What's in a title?

 A title is critical to convey the content of a novel. For me, this can be the hardest part of the process. I suppose there are ah ha moments when the perfect title jumps to the forefront of your mind. Often, it’s a matter of thinking of the themes or phrases in the book and elevating them to ‘title’ status. Since the title is the first thing someone will read it is critical. Some strategies to use in creating your title: – is the setting of the novel critical (my first mystery is titled Swiss Vendetta because of the location) -can you use the name of a character? (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Jane Eyre) -a catchy word or phrase (that’s where Gone with the Wind and Game of Thrones both got their titles) -a clever way to connect a series (Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich did this with letters and numbers) Titles aren’t copyrighted so it’s possible that there are multiples, check and see if there are others with the same name. Pick something memorable. One word can do the trick but a good phrase is equally suggestive (To Kill a Mockingbird). Remember is that a title should represent the book at a glance. It is a headline; the first call for attention. Make it memorable, but also make it honest. 

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Manuscript submittal aka euphoria

 Twenty four hours of joy. That’s what happens when you turn your manuscript in to your editor. Or at least that’s what I experienced. It is possible that the joy is actually fatigue. I know for certain that for these few hours I am no longer worrying about it, wondering if I should have added/cut/modified/reworked or any of the other things that went through my head this past week. I expect this fragile euphoria will last about a day (during this day I have so many other things to catch up on that I won’t have time to worry, but that’s another story). Then what? Revisions!!! Even as I think about it, I’m a little bit gleeful. The as yet untitled ‘baby’ will have been out there in the big world and there will be a response. Reworking, refining, polishing (completely restructuring – slight shudder here)…. These are exciting times. Because next comes publication. I’m sure that over the course of today I will slump and start to question every bit of the manuscript from plot to characters to the font style (even though it’s the standard Times New Roman). The only thing that will keep me going is the fact that soon, hopefully very soon, I’ll get that much sought after feedback and can get back to work. How did you feel after you hit ‘send/submit’?

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Distraction or Inspiration?

Years ago I met Dean Koontz at one of his book signings. He was and remains one of my literary heroes. As a fledgling thriller author I had a burning question for him. “Do you listen to music when you write?” He looked startled and fixed his darker-than-dark eyes on me. “Wow,” he said. “No one has ever asked me that.” The answer was yes. In fact, he chose a single album per manuscript and played it repeatedly as he wrote. It became the rhythm of the book. For example, when he wrote Sole Survivor, he told me, the accompanying soundtrack was Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” I listened to that album when I read Sole Survivor to see if I could match songs to passages. It doesn’t work that way, of course. Writing a book takes heck of lot longer than reading one. But I’ve listened to music while I write ever since. These days, it’s my iTunes library on shuffle unless I need an extra push to inspire a darker mood than my eclectic pop/jazz/dance/country/80’s/R&B/insert-genre-here tastes run. At such times, I listen to movie scores. Thrillers, of course.  So, my fellow Miss Demeanors, what do you listen to while you write? Cate: I try to listen to music the puts me in the mood of my characters at various points. For my third book, Lies She Told, this was my playlist: All That She Wants: Ace of BaseBack Door Man: The DoorsWhat Kind of Man: Florence and The MachineFire: Bruce SpringsteenEverybody’s Got The Right To Love: The SupremesWerewolf: Fiona AppleJanie’s Got A Gun: AerosmithYou Know I’m No Good: Amy WinehouseSamson: Regina SpektorI Told You I Was Mean: Elle KingFast as You Can: Fiona AppleYouth: DaughterStone Cold Crazy: QueenWith A Little Help From My Friends: Joe CockerPsycho Killer: Talking Heads Tracee: Great questions Robin! I definitely listen to music! I have a long playlist that is background music, often played so low it is barely audible. What I find interesting is that I usually don’t notice it, but if I accidentally hit shuffle and the songs are in the ‘wrong’ order then it’s a distraction. When I really need to focus I listen to the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. Otherwise, my playlist is eclectic: Mumford and Sons, U2, Imagine Dragons, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Carrie Underwood, Eagles, Adele, Coldplay, and much more… including a recent addition. k.d. lang’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. That one I still turn up and listen to full throttle. Paula: I have my playlists organized by genre/emotion/audience: romance, country, dance, creativity, meditation, happiness, poignancy, sweet dreams, etc., and for my bad days, f–k you. Note: For whatever reason, this f–k you playlist is the one my fellow writers most often request that I share with them. Go figure.I play whichever playlist suits the scene I’m writing–and if it’s something special, I just create a new playlist. When I’m stuck, I play my OM playlist, which is a combination of kirtan, gregorian chants, and classical music. That always gets me either to the computer or to the yoga mat…and then to the computer. Susan: I can’t listen to anything. I need complete (musical) silence to write. It doesn’t bother me if my neighbors’ are doing construction, but put on Sibelius and my mind goes dead. Alexia: I can’t listen to music while I write. I end up enjoying the music too much and paying more attention to it than to my writing. Mendelssohn is the one exception. I can write with Mendelssohn playing quietly. Usually, I either write in silence or with a quiet buzz of human voices running in the background like white noise. Michele: Put me under the column of writers who don’t/can’t listen to music while I write. I find I am so deeply and sometimes unconsciously influenced emotionally by music that it affects my writing in unintended ways. I like either total silence or the sounds of nature (birds, waves, wind, etc.). I’ve learned I love to write outdoors. It’s not that I don’t love music. Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli can make me weep, even though I can’t understand the lyrics. Dave Matthews gets me out of my seat. Simon and Garfunkel have been favorites since I was a kid and bring up lots of memories. I walked down the aisle to Scarborough Fair. I love Irish music. Harps kill me. Piano and violin move me. But all of these reactions to music tend to muddle what I’m writing. I must say I am fascinated by how my fellow Miss Demeanors intentionally use music to set their moods. I may try it.I am writing this while my daughter’s two kittens are practically sitting on my keyboard, purring like a feline orchestra. My mood is definitely influenced. I want to read a cozy. How about you, dear reader? Do you listen to music while you write?  

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Throwback Thursday

I love typewriters. My mother had one that she bought while she was in college. I found it in a closet when I was little and she let me play with it. It was a sexy, teal green Smith Corona number, complete with a tan leatherette carrying case. Tres moderne, for its time. It weighed about 10 pounds. I loved feel of the keys and the satisfying clackity-clack as the arms smacked the ribbon to stamp out letters. I even loved the smell of the ink-drenched ribbon. As a tiny girl, I mimicked what I saw my mother do when she typed out articles for the local newspaper. I climbed up in her chair and whacked random keys to fill up blank pages with combinations of letters that looked like words. When I learned to read, I graduated to the 2-3 finger hunt-and-peck method to write 1-3 page stories where ghosts haunted castles but nothing much happened. In junior high, I took a typing class and learned to unleash 100+ words a minute. My stories got a little livelier and a little longer. Computers came along and I never looked back. Over the years my keyboards have gotten smaller and sleeker while my stories got longer and “bigger” (thrillers = big stakes). But I still have a place in my heart for typewriters. On my desk is a 3-dimensional perpetual calendar. It’s a doghouse with Snoopy on top, hunched over a black typewriter. Friends give me postcards with noir-ish black & white photos of typewriters. And today, someone I hadn’t seen since early December gave me a little something he found during his holiday travels. He handed me a gift-wrapped bookmark that’s a cutout of a vintage typewriter, pictured here. I love it! How about you, have you ever used a typewriter?  

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Writing: It’s A Team Sport

I mentioned people yesterday. Let’s talk more about that. We’ve all heard what a singular endeavor writing can be, shuttered away in a dark corner with just your imagination and your preferred implements for putting thoughts on paper. I bought into that image for a while. Then I asked a friend with an impressive list of non-fiction credits to her name for advice. What should I do once I had a completed manuscript that I thought was pretty good? “Test it out. Workshop it at writers’ conferences,” she said. That turned out to be darned good advice. Life-changing, in fact. Finding the right conferences introduced me to the difference between writing for myself and writing commercial fiction. Both are fine, of course. But the latter was my goal and there’s nothing lonely about it. Yes, it’s my butt in the chair creating characters and weaving their stories. However, I learned very quickly commercial writing is a team effort. Agents, editors, publishers, publicists, mentors, writing groups, and, the crown jewels: readers. At writers’ conferences, you get to meet and mingle with them all. Take a look at the photo in this post. I snapped it while attending a recent conference. It illustrates my point. Agents dance with writers they may or may not have previously known or represent. Aspiring authors chat with best sellers. My favorite part is the table in the foreground. An author pitches an editor over dessert. She’s a writer after my own heart. I know she got some great advice. This photo reveals the beauty of writers’ conferences. They’re what you make of them. Finding your tribe. Meeting your heroes. Being mentored by industry professionals. All opportunities of a lifetime. If you’re serious about writing for the commercial market, go. Period. This is the perfect time of year to start planning your conference schedule for 2017. Which ones are you most interested in attending?  

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Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Don’t know why, but I’ve had the song “Sympathy for the Devil” stuck in my head for days. Hence the title to this post. It seemed fitting because this is my first blog as a Miss Demeanor. So, hi. You may wondering why someone with a non-fiction credit is on a crime fiction blog. Well, in addition to my day job of fighting electronic crime, I write cyber crime thrillers. You just haven’t read them yet. I’m currently revising what I hope will be my debut novel. Soon it goes off to my development editor for a sanity check before I hand it over to my agent. Then I’ll concentrate on another work-in-progress, a YA cyber crime thriller. Writers write, and I’m no exception. It makes me happy and I seem to be pretty good at it. Speaking of agents, I joined the lovely and talented Paula Munier’s stable of clients at Talcott Notch in 2016. That’s one big hurdle down and an accomplishment I celebrated like I’d just made the NYT best seller list. Did I get a rockstar literary agent by luck? Or because I knew someone who knew someone? Nope. Passion got me started, hard work, dedication to the craft, and persistence got me this far. I do know people now, and continue to meet people, which is a fun part of the process. And their friendship and mentoring helped/helps a lot. Among these people are my fellow Miss Demeanors. I’m grateful to my new sisters in crime fiction for inviting me to the party. I look forward to doing you all proud. So what brings you here? Feel free to introduce yourself in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!  

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Who are we?

The Miss Demeanors have a new look on our web site.  I love it. It seems mysterious, glamorous and maybe a little dangerous. Sort of like Myrna Loy. None of those words actually describe me, but a person can dream! Anyway, thinking about that made me wonder how my fellow Miss Dismeanors would describe themselves and our group. We’re all mystery writers. We’re all represented by the fabulous Paula Munier. But we’re all quite different too. We write different types of mysteries, for example. We’re living different sorts of lives. So what one word describes us?Here are the answers I received: Alexia: Cool. Women writing crime. What’s cooler than that? Cate:Brave. There is an honesty in fiction, a need for the writer to lay bare her true impressions and observations about human nature from beneath the thin veil of character. Putting yourself out there demands a certain amount of chutzpah. Michele:Dynamic. I am amazed at how much living my fellow Miss Demeanors crowd into life. They are either scooting off to Switzerland, Ireland, or New Orleans, or they are launching new books, even while they raise kids, work as physicians, writing teachers, etc. There is an energy beaming within and radiating from my blog mates. I admit when I’m feeling a tad depleted, I’ll go back to some earlier posts to borrow a little of their energy.  Paula:Persistent. Not a very glamorous trait, but one of the most important if you want to succeed as a writer, or as anything else. Publishing can be a tough business, and the bar is high, and the road to success can be long, but all of us have endured. We’ve learned that the “write, revise, repeat” mantra is the only one that really works. We keep on writing and revising and repeating. We persist. And so we publish.  Robin:Paula beat me to the first word that came to mind. The hazard of being in the latest time zone of the team 🙂 So I’ll say diverse. While we’re all women who write crime fiction, each of us incorporate our unique views and life experiences across multiple subgenres in fun and different ways.  Tracee:Engaged. With everything… their writing, families, blog colleagues, and other members of the writing community. And they still have time for friends, church, teaching, politics….oh, and yes, day jobs. What I admire is how each part of their lives gets the full focus when on deck.  I’ll round if off by saying “friends,” because I think that’s what we’ve become along this journey.How about you? What word one describes yourself?       

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Medieval dogs

 While doing research on my new mystery, I came across a completely irrelevant bit of information that I found charming. It was in a lecture by historian Toni Mount on medieval nuns. The lecture started off interesting, and then she began talking about wayward nuns. Immediately I was more interested. Then she started talking about wayward nuns and their dogs. I was hooked. Nuns were allowed to keep cats, evidently, because they took care of the mice. But they were not supposed to have dogs, because they served no purpose!!! Of course these medieval nuns led a very difficult life. They prayed and worked constantly, and with little human affection, and so it’s not surprising that they became passionately attached to little dogs, so much so that they would sneak them into church. At one point a bishop had to pass an injunction against bringing dogs and puppies into the choir, Mount points out. For those who were caught, in one particular parish, there was a punishment: the nun had to fast on bread and water on one Saturday. (A small price to pay, I suspect.)  I spend a fair amount of time holed up with my dogs. Being a 21st century writer is not quite like being a medieval  nun, but there is a fair amount of solitary work, and I am up early, and I felt like learning about their dogs gave me a richer understanding of who they were. On such small details are stories built! (If the course sounds interesting, you can find it at www.medeivalcourses.com.)

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Second chances

  As I go teetering into advanced middle age, I’m more and more conscious of the fact there’s a surprising amount of fun yet to be had. Instead of sitting around waiting for one of my children to produce a grandchild (not that that wouldn’t be a good thing!), I’m cavorting with the Miss Demeanors, going to conferences, discovering new drinks, writing an exciting new novel, getting into trouble, planning to march in Washington. In fact, I’m doing things I didn’t do when I was young because I worried too much about repercussions.  Or because I was exhausted.    One of the things I like about the protagonist of my mystery series, Maggie Dove, (I hope it’s okay that I like her!) is that she’s given me a chance to explore more deeply what getting a second chance means. It’s scary for Maggie. She’s set in her ways. She’s found a safe place  and doesn’t want to emerge from it, and yet, when she’s forced to come out of her shell, to solve a murder, she loves it. She becomes a Sunday School hellraiser, if such a thing is possible.  A person who has been a great second-chance role model to me is the great First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She started off her life being a certain sort of person. A debutante, a society wife, a political wife. But then her husband got polio and everything in her life turned upside down. Although she was shy and insecure about her looks, she had to step out onto the political stage. She was a great advocate for women’s and civil rights during FDR’s presidency, and after he died, she continued as a diplomat. She also wrote a fabulous memoir, This is My Story. It’s one of my favorite books.  How about you? Are there any role models who inspire you?     

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