The LadyKillers

Cop Talk

I’m just not aware that the four main characters in my two series of mysteries have favorite expressions.  I’m trying and trying to think. You as readers will have to tell me. 

I have favorite words that creep into my writing because I write as I talk.  I say “just” a lot, and “very” and “little.”  I’ll bet you do too if you think about it.  These are the unnecessary words I savagely delete in the editing process.

If you ask anybody a question in daily life they don’t answer, “Yes.” Full stop. They say, “Yeah, right. Like I said…So…yeah…like I mean, you know.” And they may rattle on about what the clerk at the DMV said and the cellphone plan they chose.

But you can’t do that when you’re writing crime fiction. The author can’t let any character prattle on about the perplexing dying patch of grass on the lawn, or the new receipt for broccoli cheese casserole they’ve got to try. Unless it matters to the plot. Or reveals something about their character, their motivations, or diabolical agenda. Or something particular about their speech pattern like an accent or a stammer.

The watchword in crime fiction—of the sort I write—gritty, psychological police procedurals is to write tight. No wasted words.

Cops have their own salty jargon the way any closed society does. So I’m going to use a colorful phrase I’ve picked up in my research and avoid the leached out, desiccated language of police report prose.

For example, “Back to the barn” – heading back to the police station. Or: “Cue ball” – a bad guy, especially a gang member, with a shaved head.

It’s fun pretending to be a hard-nosed cop. I also write for entertainment--my own as well.

Where Does Backstory Come in? by Mar Preston

Backstory got my attention when I’d read one too many books that get a good story going then drop into the past tense to catch us up on why all these exciting events have happened.

I’ve just published a 20,000 word EBook on the subject of Writing Backstory in Your Mystery.  It’s the current one in a series of how-to books on topics for first-time mystery writers. The topic is much on my mind.

Certainly backstory deepens an appreciation of the context of your characters and setting. Once they understand characters’ struggles, readers care about what happens next to them. They’ve seen cause and now effect. This has happened because of that.

But how much backstory do you need?

Imagine your heroine telling her life story to an attractive man she’s met on Match.com. She’s going to tell just enough to intrigue, yes? In fiction, she might let slip a nuance that foreshadows what is to come, or show us by inference what her driving needs are. For example, she grew up in an apartment and always wanted to own a home. What would she be willing to do to buy a house and make it her own? Would she kill? You want to make the reader curious enough to want to know the past and to find out by turning the pages.

Other than a huge indigestible lump moving like the elephant through the boa constrictor, here’s ways to deal with backstory:

• Prologue
• Research Summary
• Flashbacks
• Dialogue between characters
• Inner dialogue
• Narrative Summary of past action: exposition
• Recollection—a pause to remember

It may be that you care more about backstory than your readers do.  Here’s a last minute checklist:

• Is your backstory relevant and important to the entire story?
• Does each background fact or event reveal something essential about your character(s)?
• Does each background fact or event link up to a vital plot point?
• Does your character have a vital need to get the information at that point?
• Is your backstory broken up or inserted all at once?
• Does your character have to fight to get the background information?
• Is the backstory interesting in itself?

For more on the uses and techniques of backstory check out my EBook on Amazon.

What Do I Want To Be Good At?

I live in a tiny mountain village in the mountains a good bit north of the Los Angeles sprawl. No movie theater, no other canned entertainments. Move here and you need to know how to amuse yourself. Fortunately writing crime fiction shapes my daily life.

I see lots of women my age trundling craft supplies into the clubhouse:  lace making, quilting, scrapbooking, card creation. I pass by hearing them laughing and having a good time.

Buying a house here in 1999 that needed work, I thought laying floors and painting sounded like fun. As my own boss, I can be a terrible slave driver, or on the other hand, allow myself every sniveling excuse I can think up to quit for now. So all my DIY projects were at my own pace.

I discovered that a good use of money is to pay someone who knows what they’re doing to do work you haven’t done before. No matter how many YouTube videos you watch on laying a tile floor, you aren’t going to be good at it if you cut corners.  Did I really need to use that level gizmo on every row of tiles? Yes, you do, is the simple answer. I have to be careful where I step now because the tiles tilt up and the grout crumbles if I step the wrong way.

My father used to say I didn’t have a lick of common sense when it came to practical things. In a way that’s true.  But his common sense was founded on a lifetime of experience in mending, fixing, finding work arounds, and knowing which corners to cut.

I’ve learned how to paint nonetheless. Painting is satisfying. You can see how far you’ve come and the ways to go. Unlike writing.

You never know exactly where you’re at when you’re writing. You can always pick at a paragraph and make it better.  A word change here and there does make a difference.  Painting a ceiling you can get away with pretty good.  Or good enough. Yet I have endless patience word picking and sentence shininess.

I’ll never be good at DIY.

You might like to take a look at my website:  marpreston.com Countless hours have gone into buffing it up and it’s still not perfect.  Know the feeling?

NEWS and DIY Crafts

NEWS

Mar Preston is speaking in the Golden Pen Writers Club at the Newhall Library on Sliding Backstory into your fiction.  Her EBook on the same subject will be available at Amazon June 30^th. 

Ann Parker's WHAT GOLD BUYS is nominated for a Macavity Award, for the Sue Feder Award for Best Historical Novel! Winners are announced at the Bouchercon opening ceremonies in Toronto in October.

Ann is also up in Leadville, Colorado, today, doing a reading at the Matchless Mine with author Donna Baier Stein for "A Day with the Tabors" celebration. Burro and mule demonstrations included. And a beer tent. And music. Should be fun!

Camille Minichino reached the halfway mark on a novella, “The Magnesium Murder," the 12th installment in the Periodic Table mysteries. It will appear in the second volume of the 10-writer anthology, Sleuthing Women, due out in November. 

Priscilla Royal is back from Portland OR and the Historical Novel Society Conference. She has also sent off Wild Justice, the 14th book in series, to the Editor at Poisoned Pen Press for yea or nay. She would be grateful for any libations to the book gods! They like all formats...

Ellen Kirschman went to hear the amazing feminist writer Roxane Gay speak at Kepler's and came home with Gay's latest book "Hunger." Gay is an engaging speaker-direct, funny, genuine and very present. Her kindness towards others was incredible, considering the years of judgment and abuse she has endured.

Get Your Glue Guns Ready...

Next week is do-it-yourself and crafts week! Have a craft to share? A special do-it-yourself project/hobby? Be sure to check out our posts this week and chime in!

Drawn to the Genre By our Nature - Mar Preston

You can find my own subgenre of the mystery crime/suspense thriller on the police procedural branch of the subgenre tree. Specifically, the whodunits.  I like the cerebral quality of following the detective in an investigation. With a thriller you know pretty soon who the evil villain is and his big stakes plan to take over the world. Then it’s all a race against the clock to save the world as we know it. Granted this can be pretty exciting with a lot of car chases, steamy sex, and explosions along the way.

I like the mystery of the whodunits. When I’m reading one, I like knowing that I am getting the clues to solve the mystery and nab the killer just as the detective learns them. I had a friend who reads the last chapters first so that she knows who the killer is because she can’t stand the suspense. She has to know whodunit.  Can you imagine? I wanted to snatch my book out of her hands and beat her over the head with it.

I know the rules of suspense thrillers, and with a stun gun at my back I suppose I could write one, but would it be any good? We are drawn to one branch or another. Something in our psyche or backstory, or our world of experience takes a wisp of an idea and starts playing what if, what if? 

In my case, what if led me to the second floor of the Santa Monica Public Safety Building shared by the Police and Fire Department. My detective has been Dave Mason for five crime novels now and I’m working on a seventh. I lived in Santa Monica for a generation and saw its acceleration from a sleepy beach town to a city with a hot buzz that makes it now almost unrecognizable.

I write a second series set in the tranquil California mountain town where my security patrol officer heroine and an insufferable Bakersfield homicide cop deal with rural problems.  This summer it’s opioids and bear incursion. That’s in real life, by the way.

Mystery crime/suspense thriller? It’s a roomy branch on the subgenre tree. Detectives can vary from Lincoln Rimes to Anna Pigeon. I’ve always been fascinated by the lives big city cops live.  Never wanted to be a cop, or date a cop, or go to a cop bar, just observe.  I’m a watcher by nature, the one holding up the wall or looking at the bookcase at a party, talking quietly with one other person in the corner.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t imagine being a 5 foot 10 inch security patrol officer with curly hair chasing a bad guy (or a bear) down a dark alley at midnight.

See Holly Seabright (me) in The Most Dangerous Species.

 

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Blurting out the Truth - Mar Preston

Blurting out the Truth - Mar Preston

A work of fiction has to be about something, doesn’t it? And really good books are about a lot of things, some of them heavy social issues. Raymond Chandler’s novels are about crime and corruption in the 1940s in a place he called Bay City, in truth, Santa Monica.

No Dice, my first novel published in 2010, is about crime and corruption in Santa Monica and the attempt by a casino consortium to build a high-rise casino downtown. Please know that it feels presumptuous to put my name on the same page as Raymond Chandler.

However, I write police procedural mysteries to entertain you. I want to provide a few hours of escape from humdrum reality and give you a picture of Santa Monica only a longtime resident and activist could. But let’s have some fun doing it. So I slide in a few snarky comments about social issues as well. I’m sure even Dan Brown and James Peterson think they engage seriously with heavy social issues.

I did the research, actual years of it, to write No Dice. I read the newspapers, kept track of certain stories as they developed in California, and set up a Google Alert for casino development issues.

I knew what I was talking about when I wrote the book. Then I was faced with a tough interviewer who notified me he wanted my opinion of new casinos and land use planning, and the ethical issues surrounding gambling. (The term the industry wants you to use by the way is gaming, not gambling.)

I am no expert on casinos. People seem to want to gamble. But I am an expert on Santa Monica.

Like most anxieties that never take shape in a real form neither he nor anyone else has ever asked me a thing about casinos. Not once! My nervousness comes from the unfortunate habit of blurting out the truth when someone asks me a disturbing question because I’m just not quick on my feet. Terrible things have been said in a fit of anxiety.

This is a trait that doesn’t always serve you well. I know I should never have said that snarky thing about Dan Brown. People will stone me.

Has blurting out the truth ever happened to you?

___________

No Dice is a pretty good book.  You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Dice-Detective-Dave-Mason-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00BYDMNN4/

The bloopers. Sigh

So many.  A blush arises thinking of some that I will never share. Ever.

But restricted to the area of writing, which one of those awful moments would I choose?  The time we were all saying snarky things about a writer who was on the email thread and I hit reply all.  The entire thread of commenters fell silent. And I had to crawl on my belly and ask forgiveness. 

Or my first self-published novel. With the arrogance and timidity of any neophyte, I hit send and createspace began printing No Dice. I had worked on this book for years and still think it’s a great story and well told, but the first printed version was full of typos. I think it’s the only one of my novels my sister has read and her comment was “You need an editor.”

And I did. I yanked that book back so fast it made heads at createspace spin. I made a practice of hiring two proofreaders.  But I still have a row of garbage No Dice copies in the garage to remind me.

No one can proofread their own work with any competence. The mind is tricky, inserting words that don’t lie on the printed page.  Ever tried to read those garbled words/passages that show up on Facebook? As long as the first and last letters of the word are correct, your mind fills in meaning.  This is you proofreading.

It’s possible you’ll catch the glaring, laughable errors.  You’ll miss things like repeated words, spaces at the end of the right margin. I’m told there are writers who start reading at the back of the book and read every word from right to left. They say they do at least. I’ve never had the patience. But you might be able to do it. I also know of a writer who uses a blue pen to mark beneath each word, to make sure his mind doesn’t read words that aren’t printed on the page.  Again, this takes patience. And time.

It’s when I don’t have the patience and don’t take the time, bloopers happen. I wish I were different, but I’m only just human.

Getting Published - A Long Story

I thought everyone could write if they just sat down and put their mind to it.  As my facility for words came easily to me, I never thought it was important.

A facility for manipulating numbers was of consequence, after all, because I spent more than a score of years as an academic researcher. I would see my colleagues glance over a few pages of charts, tables, and graphs and be able to see a story line. Not so for me.

However, the University of Southern California offered me a free MFA degree for working there, and I took advantage of it. The requirement for my MFA degree was a competent novel, which happened to be my third.

I had scored an agent with my first novel, pretty much my autobiography, which should surprise no one. It was dreadful and she was a dreadful agent, but she whetted my appetite for publication. The second novel was a little better, and once again I have a sad story about another agent. The fourth novel was much better, but by then the gateway to publication, which had always been narrow had tightened.

 

It took me four full-length, finished and polished novels to teach myself how to write, and become profoundly discouraged about publication. By this time avenues to self-publishing were opening up. I wasted two years dithering about whether I was too good to self-publish.

However, I’m old and two years is a long time to waste. I had always loved mystery fiction and a crisis in my life opened up a huge block of time.  The dark side beckoned, and my first murder mystery came easily and so did the second. I self-published through createspace and it’s been the right choice for me.  

I don’t think I could write three good books in three years to meet a contract with a traditional publisher. I like being in control of the process, the timing, and have only myself (and limited resources) to blame for the fact that I am not an international bestseller.

However, I like my mystery life, blogging, attending writing conferences, and finishing the fifth now of a series of short EBooks on the craft of writing mysteries.  Along the road of publishing my six crime fiction novels, I’ve picked up some fine writing friends who see the world the way I do. That’s a quite unexpected benefit of getting published.

 

You might enjoy reading my work available here: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=mar+preston

 

Get Ready, Get Set, Write

I guess I’m the rank amateur in this blog line up as far as making preparations to write. Even though I’ve published 6 well-received mysteries and 4 EBooks on the subject of “Writing Your First Mystery” since 2010, it’s not because I’m so organized. Writing is the last thing I seem to have time for after all my commitments.

I don’t have children or aging parents to care for as an excuse. I don’t even have a romantic involvement to distract me. I have a pet or two, yes, but except for those big eyes staring up at me as I eat at my desk, they don’t ask a lot.

I may have a touch of ADHD, whatever the term is nowadays for being scatter-brained. But somehow I’ve bumbled along in life accomplishing a thing or two.

How do I ignore my political involvements? I go to meetings and write position papers and comment letters. How do I ignore the responsibilities of my executive position in the only environmental watchdog organization in our area? I have a big role in a play I’ve written. We’re in rehearsals now and I’m trying to memorize my lines.

I just took on a big editing job on a diet book of all things. Somebody else is begging me to look at her book. I don’t really need the money but I like her.I spend far too much time playing Spider Solitaire and fooling around on social media.

Once in a while I make a half-hearted attempt at self-promotion.

I’m working on a 7th crime fiction novel now. Working? I wince when I write that because I haven’t touched it in weeks. I don’t know if I get to call myself a writer in the well-organized and productive company I’m lined up with here.

Life is short and we live in interesting times. Even life in a California mountain village. I don’t know how to ignore it and stick to writing.

Here's me out in a field of wildflowers wasting time on a sunny Sunday afternoon when I could be writing.

Foolin' Around: Something different.

 I’m just foolin’ around with two new things. The first is writing a skit. I took a short story and adapted it for three characters. We have two little theater companies in our mountain village in Central California. I went to a first reading a couple of years ago intending to volunteer as stage manager. How I found myself in a lead role in a play that had appeared on Broadway I’m still wondering. But I liked the character and since our theater (an Internet coffee shop) only holds 30 seats, I figured what could go wrong?

When was the last time you tried to memorize anything longer than a grocery list? Shriek! I just couldn’t keep the lines in my head and my counterpart was an actual SAG actor. (We live close enough to Los Angeles that a number of real actors live here.)

The more impatient he became with me, the more I unraveled. He had no patience for paraphrase. It seems some actors get their cues from some exact word or line that another character says. Somehow I stumbled through the performances with my fake English accent and most of the lines intact. The roles called for it, but neither of us could manage the kiss at the final curtain. Still, thunderous applause. (It’s a small town.)

The second thing I’m foolin’ around with is editing a diet book, real paid writing work. It will probably pay more than I made selling novels and how to write a mystery Ebooks last year. Every year my tax guy looks at me funny and asks, “Is this a business or a hobby?” I’m comfortable with editing, though. I know what I’m doing, and it’s fun taking 90 pages of stream-of-consciousness rambling, finding an outline, and making a book of it.

Not long ago we got word we’d received a small grant I'd written from the local arts council to fund a Written Word series at the local art gallery. Now we can bring in speakers to talk about themselves and their written word projects.It's all writing, isn't it?

There may be those crime novelists who can sit themselves at a desk, churning out one good novel after another, but I can’t do it. I gotta do something different every once in a while You know, fool around?

Check out my latest novel, though:  https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Species-Detective-Stafford-ebook/dp/B01N4EVGLS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1491497613&sr=8-2&keywords=mar+preston