Losing yourself in a fictional world

Writers should read--seems a simple enough thing. I learn a lot by reading other writers' mysteries--they give me ideas, they make me think of things I could do in my books, and they reveal some things I seriously want to avoid. But I don't read much these days--it's partly a matter of time and partly, as I think I've said before, that it's hard for me to move from one fictional world to another. So when I'm writing, I rarely read--though it would probably do me good to read non-fiction.
The last few days I've been caught up in novels--Julie Hyzy's Grace Takes Off, which smoothly does something I've worried about: she takes a series character out of her normal setting, at least for part of the novel. I've wondered--can I send Kelly out of Fairmount on a trip? I may just do it when I get back to the work in progress. Now I'm in the midst of The Little Black Book of Murder, by Nancy Martin, who has created the wackiest ever blueblood family of sisters from Bucks County, now fallen on hard times. Watch for a review, but it too is a good read, and I'm stealing time to go back to it. And thoroughly enjoying losing myself in someone else's fictional world.
I did take time to cook today, which always relaxes me--German potato salad, which will have hot dogs in it, for tomorrow night. I'll serve corn and baked cabbage--shh! Don't tell my guests about the latter. Cooked cabbage is coming back into vogue but some people may not react well. I changed the menu partly because one of the guests said he loves spinach salad, doesn't eat cooked spinach (I had a delicious dish of polenta with cooked spinach in mind). But I also changed because I'm pushing hot dog ideas in order to publicize Danger Comes Home, with its Bun Appetit haute cuisine hot dog café, and I need a picture of this dish for a blog. At least the appetizers--Gouda and crackers--and the dessert--ice cream with raspberry appertif/chocolate sauce--should be hits.

For myself tonight I made an abbreviated version of salade Nicoise--with hard-boiled egg, avocado, roasted green beans, and Tonnino tuna packed in garlic olive oil. Tonnino is a brand of tuna I've just discovered (and my pocketbook wishes I hadn't)--several interesting varieties, like one packed in olive oil with oregano. For tonight's salad, I sprinkled it with capers, drizzled a bit of the oil from the tuna over it, added a bit of salt and pepper, and squeezed lemon juice over all. So good. Sometimes it's fun to make an elegant meal just for you. First time I've roasted green beans, and they were great.
Happy weekend, everyone.

One of those miscellaneous posts

A good friend of mine is in crisis tonight, and it's hit me hard. In fact, sometimes I think she's calmer about it than I am. But I take life changes in those I care about seriously. Maybe it's the mother hen in me, the natural instinct to nurture. If I ever again take one of those personality profiles, I'm sure it will show that I'm a nurturer--from emotional support to feeding people. So tonight I'm doing both, but the pain of people I care about is weighing heavily on me. Then again, that's what you do for friends.
I frittered the day away--took me three hours this morning to run errands that should not have taken that long. Two grocery stores, the post office--okay, that always takes a while and I had to buy mailers and address them, then wait in line. The Dollar Store where I bought some kind of weird Star Wars puzzle for Jacob--it's called a lenticular puzzle. Close as I can figure it looks like a hologram--if you turn the box one way it's one thing, turn it another and the picture changes. Its virtue is that it's a 12x9 puzzle with 100 pieces which means to me that the pieces are bigger. The bargain $1.00 puzzle I bought had 500 teeniny pieces--both Jacob and I were overwhelemed. I think he'll like this better.
We are inundated with statistics, warnings, and advice about mosquitoes and West Nile viirus. Mosquitoes don't seem to bite me much if at all, but they love Jacob, so I keep spray with Deet on hand, much as I hate it. I also have one bit of standing water--an air conditioner drip line or something--that I can't do away with, so I bought some Bti that was harmless to dogs. Put a little bit in the water and now I can't find the rest of the package. So I went to the hardware to get more; they were out and offered an alternative but it said not for drinking water. Didn't want to take a chance. Sometimes it's hard to be a good citizen!
After all that I spent most if not all of the afternoon reading and napping. Tonight I finished No Way to Kill a Lady by Nancy Martin--latest in a series I thoroughly enjoy. But without that to tempt me, perhaps I'll get back to the chili manuscript tomorrow. Though I do have to make potato salad for Monday night and probably will go to church. And my next reading venture will be a contemporary mystery that spins off Jane Austen's work. I've wondered about the various contemporary adaptations of Austen, so I'm glad for a chance to read and review one.
And that's my day. Lazy, comfortable, with a constant twinge of grief...and my ever-present conscience is telling me it wasn't productive. Oh, I did finish one guest blog and send it off. A small whittle-down in my stack of things I must do.

Books and Cooks

I seem to be in the mood for zany lately, but here are some books I've truly enjoyed. I think I've read all of the Blackbird sisters series by Nancy Martin (Murder Melts in Your Mouth, A Crazy Little Thing Called Death, Have Your Cake and Kill Him Too, and others). The sisters are zany beyond belief, as are the circumstances of their life. But the main sister, Nora, fall in love with the son of a New Jersey mobster, an alliance deemed absolutely unfitting in view of the sisters blueblood if impoverished status. The on-again-off-again state of the love affair provides a thread throughout the series, but like many amateur sleuth heroines, Nora keeps running into murder after murder--many lead her into danger, from which she is rescued by her mobster boyfriend. All great reading. I emailed Nancy Martin to tell her how much I enjoyed the series and learned to my regret that she is moving on to a new series. But you can find most of them on Kindle, and Martin has a Kindle page.
I just finished the book I was reviewing for Story Circle Network--Ann B. Ross' Miss Julia Renews Her Vows. It's the gentlest of cozy myteries, no murder, no perilous situations (besides great embarrassment) but some serious stuff--a young woman wrongly accused of theft and assault, the heroine's marriage in jeopardy or so she thinks, a smooth-talking, self-promoting marriage enrichment counselor. Through it all Miss Julia (really Mrs. Sam Murdoch) remains charming, slightly ditzy, very southern, cleverly scheming, refined (thought she hints at matters of the flesh), and absolutely charming. After beginning hesitantly, I dove into the novel and tonight sent off my review. Look for it on amazon (maybe) or Story Circle Network Book Reviews, though I don't know when it will be posted.
For those of you who don't know, Cooks' Illustrated is a magazine and a book resulting from kitchen research. The cooks try dozens of methods of cooking one thing, then tell you which is best and what was wrong with the others. They also test products the same way--cocoa, ketchup, you name it, they've probably done it. And yes, they have a TV show--on PBS I think. For some time (years) I've had their best recipe for roast beef in my "Never Tried" file, so this weekend I decided to try it and bought a 4 lb. top sirloin roast. I doubt Jacob and I will make a dent in it tomorrow night, but I had been wanting some lunch meat around and I really don't like the prepackaged kind.
The recipe involves something my mom used to do--inserting slivers of garlic into the roast. But it's much more complicated than Mom's version. You roast the garlic, unpeeled, then peel and insert the slivers. Then rub a mix of salt, thyme, and more garlic all over the roast and let is sit, uncovered, in the fridge overnight--which is where it is now. It's not the first recipe I've found recently that calls for meat to be uncovered--I think I recently did a roast chicken that way, though it was always a no-no to me. Tomorrow, I'll brown it in a high oven, then rub a garlic/oil paste on it and bake. It should come out rare, which will make Jordan stick it in the microwave if she eats the leftovers. But it sounds really good, and of course I like experimenting.  I may even see what Jacob does with corn on the cob.

The problem of voice in fiction

I was about 10,000 words into a new novel and a bit stymied when I put it aside for other projects--some office work for the press, an editing project for another press, some book reviews, and life in general which, happily, always gets in my way. During that time I read a couple of mysteries by Nancy Martin about the Blackbird sisters, who are zany beyond belief and lots of fun. Aha, I thought--see light bulb going off in my head?--I need to make my characters funnier, more zany (like that word). So this week I've gotten back to the novel and guess what? My characters have told me they don't want to be zany. The grandmother who raised them has just died suddenly, possibly under suspicious circumstances, her inheritance is at stake, and each of the twin sisters has an agenda--their agendas don't come anywhere near meeting. Besides, at three o'clock one morning I figured out who murdered Gram and why, and I could see the whole novel in my head. Well, sort of. It's a long way between 10,000 words and 80,000.
But it's a truism of fiction, repeated to me by many successful authors, that if you listen to your characters, they'll tell you what's going to happen. Elmer Kelton talked of it with The Wolf and the Buffalo, a novel he intended to be about a buffalo soldier, freed slave, just after the Civil War. But a Comanche chief kept working his way into the story, and eventually the novel was about both--one on the rise in the army and the other losing his way of life and his culture. Elmer also said the characters in The Good Old Boys took over like a "cold-jawed horse grabbing on to the bit and about all I could do was hang on for the ride." I've even had it happen to me, notably in Mattie where as I neared the end I was astonished to realize that the man in her life was going to ride away and leave her (it also proved to be a forecast of the man in my life at the time).
Point of all this: I'm not writing a humorous cozy. Yes, it's a cozy, but the characters, while sometimes light-hearted and fun and even rebellious, aren't zany. I guess that's just not my voice.
I talked with my agent today, an encouraging talk--he has sent my manuscript to his top four picks (I forgot to ask when) but he said the good news is that he hasn't had a rejection yet. We also talked about getting some of my older books into e-book format for all the different platforms out there--not much money in that, but I think the name recognition would be good.
Thanks to the anonymous reader who posted a comment about yestrday's blog and how our children are statistically mch safer today than years ago. It's just that the media focuses on every kidnapping, every case of bullying, etc. I'm sure it's true, but I'm still a bit worried about my grandchildren. But I want to thank the reader, whoever, for adding that nice comment about my children. Yes, they are indeed wonderful. And that blog sparked a long Facebook conversation with an old friend I never see any more--fun!

Cliche characters and situations

Today on a blog I read an interview with a seasoned mystery writer--been at it 30 years--who said she created her new series featurig a tough woman with a salvage business (read junk yard) because she thought she'd scream if she read one more mystery about a sweet woman sleuth with a cat and a cop for a boyfriend and a meddling mother. Ooops! She just described Skeleton in a Dead Space, which my agent is trying right now to market. Well, Kelly Jones isn't sweet--she's pretty savvy, and she's a harried real estate agent trying to raise two little girls (I think they're the best characters in the story). No cat, but she does acquire a cop as a boyfriend during the course of the novel--and a dog. The blog is making me think outside the box and go back to that series I started on the Blue Plate Cafe.
I was particularly interested to read Martin's comments because I'd just discovered her Blackbird Sisters series, read two (just finished Dead Girls Don't Wear Diamonds tonight), and found them delightfully different, funny, and suspenseful. The Blackbird sisters are about the wackiest trio I've found in fiction recently.
I've been thinking for some time how frustrating I find mysteries in which the protagonist deliberately, for less than believable reasons, cuts herself off from the man in her life--she distrusts him, or she thinks she can't share her secret knowlege about the mystery with him, or she just erects some barrier between them. You just want to shake the woman or scream at her to be sensible. It's a great device for drawing out the plot, but it's a trap I hope I avoided, at least to some extent. Talk about cliches!
Thunderstorms in North Texas tonight. I just got Scooby in before they started--he is terrified by them, and I didn't want to have to try to dry him off--he won't stand still for having his feet toweled, so I have him dance around on some old rugs I put by the back door. But now we're both snug in the study and listening to the rain. Good for all those plants that Greg put in yesterday.