J.L. Newton on the importance of environment in her novel OINK

We do love a touch of satire on Jester Harley's Manuscript Page, so it's a pleasure to have J.L. Newton with us today. The target of her humorous novel, Oink: A Food for Thought Mystery, is the world of universities. She wrote a very interesting piece for us about how the environment in your novel's setting can be far more than a backdrop.

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Making Environment a Character in Your Fiction

by Judith Newton

In writing Oink, a humorous send up of the university for its increasing devotion to self-interest, competition, and profit, I also wanted to emphasize the importance of values that are less about profit and more about the common good. I planned to do this, in part, through my characterization of Emily Addams’s campus community. It is comprised of faculty in women’s and ethnic studies who have come together to support each other and to resist having their programs defunded by an increasingly corporate-minded administration.

I wanted to do more, however, to engage the reader in positive feelings about community, and so I decided to suggest the interconnectedness of human and natural life in the very texture of the novel. To feel oneself in relation to the world of nature and to value the smallest forms of life are  precursors to valuing human community as well.

I decided that elements which appear as background—animals, plants, the weather, the seasons—could subtly enforce a feeling of interrelation. There are many animals in the novel, for example, both domesticated and wild, which just appear as the characters are carrying on their lives. As Emily drives to meet with the biologist Tess Ryan, who she hopes will have important information, “a single red-tailed hawk flapped twice, launching itself into air. The sight of a hawk’s glide always brought me to life, making me feel as if I too were capable of soaring.” Many of the characters also look like animals. The Chair of the English Department has a hound dog face which “seemed to sag into his tweed jacket.” The Vice Provost, with her long nose, resembles a hummingbird, and the greedy Peter Elliott, victim of the poisoning, is compared to a pig by another character—although the actual pigs in the novel are far more charming than he.

I named streets after animals or native California plants—Wild Deer Lane, Coyote Court, and Badger Crossing, Poppy Lane, Ceanothus Drive—and  I made the weather heighten people’s moods. Emily feels oppressed by the ninety-six degree heat as she realizes that, with the poisoning of Peter, something sinister has entered into the atmosphere at Arbor State. Later, she gets lost in a tule fog at night, making her feel even more depressed about her inability to discover the culprit.

J.L. Newton (photo: Eliot Khuner)

In all of this, I wanted to be accurate. I studied the birds and animals of northern California, and I worked with a weather calendar from October 1999, when the novel is set, to capture how the weather really operated that month in that year. Knowing what hummingbirds really do inhabit northern California made me feel the kind of attention to and connection with nature that I wanted to instill in my reader.

I also set the novel at a time of year that would convey a message. Oink begins on October 11, 1999, in the midst of harvest and Indian Summer, and ends on November 1, El Dia de Los Muertos, which marks the coming of winter, the dying of leaves, and the diminishment of the sun, reminding characters of their own mortality. El Dia also celebrates those who have died, asserts the continuation of life, and demonstrates the power of communities to fortify their members against the forces of darkness and despair.  In the context of conditions such as these— conditions in which we all live—Oink poses an implicit question: do we spend our lives in an individualist pursuit of profit, or do we work toward more communal ways of being?

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Learn more about J.L. Newton on her website.

You can purchase Oink: A Food for Thought Mystery on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers.

M. Garnet switches genre gears for latest story, EYES OF DANGER

Please welcome M. Garnet. When I learned that her most recent publication was a switch from her usual fare, I asked her to talk about why she decided to write a contemporary romantic mystery this time around.

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Anne, I want to thank you very much for inviting me as a guest on your blog.  There is a lot to say about my story EYES OF DANGER due to the fact that it is a little different than most of my published books, so the opportunity to talk about it with your readers is something I appreciate.

When I put up an introduction for my release of this story I said “I locked up my vampires in the closet and turned off my telescope”.  My fans who have read my stories will understand what I meant by that strange little sentence.  I have written several stories about love that included space travel with strange events and strange individuals.  There is something that I love to write about sexy aliens.

I also have had a reasonable amount of success writing about Vampires including a series called BLOOD SISTERS of which the third in the series, MISERY was awarded a four star award from Romance Review saying it was ‘an outstanding read’.  Some would say I should stay with what is selling.  I want to say here that I do love my vampires and I have the fourth in the series with the publisher at this moment.

But, there is always something that draws me back to the contemporary mystery genre so I just can’t resist plowing through my old notes and emailing all my great research contacts to get back into a modern thriller with love pulled apart in the middle of evil government types with too much power.

With this story, I wanted to bring my reader along with the heroine into a web that she got lost trying to understand as she fell in love with a pair of dark eyes.  I needed to surround her with some real locations, actual threats and true ways of getting away and safe.

For some authors research can be tedious and boring.  For me it is exciting and a great way to learn.  On top of that, because of my long and interesting life, I have had the surprise to find that I have a plethora of people that I know personally who have first hand knowledge on things that most of the citizens around us never even saw on the evening news.  My list of people I can dip into involves retired Navy Seals, Experts on Police and Federal armament and every military type you can think about.  My email reaches out to those in almost every US state but also those who personally experienced time deep inside the working process of both the government and the largest businesses that run this world.

The cover may not have a half naked vampire or very sexy alien on it, but still my favorite artist Carmen Waters did an outstanding job doing artwork that was stunning.  Pardon the pun but it is ‘eye catching’.  I also have to give credit to my editor Tex Burd who keeps me out of any trouble that might make me look like I slept through all the courses on Lit 101.

This is the third in the genre of contemporary mystery love story I have written but, I will have to warn my fans, it won’t be my last.  I just hope that there are some fans and perhaps some new ones that will find this story with a strange turn at the end interesting enough to recommend it to others.

Again Anne, thanks for this opportunity. 

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Learn more about M. Garnet on her website.   

You can purchase Eyes of Danger at Extasy Books.

Alan Calder: Architecture, Aristocracy, and THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH

Please welcome today's guest, Alan Calder, who writes contemporary novels with a historical background. He shares with us some fascinating backstory behind his most recent novel, The Glorious Twelfth.

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 Genesis

All my novels are contemporary, in the mystery/suspense genre with their roots planted very firmly in the history of kings, aristocrats and saints. 

My most recent novel, The Glorious Twelfth, was inspired by a building and an aristocratic family. The Sinclair mausoleum stands near an abandoned farmstead thirty miles south of John o’Groats, the northern sibling of Land’s End in Cornwall. The mausoleum housed the remains of the aristocratic Sinclairs for several hundred years before a larger facility was constructed. With an unusual ogive shaped roof, it is built over the remains of an ancient chapel to St Martin and surrounded by a graveyard which once contained a class II Pictish stone, conferring great antiquity and mystery on the site.   

                                                                                                                                             

The Sinclairs have been the preeminent family in Caithness for over seven hundred years, still holding the earldom.  They were the builders of Rosslyn Chapel in the first half of the fifteenth century, a unique church steeped in masonic and Templar mythology, so much so that in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown speculates that the Holy Grail lies buried in the filled in crypt of the building. My take on history is that the then remote and inaccessible Caithness would have provided a much better hiding place for the Grail than Rosslyn.                                                                                                  The Glorious Twelfth opens on an archaeological dig led by archaeologist, Ben Harris, on the land of aristocrat, Sir Ranald Sinclair. Ben is soon distracted both by the laird’s beautiful daughter, Fran and artefacts that point to a medieval shipwreck near a cave that he discovers is connected by a tunnel to Sir Ranald’s mausoleum. 

My first novel The Stuart Agenda, gradually materialised from reading the history of the defunct royal Stuart dynasty, replaced by the Hanoverians who still occupy the British throne today. The final trigger for the novel was a report on a young man who turned up in Edinburgh claiming to be a direct legitimate descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the romantic Scottish hero but loser at the battle of Culloden. He challenged the authorised version of history, ie that the Prince died without legitimate issue, providing an impressive family tree to back his claim. He was feted for a while until a suspicious genealogist found the falsehoods in the family tree and debunked him. It turned out that he was a fantasist Belgian waiter called Michel Lafosse. Despite the falsehood of his claim it did raise the ‘what if’ question in my mind. My fictional Stuart family is French and the novel opens with Robert, the eventual claimant, at Gordonston School, beginning to build his Scottish profile. It’s a political conspiracy hatched by his family who spot the opportunity that Scotland might be going independent and want its own monarch. The plot takes on more meaning since writing as the nationalists make strong ground, now forming the Scottish government and preparing a referendum on independence. It has something for everyone- conspiracy, politics, intrigue, espionage, royal romance and the locations in Scotland, England, France and Poland.

My third novel, A Pilgrimage Too Far, to be released soon, is based in France and draws on my own research into the life of a minor medieval French saint that I stumbled on while visiting a church in Normandy. Aspects of his life have a profound meaning in our own time and the book challenges some deeply held Catholic dogma.  

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You can learn more about Alan Calder on his blog.

You can purchase The Glorious Twelfth directly from MuseItUp Publishing or on Amazon and Amazon UK.

Guest blogger Marian Lanouette: Why Mysteries?

My guest today is Marian Lanouette, a novelist raised in my own adoptive Brooklyn, but who now lives in New England. She shares with us how she became fascinated with the mystery/suspense genre. Marian's new book is If I Fail, the first in a series of Jake Carrington Mysteries. These stories combine mystery with elements of romance.

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I love a good mystery or puzzle. So it seemed natural when I sat down to write that the genre would be mystery/suspense/thriller.  At an early age I started reading.  Unbeknown to my parents I would read the New York Daily News because I had already read through all my library books. A story caught my eye. It was the murder of eight young women in Chicago.

The case terrified me, yet intrigued me. I wanted the killer punished for his horrible acts. The reported frustrated with the police started to comment in his column instead of reporting the news. At dinner one night, I brought the subject up and each day I’d follow every story. My parents were horrified and put a stop to my reading the Daily News each day. I had to get my tidbits on the case from eavesdropping on the nightly news. How the police caught up with the murderer and the trial that ensued which intrigued me. It grabbed my attention and my imagination. To this day, I still check my closet before going to sleep. I believe it was on that day the mystery lover was created.

Throughout the years, after the trial, I would take every mystery written for children out of the library and gobble them up. As I got older, my mind started creating stories. It wasn’t until recently that I decided to send the stories in for publication. Submitting took a lot of courage. I think I bled every time I got a rejection but I stayed the course and eventually found my publisher who I love.

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You can purchase If I Fail directly from MuseItUp Publishing or from Amazon.

You can view the book trailer here.

Learn more about Marian Lanouette by visiting her website or following her on Twitter or Facebook.

Ebenezer's Locker has a Cover!

It's by Kaytalin Platt. Isn't it adorable? Launch date is June 1!

Help me, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!

I decided to start working again on a middle grade mystery novel I'd shelved 18 months ago because I got involved with other projects.

Today I printed out the four drafted chapters and the projected synopsis I'd written for the other twelve chapters, and took the bundle over to a coffee shop to read while I had a muffin. As I paged through, the prose was looking pretty decent, or at least salvageable, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the story. So, with great curiosity, I skimmed the synopsis.

When I got to the description of chapter 9, I laughed out loud and choked on my muffin. It said, "Something must happen to give them a clue. WHAT??? And how would they know?" And the last sentence was in red ink: "This plot ain't working."

And that's my ninth chapter! Weirdly, there's a lot of detail for chapters 10-16. But I've got a hole in the middle of my mystery, apparently. Do you plot around problems and sort them out later?

A Strong Sense of Place

I just read an early Ruth Rendell novel, From Doon with Death. Rendell is famous for bringing a new level of psychological sophistication to the characters in mystery novels, a technique she used in blatant rebellion against the Agatha Christie style of cozy mystery.

What I was most struck by in Rendell's writing, however, was her tireless attention to the experience of scene. By this I mean that the reader always knows what it's like to be in the place where the characters are. It's done through descriptions of the five senses, of course, but as applied to details that might not seem to a lesser author to be worth relating.

Part of Rendell's understanding of human psychology, I guess, is the realization that we all notice the oddest things about our surroundings, even when we're in the middle of something important.