Guest Blogger - Vicki Delaney

The victim in the latest Constable Molly Smith novel, Winter of Secrets, was not a nice person.

Did he have to die?
No.
Did he deserve to die?
No.

But he did, and as a direct result of his attitudes and behavior.
Winter of Secrets is set between Christmas Eve and New Years Day in the mountains in the British Columbia Interior. A group of wealthy, privileged University students from Ontario has come to the little town of Trafalgar on a two-week skiing vacation.
There’s Jason and Wendy Wyatt-Yarmouth, siblings. Jason is a med-student, handsome, charming, and thoroughly lazy. Wendy is a bitter, angry young woman whose resentment against the world, specifically her parents, expresses itself in shopping for luxury goods even she can’t afford. With them are Alan and Sophie. Alan is handsome enough to be an actor and Sophie, the Québécoise, is his new girlfriend. Alan and Sophie spend quite a bit of the vacation in their room. Ewan is there, Jason’s childhood friend, who never met a woman he didn’t want to screw, and Rob who brought his computer on holiday so as to be sure not to miss any action in the stock market. And Jeremy, who just seems to have attached himself to the group.
All of them are looking for a lot more than good skiing. Sex and drugs and making trouble are high on the list.
It is the ‘making trouble’ part that involves them initially with the Trafalgar City Police.
As Sergeant John Winters thinks, “this pack of drama kings and queens…”.

There are other people in town, of course. Locals who see rich vacationers moving in on their girlfriends, young people also in town for the skiing but who have to cobble together two or sometimes three jobs to make enough money to be able to stay, small-town girls who mistake a holiday romance for a life-time commitment.
Put them all together and you have a lot of possibility for conflict.
In the meantime, Molly Smith, now out of probation and a Constable Third Class wants to get as much time on the ski slopes as she can. Unfortunately the Wyatt-Yarmouths and their friends are also at the resort:
People lined the walls, some of them still gripping plates or cups. A long wooden table had been overturned, bowls of food and mugs of coffee spilled onto the floor. Two men were taking wild punches at each other, yelling and swearing all the while. Blood streamed from the nose of the larger man. In their inflexible ski boots they moved as if they were performing a ballet at the bottom of the Upper Kootenay River. The police officer trying to get through the crowd to reach them walked with no less difficulty.
There were a lot of people not unhappy at the death of the victim in Winter of Secrets. But did anyone actually kill him? That is the question Sergeant John Winters and Constable Molly Smith have to answer.
The first chapter of Winter of Secrets is posted on my web page, if you’d like a sneak peek: www.vickidelany.com

Everything is Fodder

EVERYTHING IS FODDER:
As readers and authors everything we do have learn is fodder for the imagination. So today my question is.....
What jobs have you had and would any of them make a good book series. I'll list mine and then I want to hear what you have to say on the topic nad hopefully you will list yours.
Mine are:
Waitress
Cocktail Waitress
Babysitter
Worked in a Daycare
Dietary Aide
Clerk for a Hallmark Shop
Nurses Aide at a hospital and at a nursing home
Sold vacum cleaners door to door
Worked as receptionist and telemarketer for photography studio
Worked as a secretary for an elderly highrise apartment complex
Worked at our local library (started as a page, then ran the front desk, then did research and information specialist and finally did adult programing bringing authors to the library for booksignings, guest lectures, I ordered adult books for the library, filled in on interlibrary loan and summer reading programs, also helped with friends of the library)
Worked for pizza hut
worked in a used bookstore
worked in a wood craft shop
sold Avon
Sold Tupperware
book reviewer (at one time I actually got paid for some of these)
Interviewer for authors
Author
Volunteered at Woman's Crisis Shelter
Briefly worked for birthright
Receptionist for beauty shop
Okay mine were in no particular order.......
Also hobbies included reading, ceramics, oil painting, researching history, baking, cross stitch, emboridery, crocheting (when in high school) drama writing poetry, and stamp collecting.
Hugs,
Pamela

Academy Awards

I don't like to be negative about the Academy Awards but the 82 Annual Awards left me feeling a little empty. I grew up watching the awards and loved all the glitz and glamour. This year not so much it was like the whole atmosphere of the event was a little too low key. Most were on and off the stage in record time. The jokes fell to deaf ears and really Steve Martin, Alec Balwin and Ben Stiller tried they really did (I feel Ben almost had them in his clutches) but honestly even George Clooney didn't crack a smile for most of the evening.
I was thrilled for Sandra Bullock and loved her dress, I was happy a woman director got the award for "Best Director" but on the whole I was left wondering whatever happened to really GREAT movies? To be honest I would loved to have seen Meryl Streep get the award for Julia and Julie because that would have been something to hang on to I do NOT need a social commentary on war or proverty or football for the Oscar night. It left me craving movies by Katherine Hepburn or Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, and so many others.
To be a little more up to date Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington and so many more.
Oprah gave a moving speech to the actress of Precious but I still would not care to see the movie. See I THOUGHT the Academy Awards Movies was to entertain the public. I want to see moving, fun thought provoking movies. I want to be entertained (I mean the price of a movie ticket alone should account for this much) I mean if you can turn on the news and see the exact same thing why go to the movies just watch the news. We all know the world is in trouble, we all know there is war and hunger and Cinderella Stories on every level. However when I go to the movies I want to escape into a fictional world whether it be love, mystery, sci-fi, horror relationships, holiday movies. Much like when I read a mystery or a romance I want to belong to that story.
There were parts of the show last night that dazzled me like the dancers and it was moving to remember the actors we lost in 2009. I just wish they would bring back MOVIES and that my friends is my take on the 82 Annual Awards.

Pamela

Guest Blogger - Alan Bradley

“Why did your victim have to die?”

What a great question!

If we’d asked Plato, I suppose he’d have answered that it is the function of the victim to die: that he or she must pay the ultimate price by being the scapegoat upon the altar of verisimilitude. But without a worthwhile crime, it’s hardly worth spending the money to buy a novel, or taking the time to read it.

A victim may be innocent or guilty. While the innocent victim will most likely receive the reader’s sympathy, the death of a despicable victim might gain his applause. Jeff Lindsay has recently – and with deft ingenuity - flipped the classic pattern by having his psychopathic Dexter kill only victims who deserve so richly to die that, when they do, we break out the flags and send up skyrockets.

Nowadays, with many of our fictional detectives being flawed in one imaginative way or another, it seems that there’s more tension in putting them to work catching the killer of an innocent victim.

In my recent book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie – and I hope I’m not giving anything away here - the victim dies because he’s a scoundrel, and that’s often enough.

It’s not so much what the reader thinks of the victim as what the characters in the book think of him. I suppose one sure way of staying alive in a work of detective fiction is to be beloved by all.

But maybe not. To a killer, even a dearly beloved might well seem insufferable.

An interesting question is this (in the Platonian sense): do we create a character for the sole purpose of bumping him off? Is the poor creature doomed from the instant we place him upon the page?

I’d like to think not. As a writer, it’s more comfortable to believe that the characters you’ve loosed in the pages of a book are free to die or to stay alive according to their actions. Freedom of will – just like in real life.

But if your victim suddenly professes the cloth, for instance, what then? Kill him anyway, and let the chips fall where they may? Or should you let the book grow a new victim in the way a salamander grows a new tail?

Most readers would suppose that a writer takes great delight in doing away with a victim of the nasty sort, but they would be wrong. Perhaps because all of the characters in a book are aspects of the author’s own personality, I’ve found that it’s incredibly difficult to kill anyone – no matter how deserving.

I once received an unforgettable lesson in a primary school classroom. I was reading aloud from a children’s story I had written in which a bold boy calls upon God to save him from footpads. A bolt of lightning blazes down from the sky, glances from a tree, and kills a cow.

I was stopped in mid-reading by a little girl who jumped to her feet and said, ‘You just put that in to be funny.’

I admitted that I had. It was, in fact, the part of the story I had invented first.

‘God would never do a thing like that,’ she said, shaking a finger at me. ‘You can’t just put a creature into a story so that you can kill it. You have to be responsible for the animals you create.’

Although I’ve tried to heed her advice, I have to admit that it’s pretty tough to avoid murder in a work of mystery fiction.

So I suppose the bottom line is this: if we must kill, then let us do it swiftly and mercifully. Let us give our murderers such skill that our victims are not even aware that they have slipped the bonds of earth.

Murder should be gentle – it’s the detection that should be fiercely executed.

Alan Bradley is the author of The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, the second book featuring 11 year old Flavia de Luce, who made her first appearance in the Debut Dagger Award winning novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

Project finish 2-14-10

Heart by San-Man Originals.

Stitched by Terri

2009 Audies nominations (Audiobook awards)

I am gaining a fine appreciation for the importance of a good narrator with audiobooks!

Terri

Guest Blogger - Dorothy Howell

Secrets, Family, and Money -- A Deadly Combination

In our real lives we all know someone who did us wrong, a person who seemingly went out of their way to make our life miserable. If you could pick someone to run over with your car, it would be that person.

But would you do it?

What if you had a secret – a big secret? If you’d worked hard for years, built a solid life, always done the right thing, but one day – poof! – something went wrong and you were desperate to cover up your mistake.

How far would you go to protect your secret?

If a loved one was threatened, would you do anything to protect them?

Anything?

I suppose none of us really know the answer to these questions until we’re faced with them. While we may have fantasized about getting even or getting back at someone who hurt us, few of us would take it to the extreme.

Yet ordinary people, overcome by extraordinary events, can do something they wouldn’t ordinarily do. And those are the people I like to write about in my Haley Randolph murder mysteries.

I write cozy mysteries so there are no serial killers, no graphic murder scenes or gratuitous violence. For me, selecting the murder victim is the easy part. My victims and their murderers are average, everyday people. Someone amateur sleuth Haley, a 24 year old sales clerk in a big-time, quarter-life crisis, would run into.

Then it gets a little more complicated. I have to come up with a reason – a reason that will hold up for 300+ pages – why that person had to die. Maybe they learned something they shouldn’t have, or pushed someone just a little too far. Maybe they’d been hurt one too many times by that person. Perhaps they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I have to come up with a killer too, of course, someone who had a very good reason for murdering that nice, ordinary person. Besides motive, they need means and opportunity, as they say in all the TV crime dramas, so that goes into the mix as well.

And as if all of this weren’t enough to fit together, I like to throw in at least three other suspects, more if I can find good reason, a few red herrings, along with a trail of clues. I need an investigation that will cause Haley to call on her gorgeous private eye friend Jack Bishop, and Detective Shuman, LAPD’s hottest homicide detective.

Since I’m writing a series, I like to keep readers updated on Haley’s friends, so they have to make an appearance in every book. Then I throw in a romantic subplot – who doesn’t like a little romance with their murder? – and Haley’s crazed obsession with designer handbags.

All of this because somebody got murdered!

So what about you? If you could select a murder victim – for a book, of course, not real life – who would it be?

Dorothy
www.DorothyHowellNovels.com