you can get some writing done in the morning (don't even try to write in the evening--you'll be wrung out from all the socializing/learning. I was asleep by 9PM last night!!!!)

One of my favorite things is still the chance to see some of the smartest, best writers in crime at their panels, like our own Rita Lakin, Priscilla Royal, Ann Parker, Staci McLaughlin, Margaret Lucke, Penny Warner, and Camille Minichino. By the way, Staci, whom I finally met in person, is a living doll. Keep an eye out for her book, it's going to be a keeper!

Tonight is the awards banquet, and I'm betting at least one of our own takes home a prize. I'll be cheering all of them on. 

So tell me, what's your favorite thing about conferences--or the thing that keeps you from attending one?

Fifth Friday special...

A jolly contingent of the LadyKillers is at Left Coast Crime in Sacramento, having a really really super time.

The Thursday "Where the Palm Trees Meet the Pines" panel was seriously interesting. "Killer Crafts" was hilariously off-beat. Nominees for the various awards--including the LadyKiller's Rita Lakin, Priscilla Royal, and Ann Parker--received impressively rendered plaques. The registration desk was hectically busy. The restaurant at the Sheraton was quietly elegant. The Hospitality Suite was generously laden with chocolate (yay!)... and the conference as a whole is going swimmingly marvelous.

For any LCC attendees: Count the adverbs, hunt down Ann Parker, and she will give you chocolate.

Sin & Bone - New Thriller by Bette Golden Lamb & J. J. Lamb

by Diana Orgain

I don't usually post about books, but this one is special. A must read.  If you like Medical Thrillers (and who doesn't?) You have to read Sin & Bone.

In a return appearance, RN Gina Mazzio (BONE DRY, 2003) is working on the eve of her wedding when takes her final Ob/Gyn telephone advice call of the week. A deadly serious male voice says, “She’s all cut up.”

The police, the hospital administrator, and even her fiance, Harry Lucke, insist it was a crank call, some sicko.
Gina doesn’t buy it, particularly after the same man calls her at home with the same plaint. She pursues the incidents, soon linking the caller to a series of nurse disappearances.

Instead of a wedding and honeymoon with Harry, she is drawn into the illicit, dangerous black market trade human body parts.

SIN & BONE is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Writing for Kids? Seriously? Don't forget the bows and arrows! Seriously!

    I generally read adult fiction, especially in the mystery genre. I stopped reading teen books when I finished the last Nancy Drew mystery back in junior high. But after hearing all the hype about a young adult book called The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, I decided to check it out to see why it was so popular.

Much like the Twilight trilogy, The Hunger Games has been translated into over two dozen languages, has garnered positive reviews, and is now a movie, so it has to be good, right? But after reading only a few pages, I quickly learned this was not really a kids’ book. The story features a 16-year-old girl named Katniss Everdeen, who lives in very hungry, post-apocalyptic world. She volunteers to participate in the annual Hunger Games to replace her lottery-selected younger sister, Primrose. The games require that children between the ages of 12 and 18 must battle to the death every year, to appease the government.

Only one will survive.

    This is a kids’ book?

    It sounds more like a Grimm’s fairytale. Speaking of which, apparently, some parents today are refusing to read the old fairy tales to their kids because they’re “too scary.” These parents prefer to retell the stories with positive endings, hoping their children will learn a valuable lesson (instead of spending a sleepless night in Mommy and Daddy’s bed.)

    I can just imagine how they would rewrite the classic, The Three Little Pigs. “The pigs work together to build their houses, then invite the Big Nice Wolf in for a vegetarian meal and a game of Candy Land. The end.” And how about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Instead of having the evil stepmother chase Snow White from the castle, Snow gives the ugly woman makeup tips, they bake an apple pie, and start a special school for Little People.

And the dog from Old Yeller lives forever.

    Goodness. The adult mysteries I read are much tamer than The Hunger Games. While Katniss is trained to kill with a bow and arrow, most of the heroines in the books I read have a skill too, but instead of archery or sword-fighting, they’re more apt to bead or decoupage or scrapbook while they fight crime.

    As for my own mystery series, I offer party tips, not how-to-stay alive tips. And my protagonist only has to juggle party planning with murder solving. Poor Katniss struggles with getting enough food to eat while surviving killer teens. Sounds like I need to ratchet up the blood and guts and simmer down on the crafts and party tips.

    My children’s book, The Code Busters Club, is about four children who solve a mystery by cracking codes, not skulls. Maybe I should rethink that and write about a kid who skips school, sneaks out at night, lies to his friends, smokes, hangs out in a graveyard, engages in witchcraft, runs away from home, pretends to be dead, breaks into a house, gets lost in a cave, nearly starves to death, and plans to become a world-class robber when he grows up.

    Oh wait. Mark Twain already wrote that book, and called it The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. And we let our kids read that?

What’s the post-apocalyptic world coming to?

(Reprinted from my article in the Contra Costa Times)

Relentlessly Stalking Adverbs

- from Susan

Adverbs? What could I possibly say to writers about adverbs that hasn’t been said before? Obviously, too much reliance on them is lazy: If the only way a writer knows how to indicate that a character is nervous is to write “nervously,” then that writer needs to read, observe, and think more. But the wholesale rule denying adverbs entrance into a manuscript can lead to verbiage. If I have to indicate the behavior of a briefly noted extra in the background whose action plays only a small part in my scene, do I need to write a whole sentence about the featureless man? “A passing waiter darted a look at me and then at the man with the gun, licked his lips, spun on his heel and headed back toward the kitchen doors.” Nice, but if the gun has been fired three times during that sentence and the waiter is one of a score of extremely nervous witnesses, do I owe the reader a description of the others too? Can he stand for them all, in which case the sentence is worth the space?

These are the decisions writers must make in service to the story, its pacing, the direction they want the reader to be looking in as things happen. A single adverb now and then needn’t feel like a single drink to an AA member, and yet my fingers come to a halt when I’m tempted to type one. Is it really the best solution? Does it derail the showing instantly into telling? Will the reader feel it as an intrusion? Most of the time, I decide the adverb is the cheap way out, and that I have to write a better paragraph, but four or five in a 250-page novel don’t make me feel guilty.

A popular author I know whose novels spill over with adverbs brushes off the case against them, and says the dictum is promoted by snobbish academics looking for a way to undercut people who actually make money from writing fiction. He does make good money. I have to admit, however, that I get to the point at about page 50 in his books where I flinch when yet another one pops up at me. They become noticeable, like a tic, and the more I try to ignore them, the more I become aware of them, even anticipate them apprehensively.

I’ll bet you can find your own examples of successful fiction that uses or eschews this maligned part of speech. Anyone have a sentence you love – or love to hate – in which adverbs play a prominent part?

The Great Adverb Debate By Michael A. Black

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why adverbs have gotten such a bad rap in recent years. Maybe it’s because they’re so versatile. When I was in school I was taught that an adverb was a word used to modify a verb, an adjective, or another adverb and expresses time, degree, manner, cause, etc. If an adjective tells us what kind, an adverb can add how much. Plus, they can be put in various places within a sentence. In English they often end with –ly. Sounds good so far, right? So, naturally, I began including them in my writing.

I first was exposed to the current stylistic trend of avoiding adverbs when my first editor mentioned that I had used too many of them.

“Really?” I asked.

“Positively,” she said. “Take them out.”

And so, valuing her expert and usually correct opinion, I did as she instructed. How did I do it? Obediently, that’s how. When did I do it? Immediately, of course. I have to admit, I absolutely liked the results.

In all seriousness, avoiding over-modification is one of the things that current editors tend to stress, and including a lot of adverbs can make your prose a bit clumsy. Streamlining is a good thing. Let’s take a look at an example.

She wound the clock tightly and set it back on the shelf quickly.

Makes you cringe, doesn’t it? Sounds like an adverbial love fest. Let’s try some streamlining.

She wound the clock and set it back on the shelf.

Is it important that the reader knows to what degree she wound it or with what speed she set it down? Possibly, but if a word is not germane to the story, it’s better to leave it out. Every word should advance the plot. That said, I think a case can be made for including an adverb now and then.

I still remember a line from one of James Joyce’s stories in Dubliners in which some men are sitting around a campfire and one spat so copiously that he almost extinguished the flames. That’s a lot of spit he got out of one word --- copiously. I don’t remember the title of the story, but I remember the image because of the adverb. Let me reach back and pick out a phrase from another one of the masters, Dashiell Hammett. In one of his Continental Op stories he wrote the following line:

I hit him with the door repeatedly.

Let’s take a look at that one. Could he have merely said, I hit him with the door? Could he have described the action using a plethora of blood and gore-ridden prose? Obviously he could have, but what did he gain by using the single adverb? Read the sentence again and you’ll see that the word repeatedly gives a special emphasis and connotes the action much more effectively . . . He hit him not just once, not just twice, but repeatedly. You can almost see it happening by virtue of just that one word. The sentence is clearly a work of art.

That’s how to use an adverb effectively.

Adverbs are like the salt a cook puts into the soup. Too much and he ruins the taste, too little and there’s not enough. But sprinkle in a bit, here and there, and wa-la, you’ll have them calling for more crusts of bread so they can sop up the rest of the juice.

And how will they sop it up?

Why, eagerly, of course.

News and Adverbs (really!)

NEWS FLASHES!!

Not a lot of new news flashing about right now...The main piece of news...

• Many of the "left coast" contingent of the LadyKillers crew will be at the Left Coast Crime convention in Sacramento, later this week. See who, what, and when in the column to the right of this post.

ADVERBS. Really? Truly!

This coming week, the LadyKillers tackle the Great Adverb Debate. Adverbs: Do they get a bad rap? And hey, what about those adjectives? Are we going to let them get off "scot-free?"

Join us this coming week with your favorite cuppa and let us know what *you* think!

 

Dusting for Fingerprints

Staci here, on my every other Saturday, to talk about clues.

More often than not, clues are a stumbling block when
writing a mystery, at least for me. Readers want them, stories need them, and
the more I think about how much I really have to have solid clues, the harder
it is to think them up.

On occasion, I’ll read a mystery that has no clues in it.
The main character blusters their way through the story, talking to people,
visiting places, and running into danger, but in the end, they stumble across
the solution by sheer good fortune, with nary a clue in all those previous
three hundred pages. Personally, I find that infuriating. It’s not a fair game
if I have no chance of solving the mystery. I don’t care what the clue is; just
make sure there is one. Mention something vital in an off-hand manner in the
middle of mindless babble, so I can read about it later and say, “Shoot, I
missed that.” Stick the bloody murder weapon in a flower pot full of gardening
tools, so when the detective mentions it later, I can say “Gee, is that what
that was?” As long as the clues are there, I’m happy.

Agatha Christie was a genius at planting clues and putting
them all together at the end to solve the case. While I generally don’t have
quite as many as her, I try to have at least two or three to give the reader some
opportunity to beat the detective to the solution. If I can think up the clue when
I’m planning the story, or even during the writing process, then things usually
work out fine. It’s when I finish the book and realize I need to put in one
more clue that things get hairy. No matter how much I tweak the text and smooth
out the words to try and slip in the clue, I feel like it’s screaming for
attention. I might as well put the clue in all caps and bold, because that’s
how obvious I think the vital information is. I realize it’s probably not that
blatant (notice I say probably), but since the clue wasn’t there in the
original text, it seems unnatural to be in there now. Then I have to weave in
more meaningless information and try to bury the clue so even I forget it’s
there. I just hope I can bury it half as deep as Christie managed to.

Who else besides Agatha Christie is good at planting clues? Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle comes to mind. Anyone else?

Adventures of a Clue Consultant

By Margaret Lucke

Do you sometimes feel as if you haven’t got a clue?

The Clue Consultant--that's me--is here to help.

I come by this title honestly. Like many writers, I earn part of my living as a pen for hire. One day I received a phone call from a psychologist who worked with children. She'd written a mystery intended to help kids develop their critical-thinking skills. Readers would be invited to match wits with the fictional detective. When they solved the mystery they'd send in a letter identifying the guilty party and explaining how they'd figured it out. If they came up with the correct solution, they'd receive a small prize.

"The story's all done," the psychologist told me. "But I need a Clue Consultant to help me figure out where to put in the clues."

How a mystery could be complete if the clues were missing? It turned out that the book wasn't as finished as she claimed. Putting in the clues involved a complete rewrite of the story, because the clues are so integral to a mystery's plot.

To plant them, I used a technique I devised when writing my first novel. Working backward from the solution, I made a list: “What the Detective Needs to Know to Solve the Crime.” Then I went through the scene outline and pinpointed where each clue was revealed or, if it wasn't there, where to place it.

For my next gigs as a Clue Consultant, I wrote scripts for mystery weekends and fundraising parties. Participants competed in teams to solve the mystery being staged in front of their eyes. Prizes were awarded for the most accurate solution--that is, the one that most closely resembled the scenario I had come up with--and for the solution that was the most wild and inventive while still taking the clues into account.

The guests were warned that anything they heard or saw during the event might be a clue. Some of them were actually actors playing parts in the story, but they pretended to be amateur sleuths like the others, keeping their roles a secret until they dropped dead in front of everyone, mysteriously poisoned.

The production team and I assembled items to be found on the victim's bodies or in their hotel rooms, crafted snatches of conversation for the actors to say in the hearing of the other guests, and manufactured fake documents that would tell bits of the story.

Before the event we hid clues around the hotel and at local points of interest. We might bury an appointment calendar under a rosebush at the bend of a path in a particular garden, or tape the financial statement of failing business beneath a park bench. A winery agreed to hand copies of Uncle Jasper's will to anyone who came into the tasting room during specified hours and asked for a certain (nonexistent) wine.

Clues led to clues--brochures and business cards found at the "crime scene" suggested where the detective teams might go on their treasure hunt to find the evidence they needed for solving the mystery. I kept a master list showing what each clue was, where it was to be found, and what aspect of the story it revealed.

So if you need to get a clue, call on the Clue Consultant. I have lots of experience in creating and concealing them. Need a fake love letter or a suspect's alibi for Friday night? I may have them in my inventory. As for writing the rest of the story--well, that's the hard part.

The electron

Today's birthday guy is Robert Millikan (1868-1953), who determined the charge on the electron. 

I haven't a CLUE what I would do without the electron.  I need my blender, my iPhone, my electric blanket . . .