Poisoned Pairings: Second in the Hera Knightsbridge Master Brewer Series

I've changed the blog and included the cover of the second Hera Knightsbridge Master Brewer series. 

The second book is Poisoned Pairings.  Here's a short blurb on it:

A student helping set up for a beer and food pairings event in Hera Knightsbridge’s microbrewery dies there under suspicious circumstances.  At first the death looks like a suicide, but the medical examiner determines it is murder, and Hera and her lover, Deputy Sheriff Jake Ryan again find themselves partners in searching for the killer.  Not only does murder threaten the community, but something more explosive has come to the valley—hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a controversial gas drilling technique whose proponents say can take the poor families of the region out of debt.  Hera and her fellow brewers are convinced it will contaminate the water supply, as it had in other places, and change forever the pristine beauty of the valley.  Connections among the student, the family of a dead brewer, a religious leader and the gas companies lead Hera and Jake into a maze of confusing and conflicting clues.  Before the two can unravel the case’s tangled threads, Jake is called away to another job, leaving Hera alone to uncover the identity of the killer before she becomes the next victim.

And a bit more to whet your appetite for beer and murder:

Rafe Oxley, my closest brewing friend, and I sat next to each other in a darkened room in the county office building. My fellow microbrewers in the Butternut Valley and other interested members of the county gathered to watch a video portraying gas exploration using hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a horizontal drilling technique injecting water, sand and chemicals under pressure to shatter underground shale and release the gas trapped inside.


Some individuals in our valley desperate for the income had already signed gas leases. Others worried the drilling would change the valley forever, destroying roads, polluting the air, poisoning our water.

The image on the screen was that of a drilling rig juxtaposed against the verdant background of virgin forest. To its left, a Caterpillar tore a trench through a nearby meadow leaving a gash which ran straight through grass and wildflowers into the scrubby pines behind the site. The camera panned to a fracking pond where the water and chemicals used to force the gas to the surface collected in a landscaping tarp to prevent leakage back into the ground.

The scene shifted to water tumbling over rocks in a small stream. A voice from off-camera said, “Let’s see if we can light this.”

A hand flicked a butane lighter and touched the flame to the water. With a whoosh, the stream caught on fire. The unexpected explosion startled me. I jumped and reached for Rafe’s hand.

“Mrs. Attenby down the road had her well explode on Christmas Eve last year,” said the man who had lit the water.

“The state has stopped the drilling, right?” asked the reporter covering the story.

“Right, but now the water around here is undrinkable. The companies are trucking in safe drinking water to the people who signed drilling leases. ‘Course, since there’s no more gas being taken, the people don’t get their monthly checks.”

Rafe and I glanced at one another, knowing what the other was thinking. Water was the lifeblood of micro brewing. We bought our malt, yeast and hops, shipped them in from other places. Some hops came from as far away as New Zealand. But the main ingredient in our beer, water, came from our wells.

Rafe leaned toward me and whispered what all of us must have been thinking.

“Our wells are connected. We saw that this summer. When one dried up, so did the others. If one well is contaminated, all of them will be. We have to stop this madness.”

Rafe and I turned to look at Teddy Buser, the largest brewer in the valley. He was scowling and shaking his head, the only one of the Butternut brewers who thought making money from natural gas seemed like a good thing. Teddy could afford to buy water, but what of the rest of us? Rafe and I scowled back at him.

The book will be available May 1 from Mainly Murder Press, Amazon, and your favorite indie bookseller.

The Virtues of a Small Publisher: Some Negatives

There you are on a beautiful August day with your hubby to help you, selling books in upstate New York.  What the picture doesn't show is how cold it was in the morning when we set up.  And how hot it got by midafternoon.

Then there was my first beer festival at Hunter Mountain.  In May.  I forgot how cold it can be in upstate NewYork in the spring.  I was dressed for it, but my feet still were frozen by the end of the day.

So there's one of the downsides of selling your own books, a must regardless of what publisher you have.  The weather is rarely your friend.  When it is, you find people are doing something other than buying books!

I promised we would continue our discussion of small publishers.  Not everyone finds advantages in going with a small press.  Hand selling in venues such as beer festivals for me or book events allows writers to meet the reading public, but weather is a consideration and so are the long hours of work with sometimes little return.

What are some of the difficulites you've encountered with a small publisher and how have you handled these?  Some writers find another publisher, others seek out an agent to get them into the larger houses, and there is always the choice of self publishing and/or epublishing.  What has worked for you?

As for me, I dress in layers (wool socks are my friend), I am published with several small publishers, I epublished one of my books, published with an epublisher, and now have an agent.  This girl does not put her eggs in one basket.

Let us know your strategy.  Sharing what you've discovered may help other writers as they try to aovid the potholes in this bumpy road to publishing.

The Virtues of a Small Publisher II: Why did you choose a small publisher?

Virtues of a Small Publisher Sleuthfest Panel Members: Back row from left: Lesley Diehl, Cindy Cromer, Mike Dennis; Front row from left: Lynnette Hallberg, Marty Ambrose

We are continuing our discussion of small publishers this week.  I think there are many good reasons for using a small publishing house.  During the Editors and Agents Panel at Sleuthfest, several panel members pointed out that advances with large publishers are getting smaller, publicity support is shrinking, less editing occurs, and midlist authors fear their contracts may be terminated.  Given this picture, many small publishers with their emphasis on more intimate and supportive relationships between author and press court talented writers and offer them a home where personal contact and input into the process is part of getting into print.

Myths about small publishers abound.  You pay them.  Not true.  That's a vanity press. They have no way of distributing your books once they are in print.  That depends upon the publisher, but most use Ingram and Baker and Taylor, as do the larger houses.  Your local bookstore cannot return the books.  Also not true in most cases.  There is no vetting process nor editing with a small publisher.   Again that varies from house to house.

I'm certain there are other myths.  I'd like to take this blog to clear up misconceptions about small publishers as well as be honest about what a small publisher can and cannot do for you.  This week I'd like your input on why you decided to go with a small publisher.  It's your decision whether you want to name your publisher or not, but I'd like to hear about the paths you took to publication and how they are working for you.

In the next few weeks we'll be talking about other aspects of going with a small publisher,so stay tuned here.

Inspiration in Orlando and the Issue of Small Publishers versus Epublishing

Early Spring in Mickey's Home

 

Mickey Inspires and I Respond

Okay, so now all of you who have read my blog know how I adore cows, but I want to confess another love.  I’m crazy about Mickey Mouse.  My husband has bought me two watches in the fifteen plus years we’ve been together.  One was a Mickey watch, the other Minnie.  As many years as we’ve been wintering in Florida, it was only five years ago I finally got to go to Disney for my birthday.  We were in the Magic Kingdom for the afternoon parade, and I think I was as thrilled by the characters as the kids there were.

That was then and this is now.  We just returned from the Mystery Writers of America Conference sponsored by MWA FL Chapter.  It was held in Orlando at the Royal Plaza.  There is no place one can go in Orlando without being exposed to the Disney brand.  It’s kitschy, I know, but I love it.

There’s no way hubby will repeat our visit to the Magic Kingdom or Epcot or to any of the parks (too bad Harry Potter), but we did go to downtown Disney several nights while at the conference, and I got my Disney fix.  It didn’t hurt that the weather was perfect all the days we were there with the exception of Sunday when a cold front blew in.  I could have walked around the Marketplace and Pleasure Island for hours.  I’m usually crowd-avoidant, but the throngs of people only added to my excitement.

Along with the ideal weather and fun setting, the conference continues through the six years we have attended to be a source of information and inspiration.  Theirs is nothing as inspiring as being around other writers, some still struggling, some highly successful.  I moderated a panel on the virtues of a small publisher.  Throughout the three days preceding my panel, I heard about traditional publishing, the big six, editors and agents.  At the other end of the evolution of the publishing process were numerous discussions on panels and in the bar about self-publishing, the e-book market.

I expected the attendance at my panel to be small, and coming as it did at the very last slot of the slot of the panels late Saturday afternoon, it was.  If I thought the attendees would be sleepy, they weren’t.  A discussion ensued about small publishers and e-publishing.  It was a heated encounter, one I decided to let spin itself out with advocates on both sides of the controversy over why publish with a small publisher when a writer can take everything by self-publishing.  Maybe I’m stretching a point, but I think our panel became a hot topic, one I hope the conference can address directly next year. 

Pair my childish pleasure at the fun venue with my favorite writing conference and the time in Orlando was near perfect, perfect enough that I recommitted myself to writing the really quirky, not the merely funny.  What would that be?  The answer is waiting for me on my computer, and I can’t wait to get to it.  I’ll keep you posted.

Where to find dead bodies: A writer’s short guide to victim placement for prime effect

A pastoral Florida scene, but what's under the water? 

 

 

 

 

I was talking the other day with my critique partner about a popular event in the Big Lake area, a festival I missed.  It’s called Mud Fest, and it occurs each year at this time.  The article about it in the paper focused on the controversy between the fun seekers and the environmentalists over whether driving four wheel drive vehicles through wetlands is ecologically sound.  Well, of course it’s not.  But the thought of churning up the wetlands with those giant, really behemoth wheels got me thinking about what else other than vegetation and probably snakes, toads, and frogs might be uprooted.  I thought of a dead body, and knew I had to attend this event next year.  The opportunity to locate a body in all that muck is just too appealing for a mystery writer.

There are the usual spots for placing bodies to be discovered by amateur sleuths, unknowing passersby or police such as face-up (or face-down) in a swimming pool or other body of water—I wonder why they’re rarely found at the bottom of the pool.  Imagine how exciting a read if someone dove innocently into the water and landed on a body.  That gets the adrenaline pumping more than a casual, “Oh look.  There’s a body in the Smithington’s  pool.”

In abandoned houses, on the street, in the trunks of cars, in a garbage dump, in churches, apartments, state parks, on beaches, in motels, bodies find their way into the most familiar places in our lives. How about some uncommon ones?  This is my favorite way to go.  Put the body someplace unexpected.  Give your reader an extra shot of surprise and do it in the first five pages of the book, of course.  You can see why Mud Fest churned up more than dirty swamp water for me.

Here are some of my favorite locations: in a brew barn from A Deadly Draught or in the dumpster of a classy country club as in Dumpster Dying.  Perhaps in a beer cooler at a barbeque festival.  This one is the location in the second of my Big Lake mysteries entitled Grilled, Chilled and Killed due out this fall.  I do not avoid the more mundane locations, but I may sprinkle the scene with mysterious or, in the case of a humorous mystery, funny elements to get the reader’s attention.  For example, in Grilled, Chilled and Killed, the body is not only stiffening up in a beer cooler but it is covered with barbeque sauce and someone has shoved an apple in the victim’s mouth.  An over-the-top description of the body, but the clues are significant in solving the murder. 

In my brewer’s series Hera, my protagonist, has found her neighbor’s body on his brew barn floor.  In the second book, someone else discovers a body, but it is in her brew barn.  Now the brew barn has become an almost mundane place for murder, but in this case the question surrounding the death is whether it was suicide or murder.

If murder is not shocking enough, the writer can always locate a body in a wholly unexpected place.  It’s an attention grabber, and one the writer can use to advantage by making the location generate its own set of clues.

How do you like your bodies?  With a double shot of surprise, murder plus odd location, or decaffeinated, face-down in the Smithington’s pool?

Cows and Why I Love 'Em!

These are not cows.  These are sandhill cranes, not usually found in a city.  Definitely a rural experience.

I just came up for air this week as I completed work on a draft of my book which will be the second in my Big Lake murder mystery series.  It’s entitled Grilled, Chilled and Killed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about cows lately.  I love cows.  I grew up with them on a farm in northern Illinois.  Until I was sixteen, we milked a small herd of Holsteins, then Dad sold the milkers, and we fattened cattle and hogs.  The latter was much less demanding of my father’s time.  He no longer had to get up early to milk nor was he tied to milking twice each day.  There was only once in all those years that my dad was too sick to milk.  He was ill on other occasions, but he got out of bed to milk anyway.

I spent a lot of my childhood years out in the barn with him.  He played the old radio tuned to either opera or country music while he milked.  He claimed the cows liked it.  They never complained at his choice of music and they gave a lot of milk, so I guess they did like it.  I never helped him with the cows, but I followed him around while he cleaned utters, placed the suction cups on teats, poured the warm milk into a pail and hauled it back to the cooler.  My job came after he finished.  I washed the utensils, the big milkers and pails, hoses and teat cups by hand in big stainless sinks in our basement.

Our cows were a part of my daily life.  Only when I became a teen when school activities took me away from the barn did I miss a day smelling the manure, sweat, and hot, creamy milk in our dairy barn.

There are few pictures of me as a young child because my parents couldn’t afford a camera, but the one I treasure is of me with a Guernsey calf.  I was told she was my calf thought I don’t know if that is really so as I have few memories of her specifically but I know I named her “Essie” after myself (I couldn’t pronounce the Ls in my name).  As an adult cow, she was the only of her kind in our Holstein herd.  Dad said it was so we could have a little cream with our milk.

The calf I followed through her calf childhood into adulthood was a Holstein, and I didn’t keep an eye on her because I was fond of her.  My grandmother had given me a pair of red knitted gloves for Christmas when I was about eight.  I loved those gloves.  In the winter, the calves came into the barn for the night and were held in a small pen near the milking stanchions.  I often fed them hay through the bars of the pen.  One of the calves took the hay and the mitten off my hand, chomped down on both and swallowed.  I remember her distinctively and until she grew to give milk as an adult.  She had one eye with black eyelashes, the other with white.  She was forever the cow I despised.

Ah, autumn in the country

I got pink eye (conjunctivitis) from the cows one fall and was out of school that year (fourth or fifth grade) for weeks.  I kept reinfecting myself and, because it is so contagious, each infection meant I had to stay home for several days.  Mom and Dad could do little to keep me away from those cows, so it was months before it cleared up.

Holsteins are big, really big, very big when you’re a five year old told to round up Mary, one of our most cantankerous cows.  She wandered away from the others and never wanted to come in from the field.  I reluctantly pursued her toward the stand of oaks and she turned and rushed me.  Dad told me to turn and face her.  To me that was like facing a freight train bearing down on me.  I ran.

Dad didn’t always do so well with these huge beasts either.  Until we went to artificial insemination, we kept a Holstein bull.  They are always in a vile mood.  The bull was housed in a pen with a fence that was over eight feet tall and made of study rails.  Yet he never failed to get out somehow.  When he chased my grandfather up the windmill, Dad laughed.  But he did the same thing several months later to my dad and somehow he didn’t find that as funny.

Farm life and the cows we raised and milked there are a part of my childhood.  In some ways they are my childhood, as much a part of who I am now as my DNA.  I carry that life around in my soul and I write all my stories from it as I believe do many other writers of cozies.  No wonder I fell so comfortable positioning my protagonists in the country.  It’s not in detailed descriptions of rural Florida or of the Butternut Valley in upstate New York that I fashion the atmosphere and setting of the book.  My country roots write the people and their relationship to their land.  Storms, drought, floods, wild animals, herds of cattle, cowboys and horses, snakes and gators are the stuff of their lives and their adventures.  It’s country.  They are my adventures.  After all, I’m a country gal, and I write country.

I'm baaaaaack!

Did you think I got lost?  Or was swept away by the flood?  Naw!  I just got busy or lazy and took time relocating to my winter home.  To remind you of the beauty down here, the picture above is of Lake Okeechobee at sunset in the winter. Look.  No snow.

This year I want to discuss different aspects of writing and try to get my readers more involved in the blog.  So look for something different here.  I’ll try to post twice each month.

Whose Story, Whose Imagination?

Here’s something I found in The Palm Beach Post on Friday, Dec 9.  It was entitled “Harry Potter and the Imagination Thief” and was written for the LA Times by Talya Meyers, a doctoral student at Stanford University.  In examining the J. K. Rowling’s website, Pottermore, Ms. Meyers suggests that, although meant to be interactive, Rowling provides so much information about Potter’s world after the end of the books that those who visit the site may be disappointed to learn what they imagined might happen to Harry and his friends is not at all what Rowling says happens.  Meyers contends that by telling us what Rowling sees as Harry’s future (her imagination) she steals what we the readers might have imagined.  I’m extrapolating now, but I assume Meyers is saying that if Rowling had written another book with all this information in it, that might have been fine, a continuation of the Potter story, but instead Meyers says Rowling has added to what is already contained in the books and given us the Potter world beyond them.  We are not free to imagine for ourselves what Potter’s life might become as he grows up, raises a family, and ages.

I wonder if this is why I usually don’t like a movie better than the book.  The movie makes the book concrete, and what I’ve imagined reading the book is replaced by the movie’s take on the look of a character, the color of a house, the way the character delivers a line.  This isn’t always true for me.  I hear Tom Selleck’s voice each time I read a Jesse Stone novel by Robert Parker.  That works for me.

So here’s my question.  Where does the author’s imagination end and the reader’s begin?  And should an author step in after the fact to assert what happens or what was really meant?  Does the book once published become the readers’ or is it the writer’s?  Perhaps authors can expect once their work is published to engage in a dialogue of imaginations between them and their readers. Pottermore might become this kind of place.  The site is still in the testing stage, so perhaps we must wait and see.  What do you think?