Writing Tip Wednesday – How to Write a Fight Scene

Posted on February 25, 2026 by mainecrimewriters

Kate Flora (from a panel I did at a conference a few years ago)

So You Want to Write a Fight Scene?

Some things to consider when you embark on this task:

  • What role does the fight play in your book? Not just in the particular scene, but in the overall book?

–how it is used to develop your plot?

–what does it do to enhance or complicate your characters?

Visualize the scene before you write it.

–what does the setting look like and how will the setting and items located in it enhance the scene you’re writing?

–where will your characters stand, how will they move, how will you make it vivid in your reader’s mind?

–Is your choreography logical?

     3)  Consider how you will use your words to enhance the scene.

            –use verbs which will reflect the tension and violence of the scene

            –make your sentences fragmented and choppy.

–connect the emotions of your reader to the emotions in the scene. Use that inner narrative to convey fear, anger, pain, strategizing, the consequences of failure, etc. Make the scene stand for more than simply what is happening in the moment.

     4) What if you’ve never been in a fight?

–Read (do we really need to tell you this?) and choose scenes you think are particularly effective. Then write them out by hand in your special notebook. Seriously—writing things, rather than copying or typing, helps to embed the structure of the words, the rhythm and pacing of the scene, in a way that nothing else does.

–watch movies with good fight scenes, with pauses and repeats, to see what actually happens.

–be obnoxious with your family and friends and ask them if they’ve ever been in a fight. Then make them tell you about it. Here’s what you’ll probably discover: that often, in the moment, things happen so fast people rarely know what is happening to them. Reflection is after the fact. So you will remember this if you scene is sudden and explosive—think tunnel vision. It will be different if this is a longer scene where your character is fighting for his or her life.

And remember: Someone who posts a comment on one of our blogs this month will win a bundle of books.

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Never Forget that This is Supposed to be FUN

Posted on February 24, 2026 by mainecrimewriters

Kate Flora: Sometimes, this writer gets sick of staring at the screen, writing words, erasing them, doing global search and replace to be sure the character’s names are spelled consistently, and searching for those words I leave out and don’t see. Sometimes then I sneak a chocolate from the hidden box of Valentine chocolates I bought on sale. And when I’m sick of eating chocolate and it is not yet late enough in the day for a proper daughter of New England to give herself over to drink, I do the indoor, writerly equivalent of going out to play.

I close the WIP, pull up my friend Gracie, and let her go have an adventure. Grace Christian is a somewhat wayward US Marshal who first appeared several years ago in a story published by Level Best Books called “Gracie Walks the Plank.”Gracie has voice and Gracie has attitude. She’s a true badass and it’s fun to see what she’ll think and say. After “Gracie Walks the Plank,” I wrote a second Gracie story about a battered wife and jewel heist called “All that Glitters.” Then, just for fun, because she’s a vacation from my other characters, I wrote “A Hole Near Her Heart,” and then Entitlements.” In a recent bout of playing hooky from quotas, I wrote “Black Widower.” I am gradually turning all the stories, plus more, into an entire Gracie novel.

Here’s Gracie:

Gracie Walks the Plank

The sound of a car door slamming brought Grace to the window. The car that had crunched up her gravel drive and now sat in a cloud of settling golden dust was new. Clean and dark and, until the dust finished coating it, shiny. It fit in this neighborhood of rust-blossomed double-wides like feathers on a turtle. The man who got out didn’t fit either. He was as clean and dark and shiny as the car. Wearing a suit, for sh#t’s sake, on a 95 degree day.

She stubbed out her breakfast cigarette in the butt-choked ashtray and checked to see if she was fit for company. Exiled to this crap job, she paid little attention to her appearance. The ratty housecoat was held together with a rusting safety pin, its once tropical colors as faded as her childhood dreams. Bare toes on the grubby brown carpet still wore traces of girlish pink polish, a color the little Vietnamese girl at the salon had called Blushing Dawn. Her unbrushed  mahogany hair was wrapped with the twist tie from a bread bag. She hadn’t yet put on a bra and her breasts bobbled gently under the thin cotton. The only touch of elegance was a diamond necklace, grand enough for a queen, heavy on her throat as the hand of God.

As the Suit’s demanding fist rose and fell against the tin can’s flimsy door, Grace wrapped a colorful Indian scarf—dots, not feathers—around her neck and padded across the room.

“Who’s there and what do you want?” Her voice, unused yet today, poured like honey over gravel. Billy used to say she had a big voice for such a small woman. Big enough to fill clubs, that much she knew. Big enough to make complete strangers cry. She wouldn’t mind making this man cry.

 All That Glitters

 Sometimes she just had to get out of the office. That’s just how it was. Ex-military and six years with the Marshal’s Service, Gracie was trained to conform. She could walk the walk and talk the talk, knot her tie and shine her shoes with the best of them. She knew shit from Shinola and she could pick the bad guy out of a crowd like nobody’s business. But once in a while, the urge to misbehave overtook her. Little stuff, like wanting to slam a jelly donut up against a wall full of wanted posters or put a fart cushion on some uptight asshole’s chair. Draw her gun at an inappropriate time and caress the barrel like it was someone’s precious dick. Stuff that could escalate if she didn’t tamp it down.

When it got so bad that she was, like the guy in the Elvis song, ‘itching like a man on a fuzzy tree,’ she’d leave the office, come out here to the park, and sit on a bench. Brick wall behind her to cover her back. And the whole roiling mass of humanity before her, doing its awkward human things. Spring drew people to the park like a picnic drew ants. Drew them in exuberant hordes, people who’d peeled down and were displaying swaths of bare skin to the sun’s warmth.

 So here’s a question for other writers: Do you ever escape from your works in progress and just go write playful stories? Dark stories? Poetry? Essays?

 

Posted in Kate's Posts | 3 Comments

Amateur Hour

Posted on February 23, 2026 by dickcass

Being laid up with the knee, I’ve had a ton of time to watch the Olympics, which put me in mind of this piece from a while back. Hope you don’t mind a rerun.

************************************************************

In 1985, David Halberstam wrote a small lovely book called The Amateurs, chronicling the work and sacrifice of four American Olympic-class scullers. Given the subaqueous profile of their sport, none of these athletes had any prospect of extrinsic reward. Even Olympic medals are not real gold. The achievable end of their physical pain and dedication was exquisitely symbolic. So why did otherwise intelligent and ambitious people endure indifference, ignorance, daily pain, and all the markers of stalled –out personal and professional lives? For love.

Love, to love, amare, is the Latin root of amateur. And doing something for its own sake, not for profit or attention or glory of others, is the mark of a lover. An amateur craves the gift of the activity more than the outcome and the activity is somehow purified by the lack of reward. Amateurs do it, whatever they do, for the love.

I like my work, even the boring and tedious parts, and can lose myself in it with joy, but I’ve never enjoyed publicizing, selling, “branding” myself in the hope of more success. I’d rather spend the time being a writer than an author. Which leads me to suspect I might be an eternal amateur.

I come to the state honestly.

Mark Twain once said: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

From the time I established myself, my work and my passions, as separate from my father’s, I’ve appreciated the truth in that. But knowing how sons push back at what our fathers stand for, I’m surprised to see how much I resemble the man I pushed against so hard when I was a boy.

The year my parents marriage turned fifty, I took my father striped bass fishing off of Cape Cod. I knew he’d been to the Orvis School for fly-casting instruction the year before but I didn’t know how much had taken.

As I feared, watching the fly line whistle back and forth, a weighted Clouser once or twice conking our guide, he hadn’t learned much. But we were deep in a school of bass and I was too busy with my own gear to pay much attention to what was going on aft, except I was aware of the flailing and some mild curses, his, not the guide’s.

“Ha!” I heard finally and turned to look.

Terry, the guide, was helping him gingerly unhook a toothy but very small bluefish.

“Got the little bastard.”

“Emphasis on the little,” I jabbed.

But the beatific smile beneath his red ball cap was enough to warm the cold windy ride back to Plymouth. He’d come to his fishing day without expectation of reward and been pleased. And that day I learned that being an eternal amateur was an honorable legacy, that not having to be an expert at everything meant not needing more and bigger successes every time.

If amateurism is rooted in love, it also springs from a passionate curiosity. One of my best friends built a national consulting business around athletic shoes: manufacture, styles and trends, financial and corporate analyses of the companies that make and sell them. It’s a serious business, even if it doesn’t sound like one – he’s been called the Sneaker King – and he’s the preeminent expert in his niche. He traveled a lot, found the work consuming and interesting, and it made him plenty of money.

So why, on Thursday afternoons, does he drive to a rickety white house on the edge of a university campus and broadcast a volunteer radio show presenting funk music? Passion – he may be an amateur in  the music and the radio ‘businesses,’ but he’s passionate about the music, curious about its history, its players, development.

I bring all this up because at eighty-six my father, the erstwhile fisherman, taught himself American Sign Language. For no particular reason – he didn’t want to stand up in front of his church and translate the service for members of his congregation. He hadn’t made new friends who were deaf. He wasn’t simply keeping himself busy: he had water aerobics, the food committee, the woodshop. He was doing it for the best of all reasons – he got curious about it.

As anyone who’s lived to eighty-six knows, curiosity doesn’t kill any cats – if anything, it feeds them. If anything, it’s certainty that kills things.

As a society, we revere specialty. We respect what appears to be a deep expertise in almost anything: business, financial, athletic, even romantic. But that kind of monomania requires certainty – you must always know you are on the right path, that nothing outside the path is interesting or can contribute to achieving your goals.

Curiosity is the dead opposite of certainty. It is the acknowledgement there are things we don’t already know that might be important, useful, or even just interesting. Curiosity is fed by that attitude of perpetual amateurism: what happens if I do it this way? Why is this like that? Why do we have to think this way?

Certainty takes things and people for granted. Curiosity is the daughter of doubt. We could use a little doubt, a little less certainty we know everything we need to know.

There is, after all, only one important certainty, that we die. When and what happens after, who knows? And who cares, really? And this thing we should be so certain of is the one thing we pretend will not happen to us. That itself is a strong enough argument against too much certainty.

So if we’re uncertain about what we ought to be certain of, maybe we also show too much certainty around things we cannot or should not pretend are knowable: relationships, politics, religion.

A politician is always a fat dumb easy target, but most politics is nothing more than certainty carried to a ridiculous degree, when even an individual’s positions can become mutually exclusive. Our politicians are certain evolution is a hoax, that old white men know best what women should do with their bodies, that homosexuality is an abomination (unless their son or daughter comes out).

All this certainty makes me yearn for a citizen legislature again, underpaid, supported by its own work outside the body. As messy and inefficient as it is – and I’ve seen the New Hampshire one at work, so I know – can our current governing bodies claim more success? Maybe amateurism can return some joy to the process – letting people with passion serve, the curious, the open-minded. Let’s bring back that perpetual amateur: in love with the work for its own sake, the process and the product, competent without being narrow, curious for what he or she knows and, most especially, does not.

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Weekend Update: February 21-22, 2026

Posted on February 21, 2026 by kaitlynkathy

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Dick Cass (Monday), Kate Flora (Tuesday), Vaughn Hardacker (Thursday) and Matt Cost (Friday), with a writing tip from Kate Flora on Wednesday.

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

From Kathy Lynn Emerson: I have a guest blog up at the website of historical mystery writers Mary Reed and Eric Mayer. Click here to read.

 Think you’d be awesome at teaching a Master Class at this year’s 2026 New England Crime Bake? The Crime Bake Committee is accepting proposals. You can fill out a form on the link provided here, as well as check out other conference information. The committee doesn’t promise that everyone who makes a proposal will teach a Master Class, but they also draw from the pool of proposals for panelists at the conference, which is Nov.  6-8 in Dedham, Mass. this year.

Kate Flora:  I’m excited to announce that The Big Book of Romance, in which I have a story, will be promoted as part of a special sale on @Smashwords to celebrate Read an Ebook Week from March 1 – March 7. Be sure to follow me for more updates and links to the promotion for my books and many more! #ebookweek26 #Smashwords.

You will find the promo here starting on March 1, so save the link:
https://www.smashwords.com/sale

Also from Kate: I’m looking for a few beta readers for the 12th book in my Thea Kozak series. Use the contact info below, and thanks!

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

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The author question I never get – it surprises me, yet doesn’t

Posted on February 20, 2026 by Maureen Milliken

Authors can expect certain questions at events, whether it’s a table at an author fair or a library presentation or a book group: Where do you get your ideas? How long does it take you to write a book? Do you read/like/know Paul Doiron? Can we talk about Paul Doiron instead of you? No problem! Everyone loves Paul!

But there’s one question that in more than 10 years of author events I’ve only gotten half a dozen times, and most of those have been in the past year. It’s one that, at first, I expected to hear much more often, but then got used to the fact it wasn’t going to come up.

In 2010, the same week that I completed my first mystery novel, Cold Hard News, [or thought I had], I was diagnosed with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder]. It was a relief. It explained a lot about the previous 49 years. I also realized that it explained a lot about the protagonist — why she behaved the way she did. Behavior that to me seemed normal, but I knew wasn’t to a lot of the rest of the world, even before my diagnosis. Despite advice from some who thought it was not a good idea [more on that in a minute], I revised the manuscript to give my protagonist Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea ADHD.

I didn’t want to hit readers over the head with it, but the revision accomplished a few things. It explained some of Bernie’s behavior. It was also a good forum to educate people about a misunderstood disorder. Also, the next time an agent asked my what my hook was, I’d have one instead of sitting there in slack-jawed beffudlement for several very very long seconds as she looked at me with growing disgust. Not that that ever happened! One thing about ADHD that people may not know, is that when you get hit with a question that’s not part of the script in your head, it can cause mental paralysis. This is often taken by the person asking the question as recalcitrance or idiocy, but it’s just the brain trying to get on a different track.

In any case, I worked hard to get Bernie’s diagnosis into the narrative without preaching or turning the book into a boring public service announcement. After all, it’s not a book about ADHD, it’s a mystery novel with a main character who has it. I also didn’t want it to seem like a gratuitous “here’s the protagonist’s required flaw!” element.

I prepared myself to talk about it with agents, publishers and readers. It’s not something, actually, that I wanted to out myself on. As much as I like to talk [ADHD!], that’s not something I really wanted to talk about. Even now, nearly 16 years after diagnosis, I still had second thoughts about making it a topic in this blog.

As far as the book went, I shouldn’t have worried. No one asked about it or mentioned it. At all.

Cold Hard News was published in 2015, and about a year after that, someone at a book group asked me why I gave Bernie ADHD and how I did the research. It was the first time anyone brought it up. My response was that she has it because it helps with character development, as far as some of the pickles Bernie gets into. And research? “I have it myself.” That was met with an uncomfortable silence. I started to elaborate a little on research and rewriting the character, but I’d lost the room. Someone quickly asked me another question — probably if I knew when the next Paul Doiron book was coming out. That’s a joke. I can’t really blame ADHD for my sense of humor. Or maybe I can. In any case, someone asked a question far, far from the topic of ADHD.

It was years before it came up again. It’s funny, because people are excited about talking about PTSD, which secondary protagonist Pete has. The fire chief, a military veteran, also has it, but it’s much less a part of the story. I did extensive research on first responders with PTSD, since I wanted to be authentic and not gratuitous. Readers love to talk about it. But ADHD? No thank you!

The reaction I sometimes get when I say I have it is similar to the reaction, if I had to guess, that you’d get if you confessed to being busted for shoplifting or got caught picking your nose. People seem embarrassed for me. They murmur some polite response and change the subject. While this has changed a little over the years, I think that it makes people uncomfortable because they know little about it. What they do know isn’t something they really want to know and it’s usually not accurate. There’s a lot of skepticism about ADHD, particularly when the person who has it is an adult.

Way back when I decided to make it the hook in my books, those well-meaning people who advised against it probably felt it would be gimmicky or drag the book down because of misguided beliefs about it.

It’s funny how people are often very happy to criticize and express their frustration about Bernie, but don’t acknowledge that some of the behavior that they don’t like is explained by ADHD. Not excused, mind you. But explained. For instance, most poeple recognized an impulse for what it is. If you have ADHD, however, you may ask yourself [like Bernie sometimes does] “Is this impulsive?” You think about it. You decide it’s not. You do it. The next day, or even sooner, you’re asking yourself “What the f*** was I thinking?” [For full translation of “f***” you’ll have ot read the books.]

By the way, she is NOT me. This is also something readers are happy to argue with me about, but I think I know myself better than someone I just met at an author event who’s read my book and never talked to me in my life. Just saying.

But back to Bernie. I tell people that yes, she can be frustrating, but if she were a perfect person the books would be pretty boring. It’s a little frustrating to me — something I don’t say at author events, but just between you and me, friend — that some readers ignore all the writing that makes her behavior an explainable part of the narrative. I try hard to write so that things make sense, to give actions and behavior of all the characters some context, but there’s a point when you can’t hit people over the head with things, or the book is just going to suck.

I’ve never regretted adding the ADHD angle to my books. Not because it’s a gimmick that sells book. It’s not. — no one is hailing me as the great ADHD author, that I know of. I’m happy with it because it fills out the character and is a springboard for behavior that can help drive the plot. Also, for readers who are paying attention, it may help them understand ADHD, and even help them relate to some of the diagnosed and undiagnosed people in their lives better.

Recently, I’m getting asked about it more.

Last summer, during a library presentation, a “retired physician” man told me I’d gotten it all wrong. Not only her behvior, but kids grow out of it. Excuse me? I’m used to deflecting mansplaining of my books, and I didn’t really want to go off track from what was a structured presentation about writing craft, but this was a little too much. As politly as I could [seriously!] I told him that knowledge about ADHD was constantly evolving and it’s been quite a while since they thought kids “grew out of it” and adults couldn’t have it. What I didn’t say was that if he’d read the book semi-closely, he would’ve learned that by the time you’re an adult with ADHD, you’ve learned strategies more or less to manage. Also, people are individuals. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to have ADHD or any other disorder. I gently [honest!] made it clear that since I was an adult living with ADHD, I could vouch for my character’s behavior as being authentic. I will say that the audience, made up of mostly women, seemed to be on my side. He got the benefit of me addressing him as “Doctor” every time he asked a question after that. Which was many. Maybe he just liked being called Doctor.

I was also asked about it at two other events in the past year. At those, the person who wasked, and others as well, were were excited about engaging in conversation about it. At least one of the questioners had ADHD. She said she found the book authentic and was glad someone was advocating for it.

One of my biggest goals as a writer is to entertain. I also want to say something, not only about ADHD, but about the world in general. I want readers to ask about the things I’m saying in my books and share what their takeaways are. I’m happy to talk about any aspect of my books. Hopefully, as we continue to be more open about discussing mental health, readers will be more eager to discuss ADHD.

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They’re Still At It

Posted on February 19, 2026 by kaitlynkathy

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. Last fall I posted about an online scam trying to trick me into taking advantage of a wonderful promotional opportunity for one of my books. Since then such offers have proliferated. I get at least three or four similar emails a day at each of my email addresses, although they are indiscriminate about which name is listed as the author of the book in question. It isn’t just me receiving these solicitations, either. Every writer I know has been spammed relentlessly.

These AI generated come-ons are pretty easy to spot. They come from unfamiliar or weird names and claim to represent a book club, or thousands of avid readers willing to review the book, or some other large writer-friendly-sounding group. They praise the title they’ve chosen to target so lavishly that some recipients have been seriously tempted to pull out a quote to use in cover copy. They seem to know something about the characters in the book they mention but, tellingly, are ignorant of other, easily found information about the targeted author. They are unaware, for example, that the title they want me to let them promote is one of more than seventy books by me that are currently available for readers to buy.

That said, I almost fell for one recent email I found in my spam folder. This one was a little different from the norm and there is even a minuscule chance that it might still turn out to be legitimate. Several clues in the text, however, make me 99.9% certain this is just another scam.

Clue one: The email claims to be from the editorial director (using her real name) of a real publishing house, but the sender used a gmail.com return address. As it happens, I had a three-books series published by this company. All my correspondence with them, most recently concerning the return of my rights to those books after the term of the contract expired, went to .com email addresses in which the .com was the name of the publishing house.

Clue two: The sender claims to be reading a title I wrote as Kathy and addressed me as Kathy but sent the email to Kaitlyn’s email addy

Clue three: the details this person included by way of introducing herself came right out of the real editor’s bio at the publishing house’s website but were not something a real editor would be likely to include in a business letter. In fact, it would be very odd for an editor to approach a writer in this way at all.

Clue four: She signed herself “Warmly” with her first name and no signature line. Again, editors do not typically contact writers this way.

Clue five: She claims to have been reading one of my books and after telling me what she “absolutely loved” about it, she writes that she’d “genuinely love to connect and hear what you’re working on next.” Again, not a professional approach. But wait—there’s more. The book she claims to be reading is one of the three her company published. It came out in 2016 and rights reverted in 2025. Not only that, but shortly after the real editorial director took the job at this publisher in 2024, she expressed an interest through my agent in seeing of another book in that series from me. That is the way editors solicit submissions, although it is pretty rare for them to solicit them at all. I had my agent tell her I wasn’t interested in writing a fourth book in the series. Less than two years later, surely the real editorial director would remember that exchange.

Yes, indeed, AI scammers are still at it, and they are getting more creative all the time.

Here’s a question for those readers who have received similar emails: what is your most frequent reaction? Do you laugh it off. Feel annoyed? Angry? Or do you end up kicking yourself for almost falling for it?

If you want to read my earlier post, you can follow this link:

https://mainecrimewriters.com/2025/09/16/how-to-spot-a-scam-writers-edition/

 

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

 

Posted in Kaitlyn's Posts | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments

Speed and Accuracy

Posted on February 18, 2026 by kaitcarson

A Wednesday Writing Tip

It’s taken me three years to write my latest novel, and it’s not quite done. Oh, I finished it a year ago, but then a publisher requested edits, so…. Yep, working on it. I expected to be done by the end of last month, but life got in the way, and I’ve rescheduled the edits to the end of February. That’s fine though, because I’ve discovered a writing tip to prevent future occurrences of the never-ending novel.

This tip is very basic. I’m expanding on it next month in my blog, but for now. Drum roll: outline.

I’ve always been a pantser, a/k/a discovery writer, mostly because I find it hard to write to a detailed outline. My hat is off to writing friends who write forty-and fifty-page outlines and maintain an interest in their stories. I’m an adrenaline junkie, and when I know my story in that much detail before I write it, well, I get bored. When that happens, I either set the story aside, or create story problems that have me looking for ways out of the corners I’ve written myself into. Neither solution works.

What’s a writer to do? Outline. I’m lucky in that I usually know who is dead, who killed them, and how they get caught. My novels typically run thirty-five to forty chapters, and I write in a program called Scrivener. Once I have my start and finish, I write a line or two describing what needs to happen in each chapter. By avoiding the how and sticking to the what, I’m giving myself free creative rein while following a basic structure. Oh, there’re plenty of rabbit holes to keep me interested and in trouble, but the words are flowing and the story is moving ahead. If the momentum holds, I’ll have a completed draft in the next six months. Champagne and fireworks will occur.

Is your story taking too long to write? Give what happens outlining a try, it might just work for you, too.

 

Posted in Kait's posts, Uncategorized, Writing Tip Wednesday | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Jailhouse Promises

Posted on February 17, 2026 by John Clark

 

John Clark with the beginning of the first story I ever sold, In Your Dreams. That was more than twenty years ago.

“I nod to Ray as I assume the position. My hands are out at my sides, legs slightly spread while his partner runs the wand up one leg, past my crotch, then down the other. We all know it’s a waste of time, but I‘m cool with it. Neither of them want to lose their jobs because they let up right when one of the hardasses upstairs makes an unannounced walk through.

As I wait for the door to open, I wonder who’ll get stuck chairing the meeting tonight. Most of the time it’s one of us old timers because the guys on the inside are still so raw and squirrely they’d waste fifty minutes just mind farting before getting around to business. Good thing AA teaches patience and tolerance, because there’s a hell of a lot of meetings I’d rather attend on a Friday night than the one in the library at Dellone State Prison. Still, I like to remember when life was ugly as hell and everything seemed ready to leap out and gnaw on my soul.”

Fast forward to just before COVID hit. I signed up for and went through training to run AA meetings at the Somerset County Jail.

Before I was able to do so, the pandemic sent the jail, like a lot of other entities, into lockdown. When things started getting back to normal, I took the refresher training and started running one meeting a month as part of a small group of volunteers so we could ensure continuity and offer the male inmates one meeting a week.

For the first year or so, things were hit or miss. Sometimes the jail was short staffed, sometimes in lockdown, at times they forgot to have a list ans I’d sit for half an hour before signing out and coming home.

Regardless of the circumstances, we kept going, eventually switching from Wednesday nights to Mondays when there was nothing to compete with our offering. Things got better, and inmates who were there for any length of time started looking forward to coming and actively participating.

Like I noted at the beginning, the process is similar to what I described. I leave everything except my car keys in my vehicle, enter the building, and sign the log. After using the phone to let the control desk know who I am and why I’m there, I go through the screener and wait until the first sallyport ( an electronically operated metal door, one of two or more allowing access to the inner part of the jail-only one sallyport can be open at a time) buzzes and I can open it. I repeat the process a second time and then a metal slot rolls open, where I retrieve a two way radio, our packet of AA materials, and a roster of those inmates who have signed up for the meeting.

Depending upon the size of the group, we meet in a classroom, or the chapel. The classroom is smaller, but has far better acoustics. I generally start by saying “My name is John and I am an alcoholic.” I then share pertinent parts of my life that I hope they can relate to; coming to in a jail cell, driving a car into a lake, hitting a tree while riding a motorcycle, and some of the other moments that would cause anyone not on the road to alcoholism, to pause and think, That’s pretty insane behavior, maybe I ought to stop doing this.

At that point, I’m reading the room, seeing who’s relating, who looks like they’re still not ready, and open it up for anyone else to share. I tell them there are no stupid questions other than the one you are afraid to ask.

Generally those who attend are under forty, Blacks and Hispanics in greater numbers than the general population of the state (not a judgment, simply an observation), and tattoos in abundance. Every so often, I see someone I know from when we lived in Hartland.

If I ever had any doubt that alcohol and drugs are an invitation to a downward spiral, listening to these men as they share, takes care of that. While most of them have done things far worse than I have, the feelings of self-loathing, hopelessness, and despair are ones I can relate to. They always take me back to before I got sober.

How effective are these meetings? It’s like when I worked at the Augusta Mental Health Institute…We seldom saw our successes because they went on to live a good life.

In any event, I generally leave the jail feeling good about the experience. I also keep my eye open for AA books and related recovery ones when visiting a thrift store and pass them on when I’m running a meeting. One other thing I do at the end of every meeting is share the promises from the big book of AA because they offer hope. I’ve copied them below.

“If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.”

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That New Car Smell

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Robert T. Kelley

Rob Kelley here, not actually defending the new car smell, which I always figured was toxic off-gassing from the plastic in the car’s upholstery concentrating in the vehicle.

Instead, I’m reveling in what is my new favorite part of writing a book: the beginning. I saw myself originally as a plotter. I had to know what was going to happen and I thought all pantsers (those who write from the seat of their pants) were insane people. I heard Hank Phillippi Ryan speak once about the fact that she is a pantser, likening her approach to being a firefighter approaching a burning building. What started the fire? What was going on inside? Was anyone in danger? How would she save them? I was appalled. How could you not know?

I’m slowly getting the attraction.

This week I moved from making notes to writing the book that I’ve tentatively titled Glass Ceiling. It will be the second book featuring the Boston-based journalist Olivia Wolfe, and is scheduled to come out Fall of 2027.

In the four days I’ve been actually writing (after assembling notes for a few months), I have rewritten the opening chapter, changed several names, invented ten new characters (in addition to the three I already knew I needed) found my protagonist a place to live and a daycare for her son. (I should be so productive in real life!)

What is so deeply satisfying for me in this phase of writing is finding out who my protagonist is and what matters to them. A corollary to “what matters” is “what’s at stake if I take it away”: the metaphorical house fire. And my principle for that pretty much boils down to “make it worse.” James Patterson’s online Masterclass class talks about “taking it to eleven,” figuring out how to really crank up the stakes so that your character is more starkly defined against the adversity they face.

It does, I confess, take my mind to some dark places sometimes, and it undoubtedly gives my wife, the author Margot Anne Kelley, pause when I gleefully describe some horrible thing I’m doing to my characters.

Some of this is undoubtedly due to a higher level of confidence I feel, as I’m working now on my third and fourth books. But also, I think it is a discovery of the joy of the creative part of the craft. The fact that you are creating a world, giving your characters a place to feel their own joy, fear, grief, love, and triumph.

I wrote in one of my recent Wednesday Writing Tips about creative humility, specifically mentioning my journey in learning the cello, which is still less than a year old. In the context of today’s post I should probably be more focused on my piano playing, which is five plus years more mature.

A quick story to illustrate my point. On Instagram yesterday I got fed an ad for a concert at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in March, featuring cellist Maya Beiser playing a piece by the minimalist Terry Riley. I’d never heard of her, so I looked her up and started listening to her work on YouTube. That’s when I discovered that she’s done renditions of some of Philip Glass’s work. The very first piece I found was her rendition of his Etude No. 5, a piece I have studied seriously on the piano. I was awestruck at her interpretation at the piece, but here’s the relevant part: I could appreciate her creative decisions because I’d knew the orignal craft of the piece.

So with beginnings now for me. I’m both hearing the new version of the story I’ve been telling myself in my head, and creating new versions of it as I begin the work. This is a different way of writing than I’ve considered before, and it’s been a thrilling beginning.

Currently reading The Night Manager, John le Carré, 1993. Had never gotten to it. Just watched the fantastic season one TV show from 2016 with Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston, loving the few small changes they made. Will be diving into season two from 2026 soon!

Next in my TBR list: The Oxford Murders, Guillermo Martinez, translated by Sonia Soto, 2011. (I have scenes in Oxford planned for the third book in my Olivia Wolfe series, so want to start soaking up a little scenery before I visit for research.)

 

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Weekend Update: February 14-15, 2026

Posted on February 14, 2026 by kaitlynkathy

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Rob Kelley (Monday), John Clark (Tuesday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Thursday) and Maureen Milliken (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

 

AND DON’T FORGET! One lucky Maine Crime Writers reader who leaves a comment on the blog this month will win a bundle of books!

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