The authors swap shop talk and meet prospective readers at Avon's Local Author Festival

With a number of other Connecticut writers, I was selected to participate in the Avon public library's Local Author Festival and spent three hours yesterday afternoon in the Author's Tent, meeting and chatting with people who came through the very busy Monday farmer's market in the library's parking lot.

I shared the tent with Patrick Scalisi, another local author I was meeting for the first time. We swapped writer talk—one of the benefits in participating in such an event. He is both dedicated to his writing (he writes for an hour before he goes to work every morning) and is aggressively building his career as a writer. For example, he has been giving talks about writing and publishing in libraries, building a mailing list, and selling books at the ends of those events. I was impressed.

Patrick Scalisi and I, ready to talk up our books at Avon's Local Author Festival

We did not talk much about our writing except to the people who stopped by to chat. Rather, we talked about the challenges of building a career, getting published, independent publishers versus self-publishing or commercial publishers, and promotion and publicity.

Another benefit of participating in something like a Local Author Festival is the opportunity to talk with people, readers and otherwise, about books, about reading, and, of course, about one's own work. This is a situation where the author needs a polished elevator speech, the two-minute (or shorter) description of a book that can engage the prospective reader's interest.

I do not believe you can "sell" a book. If a person does not read mysteries, nothing I can say about Death in a Family Business is going to persuade her to buy it. On the other hand, if someone is interested in a beach read, I can give a precis of The Girl in the Photo and, as it happened, sell the book. Patrick found readers interested in The Horse Thieves, and Other Tales of the New West. All in all, I found it a rewarding experience.

Collar Robber: A fast-moving, entertaining mystery

According to Hillary Belle Locke's bio, she graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, worked for a prominent New York law firm, and now practices law in a city far from New York. This background is reflected in her new mystery, Collar Robber and in one of the two protagonists, Cynthia Jakubek who has quit a Wall Street law firm to set up her independent practice in Pittsburgh where her key client wants an annulment so he can marry his true love in the Catholic Church.

Collar Robber's other protagonist is Jay Davidovich, a strapping, six-foot former MP who now works as a Loss Prevention Specialist for a global insurance company. The plot revolves about a scam involving a modern painting worth $50 million—a loss worth preventing.

Locke has published two other mysteries, one starring Jakubek, one starring Davidovich. I suspect that writing those books taught Locke some of the tricks she uses to make Collar Robber so satisfying. It was an inspired decision to put them in the same book. Because their backgrounds, attitudes, experiences, and gender are different (and convincing), and because they are involved with different players in the scam, Locke is able to create scenes and situations she could not have done as easily—or at all—from the point of view of only Jakubek or Davidovich.

Aside from satisfaction of working out the complexities of the case—who's the bad guy? who's innocent? what's this guy's involvement?—I thoroughly enjoyed Locke's writing. Here's Davidovich sitting with his pregnant wife in the OB/GYN waiting room "like some regular guy who worked in an office and didn't encounter thugs and Tasers on the job. What would it be like, having a real office job? Ten-fifteen, time to grab some more coffee! Ooh, quarterly budget report due in three days—pressure-city, baby! No whiffs of electrically burned human flesh. No wondering whether I'd get iced before the tyke in Rachel's womb had his first Little League game or her first Suzuki recital."

Here's Jakubek on her way into court: "I was shouldering my way through a throng of drunks, wife-beaters, hookers, street-hustlers, first-offense (sure) shoplifters, and bar brawlers in the hallway outside Branch 2 of the City of Pittsburgh Municipal Court. I got the 'important' part [of Davidovich's message], but it wasn't as important to me as stalking a client, which is what had brought me to this Hogarthian hallway."

If I have any quibble at all (and what would a review be without a quibble?), I had some trouble keeping straight the names of all the players scattered through the text: Dany Nesselrode, Will Szulz, Proxeine Violet Shifcos, Grace Stannard Dalhousie, Jennifer Stannard Huggens, Sean McGeoghan (pronounced "McGuffin," an unfortunate choice if it makes the reader think of Alfred Hitchcock), Abigail Northanger, Alma von Leuthen, Andy Schuetz, Dan Quindel, Avrim Halkani, and more.

Nevertheless, the writing is so much fun the reader (this reader) is willing to make the effort to follow along. A paragraph like this makes up for a lot: "As he glanced to his left I thought Tally couldn't have looked more astonished if he'd seen ET peddling toward the sky on his bicycle. Couldn't blame him. Clarence Washington, in all of his tiny wispiness, five-feet-nothing and a hundred-twenty pounds soaking wet, was charging forward like a chihuahua with designs on raping a St. Bernard."

I'm not going to tell you what a Collar Robber is because it's key to the mystery. But if you want a fast-moving, entertaining novel starring two interesting characters, read the book to find out.

The Kindle Scout route for writers

Last October, Amazon introduced the Kindle Scout program, a "reader-powered" site for never-before-published books. The site says, "It's a place where readers help decide if a book receives a publishing contract." For writers, it works like this:

You submit your manuscript to Kindle Scout and accept the Submissions & Publishing Agreement. The work has to be complete—edited, copy-edited, with a title and cover image.

You write a one-liner of 45 or fewer characters. Mine is, "Dirty secrets turn deadly in a small town." You write a longer book description of 500 or fewer characters. For example, "It’s 1986, and Tommy Lovell’s dream restaurant has failed, taking his marriage with it. When a family friend asks for help saving his struggling store in a dying Massachusetts town, Tommy tags along with his dad, hoping for a bit of romance and a chance to fly his father’s Cessna. The friend’s midnight motorcycle ride ends in tragedy when he skids off the road. Accident? As father and son uncover theft and deception in the victim’s business, their suspicions put them in unexpected danger."

You submit a photo of yourself, write a short bio, and answer up to three questions like "What is the inspiration for the story?" "Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?" "Where can readers find out more about you?" The site supplies the questions.

And you provide social links to let readers know where they can learn more about you.

Once the Kindle staff has vetted your submission and you push the button, Kindle posts about 5,000 words and all the marketing material you've submitted. Over the next 30 days, readers (including as many friends and relatives as you can enlist) can nominate your book. At the end of the 30 days, "The Kindle Scout team makes the final call on which books are published by Kindle Press."

Why only 30 days? "We believe that authors should find out quickly if their book will be published through Kindle Press. We think 30 days is enough time for readers to scout new books but short enough so that authors aren't left waiting." Everyone who nominates your book receives a free copy if Kindle does publish it. So what's in it for writers?

Kindle Press authors receive a $1,500 advance and a 50% eBook royalty rate based on the retail price, which Kindle sets. It pays royalties monthly. While Kindle Press acquired worldwide publication rights for eBook and audio formats in all languages, authors retain all other rights—including print rights.

Because the program became active only early this year, there has not been much written about it. Victoria Strauss has a blog post with interesting comments. Katy Waldman wrote a column in Slate dissing one of the first Kindle Scout books, with the implication that quality is going to be an issue for the program. And Neal Wooten has written about his experience.

I am going to try it with my new novel, Death in a Family Business. From what I've been able to learn, the worst that can happen is nothing. The best, of course, is that Kindle Press picks up the book, publicizes it, and readers embrace it. I'll let you know what happens.

Pre-teen boys hide out in a Boston reform school

Aiden Sullivan and Charles Wheeler are 11 and 12 years old in Boston in 1889. Aiden, nominally Catholic, nominally Irish, has no father and a consumptive, dying mother. Charles, an orphan who has already done time for stealing a sandwich, is living by his considerable wits on the streets. They connect early and plausibly in Connie Hertzberg Mayo's fascinating new novel, The Island of Worthy Boys.

Mayo shows the boys' daily scramble to make enough money for food and, in Aiden's case, for rent to keep a tenament roof over his mother and little sister. Desperation finally pushes the boys into rolling drunken sailors on the waterfront, which works until it doesn't. One night, the drunk grabs Charles who has just opened the man's pocket knife, and, in horrible accident, plunges the knife into the man's gut. Worse, a woman happens out of an alley door, spots the boys, and cries havoc. Charles and Aiden now have to get out of Boston, but where?

With the connivance of a friendly whore and an accommodating minister, the boys pass themselves off as orphan brothers and are sent to the Boston Farm School on an island in Boston Harbor. That the school's policy not to accept boys with any kind of criminal record, which Charles has; that there is rampant anti-Irish feeling in Boston in the period, which means Aiden has to watch his accent; and that the school promotes a heavy Protestant Christian ethos to boys guilty of murder makes the island a refuge filled with tripwires.

At the same time, the school offers school, work, shelter, and regular meals. The book's middle section book dramatizes Aiden's and Charles's adjustment to school life as the reader knows this idyll is too good to last. As it is.

The Boston Farm School on Thompson Island in Boston Harbor was a real institution, and Charles Bradley, the superintendent of the school in the book, was in fact the superintendent from 1888 to 1922; his wife Mary was the school's matron. The school was finally closed in 1975.

Mayo has taken the basic factual information about the school and 1889 Boston society to create two engaging 12-year-olds in Aiden and Charles. The novel works so well I think because Mayo is able to evoke the times, the society, and the thought processes of the characters. We see the world through the eyes of Charles, Aiden, and Superintendent Bradley; they are all different, and they are all convincing, given who they are and what they want.

Although the two protagonists of The Island of Worthy Boys are pre-teen, which tends to cast a novel into the YA genre, I believe this is a book adults and young adults can find rewarding. Young people will be interested how Aiden and Charles fill their days in Boston, scrounging for pennies, and at the school, adjusting to life with 98 other boys. Adult readers will be interested in Mayo's evocation of 19th century assumptions about child raising, the era of "As the twig is bent, the tree will grow." Bradley turns out to be an unusually enlightened and kind reform school superintendent. I finished the book pleased and satisfied, and, perhaps more importantly, convinced that the lives Mayo has realized could have truly lived while the drama of their story carried me along.

Joyce Carol Oates's opinions are fascinating

Uncensored: Views & (Re)Views by Joyce Carol Oates is a collection of reviews and essays. It was published in 2005, and the works originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times and elsewhere between 1999 and 2004. The dates, however, are irrelevant. Oates' comments about Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather, Richard Yates, Ernest Hemingway, Balthus, and her reviews of books by William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Mary Karr among other are as interesting today as when they were published.

I picked the book up because I was curious to see what Oates had to say about these writers, to see if there are writers I ought to know more about (there are), and to improve my own ability to read and, ideally, to write. What does a working novelist and short story author like Oates have to say? What does she respond to in a book? What does she criticize—or feel does not work?

As a writer of fiction, I think about the challenges. How do you engage a reader? How do you create—invent, devise, fabricate, fashion, build, construct—living characters that are, after all, nothing but words on paper? How do you avoid rupturing the reader's willing suspension of disbelief, throwing her out of the story and tempting her to throw the book across the room?

The only way I know to answer questions like these is to learn what seems to work and what usually doesn't work in fiction. You can, I supposed, learn this on your own, but by doing so you are always limited by your own experiences, your own history, by what you are able to bring to and take from the text. A thoughtful reader like Joyce Carol Oates, with her history and her experience, can add alternative insights, ideas, and perspectives to your own.

One of the book's more interesting essays is "A Garden of Earthly Delights Revisited." Oates wrote the novel in 1965-66 (when she was in her late 20s) and had the opportunity to revise it in 2002. "As a composer can hear music he can't himself play on any instrument, so a young writer may have a vision he or she can't quiet execute; to feel something, however deeply, is not the same as possessing the power—the craft, the skill, the stubborn patience—to translate it into formal terms."

I have not done it (and considering the demands on my time, probably won't do it), but a fascinating exercise would be to compare the 1967 edition of A Garden of Earthly Delights to the 2002 edition. How often is it possible to compare a writer's early version of a novel with her mature edition? If you know of any others, please let me know.

A gay police chief has to solve a small town murder

Stephanie Gayle has attempted a difficult trick and, in my opinion, pulled it off: She has written Idyll Threats entirely in the voice of a gay, former New York homicide detective, Thomas Lynch, now the police chief in bucolic Idyll, Connecticut.

At the beginning of the book, Lynch is profoundly depressed. He has not recovered from the death of his partner and friend in New York City, a shooting that derailed Lynch's career, sending him off to rural Idyll. He's been the town's chief for seven months, seems to have learned almost nothing about

the town ("You could fit what I knew about this town into a shell casing"), has an arm's-length relationship with his officers, and is terrified they will learn he's gay.

One night, Lynch allows himself to be picked up by a local he's stopped for speeding. They go to a shack for their tryst but find it already in use by a young woman and an older man. Lynch's arrival in uniform destroys the couple's mood and his own enthusiasm for quick, uncommitted sex. Everyone heads home, presumably frustrated. The next morning, the local golf course's groundskeeper finds the young woman's body on the 9th green, four bullets in her.

Lynch now has a problem. If he tells his detectives he'd seen the girl shortly before she was killed, he'll have to tell them where and how he'd seen her. In the homophobic world of a small town police station in 1997, this is more than Lynch can face. He has to solve the murder without revealing his involvement.

Gayle can write a lively scene. She has a chapter in which Lynch interviews an elderly, somewhat dotty woman who has seen figures on the golf course the night of the killing. He tries to keep the lady on topic while fending off her horny Pomeranians. It's a hoot (and the information relevant).

She can also write a neat description: "His bare arms were a mosaic of bad tattoos. He even had a dancing hula girl. Her lips were crooked. When I looked closer. I saw that all of her was crooked. He deserved a refund for that tat." Or: "Inside, it looked like a science fair and a yard sale had mated." And: "I couldn't say more [to the parents of the dead girl]. Didn't dare. Hope is a terrible gift. The return policy is heartbreak."

While I had no problem with Lynch's homosexuality, I had a real problem at the beginning of the book with his decision to have sex with the guy he'd stopped for speeding. Chief! Okay, it's been months since you've had sex with anyone, but this is a small town, not New York City! It can only end badly!

As it does. Not only does the visit to the shack hobble the murder investigation (although, to be fair, Lynch could not have imagined that), but the guy he'd gone off with shows up mid-book with a speeding ticket and blackmails Lynch into tearing it up.

Once I had accepted Lynch's flawed judgment, however, I was willing to be carried along by his voice as he deals with past demons and current stresses. By the end of the book, while still unwilling to excuse his actions, I understood why he did what he did. All in all, I thought Idyll Threats an interesting first entry in what promises to be an entertaining series.

Nantucket Five-Spot: An interesting thriller, filled with plausible characters

Nantucket Five-Spot by Steven Axelrod is subtitled "A Henry Kennis Mystery," but it's more thriller than mystery because we know (or should know) at page 14 who the bad guy is. We just have to see how much mayhem he plans to cause on Nantucket island one summer at the height of the tourist season.

Henry Kennis, the narrator, is Nantucket's chief of police. (Axelrod thanks Nantucket Police Chief William Pittnam "for his continuing advice and support.") The book starts with a bang. In the first paragraph, Kennis and Franny Tate, a former love, are having a romantic dinner overlooking Nantucket harbor "when the first bomb went off."

Almost immediately, the island is overrun with state police, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Joint Terrorism Task Force agents as Kennis and his officers are elbowed aside for crowd control and "support."

Of course, Kennis and his staff know the island and the year-round residents—and the residents know their chief, an important factor. Indeed, Nantucket itself is virtually a character in a book filled with characters, and Axelrod's characters have strong feelings about the island's changing landscape (the second bomb partially destroys a nouveau country club).

As Kennis says about a careless driver, "That's something I hate. People who drive like that. Sometimes I want to arrest everyone—throw them all in jail, impound their cars and their cell phones and their computers and their TVs, and give their stupid McMansions which they use two week a year to the homeless people who need a roof over their heads."

Nantucket Five-Spot is satisfyingly complex with a pulse-raising conclusion. And, perhaps because Axelrod has an MFA in writing from Vermont College, the writing often crackles: "He was a slender man with lots of well-groomed blond hair framing his hawkish face, blue eyes set tight together, sharp nose, thin lips clinched around his indignation, sucking it like a sourball. He spoke with a slight southern accent...." Another example: "For some reason she reminded me of my daughter, soberly explaining that popping all the bubble wrap would make it easier to fit the plastic into the recycling can, when both of us knew she just wanted to do the firecracker dance."

For readers like myself who trip over foreshadowing, the novel did cause me to stumble once or twice: "Just how catastrophically, tragically, fatally bad that choice had been she was going to learn before the end of this close and humid summer day...." And as I wrote a moment ago, the story is complex with wheels within wheels that might put off some readers.

But on balance, I think Nantucket Five-Spot is an interesting thriller, filled with plausible characters, and a plot that edges right up to but never quite tips over into the preposterous.

Why every writer needs an editor

A couple posts ago, I showed a proof copy of my new novel with 22 yellow tabs that marked my editor's queries. This was a proof for a book that had gone through nine drafts, a thorough editing, a spell check, and four exceptionally careful first readers, all of whom found something to question or correct. By the time I uploaded the file to CreateSpace, I was confident the book was entirely clean. I was wrong.

I'm not going to cite all 22 queries, only enough to suggest why every writer needs an editor.

Every yellow tab a query

For example, in the sentence, "She sounded as if she would seriously consider, too...." the context requires an "it" after "consider."

The mystery takes place in 1986. To indicate the time, my narrator looks at a newspaper headline: "Apparent Attempt Made to Kill Indira Gandhi." Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984.

The setting is an appliance/TV retail store and in one place I described the avocado and harvest gold major appliances. By 1986 appliances were almond and white.

In the sentence, "I heard a woman in the stereo console display..." makes it sound as if she'
s part of the display.

A character says, "This business has been a fixture on North Street for more than fifty years...." Fifteen pages later another character uses the identical words. A hundred pages after that, a newspaper article uses the same words. No.

A character is Hanna in one place, Hannah every other place. A character works at Dunkin' Donuts sometimes and at Dunkin Donuts—without the apostrophe—other times. (Dunkin' Donuts is correct.)

The sentence "I figured things weren't going well at the Jonkers..." has one too many words: "the."

The sentence "Are there any any questions?" has one too many "any."

The sentence "Like she made his was too dark" is missing something; it should be, "Like she made his coffee too dark."

Listed like this, these flaws are obvious. Hiding in a 70,000-word book, they're easy to miss. No one of them changes the setting, the characters, or the plot in any way. I believe most readers, caught up in the story, will skip right over them. Some readers, however, will see them and be taken out of the story momentarily—the last thing I want.

I want my readers to be immersed in the story, not distracted by avoidable glitches. And that's why every writer needs an editor.

A simple witness to a satisfyingly complex story

On page 2 of Bob Siqveland's Simple Witness, Jethro Plack—a very bad man—murders a young woman in a Minneapolis parking garage. It's Jethro's bad luck that one Harold Bartz, aka Bandit—not the sharpest tool in the shed—witnesses the killing. Jethro does catch Bandit's truck license number, however, and the game's afoot.

Bandit, smart enough to realize he's in danger but, rather than going to the cops with what he's seen, lights out for Las Vegas. Vegas turns out to be a city of opportunity for Bandit and he induces two other dim Minneapolis friends to join him. But not before the friends inadvertently revealed Bandit's new address to Jethro who sends two Russian hit men clean up his mess. These sections are more like Laurel and Hardy go look for Larry, Moe, and Curly than Raymond Chandler or Elmore Leonard.

Jethro's telemarketing business is a beard for his very lucrative internet scam which announces that You have WON the Fortune Fate Lottery with a £5,250,00 prize. "The notice was official-looking with lots of numbers, references, and instructions." The instructions were signed by Sir George Bedford in London. To claim the prize, the winner had to send £2,460 to "offset costs of processing your winnings, which include all account openings handling, insurance, transfer, and mailing charges."

So while the Minneapolis cops are investigating the murder, a St. Paul cop begins looking into the internet scam. Simple Witness's short chapters move from Minneapolis to Las Vegas to St. Paul to London and back, and they shift in point of view from Jethro to Bandit to Sean O'Dell, a St. Paul police lieutenant, to Tommy Ling, one of Jethro's minions in London. Because the chapters are short and Siqveland's writing is clear, however, the reader is able to follow all the skulduggery.

I thought Simple Witness was unusually entertaining. I also found Bandit and his two friends unconvincing, but I think it's difficult to write convincingly about characters with limited mental abilities. Finally, Jethro Plack is pure, unmitigated evil, and I think that's always a problem. Aside from ripping off gullible Americans who believe they've won a Fortune Fate Lottery, Plack enjoys causing women pain. He's a sicko and, as such, not that interesting as a character. He and the other bad people deserve what happens to them in the end.

Why you want to check your proof

When I finished the ninth draft of my mystery, Death in a Family Business, and an editor had gone through the manuscript with me I formatted the pages to look as they would appear in the finished book—single-spaced, 11-point type, white space on chapter beginnings—and printed a copy. I took those pages to a Staples store and had the staff print four double-sided, comb-bound copies, which I sent to my beta readers.

Every tab is a query to address.

I wanted my beta-readers to experience a book rather than a manuscript. They found typos, missing words, at least one anachronism (the book is set in 1986 by which time avocado kitchen appliances were passe), redundancies, and a couple continuity problems. (Another reason to format the pages: you need to know how many pages the book will have to allow enough space for the spine.)

I made the changes, uploaded the corrected, formatted file to CreateSpace, and ordered a proof copy. Although CreateSpace recommends authors check the proof online and with a hard copy, I didn't think it was really necessary. My book might have one or two typographical flaws, but after nine drafts and the eyes of four exceptionally assiduous readers what could be left?

A lot. Reading a printed book is a different experience from reading a manuscript or formatted pages in an 8x10 binder. My in-house editor, reading the proof copy, pasted a yellow tab for every correction, question, or suggestion. Missing little words, doubled words, and inconsistencies between the spelling of a name in the beginning of the book and the end. All tiny flaws that many readers will miss, but flaws nonetheless.

I will make the changes, upload the revised (and improved!) pages, and order another proof.