The Last....I Promise...Bouchercon Post

I apologize for taking so ridiculously long to get this final Bouchercon post finished. But here we go, my final recap for this wonderfully amazing convention.

Saturday in St. Louis was the big day for me, and I started it off by attending my good friend Erin Mitchell's panel. She was moderating a Bouchercon panel for the first time this year, and actually she moderated two panels. This panel included one of my heroes, Gregg Hurwitz, the exceptionally talented Lisa Unger and a relatively new-to-me author, Linwood Barclay.

Erin was well prepared and did a wonderful job leading the panel. All of the panelists were humorous and generous. And one of the links among the panelists is their tendency to create ordinary characters and put them in extraordinary circumstances.

Gregg emphasized the importance of relationships in the stories. One of his goals as a writer is to encourage his readers to invest in not only the characters but the relationships they have throughout the books. And he's moved away from writing villains. As he's matured as a writer, he's turned more to antagonists than villains. (I just love that statement. I think it's often what makes the difference between a good book and a great book.) In terms of his protagonists, he's also shifted. His early books dealt with characters whose jobs it was to investigate the crimes involved. But as Gregg's shifted more to common people as protagonists, the motives for what draws them into their circumstances becomes wide open.

Linwood believes that his background as a humor columnist paved the way for his career writing fiction - he always had a rather careless regard for facts, he says. Linwood likes to write about people who are ill-equipped to deal with bad people...as opposed to folks who are well-trained (i.e., P.I.s, cops, military, etc.). Part of his reason for this is that he doesn't know what it's like to be "well-equipped" to deal with bad people and he's extremely lazy; he doesn't want to have to research for months to find out what it IS like to be these people. Instead he wants to know what people like him would do if faced with those bad people; for Linwood, it heightens the suspense. He also pointed out that there's more room for transition in the character because they have to overcome a lot more in order to triumph.

For Lisa, it's always a character that she hears speaking to her or one that she's seen that pulls her into writing a novel. But while writing FRAGILE, The Hollows, her setting, started to evolve as a character and have its own personality and a "beating heart." Above all else, Lisa feels it's imperative to have an equal level of compassion for all her characters. That compassion lends itself to authenticity in the creation much more than researching "people."  Lisa also believes that writers are first and foremost observers. They are acutely conscientious to who and what goes on around them.

The panel was a most wonderful way to start the day. My only regret is that more people weren't able to experience it. One other perk of this panel was snagging Will Lavender who was in the audience and getting this picture.

If you haven't already read my raving about his book, DOMINANCE, I encourage you to do so. After having met Will in person now, I know that he's not only talented, but an extremely wonderful person as well.

Another author I caught up with on Saturday was Bill Cameron. He was signing at the Crimespree table and I stopped by so he could sign my copy of COUNTY LINE. I cherish all my pictures with the authors I meet, but I have to say, I really like this picture a lot:

O.k., so I already yapped and yapped quite a bit for this final post, and this isn't even a fraction of what happened on Saturday. Before I give you the grand finale, I have to congratulate one of the most wonderful people in crime fiction...Hilary Davidson, as you know, won the 2011 Anthony Award for Best First Novel. And I have to memorialize that here at the blog. If you've ever been so happy for someone's success that it completely eradicated your own disappointment for yourself, then you know how monumentally excited I was for Hilary to win this distinction. Congratulations, my friend! No one deserved this more:

And one more thing. I promise, this is it. I GOT TO MEET AYO!! This is Ayo Onatade who is part of the Shots Blog crew, and she is just wonderful. She's funny and smart and kind and I have to figure out how she can live closer to me because I started missing her the minute I said good bye. She lurks around here at the blog from time to time, but there's nothing like spending time with her in person. Thank goodness for Bouchercons!

As promised, here is the finale...Please try to overlook my bumbling in the beginning and I apologize profusely for the person who kicked the camera toward the end of the interview and wasn't kind enough to move it back. You can still see both of us, but we're quite off-center... my interview with the spectacular, funny, intelligent, talented, and genuine, Val McDermid - 2011 Bouchercon International Guest of Honor.

You Have the Right to Six Words - Week 20?

I'm still finding this hard to believe everyone. We are up to Week 20 in this series and you're still coming back. Thanks for sticking with me, we're going to be on the downhill side of this project now with about 6 to 8 more posts, but they're going to be some doosies. I hope you hold out to the end, and I hope you enjoy the fun.

This week, let's start out with a man who's known he loved crime fiction for a very long time. As a matter of fact, Bill Crider did his Ph.D. dissertation on the hardboiled detective novel. After successfully completing the Ph.D., Bill went on to teach English at the collegiate level. He retired from his position as English Department Chair in 2002 and began working full time at his writing career - or part time as a bum, according to Bill.

Bill has spent his whole life in small Texas towns. And he sets his books in much the same location. He has three series, something for everyone. Dan Rhoades is a small-town Texas sheriff who doesn't deal with serial killers but rather alligators, naked men in dumpsters and missing false teeth. Oh, yeah, and the occasional murder as well. Rhoades most recent capers can be found in MURDER IN FOUR PARTS which was released in February of this year. The first Dan Rhoades novel, TOO LATE TO DIE, won the Anthony Award for best first novel. Bill also has an amateur sleuth, Carl Burns, who happens to be an English teacher. And finally Bill has his P.I., Truman Smith, who earned a Shamus nomination for best first P.I. novel in 1991 for DEAD ON THE ISLAND.

In his free time, Bill runs, enjoys music and travel, is as much a mystery fan as a writer, and he tends to the needs of his three cats. He's summed up this array of achievements with

I came. I read. I wrote.

And that says a lot!

Our next memoirist, like many of the authors included in the project, has a variety of jobs on her resume. Michelle Gagnon has worked as a modern dancer, a dog walker, a bar tender, freelance journalist, personal trainer, model and Russian supper club performer? Doesn't that sound exotic? These days she calls San Francisco home where she indulges in stale popcorn and Hollywood blockbusters. When she isn't enjoying the movies she's bringing FBI Special Agent Kelly Jones to life in her IMBA bestsellers. Next month, Michelle will be releasing the third and newest Kelly Jones novel, THE GATEKEEPER.

Michelle is active in the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America and International Thriller Writers. And if that wasn't enough to keep Michelle busy, she's also blogging at The Kill Zone on Thursdays. Well grab your stale popcorn and sit back for the Michelle Gagnon show:

Dancer turns to life of crime.

Linwood Barclay was born in the United States but moved to Canada at the age of four when his father accepted a job there. Unfortunately, Linwood's father died when Linwood was only 16. He helped to run a cottage resort and trailer park until he snagged his first newspaper job with the Peterborough Examiner in Ontario. Linwood would join the Toronto Star, Canada's largest circulation newspaper, in 1981. Working there until 2008, Linwood wore many hats: assistant city editor, chief copy editor, news editor, Life section editor, and finally humor columnist. But, the world of novel-writing was calling him and in 2008 he hung up his newspaper hats to work exclusively on his books.

In the midst of all these newspaper experiences, Linwood earned his Bachelor's degree in English and met his future wife at Trent University in Peterborough.

Linwood's Zack Walker thriller series was born in 2004 and in 2007 Linwood's first stand alone thriller was published, NO TIME FOR GOODBYE. NO TIME FOR GOODBYE earned Linwood a nomination for the Arthur Ellis, the Barry and the International Thriller Writers awards. TOO CLOSE TO HOME, which came out in 2008 earned the coveted Arthur Ellis award for Best Novel. And this year his third stand alone thriller, FEAR THE WORST, was released in the U.S. in August.

And so how does Linwood sum up all this success?

Trailer park; father died; joined
newspaper.

And the rest, they say, is history!

And rounding out this distinguished group is a woman who came to writing via medicine. Tess Gerritsen earned an M.D. from the University of California and went on to practice as a physician. While on maternity leave the inkling to write snuck up on her and she began her first novel. In 1987 CALL AFTER MIDNIGHT, a romantic thriller, was published. She followed that book up with eight more romantic suspense novels and a television screenplay.

In 1996, Tess found her way onto the New York Times Best Seller list with her first medical thriller, HARVEST. And she just continued to role from there with eleven novels up to the most recent THE KEEPSAKE. Tess has teamed up medical examiner Maura Isles and homicide detective Jane Rizzoli for seven of those eleven novels and two of them have won her prestigious awards. For VANISH she received the Nero Wolfe award and for THE SURGEON she was awarded the Rita award.

These days Tess is retired from medicine, writing full time and residing in Maine. This international best selling author was

Told it was impossible. Tried anyway.

And the genre is richer for it! Thanks Tess, for doing the impossible!

I am so thrilled with this line-up this week. Michelle, Bill, Linwood and Tess, my sincerest and warmest thanks for taking the time to write your memoirs for this project. Your involvement has added tremendously to the series. I am honored to host you today.

And readers, thanks so much for stopping by. I hope you have enjoyed Week 20 as much as I have. And I hope you will join me next week. I'll be doing the mad scramble to make sure I have everything ready for Bouchercon, but I'm going to do my darnedest to get Week 21 posted. If by chance, I'm not able to get it done, please don't jump ship. I promise I'll have my act together for the week after and we'll resume!

News and Other Such Stuffs...

I have so much to share with you that I'm not even sure where to start! First, how did it get to be the end of July already? Someone is stealing my summer and I'm none too happy about it. It does take us a little closer to Bouchercon in October, though. Official countdown: 82 days! And the other thing about this summer? I've read a lot of GREAT stuff. I just finished Michael Lister's DOUBLE EXPOSURE, which you'll hear about soon, but it was fantastic. Just brilliant. And now I'm in the throws of Ridley Pearson's KILLER SUMMER. Good stuff, good stuff!

First up on the list for today is an announcement for my audiophile friends. Michael Koryta's new book THE SILENT HOUR will be available from Blackstone Audio read by Scott Brick. You can listen to a sample of it here. In addition to that, Michael informs me that ENVY THE NIGHT has been recorded for Audible.com. I don't have more details on that one, but when I do, I'll pass them along.

I've spoken before about The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles. These are the folks who so generously allowed me to attend their Festival of Books pre-party back in April. Well, I have to tell you that their customer service continues to astound me. Assistant Manager Linda Brown maintains Mystery Bookstore's Twitter account (@mysterybooks) and whenever possible she tweets during their book events. So, from across the country, I was able to join in the release party for Brett Battles new Jonathan Quinn novel, SHADOW OF BETRAYAL, and was able to attend Gregg Hurwitz's event where he signed my book for me, see:





Linda posted these pictures to TwitPic for me so I could see them in real time during the event. And I got a "hi from Gregg at the author's table." Now that's amazing customer service! And it totally made my weekend. I just love these folks. They have some more great events coming up too if you're interested. If you're in the area, of course nothing tops seeing the authors live. But, this is a great alternative for when the authors aren't close enough to you. And Mystery Bookstore will gladly save books and have them personally inscribed for you if you can't make the event (like me).

You can see the link here for their August events, but I wanted to point a few out to everyone. On August 1st a debut author by the name of Kwei Quartey will be signing his book WIFE OF THE GODS. Kwei will be here on my blog the following week. August 15th they will host Linwood Barclay signing his book FEAR THE WORST. Linwood will be a 6-word memoirist, so he'll be making an appearance here soon, too. And you all know how much I adore Poke Rafferty. Tim Hallinan will be signing BREATHING WATER on August 21st. I haven't posted my review of this book yet, but I'll tell you that you should NOT miss it. Call and order your copy now! And the last event I want to point out to you is the following day and it's called A DEADLY COMBINATION. MBS will host three talented female crime fiction writers, one of whom is Sophie Littlefield. I am SO excited to get my copy of A BAD DAY FOR SORRY, which is coming out this week. I really am looking forward to this debut novel. Sophie will also be one of our upcoming memoirists and she's one of the bloggers over at Seven Criminal Minds.

I've been meaning to mention this for awhile and haven't gotten around until now. I won what I think is the most creative contest from a book blogger. Jennifer over at The Literate Housewife held a contest awhile back to win a membership in the bookmark of the month club. Each month she MAKES a book mark for the folks who won this membership, and these bookmarks are absolutely wonderful!! I wanted to post a picture of a few so you can see. This was just a superb contest. She's a thinker, that lady is.


And another cool book-related item I want to share with you is this gift my boss gave me. It's called the Porta Book and I guess it's been advertised on TV. My boss (who is awesome by the way) bought a case of these to use as graduation gifts. I wanted to know if she was keeping one for herself and if she would tell me how it was for reading in bed because I wanted something since I do that so often. She reached in and pulled one out and said "happy graduation." And let me tell you that this basic little gadget is heaven for reading in bed. I use it literally every night now. I keep a pencil in the tray for making my notes while I read, and it folds up when I'm not using it so it isn't an inconvenience to store. Honest, I'm not trying to do a commercial - "the blogger has not been paid for these comments," I just really love this thing. It has made my evening reading 100 times more comfortable. I love that it props my book up for me and I don't have to hold it - and it weighs nothing. Thanks Candace!!



Really quick I want to remind you that the nominations are still being accepted for Book Blogger Appreciation Week. They will be open until August 15th and EVERYONE, blogger or no, can vote in the nominations - there are quite a few categories. So make sure you get over and recognize your favorite bloggers. If you are an author, publisher, publicist, whatever and you'd like to donate a prize to the BBAW, you can find a form to do so here.

Alright, hopefully that covers everything I wanted to mention...oh wait! One more thing. It's official now (I saw it with my own eyes) so I can mention it. Two of my reviews are printed in the new edition, #31 July/August, of CRIMESPREE magazine! I'm officially published! I don't think I could be more thrilled because I love this magazine. It is all about highlighting the amazing world of crime fiction literature. Every edition I pick up is packed with great stuff. I read about authors I enjoy, I learn about new authors and events. And they have tons of contests for you contest lovers. I am beyond humbled to have my name appear in this magazine. O.k., what are you waiting for? Go buy it!! ;)

Alright, now I really am done. That's all the news for this Saturday. Hope you have a wonderful last week of July 2009. Happy Reading.