How to Craft a Mystery

by Bethany Maines

Step One:  Read the paper and/or listen to your weird uncle to learn about strange ways people have died recently.  This usually involves blurting out something like “ooh, another dead body!” while snatching up the paper in the middle of the busy hour at a coffee shop. 

Bonus Points: If someone shuffles away from you at the coffee shop, collect an additional 20 Murderer Alert points!

Step Two: Having decided on your method of death it’s time for research! Start googling all sorts of things that will help you cover up your crime.  Also, go on a vacation to the place that you plan on putting your dead body. 

Bonus Points: If you can say “This is a good place to kill someone!” in an aggressively cheerful manner to the person at the tourist bureau who just wants to help, collect an additional 20 Walking Sociopath points!

Step Three: Sit down and write the book.  This is the boring bit, but it does come with fun voices in your head to talk to.

Bonus Points: If you finish the manuscript, collect an additional 20 I Have No Life points!

Step Four:  Realize that there is a plot-hole in your book and go back to step three.

Bonus Points: If you don’t become an alcoholic, collect an additional 20 At Least I’m Not an Asshole Like Hemingway points!

Step Five: Get your book back from the editor and give back your Hemingway points while you try to get over the stupid, stupid, stupid edits.

Bonus Points: Look, you’ve got a complete book at this points, you shouldn’t need stupid bonus points, but hey, if that’s what keeps you going, then take 5 I Need a Cookie points.

Step Six: Release the book into the wild and realize that you are a winner!

An Unfamiliar Sea will be available on 1.21.20

Tish Yearly just opened a wedding venue on Orcas Island in Washington State and one of her employees just drowned in four inches of water. Now it’s up to Tish and her grandfather Tobias Yearly, the 79-year-old ex-CIA agent and current private investigator, to find out who could have wanted the sweet waitress dead. 

AN UNFAMILIAR SEA: PRE-ORDER NOW! 

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Bethany Maines is the award-winning author of the Carrie Mae Mysteries, San Juan Islands Mysteries, Shark Santoyo Crime Series, and numerous short stories. When she's not traveling to exotic lands, or kicking some serious butt with her black belt in karate, she can be found chasing her daughter or glued to the computer working on her next novel. You can also catch up with her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and BookBub.

Digital Publishing

By Bethany Maines

Recently, I’ve been learning about the nitty gritty “how-to” of e-publishing.  While there are many how-to’s on how to put your story up for sale in the virtual marketplace, learning how to make an epub file is a lot more difficult and confusing. 

As someone trained in how to make print books, this status is infuriating to me.  I can make words magically appear on paper – why is the screen any more difficult?  But as it turns out epub formatting is more akin to website programming than to traditional book design.  Both epub and websites must account for the fact that the designer can never be certain on what or how the end user will view their product.  Will it be on a phone, a tablet, or a desktop screen?  Will it be a horizontal or vertical?  Which operating system will be accessing the file?  All of these factors play into how an e-book is seen and creating a file that can be used in ANY format means that many of the traditional design elements beloved by graphic designers, such as color, size, and forced white space, must be set aside. Learning to create an epub is a bit like feeding content into a slot in the wall, letting the machine in the next room whir away, and then trying to guess how the machine works by looking at the book it produces.

In the last few years website programming has experienced a burst of development that can make creating a website an almost drag and drop, WYSISWYG experience.  Meanwhile, digital publishing lags behind, still in it’s infancy. 

Take a look at these images of the first page of my third Carrie Mae Mystery novel, High-Caliber Concealer.  One is a screen cap from a mobile phone kindle app and the other is a photo of the printed book.

You’ll notice several differences – the large area of white space before the chapter title is gone and the fonts are not the same.  Fonts in epub’s must utilize a websafe font or embed the font within the file.  But, not all devices recognize embedded fonts, and they make a file larger and some platforms take a percentage out of an author’s royalty based on download size (you’re hogging space on their server).

However, there are some similarities that the programmer managed to achieve.  Notice how the gap between “Brunch” and “Mexico” mimics the print version?  And you’ll see that while the font isn’t the same, the font hierarchy and general sizing of the chapter information is the same as the print version. 

And beyond the appearance of words on a screen there is the tricky business of making all the chapters appear in the right order and having a hyper-linked (click and go) table of contents that allow readers to navigate easily through the book. 

No digital book is as simple as a word doc you type at home.  So if you see a well-crafted book on your e-reading device, take a moment to appreciate the book programmer!  

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Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie Mae Mysteries, Tales from the City of Destiny and An Unseen Current.  You can also view the Carrie Mae youtube video or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.

Whodunit? Me!

by Bethany Maines

On my recent trip to Iceland we were watching the BBC channel in the hotel room before going to bed (the entertainment value of the Icelandic Shopping Network could only last so long) and I caught a fun segment about the British Library which is showing an exhibit called Murder in theLibrary: An A-Z of Crime Fiction. The exhibit looks at the development of the whodunit genre and features the “10 Commandments” of Monsignor Ronald Knox. 

If you haven’t looked up the good Monsignor’s rules they basically consist of some guidelines to prevent the author from pulling solutions to a problem out of thin air and keep a story based in reality.  The rules hold up pretty well even over 80 years after being written – except for that one about the Chinamen.  I’m not really sure what that rule was attempting to accomplish, but we’ll hope that it wasn’t as racist as it sounds. 

Anyway, once I returned home I did a quick google on the exhibit and found an interesting article that covered the rules and posed the question: Is the Whodunit dead? Has the reading public moved on to thrillers, true crime and procedurals?  Is the Whodunit now a passé relic of an older time?

Well, I have to say that if I took a survey of the authors on this blog that the answer would be a definitive, “No!” The Whodunit is alive and well on the Stilletto Blog – whether it’s Joelle Charbonneau’s roller skating heroine cleaning up a small town mysteries or Maggie Barbieri’s college professor solving murders with the help of a handsome NYPD homicide detective – our gang write crimes that get solved.

It’s my personal theory that books, like music, no longer have one mainstream genre that is overwhelmingly popular. The world has more readers than ever and that allows readers to pick the specific genre that appeals to them.  The Whodunit may no longer be THE thing to read, but I don’t think it’s being read any less.  In fact – I’m about to start reading a new one today.