Author Guest Post - Victoria Thompson

Our guest today is Victoria Thompson, author of the bestselling Gaslight Mystery Series and the Counterfeit Lady novels. Her latest Gaslight Mystery, Murder on Trinity Place, releases on April 30.

Victoria Thompson is the bestselling author of the Edgar ® and Agatha Award nominated Gaslight Mystery Series and the Sue Grafton Memorial Award nominated Counterfeit Lady Series. Her latest books are Murder on Trinity Place and City of Secrets, both from Berkley. She currently teaches in the Master’s Degree program for writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University. She lives in Illinois with her husband and a very spoiled little dog.

Party like it’s 1899!

The first book of the Gaslight Mystery series was set in 1896, and after 22 books, we were approaching the end of 1899, so I thought it would be fun to show the turn of that century. Remember all the hoopla surrounding the most recent “turn of the century” in 1999? Y2K had many of us in a panic with predictions that computers would somehow cease working when the date rolled over to the year 2000. Planes would fall from the sky. Elevators would plunge to the basement. Life as we know it would end. Then the date rolled over and nothing happened! Except for lots of parties and celebrations for the beginning of a new century.

Y19HUN?

What, I wondered, was going on in anticipation of 1899 becoming 1900? Surely, people were excited and perhaps a bit apprehensive about something in those days, even though they didn’t have any computers back then to malfunction.

So I researched it and guess what? In 1899, people had decided that the new century didn’t really start in 1900. They felt that 1900 was actually the last year of the Nineteenth Century! They did celebrate New Year’s Eve that year, but no differently then they had all the other 99 New Year’s Eves of that century. The big celebration for the beginning of the new century was held on New Year’s Eve 1900. What a disappointment! But…

Human Beings will always be contrary.

Human nature being what it is, not everyone agreed about this, and some people still thought 1900 was the first year of the Twentieth Century. Would those people try to convince everyone else they were right? Of course they would! And would they be annoying when then did so? Yes, indeed. Perhaps even so annoying someone would want to murder them! Which is how Murder on Trinity Place begins. A man who has been trying to convince people they are wrong about the start of the new century is found dead on New Year’s morning. Was someone so annoyed with his arguments that they murdered him? Or was something else going on?

Frank and Sarah are on the case.

Frank and Sarah Malloy are asked to solve the case by their very superstitious neighbor, Mrs. Ellsworth, because the victim is the father of her new daughter-in-law. (Can we all take a moment here to lament the fact that the English language has no easy way to describe your relationship to your child’s in-laws? “My daughter-in-law’s parents” is so unwieldy. But I digress.) Since Mrs. Ellsworth once saved Sarah’s very life, they cannot refuse, and they begin an investigation that leads them to some very surprising places.

Did you believe all the hype about Y2K? Did you stay up to make sure your computer would still function after midnight? Or did you think it was all a big hoax?

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Murder on Trinity Place

The devil's in the details when a respected man is found murdered near historic Trinity Church, in the exciting new novel from the national bestselling Gaslight Mystery series...

As 1899 draws to a close, Frank and Sarah Malloy are ready to celebrate the New Year--and century--at Trinity Church when they notice Mr. Pritchard, a neighbor’s relative, behaving oddly and annoying the other revelers. When Frank tries to intervene and convince Pritchard to return home with them, he refuses and Frank loses him in the crowd. The next morning Sarah and Frank are horrified to learn Pritchard was murdered sometime in the night, his body left on Trinity Place, mere steps from the incident. Frank and Sarah must search Pritchard's past for a link between the new crimes…and old sins.

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Thank you Ms. Thompson for guest posting.  Y2K was a very real issue in my job at the time (Department of Defense) and we had many contingencies in place which actually were used.  It wasn't a hoax in our case.

Author Guest Post - Nancy Herriman

Please welcome historical mystery author, Nancy Herriman.  Nancy abandoned a career in Engineering to chase around two small children and take up the pen. She hasn't looked back. A multi-published author, she is also a former winner of the Romance Writers of America's Daphne du Maurier award for Best Unpublished Mystery/ Romantic Suspense. 

When not writing, she enjoys singing with various choral groups, gabbing about writing with friends, and eating dark chocolate. After two decades in Arizona, she now lives in her home state of Ohio with her family.

Becoming a mystery author…

I have to write this as a journey story, because that is what getting to this point has been--a journey. A nearly fifteen year journey (I had to count back to be certain). My story is not at all uncommon, however.

The writing started as baby steps. I began with an on-line writing group. Then I took some classes. I became a member of local writing communities as well as national ones. I learned from others’ experiences and read the books successful authors wrote. Most importantly, I drummed up the courage to attend writers’ conferences, where I soaked up knowledge.

And then I began to write. Truly write. I began with two hundred words a day. Then I managed five hundred words a day. I had supportive critique partners who reviewed my work, and I submitted to contests. Those efforts taught me that I needed a thick skin.

After a few years, I committed to Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) on a dare, which came with the frightening goal of 50,000 words in a month. 2500 per day, based upon my calculations. Much to my surprise, I succeeded, and had the bones of my first completed manuscript, a historical romantic suspense that won the Romance Writers of America’s Daphne award.

Because of the award, I gained an agent. Plus, I came to believe that this writing stuff was going to work out. But my agent never sold that book. We received not even a peep of interest. I’m only grateful she kept the worst of the rejections from me. I might have folded if she hadn’t.

In the following years, I dealt with the types of issues life throws at you while working on new manuscripts that also remained unsold. But, as they say, nothing you have written is ever wasted. The effort to simply put words on a page--to compose a character, to develop the arc of the story, to refine dialogue and cut back on too much description--was the journey I needed to be on. I produced two more complete novels and several half-written ones. Eventually, my agent sold one of those novels.

After this, I truly came to believe that this writing stuff was going to work out. But I was soon to learn again that matters seldom proceed as one expects. My publisher closed down their fiction line, and took my new-found career with them. Leaving me to once again start over.

After countless words of encouragement from my agent, I developed an idea for a historical mystery series set in late 1860s San Francisco, a time and a setting I loved, with a strong-willed nurse sleuth and a stoic Civil War veteran detective. My agent loved the idea as well. After months and months of hard work, I had a completed novel. The first book of my historical mystery series, A Mystery of Old San Francisco.

When it sold, I was thrilled. I also knew that the hardest work—polishing, publicizing, working on future books—was yet to come.

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THANK You Ms. Herriman for sharing your road to published author.  

Guest Post - Maia Chance

Maia Chance is a new author who is hitting the scene with two series.  First up is this Fairy Tale Fatal series with Penguin Prime Crime and second, The Discreet Retrieval Agency, is with St. Martin's press and won't be released until 2015.  Ms. Chance is a candidate for the Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle, where she shakes a killer martini, grows a mean radish, and bakes mocha bundts to die for.

Please welcome Maia to our M&MM!

Series Result of Procrastinating on Homework

When people ask me where I got the idea for Snow White Red-Handed, I’m not sure where to start. I can say with certainty, however, that the entire Fairy Tale Fatal series began as a self-indulgent, irresponsible project.

Yes. Call it Escape from Academic Drudgery. Charge me as guilty for writing an entire novel as a way to procrastinate on my homework.

This is what happened: I’ve always been fascinated with fairy tales, so when I had the chance to pick my texts for a freshman comp class I was teaching, I decided to use fairy tales and fairy tale criticism as a way to help my students learn to write about literature. So I had fairy tales on the brain, big time. The next thing I knew, the fairy tale stuff had cross-pollinated in the back of my mind with the nineteenth-century American literature texts I was reading in preparation for my PhD qualifying exams. Louisa May Alcott, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman . . . yeah. How the heck does that crowd mix with fairy tales? But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. I’ve always loved stories with outsider protagonists, and a Yankee girl in the Black Forest sounded like a book I wanted to read. So I decided to write it. Kind of for fun. And as a way to procrastinate on grading student papers and chewing through that pesky PhD reading list.

Once I got started writing and researching Snow White Red-Handed, other things worked their way into the story. Some of them are personal. For instance, my heroine Ophelia Flax is a variety hall actress, and one of my great-grandmothers was a singer on the variety hall stage.

Other personal ingredients are the Baden-Baden and Heidelberg settings. When I was in college, I spent two summers in Heidelberg working as an orchestral violinist in Heidelberg’s Castle Festival, and I traveled a couple of times to Baden-Baden on my days off.

Baden-Baden has a simply amazing thermal spa, by the way, if you aren’t averse to getting whacked on the rear after your scrubbing has been completed by a muscly attendant. Seriously. I was enchanted by the area, and it evidently left its mark on my imagination. I even have a recurring dream of hiking to a castle inhabited by elves, hidden on a mountain above Heidelberg. There is a story to that, and no, it doesn’t involve a psychotherapist. Although maybe it should.

Another personal inspiration: I’ve always had a secret crush on the composer Johannes Brahms, and Brahms spent a lot of time in Baden-Baden. In fact, even though the hero of Snow White Red-Handed, Professor Penrose, is British, I picture him like the young Brahms, plus spectacles.

Okay, so I had this amazing setting that I’d always been in love with, a hero who looks like the young Brahms, and the fruitfully absurd concept of a practical Yankee variety hall actress who finds herself in the patently impractical land of German fairy tales. Add a castle, a murder, and a cast of shifty characters, plus a hapless friend for Ophelia by the name of Prue, and off I went.

There were times, I’ll admit, when writing Snow White Red-Handed seemed like a lot more work than just doing my homework and grading my students’ papers, by golly. The historical research was time consuming, though once I found Mark Twain’s two travelogues The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, things got smoother. Getting my characters’ speech to sound historical without confusing twenty-first century readers was also tricky (fingers crossed that I pulled it off). Oh, and then there was the little issue called the mystery plot. Tangled, indeed.

In the end, though, Snow White Red-Handed almost miraculously turned out as that book I’d wanted to read: an unexpected, frivolous, magical, adventurous, and romantic romp. I am so delighted that Berkley Prime Crime picked up my Fairy Tale Fatal series, and I hope readers will enjoy escaping into the mysterious woods of the nineteenth century as much as I did.

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THANK You Ms. Chance for that delightful blog post.  

If you are needing a little something different this year in your Thanksgiving feast, consider a different take on your cranberries.  Try this delicious Cranberry Orange Bread, which is a sure fire crowd-pleaser.

Cranberry Orange Bread

Ingredients
    
     2 cups all-purpose flour
    1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
    1/2 teaspoon baking soda
    1/2 teaspoon salt
    1 tablespoon grated orange zest
    1 1/2 cups fresh cranberries
    1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
    1/4 cup margarine, softened
    1 cup white sugar
    1 egg
    3/4 cup orange juice

Directions
    Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9x5 inch loaf pan. Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Stir in orange zest, cranberries, and pecans. Set aside.

    In a large bowl, cream together margarine, sugar, and egg until smooth. Stir in orange juice. Beat in flour mixture until just moistened. Pour into prepared pan.

    Bake for 1 hour in the preheated oven, or until the bread springs back when lightly touched. Let stand 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool. Wrap in plastic when completely cool.

    Pour a 1/2 cup glaze of orange juice, powdered sugar, & vanilla over the loaf while it is still in the pan--just adds another layer of flavor to an already great mix of tart & sweet.  

Originally from AllRecipes.com