Buy 'em by the bagful! It's used book sale season.

The fourth weekend of June is a very special time in Mid-Coast Maine: it's the three-day extravaganza, blow-out used book sale in Brunswick, sponsored by one of the best libraries I've ever been to, Curtis Memorial. This year it will be held on Friday, June 26; Saturday, June 27 and Sunday on June 28. Check out the link below for time and details.

Photo: from Curtis Memorial


Touted as the biggest sale of its kind in Northern New England, the Curtis Memorial Sale takes place Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with books being re-stocked all weekend long. Can't get there at the crack of dawn on Friday? (There are people who line up early to get in right at 10 a.m.). Straggle in any time. On Sunday, when things are winding down, you can fill a grocery bag for three bucks. That's right. Things might be picked over by then, but I have come away on Sunday many a time with absolute treasures. 

So what does this have to do with mysteries and Maine?

The Maine part is obvious. But the  mystery novel category, one of 45 carefully sorted categories the sale offers, is one of the biggest. For $3 hardcover and $2 soft/trade, you can stock up on all the titles and authors you've missed the year before. And there is occasionally a really old/rare book you can snatch up. I found one last year entitled Shadow Kills (Beaufort Books, 1985), written by Rodman Philbrick of Kittery. His early protagonist was a cop-turned-mystery-writer Jack Dawkins, confined to a wheelchair after a work-related accident. If you love Boston, you'll love these books.

These are contemporaries of the Spenser novels and you'll delight in a Boston before the Big Dig, where Jack recalls eating drunken late-night breakfasts at the Hayes-Bickford and drinking at The Hillbilly Ranch. I even remember this Boston. I ended up meeting Rod Philbrick after I reviewed one of the Jack Dawkins novels for Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance's Maine in Print newspaper. Rod wrote me a letter (yes, this was pre-email) to thank me for the kind review. I brought him up to MWPA to lead a workshop on writing suspense. He's still at it, but not with Jack Dawkins, whom he let go because it was difficult to get Jack out of trouble while in a wheelchair. (That's my best memory of what Rod once told me.) He went on to write the very popular Young Adult novel Freak the Mighty.

Wow, did I get off on a tangent! But I'm passionate about these sales. They happen all over Maine and the country, so ask at your local library or do a simple Google search and plug in "used book sales."

My husband and I are planning on getting there tomorrow early to get a head start. I also collect old cookbooks and have gotten a few gems there too.

Here's the link: /http://www.curtislibrary.com/annual-book-sale

And Maine writers Kate Flora and Lea Wait wrote about other types of happenings at local libraries. Read their blog post here: http://mainecrimewriters.com/kates-posts/spending-a-maine-summer-in-the-library

Mystery: How do I find a community?

Happy Monday! It's finally summer in Maine, and it's a cool one. Woke up to 57 degrees this morning.  And I just violated Elmore Leonard's writing advice: "Never start with the weather." Well, god-luv-ya, Elmore, but when you live in a place like Maine, you wake up and start with the weather. Just sayin'.

I usually try to write first, immediately after meditation. But this morning I decided to do some admin work. I was delighted to see in my Inbox a great blog post by Maureen Milliken. Maureen is the proud author of Cold Hard News, just published, and she blogged for Maine Crime Writers about how to get published. "Preparation, hard work, tenacity" are the triple gems she prescribes, but there is something more important: joining the writing community. 

Photo: Maureen Milliken at her book launch party in June

Maureen speaks:

One thing became clear when I became serious about getting to work on my mystery novel several years ago: I had no flipping idea what I was doing. So I joined the Mystery Writers of America (a couple years later I also joined the awesome Sisters in Crime). I signed up for CrimeBake, the conference held every November in Dedham, Mass., and sponsored by those two organizations.
I didn’t sign up thinking that I would network, so much as that I’d sop up information that would point me in the right direction.
I was right about the information. I learned more about what was needed and expected to write a book and get it published at that conference and from those organizations than I knew existed. But the really cool thing was I started meeting people. People who were doing the same thing I was.

Here is the link to Maureen's blog post;

http://mainecrimewriters.com/maureens-posts/whats-the-magic-bullet-to-getting-published-join-the-community
Kate again:

My personal frustration has been that I've been working on my own mysteries for so long, and had such a long hiatus when I went back to work and raised three teens, that the writing community I worked so hard to build up seemed to disintegrate. So I'm back doing exactly what Maureen Milliken suggests. I re-joined Sisters in Crime, which has a very active sub-group called Guppies, for we, the Great Unpublished. I will re-join Mystery Writers of America and I've begun attending overnight conferences, something I could never afford to do when I was parenting. (My kids are all grown now, and are doing great, my best supportive network!).

Photo: Gerry Boyle chairs a panel at MWPA's Crimewave Conference, April, 2015
From left to right: Gerry Boyle, Gayle Lynds, Paul Doiron and Lea Wait


If want to join this great Maine writing community, here is the place to begin: Maine Writers and Publishers' Alliance. Celebrating 40 years this summer, MWPA is your first stop when you write, whether it be poetry, mystery, non-fiction, essay, memoir, it doesn't matter. MWPA offers this much-needed sense of belonging to something greater than your own inner ramblings . From their website:

Founded in 1975, the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization that works to enrich the literary life and culture of Maine. We are the only statewide organization solely devoted to supporting and promoting Maine’s writers, publishers, booksellers, and literary professionals. The MWPA has a membership of more than 1,600.
Our goals include: promoting an appreciation of Maine literature; creating a network of writers, readers, and publishers; creating opportunities for writers to improve writing and marketing skills; and informing members and the public of Maine literary and publishing news.

 

This Wednesday, June 26, 2015, MWPA will put on another "Gather," a get-together of writers in different locations all over Maine. I will host one in Waterville at Maine Brews (1 Post Office Square) at 6 p.m. Do join us!

Email me at kateconewrites@gmail.com or check out the other locations at the MWPA website:

www.mainewriters.org

I'm not sure where two months have gone, but I've been spending it doing a lot of hoping that spring would come. And it has, sort of. Here in central Maine, it's been gray or wet or both for over a week (but who's counting?). Good news is there are daffodils about to bloom in the yard and the snow is just about all but gone.

Where am I in the mystery novel process? I finished and sent in two proposals for series mysteries in the traditional genre. Think Agatha Christie. One of those has come back with some editing suggestions, and I'm pretty excited to have the attention of an agent. We'll see how it goes.

One tool I am finding really helpful is K.M. Weiland's explanation of Scene Structure. This graph was done by Christine Frazier, keeper of Better Novel Project, who reviewed Weiland's book. Better Novel Project is a great blog I highly recommend. According to best-selling author Weiland, who also has a great blog called Helping Writers Become Authors, a scene is compose of the scene and the sequel.

The scene starts with the protagonist's goal, followed by this goal coming up against a type of conflict or opposition, followed by a disaster, which could be obstruction of the goal, an injury or a hollow victory. Essential to the scene is its sequel: protagonist's reaction, (panic? fury?), a dilemma (analyze, review, plan) and the decision to take action or not to take action. Weiland spells it out beautifully, so I suggest you high tail it over to her blog or get her book, Structuring Your Novel. If you need the visual, again, see Ms. Frazier's post How to Deconstruct a Scene like K.M. Weiland.

How am I using this graph? I am such a visual learner, that this one tool, even though I don't feel I have to follow it to the letter, reminds me of what my character should do in a scene in order to keep readers interested and build a good story. And it helped push through the panic that set in after getting the email about the edits. Some of the suggestions meant re-writing entire scenes and getting rid of a few others. Gah! But after I paced around the kitchen table about a gazillion times, I went up to my writing room, set up the graph on a little stand I found at Staples so it would be staring me in the face and plowed into the manuscript. So far so good. And get on over to Better Novel Project and Helping Writers Become Authors.

Hear your characters speak: the value of giving a public reading

Will this Maine winter ever end? I've given up asking and have surrendered to the ever-present and ever-growing banks of white that surround and envelope our yard, stream from an upstairs balcony outside our bedroom and provides a white "lawn" on our deck where birds too big for the feeder land and peck at the seed I throw out.

This Saturday, February 28th, I will take part in a reading series I helped co-found over two years ago with Portland writer E.J. Fechenda. LIT: Readings & Libations allows emerging writers, meaning those who may or may not yet be published, read aloud for fifteen minutes from a piece of fiction.

E.J. and I found each other on the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (MWPA) Facebook page.  This happy coincidence -- E.J. queried the MWPA crowd about whether anyone wanted to start such a reading series at the same time I was itching to do just that -- has given me and other writers the great gift of hearing our characters speak aloud, not just to the four walls of our writing rooms when we might practice,  but in a venue where people show up to hear us read.

The practice we get at public  speaking is minor compared to the rich experience, for  me, of hearing my  four Irish characters speak in their brogues. I don't even study Irish language, and even as I'm reading I'm thinking I'm botching it. But as the minutes tick by, I forget myself and my inner editor and keep reading, and hearing.

When I leave the dais, I can barely recall what piece I read. I only know that Brother Joe, Maggie, Orla and Eamon are alive, they get angry, hungry and cold. They plot their escape and ponder their future. For fifteen minutes, I give birth. Then I join the crowd of listeners and order a beer and witness the other writers doing the same.

LIT is a free and open to the public event, so I encourage you to come to Bull Feeney's pub on Fore Street in Portland at 4 p.m. on February 28th to help us celebrate the art of writing...and reading.

New Year Ruminations

New year of blogging? Well, we're way past my making a New Year's resolution, now aren't we?

Aw well. Since my last post of December 8th, I worked like a fiend on finishing my beer book, while being present for my family for Christmas and having a crazy great time, meeting my January 2d deadline for said beer book, and getting my sick husband on a plane to Italy with 17 college kids. Happy to report he was no longer contagious by that time, he just needed my presence in Boston to see him gleefully board a plane and leave his cares and woes behind in Waterville for an entire month.

What cares? What woes? Today, on my way home from a lunch date in Brunswick, the car blew up (pretty much literally) and I managed to pull over where an 18-wheeler wouldn't ride up over me and crush me to death, wait for AAA to change a tire down the highway and finally get to me before darkness came. Silver lining? I could start a new novel with that imagery. If I throw in darkness, a snowstorm and a serial killer truck driver who stops to "help," I've even got Steven King beat (not really, but I can dream).

Being home alone for a month is an opportunity to be or become comfortable being in your own skin. I wear yoga clothes most of the time, unless I absolutely have to go out and wear what I call "grown-up clothes:" jeans, sweater, clogs. I have a loose schedule for meditating, journaling, writing, and tying up loose ends with the beer book. For instance, this weekend, I will be naming/renaming over 100 or 200 images so the editor knows whose in the photo or to what brewery the logo belongs. It's a bit boring and tedious, but it will get the book DONE.

In the mystery realm, I have been working on a book proposal for a cozy mystery series. These books can often be sold based on a proposal and three sample chapters. It's not as easy as it might sound. And you usually must have an agent on board to guide you through the process. But I've got that and I've been "playing" with my fiction for the first time in a very long time. Maybe for the first time, in fact.

And I'm back to reading voraciously. I finished South of Broad by Pat Conroy, a great novel. He's such a good writer. I learned a lot about taking my time and lingering just long enough to get the sense of place so important to this book. It takes place in Charleston, SC, one of my favorite cities.

The other book I finally finished, because I gave myself permission to read, was Maisie Dobbs. Set in post WWI London, Maisie is an educated former front line nurse who sets up a detective agency after the war. The writing is very good, the sense of London at that time is great and her tragedy, which unwinds til the last page, is well handled. Just the right amount of tension til the end. This is a series and I'll be reading more.

I'll end here. More later, as they say. Happy New Year to all, and I'm hoping for a book deal in the coming months.

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.