Maine Crime Writers

Once upon a time, I got so mad at my husband I couldn’t sleep. (Don’t worry. We celebrated our 50^th wedding anniversary last month.) I went upstairs where the family computer was, and started pounding out a tale involving an amnesiac heroine, a house of ill repute, and a dark and brooding hero who was going to do everything the heroine told him to without a question or raised eyebrow. I am blushing in shame just thinking of typing such utter nonsense, then and now.

Furthermore, I was so naïve I had no idea what a word count feature was; you see, we have four children, and I never got near enough to the computer while they all lived at home to do any exploring. I knew nothing. The day I discovered how to cut and paste changed my life, and that’s no exaggeration.

I’d grown up hunting and pecking on a big, black used Royal upright typewriter whose “e” key stuck from years of abuse and overuse in the English language. Remember carbon paper? Typewriter ribbons that smudged everything? When I went to college, my father bought me a used electric typewriter where I continued to type my term papers badly with the wrong fingers, and at the very last minute.

I am also an adult education typing class drop out, and have never taken any computer workshops which conceivably could have helped me to write 20-plus books somewhat more efficiently. Home row remains a mystery to this day.

Getting back to my first ill-fated “book” and the whorehouse. It turns out that at less than 20,000 words, it was a novella. But it was a start, and I gradually became slightly more proficient as the years rolled by. Entirely self-taught, I have a feeling I haven’t taught myself all that well, and am probably only using a small fraction of the operating system’s and programs’ possibilities.

One could say the same of my brain. But I have recently learned that despite the 10% myth, most of our brain is used most of the time, even when we’re asleep. I know just enough to be dangerous when I’m awake. Those hundred billion neurons are always busy and full of mischief. My webmistress rescues me regularly, and is worth every penny to maintain and update my website. Mind you, I’m not a total Luddite. Sometimes I’m even proud of myself that I’ve kept as au courant as I have. I remind myself for an old dog, I still have a few tricks left in me. But my four-year-old granddaughter probably knows more right now about technology than I ever will.

There are several manuscripts “under the bed,” never to see the light of day even if I could find the floppy disks they were saved to. (I know, it’s “to which they were saved.” My English teachers are long dead, and rules were meant to be broken, right?) I used to mourn them, but now feel I’ve saved myself much embarrassment and scorn. No one will be clamoring for Maggie Robinson’s juvenilia, if a past-middle-aged woman’s writings can be called that. I did win a few writing contests back in the pre-published day which helped boost my confidence, though I have no intention of trying to resurrect anything from the dust bunny skeletons now.

I’ve lost track of the desktops and laptops I’ve gone through, and the keyboards whose letters I completely erased with my fingertips. How many times have I bought and installed the Microsoft Word program? Bill Gates really owes me.

What’s your relationship with technology? Have you killed more than your fair share of computers? If you had to write in longhand, could you read your handwriting?

Maggie Robinson is a former teacher, library clerk, and mother of four who woke up in the middle of the night, absolutely compelled to create the perfect man and use as many adjectives and adverbs as possible doing so. A transplanted New Yorker, she lives with her not-quite perfect husband in Maine, where the cold winters are ideal for staying inside and writing historical mysteries and romances. A two-time Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice nominee, her books have been translated into French, German, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Thai, Dutch and Italian. Maggie is a member of Sisters in Crime and Maine Romance Writers.

Blockchain systems are changing the world. From currency to finance, this new and exciting technology will revolutionize the way we conduct business and art for years to come. Most people are familiar with this technology because of the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. But Bitcoin, although the largest of the cryptocurrencies, is a small part of what this new system does.

How does this have anything to do with writing you may ask? I’m getting there.

First of all, let’s explain what a blockchain is in the most simplest way possible. The best way to describe the blockchain is to call it a database, only the data is stored on blocks that hold sets of information. These blocks are chained together, stamped with a date and the information on them is irreversible. Computers from all over the world transact the blockchain, making it highly decentralized and difficult to control, which is the key to its power. These computers are called nodes. Any changes to the information on the blocks have to be agreed upon by the community of users.

Okay, here’s the cool part. The blockchain is being used for novelists and artists alike. Hashmask, a digital art and collectible platform, recently sold a piece of digital art for over six-hundred thousand dollars. The owner receives a NFT (Non-Fungible Token) that represents the unique art or collectible. The owner of the NFT interacts with the digital art on the blockchain and gets naming rights, as well as unlimited commercial rights. These are rare pieces of art where the owner of the NFT becomes part of the artistic process. Think these digital tokens are worthless? Ten million dollars in digital art sold in four days in February. Check out Hashmask for more information about their platform. https://www.thehashmasks.com

The prospect for writers is even greater. There are two blockchain startup platforms that are very intriguing: Scenarex https://www.scenarex.ca and Publica https://publica.com/. This is how Forbes Magazine describe this new ebook technology. “When you buy an e-book on one of these services, it puts a record of your purchase on a blockchain that establishes your ownership of the file. You get a token — a small digital file — signifying ownership. Then you can alienate — a legalese term meaning to sell, lend, rent, or give away — the file to someone else. When that happens, a record of the new ownership is put on the blockchain, and the token moves to the new owner.” When you buy the book your name goes on the blockchain forever. Then, when you sell it, the next owner is put on the chain.

The potential blockchain technology holds for authors is limitless. It will solve the problem of reselling books. In this system, authors will get paid when the ‘owner’ of the novel resells it to someone else. There will be exact accounting information and all the buyers will be known because they’ll be recorded on the chain, making marketing your books that much easier. Of course, there are issues that still need to be worked out, but I’m very excited about this new decentralized system for authors.

Blockchain technology is not only here to stay, but it will change the world. I’ve barely scratched the surface about it in this short blog and am learning more and more each day. The various platforms and cryptocurrencies seem to grow by the hour. Be ready for the economic and artistic tsunami that’s coming our way. In the near future you may be selling your art on this exciting new platform.

From Sennebec Hill in a snowstorm

Kate Flora: I was going to write today about authors sharing some of the best, and worst, writing advice they’ve ever gotten. But something about the impending snowstorm got me thinking about Maine winters of long ago and about the way that growing up in the country and on a farm has had a lingering influence on my life and how I think, especially about land and food.

For much of my adult life, I’ve lived in a suburban community where I can see the lights of my neighbor’s houses at night. That wasn’t the case growing up. We lived in an 1811 farmhouse on a hilltop overlooking Sennebec Pond, with fields stretching out like wings beside us and thick, green forest rising up a hill across the road. We couldn’t see a neighbor to the north, and a barn kept us from seeing lights from our nearest hilltop neighbor to the south. We could see lights in the houses across the pond, more in summer when people were at their camps. But they were distant lights.

For many years, our phone line was a party line. There was no internet, of course, and no computers. Mom wrote her articles and did her correspondence on a typewriter, using carbons to keep a record of her work. We had a creaky TV antenna on the roof, sometimes snowy reception, and for the first many years of television, the set was black and white. We had a record player, but not very many records. Down in the cellar, where my father used to grade and pack the eggs from our chickens, he had a radio that was always on.

We had one bathroom for a family of five, with a hole through the floor into the cellar that grew larger year by year until my mother rebelled and called a carpenter. The cellar was low ceilinged and damp, with stone wall foundations in the older parts of the house, a mixed dirt and cement floor, and housed not only the egg grading table, wire baskets full of eggs, and stacks of cardboard boxes full of eggs sorted and packed by size but a small area where all the canned goods were stored and a dirt-floored area where potatoes and onions hung in wire baskets for the winter.

Because it was a farm, we grew or raised most of our own food, and much of the rhythm of the year was tied to that. In summer, we would be sent to the garden to weed or pick. Long summer evenings were spent at the table, snapping beans, pitting cherries, shelling dried beans, or slicing cucumbers for pickles. When I see pictures of pristine kitchens—vast swaths of empty counters, shiny floors, neat desk tops, and no papers or signs of life—I contrast that with my childhood house. The double desk overflowed with bills and papers and boxes of seeds and gardening tools and balls of twine and sticks to label plants, and batteries and work gloves and miscellaneous items stored in green cardboard berry baskets or held together with clothespins. All that mixed with genealogical correspondence, research books for mom’s articles, and dad’s reference books.

The narrow counters were full of food in progress. Vegetables waiting to be prepped and cooked, loaves of bread rising or cooling, racks of cooling cookies or muffins. Boxes of eggs. Bags and boxes of flour, wheat germ, sugar, and other baking ingredients. Under the desk, potatoes and onions and in the fall, probably a basket of miscellaneous squash. On the floor in the shed, unripe tomatoes rescued before the frost. Piles of beets and carrots. The last cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, peppers, and maybe eggplant. Cauliflower and broccoli. In a cabinet in the corner, stacks of freezer containers and lids and heavy-weight plastic freezer bags.

Family dinner on the farm

In the late fall, when the harvest had been processed and food production halted, we turned to the holiday season. With no money for gifts, our gifts from the farm were baked or gathered. We made dozens of batches of cookies to be packed in tins, harvested balsam and sewed little scented balsam pillows, and my father, who loved the land and its plants, wandered the woods collecting tiny mosses and partridge berries and made terrariums. Cookies and pillows and those little gardens would be mailed off to friends and relatives who would return the cookie tins during summer visits.

When the seed and plant catalogues—what I call “flower porn”—arrive, I am reminded of my father, with his degree in horticulture, poring over the catalogues and making lists of what he would grow each year, what was tried and true and what new varities might suit our Maine soil. By February, there would likely be the beginnings of peat pots and trays on the windowsills, as seedlings were started for spring planting.

And there was snow!!

And yes, we often walked home from school, though not barefoot, and it wasn’t all uphill. But it was a very different life.

Some lucky person who leaves a comment on this, or a fellow blogger’s post this week will win a copy of my mom’s second mystery, The Corpse in the Compost.

Sheep farmer Kate

With Mrs. Kitzel, the world’s best dog

On a woods trail across the street, standing next to the hollow oak