The Freedom of Finishing by Mar Preston

I’ve just sent off my sixth novel to my editor and my two best and trusted writer friends. I am hoping to get insightful comments that help me better this mystery. It is the second in my series about a Kern County Sheriff’s Detective investigating a murder in the far from tranquil village where I live.

I’ve turned it over after two years work on it. After four unpublishable novels which served as an apprenticeship in learning how to write, then five modestly successful crime fiction novels, I thought I had the process down fairly well. This last one has almost defeated me.

Perhaps it was one I did really want to write but felt I had to. Four previous novels were set in Santa Monica and featured an SMPD detective. But my bestselling novel had been a standalone set in my mountain village. I thought it should be the debut of a series.

It’s advanced slowly through many fits and starts. I tried outlining which is against my nature. I changed the killer half way through. I gave the killer a sidekick. The only constant through this agonizing process was that the story took place in a cat sanctuary. I knew the animal rescue world and it unfailingly intrigues me.

In the meantime I wrote and published 3 eBooks on the topic of Writing Your First Mystery. The book, still untitled, just wouldn’t come and I had now put so much time into it, I couldn’t abandon it. Finally I summarized the process in a 4th eBook called Finishing Your First Mystery, now in the process of publication. I worked at the wretched novel almost every day for two years. Of course there were lapses, but not many.

Quoting one of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman: Creative work is often a slog and the only way you'll really get good at it is to finish what you start even when it's not going well. You'll end up learning more from that experience than if you quit.

Gaiman is right. I feel some sense of satisfaction, it’s true, even if I can’t say yet it’s ready for publication. By now I know it will be finished and I will feel pride when I hold it in my hand.
More than anything I feel the freedom of finishing. My first waking thought is not dread at what lays ahead of me when I open the file for the day. I can play at writing. Blogs, do some long-needed promotion, write a catch up email to my friend in Australia, pick up the phone and have a long gossipy conversation with a friend, start a new novel.

I’ve learned again that writing a novel-length piece of crime fiction is a marathon endeavor. My good friend tells me I always say I will never do this again at the finish of a novel. I don’t remember that but I believe her.

A story is already bubbling in my mind, this one in Santa Monica.

Writing Your First Mystery is available free here on my website.

Gumshoe: Same Work, No Hat

Kathleen Kaska

I’m writing a mystery set in the early 1940’s in Manhattan. It’s the first of what I hope will become a series. My protagonist is a private detective. He drinks too much and is starting to show signs of paranoia. He doesn’t eat right, wears a chip on his shoulder, and carries too much emotional baggage. It’s a wonder he can get through the day. But he’s a crackerjack detective; intuitive and fearless in a what-have-I got-to-lose sort of way. In other words he’s your typical hardboiled, wisecracking detective.

            I read a lot of the classic hardboiled mysteries, especially the ones written during the early half of the twentieth century by the great writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy B. Hughes, Patricia Highsmith, and James M. Cain. With these icons as my mentors, I’ve learned to weave a pretty good plot and develop appealing characters. For the story I’m working on, my research is focused on setting. I want to make sure I capture the essence of the decade, so I’m not just rereading many of these detective novels, but reading about the guys who wrote them and the happenings during that time.

            Nowadays no longer do women dress in pearls, heels, and stockings just to go to the grocery store, or to take the kids to school. Men, no matter what their social status, no longer dressed in suits, ties, and fedoras. Even the foremost reasons for someone to hire a detective have changed. Sure, cheating spouses are still out there and murders continue. But today’s gumshoe is more likely to spend his/her time investigating corporate security leaks and computer hacking. Those changes are most evident in a company that’s been around for almost 166 years.

            Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency started up in Chicago in 1850. Dashiell Hammett worked for them for seven years before he began writing mysteries. Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters from his Sherlock Holmes’s stories, Birdy Edwards in The Valley of Fear, and Leverton in “The Red Circle,” worked for them. Since then, the company has grown into a global security agency. It is now housed in New York City and still offers gumshoe-type services, but its website describes the business as “the industry’s leading provider of risk management services and solutions for organizations.”

            The most legendary Pinkerton cases from the 19^th century are:

·      In 1861, Pinkerton discovered an assassination plot on President Lincoln and thwarted it.

·      In 1866, they tracked down notorious train robber Oliver Curtis Perry.

·      In the 1870s, Pinkerton agents were busy pursuing Jesse James, the Dalton Brothers, and Butch Cassidy and his gang.

·      On the Mona Lisa’s voyage across the Atlantic in 1968, Pinkerton was hired as an escort.

            And here are some more notable facts:

·      Kate Warne was hired in 1856 as their first female detective. She later was put in charge of the female division.

·      John Scobell, hired during the Civil War, was Pinkerton’s first African-American intelligence agent.

·      Pinkerton developed the first criminal database by collecting newspaper clippings and mug shots.

·      By the turn of the twentieth century, they had more than 2,000 agents.

      Finally, here is the original Pinkerton code:

·      Accept no bribes.

·      Never compromise with criminals.

·      Partner with local law enforcement agencies.

·      Refuse divorce cases or cases that initiate scandals.

·      Turn down reward money. 

·      Never raise fees without the client’s pre-knowledge.

·      Keep clients apprised on an on-going basis.

            Now the code is simplified to three words: “We never sleep.” The company’s key values are integrity, vigilance, and excellence.

            Chances are you will never need the services of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, but you can “friend” them on Facebook, “follow” them on Twitter, and “link” to them on LinkedIn. Its blog offers a wealth of information for mysteries.

            Oh, by the way, Pinkerton’s is hiring.
Links: 
Fedoras and Ferragamos
Kathleen Kaska

Writing for Seniors

I write senior sleuth novels because there’s a growing market for retirees who enjoy  reading about characters in their own age group. I was intrigued years ago by Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, who were wise and introspective, but never seemed to have any fun.

That’s not true of today’s seniors who are less inclined to retire to their rocking chairs than previous generations.

The late Pat Browning, who wrote Absinthe of Malice, said: “A St. Martin's editor gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten: ‘Be careful not to turn your characters into cartoons.’ I try to picture older characters as they are--the same people they always were, only older. This is especially true when it comes to romance and sex. For all the jokes about senior sex, it's a very real part of senior life, and it's no joke to those lucky enough to have a romantic partner late in life.”

I agree. Not unlike Janet Evanovich’s character, Grandma Mazur, who is eccentric enough for a cartoon character, most seniors have the same interests they’ve always had, with the possible exception of roller blading and downhill skiing. On second thought, I once interviewed Buffalo Bill’s grandson Bill Cody, who learned to downhill ski at 65 to keep up with his much younger wife.

Mike Befeler writes what he calls “Geezer-lit.” His novels feature his octogenarian protagonist, “who is short on memory but has a sense of humor and love of life. He accepts his ‘geezerhood,’ solves a mystery and enjoys romance along the way.”

My second senior sleuth mystery, A Village Shattered, takes place in a California retirement village. The plot is generously sprinkled with humor but none of the seniors resemble cartoon characters, although a couple come close with a redneck Casanova and love starved widow. Diary of Murder followed and I portrayed the two 60-year-old protagonist widows as quite capable of traveling the country in their motorhome as well as chasing down killers who happened to be drug dealers. 

Another senior writer, Beth Solheim, spent years working in a nursing home and says she loves the elderly and their “humorous, quirky insight to life, love and longevity.”

Chester Campbell, an octogenarian, writes the Greg McKenzie Mysteries. He said, “My friends in this [age] bracket are out going places and doing things. Some, like me, continue to work at jobs they enjoy. I chose to use a senior couple in my books who are long married, get along fine, and do a competent job as private investigators. Greg, who narrates the books, is aware of his limitations from age and makes up for physical shortcomings by outsmarting his adversaries. My hope is to dispel some of the absurdity of the stereotypes about seniors that are all too familiar. Like the old song says, "Anything you can do I can do better."

Like so many other novelists, I write what I enjoy reading. My readers are mainly retirees and baby boomers who number over 78 million. Some 8,000 boomers are moving into the senior column every day, the fastest growing potential book buying market on record.

We’re experiencing the graying of America. What better age group to write about and for?

~Jean Henry Mead

Two Stories Brewing - The Start of a Series

by Linda Thorne

I’ve read a lot of reasons why authors write book series. A common explanation is the opportunity to hook readers onto their protagonist, so that they’ll want to follow her wherever she goes. Some authors say their first book started out as a standalone, but during the writing process they were bombarded with ideas for a sequel.

My ideas for my first two mysteries in my series evolved about the same time some twenty-five years ago, way before I decided to write books. I thought the stories would make good movies, books, or both, but I had no intention of doing a thing to help them get there. I carried them around in daydream mode only. Sometimes I’d share parts of my stories with others and I’d say without meaning it, “I’d like to write a book.” Looking back in time, my daydream continued brewing, gaining momentum until the day I decided to write books. By then it felt like this was my destiny.

One of these brewing stories came from numerous experiences in human resources that I’d taken from true events and created a loose plotline. My story begins with a young female employee, a no-call-no-show for work, who is found murdered. This really happened at a manufacturing plant I’d worked at in Denver. Then, at another time and workplace, I watched another young woman be continually blamed for things she had not done. I created a story, a mystery, to solve the case of the no-call-no-show who turned up murdered, to find justice for the mistreated young woman employee, and make certain bad bosses got their comeuppance. I shared this with others adding, “I’d like to write a book” with no intention of doing so.

Over the years I began to add other experiences and create new characters, fictionalized from people I met. The plot for both stories began to thicken and when I finally decided to write a book, I chose the story in the paragraph above for my debut novel. My original title was The Termination of Jolene Cromwell, based upon the young woman ill-treated by one of my employers. By the time I started writing the book, the story was about a lot more than the person I renamed Jolene Cromwell, so I changed my book title to Just Another Termination. The book was published in August of 2015.
    
My other story had come from a harrowing experience I’d had when I was twenty-two. My roommates had gone to their parents homes for Thanksgiving. I didn’t have family nearby and I worked, so I stayed alone in the huge rickety old house we rented during a wind-driven blizzard. In the middle of the night I heard someone come into the house and start up the stairs toward my room, but a one-in-a-million-chance phone call scared the person off. Another woman in the neighborhood about the same age as me was murdered shortly afterward. Was she murdered instead of me? A few months later I moved out of state and lost track of the case. In creating this loose storyline, I had my lead character, years later, move back to where this had happened, put her in danger of a second attempt on her life by the killer, and allowed her to solve the original murder of the other young woman. I shared this story with others too, always ending it with, “I’d like to write a book,” never really meaning it.

The story I just mentioned will be my second book when I’m finished writing it. I had to give my protagonist, Judy Kenagy, a reason to return to the area where the harrowing event took place, and someone else murdered, but what could it be? She loved where she lived. So, I let Judy's husband lose his higher paying job then wrote in a job promotion for her to become vice-president of human resources. The promotion required her to relocate back to where she needed to go. The title of this work-in-progress is A Promotion to Die For.

I don’t have a story yet for the third book and while writing the other two, ideas have not come knocking. For the third in the series, I only know that after Judy loses the job she was promoted to in book two, she moves to the greater Nashville, Tennessee area where I’ve lived since 2008.

http://www.lindathorne.com

Buy Links:   Amazon.com  Barnes and Noble  Google  Black Opal Books      

The Ever-Growing Peril

by Janis Patterson

Being a writer is a hard life. Not only do you have to come up with a multitude of ideas that you can shape into a coherent, interesting story, you have to then write the thing, all the while you have to check your facts, make sure your grammar and spelling are correct and your character names are appropriate to the time of the story. Then once the book is finished, you have to edit it to the best of your capability. Once that is done you can start the unholy dance of submitting it to agents/editors and waiting for months if not years for an answer. Then even later once the story is contracted you begin editorial combat, reworking your story to fit their prejudices and guidelines. Sometimes more than once. Then you continue to wait until your time comes up in their publishing schedule, which again can be more than a year. Or two. Or, if you are self-publishing, you send your story to an independent editor for their version of editorial combat. This time, however, you have the final say – it is your story after all – but never forget that you are paying them for their expertise and you very well may be too close to the story to see the holes. Then you get do work with cover artists, formatters, publicity/advertising and the various vendors.

Ain’t none of it easy. Any way you look at it, writing takes time, some money and an emotional toll.

That just adds insult to injury when others take your stories and either give them away for free or, what is worse, sell them without your permission and with no benefit to you. There’s a reason they’re called pirates.

Now of course I’m not talking about the promotions the author her/himself does through legitimate outlets. I don’t always agree with that attitude – training readers to expect a full book that has taken perhaps several years to write for nothing or for a pittance cannot be good for any of us or for the industry as a whole. Plumbers and carpenters and pastry chefs and just about everyone else don’t give their services for free or close-to-free in hopes that you’ll come back to them when you’re ready to spend money. More and more most people will just go on to the next freebie. However – free or .99 is a legal decision when made by the owner/author.

What really frosts me is the blatant way in which our works are simply taken. “If it’s on the internet it has to be free” is something we hear a lot. Pirate sites simply scoop in books and give them away to anyone. To my mind that’s theft, but apparently beyond a feeble ‘that shouldn’t be’ our legal agencies aren’t doing much of anything to stop it.

Amazon itself is fostering a kind of theft – the returns scam. A customer will buy a book, read it, then return it for full credit, which is then subtracted from your earnings. Now I’ve returned a book I’ve bought – when I find out it isn’t the book I thought it was, or my sometimes unreliable and arthritic hands click when I don’t mean them to, or some other legitimate reason, but almost always within the space of twenty-four hours, and not very often – like less than once a year. However, some people brag that they get the books, read them and return them – sometimes as many as four or five a week! I know Amazon is proud of its commitment to customer service, but surely they should be able to see that this is a form of theft, not only from us but from them! Surely they keep some kinds of record about who returns what and when…

And we won’t even go into the subject of plagiarism, where someone gets a book, sometimes does a search-and-replace on names and towns (and sometimes not!) then publishes the book as their own creation. Even when such an egregious crime is exposed Amazon does nothing about giving just recompense to the actual author. The plagiarist walks away with the unjustly ‘earned’ money.

Even though it doesn’t seem possible, it does get worse. A bunch of crooks on eBay are selling multi-book collections – sometimes numbering in the thousands – to which they have no right. Worse, they are also selling RE-SALE rights, telling their customers that they not only have the rights to these books, that they can sell them the rights to re-sell them themselves. Everyone makes money – except the creator of the books. After all, what do we matter? All we did was write them… To add insult to injury, in spite of being told many times about this situation, eBay has done nothing about it.

There’s another scheme out there that seems a little bit shady to me, but it is legal. The site – and there are many of them –  advertises that they have all kinds of books, but when you click on a book, it takes you to the Amazon page, where you can purchase the book. It’s an affiliate scheme, where the site gets a few pennies for every book sold because the purchaser came through their link. It’s true they’re using your book to earn money without your permission, but it is a legal purchase and the author does get what they’re due. That alone makes it acceptable.

However – as loath as I am to support crime, there is a bright spot on the horizon. There are sites that claim to have just about any book in the world for free, but to access them the freebie hunter (i.e., the thief) has to give them his credit card number in order to browse, or to pay for a membership, or to make some token payment like a dime a book, or whatever. The good thing is that the site has no books – it either uses the freebie hunter’s visit to plant ad/malware/viri on his computer or it’s just a plain old phishing scam that rips off his credit card number. The thief looking for free books thus gets stolen from. Golly, karma is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

So it’s not enough that we have to research and write the books, we must also be our own policemen, sending out DMCAs, which are more often than not ignored, and be constantly alert against the theft of our books. Some authors have just given up, saying that it takes too much time and the people who steal books aren’t going to buy them anyway, but that sends out the signal that theft is okay, and that offends my sense of what is right. I don’t know what the solution is, other than our government and legal agencies stepping up to the plate and actually doing something about such blatant theft, but that ain’t a-gonna happen. Anybody got any ideas?

Making One Mistake After Another

Today was my last time to post on the 3rd Tuesday of the month on another blog--and when I went to check it out, I'd posted it at an earlier date--why I couldn't tell you. I fixed it. All the time I was feeling good because I just knew I'd written a post for this blog for today.

Guess what? No I hadn't.

Do I have an excuse? Not really. I could say I've been really busy--well I have--but so has everyone else.

Just to give you a sample of what I've been doing as far as writing and publishing is concerned:

Organizing a blog tour.

Writing what I hope will be tantalizing posts that will make readers want to follow along from day-to-day.

As with all blog tours, there were a multitude or problems to solve, and having done this numerous time, more problems will pop up while I"m touring.

I've been working on my next Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery whenever I can find a bit of time to write.

I also received the text block for the next Rocky Bluff P.D. mystery to edit. This is the book that I'm doing the blog tour for.

And guess what else will interrupt all this busyness--income tax is looming over the horizon.

Sorry I brought it up, but it's something we all have to face.

I've also been trying to schedule some presentations and I've done one and have another coming up in March.

So, I'll try and pay better attention to calendar dates, and do what I'm supposed to do when I'm supposed to do it.

How about you? How is your 2016 going so far?

Marilyn aka F. M. Meredith

Ten Ways to Use Reviews to Advantage

Reviews are a great help to an author. Yes, bad ones really smart, but if they're constructive, they can still lead us in the right direction.

And, the good ones, well, those not only make us feel good, encourage us to keep writing when the going gets tough, but are also great fodder for promotions.

Some ways to use a good review, or even part of a not-so-good review:

1. Pluck a short phrase from a review and place it on Twitter, along with your book link, and a copy of the book cover. Add a few hashtags where they may apply, such as #amwriting, or #mystery, or #thriller, #review, etc.

2. Place the review link on your Timeline at Facebook. If you're lucky, at least a few of your followers will see it. Facebook has become stingy about sharing links, but even if one or two people notice, the ball can still get rolling.

3. Share the review on any groups you belong to at Facebook. Again, if you're lucky, some of the others who are also posting promotions at the groups will notice yours.

4. Try not to be too pushy, but casually mention your new review with the link at one or two of your Yahoo groups, if you belong to any.

5. Post the review at Goodreads. I confess to not paying attention to Goodreads as much as I should. I really need to follow this advice.

6. Place the link and a teaser from the review on your website.

7. Make a Review Board on Pinterest and add our review links there, or use a different board for each of your books, and put the review link on the appropriate board. If you want, you could do both.

8. Include part of the review in a blog.

9. Remember, if you're doing a special promotion, many promotional sites require at least 4 stars or more. That's your goal.

10. Post a review of a book you liked. Maybe, later that author will reciprocate after reading one of your books. Since Amazon is a little strict about buddy authors doing reviews, I don't mention I'm an author in my review profile, and my reviews have so far not been taken down.

Can you think of any other ways to use reviews to advantage?

Find all of Morgan's books at
http://www.amazon.com/author/morganmandel

Excerpts are at:
http://morgansbooklinks.blogspot.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/morgan.mandel

Twitter: @MorganMandel

And Real Life Returns

by Janis Patterson

If you’re like me, this past month or two has been a fairly dizzying round of parties and dinner parties and cooking and quick meals snatched while shopping and wrapping. Calories have been whizzing around (and sticking more than we would like, darn it) like mosquitoes on a hot, humid day.

Well, it’s all over, and I say thank goodness! Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are over, the parties are finished and we are stuffed to surfeit. All that lies ahead of us in the near future is Valentine’s Day, which is usually awash with chocolate and, if you’re lucky, a nice dinner out.

Real life is back. Now we clean up the drifts of tissue paper and wrapping paper scraps, put away the holiday china for another year, take down the tree and pack away the ornaments. If you had a real tree, you have the joy of vacuuming up the dried needles that seem to be able to hide in your carpet until July.

Oh, and work. I’ll admit my work tends to suffer during this intense holiday season. It’s hard to sit at the computer making up tales and trying to get all my clues in line when a big chunk of my mind is trying to remember how far along I am on gift buying and worrying if we’ve forgotten someone and trying to decide on what dish to take to the family potluck on Christmas Day and… well, you know. So I pretty much quit writing. It is, I delude myself, better not to spend the time screwing up my story with a bunch of stuff that will probably have to be pulled out later in favor of something more rational.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!

But now the holiday season is over. New Year’s is never a big deal in our house. We don’t like to go out and celebrate on that night – too many irresponsible revelers out after drinking too much making the streets dangerous. Like last year, like almost every year, we went to eat Mexican food at our favorite neighborhood café in the early evening, then went home and watched television while we split a bottle of champagne at midnight - or earlier. The quiet times with The Husband are the best.

As the cold days of winter set in, though, and the holidays are just a memory, it is time to concentrate on work again. I have two standalones to finish and several completed books to get into the publishing pipeline. The most exciting thing, however, is I have a new series to write. I personally dislike series, or at least most of the series I have read. Just how many times can an amateur sleuth fall over a dead body in a small town, after all? Plus, I’m very tired of the current trend of cutesy and relentlessly perky amateur sleuths (female) who obsess over shoes, who either cook or do some sort of craft, who brainlessly charge into danger and who always manage to avoid being arrested for impeding a police investigation.

My sleuth is Dr. Rachel Petrie (no relation to the famed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, a fact that is a running gag) a contract archaeologist who works all over the world, giving her a chance to stumble over a body in a different place each time. Hey, if she didn’t find a body it wouldn’t be a mystery series, would it? There does have to be a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

Currently I’m working on the first book, A KILLING AT TARA TWO, which is set in Alabama on a dig excavating a plantation house burned during the War of Northern Aggression. It’s great fun.

Now I must get to work writing on it. I hope all of you had a very happy holiday season, and wish you a happy and prosperous New Year.

What are your Plans for 2016?

Now that Christmas and New Years Eve are behind us, have you thought about what you want to do in 2016? Or what you should do?

No, I'm not asking what your resolutions for the new year are because most people don't keep up with resolutions. But surely you've thought about the coming year that is before you.

In my case, I'm hoping to spend more quality time with family--especially those I don't get to see often. Since it's getting harder and harder for hubby and I to travel, it means relying on our 2nd eldest daughter who is willing to drive us places. We are fortunate that two of our four children live nearby as do many grands and greatgrands. However, one daughter is in Camarillo and another down in Murrieta with grandkids there and in nearby Temecula--along with greatgrands.

I'm also working on a new Deputy Tempe Crabtree book, and need to finish it.

March will bring a new Rocky Bluff P.D. mystery to promote. I'm working on a blog tour now for mid April--that means finding people to host me and writing what I hope will be intriguing posts for each one.

In February I'll be attending a Public Safety Writers Association board meeting in Ventura--means daughter will be driving, but also a chance to see youngest daughter and two of our grandkids. At the board meeting one of the things we'll be doing is finalizing plans for the PSWA annual writing conference in July. One thing we'll be doing differently is having a writing seminar the morning and afternoon before registration for the conference. And yes, I've agreed to be a part of that.

Except for some doctor appointments, I don't have much written on my 2016 calendar, but I'm sure as the days progress, events will be added.

No one can really know what will be happening in the future, and since hubby and I are growing older, big changes could be ahead. But for now, I'll look forward to each day as it comes.

Share with us what you have planned.

Marilyn

I’m not weird - Mar Preston

I haven’t had to sell myself to strangers in a long time.  Sure, you have to sell yourself to readers but that’s a different ball game entirely.

I live in the mountains in central California and the cold here in winter is becoming unbearable. But then spring and summer come and I’m in love with my house and my friends and my life here. So this year, instead of making a vow I would sell my house and move before winter came again, I thought of an interim plan.

When the Central Coast chapter of Sisters in Crime invited me to speak about my latest novel, I looked around and thought what a wonderful place the coast would be to spend the winter. 

Sue McGinty, a fellow mystery writer who lives in Los Osos, asked me to house sit over the holidays. She writes good books about the central coast around Morro Bay. I breezed around San Luis Obispo and Pismo Beach looking for a place. 

Craiglist turned up a great opportunity and the dance between me and a potential landlord has begun. What do I say about myself? I’m not weird? But dark scenarios of decapitation, GSWs, blood spatter and poisons fill my mind and make me feel all jolly. To anyone but fellow mystery writers, this is weird. 

They are a young couple with a room to rent in their home and I want to live there too. I write to them: “No Drama. No boyfriend. No girlfriend. No aging parents, no children. One arthritic, ancient dog. The rent will be paid. I’m neat.  I will respect your property because I am a homeowner too.”

And I wait. I write again. They called finally and invited me to meet them next weekend. This week we are promised blizzards, cold, rain, and snow. Sigh. I will get through it hoping it’s my last bout of real winter.

I want so much to make this happen. When I meet them I will be all smiles, certified check in hand, and not one single mention of decomposition.   

Wish me luck.

 http://www.amazon.com/Private-School-Detective-Mason-Mystery/dp/0984495258/