writer – The Writers in Residence

IT WAS THE DEAD BODY IN THE LADIES’ ROOM…

by Rosemary Lord

She was enjoying such a lovely holiday exploring the English Devon Coast, the charming fishing village and the cream-teas that were to die for. But it was the dead body she found in the Ladies’ Room of the church hall that made her pause. It was most inconvenient…

How come my mind goes to those bizarre ideas – and gruesome murders – or at least a simple dead body… I mean, it’s not like I am a mass-murderer – or that I even killed just one person – not that I recall….

Maybe I should have continued that opening as a sweet and charming Cozy. I do write Cozies, too. I’m not always weird.

Perhaps, I should be writing some ladylike Regency, Jane Austen style romance, or a simple bodice-ripper. Or a sci-fi marvel. Or a very clever spy thriller or possibly a police procedural. Or perhaps not.

But my writer’s mind just goes there. My sister thought it was because our grandpa was a police detective. Could be… So, it’s probably a good thing grandpa wasn’t an insurance salesman. I mean, even a door-to-door salesman would have more interesting tales to inspire a writer.

But where would we be without our writing, without our amazing world of imagination to escape in to. I often think how lucky we writers are. When life gets really tough, when things around us are going haywire, (like today!) when we’ve had more than just a ‘bad-hair-day,’ when we think that Life has given up on us – we have our writing to retreat to.

Make a nice mug of coffee or tea, settle down in our comfy office chair, a blank page in front of us and away we go. Whether it’s with pencil and pad or the familiar clacking of the computer keys – we are transported to another world. Our Writer’s World.

Tough to explain to anyone who doesn’t write. But suddenly we’re galloping across the Sahara Desert or sneaking through the back streets of Charles Dickens’ London or stretching out lazily aboard a luxurious yacht. How about enjoying a gourmet meal in a super-posh Paris restaurant, swimming in the Mediterranean – or walking across Regent’s Park, hearing the elephants at London Zoo in the background. Or climbing Mount Everest – if that’s where your mind goes…

You see how endless a writer’s imagination can be? And what a wonderful diversion from the tough times in the Life-of-Hard-Knocks, a distraction from everyday humdrum, or just a brief diversion from today’s offering.

Mark Twain said, “write what you know.” Which is sometimes very useful. But I find it much more fun to write about a world that I never inhabited. Besides, I absolutely love researching. I devour all the books, articles, newspaper clipping to do with whatever I am writing about. I especially love reading the 1910 or 1918 Sears & Roebuck Catalogues. Just like the adverts in old magazines, one can tell so much about life in those times when you see what they wore, household items they used and the hobbies they had. There are endless opportunities for stories in those pages. Even looking at the world around us today. The Farmers’ Almanac in Kentucky will have advertisements that spark an idea, or a fishing magazine in Finland, a local paper in New Zealand or the Scottish Highland Times – all sources of tidbits of ideas that, like Topsy, will grow. I find the Obituaries in these far-off places fascinating – apart from providing me with a cornucopia of character names to use.

What other profession gives one the opportunity to snoop, eavesdrop and blatantly plagiarize another’s life? The snooping is most fun!

And we get to add historical figures into our mix. Where else could one throw in a vision of the evil sinner Sisyphus, condemned to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to be thwarted once he got to the top, when the weight of the boulder forced it to start rolling downhill. So, he had to start again. And again. Or how about our use of oft-quoted characters from Shakespeare? You see – we get to use it all if we want.

So, after an extremely busy, stressful day at work, I retreat into my world of writing – this Blog being way overdue. And somewhere in my brain I am now thinking of taking that opening paragraph and running with it. Murder and mayhem in Devon anyone?

Whatever odd twists and turns my writer’s brain takes, I always feel so relaxed and satisfied when I can print out a new page or three. So maybe it’s a good thing to have that weird streak? I just know how lucky we writers are to have that Writers’ Place to go to.

LET GO AND LIVE….

by Rosemary Lord

I went to the zoo. London Zoo. With my brother Ted. We took a picnic.

It was a lovely sunny day in May, shortly after my birthday, as we sat by the fountain enjoying our sandwiches. Just like we had done as small children – just yesterday!

Oh, the pleasure of revisiting such childhood memories.

Since then, the London Zoo has improved greatly, totally remodeled with expansive, imaginative new areas for the animals with the Global Wildlife Conservation programs. We saw the wonderful abandoned 1950s Indian railway station that is now The Land of Lions, complete with abandoned luggage, old handcarts and peeling, vintage Bollywood movie posters, to make these endangered Asiatic Lions feel they are still in Gujurat, India. The Sumatran tigers have their own roaming wilderness, as do the wild African rhinos. All endangered species, now thriving in this spacious conservation program. Even the butterflies have their own newly designed habitat. Each sanctuary was as fascinating as the last. It was an educational joyride.

Yes, I was in England visiting my family for the gathering of the Lord clan. After London, my siblings and I went back to the small fishing village in Greece that we’ve been returning to for several years. Not telling you where or it will get overrun with tourists! This is where we enjoyed leisurely dinners in the harbor, overlooking the small fishing boats. Souvlaki (chicken skewers) and moussaka still favorites – at around $14 a head including lots of wine and other dishes! We spoke of books and writers. We always come back to books and writers. Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club was much discussed as a well-thought-out Agatha Christie-style mystery. Also on the reading menu were Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Victoria Hislop’s latest, The Figurine, and Sinclair McKay’s intriguing book about The Secret Life of Bletchley Park. I love those World War II books. And am fascinated to learn more about the young women at Bletchley Park, who, having signed the Official Secrets Act, never spoke of their heroic work.

We wondered whether today’s kids will be as voracious readers as we were and still are…

We spent a couple of days in the delightful waterside town of Nafplio, an hour south of Athens. More delicious Greek food and friendly Greek hospitality.

Back in England, our wonderful, long-suffering brother-in-law, Peter, drove us to Broadstairs, in Kent – next to Ramsgate. What fun! It’s a lovely, old-fashioned ‘seaside’ town. It was one of Charles Dickens haunts. Bleak House stands on the top of the cliffs overlooking the expansive beaches. It’s a leisurely mix of old and new. The Edwardian and Victorian architecture, the Kent and Sussex painted wooden beach huts and wooden fishing and boat structures at the waters edge, unspoiled, next to charming new buildings. Beachside shops selling souvenirs, buckets and spades and saucy postcards. Fish and chips for lunch, of course. Perfect!

This was my much-needed escape from Hollywood and all the dramas of the Woman’s Club. To my jaded eyes, it seemed so much easier to be a writer in London now. Lots of cozy cafes in which to write the next best-seller and to swap literary tales with aspiring and established writers. They are everywhere in London. Cafes and writers, that is. And there are endless magazines to read, too. Several have selections of short stories. Where did the American writers’ magazines go?

And this time away gave me the chance to take a look at what I had been doing with my time and where I was going.

I read a piece by DJ Adams on ‘Letting Go of Expectations…’

She’s right. As writers and artists – how perfect do we want to be? And who decides what is perfect? “To fully embrace your creative artists or muse,” she writes, “You must learn to let go. Let go of who you think you are, releasing your idea of what your creative gift is and what you expect to achieve. This is so contrary to everything we’ve been taught in order to be successful. So instead of holding on to who you think you are (noir novelist, oil paint artist, songwriter) stand back and observe your abilities. Just like our personalities are ever changing, so our muse has many faces. Our creative consciousness absorbs. Let yourself go. Experiment without considering the outcome. Stephen King said ‘Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation…’ Let go – to grow!”

Sounds good to me.

“It’s not where you start – it’s where you finish…” wrote Dorothy Fields, lyricist for the Broadway musical Seesaw, “It’s not how you go, it’s how you land.”

And Ralph Waldo Emerson put it another way: “Life is a journey, not a destination.”

And so, as I flew back to my Hollywood home, I thought a lot about those words.

I think many of us are still working with the adjustments forced on us by the Covid nightmare. And all of those challenges that crept up on us. Life is different now. Reading and writing habits have changed, too.

Now, I decided – I wanna be FREE! I wanna be ME! I have so many untold books and stories in me, I feel I’m bursting at the seams. I gotta lotta writing to do!!

So, I’m ready for new horizons. I’m ready to let go. Not sure where or when. Not even sure who I am anymore. Just one big leap of faith into an amazing creative future.

Who do you think you are today? What do you expect of yourself? Or do you like where you are now? Eh?

LAVENDER and BURNT TOAST

By ROSEMARY LORD

“Lavender and burnt toast.” A book title? A recipe? Sounds intriguing.

I have racked my brain to figure what this was about. I had written this in a notebook of story ideas. But then I have a plethora of such notes, squiggles, post-its, unfinished paragraphs in multiple notebooks and single pages – of ideas that swirl around my head – spilling as hurried notes in these many notebooks. But, over the years, I have become a lot more organized. I have actual files – with labels!

It took me back to Professor Randy Pausch’s gem of a book, The Last Lecture, which he undertook during the last months of his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis. It was about overcoming obstacles and seizing every moment. “Because,” he said, “time is all you have – and you may find one day that you have less than you think.”

“Time must be explicitly managed, like money,” he observed. And “Ask yourself, are you spending your time on the right things?” Most useful was, “You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.”

But the thing I remember most was his thoughts on being really, super organized. Randy’s wife was against having everything filed and alphabetized. She said it sounded way too compulsive. Randy responded, “Filing in alphabetical order is better than running around saying, “I know it was blue and I was eating something when I had it.” Sounds familiar. How often have I been heard to mutter, “…It was blue and I was eating something……” as I rummage through my boxes of writing files for some specific pages of an unfinished manuscript.

“It’s not where you start – it’s where you finish…” wrote Dorothy Fields, lyricist for the 1973 Tony Award winning Broadway musical Seesaw, which was based on the William Gibson play, Two for the Seesaw. “…It’s not how you go, it’s how you land.”

I’m not so sure about that…I’ve always favored the maxim that it’s the journey that counts. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Life is a journey, not a destination.”

Do you ever look back at the journeys you have been on – or had thrust upon you? Journeys are adventures. Because it’s on those journeys that we discover exciting detours and encounter fascinating people.

Even if it’s literally a train, plane, bus or car journey we’re taking. Just think of people you met along the way, places you saw. This is, after all, where many of us writers find our inspiration. From the people and happenstances along the way.

We can see how things have never got back to the way they were, since the Covid lockdowns. So much changed. We’re in a different reality now. We were shut-ins. As writers, we had more time to ourselves to write during the shutdowns. But the regular writer gatherings and frequent workshops and writers’ conferences have been very slow to return. And they were such fun, where we caught up with fellow writers from across the world, met new writers, editors, experts and publishers, heard new ideas, discovered new talent. I’ve missed them. Zoom meetings are not the same.

Sometimes one feels like Sisyphus, earnestly toiling away to survive and thrive in this new world, dealing with the puddles that life frequently presents for us to jump over.

In Greek Mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a mountain. Once he got to the top, the weight of the boulder forced it to start rolling down to the bottom, wherein he had to start again. According to Albert Camus, the Greek gods felt that there is no more dreadful punishment than this futile and hopeless labor for Sisyphus. Hmmm. Sometimes life feels like that. Oh well. We soldier on, dealing with the adventures and challenges of our regular lives and balancing our writer’s goals and dreams.

Then, just when we least expect it, something magical happens. We discover a new author whose words inspire us to try something new, encourage us to take a leap of faith into the unknown. We hear a new piece of music or see a new painting that re-awakens that creative spark. We make a new friend or meet someone who has that missing piece of life’s jigsaw we have been trying to complete. We never know where or when that serendipity appears.

And with the freezing winter and endless rain we have all been living through, hopefully now in the rear-view mirror, Spring is just around the corner. So it really is the time to start thinking of planting new seeds. New plants. New crops. In our gardens, window-boxes and in our lives. Maybe something different this year. Read something different. Write something different. But most of all – time to make fresh plans for the year ahead, seek new ventures, add new goals to our To Do lists.

Whilst I try to remember what Lavender and burnt toast was all about….

Short Stories: The Reader

by Maggie King

A while back, I had a conversation with a well-read young couple. Like me, they enjoyed mysteries, the classics, and literary fiction. When they asked what I was working on, I said I was finishing my third novel and planned to focus on short stories for a while.

“Really?” The man looked doubtful. “I know that writers like writing short stories, but do readers like reading them?”

“I’m guessing you don’t,” I said. “What is it you don’t like about them?”

“They’re too, well, short.”

The woman added, “Just when I’m getting into the characters, the story ends.”

Are their comments typical ones? I expect so.

When I asked my book group members if they read short stories, I got blank looks. One of them, a retired English teacher no less, said, “Well … we read them in school.”

My first short story was published a year before my first novel. Two people I know told me plainly that they would wait for my novel, as they had no interest in reading a short story.

I selected the following comments from reviews of anthologies published by the Sisters in Crime Central Virginia chapter:

“Short stories cannot deliver a good mystery to me. There were a few short ones that were good, but on the whole, not a great book.”

“I am not a huge short story person usually because I don’t feel like I get enough information. I only read this book because of a book club I belong to.”

“My biggest problem is that they don’t end with a clean-cut solution. You pretty much get a ‘feel’ for what will happen and then have to use your imagination to finish the ending.”

And some good reviews:

“Very much enjoyed! I’m a busy mom with not much time for fiction, so I loved that it was a collection of short stories. …. It was truly refreshing to be able to read a good short story and then move onto the next when I was ready! Interesting stories and well written.”

“My first ever mystery story collection. A friend recommended it and I really enjoyed it! Glad I branched out to try something new.”

I asked award-winning short story writer Art Taylor to comment on the reviewer who wished that short stories ended with clean-cut solutions. This is his response:

“Short stories don’t always tie everything up nicely at the end. They often end on an ambiguous note and the reader can draw her/his own conclusion. Sometimes readers complain, as they expect the endings that novels have.

“I do try to strike some balance myself—key questions answered (no information left out) but emotional issues still up in the air a bit, if that makes sense. Maybe what happened is explained, but the fallout is still to come, and the reader can imagine some of that rolling on into the blankness of the page beyond the final word.”

Despite the criticisms, many short stories are being published in anthologies, collections, magazines (the magazines are mostly digital now). For some time, I’ve been hearing that the availability of short stories in digital format has made them attractive to readers. But based on the above in-person conversations and online comments, writers need to do more than digitize their stories–they need to make them appealing. How can we do that? How can we satisfy the reader who wants “more?”

Such a reader might like a story collection. Anthologies present stories by different authors, but the ones in collections are penned by one author.

In Shooting Hollywood: The Diana Poole Stories by Melodie Johnson Howe the mysteries are not only beautifully written, but Diana Poole, actress/amateur sleuth, appears in each one. So if you take a liking to Diana, you’ll find her in the next story. And the next. Perfect for the reader who wants continuity and character growth. Other authors feature different characters and settings in each story of their collections.

Authors with published collections include Ruth Rendell, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, and our own Gayle Bartos-Pool with her outstanding Only in Hollywood. There are many more. Suggestions for non-mystery collections: Maile Meloy’s Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge.

An idea from M. Louisa Locke, who guest-posted for Writers in Residence in 2020: she wanted to keep readers interested while they waited for her novels, so she started publishing short stories based on her Victorian San Francisco Mystery series.

In addition to short stories serving as a marketing tool, they allowed her to develop the minor characters in the series.

Read M. Louisa Locke’s post.

As for satisfying readers who want the clean-cut solutions they find in novels–that’s a tough one. Writers certainly want to please readers, but short stories are not just short novels. In my own stories, the reader will usually know who committed the crime, but vigilante—not traditional—justice is often served. I can only think of one story where I had the villain led away in handcuffs. However, I agree that some authors end their stories on overly vague, even abrupt, notes.

Likely there will always be readers who prefer novels over short stories—and that’s okay. Perhaps the best thing we can do is keep writing, stay true to ourselves, keep improving our craft, and the readers will come.

A parting idea: writers and publishers could work together to come up with effective ways to promote their short stories, collections, and anthologies.

These are my thoughts. Yours?

Coming in September: Short Stories: The Writer.

Images courtesy of book.store.bg, abebooks.com, ElizabethStrout.com