Delighted to be part of this new anthology, Writing the Cozy Mystery: Authors’ Perspectives on their Craft, ed by Phyllis M. Betz, featuring essays by some of your favorite authors — and me! Coming Aug 16, 2024. #cozymystery #cozymysteries #writingthecozymystery #writersofinstagram #writingbooks #writingadvice #writinghowtos
Art, like science, springs from questions. From acknowledging what we don’t know, and searching for answers.
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know’ … this is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us, as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, ‘I don’t know,’ the apples in his orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones, and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto.”
— Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), in her acceptance speech for the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature; quoted by Victor Lodato on Writer Unboxed, 7/4/24
I’m sure you’ve had the experience editor, author, and teacher Tiffany Yates Martin describes in this post on persistence: Knocking your head against the wall — figuratively, we hope — over some element of your craft that continues to trouble you. You work hard on it, and you get better, and yet — that’s the thing that tests you, over and over.
“These things that vex you now aren’t because you haven’t learned well enough or don’t have enough talent or skill or experience. They will likely always trouble you from time to time—because this is what a creative career is, just like getting and staying in shape. You have to keep doing hard things because it’s the only way to get you where you want to go. … We may keep making the same mistakes, facing the same challenges, and missing the same blind spots in our work. Persisting doesn’t mean that you get to the point where that never happens. It means that when it does—and it will…it always will—you know how to fix it and have your tools at hand, maybe not immediately, but eventually.”
– Tiffany Yates Martin, What It Means to Persist
Me, I think that element that continues to test you is probably one of the things you do best and care most about, which is why you so want to get it right.
(Photos taken by the author at Roozengarden, Mount Vernon, Washington.)
It’s a two-book year. To Err is Cumin, will be out later this month, and in September, my historical short story collection, All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, will be out. I think the cover is perfect — more on how it came about below. (If you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ve already seen it. And if you don’t, I hope you will — link here.)
From the cover:
Born into slavery in Tennessee, the remarkable “Stagecoach Mary” Fields was a larger-than-life figure who cherished her independence, yet formed a deep bond with the Ursuline Sisters, traveling to their Montana mission in 1885 and spending the last thirty years of her life living there or in nearby Cascade. Mary is believed to have been the first Black woman in the country to drive a U.S. Postal Star Route, the source of her nickname.
In All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories, Agatha Award-winning author Leslie Budewitz brings together three short stories, each originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, imagining the life of Stagecoach Mary in her first year in Montana, and a novella exploring her later life, including:
“All God’s Sparrows,” winner of the 2018 Agatha Award for Best Short Story; “Miss Starr’s Goodbye,” a nominee for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award; “Coming Clean,” a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s 2021 Spur Award for Best Short Story; and “A Bitter Wind,” a brand-new novella in which Mary helps a young woman newly arrived in the valley solve the mystery of her fiancé’s death and his homesteading neighbors’ bitterness toward him.
Includes an abbreviated bibliography and historical notes from the author.
“Finely researched and richly detailed, All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories is a wonderful collection. I loved learning about this fascinating woman . . . and what a character she is! Kudos to Leslie Budewitz for bringing her to life so vividly.”
—Kathleen Grissom, New York Times best-selling author of Crow Mary
All God’s Sparrows is available for pre-order. Please ask your local library to consider ordering it. Details here.
How did the cover come about? Readers had suggested to me for years that I should write more stories about Mary Fields. The three stories were too short for a collection, so if I wanted them to be available, I had to follow my readers’ advice! Last fall, I decided to write a novella to anchor the collection. I wanted to carry through on some of the themes that had emerged in the stories; I had a woman I thought was a mail order bride, a teacher, and the name Amelia, but not much more.
While I was struggling to figure out the crux of the story, I had a dream showing the image of a late 19th century woman and a rose coated with frost. I knew immediately that my subconscious was reminding me of a story told by a woman I once worked with, about her grandmother coming to Montana from Pennsylvania as a picture bride, carrying a cutting from a pink and white rose in a coffee can. The message was clear: Amelia should be the focus of the story, and the rose was a key image. I still didn’t know the crime or its effects, but the themes and key imagery put me on the right track. A rutted two-track through unbroken prairie, but a track nonetheless!
The dream image was reminiscent of the collage style of a Montana artist, Amy Brakeman Livezey, whose work I had long admired, though I had never met her. Why my dream voice chose her work I have no idea – I can only guess that I’d seen posts on Instagram or Facebook for an exhibit she was part of at the Hockaday Museum in Kalispell. I couldn’t make the exhibit opening but stopped in the next week. When I saw her portrait of the woman in blue titled “When Worlds Meet,” I’m sure my mouth fell open. I don’t know if that painting was in the posts, and I did not see that particular image in my dream, but I knew she was my Amelia, right down to the blue suit, and I kept that image in mind as I wrote. (And yes, I have told the artist this story, and she was pleased.)
I’d read an essay by novelist Barbara O’Neal on Writer Unboxed about using collage to unlock story imagery, so I tried it. Here’s the result.
I shared the story and collage with my editor. He collected covers from other historical novels that spoke to him, I added a few, and we settled on the key elements. He did a mockup, then gave that to his cover designer, and you see the final result.
What’s the lesson I can give you as writers? Trust your inner voice. Ask all your senses to work with you. Give yourself time. Play, whether with paint and glue and collage, or something else. (Finally, a use for my childhood stamp collection, still in a box in the closet!) Be open to all that’s around you. Be part of the creative community — go to art exhibits, concerts, and readings. Soak it all up.
And — how can I not say this? Follow your dreams.
I’ve long followed Dan Blank of The Creative Shift and deeply appreciate his insights into applying our creativity to our sharing and promotional efforts, as well as his emphasis on building and supporting the creative community. So I’m sharing this recent quote from his Substack article:
“Support those who create before they are gone. Is there an author whose work you appreciate? Send them a thank you email. Is there a local bookstore you love, but you just don’t get there often enough? Take a trip this week and set the intention to spend a certain amount of money to support them. Is there a local nonprofit in the arts that you admire? Go to their website and see how you can support them, even if it is just showing up for an event or spreading the word.”
We’re big supporters of local galleries and art centers, and love going to openings — First Friday Art Walks are especially great in the summer. This week, I took Blank’s advice and wrote thank you emails to the authors of two books I recently read: Anthony W. Wood, author of Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930, and Michael K. Johnson, author of A Black Woman’s Montana: The Life of Rose B. Gordon, the daughter of a former slave who was born in a small central Montana town in 1883 and lived most of her life there. I read both after I finished my short story collection featuring another early Black Montanan — All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection — coming in September, so they didn’t directly contribute to the writing, but both books helped me better understand Mary’s time and era in Montana, something that will be a big part of my book talks this fall.
Will either man reply? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. I simply wanted to acknowledge their work, something I suspect authors of books that lean toward the academic side don’t often hear! (Wood’s book is more academic than Johnson’s, but both are excellent explorations of a little known part of Montana history.)
So what can you do this week to support your creative community — local or otherwise?
(And no, I’m not fishing for thank you notes — spread the love around!)
I gave a talk on common mistakes fiction writers make about the law last night to the Puget Sound chapter of Sisters in Crime last night, and while we didn’t talk about public defender systems, when I saw this profile of a young public defender on the Washington State Bar website, Walking in Their Shoes: A Day in the Life of a Spokane City Public Defender, I remembered other articles I’d seen recently, and thought a quick roundup might be useful.
Public defender systems around the country are facing enormous pressures. So, honestly, are prosecutors’ offices. Work loads are high, pay scales are low, and the inherent stresses of the job have worsened with repeated attacks on the judicial system by some public officials. The Washington Post reports that the DC Public Defender Office is instituting mandatory furloughs. The Seattle Times published this piece on the breakdown of the state’s public defender system and reported on a recent proposal to reduce case loads.
Prosecutors’ offices have faced some of the same issues, as noted in this article from the Flathead Beacon reporting that although the public defense system in my valley is functioning well, the system is struggling in other communities in Montana, and our local prosecutor’s office is having trouble with recruitment and case loads, in part because of chronically low pay. I’m aware of several criminal trials that have been put off repeatedly because the prosecutor is so badly understaffed; several homicide cases had to be turned over to the state Criminal Justice bureau for prosecution, a rare move, because the local office could not try the case within the timeframe needed to preserve the defendant’s right to a speedy trial.
Should this affect your fictional lawyers and defendants? Maybe, maybe not. But it does affect all of us as citizens, and understanding the issues will help you write more authentically about the system and the people who work so hard to make it work.
ETA: For more on public defender systems, take a look at the June issue of the Washington State Bar News.
I subscribe to the newsletter of Tiffany Yates Martin, an editor, teacher, and writer. She recently wrote about meeting artist and illustrator Bob Eckstein at the 2024 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Conference, and talking with him about his work. One topic was creative confidence—although that’s my term, not theirs—and I very much appreciated this observation:
“[I]t’s more than simply believing in yourself. It means allowing yourself a free hand in your initial creative efforts, knowing that you have the talent and skill and persistence to be able to continue to hone it in subsequent revisions to make it what you want it to be. That kind of faith is freeing, allowing you to take chances, to loose your wildest imagination, to risk failing because you know it doesn’t make you a failure. It’s simply one step on the road to success.”
It’s a natural follow-up to last week’s quote about perseverance, because you get confidence not from rubbing a magic shamrock, but from doing the work.
Although rubbing magic shamrocks never hurts. .
| I love every book I’ve written, each for a different reason. But Blind Faith — sparked by memory that haunted me for more than forty years — may be my favorite. (Don’t tell the other books I said that.) And the Kindle version is only 2.99 today only, Saturday, June 1. |
| From the cover: Long-buried secrets come back with a vengeance in a cold case gone red-hot in Agatha Award-winning author Alicia Beckman’s second novel, perfect for fans of Laura Lippman and Greer Hendricks. For decades, the unsolved murder of Father Michael Leary has haunted Billings, Montana, the community he served. Who summoned the priest late one autumn night, then left his body in a sandstone gully for the ravens and other wild scavengers? |
| And it’s haunted no one more than Lindsay Keller, who admired and confided in him as a teenager. Compelled by his example to work for justice, she became a prosecutor. But after a devastating case left her shattered, she fled the rough-and-tumble for the safety of a desk, handling real estate deals and historic preservation projects. Good work, but not what she’d dreamed of. Now Lindsay finds herself in possession of the priest’s wallet, the photo of a young girl tucked inside. She’s sure she knows the girl, and that it’s tied to his death. But how? Detective Brian Donovan, a hot-shot Boston transplant, would like nothing more than to solve the county’s coldest case. Probing the life and death of Father Leary takes Lindsay and Donovan deep into long-simmering tensions in this seemingly-peaceful place. Then another woman far away digs up unexpected clues about her own family’s past—a history rooted in a shocking truth—and her questions bring her to Lindsay and the detective. But the dangerous answers could rock the community to its very core. |
“Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.“
— Andre Dubus
I needed to read this. Maybe you do, too.
“[A]llowing yourself to feel pride and delight in your craft is what keeps you coming eagerly back to it day after day, which is what keeps you constantly improving.
Be honest with yourself: How do you feel when your daily writing time approaches? Are you chomping at the bit to get in there and start weaving your imaginary worlds? Or do you dread it, worrying about whether you’ll hit your word count, whether you’re any good, whether the story is working, whether anyone else will ever read it or like it?
Which approach do you think is more likely to entice you back to the desk? Which do you think is more likely to put you in the relaxed, open state of mind required to tap into your fullest, freest creativity? …
Let yourself love what you do.”
– writer, editor, and teacher Tiffany Yates Martin, newsletter, 4/4/24