Given Apple, Taken Apple: Sketching out a mystery series

Happy Monday! And it's a frigid one here in Waterville, Maine. Three degrees and it feels like it. Just came in from throwing the bright orange rubber ball to my dog Henry. He's now exercised and I'm finally getting the feeling back in my fingers.

Last week I went to the Sagadahoc County Registry of Deeds in Bath to do some research for the new mystery series I'm writing. If you've never been to a registry of deeds, conjure up in your mind Bartleby the Scrivener, the character in the Herman Melville novella of the same name. Bartleby is a scrivener, that is one who copies documents, like deeds, in longhand, or cursive and that's what he does all day long. Until one day,he answers every request with the famous line: "I'd prefer not to."

That's what some people did for a living before the typewriter and photocopy machines. They labored on chest-high, slanted tables, almost like drafting tables, inkwells placed every three or four feet, copying the deeds, mortgages, easements and other documents that were put on record to help people claim their land and show "all the world" that they and no one else owned it. Those hand-copied documents were then bound into books about twelve by eighteen inches and three inches thick. In order to do our work back then, we had to hoist many of those books a day. They weighed at least five pounds or more. Then the original docs were mailed back to the attorneys or banks who handled the transactions.

When I began my training in researching titles back in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982, there were still old tables with holes where the ink bottles would have been. In some registries, I'm sure they still exist. But most of them have been switched out with more modern, less charming furniture. But back to what I was up to.

My career has been varied, but for a twenty-five year chunk of time I did title examinations. If you wanted to sell or buy a house, you would want to have the title to the land searched to make sure there were no encumbrances on it. Like, for instance, you want to make sure that the person who says he owns it really does, so when you buy it, you own it. And you do that by looking at the deed you are going to receive at the closing, finding out where that person got it, and where the person before him/her got it, back forty years. You can go back as far as the records go if you want, and that's what I was doing last week.

I know of a rare heirloom apple that was developed on a farm in Sagadahoc County. No more oak slanted tables, but a jazzy new computer system that showed me a few transactions with my apple cultivator's name. That reference led me to a plan of an easement to a utility company. That plan showed that my apple farmer's land once abutted that easement and showed about where it was.

I only had a couple of hours to spend there, but what I found was a good lead. My friends, Penny and Sally, two veteran title examiners (or "abstractors" as they are called in Maine) helped me place where the farm might have been, now a cul de sac with homes snaked through it.

When I left the "Reg," as we fondly call it, I drove down the road where the farm once was. Along the way, I found two old apple trees right on the side of the road. I got out and took photos of them, and close-ups of the lone apple, browned by the cold, hanging on for dear life.

I kept going, and this is a long, long road. When I got to the utility easement, I got out, parked in the entrance to the cul de sac and looked around. No farmhouse. But then, as if it had shouted to me, there by the side of the road was a huge, gnarled, naked apple tree. I climbed down the short embankment, almost breaking a leg doing so, and practically hugged that tree. Well, I think I did hug it. I'm new at this apple sleuthing, but this looked like a very old tree. I found some "dropsies," stuffed them into my pockets and hoped the passersby didn't call the cops on some crazy lady down in the gully.

I don't have an actual photo of the apple I'm looking for. There is a sketch put out by John Bunker at Fedco Trees, the real apple expert. But it could be "the one." I took photos of them when I got them home, cut up the smallest one and dug out the seeds. I'm going to plant them and see if they grow.

The end of the trek came when I decided to keep going instead of turning back and going home the usual way. The plan showed that this road ended up in a town near the highway ramp. As I'd gotten off the highway in Bowdoinham that day, I passed "Fisher Road." I thought, "Someday I'll take that road and see where it brings me." Lo and behold, the road where I had traveled to find that farm turned into Fisher Road, and it brought me to that very intersection I'd passed by earlier in the day. I laughed. Some random journeys we take are not as random as we think. My entire day had been filled with synchronicity, happy coincidences, and I got home exhilarated.

As a writer, we don't have to search out real people, farms or apples to flesh out our fictional stories. But I love detection, and that's what I miss about my old career...title searching involves looking through books, at maps and plans, some of them quite old, and finding where your "locus" is "on the face of the earth." And I find it fun to incorporate that into my novel research, What's this one about? Think: "An Apple to Die For."

Post Thanksgiving Musings:Writing that Book Proposal

My mother, who we called "Mum," was the original "hot ticket." She had many funny expressions, some lost to memory now, that nailed a feeling or state of being.

And I'd characterize my life right now just as she would: I've been busier than a one-armed paper hanger. First, there is my non-fiction travel guide about New England craft beer. I have one month, well, let me calculate for sure, 34 days to hand it in to the editor. I want to break down laughing, or break down crying .... saying intentions like "I WILL hand it in on time," hoping I have 62 fairy godmothers who drink beer listening in the ether, who have nothing to do but help me.

So I had to make a decision about interrupting the flow of work on that project in order to write a book proposal for an agent whom I'd approached after the Crime Bake conference. He liked the ideas I had for two cozy mystery series, but I'd need to write proposals for each series idea. And that required time away from my work in progress. I hemmed and hawed to myself, but told the agent that of course I'd work on the proposals ASAP.

Then I committed to do it. It took three days of constant researching and asking for help coming up with "comparable" books, book series similar to yours that had been renewed (showing good sales), conjuring up three books in the series, writing a synopsis of each without actually having the books written, writing a bio of my work and experience, presenting evidence of my potential market and editing the first 30 pages of the manuscript to make it enticing to an editor.

I finished it last Tuesday and looked Heaven-ward before I pressed "send." Then I plunged into Thanksgiving preparations. My son was the only one of my three kids to be able to make it home, and we had a great two days. No work on the beer book was done, except making a pumpkin pie with a local stout. That recipe can go in the book, so I guess it was research. And the pie was delicious.

Today is Saturday. We've managed to not participate in any Black Friday insanity, we got our Christmas tree up and some lights on it without killing each other (close, though) and today I get back to work on the beer project.

I will do some deep breathing when I open the master doc, see how many breweries I still have to write up, and keep going. "Bird by bird," writer-goddess Anne Lamott says, bird by bird.

Special thanks go to Wicked Cozy Authors Sherry Harris and Barb Ross and to bookseller Beth Kanell of Vermont's Kingdom Books. Your help with finding comparable series was what encouraged me to finish the proposal and not flop in a heap of tears.

Puns about beer and murder

Last Saturday at this very moment, 5:10 p.m., I was standing in line at Crime Bake waiting for my turn speed-pitching an agent. It was pretty exciting, standing with five or so other writers, all of us wondering if the agent we'd gotten assigned would bite at our book ideas. Mine didn't, as I wrote last week. Fine. Chalk it up to learning experience.

Next morning at breakfast, we decided to gather all the Maine folks around the same table. One writer I had just met gave me her agent's name and some valuable info about the type of cozy mystery she writes. Some publishers will give you a book deal without a finished manuscript.

I was going back and forth wondering if I should take time away from my non-fiction beer book, and decided to go for it. I printed out the submissions guidelines from this agent's website, ticked them off as I wrote them, and said to my husband, "Wish me luck, I'm about to press "send."" And I did it.

Now I am scrambling to think up some pithy, pun-filled book titles and book jacket copy for the mysteries I want to write. One series will feature the subject I'm pretty well-versed in: beer. The other subject is a recent passion of mine.

Wish me luck!

Brewing up mysteries at Crime Bake 2014

Brewing up mysteries at Crime Bake 2014



Fun conference and I'm hooked.

Hang out with other writers: my first Crimebake conference and new mantra

I have been so isolated where I live, I keep in touch with friends via Facebook or email (mostly Facebook) and see other writers hardly ever. If you don't live in Maine or some other rural place, you might think it's me. I live in Waterville, Maine, home of my alma mater Colby College, a second college, two hospitals and 18,000 people. Doesn't seem like an isolated place.

But in the six years I've lived here, with my retired Colby prof husband, I have made exactly zero friends and met zero other writers. And I happen to know there are more than a few afoot.

So when I got my very first chance to sign up for Sisters in Crime New England Chapter annual conference, I pinched pennies and made arrangements. Tomorrow, after waiting for months, I go to Dedham, Massachusetts for a three day crime extravaganza. We'll even get to inspect a "crime scene," set up by forensics experts for our inexpert perusal.

Wheeeeee! Can't contain my glee. There is a feeling I get when I'm around other writers. Some could view the others in attendance as potential or actual competition. I am so excited and stimulated by the talk, how interested people are in meeting each other, and listening to the published mystery writers, I float for days after.

Sisters in Crime was founded to create awareness that women mystery writers weren't being paid as well as their male counterparts. And it's an amazingly organized group. And not only that, they are welcoming as hell.

I've  met several other writers via their website and Yahoo group and look forward to meeting them this weekend.

The special guest is Craig Robinson, creator of the Longmire books on which a TV series has been based. There will be a BBQ banquet and line dancing (okay I'm skipping the dancing), and lots of talk about mysteries and series and characters and technique and all the trappings of what makes the crime writing world go round.

Oh, and I'm getting 5 minutes to pitch my novel in progress to an agent. Hope I've got it right:

"When Griffin Kane finds a body in her new batch of beer, Portland, Maine police rule it an accident. Eamon Collins fell into the mash tun and drowned. The trouble is, it isn't Eamon. And the other trouble is Eamon is gone. Who is the body in the beer vat? And why did Eamon fake his death? Welcome to the Vatican Brewpub, the former St. Dominic's church, and the seamier side of the craft beer world."

Still working on it! If you have suggestions, let me know.

Beer here…and there. Finding new suds is part of the fun

Beer here…and there. Finding new suds is part of the fun

What's taking so long? Finishing that elusive work in progress

Up front I can say I don't have an answer to that question, "What's taking so long?" I have one finished novel in a closet and even discovered recently that it was successfully saved to a floppy disc (yes) then to a flash drive.

My second novel in that same series has been in progress for years. My youngest daughter reads Slate and once sent me an article that so touched me that I have it pinned on a bulletin bar inside the same closet where my manuscript resides. At least I can see it each time I open that door.

Author Susanna Daniel wrote an article in Slate in July, 2010 titled, "What Took You So Long? The quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing."

The article begins:

There is surely a word—in German, most likely—that means the state of active non-accomplishment. Not just the failure to reach a specific goal, but ongoing, daily failure with no end in sight. Stunted ambition. Disappointed potential. Frustrated and sad and lonely and hopeless and sick to death of one's self.

Whatever it's called, this is what leads people to abandon their goals—people do it every day. And I understand that decision, because I lived in this state of active non-accomplishment for many years.

At the time she wrote it, her first novel had been accepted for publication. By now it's been out there for a few years. She cites another writer who took his time and lost hope: Junot Diaz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, also took 10 years to complete it. Neither Daniel or Diaz worked on that novel all that time. They put them down for long stretches of time, to have a child or enter a graduate program. But they answered that siren's call, which usually for me comes in the middle of the night, the call to come back and finish your story. Your characters are waiting for you.

I visited my daughter Meg the summer she gave me the What Took You so Long? piece. We were watching TV and talking. I said, "I feel like I have so much to say and no one is listening to me." 

She was 20 years old at the time, and I was floored by what she said in response: "Mom, that's what writers do. They write all the things in their heads that no one is listening to."

That was four years ago. I've been helped tremendously by bloggers and other writers I've met when I decided to go for it. Procrastination is a problem. Less a problem than a detour is the non-fiction craft beer book I'm writing. For that project, I am grateful, as it may mean income coming in from my writing. It'll be at least a year til I see it, but it should flow in and help out.

I work on writing every day, and setting up this blog helps. I either write here or in my other, food/beer-related blog or even in the novel.

Daniel ends her piece with this:

After I wrote the last sentence, I printed the whole mess and got out my red pen, and the relief of having a complete draft was overwhelming. I had more writing energy than I'd had in years. At this point, no matter that the sky was falling in publishing-land, I was certain that I would see my book in print.


I'm keeping the faith that this will also happen to me. Finishing even a first draft is the biggest event, and I know I can do it. I even have the last scene written. It's finding the balance between the fiction projects, the beer book and blogging and some freelance articles that have come trickling in. But the most important thing is to push past fear and doubt and start clacking away at the keys.

Read Susanna Daniel's touching piece here:


http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/07/what_took_you_so_long.html

Show Your Work: Advice from Austin Kleon

One of the worst things that happens to me when I sit down to write is the perfection problem. Fingers hang over the keys: a, s, d, f and on the right, j, k, l and semi-colon (which some famous writer says never to use....it only shows you're pompous). There they hang, fearful of producing drivel. But not writing hurts. If I get up without getting something on the screen, I feel like I've failed myself.

Enter Austin Kleon, author of Share Like an Artist and the more recent Show Your Work. I'm reading the latter, underlining like crazy, nuggets like: Send out a daily dispatch. No matter where you are in your work, pick a small piece of it that you can get "out there," meaning online. "Writers like Twitter," and indeed, I find myself posting short pieces, or a link to this blog on Twitter with a hashtag of #amwriting, which seems to get me some followers. It works.

I have a long way to go, and I'm not entirely comfortable in sharing my actual fiction, but I'm getting something about my process or progress on the non-fiction beer book, out into the Twittersphere every day. Some of my followers are e-book publishers or people hoping to help me market a book, but I'm "meeting" other writers, many of them with helpful blogs, who get me writing more and more.

And writing something every day has been my goal for a very long time. It's getting a lot easier as I practice at it.

Writing in the seasons, write what you know

Artist's Way author Julia Cameron urges us to write "Morning Pages," three pages of stream of consciousness blather (my word) or whatever is on your mind right after you get up. I do the pages after I meditate and have a cup of coffee, and I always note at the head of the first page: Date, time, temperature and weather.

Today, for instance, it was sunny and warm for a mid-October early morning. I reported on how many of our trees are now leaf-less, that the chickadees and nuthatches are back at the feeder after a summer hiatus and the warm quality of the air, color of the sky. Why do I do this? I have no idea. Part of me thinks after I'm gone to the big mystery novel in the sky, that my kids might like to read what I've written.

But I've discovered over the past few years that those entries can help while writing. Say for instance your murder happens in November, as it does in my work in progress, and I'm writing those scenes in the middle of the summer, which I was. What's it like in November in Portland, Maine?  Cold. But it's August and I'm staying at a cottage on Bailey Island and the weather is idyllic and I'm in an island rapture. I can fake it, from memory. But if I have some files that describe exactly what I'm noticing with all five senses firing on a given date in a given month I can go back and use that description/sense in my current out-of-season document.

The next trick will be filing those jottings into computer files. We'll see. I can pluck a journal from the closet in my yoga room, stick my finger in and find my description of the weather. Or I can find an entry where I was feeling an emotion so intensely, I can use that too. It's all grist for the mill, as Ram Dass once said. It's all good.

Give me Liberty, or give me Liberty Craft Brewing

Give me Liberty, or give me Liberty Craft Brewing



My interview with Guy Hews, owner/brewer at Maine's newest nano-brewery!

A Body in the Beer Vat: How my non-fiction book about beer changed the setting for my novel

Way back in 1995, while I was researching and writing my first travel guide to New England brewpubs, I was also working on a mystery novel. The setting for the novel was a restaurant based on The Rusty Scupper in Acton, Massachusetts. I and my four siblings had worked there for a period of years in the late '70's through the mid '80's, and it was a fun, lively place.

My first novel, which is finished and sitting in a stationary box in my study closet, was set there. Griffin Kane and her brother Riley work at The Refectory, named for the dining hall in a monastery. Why? The owner is Brother Joe, a former monk who leaves the holy life for reasons unknown and opens an eatery in this small town outside Boston.

Griffin and Riley take off for Maine to attend their college reunion and Riley is arrested there for the murder of his former girlfriend. The crime had been unsolved until this time, 10 years later. Griffin sets out to prove Riley's innocence. That one is called Like Tears Over a Cheek (Tears) from a line in Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen and is based on a true crime that has yet to be solved.

I had researched The Writer's Market and sent out Tears and got nice rejection letters, which I saved and read from time to time. When I connected with a literary agent, she was interested in my series, but feared if she sent out Tears to her usual suspect editors, and they'd already rejected my effort, she'd lose credibility. "Finish the book you're working on, we'll sell it as the first in the series, then we'll sell Tears as the second."

That sounded like it made sense. She added, "And since you're beer book will be published soon, why don't you change the restaurant into a brewpub? That brings your beer expertise into the novel."

That also  made sense. Hence in the second novel, No One to Bury, the book that has yet to have a "The End" tacked on, the setting is indeed a brewpub. And it's called The Vatican, because Brother Joe has an ax to grind with the Church and he knows  the name will drive the Archdiocese crazy.

In this book, Brother Joe's boyhood friend is found dead in the mash tun, where Griffin is brewing a new batch of beer. Who killed Eamon Collins? Again, Griffin Kane will find the killer. I even have a tag line: "She's a failure at law, he's a failure at religion. Together they solve a series of murders that shake a small Maine city."

Setting changes again: I dragged No One to Bury kicking and screaming through my MFA program, where I do believe I became a much better writer. And I developed these Irish characters, Joe, Eamon, Maggie and Orla, who had grown up in an industrial school, suffered horrors there, and attempt a life of normalcy in the  U.S., where Joe has opened the brewpub.

But by this time, I'd lived in Maine for 20 years and I was hemming and hawing about feeling at loose ends about where to place it. One of my professors said, "Just set it in Portland." So I sadly said my goodbyes to my hometown in MA and located the brewpub in Portland, Maine. Where? Where else? In a former church: Saint Dominic's on State Street, now the home of the Maine Irish Heritage Center.

I visited the Center one 96 degree day, and the people there loved the idea. So I toured the church, which has been de-commissioned, and got the layout in my head. That is now the "resting place" of No One to Bury. 

By the way, that agent worked with me for a year, for which I was very grateful. But I went through a divorce, went back to work in the legal field and let my writing go for a time. I'm back at it, writing a second beer travel guide (hello, deadline!) and finishing No One to Bury.

I'm happy with this setting. I love Portland, and it looks like the rest of the world is falling in love with it too, judging by how many foodie types are writing about the city, not to mention the beer lovers.

And just for kicks, you can check out the first beer book, What's  Brewing in New England, at my Amazon page: www.amazon.com/author/katecone

Creating a new series brings little mysteries, and apples

Have you heard of Nanowrimo? Short for National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org) where participants write a 50,000 word novel in the months of November and April.

This past April, while wallowing in my non-fiction book about New England craft beer, I wanted to get back to fiction. But I didn't want to get mired in my work in progress (WIP), a novel called No One to Bury, whose characters I've been writing since 1986. No typo's. Yes, it's been that long.

I had just had an email exchange with a friend, an older woman who has an edge to her personality and to her life. I thought, "What if I created a character who was a "nice" version of this woman. Not too nice, not too edgy. I jumped into my April Nanowrimo writing, "Murder on Cabbage Island," featuring Patsy Mason, owner and chief cook and bottle-washer of Coastal Lobster Bakes.



I continued working on the beer book, and wrote an average of 350 words a day in the new mystery. Writing daily was my goal, as well as fleshing out a "cozy" mystery novel. I ended up with 31 new pages, a new novel, and a new series character/protagonist. "Cold case, meet hot chowdah," was my tag line, and I still crack up when I read it.

Okay, here's where real life likes to come knocking: I discovered that there is already a mystery series set in Maine with a protagonist whose job is putting on clambakes I'd chosen that "job" because we were going to celebrate my husband's upcoming "odometer" birthday with a lobster bake on Cabbage Island, off Boothbay Harbor, Maine. I was worried about the event: would everyone get to the boat on time? Would we get home before dark? Dumb stuff. So I decided to make our upcoming event into a mystery about a cold case involving the disappearance thirty years before of Patsy's younger sister.

I have a legal background, and didn't want to get embroiled in a fight about whether I'd plagarized this other clambake series. So I talked to my husband about it one day, and decided: apples. That's the answer. She doesn't have to do lobster bakes. She can be a Pomologist, an expert about apples.

Real life again: Walking our dog Henry the other day, I came on an old apple tree amidst the maples in a little woods on our property line. There were dozens of yellow apples on the ground with many still on the tree. I gathered some and brought them in the house. I'd just heard an interview with Rowan Jacobsen on Radio Boston (www.wbur.org/radioboston) about heirloom apples and how people were growing them again. I grew up in apple country in Littleton, Massachusetts. That area is Johnny Appleseed country, so apples were a big part of my childhood.

"My" yellow apples weren't pretty, but Mr. Jacobsen had explained that many types of apples were quite ugly and not meant for eating, necessarily. As a title examiner, I knew that there were a few farms on our road and that our land had most likely been part of one. So today we drove up to Cayford Orchards in Skowhegan, Maine. I brought my homely apples with me and asked the young farmer about them.

"They could be Tolman Sweets," he said. "Are they ready now?"
"Ready?" I asked "There on the tree and on the ground." I had no idea what he meant, but got it later.
"The spots on these apples are caused by a fungus we call "Spotty Blotch."
Ahhh. So these apples are meant to be prettier. One mystery solved. "Is it possible to bring the tree back?"
At this point, my husband, who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and who thinks apples grow in the supermarket, starts to grimace. "Oh, no," I hear him think, "not another project of Kate's."
"How would I do that?" I ignore the grimace
And the nice 7th generation Cayford farmer told me about pruning. When I got home, I consulted the U. Maine Cooperative Extension service, which had a short paper on "Renovating old apple trees." And it isn't that bad of a project, even though they try to warn you that it might be.

I smiled while reading about my Tolman Sweets, a very old apple that may have been first grown in Dorchester, MA before 1700. They are a cider apple and cooking apple, and no mystery, very sweet.

And I smiled even more when I realized that I was not wasting a beautiful October afternoon doing research on apples. My new series character will still know a thing or two about cooking lobster, but her real expertise is all things apples. Murder of the Apple of my Eye? Murder with MacIntosh?

Get cooking: without a stove?

Get cooking: without a stove?



The only mystery involved here is how measurements can go so awry!

Mystery Writer's Process: Meditation

In my latest of writers' self-help books, the author says, "Get your work out there."He means sharing something every day on some type of social media platform. And he's right, I guess. "Tell people about your process, but don't tell them everything." Hmmm. I may have already done that in my first blog post. Bankruptcy? Foreclosure? Do those come under "Too much information?" Grist for the mill is more like it.

Here's a bit of my writing "process:" Because it took me 30 years to finally "find" a morning meditation regime, I hold to it. "Regime" sounds strenuous. Meditation has been the biggest gift I've ever received and I gave it to myself. But it took a very long time, saying I was going to meditate, trying to meditate, giving up. But one day in 2008, I was in despair. Here's where that bankruptcy and foreclosure come in.

I was in an MFA program, but it wasn't going well. I had been banjaxed by a woman professor who used our workshop to practice Evil Queen. It took me out at the knees in confidence and self-worth as a writer. A relationship was tanking, my work had fallen off due to the economic crash and it felt like the four walls were closing in. The house had been lost and people didn't like not getting paid, even though it was legal. My livelihood had been gutted by the fall of the refinance market.

I had taken Buddhist vows four years earlier, and borrowed Lama Surya Das' CD called Natural Radiance. And I put it on after my darling high school aged daughter went off to school, but before the rest of the house was awake. I had coffee and looked out at the ocean, right there, where I could almost touch it.

"Just sitting, just breathing, just being..." Surya Das says, in his Queens, NY accent. Lovely. Someone was telling me that "...just being rather than doing..." was okay. I have other meditation CD's now, but that one is my favorite and got me "on the cushion" every day.

Now, the writing. Lots of books will tell you to start writing first thing in the morning, forsaking all else. But the other day, I discovered how meditation helps my writing, and again, it took a very long time.

I did a wonderful Surya Das meditation, about 30 minutes, and the house was quiet: husband still sleeping, dog and cat quiet, candle flickering and Buddha smiling, closed-eyed, keeping me company. And instead of journaling, as I usually do, I thought, "This is a very soft moment. I can write now with confidence." And I wrote on my little netbook, which is easy to open on the kitchen table. I wrote 500 words in a novel I sometimes think will never be done. But that awareness and my noticing that there was a "soft moment" that I could create in, has stayed with me.

So I do want to journal, as Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, encourages us to do, but I find it okay to journal in the evening too, when everything is winding down, and I can recapitulate my day.

Meditation is a huge part of my process, and it's soft and easy and makes everything else so much more pleasurable.

Writing mysteries is addictive

This morning, I created this blog. I've got a couple of other blogs out there, one about cooking and the other called "What's Brewing in Maine" for my beer book in progress. But I thought I'd have a blog about the process, my process, of writing mystery novels. Or not writing them.

It was a long time ago, sometime in the early 1980's, that I began writing in the first person. I'd read a bunch of Robert Parker's Boston-based mystery novels, and since I'd lived in Boston attending college and law school, I loved knowing exactly where Spenser was going in his beloved city.

I'd always wanted to write creatively, and when I'd "heard" Spenser's first person narration enough, I thought, "I can so that."

Not so easy, cupcake. But I slogged away at it, beginning with my first novel, Like Tears Over a Cheek (a line from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa), a fictionalized version of a real murder that took place at my alma mater, Colby College, in the early 1970's. It took me awhile...I was having three kids, failing as many Bar Exams (failing sounds easy, but in order to take the Bar exam, you have to study for months, and wait for months for the result, and worry your head off the entire time). I remarried and moved to Harpswell, Maine. I found Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and through that saving grace, found my first writers' group. I was in heaven.

That recession of the early '90's forced me back to the workplace, a law firm that almost drove me crazy. I swore I'd finish the novel before returning to work. And I did. I had a local print shop print out fourteen copies, mailed them out after studying The Writer's Market to find appropriate publishers, got several rejections, some of them encouraging. I took another Bar Exam, this time in Maine, and came within 1.9 points of passing. The Board of Bar Examiners in Maine was run then by a person whose response to, "Can't you review my answers?" with, "Just take it again." This person will be a victim in a novel....idea!....how about my current work in progress!

I digress. I went to work for Shipyard Brewing Company when they had just opened their Portland brewery. An agent then told me, "Write a beer book, then it'll help get your fiction published." With big Bambi eyes, I said, "Okay!"

I wrote What's Brewing in New England, which was published in 1997. During the editing process, which I thankfully didn't have to do, I began writing a second book in my Griffin Kane series, and at another agent's advice, I changed the setting from a restaurant to a brewpub. I worked with this agent for a year, but found I was writing for her, and not for me. So I went back on my own. I also got divorced, moved with my three kids, two of them teenagers. I went to back to work in another law firm doing title searches, and with the divorce drama and busy real estate market, the fiction writing came to a halt.

It took another five years, when I decided to get a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, to get No One to Bury (a line from a T.S. Eliot poem) going again. I was also going through a bankruptcy, then, the most dreaded thing: a foreclosure. My kids were getting to be young adults, but needed me more than ever.

Several years later, here I am, writing regularly, writing another beer book due out in 2015, and finally after 30 years, attending writers' conferences, albeit local ones, co-sponsoring a reading series in Portland, Maine and getting that second novel finished.

Yes, it's set in a brewpub, now located in Portland in a former Catholic church. When will it be done? By the end of this year. I'm going to Crimebake, a conference hosted by Sisters in Crime, and am determined to come back with an agent. We shall see.