Farley here,
I’m so confused. Last November there was snow on the ground. I love snow, and I can’t find it. Every morning I head outside and check if it arrived during the night. And every morning I find green grass.
I’m ready for winter. I’ve got my booties cleaned and stacked by the door. There are extra towels to dry me off with. My blanket it ready by the fire.
Could someone call the weather people and tell them to send snow my way?
Woof Woof
I’m so proud to be part of J.P. McLean’s author journey. If you don’t know about her books, you can find out what I had do say about her latest novel and get to know another author on her site.
…
Reblogged from The Gift Legacy.
When an author has a new book coming out, they often ask another author they respect and admire for a testimonial. It’s a small stamp of approval that gives readers confidence that the book is wort…
Source: Testimonial for The Gift: Betrayal
Thinking of going to a Writing Conference? Raquel Reyes, author of JEWELER’S MARK, will tell you how to make the most of a conference. Welcome to Mystery Mondays and another fun filled blog.
Why should you go to writers conferences? There are many answers to that question, but for me, the best answer is networking. Yes, one also goes to better one’s craft or to hear the headlining guest of honor. And you will get both those things just by attending and sitting in your seat. But if you want to get the most from the conference then you need to go in prepared to network.
I attend SleuthFest in South Florida. The conference is three days of panels, mini- workshops, and demonstrations. There are four tracks: beginning craft, advanced craft, career advancement, and forensics. An add-on called “Third-Degree Thursday” is offered that provides more in-depth workshops. Put on by the Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, it is volunteer run with a twenty-plus year history. This will be my third year as a volunteer and since I am a chapter member I’m also on the planning committee. But before I was behind the scenes, I attended several times as a newbie knowing no one. The people I met those first years are in my network to this day and have provided me with support, advice, back-cover blurbs, agent leads, commiseration, hope, and laughter. When you network at a conference the results are long lasting.
Introduce yourself to your neighbor. “Hi, I’m Raquel. Is this your first SleuthFest?”
Curb your ego. Or rather let the other person speak. You’re having a conversation not selling a car.
Be confident in where you are in your career. Don’t worry if you are not published yet. Be honest. Try this: I’m a beginning writer or my work-in-progress is a suspense set in Glasgow. This year I’ll be saying, “I’ve recently published my first full-length cozy, Jeweler’s Mark.”
Have business cards with your name, e-mail, website, social media accounts, and some unique identifier. Mine say Latina Mysteries as all my stories have a Latina protagonist.
Have your elevator speech or log-line at the ready. “A Miami jewelry designer runs into the Russian mafia, murder, counterfeiting and romance while trying to save her brand and best friend.”
Give yourself opportunities to meet people. At SleuthFest there are plenty. 101 Dinner, Mystery Trivia at the bar, Agents & Editors cocktail party, the coffee stand in the bookstore— Don’t run to your room and hide whenever there is a break in the schedule.
Respect the headlining authors, agents, and editors. They are there to meet you but not while they are reading the morning news in a quiet corner of the lobby. Wait until they are mingling at an event then introduce yourself. Sometimes, they’re the first one to break the ice. One time, I was in the hot tub and didn’t know I was sharing it with an agent and her fiancé until she made introduces.
Volunteer. Not only will you be helping the sponsoring organization but you’ll be meeting people by default. Example, volunteering at the registration table guarantees you will know people’s names and they will remember your face.
Relax. When you are genuine, authentic relationships develop. You will find your tribe.
I hope you’ll attend SleuthFest. It’s a quality conference and you won’t meet a friendly group of people anywhere. Plus, I hear South Florida is lovely in February. You’ll find me behind the registration table or milling about selling raffle tickets. Find me and introduce yourself. I’ll be wearing a pink boa.
R.V. Reyes lives in Miami, Florida with a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a husband, and one delightfully, snarky teen. Like the protagonist in her Love & Diamonds Mystery series, she works in her family’s jewelry business. When not crunching numbers there, she interviews other Florida Authors on her blog, Cozy in Miami.
Jeweler’s Mark- A Love & Diamonds Mystery
Gigi Santos, wedding ring designer and diamond appraiser, is looking forward to her ten-year high school reunion. She is trying to be a better, less gossipy person, but Lourdes, her BFF since forever, has not matured past teenage pettiness. Cover boy–handsome Detective Carlos Garcia comes into the picture to investigate a year-old burglary at Gigi’s jewelry business. They flirt, and sparks fly. Gigi is sure she will have him on her arm as her reunion date. That is, until her BFF becomes the prime suspect in the murder of the reunion’s organizer. Gigi knows Lourdes is innocent and she is determined to prove it. When Gigi’s sleuthing puts her and the people she loves in danger, Detective Garcia tries to keep her out of harm’s way. But she wants a date, not a hero. Will Gigi and Carlos dance under the Miami moonlight? Or will fake diamond rings send them all to jail? Find out in the first of the Love and Diamonds mysteries.
Website: http://rvreyes.com/
Blog: http://rvreyes.com/blog/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CozyinMiami
Twitter: https://twitter.com/writerRVR
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8834980.R_V_Reyes
Book Links: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1536939501
Today on Mystery Mondays we welcome Sheri Levy, award-winning author of Seven Days to Goodbye. If you’re interested in service dogs, there’s a little bit for you at the end of the blog, so read on. Sheri’s book intrigues me. I’ve often thought of getting a service dog but haven’t lived near enough to an urban center to take part in a program.
Sheri is hear to tell us about where her inspiration came from to write Seven Days To Goodbye.
Before retiring from teaching, writing about my experiences with dogs, special needs children, and my favorite beach setting played out like a movie in my mind as I walked my dogs every day.
My story memories began soon after my husband and I moved from California to Georgia. We rescued our first dog, a German shepherd. She lived with us six years, and after her death, we knew we could never live without another dog. Our children wanted an eight-week-old white German shepherd puppy.
Eleven years later with our children grown, our house echoed emptiness. We chose our very first Aussie, Sydney. Six months later, a black Lab, blew into our yard during a snow storm. We continued through the years with three more Aussies, our last one being a difficult rescue. He required me to get involved in extensive dog training.
My teaching experience with special needs children created the idea of using a service dog in my story. Since I had used positive reinforcement with my students, I understood the newest techniques in dog training. Agility training helped my rescue overcome his fears, and taught me commands. When I began writing Seven Days to Goodbye, I chose Sydney as my main character.
I researched service dogs online throughout the U.S. until I made a connection with PAALS. Since they were close to my home, the founder included me in training sessions. I interviewed a young girl who worked as a puppy raiser and used her ambition of helping others as the goal for my main character, Trina. One generous parent shared her son’s difficulties with autism. They lived on the coast, and had a boat. I incorporated his needs of a water dog into my story and created Logan, a seven year old boy with autism. For more conflict, Trina needed a best friend, Sarah, whose interest in guys had changed her overnight.
Edisto Beach became my setting, and I used Sydney’s many beach adventures. My husband and I and our closest friends spent long weekends in a rented old house with two bedrooms and one bath, and a screened-in porch over-looking the ocean. We sat in rockers, with music blaring, enjoying the salty air and the crashing waves.
When I closed my eyes, I visualized Sydney and Jake romping on the sand with our friends’ Springer Spaniel, Darby. Sydney herded the waves and bit the white foam rolling on to shore. When he pursued the sea gulls, Jake chased Syd, and Darby raced after Jake. They made figure eights on the sand until they collapsed with their tongues drooping sideways. After writing my first version, Jake was pulled from the story to add more of an emotional impact.
During the months of May through October, outside lights are forbidden. Each female turtle returns to their birth place to lay their eggs. If they see a light, they get distracted, and head back to the water. One dark night, we spotted a trail going up to the dune and tip toed to our discovery. A loggerhead turtle using her fins, dug her nest and laid over a hundred eggs. Then she moved the sand to camouflage the eggs. It was a first for us, but a common event on Edisto, and had to be woven into the story.
I strived to capture the intense feelings of being on Edisto. Beginning with the drive through oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Watching the pelicans soar over the ocean in a V-formation against the sapphire blue sky, and an occasional bird diving for breakfast. Tossing crumbs to the squawking sea gulls. Eating boiled shrimp freshly caught. Having your breath sucked away by pink sun rises and orange sunsets. Flinging away the distressing roaches and mosquitoes. And burying your feet in the sand.
I call Seven Days to Goodbye my heart book. There’s as much truth in the story as fantasy. It was great fun creating my characters, plot, and conflicts.
Coming, July of 2017, Starting Over. More fun with dogs, horses, and many new conflicts!
After Trina’s beloved dog dies, she swears she’ll never have another one. But then she learns about service dogs, and realizes that if she becomes a puppy raiser, she could train puppy after puppy and never worry about them dying. But like all great ideas, this one has a serious flaw: Her first service dog must be returned to his kennel at the end of their week long summer vacation. And saying goodbye to Sydney is going to be much tougher than she ever imagined.
Trina’s last week with Sydney is made that much harder by her newly strained friendship with her best friend, Sarah, who’s become so over-the-top boy crazy that she’s almost like a stranger. Sarah is determined to have them hang out with every boy on the beach, but when a boy named Chase takes an interest in Sydney and Trina, it puts an even bigger strain on the friendship.
It’s hard enough to deal with losing Sydney, but now she may lose her best friend, too. And even if she manages to patch things up with Sarah—and figures out what to do about Chase—she still must face a daunting decision: is she strong enough to take on another service puppy?
After twenty-five years of teaching special education and training her own dogs in obedience and agility, Sheri finds the subject of dogs and special needs children close to her heart. Sheri S. Levy’s magazine article about a diabetic alert dog, “Scent with Love,” was published in Clubhouse Magazine in July 2010. This story was nominated for a Maxwell Medallion Award at the Dog Writers of America Association, February, 2011, awards banquet in New York.
In 2015, Sheri’s debut novel, Seven Days to Goodbye, won another Special Interest Award with DWAA. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Carolinas, teaches writing workshops, enjoys doing author visits, tutor’s students, and volunteers with an accredited, nonprofit service dog kennel, PAALS.
Farley here,
Have you ever seen this much seaweed? And how many dogs does it take to pick up a stick?
I met two new dogs at the beach. The big one is named Butter. I have no idea who the middle dog is, but she wanted my stick. It got buried in seaweed, and seaweed is gooey and very slippery.
I had the best angle, but Butter was quicker. She grabbed the stick, leaving the two of us to chase her. By the end of the game, we were all covered in seaweed, which sticks to your hair, by the way.
This seaweed is very confusing. Some days we go to the beach, and there is none. Other days, the sand is covered. But either way, I think I love the beach.
Woof Woof
The other day, I let you know about Feedback-Rewrite Better Fiction. Just to keep things exciting in my life, I’m going to blog on FeedbackForFiction as well as on this site.
Here’s my first blog out to the world on my new site…
***
I’m excited to be writing the first post introducing our app to the writing community (coming 2017). Feedback helps fiction writers turn a first draft into a great story by providing a new, automat…
Source: Feedback For Fiction | Welcome to Feedback-Rewrite Better Fiction
For those of you who’ve been reading my blog and my series called Write Better Fiction, you know I’ve been seriously engaged in creating an automated method to guide me through the rewriting step of the writing process.
I’ve co-founded Feedback Innovations Inc. along with Mathew Stanley and Michael Conn, and together we’re building an app called Feedback-Rewrite Better Fiction.
Feedback helps fiction writers turn a first draft into a great story by providing a new, automated approach to rewriting fiction.
With Feedback, writers can quickly evaluate their own work and complete a comprehensive, structural rewrite.
Creating Feedback began when I (Kristina) finished the first draft of my first novel. By then I’d read over 50 how-to-write and how-to-self-edit books. I’d taken writing courses and workshops, and had 100s of writing and rewriting tips swirling about in my head.
I knew I had to begin the rewriting process and improve the quality of my draft before sharing my work but I didn’t know how to go about it..
How was I supposed to remember the torrent of advice and apply it to each scene? A spreadsheet, that’s how!
I created a spreadsheet with a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene structure. Then I listed the different writing advice I needed to consider for EVERY scene. I ended up with over 75 “key elements of fiction”. I used the reports from the spreadsheet to visualize my novel.
After the hard work of self-evaluating and rewriting my drafts, the high quality of my fiction was validated when my first two novels were shortlisted for prestigious crime writing awards and I landed my publisher (Imajin Books).
My first editor said: “If every manuscript was this good, my job would be so easy!”
The next exciting moment came when DESCENT, my first novel, hit #1 on Amazon’s hot new releases. I’ve since sold the German rights to Luzifer-Verlag for publication in Germany. Imajin Books also published BLAZE and AVALANCHE.
Along came Michael with MAXWELL HUXLEY’S DEMON and THE RIGHT TURN, and we ran the same spreadsheet on his novels. By this time we’d covered the mystery, horror, and young adult genres.
Surely we weren’t the first authors to struggle with rewriting our first drafts, so we searched for an app to address our problem but found nothing. We did discover that many writers struggled with rewriting drafts and ended up using tools such as spreadsheets, whiteboards, or yellow stickies.
That’s when it hit us. We thought other writers could benefit from our immediate approach to evaluating and rewriting first drafts.
The excitement was too much for Mathew to sit by and watch, so he decided to get involved. He knows technology and how to run a business.
Michael, Mathew, and I worked on the concept and developed the prototype for Feedback.
Now, we’d love to hear from you, understand your rewriting issues, and incorporate your ideas into Feedback.
Our goal is to launch Feedback in the spring of 2017. In order to create an app that is truly useful to writers, we’d like your input on building Feedback. By signing up to our newsletter, we’ll send you updates on the development progress and ask you the occasional question to help define the product. As a bonus, we’ll send you rewriting tips available only to our subscribers.
Show your support by helping us spread the word and share this post.
Your support means a lot to us, so thank you!
This week on Mystery Mondays we welcome Debra Purdy Kong. I first came across Debra’s writing when I read Opposite of Dark. I loved the book and reached out to Debra on LinkedIn and was very excited to hear back from her. She’s an author who is generous with her time and her advice, which you’ll get some of below.
As you can imagine, I’m happy to host Debra on Mystery Mondays again.
Have you started to write a mystery series? With six published books in two series and more in the works, I’ve faced a number of challenges. Hopefully, these five tips will help you start and keep your series on track.
Secondly, consider pacing yourself as a writer. It’s a good strategy to focus on the first three novels in your series. Once you’re ready to submit your work to publishers, they’ll be happy if you have a long-term plan. Start thinking about the end game early in the process. How would you like to see the series end? How many books might it take to get there? Do you have the discipline and tenacity required to commit to a project that could take years to complete? Now that I’ve started the seventh book and have been working on this series for well over a decade, it’s something I struggle with.
Because my plots blend Casey’s workplace (Mainland Public Transit) with her personal life, I keep a record of every MPT employee mentioned in each book on a second Excel sheet. I like to bring back secondary characters now and then, so it’s important to track when employees appear in the series.
For each book, I maintain a Word document that contains detailed profiles of all main characters, plus those who are only featured in a specific book. The document is copied into every folder I create for each book. New characters are added, along with fresh aspects about ongoing characters. Experiment with recordkeeping ways that work for you.
Author of six full-length mysteries, a novella, and over fifty short stories, Debra has won numerous awards for her short fiction. Drawing on her work experiences in security, she’s created transit security cop, Casey Holland in The Opposite of Dark, and campus security cop, Evan Dunstan in her first novella Dead Man Floating When she’s not writing, she’s employed part time at Simon Fraser University and is a facilitator for the Creative Writing program with Port Moody Parks & Recreation. More information about Debra can be found at www.debrapurdykong.com
THE OPPOSITE OF DARK: myBook.to/TheOppositeofDark
Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-ca/ebook/the-opposite-of-dark-2
FATAL ENCRYPTION: myBook.to/FatalEncryption
Kobo: http://tinyurl.com/z5sagyl
DEAD MAN FLOATING: myBook.to/DEADMANFLOATING
Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebook/dead-man-floating
Farley here.
I’m eight years old and for the first time, I met one one my siblings.
I was running along the beach when I saw her. There was something familiar about her, so I ran closer.
Kristina said to Mathew,”Check it out. There’s a Wheaten.”
I bolt even faster. We meet, we greet, we do the usual sniffing.
By this time, my humans have caught up to us. We don’t see many Wheaten Terriers who still have a full tail.
“Where did you get her?” Kristina asked.
“From a breeder near Comox,” the man said.
My heart pounded. I knew something special was about to happen.
A little more discussion goes on, and we find out we’re sister and brother. I didn’t even know I had a sister. She’s a bit smaller than me and a bit blonder. But don’t you think we look like siblings?
Talk about exciting!
Woof Woof.
Twelve-year-old Amanda Ross finds herself on an elegant riverboat with her bestie, Leah, cruising down the beautiful Danube, passing medieval castles, luscious green valleys and charming villages. When she is entrusted with a valuable violin by a young, homeless musician during a stop in Germany, a mean boy immediately attempts to take it from her.
Back on their cruise, Amanda struggles to keep the precious violin safe for the poor prodigy. Along the way, she encounters a mysterious monk, a Santa Claus look-alike, and the same nasty boy.
Follow Amanda down the Danube, through Germany, Austria and Hungary, as she enjoys the enchanting sounds of music everywhere she goes. She remains on the lookout, wondering just who she can trust.
Darlene Foster was brought up on a ranch in southern Alberta, Canada, where she dreamt of writing, travelling the world and meeting interesting people. Following her dreams, she’s now an award-winning author of the exciting Amanda Travels series featuring spunky 12-year-old Amanda Ross who has adventures in unique places.Her books include Amanda in Arabia – The Perfume Flask, Amanda in Spain – The Girl in The Painting, Amanda in England – The Missing Novel and Amanda in Alberta – The Writing on the Stone. Readers of all ages enjoy travelling with Amanda as she unravels one mystery after another. She is also the author of a bi-lingual book, Pig on Trial/Cerdito a juicio. Darlene divides her time between the west coast of Canada and the Costa Blanca, in Spain. She believes everyone is capable of making their dreams come true.
