Summer's coming. Are you ready?

This weekend was swim team sign-ups--an annual exercise in chaos.

There are forms to fill out. There are team suits to try on. There are cookies and lemonade and countless kiddos zipping around as if they've never had sugar before.

Soon, swim practice will begin and initial excitement (yeah, pool!) will give way to Do I have to go?

In June, there will meets. Not my favorite. Think competitive parents, vodka and overheated concrete mixed with over-excited, over-tired kids...*sigh* There are no high-tech touch pads for country club swim. Nope. Instead, parents with stopwatches endure blazing heat and intermittent splashes.

I was not a swimmer (you're welcome, Mom). I did play golf. Badly. Mom had to spend her Thursday mornings walking the back nine. So much better than swim team...

The summers of my childhood were filled with Tab and limes, peeling shoulders, playing kick-the-can until the evening news came on and my parents called me home. Idyllic, nostalgia inducing days. Days that inspired The Deep End.

As summer approaches I wish you lightning bugs and cicadas, Bomb pops and Bombay and tonic, at least a few days with low humidity and many days that will have you remembering them long after their gone.

 

Swimming into the lifeless body of her husband’s mistress tends to ruin a woman’s day, but becoming a murder suspect can ruin her whole life.

It’s summer 1974 and Ellison Russell’s life revolves around her daughter and her art. She’s long since stopped caring about her cheating husband, Henry, and the women with whom he entertains himself. That is, until she becomes a suspect in Madeline Harper’s death. The murder forces Ellison to confront her husband’s proclivities and his crimes—kinky sex, petty cruelties and blackmail.

As the body count approaches par on the seventh hole, Ellison knows she has to catch a killer. But with an interfering mother, an adoring father, a teenage daughter, and a cadre of well-meaning friends demanding her attention, can Ellison find the killer before he finds her?

Julie Mulhern is a Kansas City native who grew up on a steady diet of Agatha Christie. She spends her spare time whipping up gourmet meals for her family, working out at the gym and finding new ways to keep her house spotlessly clean--and she's got an active imagination. Truth is--she's an expert at calling for take-out, she grumbles about walking the dog and the dust bunnies under the bed have grown into dust lions. She is a 2014 Golden Heart® Finalist. The Deep End is her first mystery and is the winner of The Sheila Award.

Things Aren't What They Used to Be

Things Aren’t What They Used to Be by Debra H. Goldstein

I am a dinosaur.  The signs have been there for awhile – my friends are talking about or getting plastic surgery, cruise brochures are more exciting than the ones we looked at when we booked a trip to climb The Great Wall of China eight years ago, and I know what writers are talking about when they refer to the day they traded in their Royal or Olympia typewriters for an electric Smith Corona (remember the hard-shell case?).  More importantly, somewhere in the last few years I opted to work with a trainer so that I can stay fit without injuring myself.

My trainer is the one who brought my age home to me.  I was making my usual jokes about not being quite as flexible and he was giving me his usual assurances that I was doing fine even if I can’t touch my toes, do ups and downs, or hold a plank position for more than a few seconds. “I’ve never been much of an athlete.  In fact, in gym class or team sports, I was the kid everyone wanted to make captain so I wouldn’t actually bring the team down with my athletic prowess and because I could figure out and effectively utilize everyone else’s strengths and weaknesses so we usually won.”

The trainer smiled and tapped his head.  “Intellect,” he said.  “Very important.”  I agreed.
“That’s what Jeopardy players have and I enjoy watching the show everyday when I’m on the treadmill.  I understand those players go through a whole set of tests.”

“They do.  I was a contestant.”

“You met Alex Trebeck?  I think he’s fantastic!  What was he really like?”

“Actually, Art Fleming was the host when I did the show.”

“Never heard of him. Who’s he?”

“The original host of Jeopardy.”

My trainer looked at me as if I had lost my mind and then I realized where the disconnect was coming from.  “I was on the show in 1974.”

“I wasn’t even born then.”

I got it.  He’ll never know who Art Fleming, Smith Corona, or probably even John F. Kennedy was. It’s a shame.

Hashtag This

by Bethany Maines

There’s a hashtag on Twitter for people who are writing - #amwriting. An innocuous hashtag for tracking other writers, but sometimes… it can be just a little bit smug. And given the nature of writers I was wondering if we could have a more honest hashtag? #amsurfingtheweb #amwatchingcatvideos #amdoinganythingbutwriting

Right now I’m doing anything but working on the outline of Carrie Mae Book 4.  Because, no, I don’t know how they ended up in a brawl to the death among the Amsterdam tulips.  Can’t I just wave my magic writer wand, do a little jazz hands, and write by the seat of my pants? #pantsingit  The problem with pantsing it, is that I am no Louis L’Amour.  Mr. L’Amour apparently did not believe in rewrites or edits; he believed that rewrites killed the freshness of the story.  Or he believed that we would buy whatever he wrote. #hewasright  When I attempt to pants it, my stories go sideways and I end up writing entire chapters that sound like vacation brochures. #needavacation No story was ever moved forward by a character actually stopping to smell the roses, or in my case, tulips.  Unless, of course, he got wacked on the head while bending to smell one. #deathbytulip #nameformynextnovel #dontstealit #mine

So here I am, forced into the drudgery of outlining.  Coming up with the answers before I even know what all the questions are. Or in my case, procrastinating for all I’m worth. #procrastination! I could say that I’m mulling it over or letting it marinate, but let’s face it, at no point in my life have I ever mulled something over while doing the dishes.  The only thing I think while doing the dishes is that dishes suck and we all need to stop eating so there will be less dishes.  #seriously It’s productivity through hatred of the other available task. #atleastsomethinggotdone Eventually, I’ll have to return to the outline – figure out the who, why, where and how.  Eventually, I will have to do the research and plug the plot holes.  Eventually, I will actually have to write.  #amwriting   Sigh.  Can’t I be #amvacuuming instead?  

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

Excuse my Split Personality by Marilyn aka F. M. Meredith

I suppose it all begins with having two names: Marilyn Meredith for my Deputy Tempe Crabtree mysteries and F. M. Meredith for my Rocky Bluff P.D. mysteries.

Violent Departures, #11 in the Rocky Bluff P.D. series recently became available on Amazon as a print book and on Kindle. This means I'm in the throes of promotion.

I'm nearing the middle of my blog tour--which means promoting each new blog on as many sites as possible very day. I also must visit the blog several times during the day to respond to comments and also keep track of those who commented because of the contest I'm having. (The person commenting on the most blogs can either have a character named for him or her in the next book, or choose an earlier book in the series.)

At the same time, as I'm doing several in-person presentations, two this month at libraries and I'll have a booth at the Jack Ass Mail Run in Springville near the end of the month.

I'm also planning to give a way a Kindle copy of the first book in this series, Final Respects, beginning May 1. Promotion for this type of giveaway must begin very early, so I've been working on that too.

And--yes--there's an and--I'm writing the next Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery, as yet untitled. It's a much different type of book than Violent Departures, so when I'm working on that I must draw from a different side of me.

If that was all I had to do that would be a cinch--but I am a wife, run a household, am the chief cook and laundress, and have grandmotherly duties too. All important roles.

What I don't do is housework--I find some relative who'd like to make some extra money to do that for me. And in the meantime, I've learned not to mind the mess.

Forgive me if I seem a bit scattered these days, but that's the reason.

Marilyn aka F. M. Meredith

Finding time to write

Hi gang,

It's been a busy spring for me, not only am I finishing writing Tourist Trap #6, I had edits and page proofs for Dressed to Kill (Tourist Trap #4) and Killer Run (Tourist Trap #5). I love revisiting South Cove and making sure all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed.

I've also been juggling some serious family health issues.  The good news is the bulk of the appointments and worries are crossed off the lists. The bad news is I'm worn out.

So it's been a struggle to find the energy to dive into the work in progress and find my creative spark that makes the stories fun for me to write and, hopefully, fun for the reader as well.

As a new author, I heard my peers complain about not having enough time to write. Like the universe would just stop the world for a day, let us get 3000 - 5000 words and then restart the rest of life. Kind of like having our own Samantha from Bewitched. Remember when she wanted to have a private conversation with her mother? If I had a superpower or knew witchcraft, that's the one spell I'd want to perfect.

I might even use the time to take a long, hot bath and catch up on some reading. Okay, maybe I shouldn't have the power. :)

Instead, I've been going back to basics. I've made a writing plan, set out weekly and daily word goals, and have been turning off the internet while I write. When I reach the first 1000 words, I take a break. Then, and this is the important step, I come back and write for 1000 more. Writing 3000 words a day and having a full time job is doable, just maybe not sustainable for the long haul.

Good news? I only need 20000 more to finish. And, for me, the last part of the book flies while I tie up loose ends and put my main character in jeopardy. I just have to remember she needs to save herself rather than wait for help to arrive.

I'll let you know how it goes next month when I return.

A Heroine for the Ages Meets a Bizarre Loner

by Linda Rodriguez

When a group of writers decided on Twitter to put together an anthology—Feeding Kate: A Crime Fiction Anthology (http://www.amazon.com/Feeding-Kate-Crime-Fiction-Anthology-ebook/dp/B00B6UMGSM)—to benefit our friend Sabrina and the Lupus Foundation, I was in on it from the start. After all, I love Sabrina, and I deal with lupus every day myself.

The two main characters in my story, “Rivka’s Place,” could hardly be more different. They are a true odd couple of disparate ages and experiences and yet with great respect for one another and love. I’m a big believer in courage and in love.

One, Rivka, is an elderly Holocaust survivor, a woman who refuses to be bullied as her shop’s neighborhood becomes more and more dangerous and insists on helping everyone around her. The other, C.J., came of age many decades after World War II by killing two men as his father had trained him to do, only to learn that everything he’d been taught was a lie, a man who wants nothing more than to be left alone in peace to do his work, read, and hide from his memories and those who hunt him.

Where did this bizarre partnership of Rivka and C.J. come from?

I gave Rivka a background similar to that of a well-known Kansas City woman, who had escaped from the death camps of Nazi Germany twice as a child and had indeed insisted on continuing to run her bakery in a deteriorating neighborhood, feeding many who couldn’t afford to buy her goods. She’s dead now, and Rivka looks and sounds nothing like her. Rivka came out of the folds of my brain, but her background owes a debt to this remarkable real woman I never met. I have always found her story inspiring. As I have found the stories of so many who live with lupus an inspiration.

To my knowledge, however, there is no one anywhere remotely like C.J. He sprang full-blown into my mind and demanded to be written. I have often wondered what would happen with a young person who’d grown up in one of these cults or cult-like families, indoctrinated in fear of civilization and government, trained to defend the family against that “dangerous” government, if that young person later learned that everything he or she had been taught was a lie. C.J., I suspect, arose from these idle wonderings.

Bringing the two of them together left me in a quandary when I first tried to write this story. Where could it go? How could it end? I didn’t want to lose either of these people I had come to value as I created them, but I didn’t see any way that this could end well. These two characters were on a collision course with tragedy. Eventually, I wrote the ending scene through tears. Yet in some ways it is a happy ending because each person is true to her and his inner self.

Do you like to read of characters who make difficult choices? Are there people you’ve known or just heard about who have inspired you with their courage or their love?

This blog post originally appeared on http://myfriendscallmekate.blogspot.com/.

Linda Rodriguez’s third novel in the Skeet Bannion series, Every Hidden Fear (St. Martin’s Press), was a Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, a selection of Las Comadres National Latino Book Club, and received a 2014 ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Award. Her second novel featuring the Cherokee campus police chief, Every Broken Trust (St. Martin’s Press), was a selection of Las Comadres National Latino Book Club, took 2^nd Place in the International Latino Book Awards, and was a finalist for the Premio Aztlan Literary Award. Her first Skeet novel, Every Last Secret, won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition and an International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention, was featured by Las Comadres National Book Club, and was a Barnes & Noble mystery pick. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

For her books of poetry, Skin Hunger (Scapegoat Press) and Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press), Rodriguez received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Thorpe Menn Award for Literary Excellence, the Midwest Voices and Visions Award, the Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, the 2011 ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships.

Rodriguez is 2015 chair of the AWP Indigenous/Aboriginal American Writer’s Caucus, immediate past president of the Borders Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, a founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, Kansas City Cherokee Community, and International Thriller Writers. Find her on Twitter as @rodriguez_linda, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LindaRodriguezWrites, and on blogs with The Stiletto Gang http: http://thestilettogang.blogspot.com/, Writers Who Kill http://writerswhokill.blogspot.com/, and her own blog http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.

REPLY TO COMMENTS (since Blogger still hates me):

Reine, I think the discovery that our parents have, in some way, deceived us when we were young and that the world is not the way they presented it to us--something almost every child learns when grown to at least some extent--can be a devastating discovery, especially if the deception was not the usual sugarcoating of reality but a huge disconnect with the truth. So in one way or another, I think many of us can identify to a certain extent with CJ's situation, extreme as it is.

Mary, it's more powerful and darker than my Skeet books. I suspect I will write more with these characters, however.

Where Do You Read?

by Sparkle Abbey

We just spotted a great article on the BookBub Blog about places to read. Check it out: How to Create the Perfect Reading Nook. 

 Aren’t those some gorgeous reading nooks?

But the truth is most of us don’t have the luxury of the “perfect” place to read. So we improvise.

We find places to read. Coffee shops, libraries, easy chairs. Some maybe slightly imperfect, but we make it work.

Some readers like the buzz of others around them and can read in the midst of a rambunctious family and a blaring television. Others prefer the quiet of some alone time with their reading.

There are those who read while they exercise and others curl up in a chair or snuggle under the covers with their book. Busy parents sometimes sneak in a few pages while waiting to pick up children at school.  Commuters take advantage of time on the train to immerse themselves in a story.

In fact there are so many unusual places to read that Goodreads did a poll: What are the most unusual positions (or places) you find yourself in while reading a book? You can see the wide variety of responses here.  Goodreads Poll Voting is over but it’s still. an interesting list.

The thing is, those of us with a love of the written will find a place to read. Check out our Pinterest board Books and Book Stuff for some other great book nooks. 

What about you? Where do you read? 

Leave a comment below to be entered in the #giveaway for a free Sparkle Abbey book and "mobile reading nook" care kit.  Would you like a second entry in the drawing? Sign up for updates on our website at www.sparkleabbey.com 

In our most recent book, The Girl with the Dachshund Tattoo, we revisit lovely Laguna Beach and some of the colorful characters readers have requested make return engagements. It features Melinda Langston and her quirky assistant, Betty Foxx, in the cutthroat world of Doxie racing. Cheating, doping, gambling. Controversy lies at every turn and it seems everyone has a secret – including Betty. 

Next up? Book 7: Downton Tabby  Tea, crumpets…and murder. 

The Sixties as Background for Murder

By Kay Kendall

T. Jefferson Parker, the bestselling author of 20 crime novels, once confided to me that his two mysteries that touched on the Vietnam War had “my readers staying away in droves.” He explained, “Needless to say, I never mentioned the war again.” Our paths intersected two years ago at a thriller writers’ conference, shortly after the publication of my debut mystery,Desolation Row. He believed that his readers avoided the subject of a war that Americans know we didn’t win. Were the sacrifices worth it? Let’s just not think about it.

T. Jefferson Parker and me

I knew the subject matter wasn’t popular, but it was a book I had to write. I had to get that one out of my system so I could work on the next subject I felt “called” to discuss, the women’s liberation movement of the late sixties and early seventies. So, the bottom line for me is that even if T. Jefferson Parker had warned me ahead of time to stay clear of the war that many have compared to a quagmire, I would not have paid his advice any heed. The story of Desolation Row had to come to light. I had to write that book so that the others that were waiting in line behind it, more or less patiently, could have their turn too.

The British statesman and philosopher Edmond Burke wrote, “Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it.” As well, how can you hope to understand how we got where we are now when you don’t understand where we came from? Events that happened in the sixties and early seventies still echo down the decades today. Just as some describe America’s battles in the Middle East as “the Vietnam War in the sand,” the upheavals of women’s liberation have not ended. If anything, the subject of women’s place in society is even timelier than ever.

Rainy Day Women launches on July 7, and I can hardly wait. In book two of her saga, this time intrepid amateur sleuth Austin Starr searches for a killer of female activists in 1969, a year after the first mystery took place. A murderer stalks the members of women’s consciousness raising groups at the University of Washington and the University of British Columbia. During the week of the Manson murders and Woodstock, new mother Austin bundles up her infant son Wyatt—just three months old—and flies with him across the continent to help her dear friend Larissa during her personal crisis. The Mounties have fingered her as their chief suspect in at least one of the murders. More trouble ensues.  

I have waited decades to write this book. The women’s movement played an enormous role in my life, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that it underlines everything I do to this very day. Getting the fervor and excitement of the time period right is important. Showing the raw sexism that was exhibited by many men without any hesitation is also vital. Clearly I believe in serving up a little history with my murder and mayhem. Just think--no VCRs, let alone DVRs, no cell phones or personal computers, no Kardashians! A long ago time indeed. 

I wonder if any of the other writers in the Stiletto Gang (those of the right age, that is) participated in women’s liberation groups. Did any of you readers? If so, I hope you will leave comments here about your experiences.  I’d love to know how they compare with mine.

 *******   

Kay Kendall set her debut novel, DESOLATION ROW--AN AUSTIN STARR MYSTERY in 1968. The sequel RAINY DAY WOMEN (June 2015) shows her amateur sleuth Austin Starr proving her best friend didn't murder women’s liberation activists in Seattle and Vancouver. A fan of historical mysteries, Kay does for the 1960s what novelist Jacqueline Winspear accomplishes for England in the 1930s–present atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit of the age. Kay is also an award-winning international PR executive who lives in Texas with her husband, three house rabbits, and spaniel Wills. Terribly allergic to the bunnies, she loves them anyway! Her book titles show she’s a Bob Dylan buff too.