Maine Crime Writers

Walking the tightrope of writing a mystery series

Posted on April 19, 2024 by Maureen Milliken

One question I’m frequently asked by readers is “Do I have to read your books in order?”

The short answer is no. Then again, when do I ever give a short answer? I usually tell the asker no, you don’t, but while each book in my Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea mystery series wraps up the story in the book, the character arcs and relationships develop as the books continue, so if it were me, I’d read them in order. I usually add that when I realize I’m reading a book that’s part of a series, it doesn’t take away from my enjoyment to know it’s not the first book. But once I’m done, I go back and start at the beginning.

Of course, exactly what I say depends on the situation. I had a table at the awesome Central Aroostook Chamber of Commerce holiday craft fair in December, and ran out of the first book in the series, Cold Hard News. The vendor next to me — not a writer — suggested that I don’t tell people what order the books are in, so they wouldn’t realize they’re not buying the first one. Of course, I couldn’t do that. But I did stress to potential buyers the “you don’t have to read them in order” part a little more strongly.

It’s a fine tightrope we walk when we write a mystery series. The balancing act gets tighter with each new book.

As a reader I was always annoyed when horrific life-altering things happened to a main character in a book, but they were completely unaffected in the next book in the series. On the other hand, spoilers or detail-laden references to earlier events can be confusing. Is this part of the plot of, or relevant to, this book?

Of course, once I started writing, I understood it’s not that easy to balance it out. As I worked my way through the first three books of my Bernie O’Dea series, I was conscious of walking that tightrope in a way that would be best for all readers — new ones and those who’d read previous books.

As I get close to finishing Dying For News, the fourth in the series, that tightrope is a daily writing challenge. Bad things have happened to Bernie in the first three books, as well as police chief Pete Novotny. It’s a mystery series, so that’s par for the course. Bernie is a “normal” person, one of my goals for my female protagonist when I began writing mysteries. She doesn’t have super-human powers, fashion-model looks or the uncanny ability to intuit what the bad guy is going to do and therefor save everyone from imminent disaster. Being a normal person also means that she doesn’t take life-threatening situations in stride. Pete — sorry, buddy — has taken a beating, particularly in the third book, Bad News Travels Fast. He also has PTSD stemming from childhood trauma and his years as a Philadelphia homicide cop. The extent of his PTSD becomes more apparent with each book, a major thread of the character and relationship arc.

So, as I write the fourth book, how do I acknowledge the foundations laid by the first three without giving away clues to the mysteries that happened in those books? How do I do it without leading readers to feel as though they need to have read those books to understand what’s going on in this one? How do I do it without giving so much information that it makes it seem as though those references to the past are part of this book’s plot?

I’ve set some writing rules for walking that tightrope that I try to follow as I write the fourth book in the Bernie O’Dea series.

1 Be sure to include necessary character background. It’s easy to forget, since in my mind these aren’t separate books, but an ongoing narrative, that new readers need basic introductions to the characters. These introductions, though, shouldn’t bore established readers or give more detail than is necessary. For instance, new readers must know that Bernie bought her weekly newspaper in north-western Maine after years of working at bigger-city New England dailies, and that it’s the newspaper she started out at 20 years before. They need to know she’s from a big family and her seven siblings are all doctors and lawyers. They also need to know that Pete was a homicide cop in Philadelphia before coming to Redimere, that he has PTSD, and that his brother died at 15. Those and other basics actually become more necessary to get out early in later books, so that the deeper nuances of relationships make sense to new readers.

2 Don’t include too much character background. Revealing too much can not only be distracting and confusing, but also weakens the narrative of previous books for those who haven’t read them yet. A good developing character and relationship arc through a series must be as fun for readers as it is for the writer. Readers who don’t start at the beginning shouldn’t be left out of the fun of the journey the characters took to where they are now.

3 Refer to previous plots without revealing resolutions or saying so much that it spoils the previous books. The reason I focused on characters in the first two points is because that’s trickier for me, since the development of the relationship is a thread that runs through the books. The plots of my books, conversely, are contained within the book. There aren’t any plot cliff-hangers when the book is done. But still, stuff happened in previous books that has an impact on what’s going on in the current one. Just as with character background, revealing too much is a distraction to readers — anything from too much exposition to misleading them into thinking it’s part of the plot of the current book. So, for instance, in Dying For News, Pete has a severely injured leg because of a “hiking accident” he suffered in Bad News Travels Fast. It’s relevant to the plot, but how he got it isn’t that important. Revealing details of how he got it would also spoil the drama for readers who haven’t yet read the previous book. In another example, Bernie flips out whenever she sees, or even hears about, Fergus Kelley, a feckless reporter for an online news outlet. His lack of ethics caused issues for her in the previous two books. Readers of the new book learn fast how she feels, but can understand it without knowing the details of what he did [although a nicely placed “he almost got me killed” doesn’t hurt].

4 You can’t make everyone happy. This goes for almost every choice a writer makes. It’s a garden party where you can’t please everyone, so you have to please yourself [a post for a future day]. When walking the series tightrope, specifically, it’s up to me to make sure I follow the first three rules with as much attention as possible. Once I’ve satisfied myself that I’m revealing enough to give readers the insight and information they need to enjoy the current book without feeling as though they’re missing something, or being distracted, it’s in their hands.

5 Give readers credit. Readers who are familiar with mystery series know that if they are introduced mid-series there will likely be references to the past that they’re not going to find out more about unless they read the previous books. I’ve written before about how to read a mystery series. I fully believe that mystery lovers have it down. Readers new to mysteries will pick it up. Readers are smart about what they read, for the most part. If I follow point 4, and make sure I walk the tightrope as skillfully as I can, I know they’ll follow right behind me.

Posted in Maureen's Posts | Tagged Bernie O'Dea mystery series, Mystery readers, Writing a series, writing craft | 6 Comments

Voices

Posted on April 18, 2024 by kaitlynkathy

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today admitting to my fondness for movie musicals—everything from Singin’ in the Rain to Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. Not too long ago, in the course of about a month, I ended up watching three different versions of Gypsy, one starring Rosalind Russell, one with Bette Midler, and the third, to my surprise, starring British actress Imelda Staunton (perhaps best know for her role as Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter movies).

But here’s the really odd thing: when an earworm inevitably surfaced—”Everything’s Coming up Roses”—it wasn’t any of those actresses I heard singing in my head. It was Ethel Merman, who originated the role on Broadway. That got me thinking about voices.

This post isn’t about voices done by A.I. or impressionists, or even about voices familiar to us because they belong to family or friends or because we hear them all the time on radio, tv, or a podcast. My focus is on truly distinctive voices, the ones you recognize even years after the last time you heard them.

These are rare. Lots of famous actors have versatile voices, but are they recognizable instantly? When I started thinking about it, I could come up with quite a few names, but that was a small number compared to how many actors are out there. Sometimes I hear a voice-over and instantly know who it is—Helen Mirren in Barbie comes to mind. But for the most part when I hear a voice that sounds vaguely familiar I can’t identify it. It’s distinctive, but not distinctive enough.

Somewhere along the path of my musings, it occurred to me that most of the voices I immediately recognized weren’t just speaking. They were singing, which brings me back to Ethel Merman (her name is a link to hear her singing one of the songs from Gypsy). The best film to hear her in is There’s No Business Like Show Business. Another Broadway actress with a distinctive voice was Gwen Verdon. I was lucky enough to see her live in Sweet Charity and her name is a link to one of the songs from that show, but you can hear her speaking voice in the films Damn Yankees and Cocoon.

Who else came to mind? Jimmy Durante voicing a song at the end of Sleepless in Seattle. You may have noticed that most of my examples of distinctive voices are, shall we say, old. Well, so am I!

One of the most frequent suggestions given to writers is to listen to how various people speak and try to approximate that on the page. Dialogue in which every character sounds alike gets boring very quickly. On the other hand, writers who try too hard to differentiate between characters by means of regional accents, speech patterns, or speech impediments all too easily end up with dialogue that sounds artificial.

Even harder, perhaps impossible, to convey on the page is the actual sound of someone’s voice. We end up falling back on adjectives—deep baritone, high tinkly, and the like—or comparisons to the voices of real, named people including actors (a “lazy” technique frowned upon by writing teachers), or to the sounds made by animals or by inanimate objects like fingers on a chalkboard.

So, those are my musings on the subject. I’d love to hear what folks reading this post think about conveying the sound of a character’s voice on the page, as well as who first comes to mind when the question of an immediately recognizable voice is raised. I hope you’ll chime in with a comment.

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 omnibus e-book editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

Posted in Kaitlyn's Posts | Tagged characters' voices, distinctive voices, Ethel Merman, Gwen Verdon, Kaitlyn Dunnett, Kathy Lynn Emerson | 1 Comment

A Crime Writer’s Adventures in Research

Posted on April 16, 2024 by mainecrimewriters

Kate Flora: One of the most interest aspects of crime writing is, of course, all the

Sometimes research takes me in some strange directions, like to the shooting range.

research we do. True, it is easy to put off the writing while we do one more bit of research. It is also possible to get very lost in the weeds, as one question will lead to another and then another, until the block of writing time has passed. There’s always tomorrow, though. And there’s always recognizing the necessity to apply that annoying little word I like so much: DISCIPLINE.

(You have all heard my snarky comment about waiting for the fluttery little Muse of inspiration, right?)

Recently, in my next Joe Burgess mystery, Deliver Us from Evil, (working title, at least) I needed to find something that would be attached to a blanket the victim was wrapped in that might provide a clue to where she might have been held prisoner. That led me to explore rare and endangered plants in Maine. Yes, I went down the rabbit hole, for sure. It was fun to stare at photos of plants, read their descriptions, and learn where they can be been found in Maine. Some were in too many places. Some only along the coast, while I wanted the location to be inland, in the vast, thinly settled interior. https://www.maine.gov/dacf/mnap/features/rare_plants/plantlist.htm

Along the way, I learned a term I’d never heard before: hitchhiker plants. Sure, like everyone else who tromps through fields and forests, I’ve had lots of nasty little things cling tenaciously to my socks. I’d just never heard them called that before. It has been a delight, ever since, to slip that term into conversations. Life is no fun unless I’m always learning new things.

Regular readers of this blog have already heard my story about Thea and the flashlight, and how I emailed a number of my police advisors before I had her pick up the flashlight in the kitchen and head down to the dark basement to check on why the furnace wasn’t working. I learned that one attribute of a good flashlight when you’re searching and don’t want to give your location away is a silent UI. I had to ask what a UI was. Not just an on and off switch, but a “user interface.”

Ah, adventures in writing.

Sometimes those research adventures are physical activities, like going out with wardens

Maine Crime Writer Kate Flora, retired game warden and rookie author Roger Guay, their book “A Good Man with a Dog,” and their secret weapon, Lucy, at the Guildford Library local author event June 11.

training dogs to do cadaver searches, watching in awe as dogs found cadaver scent in trees or buried in the ground, or hidden in a filing cabinet. Research might involve tromping through tick-filled fields to watch search and rescue dogs at work. Or hiding in the woods so the dog could find me. I never did get back the tee shirt they’d used as a scent object. Or going to the shooting range with the cops.

Recently, the lovely Lara Bricker invited some of us to a mystery brunch at the Exeter, New Hampshire LitFest. Our job—the writers who attended—was to take part in an activity called “Two Truths and a Lie.” I debated long and hard about what my lie would be, because I am a terrible liar. My voice changes and my face turns red and I rush through the lie because I’m so bad a tlying. So here are my two truths and a lie. Let’s see if you can guess which one is the lie:

When I was writing a scene in one of my Thea Kozak mysteries where she is kidnapped and put in the trunk of a car, I wanted to know what the experience would really be like for her. What it would feel like and sound like, so I asked my husband to shut me in his trunk and drive me around the neighborhood.
When I was up in New Brunswick, doing research for a true crime, I wanted to see where the body was found. The cop gave me a helmet and put me on an ATV to drive into the woods. I misjudged a sharp turn, banged up my wrist, and ended up in the emergency room.
Once, when I was on a ride-along, they invited me to join them on a stakeout looking for some thieves who were stealing copper. We were hanging out in the car, chatting, when I looked across the industrial park, spotted a car, and said, “Is that them?” I’d found the bad guy.

Posted in Barb's Posts, Kate's Posts, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Vocab Test

Posted on April 15, 2024 by maggierobinsonwriter

When my husband and I were first married, we taught and lived in a boarding school in Massachusetts. We had twenty eighth grade boys (shudder) in our care in the dorm, which as you can imagine held various perils. Someone really had to be with them at all times. Even then, a kid managed to break his arm horsing around.

One winter, the fire alarms malfunctioned and went off accidentally at 2 AM for several nights in a row. There’s nothing like shepherding adolescent boys down four flights of fire escape stairs in a diaphanous nightgown. After the second time, I wised up and started sleeping in flannel pajamas.

I look back and marvel over the schedule we simply accepted—nay, were grateful for. We had jobs. Housing. Food. We ate three meals a day with the students, dishing out portions family-style in a dining room that had lots of wildlife trophies on the paneled walls. We had two nights and one afternoon a week off, and every other weekend. For all practical purposes this meant nothing positive for my husband’s leisure time; he coached sports for three seasons and had practice and games when he was supposed to be “free.” Somewhere on the baseball field, his original wedding ring has been lost for 52 springs. And we got paid just once a month, which made those dining hall meals pretty appealing on week four even as the dead animals looked on.

One of the teachers who covered for us evenings used to come equipped with a big, fat dictionary. His stated goal was to improve his knowledge, not to bash the boys on the head no matter how much they might deserve it. He’d sit in the lounge reading it, pretty much oblivious to any shenanigans, and that was how that arm got broken before lights out.

I had never known anyone to read the dictionary as if it was a novel, nor have I met anyone since. But I’m all for being a life-long learner. I am forever grateful to my sophomore high school English teacher, Matthew Murphy. He was the first one to call me Maggie, and made us look up the root words of a lengthy list of vocabulary words each week. I never took a Latin class, yet I am somewhat conversant (or used to be) with the language. And I can usually figure out meanings from context. If not, the Internet makes finding definitions easy-peasy.

One of the few fun things about X AKA Twitter is the daily posting of four very strange words by @arealmofwonder. Most will never be used in normal conversation, and unlikely to be found in the dictionary or any book you read or write. But I will leave you with some recent spring-ish words, as I take a brief break from blogging with the Maine Crime Writers. May you be filled with vernalagnia (the romantic mood brought on by good spring weather) and your gardens soon flosculous (covered in flowers). No doubt there will be some dabbledy (rainy weather) ahead, but it sure beats snow. See you in September!

Words to live by:

“Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.” ~Mark Twain

“Never use a long word when a short one will do.” ~George Orwell

Some super-simple and effective words:

April in Maine by May Sarton

The days are cold and brown,

Brown fields, no sign of green,

Brown twigs, not even swelling,

And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in

The tree frogs begin

Their shrill sweet singing,

And we lie on our beds

Through the ecstatic night,

Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.

I had a book review once where the reader complained she had to look some words up. Mr. Murphy must be happy in heaven, though Mark and George and May probably don’t approve.

What’s your favorite “big” or weird word?

www.maggierobinson.net

Posted in Maggie's Posts | 11 Comments

Weekend Update: April 13-14, 2024

Posted on April 13, 2024 by kaitlynkathy

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Maggie Robinson (Monday), Kate Flora (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:

COVER REVEAL from Kathy Lynn Emerson: Treacherous Visions is still being revised and does not yet have cover art, but I’ve just released the reprint edition of Face Down in the Marrow-Bone Pie, the first book in my Face Down Mystery series. It’s print-on-demand, so it will have to be special ordered from brick-and-mortar stores. Barnes & Noble online already has copies and it will be available from Amazon, Kobo, and other online booksellers too. The rest of the series will be published in the course of 2024 and early 2025. These are trade paperbacks priced at $15.99 each.

Here’s the link to Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/face-down-in-the-marrow-bone-pie-kathy-lynn-emerson/1100068873?ean=9798224041183

Warning: For the moment you might want to avoid ordering a copy from Amazon. They’ve listed the book, but the only copies available so far are from one of their “other sellers” and that seller has added $10 to the price!

Matt Cost had a fabulous time with fellow Crime Writer, Kate Flora, and others at the Exeter Lit Festival this past weekend. He also was at the Albert Church Brown Memorial Library in China Village and was happy to see fellow mystery writer Gerry Boyle in the audience! At the time of this writing, Matt has not yet visited the Skowhegan Free Public Library, but by the time of your reading, he will have. Maybe he saw you there? Matt will be visiting a book club at Illume Books in Newburyport on Tuesday, Farmington Public Library on Wednesday, and the Gray Public Library on Thursday next week. Come on out and hear about the evolution of a book via the pirate ship Pirate Trap!

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

Posted in Sunday Updates | Tagged Face Down in the Marrow-Bone Pie, Kaitlyn Dunnett, Kate Flora, Kathy Lynn Emerson, Maggie Robinson, Maine Crime Writers news, Maureen Milliken | Leave a comment

Writing Realistic Thrillers

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Robert T. Kelley

Realistic fiction sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But readers love characters who feel familiar, locations they know in real life, and situations that could happen but haven’t. Except when they have.

Thirty-five years ago, author Tom Wolfe complained about having his fiction scooped by reality between serializing, then fully publishing, his New York novel Bonfire of the Vanities. In that 1989 Harpers article, he quoted a similar complaint made sixty five years ago by Philip Roth.

Fast forward to 2024, and the challenge is that much more real. As a writer of thrillers with strong technology plots, I definitely face it. I dodged it in my debut thriller Raven (High Frequency Press, 2025) by setting it in 1990 at the end of the cold war and beginning of the internet. Want to know what the internet had in store for us in 1990’s future? Just look around!

Raven is set in Boston in the spring of 1990, when Cambridge was still gritty and before the Big Dig blew up downtown. It’s easy to draw contrasts between then and now: pay phones instead of cell phones, dial up modems instead of broadband internet, less computing power in a supercomputer than you have in your cell phone in your pocket. (A current iPhone is 5000 times more powerful than the pictured 32 million dollar 1984 Cray-2 Research supercomputer!)

By most standards a book set in 1990 doesn’t even count as a “historical” novel. (Definitions of “historical fiction” vary widely: before 1950, at least 50 years earlier, etc. I call mine “near historical.” I’m a writer; I get to make stuff up.) Even thirty years gives me enough distance to make the world seem very different from our own.

In contrast, writing in the present moment, particularly with technology and politics as part of a storyline, opens up some very weird possibilities. Rob Hart, author of the 2018 novel The Warehouse, wrote in 2020 a CrimeReads blog post titled “When Speculative Fiction Becomes Reality”:

An online retail giant dominating the economy while the small business landscape is wiped out. And an exponential erosion of job security and worker protections. And children learning remotely as municipal budgets are crippled. And government sitting idly by while corporations rake in record profits.

These are the things I saw on the horizon, maybe ten or twenty down the road. Which is why, whenever anyone asked me when the book was set, I would shrug and say: soon enough.

I didn’t realize that would mean seven months after it hit shelves.

Turns out, writers of apocalyptic fiction usually don’t want it to come true in their immediate present. I found myself in much the same position in one of my current works in progress, Critical State. (Working title of course. Stories around publishers’ particularities about book titling is a whole other blog post!) Set in the present day, Critical State follows a journalist/blogger as she uncovers a plot to weaponize social media to malignly influence public opinion. I swear that sounded really out there when I’d started drafting it a few years ago. Just close enough to reality to be relatable, not so far out as to be science fiction.

Yeah, well, I guess I need to go a little farther out.

I’ve been an avid reader of Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction my whole life, and have dedicated myself to high tech thrillers for years as well. And like Rob Hart, I believe that “no one gets into writing speculative fiction because they’re a fatalist,” but because they want to make change, to expose something that we are hurtling toward and convince us to alter course.

One of the principles of writing thrillers is to “turn it up to eleven.” (If you don’t know that reference, recommending the movie This is Spinal Tap is my gift to you.) To make the danger, the threat, the fear, even more outsized than it might be in real life. But, in my case, and in the case of countless other writers, we were perhaps too meek. You read the news and think “how bad could it get?” then realize the answer is “much worse.”

And it’s our job as writers to make that “much worse” grab you by the shirt collar and drag you along.

Posted in Rob's Posts | 9 Comments

Maine Crime Writers in Libraries

Posted on April 10, 2024 by mainecrimewriters

Happy National Library Week! As writers, we spend a lot of time in libraries talking about our work, doing research, and getting the next book to read. To celebrate our love of libraries, today we’re sharing photos of us in libraries. If we haven’t been to yours yet, there’s still time to plan an event for summer. Making a Mystery, with patron involvement? Casting Call: How Writers Find Their Characters, Why Maine? – Crime writers on why Maine is such fertile group for our stories, There’s a Whole Iceberg Under the Surface: Mystery Writers and the Research They Do.

So here we are:

I always try to be positive and pleasant at an event, no matter how much it goes against my normal personality.

Here’s an old one . . Concord MA library, circa 2016?

Hallie Ephron, Kate Flora, Sheila Connolly, etc.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Problems of an American Mystery Crime Writer in Europe

Posted on April 9, 2024 by jselbo

In a long-past-due-because-of-the-pandemic-trip, we set off with great excitement – but I soon realized the biggest problem I have while traveling is starting my day in the way that makes the rest of my day ‘feel good’.

I like to complete a Morning-Write before the rest of the day gets in the way.

That means getting up early, putting in three to five hours of writing or rewriting and see the page count tick (slowly) upwards.

I use Rudolf Nureyev, the Russian dancer, as inspiration. He is famous for saying that his body was so tuned by his work-out habits that if he did not dance every day, he could not think or love or walk. Or something like that.

I can’t ballet a lick – and I was actually asked to leave a late-in-life class because my leaping across the floor was not pretty at all.

But Nureyev remains a fav because he was so damn dedicated. He said, “My feet are dogs,” when he was unhappy with his work. I say “My fingers are sticks” when there is no connection from my brain to their activity. Nureyev also said, “You live as long as you dance,” and I try to adopt his attitude to my time at my desk. Putting story ideas, characters, dialogue on the page makes me like life.

So what to do when traveling? In Portugal (where I was five weeks ago) there are no 24-hour diners or coffeeshops that open at 5 am (like Becky’s in Portland). Plus, as we know, the most common European dinner time is 8:30 or 9 pm, concerts and theatre start around 11 pm and bars and music venues stay open until 4 am. Filling the latest hours of the day with food and entertainment didn’t support my getting out of bed for my beloved Morning-Write.

And then there are those great free breakfasts that most hotels serve or put out on buffet: they usually start at 8 am and grazing an amazing buffet of pastry, eggs, yogurt, sausages and smoked salmon takes my mind off crime and mystery writing. Why didn’t I write in bed at 5 am? The snoring from the person next to me can put me on edge. Why didn’t I just head to the lobby at 5 am? The hotel lobbies (if large enough) tend to have short drink tables, not desk-level tables, and I don’t like to type with a laptop on my lap (even though my dislike goes against the idea of what the “lap” top was designed for). And if I had enjoyed the secret speakeasy the night before (you need to know the address and where the hidden doorbell is to get in – there’s no signage because it IS secret), the early Lobby-Write wasn’t going to work.

And if the only time you can tour the Tinned Fish Factory in Porto (a passion for sardines is responsible for this plan) is 9:30 am and you have to take a train to the outer part of the city, so you have to leave for the station at 8:35, the Morning-Write is again dinged.

A Noon-Write is pushed aside because I wanted to go to ‘the most beautiful bookstore in the world’ – Liveria Lello. It’s in an area of Porto that is packed with cocktail/port/wine bars and other bookstores (I’m very impressed, I must say, at the Portuguese love of books – and port).

The stunning Lello bookstore inspired J.K. Rowling to create a similar place in her Harry Potter series. (She was teaching English in Porto and started outlining/writing Harry Potter in the city.

Maybe J.K.’s why you now have to pay 8 Euro to go inside the bookstore (but if you buy something, the 8 Euro goes towards it so you get this great feeling you’re getting 1/3 off a book – which of course you’re not, but still…).

And Afternoon-Write was only partially successful because I wanted to hang out at the ‘oldest café in Porto’ – the Majestic. It’s gorgeous, built in 1921, in the ‘La Belle Epoque’ era, and is complete with glittering chandeliers, swerve-y arches, cupids and wild-shaped windows and mirrors.

Smartly dressed waiters sweep over and give you a menu that lists lots of coffees and ports and cocktails. The most incredible food-treat was a quickly-dipped- and-fried French Toasts served with bananas and drowned in maple syrup.

A blurb on the café reads: ‘This cafe used to be the meeting point of the elite of the city. Writers, politicians, royals, musicians, artists, and thinkers exchanged ideas here and discussed different topics over a cup of coffee or a glass of absinthe. Once you walk through the main doors it’s like you’re taken back in time, and you can feel and hear the ideas, stories and conspiracies that took place at those tables.’

J.K. Rowling spent time at the Majestic too. The café’s website states that she ‘scribbled down notes on napkins while enjoying a coffee break in Café Majestic’ and it’s noted that she even started HP, Book One here. (I got too into rubber-necking and drinking white port and eating French Toast to write more than a page.)

And then we had to walk off the tasty pastry, and there were city hills to climb, port distilleries to visit (get the history of and taste-test the fine products), art and fashion to admire and then one had to take a sunset boat ride on the river. So, the Just-Before-Serious-Cocktail-Write had to be put aside.

I have to admit, Dee Rommel didn’t even get much ‘thinking’ time in Porto. That had to wait until we reached our AirBnB in Florence – where the novelty and ‘tourist mindset’ had worn off years ago when I spent long stretches (four months at a crack) teaching screenwriting there (four years in a row and I still can’t converse in Italian). The Morning-Writes didn’t start until 7 am (damn that late night life) – but the routine was back in place in a series of cafés filled with lots of other writers (some students) on laptops at tables set at a perfect desk-height.

And Dee Rommel was joined by Los Angeles based Bennet Azuolo, a very private detective sent to Florence to find the missing wife of the very rich Vermont Parka King. I want Bennet to ‘star’ in a series of short stories that take place in Florence. One down. We’ll see if more follow…

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

The Coldest Winter I’ve Ever Spent Was Sprimg in Maine!

Posted on April 8, 2024 by joesouza

Ahhh, spring. The most welcome change of seasons. Budding trees. Tulips popping up. The optimism of another Red Sox season. Bruins and Celtics playoffs. New spring novels.

Think against!

After a mild and temperate winter, spring came in like a wolf. Two violent and destructive storms blew in and threw my writing off course. The weather is definitely changing, creating more of these dangerous ice storms. This wintry mix is proving more lethal than most of the other times of storms we receive. The trees cake thick with ice. The added weight probably increases tenfold when this happens, creating dangerous conditions when the limbs can no longer support such weight.

And then there is the loss of power. I lost it for two days. Do you know how hard it is to write when your computer has no power and the internet is out? I don’t write longhand. In fact, without my computer or television, I actually had to grab a book off my shelf and read the old fashioned way. And I really enjoyed the experience.

The irony of the storm was that I had a tree come down across my driveway. My wife decided to park in the garage the night before the storm. When I came home, I asked her why she had done that. The storm would be a nothing burger, I said. It was one of the few times she had parked it inside. Wouldn’t you know, that tree came down exactly where she always parked. Our truck would have been totaled otherwise. Not only that, but the tree just missed destroying our garage. And the irony was that it was my neighbors tree that came down, and I had ten trees cut the summer prior.

On the plus side, Portland looked like a winter wonderland for two whole days. Me and the wife went out of our cold house and went for lunch and dinner and a Mariners hockey game. We had fun until we had to return to our freezing house.

Monday came and no power, which meant no writing would get done. I went to the gym where I forgot to shower. I was supposed to meet a friend for lunch and had to take a freezing cold Navy shower at home. Burrrrrrr!

That night the power returned. What a relief. Back to writing. And then two weeks later we get another spring storm. Although the wind was worse, at least we didn’t get the icy rain. And we didn’t lose power, which meant I had a cozy day at home writing and watching Buddy bake cakes.

Well, the snow is now melting and spring is finally here. I think we are out of the woods now. I do love spring, but in Maine it can often be the cruelest and most harshest of months. Mark Twain once said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Well, Mr. Twain, come visit in Maine sometime in the spring.

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Weekend Update: April 6-7, 2024

Posted on April 6, 2024 by kaitlynkathy

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Joe Souza (Monday), Jule Selbo (Tuesday), Vaughn Hardacker (Thursday) and Rob Kelley (Friday).

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

John Clark has a story in this new anthology:

Dark of the Day: Eclipse Stories, Edited by Kaye George
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-64396-395-2 Publication Date: April 1st, 2024

An anthology of stories to celebrate the April 2024 eclipse in North America. These stories are located in various places and are even of various genres and themes. What they have in common, besides featuring eclipses, are that they are all written by brilliant authors and will all entertain you. Read them before the eclipse, to get into the mood, or after, to nostalgically remember it.
During the darkness, all manner of things can happen. When people are distracted by this spectacular celestial event, criminals can operate unimpeded, they can also be caught.
Trips to see the event can lead to disaster, or they can save the day. And the science of looking at the sun becomes important when a partner strays.
The event can mean many different things to a disaster cult, to drug-dealing Russians, to an artist striving for his grand opus.
It spreads across the country to, maybe, give confirmation to a program to analyze the universe, to give a gift to a mermaid in an abandoned water park, to show what the crazy guy at the fast food place is really like, to help a young girl find her way.
As a not-so-clever crime goes awry, a hike to view the spectacle is interrupted.
Contributors include Cari Dubiel, Katherine Tomlinson, Carol L. Wright, Joseph S. Walker, John Rogers Clark IV, M. K. Waller, Toni Goodyear, Laura Oles, Bridges DelPonte, Eric Beckstrom, Kaye George, Paula Gail Benson, John M. Floyd, Debra H. Goldstein, Michael Bracken, and James A. Hearn.

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.