Maine Crime Writers

Happy holidays, everyone. The end of the year has arrived and many of us are celebrating our favorite holidays with our families. It’s a great time to get loved ones gifts to put under the Christmas tree. One of the best gifts to give are books, especially psychological thrillers like the kind I write. Hint: THE NEIGHBOR (Kensington).

End of year is also a time to re-evaluate and reflect on the year leaving us, and  think what we can do better in the year to come. We hope to fix what we did wrong and do better the following year. Some years are better than others. The new year is always a fresh start and the beginning of something new and exciting.

I consider most years to be pretty good, but 2018 was a great year for me as an author. Kensington Books published my psychological thriller THE NEIGHBOR in the spring and we garnered some recent film interest in the book. I finished my next novel, PRAY FOR THE GIRL, which will be published in the spring of 2019. In addition, I signed another book deal with Kensington, with the hopes that it will be my home for years to come. I also had a short story chosen and published in LANDFALL: NEW ENGLAND’s BEST CRIME STORIES 2018 (Level Best Books). I performed a few readings and sat on two Crimewave panels.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year. I have a great family that I love very much. My wife and I shipped off our youngest to college in the fall, while our older daughter continues to work and attend college near home. They support me in my writing and have always been there for me. Thanks, Fam!

I consider myself so fortunate to have Evan Marshall as my agent. His wisdom, pep talks and sage advice have proved invaluable to me. Thanks to my brilliant editor, John Scognamiglio, who helps make my novels shine their brightest. In November I had the great pleasure of traveling to New York and meeting with my agent and editor at Kensington Books. What an amazing and informative visit it was. Breakfast with Evan and a great conversation about books and career goals. Then a tour of Kensington Books to meet all the people who make my books come to life. We had a nice lunch at a nearby restaurant in midtown.. Everyone treated me like a rock star and made feel so welcome. I could not have been happier.

Of course, a HUGE THANKS goes to all the people who’ve supported my career by reading my books and  reviewing them. Without readers, and their love for books, it’s all trees falling in the forest.

Finally, I’m so lucky to be a crime writer in Maine. It’s amazing the writing community us crime authors here in Maine share. Trust me, there’s nothing like it. Everyone is helpful and supportive of each other. We read together and socialize as a group and assist each other when possible. We promote each other’s works and have each other’s backs. I’d thank them all but I’m afraid I’d forget someone. So thanks to all of you fellow crime writers who have made me feel so welcome and supported in this community. We all write stories about backstabbing and murder, crimes and misdemeanors, but the crime writing community here in Maine has the kindest most helpful people you’ll ever meet. Hopefully, we can all have a productive and joyful 2019 and produce our best works to date.

Happy Holidays, everyone! Here’s Brenda Buchanan, Barb Ross, Julia Spencer-Fleming, E.J. and yours truly at Julia and her daughter’s talk at One Long Fellow Square.

When a writer refers to a book problem the assumption is she’s having trouble writing or revising. Writers have lots of those, but now I’ve got another problem with books: what to do with them when you move.

My wife and I just sold the small condo in Portland that we used as a pied a terre for 20 years and bought another in Yarmouth that we think is more suitable to our current (and likely future) way of life. Moves aren’t fun, but ours went smoothly. Except for the books. We had split our library between our two residences: current fiction and nonfiction in our house in Newry, and those from our academic lives in Portland. To accommodate the latter, we had floor-to-ceiling fitted bookcases constructed a number of years ago.

The move presented two problems: the books and shelving for them. It was far too easy to decide to take all the books to our new condo. It’s hard for anyone to dispose of books and certainly doubly hard for a writer to do so. Of course I don’t really need Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, William Byrd’s diary, or four copies of Walden. I don’t need what turned out to be 35 heavy cartons of books, but I dutifully packed them and paid movers to dutifully haul them to the new place and stack them along the walls of an empty room.

So the next step is shelving them. As we looked at various possible condos over the summer we were struck by the absence of book shelves. Only a couple of places had anything that could be called built-in bookcases, and aside from a couple of coffee-table volumes they were filled with knickknacks. The new place, grand though it is, has not a single place where a book might reside. We need a carpenter, but when I tracked down the excellent young man who built ours in the Portland condo I learned that he had recently gotten divorced and—in some related way I’m not quite clear about—had to sell his entire woodworking shop and equipment. (I wondered whether losing his tools was worse than the divorce but didn’t dare ask.) I’m now in pursuit of another carpenter but am beginning to wonder if the idea of building bookcases–for heaven’s sake–strikes potential carpenters as a bit perverse.

My books now sit in their cartons as a sort of silent rebuke and cause me to wonder why I bothered to pack and move them. The odds that I’ll re-read Cotton Mather’s correspondence are somewhere south of zero. I re-read Walden every year but don’t need multiple copies. And so on. But there’s just something about books that make them hard to leave behind, especially for a writer. They remind us of hours of pleasure, they trigger vivid memories, and of course as someone said they do furnish a room—but of course only with adequate shelving.
One reason I cling to the books is that I can’t imagine a way to dispose of them. Some years ago when my father in law moved to assisted living we helped clean out his house and had to face the question of how to dispose of his books. A Latin teacher, he had a large collection of classic texts. We called the local library. No thanks. We called some schools. No thanks. Pressured by time we finally decided that had to be recycled—i.e., sent to the local dump. But we didn’t have the heart to tell him that his beloved books were unwanted. So we told a lie. We invented the “Vassar College annual booksale” and explained that his collection would raise funds for a scholarship. He was pleased.

It’s one thing to lie, if gently, to your father in law. It’s another to lie to yourself. I just couldn’t invent a similar rouse, and so I moved the books, and they sit awaiting shelving. It cost me to move them, it will cost much more to have built-ins constructed, and it will cost me hours of time to paint the new shelves. As I eventually unpack and re-shelve them I’m sure I’ll dip in and out and set aside a few I want to re-read in full. But it’s a short-term solution since eventually all those books will end up somewhere. My son knows all about the fictional Vassar College annual booksale, and I suspect one day he will be assuring me as I lie in bed at an assisted-living facility that he donated the whole lot to a good cause. I will probably even believe him. In the meantime, I’m happy I made the decision to keep and move them. A writer needs books around, even if someone else wrote them.