Dark and Stormy Beginnings

by Eric

In her latest blog, Questioning a Master? mystery author Triss Stein reminds us that Elmore Leonard famously wrote a list of writing instructions that began with “Never open a book with weather.” Triss goes on to say "that first rule has always bothered me. Here’s why: where I grew up , weather can be a major player in that game called life we are playing and writing about."

As it happens I lived for almost twenty years in upstate New York myself and when you have to deal with 130 inches of snow in the winter it makes Leonard's rule seem a bit foolish.

A few years ago I wrote an essay for the Orphan Scrivener(the newsletter Mary and I have been putting out since 2000) in which I also disagreed with the master. I'm reprinting it without change. As it was in 2008, it has been in the nineties here this week, and Mary and I have certainly not been able to ignore it.

***

For the past week Mary and I have tried to get a little writing done while we sweltered in 90 degree temperatures and watched bright red thunderstorms brush past us on the National Weather Service radar. Aside from a handful of half-inch bits of ice which quickly turned to droplets on the sun porch roof, the storms let us alone. The power stayed on and we suffered only from heat and distraction, which was bad enough.

I was reminded of Elmore Leonard's silly first rule of his Ten Rules of Writing -- "Never open a book with weather."

What? Never open a book by mentioning the element we're all swimming in? Weather affects how we feel physically and can color our outlook too. Of course, reading what I write, someone might suppose I was a frustrated meteorologist. There's a weather report every other page of our books and if it's not already teeming, rain is in the forecast. My Constantinople tends to be a dark and stormy place.

No doubt what I write reflects my personal preoccupation with the state of the atmosphere. I tend to be very aware of the weather. It affects my moods and changes my perceptions. The world of a cold winter morning is a far different place than that of a humid summer afternoon, and certainly important enough to mention at the start of a book.

Or is that just me? What about other writers? I opened up some books close to hand at random. Here are some first lines I came across in a few minutes:

"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

"To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth." ---John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting." -- Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

Well, Okay, so what do all those old time writers know? How about someone newer:

"A big noisy wind out of the northeast, full of a February chill, herded the tourists off the afternoon beach, driving them to cover, complaining bitterly." -- John D. MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox

Glancing through Travis McGee books it struck me that every other one began with a reference to the weather. How about something totally different, though -- a fantasy written recently:

"Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights..."-- Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

See, someone else thinks thunderstorms are important.

To be fair, as soon as Leonard stated his rule he admitted he was blowing hot air. "Never open a book with weather," he said. "If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want."

Don't start with the weather unless it has to do with the story or you can write brilliantly enough to get away with it. That's probably good advice, generally, but it applies to anything. Not just to weather. And besides, I still think most of the writers I quoted broke Leonard's rule because most of those first lines strike me as being mainly for the sake of atmosphere.

My rules of writing are more concise than Elmore Leonard's:

Rule 1 -- There are no rules.

Oh, and let's not forget that Mike Hammer makes his first appearance coming through a doorway and shaking rain off his hat.

I could use some rain on my hat right now. The office is stuffy. Hot weather makes me curt and cranky. Not that I ought to write about it.

Hunting for Plot Ideas in Odd Places

At Anastasia Pollack's Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers Mary talks about where some odd places she's found plot ideas. Read The Eyes Have It.

Naming Your Characters

At PJ Nunn's bookbrowsing, Mary offers some tips and Interet resources for Naming Your Characters.

bookreporter interview

At bookreporter -- Author Talk Mary explains how we connected with the Press, the amount of research that goes into recreating the world of Byzantium in the sixth century, and the inner workings of our collaboration process.

Pets and Writing

Mary talks about pets and writing at Heather Weidner's Pens, Paws, and Claws.

The Blog Tour Continues

There's an interview with Eric Reed, our not so secret pseudonym, at Killer Crafts and Crafty Killers.

Mary's Blog Tour

We know we've neglected our blog recently. Ruined Stones, the second Grace Baxter mystery set in the UK during World War Two, was published July 4 and Mary has been "away" on a bit of a blog tour. Here are a few places you can read her essays:

Mary visits Lelia Taylor's Buried Under books to write about a vacation walk involving a Bagpiper on the Beach.

At PJ Nunn's bookbrowsing, Mary writes about Character Paper Doll for Promotional Use.

At Marilyn's Musings, Mary describes the "Newcastle flat" type of housing she grew up in and which our protagonist Grace Baxter occupies in our new World War Two mystery Ruined Stones.

Retired and Retiring

Mary and I decided to change the title of our blog because we're retiring. We've both given up all of our freelance writing and editing except for the fiction. I guess if you only work at what seems like play, you're retired.

Then again we've always been retiring in the sense of being shy and diffident, at least when it comes to making a public spectacle of ourselves in order to sell books. Our retiring natures extend to Internet social media, like Facebook. Mary shies away from the invasion of privacy involved. I cringe at how you need to accumulate, "friends" or followers. To me. social networking sites feel too much like parties and the minute I walk into a party I'm immediately flung to the wall by the centrifugal force of the social whirl.

But both of us would love to receive -- and respond to -- comments here. Talking to people one at a time is different than addressing crowds. Unfortunately, crowded social networks are the preferred method of communication these days.

We hope to post to this blog more frequently than in the past. Mary has a strong interest in Golden Age detective novels and will continue with her reviews, but we have other interests as well and are also at an age where we can be forgiven -- hopefully -- for pausing to look back along the road we've traveled. And then there's our writing. We've learned quite a bit over the past decades and writing during retirement, which so many of us aim for, poses its own challenges.

We won't pretend to be writing teachers, however. Neither of us has ever taken a writing course, or attended a workshop. We both agree writing can't be taught. It's something you learn to do on your own. We all develop our own methods and write in our own styles. There are no tricks or magic formulas.

Too many years ago, while I was living in New York City, I was invited to a party by one of my former college professors. An accomplished painter, she was showing off her newest -- and very pricey -- canvases to potential buyers. As an impoverished student from the sticks I had less than nothing in common with the well heeled big city art crowd in attendance. Her enormous expressionist paintings wouldn't have fit on the wall of my apartment. I couldn't have afforded the paint to cover the canvases let alone buy the artwork. Luckily, my professor had invited another student from the small Pennsylvania college were she taught, a friend of mine. We retreated to a shadowy, far corner of the loft and talked and joked in the relative quiet as we observed the social melee from afar.

Mary and I are hoping this blog might serve a similar purpose as our own quiet little corner of the Internet.

How Accurate Must a Historical Mystery Be?

by Eric

Most readers and writers would probably agree that the history in a historical mystery should be accurate. If your mystery plot depends, say, upon Oliver Cromwell, Jack the Ripper and Gertrude Stein being contemporaries (heaven forbid!) then you're writing alternative history. Unfortunately the question of accuracy is rarely so simple. The historical record, not to mention common sense, would indicate that Queen Victoria didn't hunt Jack down in her spare time, let alone by posing as a member of a traveling circus, but then again maybe the historians missed that. The trick to writing imaginative historical mysteries is keeping just under the radar of the historians.

There is definitely some flying room there. A little research, especially reading the footnotes, quickly reveals that historians sometimes don't know quite as much as it appears. What looks like a detailed drawing often turns out, on examination, to be a few scattered dots of facts connected into a coherent pattern by the historian based on his general expertise and personal theories. Another historian might connect those same dots into an altogether different picture. In Two for Joy we mention the pagan philosophers who fled to foreign shores when Justinian shut down Plato's Academy. The story is often alluded to, but is actually mentioned only briefly in a handful of sources.

But sources also can be untrustworthy. Consider Procopius who, while in Justinian's service, wrote panegyrics to the emperor but in his posthumously discovered Secret History excoriated him as a rapacious demon without a face. As a writer, when faced with such inconsistency, I prefer to choose whatever suits my purpose! That might sound like cheating but, I suspect, historians do much the same thing in a somewhat more sophisticated way. (I don't know if a Byzantine mosaic depicting a demon, like the one above, would give a writer of historicals license to include demons!)

It must also be remembered that surviving records can be spotty. (Not surprising after 1500 years -- I have a hard enough time keeping track of the mailing list for our newsletter for two months). Much of what we know well, we know by chance and what survives is not always what we would expect. During the life of Justinian, Cassiodorus wrote a massive Gothic History. Strangely, those twelve volumes have vanished but a short abridgment, The Getica, by Jordanes, probably made during Cassiodorus' lifetime, survives.

I'm not arguing that historical mystery writers have a license to be inaccurate but rather that they should take advantage of the many available opportunities to be creative. To put the matter into legal terms, the fiction writer's burden of proof is the opposite of the historian's. Historians must prove what they say is true while historical writers are allowed to say just about anything that can't be proved false.

Writing Together

by Eric

It's been a while since Murder in Megara came out so Mary and I have started plotting the next of our John the Lord Chamberlain mysteries. Well, actually we've been plotting to write another book for months but we only now are trying to come up with a plot. Daydreaming about novels is so much easier than getting down to work.

People often ask how two writers can work together on the same project? The first step, as Mary likes to say, is to lock up all the kitchen knives.

Next we settle on a basic idea. In the case of Murder in Megara the idea was to force John to solve a mystery without recourse to his powers as a high official and in a place less familiar than Constantinople. This flowed naturally from the previous Ten For Dying in which he had been sent into exile at an estate near his boyhood home in Greece. In the past we've been inspired by history. Let's do a book taking place during the Justinianic Plague or the Nika Riots! We wrote a book to send John to Egypt and another to tell how he rose from being a slave to advising the emperor. Ideas for interesting mystery puzzles might also form the germ of a book. You'd need to ask Mary how these occur to her. She sees potential murder mysteries in everything. I'll be lying in bed, eyes closed, about to sleep and from the darkness a voice will suddenly say -- "Paperclips dipped in curare!"

I don't think you can chase ideas and catch one. They're like cats. They come to you if and when they want to. One often cited source that's useless to us is the newspaper. Our plots are never torn from the screaming headlines. (Or is that torn screaming from the headlines? ) When did you last see a headline: "Red and Green Factions Riot Outside Hippodrome"?

Which of us usually comes up with the intitial idea? I have no idea! But once it's there, purring and rubbing against our legs, we extrapolate. (My feline analogy will end here because if you try to extrapolate a cat you'd better have a first aid kit handy.)

It goes without saying (and isn't it strange how things that go without saying usually do not go unsaid?) that we sometimes ask ourselves what happens first and if that happens then what? But we also come up with things we would like to see happen during the book, places that would make good backdrops for scenes, characters to bring the book to life. For Murder in Megara we came up with a City Defender who serves Megara as both law enforcer and judge, a corrupt estate overseer, a shady pig farmer, a servant’s unwelcome suitor, a wealthy merchant who spends part of his time as a cave-dwelling hermit, and the criminals and cutthroats populating such a seedy port as Megara. Not to mention two childhood friends whose lives have taken very different paths, and the stepfather John hated.

Okay, I just quoted the publisher's description of the book. But the reason for all those people in the description is that characters are the most important part of most novels. And each character comes with his or her own possibilities, motivations and inclinations, which help form the plot. A story is in lage part the collisions and entanglements of the characters' desires.

Mary and I tend to take notes on our thoughts and trade them back and forth via email. I wonder how long of a detour those emails take to traverse the two feet between our desks? After a time we amalgamate the notes and start talking. We manage to construct a rough plot outline before entering into hand to hand combat (remember the knives are safely locked away.) This outline is divided into scenes -- no details to speak of, mainly just who does what and when and where. Enough to get started, but not so much as to take the fun out of "discovering" the story as we subsequently write it. We might know that John is going to visit a wealthy merchant in town and discover an important clue, but we don't necessarily know exactly what turns their conversation will take. That's the fun of the writing.

So far as individual methods go, Mary thinks and thinks and then whips through a scene before going back to rewrite. I tend to scribble notes and do my rewriting slowly as I go along a method made possible by word processors. When I typed I spent most of my time half covered in Wite-Out. Once we finish the scenes we've chosen to work on we turn them over to our co-writer for "editing" which can be light or heavy. We trade edited versions back and forth until we both like them.

The further we progress in the outline the more the projected story tends to change. We add, and subtract, scenes and characters, and we might even find out we've initially tabbed the wrong person for the murder! Yes, it has happened and no, I'm not going to reveal who did or didn't do it!

Our discussions are almost always about ideas, settings, characters, plot twists, clues. Those are what most readers, including myself, read for, not for individual words or niceties of grammar. I don't much care if a writer hangs an occasional participle so long as I give a hang about the characters. Which is not to say we don't pay any attention to using good grammar and effective words, but that is just the polish. Flaubert was perfectly entitled to his eternal quest for "le mot juste" but if you ask me he's caused aspiring writers a lot of grief! Luckily Mary and I both agree on not being carried carried away with style or we'd never get anything done.

Having said all that I'm not sure I've said much, or that there is much useful to be said about writing methods. Another thing Mary and I agree on is that writing can't be taught. Neither of us has ever taken a writing class or attended a workshop. (I admit to reading two books about writing in my life: Writing Pulp Fiction by Dean R. Koontz and Stephen King's On Writing.) The creative process is a mystery. Everyone will have a unique way of writing, developed only by writing, rather than thinking about it.

Now I will check my email to see if Mary has sent me any thoughts about the notes I just sent her on the new book.

The Problem with Self Promotion

The Guardian Stones is an exciting departure for us. Set in the UK during WWII, a much different period than our Byzantine mysteries, it is also different in tone, darker perhaps, owing as much to the modern thriller as the Golden Age Detectives.

Naturally we want people to read the novel and so, already we have been dutifully attempting to bring it to people's attention. Unfortunately, although promotion is necessary, neither Mary nor I are very comfortable with it. If only Eric Reed were a real person who loved being a salesman.

In his memoir Self Consciousness John Updike described well the plight of diffident writers:

"...the price that we pay, we Americans who shyly wish to live by our eyes and wits, at our desks, away from the frightening tussle of human strength and appetite and intimidation and persuasiveness, is marginality: we live chancily, on society's crumbs in a sense, as an exchange for our exemption from the broad brawl of, to give it a name, salesmanship."

Ain't it the truth!

For most of us, although not, perhaps, for John Updike.

You're not exactly marginalized when you're on the cover of Time magazine, twice. But Updike's fame arrived in the early sixties and I would prefer to believe that back then success sought authors out because of their writing, that Updike had only sell stories and novels, and not himself. Or not to the extent that he would have had to sell himself were he beginning his career today.

How will literature change when an author cannot attain publication without without becoming a salesman? Surely our personalities are reflected in our books. A hard driving, competitive self promoter (the sort of person help wanted ads seek) perfectly at home in Updikes's "frightening tussle of human strength and appetite" is going to write a different kind of book than a person who is retiring and meditative.

Not that retiring and meditative writers have ever fared very well against the literary self-promoters but at least they were not entirely cut off from publication, which might soon be the case.

From a business point of view it isn't surprising. The financial returns from even a bestselling author like Updike amount to crumbs compared to the obscene mountains of money available from the more profitable businesses owned by the corporate conglomerates who control big publishing. Those who read books regularly have become a shrinking minority on the margins of society. Certainly not a market important enough to cultivate.

Nevertheless, some lesser-promoters will doubtless continue to write because for us there is almost no price too high for an exemption from salesmanship. Some of us still aspire to be Arthur Miller rather than Willy Loman.

Be Careful What You Wish For

by Eric

Poisoned Pen Press published our first mystery novel, One for Sorrow, in December 1999. When The Guardian Stones appears in January, a few months after our eleventh Byzantine mystery, Murder in Megara, the press will have released twelve of our books in a little more than fifteen years. We've been fortunate that a respected indie publisher has stuck with us for so long.

When Mary and I were sending our fifty page sample around, back in the days when publishers would consider unagented books, an editor at a big New York publisher evinced keen interest. Unfortunately we had made the rookie mistake of submitting a partial before we completed the book. A few months later, when we sent the entire MS, we were surprised and disappointed to receive a curt rejection.

Oddly, the pages the editor enthused over were by far the weakest part of the book. Eventually we rewrote the initial chapter about five times to make it acceptable and years later, when we refreshed the novel for the e-edition we trashed the original beginning entirely. Why had the editor's mind changed? The short, dismissive rejection gave no clue so we'll never know.

So what if our work had been published initially by one of the the big publishers?

It might seem obvious that it would have boosted our writing career immensely, but in hindsight I doubt it would have been a good thing. Probably we would have had two or three Byzantine mysteries published before getting the boot for failure to hit the bestseller lists immediately. That is the fate of most first time, unknown authors. We heard personally from one author whose "three book deal" was cancelled before the second book hit the shelves. Big publishers have no patience. Being part of corporate conglomerates they are about the bottom line rather than books.

Poisoned Pen Press, on the other hand, has given us the chance to continue writing novels and see them published..

Not to say I still don't wish we could, even just for a single book, make "The Show" as baseball players call the major leagues. But sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for.

One for Sorrow (Revised edition)

Break Out the Bubbly!

by Eric

The Yankees clinched a playoff spot over the weekend, a few days before the official publication date for Murder in Megara so, as a baseball fan and writer, it has been a good week for me. When I read about the Yankees' clubhouse champagne celebration I recalled the last time I had champagne, on the first of January, outside in the cold and snow, at Mendon Ponds Park in Rochester, New York. The C.A.T.S. running club put on a New Years Day 10K race. Beyond the finish line, in the icy parking lot, folding tables held boxes of bagels and plastic cups of bubbly.

The park terrain was formed by ancient ice sheets so we ran up and down a confusion of hills and hollows, puffing steam, our procession gradually lengthening as fast runners pulled away from those of us laboring behind. There is one particularly steep incline curving around the hill into which ancient ice gouged out a kettle pond called The Devil's Bathtub. I can still see clearly that challenge rearing up in my path. Heavily bundled, early morning dog walkers gave us perplexed stares as we passed, warmed only by light sweats and our own efforts.

I loved running. There's a camaraderie in getting together to do something pointless and stupid simply because you can. It's exhilarating. In retrospect. At the time, at the five mile mark, where the route turned out of the park onto a slushy highway exposed to a raw north wind, I wondered what the hell I'd been thinking to sign up for this.

That was a long time ago. Longer than it seems because after my back decided I could no longer run I kept making sporadic attempts and held out hope. Now it has become obvious that running is a chapter that's finished. It was one of my favorite chapters.

Running is simple. It rewards your efforts. If you put in the miles you improve. Unlike the arts where efforts can go forever unrecognized. Nor is there the subjective quibbling artistic works are subject to. At the end of the race the clock gives each competitor the objective, inarguable truth. There's no room for critics. Blowhards can't change reality or promote themselves into prominence.

These days my endeavors are limited to activities which do not require healthy of spinal discs. Things like writing. Today Murder in Megara is out. It is always exhilarating when a new novel appears. The writing itself can be grueling. With each bend in the plot a writer is confronted by new challenges. And towards the end, when we're already exhausted, rewriting feels like running an endless straight-away into a bitter north wind. Now that the finish line has been crossed maybe we should break out the bubbly.

Our Handmade Website

by Eric

It's axiomatic that writers must have websites. When Mary and I saw our first novel, One for Sorrow published in 1999 we already possessed a website, left over from the mid-nineties when it was axiomatic that everyone on the Internet must have what was then called a homepage. I simply added a book cover and some reviews to turn our homepage into the required authors' page. With a few fresh coats of html paint it remains our rambling home on the web today. Visitors intrepid enough to explore dusty corridors and open creaking doors can find pages untouched in more than twenty years.

In 1995 html seemed like magic. By keyboarding simple bits of gobbledegook even a middle-aged Liberal Arts major like me could arrange images and words on a page floating out there in cyberspace for all the world to see. Who would have guessed how useful those "<" and ">" keys would turn out to be?

Do-it-yourself simplicity doesn't last. Soon frames came along and javascript. Today .css (cascading style sheets for those at my level of sophistication) look more like programming language than the html I learned to write. No doubt, a site designed by an expert looks a lot slicker and probably works a little better than one handcoded in nineties html by an amateur.

I say expertly produced sites work only a little better because I am a believer in content and it is the words and images that contain the content, not the design. But not everyone thinks like me, and I suspect that poor or old fashioned or amateurish design discourages many people from looking at content.

All this occurred to me recently when I decided our website should be spruced up prior to the release of Murder in Megara In October and The Guardian Stones in January. For several days I studied .css and decided that unless I were willing to take a course in it (which I'm not) my version of a .css site would be no improvement on the crude html we already have. So I tidied up a bit, as much as it is possible to tidy up html written in 1995 by someone who barely knew what he was doing.

But why not hire a professional? How many authors produce and maintain their own web pages? Not many, as far as I can tell.

We're not trying to pinch pennies. It's just that twenty years ago I loved the idea that anyone could put up their own web pages, without assistance, and I still feel that way. And why interpose a professional web master between ourselves and readers? Heck, we've kept plenty of personal essays on the site, most written long before we had mystery novels published. Do they give the site an amateur feel? I doubt they have any value from a marketing point of view.

Maybe our site is just my small revolt against the obsession with slick presentation and the rush to appear more professional than thou. Yes, I prefer our books -- which people pay for -- to be produced in a professional manner. But can't we meet readers on the Internet more informally?

Mary and I hope our website might be of more interest to some readers than the typical author's site. If nothing else it's a museum quality example of Grandma Moses style html circa 1995, still crammed with old stuff, an electronic attic. Who doesn't like to rummage through an attic?

Our Website

Waiting for that First Review

by Eric

Did you hear the huge sigh of relief coming from Casa Maywrite? It blew squirrels out of the pine trees at the end of the yard. The first review of Murder in Megara is just in from Kirkus Reviews and it's excellent.

"...combines historical detail with a cerebral mystery." -- Kirkus Reviews, July 15.

Thank Mithras for that, as our detrective, John, might say.

No matter how many books they've had published, regardless of good reviews in the past, the moment advance reading copies go out for review, authors are seized by the chilling certainty that the new book will not be liked by anyone. No, not even one reader. Not even one reviewer. Not a single person on the face of the planet. Well, at least that's the way this co-author feels. I can't speak for Mary.

After months of writing and revision, waiting for a reaction is agonizing. Like performing on stage and not knowing whether the audience will applaud or boo until weeks later.

I miss the days when I could show my handwritten literary efforts -- with full color crayola illustrations in a first edition printing of one -- to my parents without fear of a negative response.

True, my dad sometimes told me what he told his school students: "Interesting...." Meaning he didn't like it but didn't want to say so.

Mary and I are particuarly pleased to get a good review from Kirkus since when they don't like a book they usually have a lot different way of expressing it than "interesting."

So finally we can relax.

But wait! What if the Kirkus reviewer was the only person in the whole world who likes Murder in Megara? Which, now that I think of it, is almost surely the case!

Now we're on pins and needles anxiously awaiting the second review. Or I am. Mary, maybe not. She must be on pins though, surely, even if not needles too. But don't take my word for it.

Read the whole Kirkus review