Visiting Author of the Week: Marilyn Meredith: A Writer of Many Talents

Marilyn Meredith is the author of nearly thirty published novels, including the award winning Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series, the latest Dispel the Mist from Mundania Press. Under the name of F. M. Meredith she writes the Rocky Bluff P.D. crime series, An Axe to Grind is the latest from Oak Tree Press.
She is a member of EPIC, Four chapters of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and on the board of the Public Safety Writers of America.

What inspired a mystery writer to pen a ghostly love story. Is there any mystery in it?
The inspiration for Lingering Spirit is the inspiration behind my Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novels. My son-in-law was a 15 year veteran of a police department and transferred to a mountain community to become a deputy sheriff. When he was a new officer he came to my house after his shift and would tell me all his adventures. He even took me on a ride-along once. His mother was not in his life and his father was gone. He treated us like his parents and my husband and I loved him like a son. Six months after his transfer, he was killed in the line of duty leaving our daughter a widow with three young sons. Though Lingering Spirit has its roots in the truth, the story and the characters are fiction. I think writing this book was part of my grieving process.

I wrote Lingering Spirit a long time ago. Oak Tree Press asked me if I had any old books I'd like on Kindle and she put Lingering Spirit on there quite some time ago. At the beginning of this year she told me that was her favorite of my books and could she publish it as a trade paperback. Of course I said yes--and that's why I now am promoting a romance with a touch of the supernatural.


As to whether there is any mystery in Lingering Spirit, the answer is no.

Speaking of ghosts, I would love to know more about your Christian horror books. How did you come about writing Christian horror? What is Christian horror?
I wrote three Christian horror. I've always loved really scary movies, especially those with the devil in them, and often thought if only the hero or heroine was Christian, they'd have a better chance. So I decided to write a horror novel with a Christian hero and then two with Christian heroines. My definition of Christian horror, is really scary but with Christian elements. I probably will never write another because when I sent them out to publishers, the main stream publishers said they were really good, but far too Christian for their audiences and the Christian publishers also liked my writing but said they were far too scary for their audience. I did find small publishers for all three but the market just wasn't there.

Did you start out writing Christian horror and move on to mysteries, or was it the other way around? Is there a dividing line between the two genres, or do you find yourself blending the two?
My first published works were two historical family sagas with lots of romance--they were based on the genealogy of both sides of my family.
When I was through with those, I thought about what I should write next. Since I loved mysteries, I decided to try my hand at one. The Astral Gift, a mystery with a touch of the supernatural, was the first and it has had three different publishers. Now, I'm the only one who has copies. From there I went on to use what my son-in-law inspired, the Rocky Bluff P.D. series about a small police department on the California coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara. The latest is An Axe to Grind from Oak Tree Press. There is no supernatural aspects in that series.
When we moved from the coast to the foothills of the Sierra, I began writing the Deputy Tempe Crabtree series about a Native American resident deputy who is often called upon to solve crimes that involve Indians or the nearby Indian reservation. The latest in that series is Dispel the Mist. Those books have a lot of Indian legends and mysticism. In Dispel the Mist, Tempe has an encounter with a Big Foot-like creature on the reservation, called The Hairy Man.

To find out more about Marilyn Meredith be sure to visit her at http://fictionforyou.com and her blog at http://marilymeredith.blogspot.com

It's Murder, My Son Now Available

Here's a bit of self-promotion (Isn't that why we do this?)
It's Murder, My Son is now available!

Needless to say I'm thrilled and want to tell you all about it!

So take a minute and stop by my website to find out more about it  and order your copy today!

Kindle should be available in a couple of days. Audio is coming soon!

Oops! I Did It Again!

Last week, the proof for It’s Murder, My Son arrived and I immediately poured a glass of iced tea, put up my feet, and proceeded to read it from cover to cover.

A book reads differently when you’re not reading it on a laptop screen or a stack of papers with a red pen in hand. The words flow differently when you are holding it bound in a cover, sitting with your feet up, and a glass of cranberry iced tea at your elbow. When it comes to the proof, the author needs to put themselves in reader mode and try to pick up on what their readers will pick up.

When I did this with It’s Murder, My Son, I sucked in a deep breath that comes with the feeling of horror when I reached page 74. Holding my breath, I reread the section praying that I was not reading it the way the average reader would read it. It didn’t do any good. No matter how many times and ways I read it, it read the same.

Multi-millionaire playboy Mac Faraday has come across a witness for Niles Holt’s murder. He calls police officer David O’Callaghan to inform him that said witness had given a statement to the police at the time, but his statement, which contained pertinent information, seems to have gotten buried. Why?

On page 74, David O’Callaghan goes to the file room to retrieve the case file. On this page I state that he had read over the file so many times that he had it memorized. A few paragraphs later, for the first time, he is reading the witness’s statement.

The question hit me: If David had reviewed the case file so many times that he had it memorized, why didn’t he know anything about that witness statement? Why didn’t he know anything about the witness? The statement was right there in the file.

Ugh!

Luckily, this was the proof and it was an easy fix before going public. It’s Murder, My Son has been through two editors, which means two fresh pair of eyes have looked at it, but still no one noticed that David missed that witness statement after memorizing the case file.

That is why authors must go over every proof even if they feel like their eyes are going to bleed if they have to read “that thing” one more time.

I take comfort in knowing that it happens to the best of us.

Celia Hayes, author of To Truckee's Trail and The Adelsverein Trilogy, calls proofing “the ritual humiliation of authors”. She confesses, “There was an essential part of a word omitted in Chapter 4 of To Truckee's Trail which still aggravates the heck out of me. On pg 60, there is a description of wagon-train emigrants breaking camp, and mention of 'the privy-pits with the last shovel thrown upon their contents’ when it should have been ‘last shovel-full’. I am still embarrassed by it.”

Celia recalls the most potentially embarrassing typo; which she mercifully did catch in the ARC, and was able to correct in the released book; was in Adelsverein: The Gathering. In the dedication and thanks, she had misspelled the name of a person who had been enormously helpful and encouraging. If she had not caught this error, Celia says it would have been “embarrassment of the most heinous.”

Recalling one of his own bloopers, Dr. John Yeoman suggests, “We worry too much about published 'mistakes' that the reader will probably never spot but we never see those errors, too late to amend, that they joy in disclosing to us.”

Yeoman recalls, “My PhD thesis in creative writing referred throughout to one 'K J Rowling' as the author of the Harry Potter novels. This mistake appeared in several places, although I had proofread the thesis umpteen times. My examiners awarded me a doctorate magna cum laude, but neither referred to my howler. This rather suggested they had not read my thesis. The error only came to light when my wife flipped through the bound volume, about to be lodged in the campus library, and whooped with delight. No, I did not correct it."

Maybe it is because of those who do delight in pointing out our mistakes after a book’s release, even in a jovial manner, that authors feel particularly sensitive to any literary misstep. It’s been ingrained in our psyche as writers that our work must be perfect. Literary agents and publishers only accept work that is error free. One mistake and you’re out, especially if that mistake goes live in a published book.

Authors can assume that those who make it to the best seller lists don’t make any mistakes like having a detective find a report tucked into a case file that he has long memorized, or not knowing the name of a famous author. After all, isn’t it their perfection that separates them from the rest of us?

Not necessarily.

Mistakes happen, even to the best of us. So many in fact that one website is dedicated to listing them for our enjoyment…and emotional support:

According to website the Best Book Mistakes, the master of suspense, Stephen King had trouble deciding which of Eddie’s arms was broken in his book IT. It went back and forth between the left and the right.

In the start of Part 6, in King’s The Green Mile, the men let Percy out of the closet. They take the tape off his mouth and he starts to rub his lips, then lowers his hand to speak. The problem is that he's in a straight-jacket at this point.

In Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, when Edward is telling Carlisle's history to Bella, he says that around 1660-1670 Carlisle found a coven of true vampires that lived hidden in the sewers of the city. According to Best Book Mistakes, the vampires couldn't have been hidden inside the sewers because there weren't any. The sewage system was only built around 1859.

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, while being sorted into houses, Harry looks up at the Sorting Stool, and there are only three people left to be sorted. Professor McGonagall then calls out the names of four more kids.

So, boys and girls, the moral to this blog post is that we can take comfort in our imperfections. This is not to say that we can let down our guard and write with wreckless abandonment and a total disregard for facts, grammar, and continuity. But, if we do make a mistake, even if it goes public, we can shake our head, say, “Oops! I did it again,” and keep on writing.

Am I Your Guest Blogger?

If any of you have had a chance to check out my Facebook page you will see my plea: Am I your Guest Blogger?

For the last week I have been struggling with my current crisis: My laptop crashed.

No, when it happened I didn’t scream and run around in circles with my hands on my head like one of those cartoon characters my son watches on Nick. I was prepared. I had a backup. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover until I restored my files that my backup didn’t include my Outlook. So I lost my e-mails, contacts, and calendar. It didn’t hit me until much later how bad it really was.

Two days after the crash, I was drinking my coffee feeling mighty pleased with myself over being so prepared for the crash and not losing any of my books when I realized something: When I lost my Outlook files, I also lost my calendar and in doing so…my guest blog schedule and blogger contacts.

That was when I started running around in circles and screaming like one of those cartoon characters that my son watches on Nick.

Why don’t I use a proper organizer? I tried. I do admire those who I see whip out one of those leather bound notebooks that are broken up into various sections: one for addresses and phone numbers, the other for the calendar in which to record your dates, and then the section in which to slip in business cards. They look so…so… ORGANIZED. They even smell impressive.

As soon as I get one of those I’ll fill out the front page with my information on the first page. I’ll write it out carefully using my best penmanship. Then I’ll fill out some of the contact information and put in a couple of dates on the calendar so that it will look like I lead a life in which appointments are made and kept in a premeditated manner; anything to create the illusion that my life is not a hodgepodge of happenstance.

I am usually able to maintain this illusion for three and a half days. Then I will tire of breaking out my organizer to write things down and decide to save time jotting notes down on a yellow stickie that happens to be within reach of the phone. Why waste time writing said note twice? Why not just stick the yellow stickie (Hey! They call it a stickie for a reason!) to the appropriate page on the calendar in the organizer.

At least I’m using the organizer!

Then, I’ll slip the organizer into my Mommy bag, where it will fall to the bottom and get buried under old grocery shopping lists written out on yellow stickies. Yes, I know the organizer has a writing pad on which to make up said lists, but first I would have to dig it out from the bottom of my purse to use the writing pad.

At the bottom of my purse, my organizer will remain along with my lost open pens that will mark up the pages and the leather cover, which in no time starts smelling like the back of my closet.

It is usually rediscovered around September.

After thirteen organizers and fifteen years of trying to get organized, I gave up. That was about the time I discovered Outlook.

This I can handle. I do most of my communication with e-mail anyway. So, when I get a date that I have to remember, with a couple of keystrokes I simply save the email, along with all the contact information into my Outlook calendar and with another keystroke, I’m back in my e-mail. No hunting down pads of yellow stickies and working pens to write out my stuff. That organizer can stay at the bottom of my purse for discovery by the archeologists in a couple hundred years to land in the Museum of Natural History. Then I’ll be famous.

I thought I had it all figured out—until my computer crashed and I discovered that the Windows 7 backup does not include Outlook, which includes my calendar, with all my contact information, including my Guest Blog dates and the contact information for the Bloggers.

So, this week I have been feeling like a fool hunting down bloggers to ask: Are you missing a guest blogger?

Please pass this message and e-mail link around to any bloggers you may know who are missing a guest blogger. My missing guest spots were for sites about books and writing. The dates and contact information I am missing are in August. I am to send the post in at the beginning of July.

In the meantime, I’m going out to buy an iPhone.

UPDATE: Great News! I have found my mystery blogger. It was Jeffrey Marks, Little Blog of Mystery, August 8!

Thank you to everyone who contacted me offering to let me guest on your blogs even though you weren't my mystery blogger. I will be in touch since I am setting up a blogging tour with the release of It's Murder My Son on July 1!

Mom Replaced by Free Download

It happens every year.

Every major school project is due the same week in May. Now that Tristan is in middle school, it is worse than it was before; and I don’t see it getting any better until he graduates from graduate school and starts taking care of us.

Until then, Jack and I will just have to bare with it.

Last week, Tristan’s social studies project was due. It was on the country of Poland, where his ancestors originated. It was very last minute. He only received the assignment right before Christmas in December.

Don’t get me wrong. For the last five months he has been working on it. He’s been doing the fun stuff: research and putting together a PowerPoint presentation complete with audio and special effects for his oral report. However, forty-eight hours before the project was due, he only had the rough draft of his twenty page research paper completed.

In came Mom, the professional writer, to the rescue. With the rough draft completed, I could have edited and polished it in a matter of hours, but I had visions of Tristan in graduate school. “Mom, my three-hundred page dissertation on the chemical components of the beagle nebula is due the day after tomorrow. I have the rough draft done and some really cool pictures. Can you help?”

Sorry, kid, they don’t have computers here in the nursing home.

So last weekend, Tristan and I sweated together, as mother and son, to complete his sixth-grade social studies project. By noon, he cried out, “Mom, can I have a break? I’m hungry.”

“Okay, twenty minutes.” I continued on. Three pages and an hour later, I realized that Tristan was nowhere to be found. I woke up Jack, who was thinking with his eyes closed on the sofa. “Where’s Tristan?”

“He went to Bronson’s house.” The kid escaped!

An hour later, I tracked him down and dragged him back to the computer to teach him more about the fine art of punctuation. “Did any of your teachers ever introduce you to a comma?”

It was with a big sigh of relief that I sent Tristan off to school on Monday morning. That was over. I could now sit and relax with my own writing projects.

At three-thirty, Tristan returned home with tears in his eyes.

Language Arts: The assignment was a twenty-five page story assigned over a month ago. Tristan was excited about this project. He had been researching and writing it for the whole month. He had the twenty-five pages written—in long hand—which were now missing!

When was this story due? Wednesday!

Unfortunately, Mom had her own deadline. So I told Tristan to start typing and when he got home the next day he could dictate what he didn’t have done to me and we’d get it done.

Before he went to bed, I asked Tristan how many pages had he typed: A whole three pages!

What had the kid been doing since he got home from school? Researching a speech to text software to help him finish the project. “Mom, can I download it onto my computer?”

I bristled. That’s cheating!

“How?” Tristan wanted to know.

It was cheating the same way word processing was to the electric typewriters, and electric typewriters were to manual typewriters, and manual typewriters were to the pen.

Tristan failed to see my logic. The next day, as soon as he got home from school, he downloaded a freeware of a speech to text program. While he dictated his story to his laptop, I fumed in the kitchen while cooking dinner.

Where was this free download when he was sobbing over his missing pages? Was it able to give him the benefit of its life experience and advice directly from the bottom of its heart? Was it going to give him a hug and an “atta boy” when he brought home his “A”? Did this free download even care enough about Tristan to brag about him on its blog?

How dare he replace ME with a free download?

By dinner, Tristan had printed up his story and presented it to me to review. It had a thrilling beginning, an intriguing plot, and a cliffhanger ending. Unfortunately, it lacked capital letters, periods, commas, and paragraph breaks. This, I firmly believe, his language arts teacher would want him to use.

“Where’s Tristan?” I asked Jack when he came to the dinner table.

“He went to James’ house.”

So, I went in search of Tristan and dragged him back to his computer where I sat on him until he finished his story, after which we celebrated with hot fudge sundaes.

There are some things you just can’t replace with a free download.

Kill Me Please

Most writers, like me, are die-hard introverts. We are most content when we are home alone with our imagination, laptop, and dog or cat or goldfish or whatever it is that keeps us company without making too many demands.

I don’t get cabin fever. This past February, I cursed when the snow plow came through three days after the blizzard. It was so unfair. My friend Jill who lives in the “flatlands” as I call the valley below our mountain got to stay snowed in for two more days. She does get cabin fever.

Yet, there is a danger to giving into your solitary ways when you are a writer. Inspiration comes from being “out there”. How else can you come up with interesting characters or story lines? You can’t count on anyone worthy of being put in your next masterpiece crossing your path while sitting in your recliner in your bathrobe and slippers. Agatha Christie based Hercule Poirot on a gentleman she saw at a café. Sherlock Holmes was based on one of Sir Conan Doyle’s college professors.

Don’t assume that being called a character is an insult. I am often asked to be put in my books. It seems to be a toss-up between wanting to be the innocent accused, or the suspect that the reader hopes did it so they will go to jail, or the actual killer.

Only once, a young man asked after one of my speaking engagements if he could be a murder victim. Never before, and never since, has anyone requested to be the victim--unless you want to count the request to be killed off coming from one’s behavior.

Have you ever seen someone incredibly ill dressed and thought, “Do they ever look in the mirror?” Well, sometimes I will meet someone and wonder, “Do they have any idea of how their behavior looks to others?”

Through my years of people watching, I have met some people who seem to beg, “Kill me! Please!” They aren’t asking the neighborhood psychopath to take an ax to them, but they do seem to be begging the local mystery writer to make them the subject of a fictional murder investigation.

Recently, in my quest for inspiration, I got out of bed, kicked off my fluffy slippers, brushed my teeth, put on my bra, and went off to census training for the United States government. (If I can get paid for people watching, so much the better.) Here I was in a large room with twenty-five other adults all awaiting the opportunity to learn how to go door to door to count people…and to meet characters.

My training class was a virtual garden of characters ripe for the picking. There was the mom wanting to earn enough money to take her children to Disney World; the wife hoping to make enough money to pay her husband’s medical bills, the dog trainer who was short on funds, and the elderly couple wanting to make enough money to drive across country in their RV this summer.

Let’s not forget the mystery writer in search of inspiration.

Add to this mix an executive recently retired from a position that had two hundred employees working under her. I know this because she broadcast it several times over the course of the week. She was also the recipient of numerous awards for excellence. She said that it was important that everyone, including the instructor, know this information. Why? Her awards were real evidence of how truly far beneath her we all were.

By the end of the first day, it became clear that I had found a potential murder victim.

An hour into the training, The Executive balked at the one hour allotted for lunch during the eight-hour day. “I find that unacceptable. It violates my employment agreement.” The Executive wanted the thirty minute lunch that she had agreed to and to leave a half hour earlier, even if it was inconvenient for the other twenty-five people in the room. Since none of us ever had two hundred men working under us, our lunch plans didn’t matter.

By the end of the week, I had a room filled with readers waiting in line to buy the book I write in which the murder victim is The Award Winning Executive.

It was during The Great Lunch Negotiations that the mother trying to get to Disney World turned to me. “There’s a reason I’m a stay-at-home mom.” Like the Disney Mom, I work at home alone for a reason. Maybe it’s because my mother drilled manners into my psyche that I have never mixed well with corporate America. I actually care about the other people in the room.

I don’t actually lift a whole character and put them into a book. Rather, I will pick up looks, styles, or traits to use. I will also store away situations that I have encountered to use in a plotline.

For example, the one home I visited for the census in which the wife screamed at me about how she refused to take part. Okay, I said. But when I turned to leave she called me back. Maybe her husband will answer my questions. After bellowing for her husband, she resumed yelling at me. It seemed to take an eternity for her husband to come to the door while she continued screaming about how she was not going to participate in the census. When I once again offered to leave, she told me to wait because her husband was coming. After he arrived, she went to get a beer while he answered my questions between comments about how nosy the government is.

It was during this interview that I put together a plotline in which a couple is murdered by a door-to-door sales rep pushed over the edge by…

After all my years of people watching, I have yet to answer this question: When characters like these end up between the covers of a book, do they actually see themselves the way the writer saw them?

The Thirty-Page Labor

I haven’t been blogging the last few weeks because I have been working diligently on completing the rough draft of my next Mac Faraday Mystery, Old Loves Die Hard (working title) while recovering from my gallbladder surgery. Now comes the hard part. Revising and editing.
One of the most gratifying feelings in writing is finishing the first draft. It’s like child birth. There’s the pregnancy where everything comes together. Then there is the getting it out. That’s the rough draft. After giving birth to the book, the writer’s next job is to mold and shape it to maturity while praying that it doesn’t end up killing anyone.
Old Loves Die Hard was born after a three day long labor. Trying to push those last 30 pages out was harder than the first 200 pages.
By the time the writer reaches the ending pages of a book the words seem to flow from the fingertips to the keyboard onto the page. I was in the zone the other night when I had reached that point. However, I am not only a writer, I am also a Mom and my son has to get up at 5:45 am to go to school. So, I went to bed with the words of those last 30 pages dancing in my head.
Jack suggested that I stay up and finish them, but I said no. “I’ll finish it tomorrow.”
I should have listened to Jack.
At 5:00 am a noise came clattering through the walls into our bedroom.
CLACK-ACK-ACK-ACK!
“What was that?” Jack sat up in bed.
Beagle Bailey woke up with a noise that resembled a mixture of a beagle bay and howl. Ziggy just plain wanted to kill it, whatever it was.

IT was a guinea hen that had decided to take up residence on the porch rail outside our front door.
I like wildlife. That’s why I live in the woods on our mountain in West Virginia. I love to look out the picture windows in my studio to see a herd of deer grazing in our backyard.
I don’t like wildlife when it is a loud fifty-pound bird sitting at our front door going CLACK-ACK-ACK-ACK!
It was still there at 7 am when I had to take Tristan to the bus stop. “Do something,” I told Jack.
“I’m not going out there,” my brave husband replied. “That thing’s big.”
So, I did the only thing I could do. I released the hounds. Beagle Bailey is no dummy. That bird was bigger than he is. He launched his attack verbally from the safety of our home.
Fearless, Ziggy shot like a bullet out the door and chased the bird up into a tree on the other side of the driveway while Tristan and I made a run for it. I had to chase the bus halfway down the mountain, but I got him to school. When I returned, the guinea hen was still up in the tree and she was not happy.
CLACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK!
They were at it for an hour until Ziggy tired of fighting with a bird that refused to come down and fight like a dog. After breakfast and a drink of water he went back out for round two. Then round three. Then round four, etc. They continued all day long. The only time I had peace was when Ziggy came in to gargle.
All day, that bird taunted me while I tried to concentrate on pushing those thirty pages from my mind to my fingertips to the keyboard and onto the paper.
CLACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK!
Ziggy and Bailey would answer back. WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF!
Try giving birth to a literary masterpiece with CLACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK! WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF!
That bird remained in our front yard for three days! Every morning I would have to send out Ziggy to chase her away in order to get Tristan to the bus stop. Then I would continue pushing those last thirty pages out to the tune of CLACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK! WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF-WHOOF!
But now, looking at my latest Mac Faraday Mystery, Old Loves Die Hard, like every proud mother, it was worth it.
I can’t wait for all of you to see my new baby.