Miss Demeanors

Writing: It’s A Team Sport

January 10, 2017 Robin C. Stuart Uncategorized

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?

Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

January 9, 2017 Robin C. Stuart Uncategorized

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!

Who are we?

January 6, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

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?

Medieval dogs

January 4, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

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.)

Second chances

January 4, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

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?

Candy! Candy!

January 3, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

The protagonist of my new mystery is a woman who likes to eat candy bars. (Don’t ask me how I know. I do.) She’s the sort of person who keeps a candy bar in her pocketbook for times when she has low blood sugar. She’s the sort of person who has a favorite candy bar, and I have spent a great deal of time, energy and calories trying to figure out which particular candy bar that would be. I was going to go with a classic. M&Ms. I like them myself, but I thought there were too many of them. For my purposes, I needed something you could take a big bite out of. Skittles were also out, for that reason and also because they took on political connotations I didn’t like. Butterfingers were too crunchy, Milky Bars too soft. Then I stumbled across the Take Five bar. It’s an intriguing candy. First of all, it has a jumble of flavors: pretzel, caramel, peanut, peanut butter and milk chocolate. My protagonist is definitely a person who likes jumbles. She mushes her food (I think). She likes jumbles of people too. In fact, one of the things that gets her in trouble is that she befriends everyone. It’s also a candy bar that has never done as well for Hershey as the big guns: Kisses and Peanut butter cups. The Take Five bar flies under the radar, sort of like my protagonist. And it’s quite tasty. As I discovered from eating a lot of them. This one small detail helped me discover so much about my protagonist. I love the way that happens when you’re writing. It’s like a puzzle. One small details builds on another and bit by bit a complete character emerges. In this case, she’s someone who I like quite a bit. How about you? Do you have a favorite candy bar?

Acceptance

December 30, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

Every New Year’s I make a resolution to improve myself in some way or another. I will be more productive, more focused, more ambitious and so on. But this year, I concluded that if I haven’t changed by now, I’m probably not going to. And all I’m going to succeed in doing is make myself feel guilty, which I already do enough. So this year I decided to accept what I am. And what I am is a slob. My desk is cluttered with papers, books, pictures of dogs, notes from people I love, notes from my agent with advice, tissues, water bottles, an icon my son brought me from Russia, dog treats, post-it notes, and books. I’d like to say there’s order to this madness, but having just spent half an hour looking for an important bit of information that I found under a chair, I doubt it. What there is, though, is energy. My office feels alive to me. When I walk in, I feel like I’m jumping into a stream of running water. Periodically I do clean it, and then I feel very virtuous, and then I sit down and write and darned if I know how it happens, but by the time I stand back up, it’s a mess again. But you know what? It works. How about you? Is there anything you’ve come to accept about yourself this New Year?

Fitting Reading into a Writing Schedule

December 30, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”–Stephen King If anyone can speak authoritatively on what’s required to be a writer, it’s prolific Stephen King. I found his book “On Writing” to be an enlightening mix of craft instruction and autobiography and I have admired his work since first sneaking a collection of his short stories from my parents’ bookshelf as an eight-year-old. I agree with his point on reading. Writers must read other books in their genre to understand what is working and why (and what isn’t). And, we need to read writers that we admire in order to push ourselves and elevate our own craft. Finding time, however, is a challenge. I don’t read when I am writing. I am too concerned about unconsciously adopting aspects of characters that I like or another author’s cadence. In between edits is when I devour books, particularly those in the genre of my upcoming novels so I have a sense of how my book will fit with and, most importantly, bring something new, to the cannon. I have a couple weeks until I get my new edit back and I am trying to read a book every other day. It’s been a fun week filled with great psychological thrillers. I’ve read The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena, Little Pretty Things by Lori Radar Day, The Good Girl by Mary Kubica, Summer House Swimming Pool by Herman Koch. Now onto The Girls by Emma Cline. When do you fit reading into your writing schedule?

The Danger Of Too Much Truth In Fiction

December 29, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

Thriller writers must be careful about being too honest about the extent of human depravity lest we be accused of unbelievability. In truth, human beings are capable of far more horrific behaviors than most of us thriller authors could ever write about. Today, for example, I read a story in the Washington Post about people who brutally murdered a former friend for allegedly attempting to steal their marijuana smoking device. The brothers presumed responsible made the victim consume kitty litter before posting photos of the brutal attack on snapchat, an online messaging platform. If I had a villain who I had not established was a psychopath or drug syndicate enforcer perpetrate a similar crime, I’d certainly be accused of taking too much license. How could readers believe that individuals, not under the influence of some psychosis-inducing PCP-type drug, would be so horrible to another human being, especially a person they had liked enough to invite into their home? In my last book, The Widower’s Wife, a few readers took issue with a character sneaking back into America via a cruise ship. They said that coming into the U.S. without papers couldn’t possibly be that easy and that human smugglers wouldn’t have acted in the way that I portrayed. I had gotten much of my information for that part of the book from a New York Times expose in the 90s called “Loophole At The Pier” in which human smugglers did what I described. To satisfy these readers, I should have probably made sneaking in seem more treacherous than it actually was according to well-respected news sources. What do you think? Has truth ever been stranger than your fiction?

New Cover: Lies She Told

December 27, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

Catcher In The Rye, The Bluest Eye, Crime and Punishment, Middlesex, Gone Girl, The Dinner, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Lovely Bones… these are some of my favorite books. The authors, styles, and genres are all different. But, they have one thing in common: though I could write the Sparknotes for all these stories, I cannot recall their covers. I don’t mean to suggest that cover art isn’t important. It is. Before a book browser picks up a novel and reads the riveting pitch on the inside flap or the praise from well known writers and critical publications, he or she needs to take the work off a shelf. I write this to underscore that I have no business deciding what my own cover should look like. I deal in character arcs and plot structures, red herrings and twists, research and, even, social commentary. I am not best qualified to pick the single image that will evoke my story and also beckon a reader from across the room. Not surprisingly, I had very little to do with the covers on my prior two books and had about the same amount of input on this one. My publisher has changed all my working titles as well. That’s fine by me. Marketing is not my forte. So, all that said, here is the cover of my upcoming book. I hope people like it. I do. Though if you do, I can’t take any credit.