Category: Writing

I attended a sobering talk last week sponsored by Sisters in Crime, a wonderful organization for writers. The speaker was Adam Chromy, an agent who works with authors to sell their book idea to publishers.

He told us that far more books are published now than ever before (400% increase in the last 10 years), and that publishers no longer have the same job. Where they used to be the gatekeepers, selecting authors whose books had potential, today they are only interested in boosting authors who have social media cred. In search of a guaranteed best-seller, publishers want authors who already have a significant and meaningful social following, who already fill up events with guests who love their books, and who write trendy books. They are, in his words, “at the top of the algorithm”.

The literary trends were the first shocker. As we have all seen, people read fewer books, and instead spend hours each day scrolling social media on their phones, looking for things that will make them feel something in seconds (or less). The books they like have a similar, longer-form feel: quick chapters that each have a little cliff-hanger, a protagonist who gets into worse and worse trouble with each chapter, a whiz bang ending that makes the reader feel something strongly, and a leit motif that holds it all together.

Since the talk was on the state of publishing today, I’m quite sure Mr. Chromy knows exactly what he’s talking about, and I’ve seen the signs of everything he mentioned. It was simply unnerving to hear it spoken so plainly.

The talk answered a lot of questions for me, like why my local bookshops pretend to be interested in me doing an event but don’t follow up. Why having a few hundred followers means nothing. Why writing slow-burn, immersive, historical books that demand sustained attention will never find a publisher. Why my fellow authors who are traditionally published complain that they still have to do all their own publicity. Why so many authors write posts ending with a question to desperately encourage “engagement”. And, yes, why everyone is writing on Substack as if it were an audition for Broadway.

The implications for writing are clear. The algorithms, which are a combination of popularity and viral luck, determine not only the marketing but the content of published books. When asked about cozy mysteries, we were told they are dying out because (1) the audience for cozies is aging and dying, (2) they create a feel of community that people enjoy but that for younger people exists now in social media,  (3) they are now in the “feel good” category, and (4) they’ll die now that mass market paperbacks are dead.

What I heard helps explain how the binge watching of “series”, the scrolling and clicking on phones, and the quick emotional climax people want, are all connected. So is what I saw increasingly in the college classroom: just give us the gist, leave out the boring stuff, don’t make me accountable for something we talked about last week. It’s why students enjoyed my lecture and my classes but learned so little history. It explains why I tend to keep older books, but give away recent fiction because most of it is fluff.

But although the tricks Mr. Chromy stated might indeed be what’s necessary to get an agent and publisher, part of me doesn’t buy it. There are readers who want an involved, escapist tale. There are people who want to be up all night reading, not because of cliff-hanging and page-turning, but because they want to stay with those characters and that story.  Not every child, to reference the old experiment on patience and impulsivity, wants one marshmallow now rather than two marshmallows later.

For authors, to prove yourself first as a social media “personality” may have very little to do with the quality of your work. As you know if you read my blog, having expressed a warm, giving, professorial persona for 34 years, I am ambivalent about creating a new one for being an author. Considering the emphasis on being “authentic”, I find it ironic that the only way to succeed as an author is to not be ones true intense, introverted self, but rather cater to the algorithm.

Is it possible to do it another way? Well, I recently read that Hemingway was a great self-promoter, showing up at everything and deliberately creating his grumpy, slovenly, drunken, holding-up-the-big-fish persona. He did this even though he balked at Scribner for making him do interviews. But he wrote his way. Perhaps that’s the model for this new age as well.

There are some stalwart theories as to why people love a mystery. Not thrillers, mind, where the excitement or suspense is the central trick, but mysteries. Detective stories, cozies, whodunnits.

For many years, the theory has been that people like solving puzzles. They enjoy watching a character find the solution, and the challenge of trying to find it themselves. But I have never been a gamer or a puzzle fan. Sure, I do the occasional crossword, but more for the words than for solving it. (Years ago when I played Assassin’s Creed, I only did it to see the scenes of Italy and London.)

Another theory is about justice. Humans like seeing justice done. Whether that justice is legal or divine, we like seeing the evildoer get his or her comeuppance. Certainly I want humans who do bad things removed from situations where they can continue doing them.  I strongly believe in societal systems of justice, and enjoy studying them.

But it occurred to me that there’s another reason we like the whodunnits. In most mysteries, though not all, the solver of the puzzle is motivated by helping people. While the murder victim may be dead, the living have questions, pain, and a need for resolution. If you’re a suspect, and you didn’t do it, you need help even more. The detective, whether professional or amateur, uses skills not common to everyone to find the miscreant, and often those skills are appreciated, at last if not at first.

It doesn’t matter that sometimes the detective doesn’t seem to care about anyone. I’d put Lord Peter Wimsey in this category, and Sherlock Holmes. Even Miss Marple keeps herself removed from the angst of a case. Others, like Benoit Blanc or Precious Ramotswe, seem to care a lot and become involved in people’s lives.

Those who get emotionally involved are often appreciated by those they assist. The detectives who distance themselves get satisfaction from what they do, regardless of whether they are thanked or not. We, the readers, provide that appreciation even when others do not, making us complicit in their helpfulness.

I am delighted to report that yesterday my first audiobook, Bummer at Luna Beach, was released on Spotify and elsewhere. This is my SoCal eco-cozy beach mystery, the first featuring silver sleuth Rosie McMahon.

I recorded the audio myself, for several reasons. First, the writing adventure has cost me far more than I have earned doing it, and I refuse to use AI. Also, I really enjoy audiobooks read by the author, so why not me?

For those interested in the technology, I used Audacity, which is wonderful and free, for recording.

The microphone was worth ordering. It was a Tonor USB microphone, about $35.

My “studio” was a table with the computer, padded all around with blankets. While recording, I put a quilt over my head to block sound and prevent echo. I put foam around the microphone to prevent sibilance. (Decades ago, my first job in the theatre was sound board operator, so I enjoy this stuff.)

Between the scenes, I wanted a sound. At first I found some recorded seagulls at freesound, and contacted the person who created it for permission. But after the first two chapters, I found the sound squeaky and annoying. So I played a few notes on the piano into my phone, and used that instead.

Audacity let me smooth out the sound for even volume, using the Normalize feature. I was also able to edit out some unexpected noises, though it’s possible there’s a cuckoo clock in there somewhere!

Findaway Voices was my choice for distribution, although I did consider others. As it happened, Findaway Voices sunsetted on the same day of my release, and became Voices by INaudio. To get my audiobook on Spotify, which had been a distribution outlet for Findaway, I just had to click a permission.

Audible, although an option, wanted 7 years of distribution even in the non-exclusive contract. So for now, the book isn’t on ACX.

Spotify gives you free promo cards, which is nice but I can’t say I’m impressed by the design. I might jazz it up in Canva.

Wonderfully, however, the audiobook is already in libraries because of Overdrive. I am ridiculously pleased to see it listed at the Beverly Hills Library, where I once spent an afternoon writing.

Is it a super-smooth, professional, glitzy recording with a famous actor doing the narration? No. But I think it’s pretty good anyway.

On my first day at Bouchercon, the huge conference for mystery writers and readers, I was taken by the fact that everyone was talking about books, which I thought was strange.

By “book” we now mean a codex rather than a scroll or an oral tradition. Since medieval times, reading silently to oneself has become the norm for experiencing a book.

From the 18th century at least, this has meant that reading is often a private activity requiring concentration and a less distracted environment. When one reads, the mind of the author feels closest to one’s own, even if someone else is sitting nearby. This puts reading alongside other usually private or semi-private activities, such as putting on clothes, kneading bread, or deadheading roses. They can be done in a group, but typically are solitary activities.

To hear others talk about books felt like being admitted into everyone’s boudoir to discuss private thoughts. [It struck me that this is why it’s so hard to get good readers to leave reviews: we are asking them to share in a public forum something that would normally be more private. To share impressions of a book means using a whisper, not a bull-horn.]

Among these thoughts, I gleaned a number of tips and perspectives:

1. Ambient story: this is the story behind the plot or experience that’s up front and obvious. Examples might be an immersive ride like the Haunted Mansion, a video game, or a Lady Gaga dress — all of these have an ambient narrative that you know is there even if it isn’t explicit. When you set a novel in a creaky old house, or a lunatic asylum, or a manicured suburb, the ambience is obvious.
2. Dialogue is key. Writers tend to be listening learners. This is why getting dialogue right is so important. Each character must have their own way of speaking, and their unique ways mustn’t slow down the reader. Dialogue also should be realistic — not everyone speaks formally or finishes their sentences, and a character’s inner dialogue may contradict what they say aloud. 
3. Head-hopping is not forbidden. In the only short course I ever took on mystery writing, my assignment was dinged for first considering one character’s thoughts from their point of view, then the other’s. This was “head-hopping”, writing from two points of view. I tried learning the rules (it’s ok in the same book, but not the same scene or chapter), and yet I had read so many good books that did this. At the conference, J.D. Robb, Louise Penney, and Scott Turow were lauded for being especially good at it. 
4. Crime or mystery novels are about community; thrillers are about the individual. This was the most helpful thing I’ve heard distinguishing the two genres. Midsomer Murders? Mystery. The Bourne Identity? Thriller.That doesn’t mean there aren’t thrillers about groups (I’m thinking Sneakers, one of my favorite films), but that the individuals in the group are spotlighted as much as the mystery. The few “thriller-like” scenes in my books all focus on what an individual is experiencing.
5. It’s about secrets. In mystery, usually someone wants to discover someone else’s secrets. As a reader, I love figuring out what the character is hiding. I realized my books should have more secrets.
6. It’s easy to lose your own voice. One of the panelists (it may have been Jacqueline Winspear) said the worst school exercise she ever had was an assignment to read a page of a famous author, then close the book and write. The tendency was to adopt the cadence and style of the author one had just read. That, she said, is how easy it is to lose your own voice.

No, that isn’t all I learned at the conference. But these points were the most significant to me, the ones I intend to do something about. I noticed awhile back, for example, that my nightly writing was getting worse. The language was too simple, with little metaphor or color. Every sentence later needed editing. At the conference, I realized this was because I had been reading, very quickly, lighter-side books rather than literary fiction during those weeks.

This may be why many of us haven’t read, or don’t read while writing, a lot of the works in our preferred writing genre. No one wants to sound like someone else.

Despite the large number of attendees (1700 people, by one count) I still felt like I was at the campfire listening to the gossip and the wisdom. Now, back to writing!

Having never done it, I was nervous about writing a romance. So before I began, I did some reading about how to write romance fiction, and concluded that there are some other challenges with a mystery writer doing romance:

1. The typical tendency to start with a dead body

When you write semi-cozy historical murder mysteries, starting with* a dead body is de rigueur. In a romance, not so much, and I did try to avoid a corpse. For about ten minutes. So, yes, I have a dead body, but only because he died without a designated heir and that’s part of the romance. Nobody gets murdered. So far as we know.

2. The intense desire to have an underlying puzzle

I could not for the life of me figure out what two people could do while falling in love that would be remotely interesting to an outsider. But if they solve a mystery together — aha! So I cheated and created a mystery to guide the plot, involving a lost miniature and some family papers. Such things aren’t huge stakes because I needed the focus to be on the relationship.

3. The nagging feeling that there must be an antagonist

I learned that the romance couple must experience not only the opportunity to be together, but also face obstacles that make the relationship unlikely or tricky. This adds an element of suspense. In mysteries, this obstacle would be an antagonist trying to stop them. Yeah, he’s in there, not trying to stop them from falling in love, but from getting what they want. I also found ways to keep the lovers separate, especially so they could imagine the worst of each other.

4. The perpetual confusion of goals

Each main character was supposed to have a goal, and in a romance it should be a goal other than to fall in love and have a romance. See why I ended up with a mystery back story? They must both want something for which love would get in the way. Love is inconvenient when you’re trying to do something else. It tends to overcome intentions, plans, and motivations. We want to be rooting for the lovers to both get what they want and fall in love.

5. The unbearable burden of not being a romantic myself

I’m unfortunately not a “romantic”, although I’m certainly not averse to candlelight and chocolates (the latter being more important, of course). Love can make people unsure of themselves and too daring at the same time. They do things they’d never do, experiencing a transformation of self that may be overly attached to the other person’s actions. I prefer motives like jealousy, money, revenge, hatred. So it was more difficult for me to understand my characters, even as they wrote their own stories. Making them likable, and adding a bit of screwball comedy, made this a pleasure rather than a burden.

I am very happy with the result. Amanda is a young, swearing, intelligent woman. Jack is a charming, clever, secretive man. It’s a Victorian romance with both serious intents and light-heartedness, as our main characters balk at the things society expects of them. There is no sappiness, sexual explicitness, or background trauma. If you haven’t read it, give it a try. 

More thoughts posted while I was writing the book are here.

*ok, maybe by Chapter 4 — I like to set the stage and characters

Writing my first romance was a challenge, literally. Some of my author friends were deciding whether to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) last November, and two of us who usually write historical fiction decided to write historical romances.

There were no worries getting up to speed on the genre. In younger days, I read historical romances all the time: Amanda Quick, Johanna Lindsay, etc. I was charmed by the strong heroines and the handsome rogue heroes, and the way the characters spoke to each other. I could not resist, however, creating an underlying mystery, problems they had to solve, things they had to find. So the novel does have a “caper” aspect to it as well.

The research part was pleasant, too, because the focus was on the characters and their relationship. I couldn’t let the setting go entirely; to me setting is always a character in the story. I chose a part of England with which I am somewhat familiar: West Sussex. I know this area because I’ve been there for other work. For most of the last several years I have been researching H. G. Wells for non-fiction, and the estate of Uppark is in West Sussex. Wells’s mother worked at Uppark, first as maid and later as housekeeper, and young Wells frequently stayed there. I’ve visited, and was even invited to be a docent.

I used Uppark’s location as Lady Brandon’s house, where my heroine, Amanda, works as a companion. Everything else that happens is measured from there, to the surrounding towns (especially Petersborough, where there’s a pub that claims Wells wrote there at the tables) and south to Portsmouth. Portsmouth I visited many years ago on another historical quest, for the first Duke of Buckingham, who was murdered there in 1628. I even found the room where he was taken, which in the 1980s was an architect’s office, and they were so nice about letting me in to absorb the atmosphere.

Writing about places one has visited or lived is always enjoyable. But the story was another challenge. The standard pattern for a heterosexual couple romance is boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. But I wanted my heroine, Amanda, to be unusual as well as strong, not conventionally attractive but attractive to the hero, and unfailingly honest. I’ve known women who are tough and swear like truck drivers, like Amanda, and men who lie through their teeth as a matter of habit, like Jack. Their innate truthfulness (or lack thereof) plays a major role in the story.

But I didn’t want this to be another tale of a woman falling for a man, like so many romances. Although told from Amanda’s point of view much of the time, I wanted Jack to fall harder. Why? Because in so many romantic stories it is the female character who has to sacrifice something–leave her home, end her associations–to be with the man. I wanted the man to make the sacrifices, and give up things, and change more than she did.

Only recently did it occur to me that this impulse may have come from my feelings about the movie You’ve Got Mail.

<Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen You’ve Got Mail, stop now, see the movie, and come back!>

I’m a huge fan of Nora Ephron, including her movie romances. But the ending of You’ve Got Mail has always bothered me. The female protagonist loses her business and her associations (with the neighborhood, the customers, and her family memories) because of the man’s actions (in a predatory business), and she gets together with him anyway. Although it’s based on Shop Around the Corner, this takeover aspect is not part of the original story nor any of its variants (the movie In the Good Old Summertime, the show She Loves Me). It wasn’t right; it wasn’t fair. I wanted him to make some sacrifice to be with her. So in my book, it’s different.

For that reason, perhaps, like You’ve Got Mail, my novel A Heart Purloined ended up being a “clean” romance, where physical attraction is there but not explicit sexuality. The emotional connection, the changes to each as a result of knowing the other, were simply more important.

But the reader should in no way feel there is a “message”– it’s a fun, light-hearted story with delightful characters, not a treatise on loving sacrifice. The book is doing well in its first month, and I hope even more readers enjoy it.

Hello, and a happy New Year to all my subscribers!

It’s been a crazy time here preparing multiple books, but I think I have a handle on it. Murder at an Exhibition was recently released. It’s an art history mystery, with illustrator Jo Harris and her friend Bridget helping to solve the murder of a photographer. Photography, while not exactly brand new in 1863, was at a stage where it was being used for record-keeping, artistic endeavor, and more nefarious activities, just as the internet is today.

So I will reveal more soon about the context of the story, art, and London in 1863. For now, check out the map:

You’ll see the house of Dante Gabriel Rossetti way over in Chelsea, on Cheyne Walk. Rossetti will help Jo with the case, and I love it when real historical people and fictional characters team up!

Murder on the Pneumatic Railway, the third Tommy Jones Mystery and the one featuring Tommy as one of the friends who solve a murder, is in the editing stage and will be released in spring. Before that, Grousable Books is pushing for a Valentine’s Day release of Lydia Greenwood’s historical romance, A Heart Purloined. It’s a light-hearted romance with plenty of history and mystery, so look for that soon.

The best New Year to everyone. I have seen some people saying good riddance to 2022, but for me it was a heck of a lot better than 2021 in a number of ways. Looking forward to seeing what’s next!

In anticipation of my Conversation to benefit the Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret in London, which will take place in Zoom on December 8 at 7pm British time, I am posting here about the history of the old hospital and its time in Surrey Gardens. I will be talking about some of this during my presentation. This is a re-post from March of 2020, as I was starting to write the book. Enjoy!

St. Thomas’s Hospital at the Zoo

The cholera ward, of course, was in the giraffe house…

In my recent researches of St. Thomas’s Hospital, Southwark, I have discovered an unusual episode, a time when the hospital went to the zoo.

St. Thomas’s Hospital was located on Borough Street in Southwark from the medieval period until 1862. (What remains of it, the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, is my all-time favourite museum in London.) At that time, the railway was forcing itself through the area as companies competed with each other. The proposed railway went right through the heart of the hospital grounds. So in 1862 the hospital was sold to the railway company, for £296,000, according to this.

Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospitals shown on “Improved map of London for 1833, from Actual Survey. Engraved by W. Schmollinger, 27 Goswell Terrace”

A new hospital site was arranged to be built where most of it still stands, in Lambeth, across from the Houses of Parliament. But this site wasn’t complete until 1871.

Most sources skip over this gap. Where did the hospital go in the meantime, for nine years?

It went to Surrey Gardens, in Newington, Walworth, in September 1862. Surrey Gardens had been a pleasure garden, like Vauxhall. It had a zoo. But as business declined, the animals were sold off to build a huge music hall. The hall was gutted by fire in 1861, which coincidentally led to a court case that determined you cannot hold someone to a contract when it’s impossible to fulfill it (in this case, a concert reserved for a burnt-out hall).

St. Thomas’s Hospital decided to lease the whole property, repaired the building, and repurposed some of the zoo.

I’ve been looking for histories and records of St. Thomas’ Hospital to learn more about the situation at Surrey Gardens. The St Thomas’s Hospital Report of 1867 is available, for some reason, at Google Books. Amputation fatalities, I discovered, were lower at the new location.

[Aside: there were also some figures in the Report tables that seem odd to me. How could the average stay in hospital for an ankle sprain be 11 days (p602)? This made me wonder whether one had to stay in hospital to be allowed off work, or whether people really had no one at home to take care of them (or no home — quite possible in a poor neighborhood), or whether ankle sprains were for some reason more serious then? Four men and four women had sprained their ankle that year, and the average stay was 11 days? Perhaps they had more wrong with them than a sprained ankle.]

The giraffe house really was the cholera ward, and the old elephant house was used for dissections. That piece of information comes from a book about Florence Nightingale, who was a big part of all this. She had opened her first nursing school at Old St. Thomas’ only two years before the move, and helped provide for room and board for nurses at the hospital. She also helped design the new Lambeth hospital for maximum light, ventilation, and separation of patients into pavilions. [And she promoted hand-washing as the best anti-infective, as true now as it was in 1860.]

The Illustrated London News of December 1862 (copy available at HathiTrust) features a quick column on how the facilities at Surrey Gardens boasted the “rapid and complete conversion of the old buildings to their new and beneficent uses”, and imagined the gardens would provide a unique opportunity for medical students to stroll and contemplate. Nightingale, who believed in patient access to the outdoors, would have approved this. She wrote a letter to Henry Bonham Carter (her cousin and the Secretary of the Nightingale Fund) on the advantages of temporary buildings for hospitals, but it isn’t available online.

The 9-year relocation gets only a single-sentence mention in Wikipedia. That’s a shame. It seems like such an interesting interlude.