A Cozy, Little Success Story 33 Years in the Making / Author Rosalyn Ramage

Sometimes an idea needs time to mature, or in the case of this week’s guest blogger Rosalyn Ramage, the idea needs to find a genre. I think most authors would agree that stories have to come out one way or another. How they are received is another matter. Ramage explains how her latest book took 33 years to see the light of day.

Happy Reading!

Clay Stafford,
Founder Killer Nashville,
Publisher Killer Nashville Magazine

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 A Cozy, Little Success Story 33 Years in the Making

By Rosalyn Ramage

It’s a done deal! Millicent’s Tower, Five Star Publishing, 2014. Mission accomplished! But wait a minute, I thought as I sat gazing at the book in front of me. Where did you come from, Millicent? Where have you been? What took you so long to get here? Memories began to flutter in . . .

The year was 1980. I had just received my college degree at Belmont College as an older student with children at home. During that time I had been fortunate enough to do some freelance writing, including the publication of two books of children’s poetry. I was on a roll!

Then, in 1981 our family went on vacation to Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, just across the causeway from Lubec, Maine. We were there for a month, and while there, I wrote a book!

Actually, the main plot of the book had been floating around in my head for a while. I had had situations and characters in mind, but no specific names. As we had embarked on the trip, one of our pastimes was to create names for characters that would be in my book. We named them for places and signs that we saw along the way (like Moose when we saw a “Moose crossing” sign).

I had taken my manual typewriter and a ream of paper with me. My writing space was a small room at the back of the cottage with a fantastic view of Passamaquoddy Bay, looking toward Lubec. It was in that setting that Who? came into being. What, you might ask, is Who? That was the title I first gave my book. I called it Who? . . . as in “whodunit.”

Believe it or not, I accomplished my goal and returned to Nashville with a three-ring binder filled with pages for my book. After sharing it with friends and relatives, I met a literary agent who took a look at it. He reviewed the manuscript and returned it to me, saying, “I like the book, but, quite frankly, I don’t quite know what to do with it. It is family-centered, with children, but with adult topics and situations, like . . . dead bodies and . . . ‘language.’ ” He wished me well. All of this was in 1981.

My reaction to this rejection was to take it to my office, put it on a shelf, and forget about it. Life went on.

Then, 29 years after I had given up on my novel, my oldest grandson, who was in college, brought up the topic of Who? He said, “I’ve always heard people talk about Who? But I’ve never seen it myself. Could I read it sometime?”

Hmmmm. Let me see now. Just where had I dumped that dusty, musty manuscript so many years ago? Ah, yes. Here it is. I pulled it out, dusted it off, began to read … and I liked it. As a matter of fact, I liked it so much, I retyped it, added more characters and material, extended the storyline, and dared to ask for a critique at a conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) in the fall of 2011.

The gist of what my critiquer said was that she “really liked the story, but didn’t quite know what to do with it.” Sound familiar? It really wasn’t a hard-core adult book, she said, but it certainly wasn’t a children’s book. Young adult? Maybe.

And then she said the magical words: “I think what you have here is a cozy mystery.”

“A what?”

“A cozy mystery,” she said. Hmmm.

In my quick research on cozy mysteries, I found that my book had all of the attributes of a cozy mystery.

I was intrigued. So intrigued, in fact, that I signed up to go to another conference known as Killer Nashville, an annual conference geared especially for writers or would-be writers of various kinds of thrillers, mysteries and suspense.

Long story short, I decided to “pitch” my manuscript and, to my surprise, was asked by an editor at Five Star Publishing to submit my full manuscript for review. After a bit more preening, I submitted Who?, which, by now, had been renamed Millicent’s Tower.

And, in January 2013, I was informed by the editors at Five Star that they would take pleasure in publishing my book.

A long journey for a cozy mystery? You bet. But one I have enjoyed creating at every uncertain step of the way. I sincerely hope other writers will find my story encouraging as they pursue the journey for themselves.

If you would like to read more about Rosalyn Ramage’s books please click here.

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Rosalyn Ramage is the author of two books of children’s poetry entitled A BOOK FOR ALL SEASONS and A BOOK ABOUT PEOPLE. She is also the author of three middle grade mysteries entitled The TRACKS, The GRAVEYARD, and The WINDMILL. She is a retired elementary school teacher who enjoys writing poems and stories for readers of all ages…just for the fun of it! MILLICENT’S TOWER is her first book for a more mature audience. She and her husband Don split their time between their farm in Kentucky and their home in Nashville, Tennessee. She invites you to visit her website at rosalynrikelramage.weebly.com.

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(Have an idea for our blog? Then share it with our Killer Nashville family. With over 24,000 visits monthly to the Killer Nashville website, over 300,000 reached through social media, and a potential outreach of over 22 million per press release, Killer Nashville provides another way for you to reach more people with your message. Send a query to contact@killernashville.com or call us at 615-599-4032. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks to Maria Giordano, Will Chessor and author Tom Wood for his volunteer assistance in coordinating our weekly blogs. For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com)

Natural Born Writers, Ready Made Stories: Writing and the Law / Author Robert Rotstein

The legal system abounds with conflict, quirky characters, mystery, and moral ambiguity. This is why writers tend to draw often and steadily from this familiar well, says author Robert Rotstein. This week’s guest blogger, Rotstein spells out why writers, many of them lawyers, find inspiration at the courthouse.

Happy Reading! And until next time, read like someone is burning the books.

Clay Stafford,
Founder Killer Nashville,
Publisher Killer Nashville Magazine

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Natural Born Writers, Ready Made Stories:

Writing and the Law

By Robert Rotstein

Stories about the legal system abound and have for centuries. There are novels, some of them classic works of literature, like Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd the Sailor, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, and Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent.  There are great movies, like 12 Angry Men, The Verdict, Philadelphia, and A Few Good Men. And there are the long-running TV shows: Perry Mason, L.A. Law, Law & Order, The Good Wife.

Not only do authors write about the law, but many lawyers have become authors. Henry Fielding, Wallace Stevens, and Franz Kafka had legal backgrounds, as do thriller writers Grisham, Turow, Steve Berry, and Lisa Scottoline, among many others. I’ve written two legal novels and still practice law full time.

If you accept the stereotypes, writers and lawyers are nothing alike. Attorneys are supposedly combative, social, linear thinkers. Writers are imaginative, introspective loners. So why are fiction writers fascinated with the legal system? And why have so many lawyers become successful writers? I believe it’s because lawsuits are real-life dramas.

The most basic piece of advice that aspiring writers hear at workshops in seminars is that the story has to create conflict. Lawsuits are all about conflict. The legal system is set up that way—it’s an adversarial system, and where there are adversaries, there are stories. Take the most basic slip-and-fall lawsuit. The plaintiff says he fell on a banana peel in the supermarket-produce section. The store manager says they’d swept the area two minutes earlier. A video from the security camera shows a shadowy, unidentified figure, taking something out of her pocket and dropping it in the area where the slip and fall occurred. Even with those sparse facts, you have the germ of a story. In a sense, lawyers are trained to become storytellers. (And I don’t mean to add the misguided stereotype that attorneys make things up; often, there really are two sides to the story.)  Conversely, the law provides raw material for the writer, automatically creating conflict. Lawsuits also create mystery, because the facts are almost always ambiguous—an automatic whodunit.

There’s another reason why writers are drawn to the law and lawyers are drawn to writing—as author-lawyer Daco Auffenorde has pointed out, lawsuits have a classic three-act structure. http://www.usatoday.com/story/happyeverafter/2014/04/22/daco-romance-authors-lawyers/8013569/.  The attorney files a complaint and learns about the witnesses (characters) (Act I); conducts depositions and fact investigations, where confrontation occurs (Act II); and resolves the conflict at a trial (Act III). In a sense, trial lawyers live out a drama each time they handle a case. And authors of legal drama have a ready-made structure just waiting to be molded into a novel.

While it’s not the most pleasant part of the job, attorneys also have to become conspiracy theorists. They make judgments about their own client, about the other side, and about the third-party witnesses. Lawyers must ask questions like, “Who’s lying?”

“Who’s self-motivated?” “Who’s ethical?” “Is he nervous?” “Will the jury think her arrogant?” In other words, the lawyer, like the writer, engages in character studies, and the legal system provides ready-made characters for the writer. In my own recent novel, Reckless Disregard, my lead character, attorney Parker Stern, represents a video-game designer known to the world only as Poniard, who’s becomes a defendant in a libel action after accusing a movie mogul of kidnapping an actress twenty-five years prior. Poniard will only communicate with Parker through e-mail, which makes the attorney’s usual “character study” of his client impossible. And this inability to evaluate his own client leads Parker into great danger.

Lastly, our adversarial system of justice assumes that there’s a right side and a wrong side, and where there’s “right and wrong,” there’s a moral judgment to be made. Writers thrive on raising moral questions. Melville’s Billy Budd shows how earthly justice and divine morality sometimes conflict. To Kill A Mockingbird explores personal courage in the face of violent racism. The never-ending lawsuit in Dickens’s Bleak House casts an unjust legal system as the novel’s antagonist.

So lawsuits have all the attributes of a good story—conflict, characters, mystery, and moral ambiguity. That’s why the legal system has provided grist for fiction and why so many lawyers are equipped to become authors.

At least, that’s this lawyer’s story.

If you would like to read more about Robert Rotstein’s books please click here.

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Robert Rotstein is a writer and attorney who’s represented many celebrities and all the major motion picture studios.  He’s the author of Reckless Disregard (Seventh Street Books, June 3, 2014) about Parker Stern, an L.A.-based attorney, who takes on a dangerous case for a mysterious video game designer against a powerful movie mogul. Reckless Disregard has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist. His debut novel, Corrupt Practices (Seventh Street Books), was published in 2013.

Visit his website at robertrotstein.com

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(Have an idea for our blog? Then share it with our Killer Nashville family. With over 24,000 visits monthly to the Killer Nashville website, over 300,000 reached through social media, and a potential outreach of over 22 million per press release, Killer Nashville provides another way for you to reach more people with your message. Send a query to contact@killernashville.com or call us at 615-599-4032. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks to Maria Giordano and author Tom Wood for his volunteer assistance in coordinating our weekly blogs. For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com)