Yes, I'm Behind

My only excuse is I've been really, really busy--and then I was tired.

My days are really full--especially the mornings when my mind is clear and ready to work. This is my ideal time to write. However, I've been busy with other pursuits and "have-to's" leaving no good time for my work in progress. And yes there is one.

I'm nearing the end of the first draft of my latest Rocky Bluff P.D. mystery. It's been a fun one. Some insights, The RBPD is still dealing with the effects of the pandemic,the city council is unhappy with decisions Police Chief Taylor made,  a fortune teller and a philandering husband have been murdered, the mayor's daughter must choose between living with her father and her aunt, and as usual, life has it's many ups and downs for those living in Rocky Bluff.

I've also been planning a trip to Las Vegas--not for fun, but to attend my last Public Safety Writers Association board meeting. Though I hope to have helpful input, I'm also looking forward to spending time with the board members, most of whom are long-time friends.

While I'm in Vegas, I plan to see my sister and a few members of her family since they live there. I never do all the other things people go to Las Vegas for.

When I get home, it will be time to do my taxes--not something I'm looking forward to, except getting them done.

And this is my life as an author--not anything like I dreamed about. However, not matter what is going on, I still love the excitement of creating another world, and getting to visit with the characters I've spent so much time with other the years.

How is your February going?

Marilyn

Just Home from the PSWA Conference! by Marilyn Meredith

What a great conference! Loved seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

We had a Pre-Conference Writer's Workshop--first time we've done this. I was one of the instructors and my impressions was that it was helpful.

These are the types of people who attend: a handful of mystery writers, cops from various locations, still on th4 job and retired, a couple of publishers and several editors, screen writers, published and unpublished writers in many genres, homicide detectives, a search and rescue dog handler, bio-terrorism experts, military veterans, undercover cops, those who once were FBI and worked various investigations. SWAT team members, a public relations consultant, a retired biology professor, vice detectives, active and retired fire people, a forensic scientist, and public relations person, and the editor of PoliceOne.com. Such a wealth of information these folks shared.

Like most mystery cons we had great panels with all kinds of public safety topics and writing topics.

Every year I don't see how it could get better, but it always does.

We'll meet again next year at the same time and place--Orleans hotel and casino in the conference center. So do consider it.

Marilyn

(I was just headed back to my seat after taking a photo of a panel.)

Oh, Those Pesky Ideas!

by Janis Patterson

I am a pretty organized kind of person – where work is concerned, that is. We won’t talk about my housekeeping. With my books, however, I am very orderly. I try to write a fair number of words every day – though I don’t always make it every single day. (Life just gets in the way sometimes!) I keep to a schedule and respect deadlines. I have my books blocked out for the next eighteen months – a gothic romance, the first book of my new Rachel Petrie archaeological mysteries, a sweet older-heroine romance… It’s a nice, orderly system.

Except when it isn’t. Unfortunately, creativity has no respect for schedules and orderly systems.

I’ll explain. Last month The Husband and I took a trip to Las Vegas. We had won it some time ago and it had come down to use it or lose it, so of course we used it. We were put up in the Plaza, an older but nicely refurbished hotel/casino at the end of the Fremont Experience. That’s sort of an outdoor mall – it used to be one of the main downtown streets, but they closed it off, put an enormous canopy over it (way over it – 6 or 8 stories!) to keep the worst of that vicious Las Vegas sun off. I personally prefer the funky downtown Fremont Experience to the Strip.

When we left I had just finished the final edits on the new Flora Melkiot mystery – Murder in Death’s Waiting Room – and I had thought she was ready to be retired for a while. After all, I was already doing prep work on my new gothic and even had a couple of chapters written, then had started doing some early prep work on the first book about contract archaeologist Rachel Petrie. I also have two books ready to self-publish, and that takes a lot of work.

Except once in Vegas ideas began pelting me like summer hail in Texas – big and fast. Starchy, proper, elderly Flora and Las Vegas seemed made for each other. The entire story – motive, method, murderer, MacGuffins, clues (sorry – I couldn’t think of a word for clues beginning with ‘m’) – spooled through my head with terrifying cohesiveness. During our wandering around I wore a purse only big enough to hold my credit card, a hanky or two and my phone.

You know, that could be a writer’s vision of Hell – a great idea and no pencil or paper. However, I have adapted well to modern times, so while The Husband fiddled with the slots, I would sit and email ideas to myself on my phone.

It’s still a great idea, and I’ll probably write it just as soon as I finish this current, half-written gothic which has a hard deadline. And it works out well too, as my primary advisor for the Rachel Petrie series has to defend her PhD thesis this summer, so we’ve agreed to start over in the fall.

Schedules? How can they hope to stand up to inspiration?

It's Christmas. Again.

by Janis Patterson

Remember when we were children and it seemed that geologic ages crept past between one Christmas and the next? Now it seems that the pine needles from one holiday season are barely swept away before another Christmas is barreling toward us.

This year I’m soft-pedaling the holiday. We have no small ones at home (save for the furbabies, who really don’t care) and all our family get-togethers are at other people’s houses this year. Yea! I don’t have to decorate. Or even dust.

It’s not that I don’t have the Christmas spirit – I’m just tired. A publishing blitz of ten books in four and a half months, four new books written, freelancing and regular blogs, plus the normal things like family, friends, the day to day things of laundry and cooking and the rest… it gets exhausting. Add on Christmas shopping and wrapping and parties and it gets even worse. Plus I’m getting older. (I will have to admit that I have reached the cereal years – every time I move it’s snap! crackle! pop!) Somehow putting up wreaths and crèches and garlands and animated lawn ornaments – though they are beautiful – doesn’t really excite me this year.

The Husband asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I didn’t have a clue. I mean, there are the things we can’t do anything about, like world peace and more sales (lots and lots, please!) of my books (Please, Santa – I would like to earn back at least the costs of publishing) and for Microsoft to quit making us change every few months to new programs that are both unnecessary and overly complicated. Then there are the things I really want but we can’t afford, like a new Herman Miller Aeron office chair (which costs about the same amount as my first car) or an office/workroom built above the garage. We already have everything we need, and a lot of things we want, so this year we have agreed that while there will be a few little trinket packages for Christmas morning, our main presents this year will be our trips. We are planning a lot of trips in the new year – the FRW cruise conference in February, perhaps a trip to Egypt in March, a sometime trip to Vegas we won, NINC in October and Denver in June…

Oh, have I told you about that? The Historical Novel Society is a prestigious international association which is holding its conference in the US this year – in Denver in June, to be exact. And…. (drum roll) I have been invited to appear on a panel on “Egyptology and Elizabeth Peters.” You all know what Egyptomanes The Husband and I are, and Barbara (Mertz, aka Barbara Michaels and Elizabeth Peters) was a friend. That invitation is truly a memorable gift.

While I love Christmas presents and parties and decorations, none of those are the true meaning of Christmas. There are those who can talk with much more eloquence than I about love, and faith, and grace, and all the other real things that Christmas means. Beside such cosmic truths poinsettias and reindeer and all the rest fade into insignificance.

So – this year I am going to try to be a better person, and keep the true meaning of Christmas in the forefront of my thoughts. I will be kinder and try to be a truly better person. I will try to treasure the things that really matter – family, friends, love, beauty and all the rest.

In one thing, however, I will remain the rebel – in gleeful defiance of the cleric Abu Musaab Wajdi Akkari (the one who said that wishing someone Merry Christmas is “worse than fornication, and drinking alcohol, and killing someone”) I will proclaim at the top of my voice “Merry Christmas to all!”

Beyond the Screen

by Janis Patterson/Janis Susan May

Sometimes our lives get so tied up with words and writing and editing and publishing and publicity that we forget there is a world out there beyond the confines of our computer screens, so today I’m not going to talk (at least very much!) about business.

This past week was my birthday – exactly which one we won’t mention – and to mark the occasion The Husband took me on a four day trip to Las Vegas. I have been so occupied with my June-October publishing blitz that he complains he never sees me anymore because I’m always locked away in my office. I wasn’t even allowed to take a computer on our trip, just my phone to check emails.

The trip was wonderful. We spent an entire day at and in Hoover Dam. I never thought of that as particularly fascinating (I had seen it before) but the trip inside was incredible. Do not go if you are in the least bit claustrophobic. The tiny little tunnels, well-lit but dank as cave passages, made me feel as if we were in the bowels of the earth – until we got to peek out a ventilation shaft halfway down the face of the dam and our perception changed immediately. 400 feet down from the dam top is still a verrrrry long way from the bottom! It did not make me feel secure when we found out that the second half our group was stuck in the elevator we had just exited, either! That made us have to climb approximately four floors to the next part of the tour, and I had morbid fantasies of having to spend hours and hours climbing out of the dam’s innards. The problem was fixed by the time of our next elevator ride, however, and we rode up with no troubles at all.

One day we spent most of the day at the Atomic Energy Museum, where you can learn EVERYTHING there is to know about the history and uses of atomic energy in stultifying minutiae. The Husband loved it. I… Personally I enjoyed the exhibit on Area 51 much more, even though the lighting was so ‘atmospheric’ and the exhibit cards print so light that reading the information was sometimes difficult. When I pulled out my pocket flash (never leave home without one!) The Husband pretended he didn’t know me.

We had planned to see a show or two, but by the evenings we were so tired out we just said ‘next time’ and left it at that. We did gamble – a little. We work too hard for our money to enjoy gaming deeply, but we did give ourselves a $25 budget for an afternoon of the penny slots. We won a little bit, which we then lost again, but had a lot of fun – a lot more than some of the players at the big $$ machines and tables seemed to be. We saw a couple of the more fantastic casinos (the Egyptian statuary at the Luxor is really quite good for commercial replicas) and walked the Fremont Experience. We also ate ourselves into a stupor – never saw so much fabulous food at such reasonable prices.

One of the high points was a visit to the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop (the one from the TV series Pawn Stars). It’s smaller than I had expected, and the four stars of the show weren’t there, but as an added and completely unexpected gift I got a beautiful white gold and kunzite ring studded with teeny-tiny little chips of emerald, ruby, diamond and sapphire in a floriform design. Beats meeting TV personalities any day!

As much as I love writing and creating my own worlds, the real world has it beat.

UPDATE :

My August 15 release SHADOWED LEGACY marks the tipping point of my 30 June – 30 October publishing blitz. It’s a gothic romance set in Louisiana of the 1870s. The story is about an orphaned young woman who has survived by singing in the saloons of the Western silver camps only to be ordered by her unknown and autocratic grandfather to come to his plantation. She wants to be part of a family, he has other ideas and an unknown villain has more sinister plans. It was a fun book to write.