I’m thrilled to announce I’ve sold the eBook and print rights for my upcoming novel LOOK THE OTHER WAY to Imajin Books.
What’s LOOK THE OTHER WAY about?
It’s the beginning of a new series set in the Bahamas. The mystery takes place aboard a Lagoon 380 catamaran, which happens to be the type of boat I lived on for 5 years.
Mattina in the Bahamas
Here’s the blurb:
A year after her Uncle Bobby mysteriously disappears in the turquoise waters surrounding the Bahamas, Shannon Payne joins her grieving aunt to trace his last voyage. Shannon hopes the serenity of the sea might help her recover from a devastating breakup with her fiancé.
Sailing their 38-foot catamaran, A Dog’s Cat, is Captain Jake Hunter, a disillusioned cop who has sworn off women. While Shannon tries to resist her growing attraction to the rugged captain, she uncovers some dark truths about her uncle’s death that might send all three of them to the depths.
Thank you to Imajin Books for once again supporting me!
Imajin Books is a Canadian publisher that publishes suspense, mystery, thriller, paranormal, horror, romance, fantasy, young adult and select non-fiction. They will be open for submissions April 2017, so keep your eye on the website if you’re looking to submit a novel this year.
Don’t despair. There is light at the end of the editing tunnel. Just like you learned how to write a novel, you can learn how to perform a big-picture edit. All you need is a clear process, some editing knowledge, and the right tool.
With ourfree eBook, you’ll learn how big-picture editing is all about evaluating the major components of your story. We call these components the Key Elements Of Fiction. Our eBook shows you how to use the key elements of fiction to evaluate your story.
Today we celebrate another year of Mystery Mondays. Thank you to the contributing authors who make this series possible. And thanks to Rebecca Bradley for rounding out 2016 and sharing with us a unique way to research a novel.
I’m looking forward to another year of Mystery Mondays and a wonderful group of authors to meet and learn from.
All the best to everyone in 2017!
Rebecca Bradley, author ofMADE TO BE BROKEN, is a retired police detective. There’s a little tidbit that should entice you to read her novel. I know that’s what I thought when I read her bio.
Before we get to Rebecca’s post, let me tell you a bit about her novel.
A rising death toll. A city in panic.
A young mother is found dead in her home with no obvious cause of death. As DI Hannah Robbins and her team investigate, it soon becomes clear that the woman is the first in a long line of murders by poison.
With the body count climbing, and the city of Nottingham in social meltdown, the team finds themselves in a deadly race against a serial killer determined to prove a point.
And Hannah finds herself targeting an individual with whom she has more in common than she could possibly know.
Over to Rebecca…
Using Google Alerts For Research by Rebecca Bradley
Using Google alerts for research…
I hadn’t thought of this until I was talking to a woman who specialised in a specific area that I was interested in for my current work in progress.
I’d emailed Jo, informed her of my interest and we agreed to meet in London for a bite to eat and a chat as she had a lot of information I needed. This was me researching my novel. Meeting people face to face. It’s the way I soak up and retain information. Some people retain better by reading, some by listening (audiobooks) some by doing (tying themselves up in the backs of vans to see how it works and feels – I actually read about a crime writer who did this!) and others, myself included, take on board information better by conversing. We all have a different style of learning. (If you Google learning styles, you will find a whole host of information on this subject and you can even take a test to find out what kind of learner you are, if this interests you of course!)
I had a great afternoon with Jo and came away with lots of useful information that will definitely make it into the novel, but not where you’d be able to see it. I also came away with a great tip that I hadn’t thought about for continued researching as I was writing.
Because she has an ongoing interest in her field, Jo wants to know about all new mentions, in whatever capacity it might be, of her chosen area, so she has Google alerts set up. When she said this, it was a lightbulb moment for me. Why couldn’t I use this? For this very subject that I’d been talking to Jo about and for other subject areas within the novel! I would have all up-to-date information at my fingertips.
Google alerts are when Google picks up a mention of whatever it is you’ve asked it to look out for, anywhere on the internet, so, news articles and blog posts etc. and sends you an alert with the headline and a couple of lines of what’s inside and a link.
So, when I arrived home, I set up alerts for Jo’s subject and two other subject areas. A tip for when you’re setting them up; don’t just use the one specific phrase you might think you need, consider if it could be called or reported as something else and create an alert for that as well. Cover your bases.
One of my alerts is quite rare and I don’t get many hits. One of my alerts brings me hits every day, as it’s for Moldova, and I just skim read it. Picking out the bits I think I’ll be interested in. But, I’d definitely say it was worth doing because I don’t know enough about any of the areas I set the alerts up for.
Having already written two novels and a novella I’m wondering why I didn’t figure this out sooner! No amount of research will keep you as up-to-date as what is coming in through the news on a day-to-day basis. You could miss an amazing new breakthrough or a weird and wonderful titbit that could be the icing on the cake of an already promising work in progress.
Do you use Google alerts when researching? Is it something you would now consider doing?
Who is Rebecca Bradley?
Rebecca Bradley is a retired police detective and lives in Nottinghamshire with her family and her two cockapoo’s Alfie and Lola, who keep her company while she writes. Rebecca needs to drink copious amounts of tea to function throughout the day and if she could, she would survive on a diet of tea and cake while committing murder on a regular basis.
Publishing a book takes an incredible amount of time and energy, so an author has to choose where they spend this time and energy. I chose to research who would be a good fit to endorse AVALANCHE, to write letters requesting endorsements, to send out ARC’s of AVALANCHE, and to thank the authors.
For each of the novels in the Stone Mountain Mystery series, I’ve received incredible endorsements to be placed on the covers and on the inside of the books. Once I received the endorsements, I sent them off to my publisher.
I believe endorsements are important. They inform readers that your novels have been vetted by an authors who write in a similar genre that you do. This is assuming that you asked authors who do write in your genre. My thinking was that if I asked authors of a similar genre then their readers might like my books too.
Imajin Books shortens the endorsements that go on the cover, picking the best words that highlight the story. Here are the shortened versions.
“As thrilling as a heart-stopping run down the slopes ~ Gail Bowen, author of the Joanne Kilbourn Shreve mysteries”
“A story that keeps you guessing. You can’t turn the pages fast enough ~ Jeff Buick, author of Bloodline, Lethal Dos, African Ice, Shell Game and Delicate Chaos”
“Avalanche smashes and uproots relationships in Stone Mountain, leaving devastation in its wake. ~ James M. Jackson, author of the Seamus McCree Series”
Here are the long versions of the endorsements that I showcased on my website, amazon author page, and that Imajin Books includes inside the book.
A mountain as deadly as it is majestic; characters far too familiar with the Seven Deadly Sins and murder−Kristina Stanley’s Avalanche has it all. This fast-paced mystery is as thrilling as a heart-stopping run down the slopes. ~ Gail Bowen, author of the Joanne Kilbourn Shreve mysteries
Layer upon layer, like snow building for an avalanche, Stanley weaves a story that keeps you guessing. You can’t turn the pages fast enough. ~ Jeff Buick, author of Bloodline, Lethal Dos, African Ice, Shell Game and Delicate Chaos
Avalanche smashes and uproots relationships in Stone Mountain Resort, leaving devastation in its wake. With as many layers as winter’s snow, this whodunit will keep you turning pages and guessing to the end. ~ James M. Jackson, author of the Seamus McCree Series
AVALANCHE is on sale for $0.99 USD for a limited time.
If you haven’t read any of this series, you can read a sample of DESCENT and BLAZE right from here.
I lay face down in the snow wondering what happened…
My skis are scattered, my face is cold, but I think I’m ok. I hear ski boots clomping across the run.
“Are you alright?” Andrew Nelson, famous BC avalanche forecaster and guide asks.
“Yeah.” Mostly I’m embarrassed. I’m skiing with the director team from the resort I work at. All men. All great skiers. I get up and wipe the snow off my jacket.
“You have something on your nose,” Andrew says.
I remove my glove and touch my nose. My fingers come away red. Must have been a bit of ice where my face hit the ground.
Andrew cleans my nose, applies a bandaid, and we are on our way.
The only problem. I’m a little shaky now. We come to the next ridge. I look over the edge and into a mass of trees. My legs stop working. My feet won’t move. “Andrew, can you come here a minute?”
He smiles and joins me.
“I can’t move.”
“Are you hurt?”
I shake my head. “I’m scared.”
He smiles. “No problem. Just follow me. Stare at my back. When I say turn left, you turn left. When I say turn right, you turn right. Don’t look at the trees.”
Without letting the others know what’s going on, he launches down the slope. I take one deep breath. Then another. “Suck it up, Buttercup,” I tell myself and jam my poles into the snow.
I stare at the space between Andrew’s should blades. My eyes zone in on his orange jacket, and I see nothing else. He switches his glance from downhill to back at me, each time telling me which way to turn. I obey. I crank my skis left, then right.
My adrenaline is raging. My heart is pounding, but I’m skiing around one tree after another.
We reach the bottom ,and I’m exhilarated. I did it!
“Everything good?” Andrew asks.
More than good, I think. I’ve just come up with the idea for AVALANCHE. So who’s my hero for the day? Andrew, of course. He never let on to the others that I was frightened on the mountain.
Andew Nelson
This was my story. Sometimes I’m asked if the character Kalin Thompson is based on me. The answer is no, but I did use some of my experiences skiing to help write the Stone Mountain Series and to create Kalin.
Years later, AVALANCHE is set to be published. It’s one sale for a short while longer at: myBook.to/Avalanche for $0.99 USD.
Exciting, exhausting, satisfying – that’s what the week before a new release is. Yesterday, author Kat Flannery kicked of my blog tour and kindly let me write about research…
RESEARCHING A NOVEL: Rewriting the novel gave me time to do more research into avalanches. I met with Andrew Nelson, Association of Canadian Mountain Guides Ski Guide, Avalanche Forecaster and Educator. Andrew not only spent hours showing me videos and explaining the process a ski resort goes through when an avalanche occurs, he read an early version of AVALANCHE to check for accuracy.
You’ll find his term “Ice Mask” on page two of AVALANCHE.
If I wasn’t frightened enough by talking to Andrew… Read More
AVALANCHE is on sale for a limited time. Only $0.99 USD. But not for long…
With only 6 days to go until AVALANCHE is released, Imajin Books has just announced that AVALANCHE is now available in Trade Paperback onAmazon.com.
AVALANCHE will be available soon in Trade Paperback on other amazon sites world wide.
Today begins a busy week for me. I start touring blogs tomorrow, with the wonderful Kat Flannery kicking off the tour. I’ve written a unique blog for each guest post, hoping to give everyone’s readers something special.
Next Saturday, is the big day. It’s less than a year since DESCENTwas published, nine months sinceBLAZEwas released, and I have to pinch myself to believe it’s actually happening.
In case you prefer to read on your eReader, AVALANCHE is on sale for a limited time for $0.99 USD.
Thank you to all of you who have supporting me in my journey to publish the first three novels in the Stone Mountain Mystery Series.
Today, Tuesday June 7, is the FINAL day Raven Lake is available for the special promo price of 99 cents!
Location! Location! Location!
Thank you, Kristina, for hosting me here today. When I think of your Stone Mountain mysteries, their spectacular setting pops into my mind—a ski resort high in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. So I thought it would appropriate to share some of my thoughts about setting with your followers.
Setting is the backdrop against which characters act out the events of the story. But it’s impossible to powerfully capture a setting by objective description alone. Today’s readers will just skim over paragraphs of exposition. It is through the eyes and heart of a character that a place comes alive. How does the character feel about this place where she lives or is visiting? That, and a few vivid details, can create your story’s backdrop.
Historical novels—set in Tudor England, ancient Egypt and Rome, the American Old West—seem ideally suited to display setting. Their authors have researched the visual backdrops: the buildings, the clothing, the modes of transportation. But they also need to create a sense of the times on the page through dialogue and their characters’ body language and manners.
Settings are either real or fictitious. If your character finds herself in Paris, you have a real setting and your readers probably know enough about Paris to form a mental picture of the city. But you’ll need to make sure you have your facts straight. You may want to save up for a trip to Paris to find out how long it takes to ride the Métro from Champs Élysées to Port-Royal. (And at tax time, you can claim the trip as an expense against earnings from your writing.)
For stories such as Alice in Wonderland and Lord of the Rings, their authors had to create fictional settings, which takes a lot of work. They had to map out their fictional landscapes carefully in order to present them clearly to their readers.
Safe Harbor, my first Pat Tierney novel, is set in Toronto, where I currently live. I used neighborhoods that I know well, but I fictionalized some things such as the name of a Toronto newspaper, the Toronto World. In his review in the real Toronto Star, Jack Batten wrote that Safe Harbor has “an exact feel for the Toronto locales.”
I set Black Water, the second mystery in the series, and Raven Lake, the third that has just been released, in Ontario cottage country north of Toronto. The setting is inspired by the Haliburton Highlands, lake country on the Canadian Shield north of Toronto that I know and love, but I’ve fictionalized it. I call it the Glencoe Highlands, and I’ve created a town called Braeloch, which incorporates some aspects of the two real towns in the area, Minden and Haliburton Village. I needed to create special places in Braeloch and in the surrounding countryside for my plots that don’t exist in the actual area.
I’ve included a disclaimer in both novels that says they are “set in an imaginary part of Ontario cottage country that bears a strong resemblance to the real Haliburton Highlands. None of the Haliburton Highlands’ residents appear in this book.”
In the planning process before I start writing, I draw up a list of the key settings that I know will appear in the novel—and others may crop up as they are needed. Pat Tierney’s home or where she is based in that story will always be an important location. The wider geography of the area is also featured in Black Water and Raven Lake. In the first, Pat drives over the township’s frozen lakes in a snowmobile. In the second, she explores the same chain of lakes in a kayak.
There are times when setting seems to participate in the story. Places in a novel may have a special—maybe even a magical—significance. The diner where the protagonist and her friends hung out when they were teenagers. The stone quarry where they swam in the summer. In Raven Lake, Pat’s kayak takes her to places she would have difficulty reaching without it, and her trips over the lakes help her unwind and think about the puzzles she’s trying to solve.
Setting can be effective when it goes against readers’ expectations. Ray Bradbury uses a carnival setting for terror in Something Wicked This Way Comes. In Stephen King’s The Mist, people are trapped in a supermarket when a fog filled with nightmare creatures surrounds the store. In Raven Lake, a murder takes place during a Canada Day fireworks show.
But beware of going overboard with setting. You may have spent hours on research, but you don’t need to use everything you dig up. A rich, detailed setting can overwhelm the story. The setting should always be positioned behind characters and events.
WHO IS Rosemary McCracken?
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Rosemary McCracken has worked on newspapers across Canada as a reporter, arts reviewer, editorial writer and editor. She is now a Toronto-based fiction writer and financial journalist. Her first Pat Tierney mystery, Safe Harbor, was shortlisted for Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger in 2010 and published by Imajin Books in 2012. It was followed by Black Water in 2013. “The Sweetheart Scamster,” a Pat Tierney mystery in the anthology Thirteen, was a finalist for a Derringer Award in 2014. Rosemary’s third Pat Tierney mystery, Raven Lake, has just been released! Jack Batten, the Toronto Star’s crime fiction reviewer, calls Pat “a hugely attractive sleuth figure.”
Here are links for the books mentioned in the blurb above. The first three are universal links for Amazon, so whoever clicks on them will reach the Amazon in his/her own country.. Thirteen’s is a link to Amazon.com
In the life of an author, one of the best days is the day a new book is released. Today is that day for me.
I’m feeling awesome and would like to thankCheryl Kaye Tardifand Imajin Booksfor suggesting I write this book and for publishing it.
My trek to visit as many non-bookstores as possible led me to sell more books to non-bookstores than bookstores, so I took photos throughout the journey.
The best moment during the pre-release phase:
Who wouldn’t want to be placed beside the “nice” shark,Robert Herjavec?
If you’d like to buy the book it’s available at: Amazon, Kobo, Google PlayAlso on iBooks
How does a cover come to be? You need a good cover designer, like Ryan Thomas Doan. But how does he decide what to create?
Well, I gave him a detailed description of what I wanted. Did you hear the sarcasm?
Here are the three short sentences I sent Ryan:
I think it’s important to keep the look the same as DESCENT and BLAZE. I’d like the font, type and placement all to be the same. Maybe a hand flying through an Avalanche.
And here is what Ryan sent me:
I’m absolutely amazed at his talent, and I’m very pleased with the cover.
Rebecca Bradley is a retired police detective and lives in Nottinghamshire with her family and her two cockapoo’s Alfie and Lola, who keep her company while she writes. Rebecca needs to drink copious amounts of tea to function throughout the day and if she could, she would survive on a diet of tea and cake while committing murder on a regular basis.
Kristina Stanley 