Over the weekend I spent far too much money at the book store. I got two Miss Silver mysteries, one of the Blackbird Sisters mysteries by Nancy Martin (Nancy is a member of DorothyL, the mystery discussion list I am on, and her books are at the top of my "buy now" list partly because I enjoy them, especially the character arc, and partly because Nancy herself has gone out of her way to be friendly and encouraging to the wannabe. I should probably write something about her series one of these days.)

However, the book I was really looking for was Diana Killian's new one, Corpse Pose.

Full disclosure: Diana Killian is D.L. Browne, list owner and head moderator of the Yahoo mystery writers' group Wicked Company, of which I am also a member and junior co-moderator. I am violently prejudiced in her favour... which in terms of reviews means that if I had bought this book and hated it, I would never have breathed a word about it. Ever.

Fortunately, I loved it. And if you're a fan of amateur sleuth mysteries, especially one with a specific hobby or professional setting, I recommend this one.

Our heroine is AJ Alexander, freelance marketing consultant and bona-fide Big City Girl. Think Cosmopolitan. Think Sex and the City. Think...

...of something else entirely, because AJ has never felt less like a Fun Fearless Female in her entire life. Her ten-year marriage to her university sweetheart has just collapsed--Andy has just left her for another man, which has left AJ understandably shaken up--if she could be so fundamentally mistaken about the most important relationship in her life, and know so little about the most important person in it, what else is she clueless about?

A complicating factor is, AJ is not what you would call an untroubled person in the first place: raised by a narcissistic alcoholic actress mother and what seems like an emotionally absent (now deceased) dad, AJ loves her mother best from a distance and considers her earth-mother aunt Diantha to be her rock.

So when she gets the phone call telling her of Diantha's murder, she is understandably devastated.

Especially when it becomes clear that, as heir, AJ is a prime suspect.

And then her mother arrives to deflect the attention of the police by declaring herself a prime suspect. Mother, thinks AJ, is a drama queen even by the standards of a retired actress.

If this was all there was to the story it would be fun but forgettable. What I really liked about Corpse Pose was the dawning realization that AJ's interactions with these other characters were not going to follow the rules of sitcoms. Andy the ex did not automatically become the Gay Best Friend--AJ was really hurt and angry, and Andy was hurt and felt guilty, and the two of them need to decide whether there is going to be an ongoing relationship and what form it will take. Likewise, AJ and her mother start out sniping at each other like a comedy duo, but it doesn't take long for the reader to recognize this as protective, and eventually the fact they are forced to spend time together makes AJ realize her mother wants, in a disorganized way, to make amends. And maybe AJ wants to let her.

The victim, Diantha, was the owner of a yoga empire (well, sort of) and was the sort of person who stood on principles. Actually, according to Andy, she was the sort of person who would "burn you at the stake for your own good." AJ loved her, but not everyone else did, although even some of the people who disliked her admired her.

And maybe one or more of the people who loved her also feared or even hated her.

I concentrated on the characters in this entry because they are interesting enough to support a series, which this is going to be. The mystery part, including the investigating officer who likes AJ just fine but has no sympathy for "Snoop Sisters," works well. The reader will probably get the solution half a step before AJ, which adds to the tension. AJ does not pull and Too Stupid To Live moments and her mother turns out to be better in a crisis than I--or AJ--would have expected.

It's a very promising start to a new mystery series and I recommend it. Actually, because of my prior relationship with the author I recommend that you buy it new. But I'm sure it would be okay if you bought your copy new and then encouraged everyone you know to read it.

And I must say, if a person is going to be in a mystery-writing discussion group, it's nice to know it's run by someone whose writing I admire.

So I finally got to the shootout at the campground--I simplified the scene a little and had Jordy simply stand up at the wrong moment and get winged. My writing group approves of the part where Mrs Goodnight and her grandson return fire from the house. Elderly ladies in pink housecoats, carrying deer rifles, amuse them.

This scene sets up Gareth getting released by the cops, and also causes Jordy to start wondering why he was so sure Ted Goodnight was Mr. Goodnight. Which eventually leads him toward the solution of the mystery.

On Saturday night I read a mystery called Cries and Whiskers by Clea Simon. It's the third in a series about Theda Krakow, a freelance journalist who covers the club scene in Boston, and her cat Musetta. (Musetta does not sleuth. So far, though, the two stories I've read from the series have involved cat rescues and music.)

The characters are likable, the cat is realistic, and although they are technically termed "cozy," there's nothing cutesy about them. I'd recommend them to fans of amateur sleuth mysteries who also like to feel like they're meeting interesting new people.

Sometimes readers read for idiosyncratic, stupid reasons.

I just checked my email and found a post from a mystery-related mailing list. In it the author extolled her latest book, warned us that it is super-cozy (we are in the midst of the semi-annual round of cozy-versus-hardboiled, in which the hardboiled people sneer at the cozies and I lose my temper--AMAZING AS THAT MAY SOUND TO YOU ALL!!) and suggested we check out her Web site. While there, she also suggested we check out her astonishingly beauteous great-grandchildren.

So I did.

And the great-grandchildren are, in fact, so astonishingly beauteous that I went directly to the public library site and found a book by her, which I placed on hold.

Yes, I will actually read a book by an author just because her great-grandchildren are astonishingly beauteous.

Observe for yourself!

And besides, now I know she is a truthful lady, so if she tells me the book is good I have reason to believe her...

I know I said I was all through with the Tudors, but as my last post makes clear, I seem to have lied. I'll finish The Sunne In Splendour and then it's ho for the Ives book on Anne Boleyn, which appears to be the biography of Henry VIII's second queen.

Over the weekend, however, I had two vampire novels by Barbara Hambly out of the public library. Over the past few weeks I have done considerable giggling and a little ranting about this one inept vampire novel, and in passing I commented that I really don't do vampires in the first place. Hambly's books, especially Those Who Hunt the Night (classed as young adult in my public library) were recommended to me as excellent examples of the genre. Subgenre. Whatever. I also signed out Traveling With the Dead (containing absolutely no references to Jerry Garcia) which is about the same characters (James Asher, Oxford don and former spy, his intellectual wife Lydia, and Don Simon Ysidro, 350-year-old vampire who "danced with both of Henry VIII's remarkable daughters"--a nice turn of phrase for sure.) The books take place in 1907-08.

( And my verdict is... )

So. Apparently I'm not into vampires, and apparently I know why.

Good. Now I don't have any scruples about dropping the subject and moving on to other things that interest me more. Whew!

I am part of an online writer's community, and some of the more serious (and by "serious" I mean "published") writers there are a bit snarky about the sort of writing group that consists of cheerleading and back-patting.

I say this simply as an introduction to my in-person writers' group, which pretty much consists of cheerleading and backpatting. Oh, and eating tasty snacks.

The thing is: we're all serious about our writing, although all of us have other stuff going on, and most of us (except for me, inflicting myself on you) have very little outlet for talking about our writing. So at our sorta-monthly meetings we talk about writing, read excerpts, and kind of encourage each other along with offering suggestions or little bits of critique or whatever.

I actually had a bit of a breakthrough last night, in a way: I accept that there are too many characters in my story, but I certainly can't be bothered to go back to scenes I wrote months ago and prune out characters just yet. It's much too easy to get bogged down in a first draft. And I've been mostly reading the early parts so far for chronological reasons, so whenever I read I get "you know, you have too many characters in that scene." Point long since taken, and I'll do something about it when I go back to do something about it. Honest. Also, my characters are all really young, so one member keeps telling me it's probably a YA novel and I keep telling her that it's fine with me if it is.

However, last night I read the first half of the scene in which Jordy meets Mrs. Goodnight, after which one member remarked that she still thinks there are too many names floating around. (I finally pointed out that at least a little bit of the problem is that the group is hearing about two pages worth every couple of months--there are too many characters, but more context would help.)

However, after we agreed that I'll look after editing that sort of thing once I get this draft done, pretty well everyone remarked that they like the perspective character, and that he feels like a real person.

Which is the only reason I can see why any reader would want to carry on with this thing--you pretty much have to like the main character. If you don't, why would you worry about how worried he is?

So that was something.

I mentioned a week or so ago that I was getting a book out of the library and wondered if I could focus on the large print format. The print turned out to be fine, the problem was, alas, that I just didn't care for anyone in the book. There are books that in theory should work for me and just turn out to be blah, and this was one of them. And there were even quarter horses!

Okay, one of the things that amused me about the story was the name of the main character's yearling colt: Peppy Leo (which you'd think has been used by now) in honour of his great-great-grandsire Mr San Peppy and his whatever-grandsire Leo San. On the one hand, it demonstrates a knowledge of the bloodlines she's writing about. On the other, I find it absolutely hilarious when breeders dig eight generations back for a famous ancestor to name the horse after.

The thing most worth noting about this story is that it uses the artificial-insemination-fraud plotline I suggested for my inundation of Appaloosas idea. (What's really funny is that none of the horse breeder characters seem to be able to discuss the details of AI or breeding or use the word "stud," let alone "semen." I don't know about you, but the horse people I know are not nearly so prim!)

However, the idea of the nasty joke which turns out not to be at the heart of the mystery is still up for grabs. Dibs!

I can't see anyone bumping you off for providing them with this:



Or this:



Although admittedly, it'd be less of a shock if you started out with this:

Robert Pickton must serve 25 years before being considered for parole.

He is also charged with twenty more counts of murder. In this case he was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder, and the families of the victims are understandably upset that the convictions were not for first-degree murder (because honestly, "planned and deliberate" does not begin to cover what he did.) However, the sentence is exactly what he'd have gotten for first-degree murder.

In other posts and elsewhere I've mentioned that, while I read a lot of crime novels, I have no interest in serial killer novels and am bored (or more accurately, annoyed) with the convention of glamorous genius serial killers. There are a few reasons why this convention does nothing for me, but I think a big part of it is that I have trouble suspending my disbelief over some things, and I can't not remember that in real life, serial killers tend to be banal, vicious bottom-feeders who prey on the most vulnerable.

The best serial killer novel I ever read was Forty Words For Sorrow, by Giles Blunt. I nearly put it back on the shelving truck when I realized it was about a serial killer and we were going to have chapters from the killer's perspective. (I hate the slavering mad mad killer convention.)

I'm glad I read the book, though, because it focused mostly on the police investigating the crimes, the victims' families, and one young man who was about to become the next victim. The chapters from the killers' POV worked because these were no fabulous geniuses, but a couple of disaffected, fatally selfish people whose only real "diminished capacity" was a diminished capacity for empathy. They were as small and as rotten and as unworthy of adulation as real serial killers.

I don't have a tag for monsters or I'd use it here.

While going on and on about The Last Waltz the other day I commented that the movie (and backstory in general) had given me an idea for a murder mystery. (Of course, grocery shopping sometimes gives me ideas for murder mysteries, but I digress.)

In thinking it over harder, I think the guitar player who ends up getting murdered would have to be the one who'd changed his ways and made friends with Kowalski. It just wouldn't work if they were friends with someone who wasn't murdered, and I can't think of a good reason to not make the victim the guy everyone else was mad at. (Mind you, I might come up with something.)

So the old band mates would be together rehearsing for their first show in years, a deliberately low-key but sentimental affair to mark something like the fortieth anniversary of their first album or something. The drummer, who carries a grudge, didn't want to come and still blames the guitar player in part for the death of one of the old members. The keyboard player and bassist talk him into it. Murder ensues, et cetera.

The problem that occurred to me was this: the bass player character (you can call him... Rick) is the least likely suspect. So he should be the killer (unless I decide to kill him after all and... I don't think I can.) But because he is the least likely suspect, by the Law Of the Cozy that actually makes him the most likely suspect, if you follow. So either way I can't win.

And then I realized that the surviving keyboard player (call him Garth...) a quiet and well-disposed and temperate fellow, is an equally unlikely suspect for different reasons.

So whatever I do, including making both of them victims or both of them innocent, I will be equally right and equally wrong, so it's even.

The one thing I cannot do is have the drummer (call him... well, you get it, and of course I have to call them all something else even before I start imagining them into characters of my own)--anyway, the one person who absolutely can't have Dun It is the drummer, because he is the likeliest suspect. And lately I have read a few stories in which the likeliest suspect is actually the killer, and you know, it's really not all that much fun and far less surprising than I think the writers were hoping.

However. I may need to think this one over. Possibly over Christmas when I am too surrounded by confusion to do any serious writing on a real story.

Hmm.

(Okay, the userpic isn't from a Wentworth book.)

I thought I'd posted about this already but I can't find the reference. Over the last few days I've been moving books around and I stopped to take a look at a few of them. This is one of my favourites by Wentworth, mostly because of a single supporting character.

In this story Miss Silver becomes entangled in a mystery surrounding a pair of old friends and the recently-returned beau of one of them. One of the two old friends has a nephew who was once engaged to a lovely local girl, jilted her for a flashy blonde who played him false, and has come to visit with his new attachment, a girl of the same general type as his runaway wife.

It's the new attachment who makes the story. No, really. She's a minor character and when she's first introduced we're allowed to do the Golden Age thing of looking down on her as a working-class girl on the hunt for a man with money. But that only lasts for a minute or two, and it's instructive how Wentworth manages the change in reader attitude. (Okay, it might come more naturally to a modern reader than one from 1951--but I know it happened.)

The girl at issue is one Frances Bell, called Fancy. She works as a showgirl and live mannequin, has platinum-blonde hair, eyelashes "a yard and a half long," and "the traditional rose-leaf complexion." On first sighting even Miss Silver registers her as being "unnecessarily pretty."

She looks like Fancy, but she behaves like Frances. In a passage that is sort of a cross between omniscient narration and Fancy's stream-of-consciousness we learn that she is a respectable girl (often a putdown even in 1951) with a "hard streak of common sense." She is not out for a good time, she wants marriage and a lift in life. Well, a bit of one. Not enough that your in-laws look down on you. Say, enough for a little house, and maybe three kids, and someone to do the rough housework although, of course, she knows she'll have to do a lot herself and that's fine with her--

And before you know where you are the flashy little gold-digger has transformed into a sensible but guileless girl who quotes her equally sensible mother at all occasions. The young man she's attracted to is a widower, and Fancy would never expect him to forget his first wife, but she's justifiably worried that he's only attracted to her because of the physical resemblance.

As the story progresses the various "county" characters who encounter Fancy are initially put off by her appearance but end up taking to her. Miss Silver naturally takes her measure at a glance and gently extracts a ton of useful information from her by appearing as a friendly adult who can be trusted to help.

I mention this because I also have a copy of Agatha Christie's The Body In the Library, which also features a flashy working-class girl the same age as Fancy. In this case the girl, Ruby Keene, is the victim, but that doesn't earn her much sympathy. Naturally she's a true gold-digger, and naturally even the person who initially expresses distress about her fate comes to realize that there was nothing about her that made her valuable or worth worrying or grieving about. There's a short passage near the end of the novel when we realize this old gentleman, who had planned to adopt her as his daughter (hey, I didn't write it) is no longer upset about her and will probably never spare her another thought.

And I find that kind of disturbing. I definitely prefer the world view that gives us Fancy Bell.

I wish I could say this type of story is only a product of an older, snobbier time, but a few years ago I read a modern series mystery by an American author, and the victim in that case was a young man who turned out to be a con artist, and the middle-class main characters therefore assumed his own mother (also a con artist) could not possibly feel any sorrow over his premature violent death. Because, of course, those sorts of people don't feel things they way we do.

In the story the victim is engaged to a "lovely" young woman, and I was interested to learn that the author apparently did not find it one bit creepy or inappropriate that she got over her grief the same moment she learned he was not really rich. (Still better than her mother and the mother's friend--our heroine--who decided the young man was impossible and unworthy of their friendship when they saw him wearing black socks with his sandals and I only wish I was kidding.)

At the end of the novel, about two days after the death of the first young man, his bereaved fiancee is a bride after all when she marries the local boy the author clearly thinks is perfect for her. Before her original fiance is in the ground.

Ewwww!!

I don't think this is strictly a cozy thing, because God knows private detectives like Spenser make draconian snap judgements on the worth of other people all the time. But because this is the subgenre I write and mostly read in, it bothers me when I run into this sort of disposable mystery. Because really, if the good guys don't have any respect for other people, who do I have to root for?

Mystery fans are familiar with the concept: the cop or sleuth or someone knows the suspect is guilty, and so they use whatever means necessary to extract the confession. I've read books and seen shows that left me thinking, "And then the defense lawyer got the coerced confession thrown out and it was back to the races!"

Sometimes the person who is so sure turns out to be wrong. It makes for interesting fiction and terrifying real life. And along that note, here's a research study from the school where I work. It appears to find that when the interviewer is very motivated to catch someone in a lie, he or she may see lies where none exist.

Interesting.

I'm also interested, in mysteries, in sleuths' assertions that anger on the part of the accused is a sign of guilt. "If you didn't do it, you have nothing to be angry about." Think about that for a second: if someone accused you of a terrible act that you'd never dream of doing, wouldn't it make you a little angry? Just a tad?

I think I read a true crime book or something once in which a real cop noted that innocent people tend to lose their tempers under accusation because they're not afraid of letting something slip. It's the guilty people who keep patiently and carefully answering questions, long past the point when they should be having a fit, because they're so focused on keeping their story straight and convincing the accuser.

I have no idea whether that's true or not and I can't remember where I read it, but based on my reaction to being accused of plagiarism last spring (long and stupid story--short version: the prof was crazy) I tend to concur. Because I was innocent as a newborn lamb, and boy, did I get angry.

Solo aviator Steve Fossett is still missing.

I mean, I assume he's dead, but it's very weird that his emergency locating device didn't go off if he crashed. It's not like we're in the days of Amelia Earhart.

Which reminds me, I found my copy of Peril At End House the other day. That was a pretty good book.

So it occurred to me that Canadian Idol ended without my taking much notice, as did Big Brother and American Idol before it. I'm slightly relieved to note that I seem to have mostly kicked my reality-TV habit. Whew!

Mind you, some of those shows are still a murder mystery waiting to happen. I've got Dead Famous by Ben Elton on hold at the library, which is apparently a Big Brother-themed mystery. I'd have killed everyone else in the house by about day three, so there you go. (And there's a creepy little Canadian flick called With My Little Eye that's about a Web version of a Big Brother type of show. Quite scary, really.)

I'm disappointed that so far nobody's written an Idol-themed mystery that was any good. Ben Elton wrote a non-mystery novel about a season in a show like that, but nobody died. Sadly.

And there's an American writer who has a "rock'n'roll detective" character who's a little too impressed with his own cool, but he's not bad. The first book in the series was obviously about Marilyn Manson, and the MM character was handled sympathetically, as though he was a person worthy of our interest. In the second one I'm pretty sure he killed off Madonna under a pseudonym, which didn't bother me none. But the third was his Idol-themed one and it was useless. Like, about four-fifths of it was a cooler-than-thou diatribe against the show, the contestants were cyphers, nobody cared about the kid who died or worried that any of the others might be next, and the solution didn't make sense. It was like he figured he could sell a book with that theme and he didn't even do anything interesting with his distaste. You read more interesting rants all over the Internet.

What really irked me was his contention that the big TV studio was so powerful that nobody would ever even find out the murder happened, or that someone famous was convicted of it. Because in the second case, tabloid reporters would never dream of taking pictures of a minor celebrity at an embarrassing moment.

And in the first case, naturally nobody noticed the kid was dead. His friends never called or emailed him and wondered why he never got back in touch. His girlfriend never tried to find out what had happened to him. None of his grandmother's friends ever asked "how's your grandson these days?" No nosy blogger or entertainment reporter would ever get suspicious. Of course not. For if there's one thing the Internet has taught us, it's that people are not nosy and do not resent being given no answers to their questions.

It was stupid and perfunctory and he should have just written something he was interested in, you know?

Of course, this leaves the field free for my far-superior story. My heroine is based on Nikki McKibbin, for whom I had a soft spot in season one. The character is a young single mother who feels bad about leaving her youngster behind for a few weeks (with her mother, and her friend Travis, whose role becomes important later on.) Her last words are, "If she wants to colour her hair, make sure she uses the Kool-Aid without sugar in it!"

In my version, votes would be cumulative, so the killings are hard to cover up. And the killer is finally caught when he/she tries to murder one of the cute little girl singers who responds by screaming and then pummeling the killer with a high-heeled shoe.

I know, I know. I'm never going to really write it. But it amuses me to plan it out.

As noted, I spent a large chunk of the weekend watching my brother's DVD of season two of The Rockford Files. I am often afraid to revisit shows or books I used to enjoy, because some of them have not aged at all well.

Rockford, however, is not one of them. Still awesome.

So apparently I never did get a chance to write that post about my writing progress. The past few days I've been sorting out who is suspected and in what general order. I'll be keeping some scenes from the original draft, but I'm not sure what to do about the scene in which Jordy has the nightmare and ends up doing laundry in the middle of the night. Originally he was with Mike and that was where they talked about how Kowalski ended up at the event in the first place. I'm leaning toward changing that so he has the same conversation with Erica instead. In fact, given just how worried they all are, I'm leaning toward having the whole damn band wake up when Jordy does. I could see them all falling asleep in the laundry room. The problem is that gives me too many characters onstage at one time--again.

Taking Erica out of the tent when all of them are worried about her doesn't appear to work, so I think the likeliest thing to happen--and I'm deciding this as I type so it may require more thought--is this:

Jordy has the nightmare, a variation on his usual stress dream about being abandoned among giants (in this case, the giants are all covered in blood)

Mike, who is prone to insomnia at the best of times, is awake anyway and rouses him

Someone else, possibly Devin, may wake up and be told by Mike that everything is cool and to stay put

Mike and Jordy then decamp to the laundry room because as long as you can't sleep, you might as well be useful

This is essentially the same way the scene played out in the first place, only with another person roused which is probably realistic considering there are five people in that tent. Again, it would be nice if Jordy could have a serious talk alone with Erica, but if I do that they have to leave the tent without waking anybody else, because nobody in the band would let Erica, who they believe is in danger, go off into the dark with only Jordy to protect her. Not even Jordy.

Actually, that would work. The next morning after they wake up in the laundry room and return to the campsite the rest of the band could give them holy old hell for disappearing like that.

Another option is this: in the chapter I'm writing now Erica is going to explain exactly what happened at the old band's final gig. I suppose I could have her too upset to tell the whole band and Mrs. Goodnight, and she could just tell Jordy privately. Mrs. Goodnight would let them go out into the kitchen or something. That would give him the chance to talk to her alone, and still have Mike explain their presence. Although now I think again, they should probably get all that in the open in the scene at Mrs. Goodnight's. Hmm.

I'm also using the scene where Jordy tries to explain his theory to the police. Despite the fact he has few qualms about breaking little unimportant laws related to drinking ages and the possession of various controlled substances, Jordy believes in letting the police handle catastrophes like multiple murders. But the detectives sort of blow him off so he and his friends get scared and decide they have to figure things out for themselves.

(The police, incidentally, do investigate his theory. They just don't think they need to explain their every move to the public. Especially to what has just occurred to me is... a bunch of nosy kids in a van ...) (And ha! According to this Wikipedia entry, the show was originally about a crime-fighting rock band!)

(Damn, that's embarrassing.)

The explaining-to-the-cops scene will now be preceded by a scene in which Erica is packing up Gareth's tooth brush and a change of clothes and whatnot for him. Which gives Jordy a moment to sort through t-shirts ("Mike? Can I send him that Scouts Canada shirt of yours?" "Of mine? I thought it was yours") and notice Mike's Monty Python shirt, which he wears so much it has its very own gallery on their Web site.

It's only later that it occurs to Jordy that Anabeth was not only wearing a Nova Scotia tartan kilt when they met her (and insisted she didn't know what it was), she was also wearing an "I Weigh the Same As A Duck" t-shirt.

Which is just one more coincidence he doesn't believe in, and that's when he confronts her. Except by the end of the confrontation he doesn't think she's guilty. (This has to be added to his suspicions of her friends Chris and Justin, and that's all too complicated for this post.)

And I perceive that now I have written that post on my writing progress. So there you go.

I've mentioned that I need to plan out what happens next in my story, so I've been making notes lately. (Whether I can make it work is another matter.) I have a tentative plan for who is suspected and interviewed and in what order.

I've also planned out, in more detail, exactly how Jordy figures out who the killer is and why. Part of it is the same "eureka moment" he had in the original draft from November 2005, when he realizes the killer is using an alias based on his own name. However, there are a few things that don't add up for Jordy before then. (This stuff is based on a continuity error I made in the original story and decided I would keep.) I need to go back and add another few conversations with the killer, but what I've got ties into one of Jordy's most salient personality traits: he pays attention to other people and remembers things about them.

What happens is this:

Kowalski meets the catering guy, George MacShane, early on. He makes a crack about how they're staying at "Ted and Lucinda Goodnight's."

Later, in a bit I have to insert, probably right after Jordy talks to Adrian, George mentions to Jordy that he's a local guy.

Throughout the course of the story Jordy has been wondering where Mr. Goodnight is, and whether he exists. After the campground shooting, when we finally meet Ted Goodnight, Ted turns out to be Mrs. Goodnight's grandson. Jordy wonders why he was so convinced there was a Mister Goodnight.

Eventually, though, he remembers the conversation with George. His point is, if someone was talking about him and his mother, they'd never say "Jordy and Kate MacPherson." They'd be "Kate MacPherson and her son Jordy," or "Jordy MacPherson and his mother, Kate." Saying it the other way makes them sound like a couple. Jordy figures out that George doesn't actually know the Goodnights or their relationship, he was just trying to sound like a local. So the question is, why would he lie about something like that?

The "eureka moment" follows soon after, on the heels of Jordy's realization that, while you might get really upset if a friend got killed, you'd be even more upset if your child was the victim. So maybe he should not be concentrating on suspects his own age.

There has to be more to it than that, obviously, but that's a big part of it--the thing that doesn't make sense. The thing is, George assumed Jordy wouldn't be paying attention to him and would not remember anything about him, but we've already established that he does in fact remember details about people. I'll have to work in some kind of precipitating incident to lead to the final confrontation, because confrontation is not Jordy's style unless he's cornered. But I can work with this.

The mystery writing group had a meeting last night--sort of scheduled at the last minute so we didn't end up missing September. One of our members had been wrestling with a series of long time characters she was attached to, but was having trouble with. Apparently she's ditched them and now the new thing she's working on is going really well.

Another member is in the edits phase before she starts sending her story around. I think we're going to get to see some more of that at our next meeting.

Me, I'm just working along and making some progress.

It's not a formal group but I do like touching base with other writers. It's good to know we're out there, you know?

A while back I posted something about a member of a mystery list I'm on, a self-important author with a bad habit of going on about the perfection of his own (as far as I can tell mediocre) books. I was partly warning myself against acting like him, and partly being a spectacularly petty bitch.

Anyway, some time after that he posted something about his series heroine, a spectacularly beautiful female medical examiner. He was basically pinning rosettes on himself for having a mid-thirties heroine, unlike what he referred to as the "stereotypical blond, blue-eyed twenty-two-year old heroine."

And that got me thinking about non-YA mysteries with very young sleuths. Despite his remark, I can't think of very many of them--I've mentioned that mystery writers have little fear of a Mary Sue, so a tremendous number of series heroines are women in their thirties and forties. If I'm ever published there will be people who are surprised my sleuth is not a mild-mannered fortyish librarian.

I did, however, recall a book I bought in the 1980s, when I was in my late teens or so, called Death Of A Radcliffe Room Mate. It was a sequel to a book called Death Of A Harvard Freshman, and as far as I know was the last book in that series. The sleuth was a Harvard freshman called Lauren, and along with her friend Michael she solved a couple of baffling Ivy League murders. The two of them are overly impressed with themselves, pretentious, boy-crazy, shallow, not as smart or sophisticated as they think they are, kind-hearted, and I think I found them mildly annoying when I was their age. Now I find them endearing and quite charming, which makes me wonder whether the mystery group friends who think my band story must be a YA are maybe not on the right track after all. It's possible my characters, too, might be more likable to people old enough to be indulgent. I dunno.

Room Mate included one gem, though: Lauren is thinking about an acquaintance who writes poetry, and reflects that many insecure kids write secret poetry and feel superior to other kids with less poetic souls... even though they too may be secret poets. I liked her for that at the time. And it's not a bad warning to would-be writers now.

I'm coming up on the end of already-drafted material, and noticed that I have Jordy, who says he doesn't know much about the accident at the long-ago show, displaying much too much knowledge about it. I know he generally knows more about stuff than he thinks he does, because people talk to him, but I ended up striking that and saving it for Erica. When she and Mike get back from police headquarters, where they've gone with Gareth, I'll get Jordy and the others to make her tell them exactly what happened. This is also a good opportunity to have her confess that her band didn't exactly try to stop the rowdiness that led to the accident, because they didn't like the audience any more than the audience liked them, and they just wanted to get offstage. And now she feels guilty about it.

I've also decided that the explanation for Jordy doing the sleuthing is this: after he decides the police aren't taking his theory seriously, the band decides that most of them will make sure Erica is never alone, and he'll go talk to people. Because people do, in fact, tell Jordy things, mostly because he's unthreatening and seems dumber than he is.

Right. Onward.

Okay, in what should be the final post from the weekend: I took the laptop home from work and then hardly used it at all. I didn't do any transcription worth speaking of, but I advanced the longhand draft by about fifteen hundred words. Jordy, Devin, and Kenny are at Mrs. Goodnight's house, trying to explain Jordy's suspicions to her. They're not a bit sure she cares what happens to them, but she seems intellectually interested in the problem.

I'm about five pages away from being finished the rewrite and getting into completely new territory, so I will have to start planning and outlining again. The point of backing up and rewriting was to get the suspects onstage earlier. I've probably had mixed success with this, but I may have succeeded in creating two distinct acts in the story--the one in which the murders happen and Jordy has no idea what's going on or who to suspect, and the one in which he's pretty sure he knows why things are happening, but not who is responsible.

Now, to get them to work together. Yikes.