Over the weekend, two-hundred and seventy-five (more or less) crime writers descended on Dedham, MA for the New England Crime Bake.
I’ll keep this post brief.
My favorite moments in no particular order:
- Standing outside dressed as a lobster when a fire alarm went off and the firemen came. I can dress like a lobster for my crime writer friends. But it was a little awkward with the firemen.
- Talking to Curtis Ippolito, Vanessa Lillie, and Delia Pitts about dialog, voice, and developing authentic characters. All. At. One. Table.
- Meeting David Heska Wanbli Weiden. I think he’s pretty great. If you haven’t read his books, you should.
- Seeing old friends and making new ones.
- Listening to John Nardizzi and the exonerated clients from the New England Innocence Project. This is probably one of the most powerful panels I’ve attended. I’m grateful to John for pitching the panel and appreciative of the men who shared their experiences.
- Scott Lyerly leading a rousing lobster race during the banquet.
- Meeting the wonderful guests of honor: Lisa Gardner and Joe Finder. Listening to the Luminary panel on Sunday with Hank, Hallie, William, Kate, Ruth, and Paula.
- Talking to Sarah Stewart Taylor, Dick Cass, BJ Magnani, and Jim Ziskin about how the develop their protagonists.
- Meeting mystery gamers – VERY cool to think about designing experiences around a mystery.
- My Maine crime writing buddies.
- Story-telling is powerful – the Lore experience.
A few things I’m going to commit to:
- Memorizing the first line (or two) of some of my writing. Bill Martin did this and it was pretty powerful.
- Write a little every day. Even if it’s just an hour. Keeping the momentum on longer projects is key.
- Everyone, even the most impressive writers, think from time to time, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever written.”
If you are in and around Portland this week, I hope you can join Rebecca Turkewitz and I in conversation about the Best American Mystery and Suspense.
I hope you can join us!
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Gabi Stiteler (Monday), Jule Selbo (Tuesday), Brenda Buchanan (Thursday), and Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Friday).
Kate Flora: A perfect example of how dazed and dizzy I am is that yesterday, I wrote a whole post, pressed the button to have it post on the website, and it disappeared into the ether. That’s how things feel these days. Between the constant barrage of requests for money from everyone in the country, nerves about the election, and the disjointed effect of the time change, at least once a day I’m convinced that my brain has failed.
New England Crime Bake. That should be fun if I can only organize my thoughts and remember how to do a power point. It also says I’m going to moderate a panel on Sunday. It says there’s a dentist appointment, a hair appointment, two more “maintenance’ appointments and then a quick trip back to Maine to preview the marvelous Gardens Aglow at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden. When, exactly, are those quiet late fall days sitting at my desk writing?
What does that look like? Unlike those of my fellow writers who are plotters or pantsers, I’m a cooker. I don’t write out elaborate notes. Nor do I sit down and start writing and see where the story goes. I start working on the plot and wondering. Wandering around for a few months asking questions. Who was killed? Why were they killed? Who killed them? Who else wanted them dead, and why? What will I put at the crime scene that will help the investigation? And so forth. I often say that, like Paddington Bear, during this process I should wear a little tag that says ‘please look after this author. Thank you.’ And on the back, when I’m found staring blankly at the frozen peas, ‘If found, please return to…’ and my address.
The scary part revolves around a ghost-dog wailing in the night. I’m not sure why it scared me so much, because by then, I’m going to guess I was around 10 or 11, I was reading plenty of mysteries and horror without any adverse effects, but even seeing the cover now gives me a chill. I guess it’s the combination of something frightening and unexplained up against the need to do what’s right and vulnerability? The heroine was trying to save an abused horse owned by scary crazy person on a neighboring farm. The ghost must’ve been written in a way that made it terrible and inexplicable. I don’t even remember and I still can’t say. I do remember the feeling it gave me. As kids, we had a habit of reading out loud to each other. I’m not sure how this happened in our otherwise unruly and cranky group, but we did up into the early teen years of us older kids, when it faded away. Anyway, I have a vivid memory of being in an upstairs room on a summer night with the window open and hearing my brother, on the patio below, reading the book to our younger siblings. I’d already read it, and I knew what the resolution was, and I still had to shut the window.
The only thing that compares is a few years later, when I was 14, and inexplicably home alone on a chilly, dark fall day. For hours, I read “In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote. Our dog kept barking for no reason and I several times got up to look out the windows and make sure there were no mass murderers lurking out there. I even locked the doors, which we never did at our house in Augusta, since there were so many of us coming in and out at all hours (including the occasional stranger, a post for another day). It’s one of the few times in my life that I remember being happy when people returned home and I was no longer alone in the house. Boo!
Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: I don’t remember being scared by any book when I was a child (movies, yes–the cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad had me looking over my shoulder for weeks after I saw that one.) but I do know what book terrified me most as an adult. That was Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, with his Salem’s Lot as a close runner-up. Much as I admire him as a writer, I’ve never read another of his books except for the On Writing. He’s just too darned good at evoking terror. This was the novel, by the way, that King said scared even him and I believe it. As an aside, years later, an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer made use of the same, shall we say unsettling possibility, but in televised form I found it much less upsetting. Go figure.
te Flora, had a hundred acres of fields and woods, and our house was set a quarter-mile from the road, a driveway that was only passable on foot in the winter. We had wood stove heat only. The only running water was cold. And the house was built by my father, who’d never even built a birdhouse before. In the chill of the winter, the wind whipping the zero-degree temperature into minus digits, I was reading this fine book by myself, huddled on the couch, probably because I was too lazy to add a log to the fire, when I came to the part where the large demonic pig, Jodie, is seen outside the house, looking in with large glowing red eyes. I will swear to this day that I looked up at that point, across at the window, and saw those two large glowing eyes staring at me. I’m not sure if I ever finished the book, as I blacked out most of the next two years of my life in sheer terror that Jodie was hunting me.
Kait Carson: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I don’t remember how old I was when I read the book, but it terrified me. I grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey, home of the then main campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Iviswold Castle. Built in 1869, the Castle, as we called it, was originally known as Hill House. Despite the subsequent name change, and despite the building’s use as classroom space and administrative offices, the legend stuck. Generations of Rutherford kids dared each other to sneak into the ‘dungeon’ where all manner of horror, and certain death, awaited.
In spring and into early summer, South Florida streets disappear into a riot of color. Red royal poinciana trees, yellow tabebuia, and lavender orchid trees burst into bloom. The scent of orange blossoms perfumes the air. Jasmine runs riot. Bell shaped angel’s trumpets fill backyards, and all varieties of crepe myrtle turn the landscape into a crazy quilt of color.
