NEWS FROM AWAY, the fifth book in my Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea mystery series was supposed to be out by now. I’m reminded about that quite often by readers anxious to get their hands on it.
It’s gratifying and flattering that people are excited about my books, and even that they’re disappointed they have to wait for the next one. But I’m not doing it on purpose just to feed my ego. Believe me, I’d like it to be out too. In fact, I can say with confidence that no one wants that book finished mor than I do.
But writing is a hard, long process and sometimes life and other stuff interrupts and slows it down. It can be hard to get back on track once you’re off, and there are many things that go into getting a book out of the laptop and into a reader’s hands that take time and effort.
That said, News From Away will be out… sometime. I wish I could be more definite. The one definite thing I can say is that it will be out. Sometime.
Is this a blog post about why books take longer than expected to be completed? No. It’s a blog post to simply answer the question. The book is coming. At some point. The fact that a cover for it exists is proof!
I won’t go into a whole “how the sausages are made” blah blah blah about the writing process and the mental and physical aspect of it and what happens when that gets interrupted, because even I am not in the mood for it today. I also won’t go into a long elaboration about the publishing process and why that can take longer than anticipated and what slows it down. I’m bore with that topic, too.
I read somewhere in the past couple of days that August feels like “the Sunday of summer.” In that spirit, let’s take a break from all the thinking and boring stuff and just enjoy the nice (ish) weather. Summer will be over soon enough and we’ll be into the figurative Monday of it all. The metphor kind of falls apart if you think about it too hard, since Monday is at the beginning and fall isn’t… never mind. I wasn’t going to do any brain stuff here.
In fact…
If you’re not feeling the spirit of summer, here’s a photo to help you out. My dog on the dock at my sister’s lake place in New Hampshire. The only thing missing is a book and nice beverage. Dog. Lake. Dock. Sun. Summer. Enjoy it while it lasts. Pick up a book that’s available now, settle in, relax, and enjoy August. There’ll always be time to finish writing books, or ask authors when the book will be finished, once summer is gone.
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Maureen Milliken (Tuesday), Kate Flora (Wednesday), Dick Cass (Thursday), and Vaughn Hardacker (Friday).
Margaret Frazer encountered this same phenomenon. “For the one series, the main character is a Benedictine nun in England in the 1400s. I always make the story fit the reality, not the other way around. I even try to keep my vocabulary pre-1500, which helps me stay in the characters’ mindsets. And then I get something like one Amazon.com comment about The Sempster’s Tale—that some of the characters have modern attitudes. The attitudes they have may be modern, yes, but those were attitudes held by some medieval people, too, and I found them in my research.” A review of Frazer’s other series, featuring a traveling player, praised how well she detailed how things were done in medieval theater, but much of that she was making up. There is so much we simply don’t know about that period of history that she had to extrapolate.
When I was working on Face Down Among the Winchester Geese, I was unable to turn up any information concerning the disposition of unclaimed, murdered bodies in 1560s England. Was there such a thing as a morgue? The OED told me that the word was not yet in use and indicated that there was unlikely to have been a specific place where murder victims were customarily taken. It only seems logical that some procedure was followed, but lacking specifics, I decided to have my sleuth claim the body at the murder scene by saying it was that of a relative.
I have another story out in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine for the Sept/Oct edition. “We, the Aging” is my third Sloane story (which was actually the first that I wrote, but submission timelines are a funny thing). Her stories are set in and around Portland and feature some of my favorite spots. Sammy Scoops! Payson Park!
I have a few events I’m looking forward to:
SMALL MERCIES by Dennis Lehane
THE SLIP by Lucas Schaefer *DEBUT*
THE SWEET FOREVER by George Pelecanos
This morning it is raining, something of a rarity of this summer. The world I’m looking out on is not the gorgeous and inviting blue skies and shining blue ocean of most days but gray sky and gray sea. As I was having my coffee, a kingfisher landed on the dock and lingered there. Farther out above the cove, an osprey battled the winds to bring a fish home to the nest.
in morning air. As I’m sinking into a new book, and feeling like I need a tune-up, I’ve been trying to do some of the exercises I assign to my students to tune up their awareness of the world around them. While we all have many senses to choose from, in August, it is the scents that capture my imagination and send me back through decades of Maine summers.
If you don’t think August has its own set of smells, take yourself to three or four different familiar places, close your eyes, and inhale. Don’t rush things. Take your time to notice what is coming at you, what the wind currents bring. What your moving feet disturbs. Sage. Beach roses. Hot seaweed baking in the sun. Go to a farmer’s market and don’t just take in the visuals. There are stargazer lilies and cinnamon bread, the first early scents of apples. Close up, the enticements of ripe melon and the almost irresistible sweetness of ripe peaches. The nip of fresh, young onions.
I grew up on a lake, and so my water memory is of the vegetative smell of lake water and the slight tannins of decaying leaves. Twelve years ago, when we got a place on the ocean, I acquired a new set of Maine smells. Walking down the steps to the cottage, I would take deep lungfuls of briny air and feel like I’d been given a tonic. Mackerel Cove is a working lobster harbor and so yes, there is also sometimes the smell of lobster bait.
