Turks and Caicos

I had a wonderful week in the Turks and Caicos Islands.  Fabulous place.  As a picture is worth a thousand words, here's an account of my vacation (the beautiful young woman is my youngest daughter, Alexandra).

Bouchercon

Some pictures from Bouchercon

Me and Anthony Biduka looking very worried (I don't know why)

Never leave home without an appropriate hat

The great Kraft Dinner Handover with Zoe Sharp

Aunt Agatha's Mystery Bookstore

On Wednesday I was fortunate enough to be a guest author at the 20th anniversary celebrations for Aunt Agatha's mystery bookstore in Ann Arbor Michigan. From there my travel companion, Rick Blechta, went on to Bouchercon in Cleveland.  Because I left my camera at home, I am dependent on others for photos.  I'll post a few as they trickle in.

Here I am talking to a reader while Julia Spencer-Fleming, Steve Hamilton, and Rhys Bowen mug for the camera. Unfortunately Louise Penny who is seated on my other side is cut off.

  
I will be in Arizona and California touring with Donis Casey from October 25th to Nov 7th.  To see dates and locations, please click on the link at the above left.

MORE THAN SORROW

More than Sorrow is getting some great reviews, I'm happy and relieved to say.  And as usual, the best ones are by what we might call 'amateurs'.  Perhaps that's because amateurs writing on their own blogs in their own time have more room to discuss a book in depth than reviewers paid by magazines or newspapers, who are limited in space as well as probably told what to review.

Here are links to two of my favourites.  I really am pleased that both of these women caught the essence of what I was trying to achieve in this book.

Lesa Holstine is a librarian in Glendale Arizona. Hugely popular in the mystery community she regularly hosts authors at her library in a series she calls Authors@theTeague.  I'm delighted that Donis Casey and I have been invited to visit the Teague on Thursday October 24th. 2:00 pm.

As much as I love Vicki Delany's Constable Molly Smith books, she's outdone herself with her standalone, More Than Sorrow. She carefully weaves together two storylines, one contemporary and one historical, in a thoughtful, unforgettable story of the damage and tragedy of war. But, Delany makes this a personal story. This isn't the trauma fighting men suffer. This is a suspense novel featuring women as victims and heroes.

To read the full review and find out what other mysteries Lesa is reading: http://www.lesasbookcritiques.blogspot.ca/2012/09/more-than-sorrow-by-vicki-delany.html

Judith Starkson is a reviewer new to me, who I'll be checking in with regularly from now on.  She says:
Plenty of action and suspense, but to me the sustaining force of the book lies in the way we are invited to think about women and the interplay between courageous acts of independence, garden-variety daily repression across centuries and cultures, and villainous acts of suppression. Being a woman can be tough. Nice to meet some female characters who face the job with courage even in the midst of tragedy.

Judith's full review on her web page: http://www.judithstarkston.com/reviews/review-of-more-than-sorrow-by-vicki-delany/

Thanks, women. 

How True is True - A guest blog for 25 Years in the Rearview Mirror

I'd like to welcome Carole Shmurak, one of my fellow authors from the brand new e-book 25 Years in the Rearview Mirror, 52 Authors Look Back.  Carole is stopping by as part of the 25 Years in the Rearview Mirror Blog Tour. If you enjoy magazine columns and Chicken Soup for the Soul books, then we're sure you'll enjoy our collection of essays, designed to warm your heart, raise your spirits and compel you to examine your own life. Get a full listing of authors, essay titles and retailers here: http://stacyjuba.com/blog/25-years-in-the-rearview-mirror-52-authors-look-back/

Follow the 25 Years in the Rearview Mirror Blog and Radio Tour schedule here and enter for some neat My Memories Suite digital scrapbooking software: http://stacyjuba.com/blog/25-years-in-the-rearview-mirror-blog-tour/

And don't miss the chance to join the 25 Years in the Rearview  Mirror Yahoo Group, a fun and inspirational group that discusses the past and will help you to stay on track for the future. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/25YearsRearviewMirror/

Now, Welcome Carole. 

When I see a movie that says “based on a true story,” I always wonder: what exactly does that mean? How true is it?  

So, full disclosure here: I often base my books on events that really happened, but I transfer them to times and places that are purely fictional. And the people who inhabit my books are often modeled on real people — including myself. Authors have always done this; Dorothy L. Sayers, for example, based Harriet Vane largely on herself and used an unhappy love affair of her own as the basis for Strong Poison. My detective, Susan Lombardi, shares my work history: she’s a former high school science teacher who is now a professor of education at a state university in Connecticut, but as Sue Grafton once said of her detective Kinsey Millhone, she’s “smarter, younger and thinner” than I am.

When I started to write Deadmistress, I wanted to capture the fishbowl setting of a New England boarding school, similar to the one at which I’d taught for fifteen years. So, with tongue firmly in cheek, I created Wintonbury Academy for Girls, familiarly called WAG, and I populated it with characters based on my former colleagues and students. Such a closed community obviously called for a traditional Christie-esque mystery, with carefully planted clues and red herrings, as well as a map and cast of characters. So for Deadmistress, the plot was purely imaginary, but the characters and setting were essentially real.

The plot for Death by Committee, on the other hand, was “ripped from the headlines.”  An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education bore the headline, “Worst tenure case ever,” and reported a tenure battle at a Midwestern university that had involved death threats, a hunger strike, and political infighting of the worst sort. All I had to do was transplant the tenure case to Susan’s department, and imagine how my university colleagues would react to such events. And of course, I had to have one of the death threats get carried out.

Death at Hilliard High was based on two true stories: one that I had read in a local newspaper about an African-American teacher harassed by her white students at a suburban high school and one that was told to me at my high school reunion about one of our former teachers who, rumor had it, murdered his wife. I combined the two stories and again transplanted them to a Connecticut setting, an affluent suburban high school at which Susan consults.  This also gave me the opportunity to bring back one of my favorite characters from Deadmistress, Shauna Thompson, once a student at WAG, now a Yale graduate who is the only black teacher at the high school. Shauna too was based on a student I had known.

My latest book, Most Likely to Murder, came directly out of my own high school reunion. Having edited the reunion booklet, I had the life stories of nearly 200 people in my head, and I knew that some of them would make wonderful fictional characters. But since Susan Lombardi is quite a bit younger than I am, I had to make my characters younger than my classmates and I. That meant changing the names to those that were trendy among babies in 1962 (Carols and Barbaras became Sharons and Lisas), and updating the music that they danced to at the reunion to the late 1970s (the Everly Brothers morphed into the BeeGees). The real joy of Most Likely to Murder was creating Susan’s high school. Since I’d mentioned in an earlier book that Susan had grown up in New Jersey, I decided to name the school after a famous New Jerseyite. To my delight, I found that the jazz musician, Count Basie, had grown up in New Jersey, so I named the high school after him. That enabled me to name the school newspaper The Jazz and the yearbook The Jitterbug, and then to add some of my own high school reminiscences. And of course, I got to bump off one of my fictional classmates and make a few of the others prime suspects.

So there’s a lot of truth in my mysteries and a lot of fiction. Is there ever an instance when the line between the two gets blurred? Well, there’s Susan’s husband, Michael Buckler (also known as Swash) who is independently wealthy and a gourmet cook; my own husband Steve is neither of those.  Yet a number of our friends and acquaintances have asked Steve about his blue silk pajamas (described in Deadmistress) — and our dentist repeatedly calls him “Swash.”

Carole B. Shmurak, Professor Emerita at Central Connecticut State University, is the author of eleven books, including  Deadmistress, which introduced professor/sleuth Susan Lombardi, Death by Committee, Death at Hilliard High and Most Likely to Murder.   Under the pseudonym Carroll Thomas, she is the co-author of the Matty Trescott young adult novels, one of which (Ring Out Wild Bells) was nominated for the Agatha for best young adult mystery of 2001.

  You can find Carole online at:

website, http://www.carole-books.com

blog, http://deathbycommittee.wordpress.com

Amazon page, http://amazon.com/author/carole

Facebook author page, http://www.facebook.com/carolemysteries.

Welcome to Karen McCullough

Continuine the 25 Years in the Rearview Mirror Blog tour today's guest is Karen McCullough.  To find out more about the 25 Years Porject, have a peek at Monday's entry or visit: : http://stacyjuba.com/blog/25-years-in-the-rearview-mirror-52-authors-look-back/

Reading – It’s All Good

When my son was young, he wasn’t much of a reader. It was pure work for him and he found no pleasure in it. That caused much dismay on the part of his parents, both avid readers and writers. We'd spent countless hours reading to our children when they were young, trying to instill the love of stories, and our two daughters dove right into reading themselves as soon as they were able.  But not Joe. For years we did everything we could to encourage him to read on his own, but nothing worked – until he picked up his first comic book.

It was love at first word—or maybe it was the pictures, but it doesn’t matter because he read every word of that comic book, and the many, many more that followed it. Then he got into role-playing games, which caused him to pore over rules books and companion modules. Eventually he also became an avid reader of science fiction and military history. He got a degree in history from UNC, and is now a senior editor for a British publishing company that specializes in military history books.

A few people raised their eyebrows that we allowed—even encouraged—him to read comic books and role-playing game modules. But we believe in reading, and anything that sparks the imagination and helps forge the connection between words on paper and images in the mind works for us. Comic books are a gateway drug to the addiction to reading.

In fact, my husband and I both read comic books while we were growing up.  I also devoured Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and then worked my way through my father's library of mystery, adventure, science fiction and fantasy works.

I won't say there were no lines I would have drawn when it comes to my kids' reading, because obviously there are things I wouldn't let children have. But I encouraged them to tackle pretty much anything they wanted to read that wasn't completely inappropriate for their ages.

It’s all about discovering that words are more than just squiggles on paper, more than just a way to communicate information from one person to others. They’re the sparks that fire your imagination and carry you away to another world. A world that’s entirely within your own head, but is often more real to you than anything else around.

Without even realizing it, reading and stories begin to shape your world and how you view. It enriches your life and extends your experience to times and places and events you could never participate in otherwise.

Bio:

Karen McCullough is the author of eleven published novels in the mystery, romantic suspense, and fantasy genres and has won numerous awards, including an Eppie Award for fantasy. She’s also been a four-time Eppie finalist, and a finalist in the Prism, Dream Realm, Rising Star, Lories, Scarlett Letter, and Vixen Awards contests. Her short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and numerous small press publications in the fantasy, science fiction, and romance genres. She has three children, three grandchildren and lives in Greensboro, NC, with her husband of many years.

Welcome to Donna Fletcher Crow

I'd like to welcome Donna Fletcher Crow, one of my fellow authors from the brand new e-book 25 Years in the Rearview Mirror, 52 Authors Look Back.  Donna is stopping by as part of the 25 Years in the Rearview Mirror Blog Tour. If you enjoy magazine columns and Chicken Soup for the Soul books, then we're sure you'll enjoy our collection of essays, designed to warm your heart, raise your spirits and compel you to examine your own life. Get a full listing of authors, essay titles and retailers here: http://stacyjuba.com/blog/25-years-in-the-rearview-mirror-52-authors-look-back/

Follow the 25 Years in the Rearview Mirror Blog and Radio Tour schedule here and enter for some neat My Memories Suite digital scrapbooking software: http://stacyjuba.com/blog/25-years-in-the-rearview-mirror-blog-tour/

And don't miss the chance to join the 25 Years in the Rearview  Mirror Yahoo Group, a fun and inspirational group that discusses the past and will help you to stay on track for the future. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/25YearsRearviewMirror/

Welcome Donna!

Hi Vicki, thank you so much for having me as a guest on your blog today— and for being a guest on mine. I love blog exchanges, so let me invite your readers to come over to “Deeds of Darkness; Deeds of Light” to read your article when they finish this one. http://ning.it/dhRSDI

I was so interested in reading the reviews of your MORE THAN SORROW because I see that you bring a lot of history into your contemporary gothic mystery and that’s exactly what I do in A DARKLY HIDDEN TRUTH as well, so I think we and our readers will enjoy each other’s books.

In A DARKLY HIDDEN TRUTH, which is the second in my Monastery Murders series, Felicity Howard, a thoroughly modern American woman who, rather rashly— as she does most things— has gone off to study theology in a monastery in Yorkshire. The Father Superior has asked Felicity and her church history lecturer Antony to find a valuable missing icon. But Felicity can’t possibly help. She’s off to become a nun. Then her impossible mother turns up unexpectedly. And a good friend turns up murdered. . .

In the midst of breathtaking chase scenes, mystical worship services and dashes through remote waterlogged landscapes Felicity learns the wisdom of holy women from today and ages past and Antony explores the arcane rites of the Knights Hospitaller. But what good will any of that do them if Felicity can’t save Antony’s life?

And especially since our exchange is part of the 25 YEARS IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR tour where we are two of the 52 authors telling their stories of what we were doing 25 years ago today, (http://ning.it/NZpHrP) I should share how the background of this book grew out of what I was doing 25 years ago.

All of the backgrounds of my nearly 40 books draw on my fascination with British history and all have required onsite research trips— for which I took our daughter Elizabeth along on numerous journeys. That resulted in her eventually studying at Oxford, teaching in London, and going off to study theology at a monastery on a green hillside in Yorkshire— funnily enough exactly what my heroine Felicity Howard does.  Elizabeth fell in love and married an Anglican priest. Well, the jury is still out on Felicity and Antony’s relationship, but I’m hoping it will end as happily as Elizabeth and Lee’s.

I hope your readers, Vicki, will take a look at 25 YEARS IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR http://ning.it/NZoO2K and visit me at www.DonnaFletcherCrow.com to see the trailers for my Monastery Murders books, pictures from my research trips and a visit to my rose garden.

Donna Fletcher Crow is the author of 40 books, mostly novels dealing with British history.  The award-winning Glastonbury, A Novel of the Holy Grail, an Arthurian grail search epic covering 15 centuries of English history, is her best-known work.  She is also the author of The Monastery Murders: A Very Private Grave  and A Darkly Hidden Truth, as well as the Lord Danvers series of Victorian true-crime novels and the romantic suspense series The Elizabeth & Richard Mysteries. Donna and her husband live in Boise, Idaho.  They have 4 adult children and 11 grandchildren. She is an enthusiastic gardener.