They say change is good.  It wakes up the brain, stimulates the imagination.  Forces you to see what your eyes tended to slide over because you’d seen it so many times before.

So here I am, seeing green mountains instead of desert, rivers instead of dry washes, myriad birdsong instead of a single far-up cry of a hawk searching for breakfast down among the cactus.  It’s very relaxing after a year of conflict and disruption.  Maybe too relaxing.

I don’t know enough about the area to start plotting a murder mystery, although I’ve been told they do happen around here, no matter the seeming tranquility.  I’m tempted to write at least one more book about the desert and those wonderful cops who patrol it.  But can I remember enough to make it come alive, as I experienced it?  I could write of an amateur or even professional detective who has been transplanted, but that seems to have become almost cliché.  On the other hand, can I learn enough of the deep-down life here to really understand it?  I have no confidence of that, not yet, despite having personal “ins” to the police, fire departments and emergency services, not to mention the families.  A little more time, perhaps.

Meanwhile, I will try my hand at creating a plot in an area I am familiar with, enough to bring “real” people into it.  Maybe not the desert, but I have lived many other places – the Midwest, the Southwest, Mexico.  We shall see!

Good writers are always good readers.  But even in today’s world of cheap digital books it can be too easy to run up one hellacious bill.

Both of my parents grew up in the depression, and the maxim “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” was a strong part of their psyche. My father was proud that he could support his family by himself and could give my sister and me an allowance, which was to cover most of our small desires and FOR WHICH we were expected to perform certain chores, such as making our beds and keeping our rooms clean.  If we sloughed off, we were docked our allowance.  I spent a lot of time at the library.

I was in junior high school when I offered my mother a deal: If they would double my allowance (from fifty cents a week to a dollar!) I would wash and dry the dishes every single night, no matter what. I was a bit miffed when I came home from my first out-of-town job and discovered that my younger sister was getting five bucks a week. For the same work. The aggravation of inflation and the cost of living.

But whatever, the thing I quickly learned in childhood was the value of putting in the work to earn the pay, and then budgeting that pay — I could blow the dollar on Cokes and comic books, or I could save up and buy myself a pair of nylons that didn’t have dried nail polish all over them to stop the runs.

These days I may have progressed from comic books to novels, but it’s still tough reining myself in at the bookstore.

    When I moved here, I looked around to see what kind of support systems there were for writers in the area.  I found one with some sort of “Writers League” name.  It had been around for a long time and seemed to have a lot of prestige, so when I saw they were giving a panel talk, I went down to listen and perhaps join up.

All of the panelists were “traditionally published”, which is great if you can get it.  I’m old enough to remember dreams of being some day published (back then ‘traditional’ was the only game in town).  I dreamed of being edited, coddled, feted and sent around the country on my publisher’s dime to meet people and sign my Great American Novel.

It’s a little different now, even if you do score a contract with one of the Big Whatever-number-they-are-now-it-keeps-getting-smaller.  No big travel budgets, no coddling.  You had better do a professional editing job (or hire it done) before you even send it in to the slush pile.  And if you aren’t a Gaiman, a Kellerman or a Patterson, good luck with that.  You probably won’t make the first assistant reader.  But that’s okay, because now, frankly, we have choices.

Which is how one of the panelists answered when someone in the audience said her daughter had written a novel and was thinking of self-publishing, and how did they feel about that?  The first panelist was a decent man, and although you could tell he didn’t think much of it, he tried to answer honestly.

“It’s one way to go,”  he admitted.  “Just tell her to be ready to do all the work herself.  Not just the editing, and not just all the marketing at her own expense, but the formatting, creating a cover design and discovering how to submit cover and manuscript to the right commercial platform, depending on whether you want ebook, paperback or both.  She will have to do it all.”

It was a fine, sensible answer.  Wannabe bestsellers need to realize how much work it is when you try to self-publish.  And if you hire someone else to do the work, odds are you won’t make your investment back.  But you will be published.  Do it right, and you’ll be up on Amazon within a month of sending it in to Createspace or one of the other publishing platforms.  Right up there with your name in lights.  Or at least on a search engine.

Then the next panelist leaned forward and said,  “Actually, people who self-publish are just lazy.”

Really?  Did you not just hear the warnings about doing all the work yourself?

He went on,  “They just don’t want to bother going through the rejection process.”

The rest of the panel bobbled their heads in agreement.

So writers only self-publish because they are too lazy to spend two years or more trying to get an agent or a publisher to pay enough attention to their manuscript to tell them how to rewrite it so they can send it in again.  And again.  And maybe again.  They’d rather go the lazy way and learn how to edit, program, and format their entire manuscript, along with learning how to design a cover and price their product.  And then how to set up at least five different marketing media platforms.  That’s so much easier.

He went on in this vein for some time, not letting anyone else have much of a say.  I don’t think he ever realized the point at which he had pretty much lost his audience.  No one was rude enough to get up and walk out right then.  But from the comments I overheard afterwards, a lot of people had decided that if this group was too elitist to stick their heads up out of the twentieth century and see what was really happening in the publishing world, then they had nothing to teach the rest of us.  That’s a shame, because I’m sure there is a lot they could share.  They just have to work on their presentation.

I just spent the morning sitting at the local Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, making notes for the new book in the Del Sueño series. I wish I had a dollar for every business type who walks in carrying his laptop in a shoulder bag. There are more polo shirts than button-downs and more jeans than khakis. Texas casual?
My plot is becoming clearer, but last night I decided to kill off my main character’s little daughter. Crime writers are nasty creatures. But in this case, the little girl died long before the start of our story. If she died in the car crash that killed her father, it would better explain the main character’s compulsion to find out what really happened to her friend’s child. Her friend is not as sympathetic a character as she first appears, so I needed something besides just good will and old time’s sake. But now I have a few questions for the main character that had been answered by her daughter’s chatty [nosy?] nature. Sigh.
Chop down one plot problem, three more grow in it’s place.

Monday, December 5, 2016
2:00 PM to 4:00 PM
Lake Travis Community Library

The weekend of November 5 & 6, 2016, Austin’s streets will be lined with booths and pavilions full of authors and books for your browsing pleasure.  Come visit us at the “Sisters in Crime” table and see what murder and mayhem Austin has to offer!  And listen to some great music, too.

Last Sunday I was one of the authors who met at Malvern Books in Austin Texas to sign and read from our crime novels [the event was sponsored by Sisters in Crime, Heart of Texas chapter, of which I am a member].  I read from the first in my Del Sueno series, “Murder at the End of the Line” and it was well received.  Malvern’s Becky and the rest of the crew have made a lovely venue for reading, talking and meeting other people who love books.  So many great authors!