True Hauntings and Fictional: Getting Your Mystery Fix with a Spook

The books in Heather Graham Krewe of Hunters series read two ways--as stand alones or as a strong series where a shifting, but continuing cast of characters solve interesting ghostly mysteries. She even adds more value for the reader by using interesting places for her settings.

{In fact, she teased me into buying this book by setting The Hidden in Estes Park, Colorado, a retirement-central extraordinaire if you like a high altitude and cold. [I prefer the flats along I25.]}

Seems like I've read a few books set in my local area, lately. Sometimes, the descriptions have been right on [Lee Child's Midnight Line]. Other times, I had a hard time recognizing the places. Graham got the mountains surrounding the bowl/park right. But, Estes Park is infested by unavoidable elk. Two days after finishing the book, I can't remember one mention of elk. They're one of the prime tourist Estes Park's attractions in addition to the Stanley Hotel.

Copycat murders provides the core mystery for The Hidden. Former Reb soldier, Nathan Kendall, is murdered, shortly after the US Civil War. The crime was never solved. Today, his ranch has become a guest ranch and museum.

When modern descendants [thank the various DNA sites for this] are killed in much the same way as Kendal, the museum director, Scalett Barlow, comes under suspicion for their murders. With a plot hop--a Krewe of Hunters member is her former husband who rushes to prove her innocent. Everyone gathers for the crime-solving fun. 

Of course, there is a romance. Actually, a couple of them, including the runaway marriage of Nathan Kendall and his wife, who lend their ghostly fingers to solving the muders.

The Hidden isn't one of Graham's better books. I thought it lack suspense, the m/c was rather sappy, and the plot predictable. Maybe I have read too many of them, and the well-constructed plot elements have become tedious for me. [Must admit the moose was a surprise.] Or, is it just the romance and bed scenes I find overly similar? 

On the other hand, I always get a good relaxing read from Graham's books, reads that tempt me to read one more chapter, even though it's midnight or after. Bottom line: when you craft a book as well as she does, even your less than stellar books are worth reading. It's not her fault I've usually guessed the perps 2/3rds into the storyline.

Want to read other peoples' reviews? You can also check out some samples on

Amazon/Kindle          Barnes & Noble/Nook         kobo/Rakuten 

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Other Interesting Reading

Stephanie Laurens has it made with her Cynster series. Her characters and backgrounds come ready made. She's now working on the grandkids of the first book m/cs, an English duke finding his true love during the French Revolution. The series has reached the Victorian era as she writes the stories of how the varioious members of the Cynster clan find true love. She gets a little explicit on the love scenes, but she really doesn't go overboard. Of course, an evangelical Christian whould probably disagree with me.

What's notable--her female Cynsters are just as strong and dangerous as the males. If you like your romance in period settings you might take a look at A Match for Marcus Cynster. -- Yeah, Laurens has strong non-Cynster ladies in her world--though they aren't as menacing as her masterful males.

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Have you ever though about writing a blog? Jane Friedman, one of the best bloggers, is holding a webinair [12 April 2018], sponsored by Writer's Digest, on how to do the blogging bit effectively. [Yes, there are ways to write better blogs than I do since I'm a confirmed dillettente.]

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My  Writing Rut

Don't think of my blog as a rut, but I do write it. Imagine my surprise when I noticed I've written 500 blogs. 

Actually more. I used to write a separate blog about my Far Isles Half-Elven. But I got in a rut when after writing Night for the Gargoyles. I couldn't get out of Andor. Seems publishers think demons are more interesting than elves. You can download ebook free, for sure, on Amazon , iBooks, and kobo/Rakuten. Don't know if it shows up as free in other countries besides the US, but you might take a look.

Night for the Gargoyles was the inspiration for There Be Demons, the first of a possible Demon War trilogy, which is available at the same places. Had to write a book to find out what happened when Gillen tried to teach for head-strong teens from the projects how to fight demons...and survive. I like to joke that the book has more reviews [good] than sales [bad, though it's approaching the average sales for an indie].

When a Great Idea Misses the Mark - Book Review of Ghostseer by Robin D. Owens

One of the premises for this blog: I review books that I discover on book shelves -- new book stores, used book stores, and supermarkets. In this case, I found Robin D. Owens' Ghost Seer.

Why did I decide to buy it? First was a nice cover with a picture of Denver in the background. [My eyes latched onto Denver's iconic Quest building in the circle. You can barely see it in the cover I lifted from Barnes & Noble, but I thought I saw it.] Second, Owens is a RITA Award-Winning Author -- who I had never heard of. Third, Ghost Seer is the first in a new series.

After Clare Cermak's eccentric, but very rich, great-aunt dies, Clare inherits more than her money -- her great-aunt's obligation to help ghosts leave this plane for the next comes to plague her. Accountant-minded Cermak finds the transition from normalcy to seer difficult. But all isn't bad. She finds her hunk [aka love interest], a former cop suffering from a similar problem -- trying to deny a supernatural gift of his own, plus he must seek a new career because he was disabled during an arrest-gone-bad. The two are thrown together as they help the shade of Jack Slade, a notorious local character, find the severed ears he wrongly removed, so he can pass on to the arms of his waiting wife.

Promising premise. I settled in, looking forward to a comfortable read ... even though I knew a happy-ever-after loomed in my future. The promise of ghosts causing trouble made me willing to take the ride. Owens does build a well defined plot based on the premise that ghosts sometimes need a living, helping hand to make restitution before they can pass onto the next world.

But the gremlins soon appeared. While I don't visit Denver often now, we used to travel there every month to buy ethnic foods we couldn't get in the small town we moved to. The lightly sketched for Denver had me wondering: What the heck? 

One example. The public library and Denver Art Museum are two of the most distinctive buildings in Denver. Even though Owens has Cermak helping a ghost pass on in the plaza between the two buildings, the she creates no sense of a unique place. Just gives a generic description of a paved area. Being told that Cermak is eating lunch in the plaza which could be one of the spaces in New York City or a hundred other US towns or cities. Virgina Dale, which is a real place on the Colorado-Wyoming border, didn't fare any better.

The characters didn't escape the sterotypes either. While I realize the romance formulas generated a huge following, I want a more complex read. I want my characters to be unique people. Oh, both Cermak and the hunk are pleasant enough. Sadly, I'd met Owens' characters before.

The only character that escaped its stereotypical confines, was Enzo, a ghostly labrador housing something Other who acts as a spirit guide on Cermack's journey to accept her new talents.

A competently written book which held my interest with only one interruption, but offers no special wonder besides the idea of ghostly restitution. I give it three ***.

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When I proofed this blog, I realized my age is showing like the proverbial slip below my hem. I basically read print ... and mostly mass paperback. Yet all my stories are e-published, mainly because I can't see any economic sense in publishing a short novella in print.

As far as I can tell, everyone e-publishes now ... even the humongous five. But I'm wondering what people read. I know I make most of my sales on Nook. But what do you read? Care to share a comment anyone? I'm curious.

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  What have I been doing this week? ... I know I did something...if only because I sit in the chair in front of my laptop so many hours without getting bored. [If I played Mah Jong all the time, I would of given up and gone elsewhere.] 
 
Basically, I've been reorganizing the files on my desktop in the lull between waiting for comments on Crossings from my critique group and waiting for the copy edits on The Ignoble Nobel Prize Winner.

My critique group slammed me up the side of the head again -- for being stupid. What I thought was the ending of the novella is now the end of the middle turning point. I still have another third of the story to write.

Did get book trailers -- in my case story trailers -- up on You Tube. The only good I can see so far is that I have two channels and can't figure 

out how to merge them into one. Need to go to my video-smart daughter for some hand holding. Anyway, I would appreciate you taking a look at them so the numbers aren't so pitifully small: The Ghost in the Closet and Noticing Jamilla.

Might I make a promotion tip ... if you are a writer working to publicize a book? You might look at the various gigs on Fiverr. Not only did I find someone to do my videos

under marketing but Fiverr people did the above book covers too. The covers are cheap enough that you can even have two or three people do covers for you, and you can then pick the best one. Then, there's the promo posting help. I won't mention you can hire reviews too.

Oh, did I say something I shouldn't? Of course, writers pay for reviews. What do you think a blog tour is?
 

Long Books: Are They Easier to Write than to Read?

Oh, yes, I can read long books, fantasy or otherwise. Case in point, Spirit Walk by Richie Tankersley Cusick. Okay, if you want to nit pick, it's two books in one volume, but I started reading it as I got bored with Great North Road. And--I don't think I finished it because it was 200 pages shorter, either.

Spirit Walk is solid Young Adult fantasy where the protagonist moves to a new town just as she's developing the talent to see and hear ghosts. 

Miranda Barnes gets relocated when a hurricane destroys her old life, and when she's moved to her mother's home town, she learns that her grandfather is the town's lunatic eccentric. Turns out his "strange spells" come when he contacts the spirit world, but he dies before he can teach and guide Miranda to control her developing abilities. Fortunately, she finds a group of friends who are more than willing to help her cope, including the local "bad boy" who provides the love interest.

Sounds like a cliche, but it's a cliche like romance books are a cliche. It's all in the writer's imagination and ability to develop a plot line. In this case, Cusick demonstrates good craft skills plus plausible depictions and explanations for the phenomena she works with. Miranda is a good kid trying to find her feet in a new world and, thanks to Cusick, does it in a logical way with only a few normal freakouts. Her sidekicks are all well differentiated and, while they are familiar types including a southern belle, have kinks that move them away from the norm. 

The ghosts? They're the best of all. They come across as characters with real problems rather than flitting balls of light.

As for being long, there are two major things that can go wrong with a story line. One you go into so much detail that you lose your reader's interest. [Like the Great North Road did for me. Though George R. R. Martin does it for me too.]

Another reason is all the writers, who are still learning their craft as their storyline meanders in and out of plot twists and extraneous scenes, who give up. If the beginning writer's lucky, they keep writing until they learn how to construct a novel. If they are luckier, they'll go back and discover a mouldering draft containing inspiration for a number of different novels.

One example of this is a recent blog by Margo Berendson about a unicorn novel she wrote when she first started writing. ... I was an early critiquer of the unfinished novel, way back, but the plot line always has stuck in the back of my mind. I'm glad she's recycling the material now that she's gained a better mastery of her skills. Check out her experience on rekindling her writing dream.

I'm doing much the same thing with some short stories I wrote way back when. Discovered that some of them could be rewritten to fit into my Andor world [There Be Demons and Noticing Jamilla]. I'm now in the process, while I wait for The Grumpy Dragon to do its thing, of converting the short stories into planks in my platform.

Have you made any other use of your trunk novels, besides making a home for dust bunnies?

Oh, Spirit Walk. I give it a five star rating because it kept me reading past my bedtime.

One Character, Two Characters, Three Characters, More?

How many characters should appear in your first chapter? It's a question I'm  sweating over since I have an agent interested in looking at samples of Dark Solstice. Yeah, I gotta write a whole new chapter from scratch. The second chapter, the much-revised original first chapter, was rejected, partly, because it had too many people in it. Guess I'll have to revise it too and take out some of the named characters.

The "Ugh" reaction is so big, I doubt I'll do it. The above publisher-attitude makes me wonder how much the mental abilities of the "American public" have been "dumbed down".

Old Haunts by E. J. Copperman is one of the books on my stack of "read, but not reviewed". Haunts is a well-done ghost-story mystery. The premise is neat: the ex-husband of one of the ghosts haunting Alison Kerby's guest house is found buried on a beach, murdered some years ago. 

Amateur sleuth Kerby reluctantly agrees to investigate when someone wants to hire her to investigate, and the dead ex-wife of the victim, who lives in her guest house, convinces her to take the job. The major complications arrive in good time to compel the reader to keep reading: the arrival of Kerby's own ex who pretends to want to reconcile and the arrest of the ghost's mother for the murder when Kerby investigates.  The resolution flows well from the incidents, both major and minor, in the story line.

So, how are the characters introduced? Copperman involves three characters in the first chapter -- the owner and the two ghosts who were killed at the guest house -- plus a fair amount of back story. I didn't consider the information an info-dump, but then, I'm tolerant of background. [If you've read any of my stories, you know just how tolerant.]

Copperman is an American, so she follows the American short-chapter pattern. She includes a few characters and sets up a complication at the end of the chapter. In this case, the complication was the arrival of the MC's ex-husband, "The Swine". The "Guaranteed Smile" here would raise the sympathy quotient of many female readers. [Yeah, I know females can be swine too. Got one in the extended family.]

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Have you heard about Pinterest yet? Have you explored it? I'm trying to limit my social networking ... but I find the concept intriguing. Jeff Bullas at jeffbullas.com discusses Pinterest plus gives some tips on using the site in your marketing. If I don't have to visit the site every day, I might put up the covers of my two free Half-Elven stories.

Speaking of social media, do you use a Facebook author's page? I have the Far Isle Half-Elven up there as well as my personal page ... or whatever they call it. Chanced to Google "Half-Elven" while checking my daughters new promo pics. Was surprised to see I've three links to pages on my website on the first page, including an earlier version of The Foiling Gorsfeld from Renna's point of view

If you Goggle "Far Isle Half-Elven" I've got the monopoly on the first page of listings. Now, I have to spend time exploring the links. Would you believe Chinese search engines have found my website?  -- And, no. The listings haven't increased the downloads of my free stories on Smashwords or the sales of Taking Vengeance. 

Though I'm beginning to wonder about Smashwords' statistics. I know four people who say they boought the novellette on Smashwords, and their statistics say I've only sold one. Good thing I don't care that much.

Newbery Books, Ghosts, and Other Things

The Reading Lesson:

A couple months ago, I thought it might be nice to read all the books that got the Newbery Award, but had already read most of them.  One I hadn't:  Ruth White's Belle Prater's Boy from 1996, if I read the copyright correctly.  The book was a nice dose of magical realism combined with a mystery.  Each character -- the narrator and her cousin, Belle Prater's Boy -- had a problem to solve.  Thought the book gave a good lesson in weaving two similar strength plot lines involving two different characters together.

Everybody likes a ghost story.  So, it's no surprise I picked up another middle grade book:  Mary Downing Hahn's The Old Willis Place: a Ghost Story.  The book was told from a ghost's point of view.  The three main characters are well drawn with an evil old woman's ghost lurking in the background, scaring the bejesus out of the kids, ghost and alive.  Hahn's setting the clues about the wild kids in the woods is masterful. --  Hop the younger step-grandkid enjoys the book when I give it to her for Mother's Day.

After reading the two books close together, I'm thinking more and more people trying to write publishable books for adults should read good middle grade.  It's so much easier to see how the writer's work their craft tools.

Web Promotion and Other Stuff:

I've been sending rough drafts of a short story out for critiquing lately, mostly because of time crunches.  This gives my critique partners an easy target where they get back at me for highlighting I've done of their use of "to-be" forms.  Only not all "was" forms are wrong.  Do you know when "was" is the correct word to use?  The Grammar Divas give you some hints, if you care to read them.

Tagging can get your or your friends books noticed in the great e-publishing swirl.  Karen Nut writes about a technique to bring your book to people's attention at the 1st Turning Point.

For those seeking agents, I thought I'd add this blog [from a link at Writer Beware's Facebook comments].  Jennifer Laughran of the Andrea Brown Agency commented on agency agreements at her blog Jennifer Represents.  While I'm not querying agents at the moment, I thought it interesting and filed it for when I get Emma revised, edited, etc.

Let's go on to imagine when we become a best selling author like, say, Yasmine Galenorn.  In her blog, Life on the Fringe, she blogged about how many pages she should produce each day ... and then goes on to explain there's much more to being a best-selling author than just writing, or even revising/editing, pages.

Progress:

Got the short short story [Devil in the Details] -- which is different from flash fiction -- back from the critiquers.  Sent it out to Betas after revising/editing it a couple times.  Wanna bet I won't revise it when I get it back again?  You'd lose.  --  It'll be nice to have something to submit to the professional-paying markets again.   

Also, I'm reaching the middle of the editing (yet again) of There Be Demons.  [Then, I'll submit it to a couple of e-publishers.  In the end, I expect I'll be self-publishing it.  The language is really rather strong even after I've been removing the f-bomb.  [Hey, it's my favorite expletive, though sometime I soften to "screw it".]  We won't talk about my bureaucratic angels, twisting of Catholicism, and wrong-aged protagonists. --  And, I thought it was middle grade?

Say, aren't I supposed to be creating something new?

Trivia:

I've been reading a couple romances and thinking about "happily-eve-afters".  I think the HEA comes after you learn to keep your mouth shut ... until you think of a neutral way to present your position.