My husband Will and I have been following Deadly Fall’s appearances in Chapters/Indigo stores on the company website. Saturday, four copies were recorded for the store closest to us – Chapters MacLeod Trail. Excited, we drove through Calgary’s freak April blizzard to see how Deadly Fall looked on the Chapters shelf.

As we entered the store, we were greeted by local author, Hugo Bonjean, who was doing a book signing. Since I have lined up some book singings in the Okanagan for late May, we listened to Hugo’s spiel. Will bought the book.

Further into the store, a bookseller, Diane, offered us a sample of herbal tea. We told her we were looking for my novel Deadly Fall. When I said it was a mystery set in Calgary, Diane asked me to bring her a copy when we found it in the store – she wanted to buy it for herself.

Will and I walked up to the mystery section and found nothing on the “Ca” spot on the shelf or on the table display. We went back to Diane, who hurried off to hunt for the book in the back of the store. She returned with the four copies. I signed hers, with an inscription. Another bookseller standing nearby, asked me to sign the other three copies and they would attach a “signed by the author” sticker. Later this week, I’ll visit the store again to see how the books are displayed.

Diane directed us to the person in charge of author signings. Tracey gave me her card and asked me to e-mail her. If the store is willing, I’d like to set up an author signing – something I swore I’d never do. I hate sales and pumping my book goes against my natural shyness. But, now I’m thinking book signings are worth trying to get Deadly Fall known to potential readers.

Insurance … dull? Or a cesspool of murder?

Last week, I launched my first novel Deadly Fall, an amateur sleuth mystery. My protagonist, Paula Savard, investigates the murder of her childhood friend.

As I was conceiving Paula’s character, among her many attributes, I gave her the job of insurance adjuster because I’m familiar with the field. The longest job I held – ten years – was insurance claims examiner, which involved reviewing reports of adjusters out in the field investigating whiplash and liability claims.

Paula’s job became part of her motivation to solve the murder. Here was a chance to apply her training and skills to something she finds more meaningful and exciting than sore necks. Paula, like me, viewed insurance as boring and this was part of her problem at the story start. She’s gone as far as she wants to go in her career and needs more.

While writing the story, I stayed as far away as possible from Paula’s insurance work. I thought this would be dull, compared to the mystery, romance and other personal aspects. I also worried my insurance information was out of date since I hadn’t worked in the field for over twenty years. My former insurance colleagues might have joked, “Don’t worry. There’s nothing new in insurance.” And to be honest, a lunch with two friends in insurance reassured me not a lot had changed.

By the end of Deadly Fall, Paula and I realized insurance offers plenty of scope for crime. Burglaries, fires, hit-and-run accidents might be cover-ups for murder. My editor at TouchWood urged me to include more of Paula-on-the-job, to give readers a better sense of her character and set up future books in the series. So, I wrote scenes of Paula dealing with two suspicious claims and threaded them through the book.

Meanwhile, I wrote a sequel titled Secret Spring. Once again, I set Paula off on an amateur quest, although had her working with a detective she developed a relationship with in Deadly Fall. Secret Spring incorporated more of Paula’s job. I hope my editor will be satisfied. She’s reading the manuscript now.

Last fall, I started Book Three and decided it was time for an insurance-related murder. A man dies in a house fire. Paula investigates the case from the fire insurance angle. On the job, Paula continues investigating two suspicious claims she began working on in Secret Spring. This book will require more than my current insurance knowledge. For research, I’m looking for a contact in the adjusting business.

Mysteries are often classified as professional or amateur sleuth. An insurance adjuster falls in the middle. Unlike a police detective, Paula’s job isn’t solving murders, but she can easily stumble upon them in the course of her work. As the series continues, she will stumble more.

Now that I’ve written stories from both Paula’s amateur and professional perspective, I see the difficulties with each genre. For the amateur sleuth, there’s the problem of motivation – why is she doing all these things and exposing herself to danger? For the professional, the why is simple: it’s her job. But, in Book Three I quickly realized Paula’s investigation would become mechanical for the reader if I didn’t make it personal for her. My conclusion from all this is, amateur or professional, writing a mystery is a challenge.

In his celebrated book On Writing, author Stephen King says that people love to read about someone else’s work. What may be routine to you, fascinates others. Every job is bound to contain possibilities for murder and crime. All it takes is a little what if? In Deadly Fall, Paula and I discovered this about insurance.

Last week, I went to Lethbridge to speak and read at the opening night of the Lethbridge Library Conference. This was my first presentation with an actual copy of Deadly Fall. I dressed for the occasion in a dark brown skirt and yellow shirt, which happen to be the colours of the Deadly Fall cover. I hadn’t thought about co-ordinating book cover and wardrobe before, but it’s not a bad idea.

Fellow writer Anne Sorbie picked me up in Calgary at noon on Thursday. I had met Anne only once briefly, but judged her a person with whom I could spend time in a car and share a hotel room. We arrived a few hours before our scheduled restaurant dinner with librarians and other writers travelling from Calgary. During our wait, we explored the hotel, had a snack and tea, went for a walk on the ridge outside the hotel and selected our passages to read that evening for our allotted five minutes.

From dinner, we drove to the Lethbridge library Crossings Branch, a large, lovely building on the outskirts of town. We five presenters were seated in front of the fireplace. Event organizer, Susan Toy, introduced us in turn. I spoke about the premise of Deadly Fall and read the excerpt on the inside flap, the beginning of Chapter Two. The librarians announced that the first Lethbridge Word on the Street will take place Sept 25, 2011.

Cake, mingling and book sales and signings followed the formal events. I spent a long time chatting with Neil McKinnon, a classmate from a years ago short story course at the Alexandra Writers Centre. He was in Lethbridge visiting his mother-in-law and had seen my name on the event poster. Neil’s short story collection Tuckahoe Slidebottle was published in 2007 and shortlisted for the Leacock Humour award. He spends most of the year in Mexico and told me about an annual writing conference in Puerto Vallarata, which I’d love an excuse to re-visit. I’ve since made contact with the PV writers’ group that organizes the conference and become an online member. Just reading about their writing activities in warm, sunny Mexico gives a boost to my winter day.

At our hotel, Anne and I had received a spring fling coupon for a platter of appetizers. We invited attendes to our hotel lounge for wine and food in a garden setting. One who came along was Blaine Greenwood, a Lethbridge poet and disc jokey at the university radio station. He invited us to the staion the next day to record 10-15 minute readings from our books. Anne and I got up early; Blaine drove us to the station in snow that foreshadowed a tough drive home. In a closed off room, I read Chapter One from Deadly Fall. Blaine plans to stagger the broadcasts and will let us know when they air. He won’t post the recordings on the radio website, so we’ll have to try to catch them “live.”

After our recordings, Anne and I hit the road. Conditions were white with snow drifted onto the left lane. A snowblower ahead of us blew up so much snow it reduced our visibility to zero at times. The snowblower got farther ahead; other vehicles passed; down the road we saw one smashed into the snowblower’s rear. Anne got us safely through. In addition to being a great travel compantion, she’s an A-one driver. As we reached Okotoks, the sun came out. We stopped for coffee with Okotoks writer Lee Kvern.

Altogether, it was an interesting, fun and productive trip that promises future opportunities. Many thanks to Susan Toy and Lethbridge librarian Elisabeth Hegerat for organizing it.

Yesterday, I taped the first interview promoting my novel Deadly Fall. Susan Toy, of Alberta Books Canada, arranged the interview with Brenda Finley of CKUA radio.  

I was pretty nervous, especially since I didn’t know the questions in advance. Brenda drove through winter rush hour traffic from SAIT to my home in southeast Calgary.  With little preamble, she did a voice check and began the interview. Despite my nerves, I enjoyed answering her questions. Mainly, she asked about my individual story characters. What made this really good, is that she had read the book completely from an advance copy. She taped 12 1/2 minutes and plans to edit them down to 10 for the show. 

One thing Brenda does with editing – I found this interesting – is, where she can, delete her question and string the interviewees responses together. I had noticed, from listening to previous shows, that there wasn’t a lot of Brenda in her interviews and the writers often talked at length.

I think it was during the taping – not just in our post talk chat – that Brenda referred to the sex scene in my novel. I joked that she should make sure to leave that comment in. It might sell a few books.  

CKUA plans to air the interview on Sunday, March 6th at 12:30 PM. Right after the program, they archive it on the  website so you can listen to it there. http://www.ckua.com/pages/bookmark. I hope I come across okay. I think I said some interesting things. It won’t be boring. 

Thanks, Susan, for arranging this and Brenda, for reading my book and appreciating my work.

My online writer-friend Teri Vlassopoulos wrote this post about our online writing support group and its recent accomplishments. especially a huge award nomination for Darcie Friesen Hossack. I get name-dropped in the post.  

http://www.bibliographic.net/2011/02/11/go-team/

Two years ago, my husband Will and I spent a couple of weeks in Los Angeles and San Diego, California. After we got home, I started a novel about two women who travel from Calgary to southern California on a quest. About half of the novel turned out to be set in an undescribed location roughly a two-hour drive southeast of LA and a similar distance north of San Diego. It was an area I had never visited.

This  January, we had another opportunity to visit San Diego. To research the book, we tacked on a four-day road trip to explore my story setting. I still intended to keep the locale an imagined place, but wanted to pinpoint it and make it more believable and authentic, with local colour and details like vegetation suitable for the setting and time of year. The story takes place in January.

We left Calgary in minus twenty degrees Celsius weather, with light snow, and arrived to sunshine and above twenty degree C temperatures in San Diego. My characters will also experience that pleasant jolt from winter to summer – flowers in bloom, palm trees and roads that never experience snow or ice. We picked up our rental car, changed into shorts and drove the freeway to Murietta Springs, a resort community, and the towns immediately to the north of it. I realized I would have to modify my concept of the story setting, which included (1) a holiday retreat between two valleys, isolated from the surrounding world – retreat visitors couldn’t see out and others couldn’t see the retreat from a distance (2) lots of trees blocking the views out and in and lining the entry dirt road (3) within the retreat, Mediterranean vegetation such as citrus trees (4) a small lonely older town outside the retreat, with a single motel, that serves as the retreat gateway. 

Right away, I saw my desired isolation was going to be a problem. I should have realized that this part of California is endless suburb stretching from LA through Anaheim (Disneyland) until it meets the San Diego suburban belt.  I had some hope between Murietta and Perris when we passed pockets of farmland not yet developed. There was a dirt road to low rolling hills that might, with a stretch, conceal a retreat. 

Trees, other than planted ones, are almost non-existent in this region, which is, essentially, dessert. Irrigation would be needed for my citrus and other crops.  The retreat gardener, a major character, would mention irrigation in the book.  

We spent our first night at Lake Elsinore, a holiday boating town. Dinner at a Mexican restaurant reminded me to include Latinos among my local characters. 

The second day we drove through Corona, a pleasant looking place we fantasied about spending a month in some winter. Corona merged into Riverside, where we visited the California Citrus State Historic Park, a tourist attraction that I highly recommended. Around the time of the California Gold Rush, entrepreneurs planted the first Californian oranges in Riverside. In the long run, citrus and other produce turned out to be the real California gold. In addition to taking you through the world history of citrus, the park includes walks through citrus groves like the ones that covered the whole region before suburban development. We picked oranges and grapefruits to sample on the spot. The park made me really want to keep the citrus trees on my retreat, with the added feature of guests being allowed to pick and eat as many as they like. 

That night, we stayed at the Riverside Mission Inn, a large, rambling historic hotel that, with its decor, odd crannies and walkways, made us feel away-from-it-all in the heart of the city.  It may be possible, I thought, to create a retreat that feels isolated from its surrounding world and encroaching suburbia. 

Surely, that thought justifies the splurge of the Mission Inn as research.

Day three took us high into the San Bernardino mountains. Thousands of feet of elevation led to an  environment more reminiscent of Canada than southern California. Pines and large deciduous trees. An alpine village on a lake. Mounds of snow. We followed the steep, winding roads to the Mojave desert on the other side of the mountains. Here was vast flat land dotted with sage and scrub – no place for my retreat to hide and the land is too high and cool for citrus trees. I was ready to turn back, when we arrived at Pearsblossom, a small town that struck me as perfect for the town in my story. Single motel. Small houses scattered among cacti. To the left, rolling hills where my retreat might nestle. 

We took a side road into the hills and, within minutes, saw a sign for a religious retreat. We turned in, but were too shy to look around. So, retreats can be here, hidden by hills and the enormous San Bernardino range. Continuing along the road, we passed ski and toboggan slopes packed with families from the Los Angeles area out to experience their one day a year of northern winter.

I could re-set my novel here, an easy drive from LA. The region has the isolation I want for the story and a town even more suitable than the one I envisioned. But no citrus. Would olive trees work? Would the mountains shade the retreat too much? I want sunshine – a feeling of California. 

After a spending the night in Riverside, we drove the San Moreno valley – more suburbs – to farms, a golf course, rural land. Finally, we were outside the Los Angeles and San Diego metropolitan zones.

We reached San Jacinto and Hemet, two older towns now popular with retirees and young people seeking affordable homes. Luxury houses staggered up the hillsides, next to citrus groves. One of those valleys might contain my retreat. Valle Vista, past Hemet, was too modern for my gateway town, but might work. Trees to conceal the retreat could be planted. Irrigation would come from streams falling from the mountains backdropping the region. 

My setting will need some modifications. In addition to changing the nature of the town, I’ll have to shift the citrus groves to the other side of my retreat valley. But now I’ve found the spot, picked up details for local atmosphere and had a fun and memorable trip.

Sometimes I read a novel that’s so good I want to tell everyone to read it. Room by Emma Donoghue is one of those books.   

Room was a buzz book last year.  It won the 2010 Booker Prize and received attention for it topical subject matter. The story is narrated by Jack, a five-year old boy, whose mother was kidnapped at age 19. For the past seven years Ma has been held hostage in an eleven foot square room.  Jack was born in Room, as he calls it. He believes there is no real world outside of Room. All he knows is TV, which he thinks is a fantasy land showing various planets, such as the hospital planet and assorted cartoon planets.

Jack’s view of everything is unique. I had to pay close attention to always understand what he was talking about. The novel grabbed me from the start and moved along at a fast pace, thanks to an abundance of dialogue, initially between Jack and Ma and later between Jack and the people he encounters Outside. Jack’s escape from room is as gripping as a thriller.

My only quibbles were occasional words or thoughts of Jack that didn’t quite ring true for me, even coming from a child raised in his unusual situation. I felt them the author’s devices to make a point. These occasions were rare, it would be impossible for any author dealing with this material to nail every word for every reader and these moments didn’t detract from my appreciation of the book. 

Despite being creepy at times, Room is an enjoyable read that will stick with me a long time.

When is a novel a stand alone and when can it be the start of a series?

According to a mystery writing advice book I read some years ago, a novel should stand alone if it resolves the protagonist’s basic problems; if it doesn’t, it invites a sequel. The author further advised that series books should have an overall story arc.

When I started my mystery novel Deadly Fall I was certain it was a one shot deal. At the same time, I sensed publishers tended to like mystery series. So, I set up the novel ending to make it look like my protagonist was heading into further mysteries, which I had no intention of pursuing.

I continued to view the book as a stand alone until the end of draft #2, when I realized I wouldn’t be able to completely resolve my protagonist’s issues. I also wanted to know more about what would happen to her and a core group of characters. This might become a series after all.

I finished the third draft. While working on draft #4, I contemplated alternative titles. My original title In Remembrance of Me came from the novel’s funeral scene. Paula, my protagonist, sees the message on the communion altar Do this in remembrance of me. She interprets it as a message from the victim, her childhood friend: find my killer. On another level, Paula is searching for herself, the youthful “me” who got lost in the business of growing up.

For those reasons, I liked my original title, but felt it didn’t sound like the title of a mystery book. What else could I call it? The story takes place in the fall. Fall has evocative connotations. Fall from grace. Fall into danger and the emotional abyss. Deadly is a common mystery novel adjective. A Deadly Fall. I looked it up on the Chapters/Indigo and library websites to see how many other books had used the title. To my surprise, there were none. A Deadly Fall it is. Or was, until the publisher later simplified it to Deadly Fall.   

Fall naturally led me to think about seasons, which sparked an idea for a four-book series with an overall story arc for Paula. Now, I could honestly tell publishers A Deadly Fall was the start of a series. They didn’t need to know the series was limited.

I quickly decided on a title for book #2: The Secret Spring. While waiting to hear from publishers, I wrote the sequel with the title in mind. As a result, spring is more integrated into the story. In addition to the spring time frame, the victim is found dead in an isolated (secret) hot spring. All mystery novels are about secrets.

I decided Book #3 would be summer and book #4, the finale, winter.

After Deadly Fall was accepted by a publisher, I pondered the series further. Could it and should it be more than four books? I thought through the narrative arc. Four books would rush the arc, there were many more things I could do with my characters and, given Paula’s profession as an insurance adjuster, many more mysteries she could solve.

Author Sue Grafton was thinking ahead when she used the alphabet for her mystery series. It gave her 26 potential books. With only 4 seasons, I’ve painted myself into a corner.

I’m sure I’ll figure a way out of the corner. That’s what we mystery writers do.

… The mystery or the personal story?

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/article/850598–the-nesting-dolls-and-crime-machine

My sister discovered my novel Deadly Fall listed on Amazon.ca. I hadn’t thought to check since the book won’t be released until March. I looked at Chapters/Indigo.ca and also found it there. It’s also on Amazon.com for US readers. 

In our enthusiasm, my husband Will and I instantly fired off a batch of e-mails to tell family and friends the news.  A couple of them told us they pre-ordered the book. The next day, while poking around the Amazon site I found that Deadly Fall was # 95  on the Amazon bestseller list for Mysteries with Women Sleuths and # 20, 234 for overall books. Many thanks to the book’s first purchasers. 

A day later Deadly Fall was off the Women Sleuths list and something like #40,000 overall. What a difference a day makes. It was fun while it lasted and is still fun to see my novel posted on the sites.  Here are the links:

Chapters/Indigo:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/home/search/?keywords=susan%20calder%20deadly%20fall&pageSize=12

Amazon.ca: