KN Magazine: Articles

7/11/17 7/11/17

How Can Theater Training and Storytelling Improve Your Fiction? / Lynn Hesse

My job is writing, but I am a member of three community performance troupes involving storytelling, movement, and singing. My improvisation skills, stage experience, and playwriting enrich my fiction. Here is the Cliff Note version for non-actors or non-performers listing reasons why you might want to give my suggestions a try and develop theater and storytelling skills.

Backstage Decisions Made by Actors and Directors:

Structure of scene: Performance of the same material teaches you what is essential in a scene. If you took the line of dialogue or a character out of the scene it wouldn’t work. Every character must come out of the scene changed, however mundane. Maybe it’s the character Aunt Mary’s job to introduce the red herring or the poisonous mushrooms she unpacked from a grocery bag. Every person in the scene has a reason for being there, and they must show the audience what is not stated outright in dialogue. If not, those pretty phrases or funny bits you love so much need to be cut. What is the scene doing for the entire structure?

What about the lines that hint at upcoming events or help the reader understand the desires or fears of the character? Yes. The Character’s Motivation: What does each character want, their little and big Ds, or desires, and what is blocking them from obtaining those needs? In my novel Well of Rage the overriding desires for my protagonist, Carly Redmund, are to survive and solve the cold-case murder of an African-American teenager, but the rookie’s underlining desires are to start again in a new city, Mobile, Alabama, and find forgiveness. Carly’s mannerism and speech patterns emphasize these wishes.

Research to Inform Backstory:

I visited Mobile, talked to the curators of the Mobile Mardi Gras Museum, went to the library, walked the streets, read books, and scoured the web data to make the city of Mobile come alive on the page. Could the story have been set in a different southern city? Yes, but from my perspective, Mobile has a unique history, culture, and is the right size to highlight the racism and sexism embedded in any governmental structure. Hemingway used the iceberg principle in the Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, No. 21 to illustrate most of what an author knows about a subject can be omitted because seven-eighths of its underwater in the story. The reader understands without being told, but if the writer omits because they don’t know something, a hole is left in the story.

The Character’s Physicality, Movements, and Gestures:

I am a dancer and expressing an intention without words is my first go-to, but play writing helped me hone the ear for dialogue and gestures particular to each character. I study people in restaurants and walking on the streets. You can tell a lot about a person by their posture, gait, how they eat food, their ticks, or their use of humor to misdirect, embarrass, or get noticed. A person’s physicality can be deceiving. A writer can use all these tools to inform or lead the reader to conclusions about characters and plot, but that brings up another question. Why does a reader invest or care about a character? I suggest examining point of view from backstage.

How far away do you want your reader to view your characters? I used multiple points of views in my finished manuscript, “Another Kind of Hero.” In the theater, as well as fiction, a narrator can be unreliable or reliable. Heroes can be reluctant or gung ho. All these factors came into play as I made my decision about POV. I used first person for the narrator scenes and third person for the others. Combining POVs can be tricky, but I realized early on I had two plots weaving together: I had a DEA agent trying to take down a drug pipeline, an opinionated narrator, and a casket full of money and drugs at the Pick’n Pay in Forsyth, Georgia leading dissimilar sisters into jeopardy. I wanted to convey small town life in Georgia in an intimate way to preserve the dignity of the southern culture while examining the hypocrisies that plague American life in our pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. By the way, using my storytelling skills helped to convey a fireside chat feeling between the narrator and the reader.

Don’t laugh. Wanda, the ghost, woke me up one morning and insisted she be put in the manuscript. I realized her voice had been developing through several shelved manuscripts and many improvisational performances. If I can say one true thing through Wanda’s voice, I will be happy.

Summary:

You don’t need to take acting lessons or manage backstage to gain the skills I’ve listed, but it is a fun, hands-on approach I recommend.

Lynn Hesse, the first place winner in the 2015 Oak Tree Press Writing Contest, Cop Tales launched her debut novel Well of Rage as an Atlanta Writers Club Author Panelist, 2016 Decatur Book Festival in Decatur, Georgia. Her 5-star rated novel on Amazon is based on her law enforcement experience and shows how the “isms” separate us. The themes of her fiction and short plays focus on re-framing traumatic events, taking a look at the facts, and then using humor and forgiveness to heal. A detailed interview about Lynn’s police career and the performance video Blue Steel can be seen in The Women’s Archives, Second Feminist Movement, Georgia State University. Lynn is a performance artist and lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Reach her at her website here.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.

7/6/17 7/6/17

How I Sold my First Novel / D.J. Donaldson

The other day I opened the first book in my New Orleans mystery series and looked at the publication date. I was shocked to see that it was 1988. My God… that means the time between that book and the new one in the series, Assassination at Bayou Sauvage, was twenty-nine years. Wondering if that was some kind of record, I searched the Internet and found it wasn’t even worth a mention because, in the site I checked, there had to be ten books in the series to even qualify for the list. The winner was the late, Ed McBain, who wrote fifty-four 87th Precinct novels over a span of forty-nine years. That means some years, he published more than one. Now I’m really feeling like a slacker. But in my defense, between the first book in my series and the new one, I wrote five medical thrillers. (“Big deal,” Ed McBain might say.)

Though greatly humbled by McBain’s accomplishments, I still feel like writing about me. (See, that’s the thing about authors… you can’t keep them from discussing their favorite subject.) The first book in my series was titled, “Cajun Nights.” I don’t remember the exact timing, but St. Martin’s Press must have acquired it at least a year before publication, so it’s been three decades since my then agent, the late Oscar Collier, called me one day and said “There’s an editor at St. Martins who wants to speak with you.”

I’d been waiting for a call like that for years, and I was so excited I didn’t even realize that it would have been much better for him to have said, “I sold your book to St. Martins.” Arrangements were made for the editor to call me and I was soon listening to an actual editor at a big publishing house tell me that he loved everything about the book, but the ending. He didn’t feel that the existing conclusion was good enough. He then gave me a few guidelines for a new ending. We agreed that I would think about what he’d said and we’d talk again.

During that call I gave every indication I could give him what he wanted. But inside, I’m thinking, I can’t possibly change the ending. I thought about the existing one for weeks. I just can’t do it. The next morning, I woke with an idea. I called him, told him briefly what I’d come up with, and he said, “I love it. Now, I’d like for you to write me a description of how the new ending will affect each chapter of the book.”

Oh great, I thought, how am I going to do that? When I write, I know the general direction I’m headed, but get there by actually sliding behind the wheel and stepping on the gas. He was asking me to not only plan my exact route but tell him what I’d see along the way. I figured If I tried that, I’d kill the deal. So instead, I simply rewrote the book and included the new ending. It never occurred to me that I had just demonstrated I couldn’t follow directions. Apparently, the editor at St. Martins didn’t notice either, or if he did, he didn’t care, because he bought that book and wanted more. Ever see the old movie, “Singing in the Rain”? Picture me as the male lead in that film’s big production number and you’ll know how I felt after getting the phone call saying I was not only going to be published, but there was money on the way.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

6/27/17 6/27/17

On Edge / Albert Ashforth

We draw inspiration for our stories from all sorts of different places. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Albert Ashforth, discusses what led to the writing of his latest novel, On Edge.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Within days of my arrival in Kabul in 2010, I knew that I wanted my next Alex Klear adventure to be set in the Afghan capital. Unbelievably, the largest bank fraud in history, the looting of the Kabul bank by 22 of the bank’s employees, was unfolding before my eyes.

Part of the problem of my writing about the fraud, though, was the fact that very few American news outlets were pursuing the story. Was this because the looting of the bank was an embarrassment for our government? The Kabul Bank had been established by the American government in 2004 as a financial conduit to pay for the war against the Taliban and to rebuild Afghanistan’s infrastructure.

The story of the bank’s failure had begun coming out in dribs and drabs in 2009, when property values in Dubai, one of the Emirates, began to fall. Why had the bank been making heavy investments in Dubai? The following year there was a run on the bank by Afghan depositors. By the time the smoke cleared, the Kabul Bank had officially lost 935 million dollars. Unofficially, the figure was believed to be well over a billion dollars.

The bank had a strange history. When it was established, our government, in an obvious quandary regarding who might run the institution, asked President Hamid Karzai for some names. Unsurprisingly, he supplied the names of two of his closest cronies, Khalilullah Ferozi and Sherkhan Farnood, neither of whom had any financial experience. Looking back, one can say the American government could have done a better job of oversight where taxpayer money was concerned.

Because I wanted to write a story which involved the bank scandal, I had to involve retired intelligence officer Alex Klear, my hero, in the looting of the bank. I did this by moving the story forward chronologically, to 2013, when the trial of the bank officials was taking place in the Afghan courts. Since Afghan judges take bribes as a matter of course, Alex, who is in Kabul to find the murderer of an American colonel, wonders whether or not the accused bank officials will be found guilty. Although the American authorities have identified a young Afghan soldier as the killer, Alex isn’t so sure. Almost immediately, he senses that his investigation is being thwarted at every turn by both the Afghan and American governments.

Another factor involved in my wanting to write this story has to do with theatmosphere of Kabul itself, which is a fascinating city and which in some ways resembles Berlin in the years after World War Two, when it was under Four Power rule. In Kabul there are three powers intriguing for control – the elected Afghan government, the NATO nations among which the United States is the most prominent, and the Taliban.

It is the Taliban’s campaign of terrorism which makes Kabul such a dangerous city. The danger is constant in the story, and Alex, anytime he’s away from an American base, spends a good deal of time looking over his shoulder.

Specifically, what Alex has to worry about is becoming the victim of a “green-on-blue” attack. A green-on-blue occurs when an Afghan soldier or policeman – someone who has been trained and gained the trust of the American military – turns his weapon on an American soldier. When Alex hears of the cruel manner in which the murdered colonel has died, he becomes more determined than ever to find the suspected killer.

The more I learned about the bank scandal, the more fascinating it became. Immediately after the appointment of Farnood and Ferozi, the Kabul bank gave undocumented loans to 207 borrowers, all of whom were members of the country’s elite. None of the borrowers ever made any repayments. Nor were they required to pay interest. It was as if these individuals had been given million-dollar gifts by the American government. When I learned that much of this money went to buy villas in Dubai, I knew why the first rumblings of the bank scandal had been set off by the news of falling property values in Dubai.

Yet another reason for my wanting to write about the bank scandal had to do with the fact that American newspapers carried very little news of the fraud. In fact I’d gotten most of my information from British publications rather than American. There’s no question that the loss of so much tax money must have been something of an embarrassment for our government and would not have gone down well with American readers. Because our news outlets as a rule carry so little about such matters, I believe that some of the best informed American citizens are those who read thrillers, and I am hoping that readers of On Edge will learn a great deal about the looting of the Kabul Bank, now believed to be the largest bank fraud in the history of the world.

After serving with the U.S. Army overseas, Albert Ashforth earned a B.A. from Brooklyn College and a M.A. and a Ph.D. from New York University. He worked for two New York newspapers before returning to Europe as an instructor for the University of Maryland’s Overseas Program. He also served at the German Military Academy training NATO officers and as an instructor at the 10th Group Special Forces headquarters in Bad Tolz. As a military contractor, he has done tours in Bosnia, Macedonia, Germany, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. He is the author of three novels and numerous articles and short stories. His novel The Rendition won the Military Writers of America Bronze Medal. His follow-up novel, On Edge, was released in 2016. Ashforth is on the faculty at the State University of New York and lives in New York City.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

6/13/17 6/13/17

Elements of The Psychological Thriller: My Favorite Genre to Date / Valerie Joan Connors

I was fifty-two when I started my first manuscript and fifty-six when I signed my first publishing contract. My first two novels, In Her Keeping and Shadow of a Smile, are both categorized as women’s fiction. But I didn’t set out to write “women’s fiction,” I just wrote the stories and let the label come from the publishing professionals. My third novel is classified as historical fiction. Again, I didn’t set out to write historical fiction, but my story begins in 1949. The story I wanted to tell just happens to have taken place the past. But with my fourth novel, A Better Truth, I set out with purpose and determination to write a psychological thriller.

Since I was new to writing this sort of novel, I had to do some research to find out what readers expect from a psychological thriller. This is what I learned:

Physical Strength vs. Mental Resources: In a psychological thriller, the characters don’t rely on their own physical strength to overcome the villains. Instead, they use their mental resources. Often the villains are not external, but internal, like phobias, fears, unhealthy urges, or mental illness. The conflicts unfold through deception, mind games, and manipulation. The villain may try to push our hero to the brink of insanity, or make them question their own reality. Sounds like fun, right?
Dissolving Sense of Reality: Stephen King’s books are a great example of what readers love about the psychological thriller. He begins with a story that seems firmly grounded in the real world. This sense of reality dissolves so gradually that we stay with him as he moves us into the supernatural.
Complex, Tortured Characters: Whether obsessive, pathological, or mentally deranged, the characters in a psychological thriller usually experience life differently than those of us who are, to a greater or lesser degree, normal. But at least on the surface, they have to appear to be just like the rest of us. Like our friends and neighbors.
Unreliable Narrator: The unreliable narrator is a first-person account given by a character whose credibility is compromised. In other words, he or she is not trustworthy. This character may be unintentionally unreliable because they are naive, like a child. Or, their unreliability could be intentional because they have something to hide, or sinister ulterior motives. This unreliability may be revealed gradually, or it may come in the form of a single revelation or major plot twist.
Setting: Psychological thrillers are often set in dark, isolated places like Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley in her novel Rebecca, or in claustrophobic domestic settings like in V.C. Andrews’ novel, Flowers in the Attic. These novels are often set in familiar places, with familiar subjects and relationships. The thrill in the psychological thriller comes from the idea that what is happening to your main character could happen to you.
Common Themes: Characters may be unstable because of guilt or obsession. They may struggle with perception, reality, identity, delusions, and paranoia. Questions about the true nature of humanity will be raised, though probably not answered.

As with any mystery, don’t forget the red herrings, keep those main characters as unstable as possible, and sprinkle everything with a generous dose of dread. And finally, make sure the reader doesn’t learn the truth until our hero does.

These elements of the psychological thriller opened the door to all sorts of new possibilities for my novel, A Better Truth. My protagonist, Willow, was already quirky, but I was able to magnify her quirkiness as she begins to fall apart. Willow has a difficult time coping with the “busy-ness” of her life. As she becomes more stressed out, she struggles to recognize the difference between reality and hallucination, nightmare and memory. There’s a traumatic event from her childhood that she’s trying very hard to forget. And the harder she tries to suppress it, the more these symptoms manifest. What fun!

Since I enjoy reading psychological thrillers, I don’t know why I was so surprised to discover that I would enjoy writing them. I think I had more fun with this book than with any of the other three. I’m not sure whether my genre hopping is something a publishing professional would recommend, but that’s what I’m doing. Currently, I’m working on a detective thriller series, a dystopian adventure, and a literary adventure story about African lions. I used to force myself to work on one project at a time, and I think there was a good reason for that. This is what happens when you break your own rules. Alas, it’s a journey that never fails to surprise me.

Valerie Joan Connors is the author of four novels, A Better Truth (Deeds Publishing, 2016), A Promise Made (Deeds Publishing, 2015), Shadow of a Smile (Deeds Publishing, 2014) and In Her Keeping (Bell Bridge Books, 2013). The child of an artist and a musician, Valerie was born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan a long time ago. Her family moved her out west, where she spent her formative years in Eugene, Oregon. Then she bounced up and down the west coast, spending time in San Diego, Seattle, and Portland, before her job as a software consultant brought her to Atlanta in 1996, the same day as the Olympic torch. Valerie credits her association with the Atlanta Writers Club for the fact that her four novels were both written and published. She has served on the AWC Board since 2011 in nearly every capacity, including as AWC President from 2013 to 2015. She continues to serve as the VP of Programming and Officer Emerita. During business hours, Valerie is the CFO of an engineering firm. She is a dog person, and supports lion, tiger, and elephant conservation efforts, and hopes to raise awareness through her writing. Valerie lives in Norcross with her husband and two rescue dogs, and is working on her next novel. Find out more about Valerie and her books on her website: valeriejoanconnors.com

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

6/7/17 6/7/17

Dropping Anchors / Matt Coyle

If I were ever to teach a class on novel writing, I’d tell the students how not to do it and cite my process as an example. I don’t outline, so I’d be referred to as a pantser: someone who writes by the seat of their pants. That’s a little too anatomically close to turning out crap for me. So, my writers’ groups in San Diego have always called writing without an outline as being a blank-pager. This is a hat tip to Raymond Chandler who is thought to have said he started writing every day staring at a blank page.

Surprisingly, being a blank-pager in crime writing is not that unusual. I’d say about half the writers I know don’t outline. You’d think we’d spend weeks in advance laying out intricate plots on a spreadsheet before we start writing the actual story. After all, we’re supposed to keep readers guessing as well as produce a plot that makes sense and doesn’t cheat them when we connect the dots at the end.

Outlining seems like the smart, organized way to go. I’ve been called smart many times, but ass is usually attached to the end. However, no one has ever called me organized. Thus, I’m a blank-pager. But, that’s not the “how not to” part of my process. Dropping anchors is.

Now, even as a blank-pager, I have to have a beginning when I start a book and I always have an ending in mind, too. The fun and frightening part is filling in the in-between. My books have action and dead bodies, but I think of them as character driven. An inciting incident sets the plot in motion, but the rest of the story is dictated around the decisions the characters make and the actions they take.

That’s where the anchors come in.

My subconscious works hard when I’m writing — and even when I’m not. Harder than me. So, when it pops a line into my head, I listen. The line may not immediately make sense to me and may not have much to do with the scene I’m writing. Or so I think. I’ll drop an anchor and write the line into the scene. Sometimes, just putting it on paper-or on monitor-will open the door to what my subconscious had in mind (literally) and I’ll incorporate the sentiment into the scene. This often gives the scene more depth and unlocks the true meaning that I couldn’t see. Sometimes the anchor just sinks to the bottom of the story without making a splash. But that’s okay. I’ll take another look at it on revision the next day. Often, the meaning of the anchor will float to the surface and I’ll write it into the scene.

There are times when that anchor just sits on the bottom of my brain for the rest of the year I’m writing the book, pulling down whatever scene it’s in. That’s okay, too, because I can always pull it up when I start the first overall revision of the book. The important thing is not to forget it’s there.

Strange process, sure, but it worked for me in my first three books, including Dark Fissures (December 2016). Another example of how it happened is in the book I’m writing now.

My protagonist, Rick Cahill, is talking to Peter Stone, the most powerful, egocentric man he knows. Stone is always in control of every situation he’s in. A dangerous man who is not afraid of anything. The scene was okay but nothing special. A bit of needed information that didn’t have much punch. Rick accused Stone of something he claimed he hadn’t done. Then my subconscious dropped an anchor. It told me Stone was suddenly nervous about who may have done the thing that Rick accused him of. I didn’t know why Stone was nervous. There was no place in the story for it, yet. I left the anchor in and moved on, but it made me wonder who was scary enough to make Peter Stone nervous and why.

I continued writing another hundred pages and then the people who made Stone nervous showed themselves. They fit perfectly and added another layer of menace to the story as well as a ticking clock. Plus, they gave me an avenue to my next book.

That was one heavy anchor I’m thankful I let drop.

So, if you decide to do it how not to do it like me, when your subconscious talks to you, listen and drop an anchor. The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll have to pull it up.

Matt Coyle grew up in Southern California, battling his brother and sisters for respect and the best spot on the couch in front of the TV. He knew he wanted to be a writer at the age of twelve when his father gave him The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler. His debut novel, Yesterday’s Echo, won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, The San Diego Book Award for Best Mystery, the IBPA Ben Franklin Silver Award for Best New Voice in Fiction, and was a Macavity Finalist for Best First Novel. The second Rick Cahill crime novel, Night Tremors, was a finalist of the Lefty Award for Best Regional Mystery and is a finalist for the Anthony Award for Best Mystery and a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. The third Rick Cahill crime novel, Dark Fissures, arrived in December, 2016. Matt is currently writing the next book in the Rick Cahill crime series. He lives in San Diego with his Yellow Lab, Angus. Reach him at www.mattcoylebooks.com

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

5/30/17 5/30/17

Black Swans in Publishing / By Gregory C. Randall

As a writer who has independently published my own work through my own publishing company, I am amazed at how little authors know about the publishing world they work in. While many writers are brilliant and even inspired, the gobbly-gook of the publishing world is just stuff out there to be handled by their agents and publishers. What I have seen change in the world of academic non-fiction and fiction over the last sixteen years and thirteen books is just, well, dumbfounding. As Dorothy said to the dog, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

“Black Swan,” with its roots in a Latin phrase by Roman poet Juvenal, simply means being smacked against the side of the head with something so new, so shocking, and so disturbingly out of the normal as to change the whole direction of a thought, a thesis, a belief system, and even cultures and institutions. Ideas can be Black Swans and can change the course of history. Jesus Christ and Mohammed come to mind, as well as the American concept of democracy. The steam engine, electricity, even double entry bookkeeping radically changed the course of the normal. These things from out of left field can influence systems far beyond the original intent of the concept or invention.

In our world of words and storytelling, the publishing empire had settled comfortably on a simple, yet profitable, system. Writers write, agents sell, and publishers buy. Then publishers sell through distributors to the ultimate retail outlet, the bookstore. There the customer acquires the writer’s work, and after a hundred fingers claw out their few pennies, the writer declares: “What the hell?” The system obviously isn’t there to help the writer eat, clothe themselves, and live comfortably, but it certainly is there to enrich the publishing industry. Don’t get me wrong, the system worked well, exceedingly well, and many writers became successful and wealthy.

But with success came complacency and fortress building. No matter how hard the writers and authors tried to breach the walls, it was very difficult to be invited inside through the well-defended gates. There were many who said enough and started their own publishing companies to get their words out. That was costly, and the doors to the bookstores were still well defended.

In the early part of the first decade of our twenty-first century, two Black Swans flew in by the names of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. Jobs and his development and reimagining of the personal computer and eventually the iPad, and Bezos with his new model for selling books (and a lot of other stuff) that led to the Kindle system and retail merchandising on a massive scale. From these sprang the ebook, a notion that had floated around for more than ten years but was impossible to seriously market and distribute (issues of copyrights, distribution, and bad hardware). The iPad (and its many facsimiles) changed how we use and access information on the portable level, the Kindle made it affordable and the software (mobi, epub, pdfs, and a few others), made it available to everyone. The first Kindle was released in 2007, the first iPad in 2010, since then the publishing world has been turned on its head.

With the invention of Print On Demand (POD), your words can be published and in your hand within a few days for minimal cost. POD simply took old copier systems and reimagined them into machines that print and manufacture a paper book with a professional look in minutes. Another system turned upside down.

Whole industries have grown and expanded within this new universe. The number of cover artists, copyeditors, story editors, marketing gurus, ebook facilitators, book builders and designers; have increased because there are now customers (writers) who are willing to pay for a quality product. However, as with any opportunity caution is advisable, costly horror stories have been reported due to ineptitude, unfulfilled promises, and outright fraud.

Today writers can finish a manuscript and within minutes have it available to the world. It was messy, especially during the first few years, but it has matured to a point where new systems of facilitating software (like the app industry that grew out of the iPad and its camp followers) are ubiquitous. Now everyone is in the pool, Google, Microsoft, the hardware manufacturers like Samsung, Apple, Amazon, and dozens of others, and software from Scrivner, Adobe, and Kindle. There are now millions of authors who keep at their craft because they get the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.

The traditional publishing industry was gobsmacked and immediately fought the revolution and reinforced the fortress. They trashed the ebook, the whole idea of the indie-publisher, and even put the shame and guilt of the collapse of the bookselling industry on the shoulders of Amazon. But every system, no matter how seemingly successful, needs to be shaken to its core and rebuilt – ‘Creative Destruction,’ coined but Joseph Schumpeter in 1942, comes to mind. Now the publishing industry has thousands of new and experienced writers to consider and offer contracts.

Not surprisingly some of these writers know more about the world of publishing and marketing than their own publishers. New genres have developed, expanded, and prospered – romance, erotica, steampunk, poetry, and dozens of others have spun out from the old genres. There aren’t enough genres to identify the subcategories at Amazon and the bestseller lists, and they keep adding new ones.

I’ve published and republished nine books all under my own publishing imprint. As one of those that not only writes but produces the whole package (cover, design, and marketing), I’m now convinced that anyone with even limited skills (or the desire to learn) can become a published author and bring to their customers a quality product. I’m also engaged with a leading publisher to bring out two thrillers next year under their imprint (great experiment here for me), and this particular publisher is one of the leading believers in Black Swans and how to radically change the face of publishing. It is an exciting time for authors and publishers, and more importantly for our readers.

Are there other Black Swans on the horizon? The nature of the phenomenon is sudden surprise and shock. So what might be out there? I see dramatic changes in the marketing of published works directly to the customer both directly and indirectly. There is huge potential for the integration of video into published works.The growth of audio books (commuters, travelers, those with sight issues, and of course that awful hour at the gym) now includes well-known actors and will continue to expand. The impact in intuitive/digital education has yet to be seen. The future is boundless. However, the true nature of a Black Swan is the profound wonder and the chaos that may ensue. It is by nature anarchy—and ain’t it great.

Randall has made the San Francisco Bay Area his home with his wife for the last 45 years. A graduate of Michigan State with a degree in landscape architecture, Randall has 45 years of community design and urban planning experience. His books almost always have an historical component and often reflect how the past has impacts on the present. Randall has developed all the cover cart for his books as well as the interior design, graphics, and overall formatting. This also includes ebook formatting. Greg is the author of the five book series, The Sharon O’Mara Chronicles. The six book in the series is under development. Randall and his wife have their own independent publishing company, Windsor Hill Publishing. He is a book cover designer and artist and is well versed in the ebook conversion process. Reach him at gregorycrandall.com

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

5/23/17 5/23/17

Writing Tics: Finding the Whys / Danny Gardner

My debut novel, A Negro and an Ofay, has, by my last count, been finished seven times. First was when it was accepted by a publisher that unfortunately closed shop. Luckily I found a wonderful agent in Liz Kracht, of Kimberly Cameron and Associates, who took it on with verve. Her notes helped me shape it into a work worthy of submission. Query feedback was very positive. We were getting close to a deal, which lent the perception I was done. Then I believed I was done again. And again. Eventually, it found a new home with Down & Out Books, where publisher Eric Campbell and associate editor Lance Wright put my manuscript through the paces.

My work in this book encapsulates themes of race and class as it relates to crime. I address police corruption, brutality and criminal justice from the perspective of a bi-racial protagonist in 1952 Chicago. I often play upon the unacknowledged fascination our society has with race to make strong points. In many instances, I gleefully court controversy. Although more than a few editors appreciated my tone, their constructive criticism advised me to expect reasonable compromises down the line. I crossed my fingers and said a little prayer for the darlings I feared I’d have to take out back and shoot. Once I received my manuscript back from Eric, I had my work cut out for me. Happily, I got the all-clear on the story. No compromises would be necessary.

What it needed was another edit, because my writing was riddled with more tics than if it spent a summer camping in Yosemite.

I had come to long-form writing from entertainment, mainly as a stand-up comedian, occasionally as an actor, screenwriter and filmmaker. The tendencies I developed over my career added some nuance and even a bit of polish to my book. Feedback indicated strong pacing, characterization, and dialogue. More than a few readers remarked how each chapter felt like an episode of a television series. Unfortunately, even I could tell my novel was rife with imperfection borne of years of hearing myself talk. It wasn’t enough to know the what. To make it the best it could be, I had to understand the whys.

Screenwriting Tics: The very fortunate — or powerful — can direct their own screenplays. All others must take a story written by someone else from the page to the stage. You may be shocked to learn that Hollywood doesn’t regard screenwriters as indispensable. Once the script is approved, no one wants us around to gum up the works. In kind, screenwriters don’t trust executives and producers not to whittle away at what we’ve worked hard to create. We expect film directors to misunderstand everything. Editors abuse us. When we write screenplays, we try to think like the person who is most likely to go against us. That’s no point of view from which to proceed writing a novel, where the reader is on the writer’s side. They don’t need everything spelled out the way a line producer does. Brevity and simplicity help them attenuate to the author’s intentions. Novels require focus. Too many details take the reader out of the story. I needed to trim some unnecessary fat.

Comedy Tics: The attention span of the average comedy audience varies. A theatergoer enjoying a revival of Oscar Wilde has a different attention span than the teenager who loves shows on Adult Swim. There are some hard and fast rules about presentation in comedy, from the threes on up to Ars Et Celare Artem, but while these all work in an audio-visual medium, they don’t necessarily translate to narrative fiction, where bits can be confusing, or even distracting. If something is supposed to be funny in a novel, it will happen in the imagination of the reader. This is entirely different than, say, sketch comedy, where things can go off the rails to horrible effect. There’s no bombing on the e-reader like there is on stage at the Laugh Factory. I could relax and just write my story.

Performance Tics: Dialogue should sound like actual conversations. Narration, however, should provide contrast that gives dialogue depth. Often, and in key moments in the work, my narration came off as conversational. Sometimes it was an enhancement, especially those instances where I wanted the reader to feel what it was like to be black. In other moments, it obscured what I wanted to convey. To fix this, it helped me to think of my narrator as the straight man. In improv, we call it Advancing. Sometimes the narration needed to keep things moving right along, no matter the opportunity for elaboration. Where my narration was Commenting, which is another improv term, meaning it was self-referential, I used dialogue to make things unfold, although it went beyond “show, don’t tell.” It was more, “Don’t tell or show. Let them get it on their own.”

Cultural Tics: I speak a few different languages: American English, current black American vernacular, and Chicagoese, that beautifully rich dialect that most people outside of the Midwest can’t easily understand. Eric pointed out my repetitive use of the words who, then, since, with, and & was. A lot of folks have read this book and no one mentioned a thing. Then I realized most of my beta readers were from backgrounds like my own. Eric is from Florida. He hadn’t been conditioned to hear the same semiotics. He took my word usage as repetitive, and sometimes it had been. Other times, they’re more like fuggedaboutit; same sound, myriad meanings. Like my ticks of performance, I was writing what sounded right in my head. The tone was right in my mind, but not on the page. I approached the edit as if I was writing for the reader most unlike me. I found it didn't change much in the way of my plot and structure, but it made room for me to expand my work. Eliminating shortcuts saved me word count.

After two more edits, I managed to deliver to Down & Out a manuscript finally ready for print. In doing so, I’ve prepared myself for the writing journey ahead. It’s up to others to decide if the book is good. At least I can feel I’m not limiting myself with habits that are incompatible with the work I’m doing. Once I took the time to discover why I had them, I found my tendencies are attributes. That gives me a lot more confidence I can pull off another book after this one.

Danny Gardner’s work has appeared in Beat to a Pulp, Out of the Gutter, and Literary Orphans Journal. His first novel, A Negro And An Ofay, will be published May 2017 by Down & Out Books. His short fiction will be featured in Just to Watch Him Die, a Johnny Cash-inspired anthology, published by Gutter Books. He is a member of the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, as well as the International Thriller Writers. He lives in Los Angeles by way of Chicago.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

5/16/17 5/16/17

Fiction Anticipates Reality! / Susan Wolfe

In Chapter 1 of my new thriller Escape Velocity, my main character, Georgia Griffin, is leaving what she believes is a successful job interview with Mr. Ken Madigan when she spots a rival in the lobby:

Georgia’s stomach cramped with hunger as she emerged into the lobby and saw a woman in her mid-thirties glancing through a magazine. Tailored suit, precision-cut blond hair, leather case laid neatly across her lap. Completely professional, and she had ten years’ experience on Georgia at least. No. No way. Georgia walked briskly over to the woman and stood between her and the receptionist.

“Ms. Millichamp?” she said quietly, extending her hand.

The woman stood up and smiled. “Sarah Millchamp. Nice to meet you. I know I’m early.”

“I’m Misty. So sorry to tell you this, but Mr. Madigan’s been called out of town unexpectedly. He’s headed for the airport now.”

“Oh!” The poised Ms. Millchamp quickly regained her composure. “That’s too bad. But of course I understand.”

“Thank you for being so understanding. This literally happened ten minutes ago, and I’m completely flustered. I know he wants to meet you. Are you parked out here? At least let me walk you to your car.”

She put a sisterly hand against Ms. Millchamp’s elbow and began steering her toward the exit. “Tell you what, can I call you to reschedule as soon as Mr. Madigan gets back? Maybe you two can have lunch. Just don't take that job at Google in the meantime.”

“Google?”

“Now, don’t pretend you haven’t heard about the job at Google. In Brad Dormond’s department? They’re our worst nightmare when it comes to competing for good people.” The air in the parking lot mingled the spicy scent of eucalyptus with the small of rancid engine grease, and her stomach lurched. “So, see over there? That’s the entrance to the freeway. Bye now. I’ll call you soon.”

Georgia waved as Sarah Millchamp backed her car out. Then she hurried back inside to the receptionist.

“Hi,” she said. “That lady, Ms. Millchamp? She just let me know she has a migraine and will call to reschedule. Will you let Maggie know?”

The receptionist nodded and picked up her phone. “That’s too bad.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

Done and dusted, as Gramma Griffin would say.

***

Georgia comes from a long line of proud con artists, and I want the reader to see early on that she is going to do a few things the rest of us might only fantasize. Georgia takes chances.

But not so fast. Once the book was released, I started hearing that the scene resonates with some readers because it reminds them of their own behavior. First, a friend who is a well-respected lawyer described the time she saw a notice for a job she wanted, so she tore the notice down and threw it away before she applied for the job. Then a gentle-seeming, wholesome kindergarten teacher at my Barnes & Noble reading drew gasps and laughter from the crowd when she confessed that she misled a fellow interviewee by saying the interviews had been moved to a different location.

Today I received an email from a woman who says, “When I read Georgia’s 1st interview at the beginning of the book I totally was taken aback because of something I did once. I'll share that story sometime.” I hope it involves poison.

What’s going on here? When I wrote the scene, I didn’t know anybody who had done what Georgia did. I just imagined what my particular character would do. And now I discover some people have actually acted this way in real life. It seems when I go into my trance and imagine my character taking action, I can sometimes be downright prescient.

Here’s another example: In my first book, the Edgar award-winning The Last Billable Hour, I loosely based one of my composite characters on a person I had encountered in real life. Call the real guy Joe. My fictitious character likes to hunt on his ranch out of season, and in the book he gets injured in a freak hunting accident. Just seemed like something that would happen to my character. Imagine my surprise two years later when I got a call from a friend: “Guess what just happened? Remember Joe? He got injured in a freak hunting accident!”

Now, if that hunting accident had occurred before I wrote my book, people would have assumed I copied it from real life. But since it happened the other way around, what’s the explanation? I spent a lot of time observing and thinking about Joe (who I didn’t know personally) in order to incorporate him into the composite character for my book. I incorporated Joe’s contempt for rules, his penchant for risk-taking, and the thrill he got from illicit activities. Score one for me, two years later Joe was lying in a ditch beside his hunting rifle (happily more scared than injured.)

Excuse me while I get back to predicting the future.

Susan Wolfe is a lawyer with a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Stanford University. After four years of practicing law full time, she bailed out and wrote the best-selling novel, The Last Billable Hour, which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. She returned to law for another sixteen years, first as a criminal defense attorney and then as an in-house lawyer for Silicon Valley high-tech companies. Born and raised in San Bernardino, California, she now lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, Ralph DeVoe. Her newest novel, Escape Velocity, was released in 2016. Visit Susan at authorsusanwolfe.com or Facebook.com/SusanWolfeAuthor

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

5/9/17 5/9/17

Routine Writing Habits Are Rewarding / Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Getting in a writing routine can be a difficult task! Our lives that exist off the written page can often be hectic, but finding a pattern that works for you is well worth the effort. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, discusses his balancing act of life, work, and writing.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

As I like to say, I’m a reporter by day and a mystery writer by earlier in the day. Most mornings I’m up before 5 a.m. After breakfast, dog-walking, and perusing the headlines on my phone and in the paper, I write from about 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. before changing hats and heading to the office.

It’s a challenging routine, but in my experience it provides the minimum amount of time I need — combined with four to five hours on Sunday mornings — to put together sentences that make some semblance of sense, not to mention figuring out whodunit, why, and where that body should go. (The latest book in my series about an ex-college quarterback turned private eye in Columbus, The Hunt, came out in April)

As a failed night owl, my regimen is built around early mornings. But over the years I’ve developed strategies for maximizing writing time that I think apply whether the view outside your window is lightening with the coming day or darkening with the setting sun. Until I write that bestseller or Netflix comes calling with a series proposal, here are some of the rules I follow as I navigate my two jobs.

Separate church and state. In times past, I tried warming up my brain once in front of the computer by reading a couple websites, trolling Facebook and pecking out an email or three. No more. How many status updates does a guy need first thing? These days, I focus my morning’s work on the writing task at hand — sit down, open Word, locate manuscript, read the prior day’s output, and then proceed with new material. Along the way, I’ll open a web browser to check a fact or two, but I resist the temptation to peek at Twitter just yet. All the ancillary writing tasks — the blogging, the email, the research — I reserve for evenings when the spirit is willing but the brain cells are sagging. No matter how much time your own schedule allows to write or what time of day, those minutes are too precious to squander on clickbait.

Farm sustainably. One of our family mottos is “don’t farm too close to the edge of the field.” Meaning, we try not to fill our days so full that there’s no room for occasionally just sitting around and doing nothing. Pouring a second or third cup of coffee. Reading. Watching a show. Taking a nap. I try to follow a modified version of this as I write. That means leaving open the possibility of pondering for a minute or two rather than just pounding away on the keys. Yes, in my experience, it’s possible to write for two hours without ceasing. But inevitably, the result is lacking. Writing requires reflection. A few moments or more spent considering a plot point can save a couple hours later when you realize the point wouldn’t fool a fifth-grader, let alone a discerning crime fiction fan.

Take a breather. This is related to the prior point, but on a macro level. Balancing daily writing with work and family obligations is one challenge; producing a manuscript under the confines of this schedule is yet another. One approach—and possibly the best one—is keeping at it seven days a week until you’re finished. Afterward, celebrate by walking away from the computer for a few days or weeks while you catch up on all those household chores that piled up while you were mentally away. In order to preserve familial harmony and keep the house from falling down around me, I’ve chosen that path with a small detour: giving myself permission to take Saturdays off from writing. The downside is that by pausing mid-stream, especially if the words are flowing, I risk losing momentum. And, to be honest, that’s happened more than once. The upside is both a chance to catch my breath—what bliss to start the day sipping coffee and just reading for a change—and to wrestle the chaos of home owning back into a semblance of order. Where did I put that screwdriver?

So far, it’s a system that works for me: focus on the work at hand; give myself time to ponder as I pound the keys; and take a break once a week. Now if you’ll excuse me, my alarm is going off. It’s time to move that body from Point A to Point B . . .

Welsh-Huggins, a long-time reporter at The Associated Press in Columbus, Ohio, is the author of the Andy Hayes mystery series, featuring an ex-Ohio State quarterback turned private eye, including Fourth Down And Out, Slow Burn, and Capitol Punishment (called “nicely plotted” and “a perfect read in an election year” by Publishers Weekly), along with nonfiction books about the death penalty and domestic terrorism. In the fourth book in the mystery series, The Hunt, Hayes searches for a missing human trafficking victim as a serial killer stalks prostitutes on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. When Welsh-Huggins isn't writing he enjoys running, reading, spending time with family and trying to remember why having a dog, two cats and two parakeets seemed like a good idea at the time. More information is available at andrewwelshhuggins.com

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

5/9/17 5/9/17

The Joys and Challenges of Writing a Series Character / Joe Clifford

I write the Jay Porter thriller series (Oceanview Publishing). With three in the bag (Lamentation, December Boys and Give Up the Dead), and numbers four and five under contract, I am preparing to dive back into the bleak wintery world of Lamentation Mountain.

Oftentimes when I tell someone I write a series character (usually at Christmas parties I don’t want to be at), I get one of two responses. Well, I get a lot of different responses, but two of note. The first is “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. How about I tell you, you write it, and we split the money?” As tempting as that offer is, I pass. The second, more interesting question is whether I find it stifling, artistically speaking. Whereas many of my responses in uncomfortable social situations tend to be standard, here my answer is always authentic and unique.

Like the books and characters in the series, the answer evolves; and like most of life’s compelling examinations, a great deal of conflict presents itself. There are parts I find stifling, but not for the reasons most think. Generally, I get asked this question by other artists, other writers. We are, after all, in this game to forge new ground. How many Jack Reacher books can Lee Child write? As many as he wants! I’d kill for his career, as I am sure most writers would, at least those of us who write genre. And that is where I’ll start.

Part of writing genre is ascribing to a template. I will avoid the word “formula” because it has such nasty connotations. I started out as a literary fiction writer before making the switch to the Dark Side. Even now I retain enough of those sensibilities that I can get slapped with the “literary thriller” label, which I love but drives bookstores mad.

When one says something is contrived, what they mean is he or she can see the strings. Readers don’t want to see the strings. They want to be submerged, lost, whisked away in the fantasy. But all art, by definition, is contrived; we make something out of nothing, create an illusion. One wrong move and it can all fall apart, exposing the machination behind the curtain.

But I like having that map, knowing I am not flying blind; I like a flight chart that gets me from Ashton to Arizona.

In the Jay Porter books, I get to chronicle the life of a man I care very much about. As crazy as it sounds, Jay has become as real to me as most of my friends. I certainly spend more time with him than I do most of my friends. Jay began as part me, part my half-brother, but now, after three books, he has grown into a wholly original creation. Deeply flawed, self-sabotaging, good intentioned but often perverted by anger, rage, and misunderstanding a dream that is just out reach, Jay resonates because of these conflicts (or so I’ve been told). I think it was Mailer who said our heroes need to be larger than life. I counter Norman that they need to be slightly less than. Because that rings truer for me. We all know the life we want. How many of us get it?

To this end, no, there is nothing stifling about watching a creation come into this world, and not unlike parenting a child, having to surrender ownership to allow that child to become what he needs to be, not what you want him to be. When I begin a Jay Porter book I have a loose idea of a plot, and then I see where Jay takes it. This is the very opposite of stifling. It’s exciting, unexpected, and I am often just as surprised (and infuriated) by Jay’s choices. But I find the ride richly rewarding. I hope my readers do too.

But there is a stifling component to writing a series. And like I said it’s not what most think. The hard part is that when you write a series, it becomes harder to write outside that world. Your style becomes immersed and associated with that one character and series, which makes it tougher to write different books. I’ve written several standalones, books I think are just as good as the Porter books, but it’s been harder to find them homes. I’ve heard if I “made them a Jay Porter book” . . . But that is what I am trying not to do in those situations.

Still, this is a minor gripe. I work as a professional novelist. How many writers would love to say that? I am humbled and honored by the opportunity.

Joe Clifford is acquisitions editor for Gutter Books and producer of Lip Service West, a “gritty, real, raw” reading series in Oakland, CA. He is the author of several books, including Junkie Love and the Jay Porter Thriller Series (Lamentation, December Boys, Give Up the Dead), as well as editor of Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Stories Based on the Songs of Bruce Springsteen. Joe’s writing can be found at www.joeclifford.com.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

5/3/17 5/3/17

Meet the New Hand-Sellers / Baron R. Birtcher

Being a writer in 2017 involves facing challenges that didn't even exist a decade ago. With the services currently available online anyone can publish anything. It has never been easier to get your book printed. So why is that a bad thing? Oversaturation of content with no filter for quality. There used to be several checkpoints you had to go through to get your book published, now all you have to do is cut a check to Amazon. This is not to say that amazing works have not been self-published, because they have! However, being a published author no longer holds the same weight as in did in years past. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Baron Birtcher, shares his insight on writing in modern times and how we can all help each other!

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Ask any author — aspiring or established — why they write, and you will likely get some variation on one or more of the following answers: (A) I feel I have a story inside me that has to come out; (B) I have always wanted to write; and (C) I want other people to read it.

It’s that last one that’s the trick, though, isn’t it?

The fact is, without readers we’re simply tapping away on the keyboard and entertaining ourselves. But when it’s all said and done, we want to know that our words have been read; that they’ve found an appreciative audience that engaged with the characters and the world we created on the page.

As a result, I have adopted a new mantra: Read a book, review a book.

Like so many of us, I look back fondly on the days of vinyl LPs and FM radio, where in the space of an hour you would hear everything from Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin to Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan. If you had an hour to kill, you’d drop into Tower Records and browse the bins while the girl at the register played something you’d never heard before on the house sound system. Pure bliss. The point is, there was room enough in our heads for all of it. We wanted to hear it! That was the very definition of Hand-Selling!

Reading was no different. Most of us want to be exposed to new authors, new subjects, new ideas, and new styles. But how do we find them in this new era of online sales?

I was introduced to Michael Connelly’s first book — at the time, just another new guy on the scene — by a knowledgeable bookseller in a brick-and-mortar store. Same with Robert Crais, Randy Wayne White, Don Winslow, and the list goes on and on. I’m sure that many of us share that same experience. Hand-Selling!

Problem is, where have the bookstores gone? The Internet irreversibly changed the game. Without the need for a traditional publisher and distributor, the playing field just became more level than it’s ever been before, and that’s a good thing, right?

Well…

By analogy, let’s take another look at the music business. At one time, the music industry was rife with “gate-keepers.” There were club owners, agents, managers, producers, and ultimately, Record Labels. The fact was, if you could run that gauntlet successfully as an artist, you must be pretty good, or at least appealing to some perceived market segment.

These days, if I have a song in my head, I can record it in my basement and have it up on YouTube or Spotify within minutes of cutting the tune. No gate-keepers; nobody to tell me if it needs work. The bad news is, there’s no record label to shout out the existence of my new hit from the rooftops, or through those radio speakers. In short, it’s invisible until somebody hears it … and that person tells somebody else … and so on.

The new world of literature is virtually identical. There are some authors who simply captivate with their enviable use of language. Others weave plots that are so compelling that you practically tear the pages from their binding from turning them so quickly.

But, while we are presently enjoying a new and liberating digital playing field, it is vital to remember that quality still matters. In the absence of the traditional gate-keepers, we are now faced with an avalanche of reading options that range widely in terms of editorial quality. Because content (i.e. Kindle, etc.) tends to “look” the same to the online buyer, the new gate-keepers—in essence, the new Hand-Sellers—are the bloggers, the critics, and the readers who take the time to post an honest review.

Sure, we are blessed that we also still have a handful of stalwart, dedicated and brave brick-and-mortar bookstores out there, but the folks who are increasingly responsible for spreading the word about a new book, new author, or new voice is us.

All of us.

If we want to help our favorite new author reach a broader audience, we must take the time to post a review — shout it from the rooftops in the digital realm. For instance, copy the URL address of this fine blog site and share it with your friends, and encourage them to do the same. Now, while it is highly unlikely that my posted review of the superstar authors like Connelly, Crais or King will have much effect on their sales performance, the positive influence of reviews for new or less-established authors is practically immeasurable!

Which makes it all the more important for us to take the time to sit down and write that post, dash off that review, and let the reading world know what a great discovery we’ve found. If we want to find the golden treasures in the ever-growing stream of literary content, we’ve got to contribute to the process and be active participants not only as authors, but as fans and reviewers.

Let our collective mantra be: Read a book — Review a book. And it doesn’t have to be a brand new release. Post a review for any book you’ve read and loved!

To paraphrase the late, great cartoonist and creator of the Pogo comic strip, Walt Kelly: I have met the new Hand-Seller, and he is us.

Baron R. Birtcher spent a number of years as a professional musician, and founded an independent record label and management company. His first two Mike Travis novels (Roadhouse Blues and Ruby Tuesday) are Los Angeles Times and Independent Mystery Booksellers Association best sellers, and he has been nominated for a number of literary awards, including the Nero Award (Hard Latitudes), the Claymore and Silver Falchion Awards (Rain Dogs), and the Left Coast Crime “Lefty” Award (Angels Fall). His newest thriller, South California Purples, was released April 30, 2017. Baron currently divides his time between Portland, Oregon and Kona, Hawaii. Read more at www.facebook.com/BaronRBirtcher/

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

4/25/17 4/25/17

The Only Question You Need / Carter Wilson

Outlining is an essential step for some writers! An outline can be a helpful tool to keep us on track and meet our goals. They aren't for everyone though! This week's guest blogger, Carter Wilson, discusses his experience with outlines and why he made the choice not to use them.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Screw outlining.

That’s easy for me to say, because I suck at it. Sure, I had tried, but never in earnest. So after I’d written a few books, I decided to give outlining a series go — notecards and everything. I spent nearly six months outlining an idea I had for a book, and you know what happened? I got so bored with everything I threw the entire story out the window, never to return (I barely remember the original idea now).

I am what is called a classic Pantser (as in writing from the seat of). This, as opposed to my Plotser colleagues, who can see the entirety of a story, start to finish, before they actually write it out. So, after four published novels and a fifth under contract, I have learned one unalterable truth. In writing, I remain a dedicated Panstser and all I ever need to do is continually ask myself one question:

What if?

What if? is the question that drives the story for me. And this question has a sister: what does that mean? Let me elaborate.

All my books start out with an idea of an opening scene. That’s it. No sense of any character, no arc for the story, and certainly not an ending. Just a (hopefully) gripping opening scene, one I’d like to read myself, or see in a movie. In my award-winning novel, The Comfort of Black, I initially opened with a sex scene between a husband and wife. My nugget of an idea was theirs was a stale and fracturing marriage, and the scene would be meaningful because, despite their struggles, they’ve decided to try to conceive a child, and this night was their first concerted effort. They finish, the husband falls asleep, and the wife sits in bed, mulling the possibility of becoming a mother. Then, I thought:

What if the husband starts talking in his sleep? And what if his sleep-talking is about raping and killing someone?

What does that mean? How would the wife react? What is he hiding? What does she do next?

Oh, the possibilities.

Or this opener, from my latest release, Revelation:

A college student regains consciousness in a dimly lit, dirt-floor cell. There are two things in the cell with him: the eviscerated body of his friend, and an ancient typewriter. There’s a stack of blank paper next to the typewriter, and on the top sheet is a single, typed sentence. You’re the writer, tell me a story.

Holy hell, what does that mean?

Those two opening scenes were the only ideas I had for the books, because all I tend to think about is what if? And answering that question is where I derive nearly all of my enjoyment in writing. I love not knowing what the hell I’m doing. I love subjecting a character to a highly intense experience for about 100 pages, and then spending the next 300 pages trying to figure out what it all means. I learn as my character learns. Things evolve, storylines develop organically, and suddenly, at some point in the novel, it pops. All the answers unfold. And, because the answers often surprise me, they end up (usually) surprising my readers as well. And it’s so satisfying.

But pure Pantsing is not for the faint of heart. Some downfalls:

You will absolutely sit for hours and not have a clue what the next chapter should be about.
You could be 300 pages in and realize 1) you don’t have answers to your questions, 2) your answers are completely implausible, 3) your story is stupid and you’re doomed.
You have to do A LOT of revising, mostly because of the three points above.
You have to heavily rely on your subconscious to figure everything out.
You could think of a what if at the end of the story that’s so good you can’t ignore it, but you’d have to change everything before it.

All of these above have happened to me. And that’s okay, because the enjoyment for me is the high-risk/high-return proposition of just starting with an engaging scene and building around it, one grain of sand at a time.

At the moment, I’m working on the biggest What if? opening scene I’ve ever written (no spoilers here). And the reason I love not knowing what comes next is because of the equal parts of fear and excitement it stirs in me.

Here's hoping I don’t screw it all up.

USA Today best-selling author Carter Wilson explores the depths of psychological tension and paranoia in his dark, domestic thrillers. His novels have received critical acclaim, including multiple starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Carter is also the winner of the Colorado Book Award, the International Book Award, and the National Indie Excellence Award. His fourth novel, Revelation, was released in December 2017 by Oceanview Publishing. He resides outside of Boulder, Colorado in a spooky Victorian house.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

4/19/17 4/19/17

What Does It Mean to Write What You Know? / Patricia Bradley

Write what you know. It can be a very restricting piece of advice when taken literally. Sometimes we want to write on something that we don't have an in depth understanding of, and that's fine. In fact, I'd encourage it. When writing in unknown territory use your resources. Reach out to friends and professionals in the field. Write what you know, and learn what you don't.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Write what you know. We’ve heard that phrase so much, it’s become a cliché, and we often equate it with writing what we have personal knowledge of, as in a career. I’ve found writing what I know to mean much more.

When I sat down to start Justice Delayed, my first Memphis cold case novel, I stared at the blinking cursor on the blank page for a good two hours. It was as if everything I knew about writing had suddenly deserted me.

I paced a bit, got a cup of coffee, thumbed through a couple of craft books, and then remembered, write what you know. Okay, what did I need to know about the story? Before I can begin any story, I have to know my characters since my characters drive the plot.

That’s where I started to work—fleshing them out. And hit a wall. My heroine is a TV reporter, something I only know about from watching the news. I have no personal information about the job. But I do have a friend who is in the field and shot an email off to her for information. In a bit, I got an email back, and we communicated back and forth until I felt I had a handle on my heroine.

My hero is a sergeant with the Memphis Police Department. Again this is out of my realm of expertise, but I had a contact in the MPD Cold Case Division already lined up. A year earlier, he gave me a tour of the cold case and homicide departments along with his contact information, and I’ve kept the airways hot with texts and emails as I’ve written these novels.

When you know nothing about a subject, find someone who does.

I grew up in Memphis so the setting was just a matter of reacquainting myself with the area. However, part of the story takes place at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville, a place I know nothing about. I quickly learned that not all maximum security prisons are equal. Every state has different procedures. But through a lot of research, I discovered a blog written by a person who taught classes at Riverbend, and she provided the information I needed, things like the prisoners, even those on death row, could have jobs. That surprised me. Again, find someone who knows what you don’t.

All right, so far I am not writing what I know. So where does it come in?

For me, the real meat of writing what I know comes into play with my characters’ emotions. While I’ve never killed anyone or even plotted to kill someone, I have had fantasies have plotted to get my own way about something. Haven’t you?

When I was much younger, I thought I knew what was best for almost everyone, and proceeded to plan the details. It’s only in looking back that I can see how wrong I was. But I vividly remember my single-minded focus to get what I wanted. Creating characters with that blind ambition works for your protagonists as well as your villains.

Another thing that helps me is remembering how it felt as a child or teenager to get caught doing something wrong. Or the emotions I went through when I covered up my wrong-doing. How I justified what I was doing and rationalized it even to myself. These are emotions we are all familiar with, and are emotions we can pour into our characters. And not just antagonists—let your protagonists wrestle with blind ambition. They’re also flawed, after all.

In writing what you know, remember your own greatest desires and fears. Maybe you’re afraid of spiders—you can infuse that fear into a character. I was locked in closet one time and didn’t like being in enclosed places as a kid. Still don’t. My heroine of Justice Delayed hates being in a place she can’t easily escape from. It was easy describing how she felt because I knew it.

Her greatest desire was to get the plum job of TV anchor, so she took risks. She also always felt she had to prove herself because she had survived while her sister hadn’t. Even though I didn’t have a sister who died, other events happened in my childhood that drove me to prove I was just as good as anyone else.

I can still remember as a child when we had indoor plumbing installed in our house and lying in the bathtub, thinking that when I grew up I was going to fill the bathtub to the top of the rim—our dad wouldn’t let us run over two inches of water in the tub. The reason being, more water cost more money, something we didn’t have much of. That desire drove me for a lot of years. Give your characters that kind of drive.

Writing what you know: dig deep and take your experiences, your hurts, your fears, your desires and write them into your characters. Then, you will have believable characters readers can identify with. Even your villains.

Patricia Bradley is the author of Shadows of the Past, A Promise to Protect, Gone without a Trace and Silence in the Dark. Bradley received the 2016 Inspirational Readers Choice Award for the third Logan Point book, Gone without a Trace, and has been a finalist for the Genesis Award, a winner of a Daphne du Maurier Award, and winner of a Touched by Love Award. Bradley is cofounder of Aiming for Healthy Families, Inc., and she is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers, Romance Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime. Bradley makes her home in Mississippi. Learn more at ptbradley.com.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

4/11/17 4/11/17

Location as a Character / Lisa Harris

Often times, we as writers get so caught up in the details of our characters and scenarios that we may put our setting on the back-burners. The setting is the difference between being alone in a dark alley and being alone in an open meadow. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Lisa Harris, shares her insight on just how important the setting is.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Try to imagine Frodo’s journey in The Lord of the Ring set not among the rolling hills of the Shire and the eerie volcanic region of Mordor, but instead the flat plains of Kansas. Or imagine if Anne of Green had taken place in the bustling city of modern New York instead of a farm on Prince Edward Island. The novels simply wouldn’t be the same, because the settings in both are an integral part of those series.

When I first started writing nearly two decades ago, a story’s setting was simply a necessity. I thought all I needed was a generic town in Anywhere, USA with a few descriptions sprinkled throughout, because the location didn’t fit into my focus on the story line. What I didn’t understand was how a well-planned and well-developed setting can suck your reader even deeper into the story. Which is exactly what a writer wants.

But how does a writer take a setting beyond a few paragraphs of descriptions and create a location that becomes an essential part of the story?

When I started writing my Nikki Boyd Files series, I began thinking through different locations that would not only be interesting to the reader, but that would also help set the tone for the series. I soon decided to set the books in the beautiful state of Tennessee where I once lived, but that wasn’t enough. I needed to narrow down the setting even further and find the perfect backdrop for an intense missing person case.

I started looking at the area around the Smoky Mountains. I read stories by people who’d walked the Appalachian Trail and told how the mountains themselves could be deadly with unexpected storms popping up. They were a place where one could disappear if they wanted to, and where others—including small planes—had somehow managed to vanish unintentionally without a trace. Thick canopies in the mountains were described by those lost in them as laurel hells, a terrifying place to discover you were lost. So not only did I find the Smoky Mountains beautiful and mysterious, but they became the perfect backdrop for when Nikki finds her own life in danger.

With my setting chosen, I decided to open my first book in The Nikki Boyd Files series, Vendetta, with a tense scene in Northeast Tennessee near the Obed River. Nikki is repelling off a sandstone cliff into a ravine, when her rope catches and threatens to snap above her. It doesn’t take long, though, for the tension to shift from the narrow ledge of the sheer cliff to the Smoky Mountains when a call comes through from her boss about a missing teen. As she and her team investigate the disappearance of the young woman, Nikki finds herself forced to relive her past when clues from her sister’s kidnapping a decade ago emerge, and Nikki discovers that her sister’s abductor is back. As she follows the clues deeper into the vast, mountainous landscape, the danger Nikki faces simultaneously intensifies.

For book two, Missing, I decided to switch the setting to the Nashville area, which gave the book a completely different feel from the sometimes sinister woods of the Smoky Mountains. Setting the book in the city allowed me to write very different scenes, including a confrontation with a sniper, a frantic boat chase after a possible murderer, and a tense hostage scene on the roof of an apartment building.

Right around the time of the book’s release last fall, I had the opportunity to return to Tennessee and visit the Smoky Mountains, a part of the state I’d never seen before. After spending hours and hours of research online, it was uncanny how it felt as if I was stepping back into a familiar place. I became my family’s tour guide to a place I might have never visited in person, but I felt like I knew. The craziest part, though, was that I kept expecting to run into Nikki!

Lisa Harris is a Christy Award finalist for Blood Ransom (2010) and Vendetta (2016), Christy Award winner for Dangerous Passage, and the winner of the Best Inspirational Suspense Novel for Blood Covenant (2011) and Vendetta (2016) from Romantic Times. She has over thirty novels and novella collections in print. She and her family have spent over twelve years working as missionaries in Africa. When she's not working she loves hanging out with her family, cooking different ethnic dishes, photography, and heading into the African bush on safari. For more information about her books and life in Africa visit her website at lisaharriswrites.com

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

4/4/17 4/4/17

The Durable Hauntings of Place / Philip Cioffari

The setting of your book is just as important, if not more important, than the characters themselves. Being familiar with your setting is crucial to keeping your story authentic and consistent. That's why it's important to do your research thoroughly. This weeks' Killer Nashville guest blogger, Philip Cioffari, discusses his experience with knowing your settings.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Place has always been one of the strongest inspirations for my writing, and no place stronger than the place I grew up: the Bronx. Though I have set novels in other places — New Mexico in Jesusville, the everglades in Dark Road, Dead End — I keep returning to the Bronx for setting, as I did in my latest novel, The Bronx Kill.

I ask myself what is it about place that so stimulates my urge to write, but I have no ready answer. It’s one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it kind of things. I particularly like old places, be it a funky railroad car-style diner, a pre-war tenement, Colonial or Victorian-era houses, dive bars, a deserted country road that leads to a ramshackle cabin, dank and shadowed alleys that lead to nowhere. The more time-worn the better. Without getting mystical about it, I feel a story lurking in places like these. All I have to do is uncover it — which involves both going deep inside myself as well as into the history and culture and atmosphere of the place itself.

And so, back to the Bronx.

I can’t leave it behind. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, it won’t let me leave it behind. Though it has been more than four decades since I moved away from it — a mere seven miles but an altogether different world in New Jersey—I find myself returning to it several times a month. Field research, I call it. Keeping it alive inside me so I’m sure not to miss the stories it wants to offer. I walk the streets, visit the parks, all the old haunts. Friends and family have long since abandoned the borough, so it truly is the physical place — the brick, the playgrounds, those enduring alleys — that I’m connecting to.

Because stories don’t come to me all at once — they arrive in fragments over time — I don’t feel connected to the story until I have a firm grasp of the setting. In the case of my new novel, I had the title first. Over a decade ago, I’d been perusing a map of the Bronx and came across the name. The Bronx Kill is a channel of water (so named by the early Dutch settlers in NY) that runs between the Harlem River and the East River in the southernmost tip of the Bronx. It is a dangerous place, and very old. It’s barb-wired off from the rest of the borough, a forlorn wasteland of abandoned railroad cars and tracks, overrun by weeds and detritus: TVs, tape decks, tires, appliances of all kinds — a mishmash of things that are no longer useful. Gangs and drug dealers hang out there, as do the homeless. Bodies are sometimes dumped there.

My kind of setting — all I had to do was find the story to go along with it.

I began by writing several short stories about three teenage boys, friends since childhood who lived nearby it. I put them through several incidents which tested their values, their commitment to one another. But it wasn’t until I added a girl, Julianne, with whom they are each in love that the story began to cohere. (Bear in mind this process I’m describing occurred over a ten-year period.)

A fourth male was added — a beautiful boy known affectionately as Timmy Moon whom Julianne falls for and who, as a result, is envied by the three original friends. After this, I added the dare or challenge: On a hot August night, they decide to swim the East River from the Bronx to Queens. In the attempt, Timmy Moon drowns under questionable circumstances and Julianne’s body is never found. The three survivors take a vow never again to speak about the incident and go their separate ways.

One more element was needed to complete the story, and that came in the character of the older brother of Timmy Moon, an NYPD detective who holds them responsible for his brother’s death and vows to bring them to justice by any means possible.

So I began with setting and, piece by piece, built or found the story that belonged to that place.

Lest I’ve given the impression that the hauntings of place are mostly negative in their impact, I’d like to quote from the thoughts of my main character, Danny, towards the close of the novel.

“And walking the streets these days, despite all that had happened, he could feel with a clarity he hadn’t experienced before how much he loved even the most ordinary of things this place had to offer, like riding the EL, gazing down at rooftops and the suddenly miniaturized world of pedestrians and cars moving street to street.

And the streets themselves, the tingle he felt simply walking them, the vibrancy of sights and sounds and smells and small miracles, like the way a playground turned even the dreariest and most unlikely space into a joyful arena of games, a fortress against the ever-changing, threatening world.

In Florida he had never gotten used to the expanse of sky, the continual bright sun. Here the sky could be observed only in bits and pieces, between brick towers, through gaps in the steel webbing of the EL. So you never took it for granted; it was something you prized. Like the open space the rivers offered, so that even the grimy weeds and gnarled grasses of the Kill were things of beauty to be cherished.”

Philip Cioffari is the author of the novels: Dark Road, Dead End; Jesusville; Catholic Boys; and the short story collection, A History of Things Lost or Broken, which won the Tartt Fiction Prize, and the D. H. Lawrence award for fiction. His latest novel is The Bronx Kill (Livingston Press, 2017). His short stories have been published widely in commercial and literary magazines and anthologies, including North American Review, Playboy, Michigan Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, Florida Fiction, and Southern Humanities Review. He has written and directed for Off and Off-Off Broadway. His Indie feature film, which he wrote and directed, Love in the Age of Dion, has won numerous awards, including Best Feature Film at the Long Island Int’l Film Expo, and Best Director at the NY Independent Film & Video Festival. He is a Professor of English and director of the Performing and Literary Arts Honors Program at William Paterson University. philipcioffari.com

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

3/29/17 3/29/17

How Writing What I Didn’t Know Led Me to My Mystery Series and Beyond / Scott Graham

Write what you know. It's a phrase branded in the memories of writers everywhere. This weeks' Killer Nashville guest blogger has a little something to say on the matter though. Write what you don't. Scott Graham discusses his adventures traveling across Texas and learning his craft.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Write what you know. So goes the age-old authors’ adage.

Then again …

When I sought to switch from nonfiction to fiction writing, what I didn’t know—and wound up learning during a confounding road trip through Texas—led to the conception of my National Park Mystery series. From there, continuing to focus on what I didn’t know helped me develop the protagonist for my series and the personal challenges he faces.

For a number of years, my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring new-to-us national parks across the West with our two sons—until we decided, one fateful spring break, to visit Big Bend National Park in far southern Texas. We set off as we always did, with a camper full of food and the plan to pull off the road to explore public lands as we passed through them along the way.

But we didn’t know our American history well enough.

As an enticement to lure Texas into statehood, public lands in the Republic of Texas were turned over to state ownership upon the creation of the Lone Star State in 1845. The Texas state government promptly sold off more than 216,000,000 acres of those newly acquired lands to ranchers and speculators. As a result, Texas today has one of the lowest percentages of public lands of any state in the nation.

Modern-day rural Texas is a seeming paradise of vast and beautiful expanses, yet the thousand-mile drive south through the state was far from paradisiacal for me and my family. Magnificent mountain ranges and windswept plains were fenced off from us, side roads gated and locked, rural highways lined with No Trespassing signs. All the way to Big Bend and back, we spent our nights in crowded, edge-of-town commercial campgrounds, boxed in by behemoth recreational vehicles.

The frustration of our Texas fence-out led my wife and me to an even greater appreciation of the public lands of the United States, showcased especially by America’s open-to-all-comers national parks. When I turned to writing fiction, I resolved to dedicate my new murder mystery series to celebrating “America’s best idea,” its publicly owned national parks.

Each book in the series, I decided, would be set in a specific park and would seek to capture and share with readers that particular park’s unique sense of place, beginning with that most iconic of America’s preserved landscapes, the Grand Canyon. Thus was the setting for the first book in my series, Canyon Sacrifice, determined.

But what, in the national park milieu, would comprise a workable profession for my protagonist?

I turned, again, to what I didn’t know for the answer.

I needed my amateur sleuth, Chuck Bender, to be an independent sort who could bounce with logical ease from park to park. The solution: Chuck would be a professional archaeologist, moving from one park to the next performing temporary, contracted archaeological digs in each. But while that profession for Chuck would serve my needs well, I didn’t know much about the field of archaeology.

I signed up for a course on the basics of the craft aimed at would-be volunteer archaeologists. When the lectures proved fascinating and the field work engrossing, I realized my readers likely would enjoy experiencing the field of archaeology through Chuck as much as I enjoyed learning the subject in preparation for writing my series.

Finally, I needed to load Chuck down with some personal baggage. Who, after all, wants to read book after book about a protagonist whose life is tranquil, composed, and trouble-free?

Once more, I turned to what I didn’t know to add strain to Chuck’s life. I gave Chuck—long a set-in-his-ways, middle-aged loner—a new family in the form of a headstrong Latina woman with two young daughters.

What did I, a middle-aged Anglo guy and father of two sons, know about Latino culture and raising daughters? Very little. But learning along with Chuck would enable me to share his missteps and confusion as he dealt with his new, unfamiliar role as an instant father in an ethnically mixed family.

With the release in June of Yellowstone Standoff, the third book in the National Park Mystery series, and my recent completion of Yosemite Fall, book four in the series slated for release next year, I’m continuing to revel in figuring things out each step of the way along with my readers.

Write what you know? Sure.

But the real fun and challenge of fiction writing, I’ve found, comes from writing plenty of what I don’t know as well.

Scott Graham is the National Outdoor Book Award-winning author of eight books, including the National Park Mystery Series for Torrey House Press. The third book in the series, Yellowstone Standoff, was released in June. It follows 2014’s Canyon Sacrifice and 2015’s Mountain Rampage. Graham lives in Durango, Colorado. He writes the Prose & Cons book review column with fellow award-winning mystery and true crime author Chuck Greaves. Learn more about Graham, Torrey House Press, and the National Park Mystery series at scottfranklingraham.comand torreyhouse.org. Reach the author at scottgrahamdurango@gmail.com.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

3/21/17 3/21/17

Four Basic Twitter Tips for Writers / Margaret Mizushima

Social media is becoming an integral part of self-promotion as a writer. One of the most popular outlets for writers to speak to their readers is Twitter. If you've never used Twitter before, the terminology and efficient use of it can be a daunting task. This weeks' Killer Nashville guest blogger, Margaret Mizushima, discusses her experiences with learning how to use Twitter effectively.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

When my agent suggested that I develop an author platform on Twitter, my first reaction was to go running into the dark night screaming, “Noooooo!” Previously, the only exposure I’d had to Twitter had been tales about my friend’s ex who spent hours glued to his phone tweeting out updates involving the minutia in his life. Who has time for that?

I finally agreed, and my agent, Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management (@AKA_Terrie), helped me set up my new Twitter account and handle (@margmizu). She also gave me tips that set the foundation for my tweeting strategy, and soon I grew to love this form of social media. I’ve combined my agent’s advice with that of my publicist, Dana Kaye of Kaye Publicity (@KayePublicity), and have added my own experience to develop four basic tips that I hope Twitter beginners will find useful.

Engage with others and be social. The writers’ network is very friendly; search out other writers and follow them. Run a hashtag search for #amwriting, #writing, or #author, and follow a few new writers each day, as well as libraries, booksellers, and others in the publishing industry. Chances are, they’ll follow you back. Be active and retweet for others.

Use #WW (Writer Wednesday) or #FF (Follow Friday) to mention a string of your followers and introduce them to each other. Others might start to include you in their own shout-outs, giving you a list of new people you can follow. Send good morning or good evening tweets to a friend or group of friends, or send someone a photo or link to an article that you think they might like.

One evening I posted a good evening tweet with a picture of a Colorado sunset—the sun disappearing behind a jagged mountain range in a vermillion blaze—to a group of followers from around the globe. Within minutes, they all joined in and we shared evening photos from Colorado, Boston, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, and Dublin. Such fun!

Develop tweet content that matches your brand. For example, I write the Timber Creek K-9 mystery series about a sheriff’s deputy, her dog, and a veterinarian who solve crimes in their rural community set in the Colorado high country. I look for photos and articles about dogs, police dogs, animals and their babies, country life, the vet’s life, hiking, Colorado, the writer’s life, writing tips, and inspirational quotes. Sometimes other topics sneak in, but for the most part, these are my focus.

Tweet using content that others find interesting, and your followers will retweet them, which expands the number of people who might notice your tweets. Balance your tweeting content with a ratio of about ten non-promotional tweets to one promotional.

Develop a Retweet Friends list. You can set this up using the Lists function on Twitter. Note those who retweet for you and add these people to your list. Reciprocate by retweeting for them.

You can monitor your Retweet Friends list by using TweetDeck, which offers a free version that includes a tweet scheduling function. Set the program to watch your list, making it easy to catch your friends’ new tweets. (You can set it to watch a hashtag, too.) As your network broadens and more people retweet for you, you have potential to reach hundreds of thousands of tweeters, not just the group who are following you. There is communication power in the retweet network, and reciprocal relationships are key.

Use hashtags effectively. When you first start, stick to the suggested hashtags that pop up while typing your tweet, because people search for these and your tweets will stand a better chance of being read. Since I write mysteries, I usually include this string of hashtags with my tweet: #amwriting #Colorado #mystery. Sometimes I add #outdoor if there’s room.

Hashtags are also used to designate chats and trending topics, but you can learn about that later. Since hashtags and other repetitive messages are often abbreviated—you only have 140 characters/tweet—you might want a resource to look up definitions, like TagDef. You might eventually want to create your own hashtag, and if you do, use it consistently and frequently to tag your tweets for others to recognize.

I’ve grown to rely on Twitter to keep abreast of my friends’ news, writing topics, and organizational news and events. Once I learned to set up various hashtag and list watches on TweetDeck, it’s been easy to keep updated by spending only about ten minutes twice per day. The one thing that slows me down is the discovery of so many interesting articles, blogs, and websites that I’m compelled to check out. I hope to see you in the Twitterverse. Follow me and I’ll most likely follow you back. Enjoy!

Margaret Mizushima is the author of the Timber Creek K-9 mystery series, which includes Killing Trail (Crooked Lane Books, 2015), named debut mystery of the monthby Library Journal, and Stalking Ground (Crooked Lane Books, 2016). She lives in Colorado where she assists her husband with their veterinary practice and Angus cattleherd. She can be found on Facebook, on Twitter @margmizu, and on her website at margaretmizushima.com.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

3/14/17 3/14/17

You Only Have I’s For You / Ross Klavan

As writers we are selling ourselves. We are taking our thoughts and funneling our imagination into stories. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Ross Klaven, discusses his experiences with using your own experiences to create genuine work.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

An old writer friend, who disappeared into the wilds of Canada and changed his name, gave me this advice: “If they want to buy your writing, sell your writing. If they want to buy your voice, sell your voice. If they want to buy your face, sell your face. You’ve only got you, you’ve got nothing else to sell.”

OK, this was a downbeat guy and this was phrased in a downbeat fashion. Still, it’s got a nice ring to it. Like an actor, a writer has only him or herself to use but it’s how you use yourself and your vast experience that will either get you working or will leave you at the keyboard sitting immobile in deep freeze.

My film Tigerland (starring Colin Farrell) was based in my own infantry training in the U.S. Army. Two guys from the unit got in touch with me when the film came out many years after the fact—one said I’d embellished things but he understood it was a movie, and the other said, “It’s so accurate you must have a photographic memory.”

I’d also read most of the great war novels and seen the films. So, for me, it was a weird mélange of all that. I dropped the experience into the muck and let it ferment until it took on a quality of…I don’t know what to call it. Maybe it has no category or maybe the transmission of the facts of our lives into fiction is a fundamental human action in itself and needs no translation.

The same for my novel Schmuck which is based on a character very much like my father, a radio comedian in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This book sat stalled, I could not get things right. And then one night I dreamed that I was walking through an old time radio station—the studios, the newsroom—and everything was tinged in a green mist. When I woke up, I realized that everyone in the dream was dead, and because radio is based in sound and voice, the sound and voice of my draft was dead, as well. It needed a different narrative voice, not the one I was forcing on it (apparently) but one with a little more buoyancy. That change done, the darkly comic book took off.

Triple Shot, proved to be slightly different. My novella Thump Gun Hitched is about two LA cops who get into a lot of trouble and, off the force, get into even worse trouble trying to help each other out south of the border. To write this so that the reader wouldn’t throw it across the room in disgust, I screwed together a whole series of experiences and some you might not expect. I’ve never been a cop, but years ago I was a reporter and spent way too much time with the police. I was in the military and know a little about weapons. I’ve spent some time in the desert and love that kind of landscape even though it’s always got a touch of desolation, despair and danger. But all that mixed with two other elements—a guy that I spoke with once who taught unarmed combat to cops and soldiers and who’d been a cop until, at a party, he did something dumb and ended up doing time. And some of the great Western films. I’d loved those films, always wanted to write one … and that, I think, became the wheel that gave me distance and a voice and on which I could turn lots of disparate experience to make the story a hoot to read.

The actors I know seem, for some reason, much more comfortable with using this level of “psychic reality” for their craft. I’ve known actors who used a momentary scare that turned out to be unnecessary (like being robbed with a toy gun) into a terrifying, believable fear on film. I’ve seen actors use hallucinations from an LSD trip, not to depict the surreal, but to put emotion on stage. Writers, often, seem either apologetic about how they use experience, as if it’s expressly forbidden to “write about yourself” or they see their everyday experience as mundane and not useable. Or they’re desperate to be thought imaginative, so nothing they write, they claim, has any basis in what’s hilariously called “real life.”

What you make up is most often—but not always—better than simple reporting. If you work in fiction of any kind, though, you know that everything has a fictive sheen to it. And it’s that little bit of distance on the mix of the so-called “real” and “unreal” that works, I think, and the understanding that if it’s you writing, then for better or for worse, you have nothing else, really, to offer besides yourself.

Ross Klavan’s novel, Schmuck, was published by Greenpoint Press in 2014. He recently finished the screenplay for The Colony based on the book by John Bowers. His latest writing project, Triple Shot, is a novella featuring fellow writers Charles Salzberg and Tim O’Mara. Nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, his original screenplay, Tigerland, was directed by Joel Schumacher and starred Colin Farrell. He has written screenplays for InterMedia, Walden Media, Miramax, Paramount, A&E and TNT. As a performer, Klavan’s voice has been heard in dozens of feature films including Revolutionary Road, Sometimes in April, Casino, In and Out, and You Can Count On Me as well as in numerous TV and radio commercials. In other lives, he was a member of the NYC alternative art group Four Walls and was a reporter covering New York City and London.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

3/9/17 3/9/17

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

Oh the mushy middle. It's something that we have all had to deal with. Sometimes working through it can be a daunting task. Failure to solidify the mushy middle can result in your book being left half finished and back on the shelf. This week's guest blogger, Kathleen Delaney, shares her insight on how to keep your book interesting from cover-to-cover!

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

The first time I heard that phrase was during a writing class I took at UCLA given by three romance/ romantic suspense writers. I’m not sure why I took it, I don’t write romance, but I’m glad I did. It was the first class I’d taken that talked about how a writer got from point A, the awesome beginning, to point Z, the zinger that ends the book in a way that causes you to snap it shut, smile and become a fan for life. But they issued a warning which they empathized pertains to all genres, especially mysteries. Beware the mushy middle. The what?

Someplace between page thirty and fifty you need to take a break from all that dead body finding you’ve used to get the book up and running and slow the pace. Slow it, not bring it to a complete stop.

How do you avoid that trap? By making sure everything that happens in your story leads to something else. Even in the middle. Especially in the middle.

Your heroine may be at home, making a cup of tea, or drinking something a bit more fortifying, doing nothing, tired from finding the latest body. The phone rings. The call can’t be a reminder that the PTA meeting is next Thursday. Something in that call has to remind your heroine of something, or someone. It needs to set off a train of thought that propels her to take the next action. And, of course, in so doing she learns something important or walks right into the middle of a situation she could have done without, but which leads her one step closer to that zinger ending.

Middles can be filled with all kinds of mundane activities. In real life, most of our days are full of them. Cleaning the bathtub usually has little meaning other than you get a clean tub. In a story, that’s not enough. Her shampoo bottle is not where she always leaves it. The medicine cupboard door is slightly ajar, but she knows she closed it that morning. Or did she? She hears a door close just as she turns off the water but she’s alone in the house, or so she thought. Maybe none of the above happens, it depends on the story, but cleaning the tub needs some meaning if nothing more happens than we follow her thought process while she works on her suspect list as well as the tub.

Stories, especially mysteries, are built on tension. They start out with a bang, getting the attention of the reader while you build that sense of suspense, of danger. We have to let that die down a little so everyone, including the author, can take a deep breath before we start tightening things up again, then back off once more before we build to the final crescendo. Only, sometimes the mushy middle traps us with meaningless action, events that do nothing but stop the story cold. So, if you think you are caught in the maze of the middle and can’t find your way out, go back and take a second look at some of the things you’re people are doing. Does that conversation she has with the butcher do anything besides provide her with fresh ground round for dinner? If not, maybe you don’t need it. If she’s not figuring out how to prove her best friend innocent of murder while she’s ironing that shirt, let it stay in the basket. It’s not doing one thing toward solving the murder.

This was particularly hard when I was writing my first Ellen McKenzie real estate mystery, Dying for a Change. I wasn’t sure how to make the mundane events in Ellen’s life matter to the story. Then I sent Ellen on her first listing appointment. The significance of a casual statement from a ditzy seller didn’t sink in at first, with either of us, but it did later, and suddenly I understood. Later in the book another remark from another seller gives Ellen the last piece of the puzzle and we move rapidly from that to the zinger ending.

In Purebred Dead, Mary McGill attends a committee meeting. A chance comment sends her looking for someone who isn’t where he’s supposed to be. That starts a chain of events that leads Mary to find a murderer and adopt a dog.

Read your work in progress again. Don’t let that middle stay mushy, don’t let the reader plow through it, wondering what just happened has to do with the story, only to find out later, absolutely nothing. Make each event count, propel your story forward and don’t let your reader go until you get to that zinger ending.

Kathleen Delaney came to the writing life a little late. Instead, she raised five children, heaven alone knows how many cats and dogs, more than a few horses, and assorted 4 H animals. She also enjoyed a career as a real estate broker in the small California town of Paso Robles. Somewhere in there she found she wanted to write as well as read, and her first book, Dying for a Change, was a finalist in St. Martin’s Malice Domestic contest. Since then she has written six more books that have received praise from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. The first in her new Mary McGill canine mysteries, Purebred Dead, is available in both hard cover and ebook form, and has recently been released in soft cover, just in time to greet the release of the second in the series, Curtains for Miss Plym. The third in this series, Blood Red White and Blue is scheduled for release in the U.S. on July 1. Perfect timing for a 4th of July book. Kathleen resides in Woodstock, Ga., with an exuberant dog and a grouchy cat. She has recently moved from a fairly large four-bed home into a small two-bed home and loves it. As she brought along her sofa which has been taken over by the dog, and her reading chair which has been claimed by the cat, they are content as well. Learn more at kathleendelaney.net

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

3/9/17 3/9/17

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

How do you avoid that trap? By making sure everything that happens in your story leads to something else. Even in the middle. Especially in the middle.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.

For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.

And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.

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KN Magazine: Articles

How Can Theater Training and Storytelling Improve Your Fiction? / Lynn Hesse

How I Sold my First Novel / D.J. Donaldson

On Edge / Albert Ashforth

Elements of The Psychological Thriller: My Favorite Genre to Date / Valerie Joan Connors

Dropping Anchors / Matt Coyle

Black Swans in Publishing / By Gregory C. Randall

Writing Tics: Finding the Whys / Danny Gardner

Fiction Anticipates Reality! / Susan Wolfe

Routine Writing Habits Are Rewarding / Andrew Welsh-Huggins

The Joys and Challenges of Writing a Series Character / Joe Clifford

Meet the New Hand-Sellers / Baron R. Birtcher

The Only Question You Need / Carter Wilson

What Does It Mean to Write What You Know? / Patricia Bradley

Location as a Character / Lisa Harris

The Durable Hauntings of Place / Philip Cioffari

How Writing What I Didn’t Know Led Me to My Mystery Series and Beyond / Scott Graham

Four Basic Twitter Tips for Writers / Margaret Mizushima

You Only Have I’s For You / Ross Klavan

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

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