With stories, my dad was like a magpie; anything flashy he took.  Often he polished those tales to his own particular shine, too, and with a charming disregard for historical accuracy.

For example, if you climb up our family tree on Daddy’s My side far enough, way back to the 1760’s and then hop over to a stubby branch that started in 1763 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and ended in 1808 in Natchez, Mississippi, you’ve found Lewis Wetzel, scout and Indian killer along the Ohio River during the American Revolution.

“Now, Lew,” as Dad called him as if Wetzel were his second cousin instead of his uncle many times removed, “was just a kid, thirteen, maybe fourteen, when some Indian braves ambushed his family.  Murdered them all, except for Lew.”  (Dad never mentioned that Lew’s brother, from whom we’re descended, also survived probably because the omission improved the story.)  “And after that, Lew killed as many Indians as he could get a hold of.  He scalped them, too.”  Thus Wetzel became a hero to the settlers on whom the Indians preyed.

“Now, Lew,” my dad continued with relish,  “was a Dutchman,” that is, Pennsylvania Dutch, “and he had long, blond hair all down his back.  And after a while, so the Indians wouldn’t recognize him, he braided his hair and tucked it up under his black hat.  They wanted to take that blond scalp in the worst sort of way to stop him killing them off.”

When my dad told this story, I’d picture Lewis Wetzel, young and blond and fleet of foot, wearing buckskins, long rifle on his shoulder and in his belt, as he pursued a doomed band of Indians through a shadowy forest near the wide and deep Ohio River.  Wetzel was James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Hawkeye and Leatherstocking, only better because he was real and he belonged to my family.

So, I was pretty disgruntled later when I read Betty Zane, Zane Grey’s historical novel of the American Revolution and discovered that Daddy pretty much stole his version of Lewis Wetzel from Zane Grey.

Daddy swiped other favorite stories, too.  In the evenings before supper, when Mom, Dad, my daughter and I lived together in Columbus after I went back to school, he’d sit upstairs in his easy chair with the one cold-water toddy Mom allowed him every day.  Enthralled, my tow-headed daughter would sit in front of him on a stool.  A forgotten dishtowel in my hand, I’d lean in the door.  Dad would nod his head, covered then by a thin brush of white hair, and beat the rhythms with his hand as he recited “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” “The Ballad of Dan Larue,” “Gunga Din.”  Because of the verse, I always knew Dad stole these stories, but he gave them his own style and I loved them.

And I have to admit that Dad came by at least one of his stories honestly (as far as I know).  This tale comes from the part of Dad’s life during the 1930’s when he was a surveyor for the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Several times Dad told me about him and his crew surveying for fire roads in the national parks up in the steep West Virginia hills.  “Once in a while,” Daddy said, “we came upon some old mile markers, leaning every which way, some of them completely out of line down the hill away from the others.”

Looking at those old stone mile markers, one of Dad’s buddies said, “This fellow sure was a lousy surveyor.”

“Well, sir,” my dad said, “you got to take into account the way creeks have eroded the land hereabouts and the hills have slumped in the past hundred and fifty years.  Miners blasting underneath for coal didn’t help either.  If you keep those changes in mind, you’ll see that surveyor had a true eye and did wonderful work, especially considering the equipment he used.  Yes, sir,” my daddy would add, “George Washington was a darned good surveyor.”  And goose bumps would rise on my arms.

That fine story aside, I now know for a fact, though not when he first started telling it, that Dad stole one of his best stories, the tale of Smith and Sir Digby Legard’s beautiful daughters, which harkens back to the late 18^th century.

About the time Lew Wetzel was scalping Indians in the west, a man named Miles Smith, in need of a wife, set sail for Britain from the east coast of the savage new world where, in my imagination, single-handedly he’d fought off hordes of Indians and hacked a homestead from the wilderness.

“Once he got to England,” Daddy said, “he happened to meet Sir Digby Legard, a wealthy landowner, who had two beautiful daughters.  As soon as they laid eyes on each other Smith and Sir Digby’s older daughter fell in love and off they went together to America.  And when that wife died, Smith went and got Sir Digby’s other beautiful daughter.  This, of course, sorely irritated Sir Digby Legard.”

Well, Dad got that last part of the story right as well as the basic story outline.  But he put his own spin on it, and he left out lots that didn’t fit his version.  For instance, according to my cousin, the family genealogist, Miles and his first wife had five, maybe six, children before they left for America.

Regardless of facts, Dad made the story so completely his own that I assumed it came from his family.  It’s a good thing, though, that I didn’t go looking for Miles Smith, Sir Digby Legard and his beautiful daughters on my paternal family tree because I wouldn’t have found it.  Instead it comes from my mother’s family.

Sometimes I imagine a scene with my dad during which I call him on his thieving ways.  “Daddy,” I say, “that story about Lewis Wetzel.  You stole it from Zane Grey.  And the one about Miles Smith and Sir Digby Legard, you stole that from Mom’s side of the story.  And not everything you said was true either.”

I level my snapping brown eyes at his faded hazel eyes.  “What about the George Washington story?  Did you steal that one, too?”  I hesitate, suddenly appalled, then add, “Don’t tell me you made up that stuff about our founding father.”

He doesn’t tell me.  Instead, he lifts his white eyebrows and presses his hand to his chest.  “Now, sweetheart, I’m hurt you think I’d lie about George Washington.  That’s all true about him being a surveyor in the western part of Virginia.  Heck, he got as far north and west as what’s now Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.  If you don’t believe me, look it up.”

“Okay, I will.”

Then he grins.  “But you know, I might have improved on the story.”  He pinches his thumb and forefinger together.  “Just a little, here and there.”

If you’ve read my blog much, you know that mostly I read fiction, write fiction and write about fiction. But this time, I’m writing about Sally Ooms’ Finding Home: How Americans Prevail. I unabashedly recommend it. Even if you’re like me and mostly read fiction, let this be the one nonfiction book you buy and read this year. Finding Home will make you appreciate your own home wherever you’ve made it and the book will move you in some surprising ways.

Reading these first person accounts in ten categories from Americans talking about their experiences of home, finding home, losing it, and finding it again or remaking their definition of home made me appreciate the home my daughter and I have created for ourselves. We’ve been luckier than many of the people who tell their stories in Sally Ooms’ Finding Home.

Except for her preface called “Displacement as Mirror,” introductions to the individual accounts and some explanations inserted here and there, Sally lets the people she interviewed tell their own stories in their own way, in their strong, individual voices. Many of these stories were inspiring. I would hope to do as well as these people have done in the face of adversity.

But many of these stories made me really angry. For there are villains in Finding Home.

Some of the villains are mindless forces of Nature like Hurricane Katrina and the tornado that leveled most of Greensburg, Kansas. But many of the villains are faceless bureaucracies, systems and situations created by people. These have produced lots of suffering for other people. These outraged me.

Here are three examples.

1) In the state of California and elsewhere, foster parents receive financial support for children they care for until the children reach eighteen. And often once they reach eighteen, the kids are thrown out to fend for themselves on the streets.

2) For no reason that they’ve ever discovered, the citizens of East Biloxi, Mississippi, received no help immediately after Hurricane Katrina from any agency including FEMA and the Red Cross.

3) Citizens of a large portion of the Navajo Nation were forbidden by the federally mandated Bennett Freeze to repair their homes, roads, and infrastructure. Nor could they build any new structures because of a land dispute between the Navajo and Hopi tribes. This went on from 1966 through May 2012, twelve years after the suit was settled. And now the repairs, improvements, and replacements that might have cost millions if done in a timely way will cost billions. Money can never pay for the suffering the Bennett Freeze caused.

But in addition to villains, heroes appear in Finding Home.

In all of the instances listed above, heroes have stepped forward to alleviate the suffering of others. To avoid many spoilers, I’ll give only this example: To help children no longer in foster care receive education, Katie Elsbree helped start sixteen Fostering Opportunities Dollars for Scholars organizations in San Diego County, California, to fund schooling for young people past the age of foster care.

I hope that nothing catastrophic like a tornado destroys my home. I also hope that I don’t have to leave it unwillingly because of powers outside myself like foreclosure. But if I do, I hope I will find heroes to help me as so many in Sally Ooms’ Finding Home: How Americans Prevail have shown themselves to be.

To see pictures of some of the people whose stories fill the pages of Finding Home, go to www.findinghomestories.com.

You can buy Finding Home: How Americans Prevail at http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Home-Americans-Prevail-ebook/dp/B00D09W7JU/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1370980528&sr=1-1&keywords=Sally+Ooms

(I first posted this golden oldie blog on 11/11/10.)

Over the forty years I’ve read his books, I developed what I call my “Francis reflex.” It goes like this: I walk into a bookstore, spy a horse and rider against a color as vibrant as a jockey’s silks, and automatically and totally without input from my brain my arm shoots out and my hand grabs the latest Francis thriller which I clutch to my chest all the way to the check-out line.

Recently my Francis reflex came into play at the library when I spotted Crossfire, the fourth collaboration of the grand master, Dick Francis, and his younger son Felix. I checked Crossfire out, brought it home, let it sit for almost a week while I finished reading something else and worked on my WiP. But once I started Crossfire, I snarfed it up, galloping over the finish line at 7 a. m. the day after I started reading it.

It’s an exciting ride. And happily I can report that the occasional clunky sentence that slightly marred the three previous thrillers father and son wrote together doesn’t appear here at all. The writing is smooth, the editing impeccable, and the thrills we expect from a Francis book are all present. (This is not to discourage anyone from reading the three earlier collaborations. They’re very good and I absolutely adored the end of Even Money.) So I can say that the reins have been passed from father to son and I expect my “Francis reflex” to swing into action for years to come.

[Back in 2010, Victoria Cotsworth made this comment: “I enjoyed your dissection of Dick Francis’ style. While I agree with all you said, the reason I, like you, devoured each of his books is that no one else can write a race sequence with as much intensity and sheer beauty. The theory to “write what you know” shines through in all his books. He held the reins over many a fence. I will read Felix’s books, but he doesn’t know horses like his father did.” Well said, Victoria.]

So how did Francis hook me so thoroughly and so well? What can I learn from his books that can help me craft my own?

Francis created a form that he delivered on repeatedly. If you’re a Francis fan, you know that his typical protagonist is a male, around thirty, often though not always single, who in some way is connected to horse racing. Sid Halley, for example, one of the few Francis heroes to appear in more than one book, is a former jockey who becomes a detective after injury forces him to retire from steeplechase racing. Another ex-jockey, Freddie Croft of Driving Force, owns a horse van business. Gerard Logan of Shattered is a glassblower who makes trophies for horse racing winners. I won’t continue to list them here, but suffice it to say that over the years, Francis found many unique slants on the horse-racing world that he loved.

Jockey or not, the Francis hero always gets into great physical danger at the hands of the villain. You need only to think of Sid Halley, with only one good hand, chained to a boiler about to explode for an example of the peril that might befall a Francis protagonist.

As for the writing craft, I can’t think of any Francis horseracing novel that isn’t written in a tightly focused first person point of view.

And then there’s the author’s compelling story-telling. Typically he ends one chapter with a lead into the next. Often, especially toward the end of the book, this is an outright cliffhanger that makes the book impossible to put down. After many a sleepless night, I’ve learned to leave off reading in mid-chapter, and naturally I’m trying to end all the chapters of my WiP in the same way.

Earlier I used the word form instead of formula on purpose because the latter might make you think Francis wrote the same book over and over again. But he didn’t. And that’s the beauty of the Francis form. Having a new protagonist and a new slant makes each new book fresh and full of surprises.

Now, originally, I thought I’d do a detailed analysis of Decider, my very favorite Francis, to determine other secrets of his success. But I’d reread it not long ago and decided to choose another. And when I came upon Reflex on my Francis shelf (between my Tony Hillerman and C. J. Cherryh shelves), I grabbed it. Now I’m given to unconscious puns, so I might have just associated my Francis reflex with the book title, but still I remembered it as quite a good book.

And oh sure, the usual aspects were there including the first person point of view and the unmarried male protagonist, in this case a steeplechase jockey who also is a photographer. It didn’t take me long to realize, though, this wasn’t just a good book. It was great. In it, as in several others, Francis transcended his established form.

So what’s great about it?

To answer this question, I need to tell you about the time, to my great joy, Gus Lee, author of China Boy, visited the Creative Writing Workshop, the class I taught Tuesday night, Spring Semester, for twenty years. Oh foolish me, I commented to Mr. Lee that it was surprising that a book about a kid who learned to box at the YMCA would sell so well. With pity for my ignorance and just a little scorn, Lee said, “Oh no, Juliet. It’s about a boy who’s lost his mother.” Lee’s story had universal and timeless appeal and indeed more women bought and read China Boy than men.

In Reflex, Philip Nore must make a very difficult decision, to cheat or to give up his career as a jockey. It’s not an easy choice at all and he anguishes at length over the morality of the situation as well. Who among us can’t identify with that?

So that’s why I’ve stayed hooked on the books Dick Francis wrote. Yes, he always wrote about horse racing in some way. Yes, he always wrote compelling tales. But most importantly, from Lee Morris in Decider protecting his son to Sid Halley overcoming adversity and Philip Nore making a difficult moral choice, Dick Francis repeatedly found the everlasting humanity at the heart of the story.

I should do so well.

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As Francis fans know, the grand master, Dick Francis passed away on February 14, 2010, several months before I posted this blog. Since then his son Felix Francis has continued on alone with Dick Francis’s Gamble and Dick Francis’s Bloodline. And when I was researching this golden oldie blog to update it, I discovered – “gasp! OMG” as my Dick Francis reflex kicked in – a new Sid Halley called Dick Francis’s Refusal is coming this September. Awesome.

As for my fiction’s theme, I’m writing stories of a mistreated child who grew up determined to break the chain of abuse and be a positive force in others’ lives.

And I continue to use some of the fiction writing techniques I mention here. For instance, my dear friend Gail F. was reading Chapter 1 of the new WiP the other night when she came to the cliffhanger end. “What?” she said. “Juliet!” All right, it still works, I thought as I handed her Chapter 2.

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I’m JulietKincaid on Twitter and juliet.kincaid on Facebook. You can e-mail me at jkincaid4@kc.rr.com.

And recently I’ve published some of the short stories about Cinderella, P. I., twenty years, three kids and a few extra pounds after the ball, as Kindle eBooks. Here’s the link to the award-winning short story that started it all.

http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00BAZPXEM/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_eos_detail

(I first posted this piece on December 23, 2010.)

Not long ago, in one of the writing groups I belong to, my friends gave me to know that the pace of early chapters of my WiP is hectic. I’ve got lots of plot, they said, but I need to slow down and give my protagonist and my readers some breathers here and there.

By good fortune, at the time my friends told me “You need to slow down, Juliet,” I was reading A Holiday Yarn, the latest in Sally Goldenbaum’s Seaside Knitters Mysteries. This installment has a particularly thoughtful protagonist/viewpoint character in Nell Endicott.

As I read, it struck me that Nell’s thoughts and reactions are exactly the way a person not used to violence might react to murder, much differently than the police detective in Tami Hoag’s Kill the Messenger, for example. Nell is quietly unsettled by the murder and, with the help of her fellow knitters, determined to figure out who committed the crime so that peace will return to their little town.

Another knitting amateur detective leaps to mind, Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple. Like Miss Marple, Nell is an armchair detective who figures out solutions to crimes often while she knits.  Over the years, though, Miss Marple developed a type of wisdom edged by cynicism. Nell’s not cynical but quite troubled about what would drive a person to commit murder.

In more ways than one, Ella aka Cinderella, the protagonist of my WiP, resembles Sally G’s Nell more than Agatha G’s Miss Marple. For one thing, like Nell, my protagonist is married though she has three kids while Nell and her husband are childless.

In the years of their marriage, Ella’s husband has shielded her from the type of abuse she experienced as a child at the hands of her stepmother and stepsisters. She’s forgotten about the worst elements of their torment, though they twit her slyly every chance they get, especially about her slight weight problem even though her younger stepsister is downright fat.

Once the plot of my novel gets rolling, the protection Ella’s husband has provided over the past twenty years is ripped from her, her children taken away, and she’s exposed to scorn, sarcasm, and blame for a crime she didn’t commit, as well as to physical violence she’s grown unaccustomed to. The antagonists in the book give her lots to think about and to react to along the way.

Going back for a second look at A Holiday Yarn, I noticed that indeed it starts with Nell reflecting on the unsettling events that unfold in the book. Though this lasts only a page, the opening establishes Nell as a thoughtful person.

The book continues for another twenty-four pages leading up to the discovery of the murder victim. Shortly after this, Nell literally sits down to ponder the events of the night before. Sally gives Nell nearly five pages to react to this event that deeply shocked and saddened her before the narrative moves into the next scene. Later in the book, though not at such length, Nell again takes time to think about what has happened.

Sitting down to think about a murder instead of rushing on to the next plot development as my character often does strikes me as a very realistic response of a quiet, thoughtful person unused to violence. Besides the emotional and psychological realism they add, the thought-passages allow the protagonist and the reader to consider the moral elements of the crime before continuing.

And so, following the examples provided by A Holiday Yarn, I’ve already added a quiet, thoughtful scene between two action scenes in my WiP. Thanks, Sally G., for your model, and happy holidays to all who read this blog installment, the last of 2010.

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Since I posted this blog installment at the end of 2010, Sally Goldenbaum has continued her Seaside Knitters mystery series with The Wedding Shawl in 2011, A Fatal Fleece in 2012, and Angora Alibi just out this week. I’m very much looking forward to reading it and finding out what happens next in the lives of thoughtful Nell Endicott and her fellow knitters.

As for me, the WiP I mentioned in this piece has become two books. Recently I completed the first, Walls, a Cinderella, P. I. Novel, and have begun shaping the chunks, large and small, I have left over from previous drafts, into the second book, Wings, a Cinderella, P. I. Novel. And recently I have published some of the short stories about Cinderella, P. I., twenty years, three kids and a few extra pounds after the ball, as Kindle eBooks. Here’s the link to the award-winning short story that started it all.

http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00BAZPXEM/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_eos_detail

(This golden oldie was originally posted on 1/6/11.)

A chronic problem I’m having with my WiP is balancing its dark and light elements. But when I talked to my friends in my fiction discussion group about this issue, they advised me to go lighter instead of darker. (Thanks again, Lisa, Cheryl, Suella, Larry, and Mark T.)

Good thing, too, as I really enjoy mysteries on the light side, all the way from a little leavening of humor here and there through out-and-out comic mysteries. Here are ways several published authors have lightened up their mysteries.

1. Cozy up

Lighter mysteries tend toward the cozy subgenre. That is, they have amateur detectives rather than private investigators or police officers; murders off stage and bloodless bodies; puzzle mysteries instead of procedurals; and charming country locales, not mean city streets. They often are niche mysteries like Diane Mott Davidson’s caterer Goldie Bear series and John Lamb’s Teddy Bear mysteries.

2. A Detective with a Sense of humor

Take, for example, Marcus Didius Falco, the detective in Lindsey Davis’s great series set in Ancient Rome. With wit and a sardonic sense of humor, Falco reflects on the foolishness of his fellow human beings, often related to him by birth or marriage, as he sorts through nefarious plots and discovers the “whodunits” of nasty murders along the Appian Way.

In Nemesis, Davis’s latest, for example, Falco entertains himself and us enormously by quietly pulling the leg of Laeta, a stuffy bureaucrat he’s interviewing. In Saturnalia Falco takes us to a wild toga party. And the whole concept of Ancient Romans sightseeing in guided group tours in See Delphi and Die still makes me laugh.

Not least of Falco’s charms is his smart mouth. Sometimes he goes in for self-deprecation as, for instance, admitting his patrician wife Julia Justa always sees right through him. And she’s usually at least one step ahead of him in figuring out cases, too. But most of the time, Falco cracks wise and witty about the foibles of others. For instance, in his most recent adventure, in a scene with Anacrites, master spy and Falco’s arch-enemy, Falco apes incredulity and goes heavily into sarcasm at the very thought that Laeta, the enemy Falco and Anacrites share, would ever have dishonorable goals. It’s sort of like Sarah Palin’s “Oh, Joe, tell me it isn’t so.”

3. “What fools these mortals be.”

Fairly often the detective of a lighter mystery is a straight man, or straight woman in the case of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next. Her matter-of-fact delivery highlights the absurdity of the world she lives in.

But sometimes the detective is the butt of the joke like M. C. Beaton’s middle-aged Agatha Raisin, shown warts and all. Well, really, instead of warts, she obsesses over facial hair in books like Busy Body.

Both Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth, Beaton’s other series protagonist, have problems with romance that lead to awkward situations and pining for “the one who got away” through several books in their respective series.

Continuing with the Inspector Clouseau-type detective, we must discuss Janet Evanovich’s best-selling series that feature Stephanie Plum. The sexy bounty hunter bumbles or stumbles from time to time and lately can be counted on to trash one of Ranger’s vehicles. These mysteries contain other comic characters, too.

4. Crazy sidekicks/families, aka second bananas

Lula, the former “ho” and later Stephanie’s fellow bounty hunter, memorably first appeared naked in the rain and on the lam from a murderer on the fire escape outside Stephanie’s apartment. Lula continues to entertain in Sizzling Sixteen, the latest in the series, with her “one diet.”  (Lula allows herself only one of each thing per meal, for example, one green bean and one box of donuts.)

Another Evanovich favorite is Stephanie’s Grandmother Masur, who visits the local funeral parlor for entertainment like more normal grandmas go to the movies.

5. Speaking of bananas. . . .

Then there’s the stepping-on-a-banana-peel-and-falling-on-your-keister sort of humor; that is, pratfalls and other physical comedy, aka Keystone Cops. Agatha Raisin’s disastrous encounter with a sink in a ladies’ room in an early installment of M. C. Beaton’s series is one of my favorite laugh-out-loud moments in all of mystery fiction.

This sort of humor is an element of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum mysteries that keeps readers like me coming back for more, especially when it appears in big set pieces toward the end. For example, in an earlier number in the series, who should come riding to the rescue but a guy in drag driving a big, yellow school bus? Sizzling Sixteen has a wonderfully comic rescue sequence, too, but I won’t spoil it for you.

6. Set-up and delivery

Now, before a mystery writer like Evanovich presents a climactic comic moment, she has to set it up so that when the moment arrives, it fits perfectly even though you didn’t see it coming.

Absolutely no writer I read regularly delivers comically on his set-ups better than Carl Hiaasen. For instance, in Sick Puppy, a bunch of scheming, greedy, environment-raping jerks get their well-earned come-uppance through an encounter with black rhino and a black lab. And in Basket Case, the protagonist’s obsession with famous people who died at certain ages leads to a very funny revelation near the end. All of Hiaasen’s books are fun to read including the current Star Island.

7. Monty Python moments

In both his Thursday Next and Jack Spratt series, Jasper Fforde regularly pulls humor off the wall, as, for instance, the apostrophe-excreting bookworms mentioned in a previous blog.

8. Traveling in Gulliver’s footsteps

Also Fforde would have made satirist Jonathan Swift proud for his use of parody and lampoon, as in the quotations from Thursday Next’s memoirs and other mock sources that start the chapters of The Eyre Affair.

9. Pitfalls among the pratfalls

Now, humor is a delicate thing, so sometimes in trying for the light side, writers can go too far and give readers these:

Caricatured characters who make you snort, “Get real!”

Detectives who act so dumb you groan, “Oh, no!”

Gimmicks used so often you shout, “That! Again?”

Set-ups so tedious you say, “I’m not reading any more.”

As we approach the end of this discussion, let’s return to my WiP, a mystery set in a fairy tale world. In the last few years, several writers have mined the Grimm lode and some of them have brought out loads of coal, that dark stuff. Personally, I don’t like much hearing the stepsister’s side of it or the wicked witch’s back-story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the Grimm Brothers’ tales were often grim. But hey, I grew up with Disney and so did everyone else in the world born after 1937 when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs first came out. So I’ll end with. . .

10. “A spoon full of sugar”

The Fat Man, A Tale of North Pole Noir by Ken Harmon, offers many of the features I’ve covered here, and in its protagonist something else as well. Sure, sweetheart, Gumdrop Coal, one of Santa’s first elves and 27 inches tall, talks tough just like any other hard-boiled p. i. And he walks on the dark side, too. But he’s got a soft heart and he does the right thing in the end. (I loved this book.)

In closing, I invite you to comment on lighter mysteries you’ve enjoyed.

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Recently, I completed the WiP mentioned in this blog posting. And while it turned out not to be a comedy overall, it has its moments, I’m happy to report. On the other hand, the fairy tale mystery short stories that I’ve started publishing as Amazon Kindle eBooks, are very much in the comic vein. You’ll find the first one, the award-winning Cinderella, P. I., at

http://www.amazon.com/Cinderella-Fairy-Mystery-Stories-ebook/dp/B00BAZPXEM/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1361658395&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Juliet+Kincaid

(I first published this golden oldie on 10/1/10. I’ve tweaked and updated it a little here and there.)

Lately, I’ve been trying to integrate a lengthy back story of how my protagonist got in the fix she’s in with the story of her trying to get out of the fix she’s in. And my readers have been blasting me with questions about it, so obviously I’m not doing it so well. So, I’ve taken a look at how some of my favorite mystery authors shape their novels into chapters.

Part I: Ways to slice the pie

1. One of my first word processors held only about twenty manuscript pages per file. So most of the chapters of the novels I wrote then ran twenty pages. If it looked like a chapter might run over that, sometimes I’d start a new file for the rest of the chapter, but more often than that, I cut the deadwood to make the chapter fit the twenty-page limit. Even now, I get antsy when a chapter runs too far past twenty pages and look for a spot to stop. I also find ten-page manuscript chapters skimpy and try to pad them.

Dividing an apple pie into equal sized wedges may work for a roadside café, but there are better ways to divide novels into chapters.

2. Robert B. Parker had no problem with short chapters because his typical chapter contained only one scene. That was part of his success. He used short words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs since mostly he used dialogue presented in single scenes started, developed and completed in short, compact chapters. Zip, zip, zip.

3. Several years ago, Nancy Pickard, author of prize-winning The Virgin of Small Plains, started a mystery book dissection group as part of the Border Crimes Chapter of Sisters in Crime that she also started.

For our first session, we read Sue Grafton’s classic A is for Alibi. And Nancy outlined it. For every chapter except the first, in which Grafton introduced the major plot line and a subplot, Nancy summarized the action in a single sentence. For example, in Chapter 2 Kinsey discovers a second murder. In Chapter 3, she accepts the case. In Chapter 4, she meets the first suspect.

Thus, authors can divide a novel so each chapter presents a distinct development in the overall plot, not necessarily limited to a single scene. A well-written chapter has the shapeliness of a well-written story. It starts with a character, most often the protagonist, setting a clear goal and includes obstacles to the character achieving that goal before ending with a resolution to that particular part of the plot.

In Chapter 2 of T is for Trespass, for instance, in several scenes, Kinsey and her landlord Henry worry about their neighbor Gus, check on Gus and get help for him. This sets up the major plot line for the book. In a separate section at the end of the chapter and to set up a subplot, Kinsey tries and fails to deliver a form to someone named Bob.

4. Instead of resolving a part of the plot at the end of the chapter and starting the next with a new goal for the protagonist, Dick Francis, that crafty master of suspense, often ended a chapter with a cliffhanger. The next chapter would pick the action up right at the edge of the cliff, get the protagonist off the cliff in some way, then let him relax in a quieter scene or even what Jack Bickham called a sequel. With less dialogue, action, and more thought and exposition than a scene, the sequel lets the protagonist react mentally to the preceding scene and figure out where to head next, which in a typical Francis mystery, is hurtling, quite possibly on a horse, towards another cliff.

5. A new chapter can signal a major shift of some kind, like a change of setting, a jump forward or backward in time, or a shift from one character’s point of view to another. Many mystery writers do this in the first part of their books. For instance, Nancy Pickard begins No Body with a prologue from the perspective of a supporting character in third person and then shifts to Jenny Caine’s perspective, in first person, in the first chapter and throughout the rest of the book.

For another example, Grafton’s T is for Trespass begins with a chapter from the third person perspective of the antagonist and then shifts to Kinsey Millhone’s first person account in the second. From time to time later in the book, we get more chapters from the antagonist’s perspective. Observing the antagonist sneaking around and planning evil to visit on the good guys adds lots of tension and suspense.

6. Often authors combine two or more techniques to shape their chapters.

For instance, in one of the later chapters of The Crocodile’s Last Embrace, Suzanne Arruda shifts from the perspective of the protagonist, Jade del Cameron, to that of a secondary character. (See item 5 above.) That character sets up a clear goal, goes after it, and achieves it by the end of the chapter. (See item 3.) In the next chapter we return to Jade’s perspective.

Mary Higgins Clark, another master of suspense, generates buckets of tension in Where Are the Children? by combining items 4 and 5. In this book often she sets up a cliffhanger at the end of one chapter, then shifts to another character’s perspective in the next chapter. In this chapter, we see the heroine heading toward something bad. Then Clark leaves us dangling about what’s going to happen to the heroine while we skip to the bad guy’s perspective and watch him plotting evil against those poor little kids, or the heroine, or the poor guy knocking on the door. And then we’re back to the poor guy at the door. Will he die when the door opens? Oh gosh.

Part 2: Add-ons

Besides dividing the mysteries into chunks and numbering the chapters (1, 2, 3 as Robert B. Parker did or the more elaborate Chapter One, Chapter Two), authors sometimes add information at the beginnings of chapters.

1. Often a number’s not enough if you’ve performed some kind of shift between one chapter and another. So, for instance, in Strange Images of Death, a Joe Sandilands murder mystery, Barbara Cleverly states the time and place of the action at the start of prologue, at the start of the first chapter as the time and setting differ slightly from the prologue, and before the last chapter which takes place about a month later in a completely different place. In T is for Trespass, Grafton adds the heading “Solana” to every chapter presented from the antagonist’s perspective.

3. Some authors give chapters titles. Check out Earl Emerson’s Mac Fontana mysteries like Morons and Madmen for an interesting take on that.

4. Some authors include quotations at the start of their chapters to foreshadow or set up in some way the action to come. For instance, Suzanne Arruda begins each chapter of her mysteries with a quotation from an article her protagonist travel writer Jade del Cameron wrote for a magazine called The Traveler.

[In 2013, I simply can’t help myself from mentioning the often hilarious quotations from George W. Bush that begin the chapters of Killed at the Whim of a Hat, the first in Colin Cotterill’s Jimm Juree mysteries. In the second, Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach, Cotterill uses garbled quotations of verses from popular songs for titles.]

On the basis of this examination and the very helpful feedback on the WiP by some of my readers, this week I made some changes in the first 100 pages of my current project. I’d given some, but not all, chapters titles in an earlier draft, but the titles I had got out of sync as I reshuffled the plot line. For example, the chapter called “We All Fall Down” no longer came right after the chapter called “Ashes, ashes.” So I threw all the titles out. More importantly, I inserted chapter breaks each time the story shifted back and forth in time and added place and time markers at the start of each new chapter. I’m not happy with the names I’ve given the markers, some of my new chapters seem too long, and others too short. But overall, the book reads better. And I’m pleased with the changes.

I hope this examination helps you as much as it has helped me.

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Now, in April 2013, I’m happy to add that my current readers have said that I didn’t lose them when I shifted back and forth between back story and on-going action in the first part of the WiP. Thanks for the feedback, my friends.

Thanks also to these masters of the mystery writing trade for their guidance: Robert B. Parker, Nancy Pickard, Sue Grafton, Dick Francis, Suzanne Arruda, Mary Higgins Clark, Barbara Cleverly, Earl Emerson, and Colin Cotterill.

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You can find my fairy tale mystery short stories in Amazon’s Kindle eBook store. Here’s the link to the prize-winning “Cinderella, P. I.,” the story that started it all.

http://www.amazon.com/Cinderella-Fairy-Mystery-Stories-ebook/dp/B00BAZPXEM/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1361658395&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Juliet+Kincaid

Please feel free to comment on this discussion here. Or if you prefer, you can email me at jkincaid4@kc.rr.com; tweet me at https//twitter.com/JulietKincaid, or friend me at https//www.facebook.com/juliet.kincaid.

(I first published this Golden Oldie on September 17, 2010.)

One of my students once introduced more than a dozen characters in the first five pages of the novel she’d started. “Don’t do that!” I shouted. “It’s so confusing!”

But I’ve made the same mistake. For example, in an early draft of the first chapter of my current project, I trotted six characters that just stood around watching the action between the principals. These six literally took up space I could have used better, but what should I do instead?

Recently, as I reread The Tale of Hill Top Farm, the first of the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter that Susan Wittig Albert is writing, I noticed she’s got a whopping lot of characters. Over fifty!  Now that’s a crowd. So what techniques did Albert use to introduce and manage this huge cast of characters without overwhelming readers at the start and losing them later on?

1. Albert starts by listing the Cast of Characters, a highly organized and rather detailed list. As protagonist, Beatrix Potter goes first on the list. We find out Potter’s a writer, as if we’d forget. Still, Albert includes Potter’s profession for uniformity with characters we don’t know. Albert also names the four pets like Tom Thumb Mouse that come with Potter on her trip to the village of Sawrey. This entry shows a basic principle Albert uses in the list and later in controlling the appearances of her characters: she presents them in groups or sets. So from the early pages Potter’s pets have their place in the story; and whenever Albert brings them on stage later, we see them as related to Potter, so we don’t get them confused with other creatures we meet later.

The list continues introducing other characters generally in order of appearance, again in sets. For instance, in the second entry to the list, we learn that Dimity Woodhouse and Captain Miles Woodhouse are brother and sister. (Albert uses family relationships especially well to establish several sets in the book.) Their housekeeper Elsa Grape completes this particular group.

2. From the list we also learn the characters’ physical places in the village. This is another important organizing principle Albert uses in the book, enhanced by the handy map on the page opposite the start of the character list. For example, the Woodhouses live in Tower Bank House, # 9 on the map.

3. Furthermore, we learn that Miles is Sawrey’s Justice of the Peace. So there’s another principle Albert uses in this book. She gives the role, societal or occupational, that a character plays in the village of Sawrey.

4. In the past, I’ve thought the main job of the first pages of a book was to introduce characters, most important ones first. So I expect to meet up with Beatrix Potter, the protagonist of this novel, on page one. Surprise! She’s not there. Instead, we learn about Miss Abigail Tolliver, recently deceased, and Miss Dimity Woodhouse, who has gone to talk to her about the “School Roof Fund.” Thus, Albert starts with the book with setting up the book’s major plot line about a mysterious death with the discovery of the body. Though I don’t know it yet, she also introduces a major subplot on page 1.

The first page of the mystery also shows Albert using another important principle: introduce each character in action, doing something integral to the plot at that point, or better yet a couple of plot lines. Don’t just trot them on to say howdy and send them off again for their real appearance later on or in the case of my first chapter make them stand around watching other people do stuff. This probably seems obvious, but hey, I’ve made every mistake in the book. And you learn from your mistakes, right?

Actually, besides the body and the discoverer of the body, Albert introduces a third character early in The Tale of Hill Top Farm. Tabitha Twitchit, the first of a set of sentient, though not talking, animal characters in the book, appears on page 2. It’s important that we get used to these, so Albert introduces one very early on, in the context of a setting and major plot line. We learn how these creatures communicate with each other and how the human characters typically react to them.

5. Later on page 2, we meet a couple of villagers, who react to the sad news of Miss Tolliver’s unexpected death. These never appear again. This made me a little crazy since I couldn’t find them in the Cast of Characters. Then I realized Albert didn’t list them because they wouldn’t appear again and I relaxed. Still they serve in a set, related by family and setting, to show the kindness of people in this small village. Thus, two characters stand in for an entire group, another really handy principle to know.

6. Many other characters soon appear, in their physical settings in relationship to the late Miss Tolliver’s home, Anvil Cottage (# 8 on the map) and in their roles in the village. These include the church sexton, the teacher at the school, the school’s headmistress and her sisters, the postmistress, Beatrix Potter’s future landlady and that landlady’s husband’s dog. Besides their reactions to the death of Miss Tolliver, they gossip about Miss Potter, a woman, an outsider, who has bought Hill Top Farm! How shocking! What is this world coming to?

7. This is the next important principle Albert employs beautifully. She holds off on introducing her protagonist to build some suspense and anticipation for her appearance and also to give the readers the delicious ability to know more than Miss Potter knows at that point of the story. Albert also uses this principle with the fictional Jeremy Crosfield, a young boy later accused of stealing the School Roof Fund and with the real William Heelis, the man who will in eight years marry dear Miss Potter.

8. Once the story gets going, Albert helps us keep characters straight and remember them through the devices described earlier and through repeated bits of characterization, especially helpful with minor characters. The vet’s wife, for instance, shares Beatrix Potter’s love of the Sherlock Holmes’ stories. Another drops a hilarious malapropism every time she speaks. (And we can always check that handy list at the front of the book if we’ve forgotten exactly who’s who.)

So what have I learned from Albert that will help me with crowd control in my current project?

For starters I sent four of the six characters leaning up against the wall in Chapter 1 off to the wings till later. I described the remaining two minimally along with action with one character and dialogue with the other. Unlike Albert, since I probably won’t use that handy list, I decided to name these two only when they reappear in chapter 3.

In the place of the four characters that didn’t need to be in Chapter 1, I inserted at the very start a brief scene that introduced my protagonist’s husband and three children, whom she misses terribly, as a set, in one setting with action, dialogue, and some description. My readers told me this addition vastly increased their sympathy for the protagonist and helped them understand the ironies in the rest of the chapter.

In Chapter 2, I reintroduced the same four characters as a group more fully in action in a single setting. And later in the book I introduced another set of characters as a family in another setting. In this draft of my current project, I plan to use more of the principles I learned from studying The Tale of Hill Top Farm. Thanks so much for your help, Susan Wittig Albert.

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Since I first posted this piece, the one book I’m writing has become two and I’ve put the first through five more drafts. Yet, even though I’ve completed the first of these (pretty much), as recently as this week I tweaked the start, using some of the lessons I learned from Susan Wittig Albert about controlling my characters.

Also, since I first posted this post, Albert completed the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter series with The Tale of Castle Cottage in 2011, the same year as The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies, the first in a new series set in a small Southern town during the Depression, appeared. And I’m very proud to say as a result of my article about The Tale of Hill Top Farm, Ms. Albert “friended” me on Facebook.

You can, too, at https//www.facebook.com/juliet.kincaid. You can write me at jkincaid4@kc.rr.com and follow me at https//twitter.com/JulietKincaid.

Plus, you can find my fairy tale mystery short stories including the prize-winning “Cinderella, P. I.,” on Amazon.com as Kindle eBooks.

(I originally published this golden oldie blog post in August of 2010.)

One spring semester in Creative Writing Workshop, a class I taught on Tuesday nights for twenty years at one of America’s top community colleges, one of my students didn’t like to write dialogue. She solved that problem by placing the protagonist of her fantasy novel among people whose language she didn’t speak, thus eliminating the need for dialogue. Cool solution, right?

Well, no, and I carped at her, griped, wrote suggested dialogue for her for weeks. The student would have none of it and kept on cranking out ten pages a week without dialogue. Thick prose covered each page, word after word from left margin to right, line after line, from top to bottom. Her novel was like a loaf of bread, loaded with raisins, nuts, molasses, tasty things for sure, but unfortunately too much for the yeast. Reading it felt like eating slabs of lead. So I, who prided myself on reading every manuscript every week from every student, finally couldn’t choke down another bite.

Not that I remember always and automatically to use dialogue in my own fiction writing. For instance, not long ago, I wanted to get over fast some action that really didn’t matter much to the overall plot of my current project. So how did I do it? A list! Clever, huh? A list, for crying out loud, in a novel? No, no, no, not clever at all, but BORING. So then I figured out a way for my heroine to tell a loved one about what happened. It went really well, for some of the reasons I’ll explore soon.

(Thus primed to write dialogue, I let the characters talk a lot in the next scene I wrote and it sped by. TIP: when you’re drafting fiction, get a couple of characters talking to each other and they’ll write the scene for you, that scene and others till the piece is done. This advice isn’t original to me, by any means, and apparently it’s one I keep having to learn.)

We can all learn lots about writing marketable fiction from Robert B. Parker, the late master of dialogue. Now, I’m not saying our characters should talk like Spencer, Jess Stone, and Sunny Randall, using Parker’s branded “crackling dialogue,” as a Forbes’ reviewer put it. Here is the great lesson Parker gives us: as often as possible: do it with dialogue.

Why? Here’s the first good reason.

Of the five modes of writing fiction (Dialogue, Action, Thought, Exposition, Description), dialogue is the most economical because with it you can do at least two things at once.

Dialogue can provide action, details of setting, and other descriptive details. (Parker doesn’t do much with these first three, but you could, so I’ve included them for completeness.)

In addition to the above, dialogue can explain background information; develop character by showing, among other elements, education, intelligence, ethnic or national background, preoccupations, psychological or emotional states; demonstrate relationships among characters; play the conflict among characters; and highlight themes.

Now, you’re probably saying right now, but I’m not writing a play or a script for goodness’ sake. Well, honey, I say, not for nothing is the basic unit of fiction called the scene. Let’s watch the master at work in the first chapter of Spare Change, Parker’s 2007 Sunny Randall novel.

The first paragraph of this four-page chapter is the longest at nine and a half lines, and it contains no dialogue, but mostly description. The paragraph does, however, economically set up the who, where, and what of the scene: Sunny Randall, the book’s female narrator/protagonist, sits at the kitchen table looking at some crime-scene photos with her dad, Phil Randall.

Then we’re off through the sixty-plus other paragraphs, not counting a quoted letter, of the chapter. (The letter, by the way, includes a vital clue to Sunny’s epiphany near the end of the book.) Fifty-three of these paragraphs, more than eighty percent, are all or mostly dialogue. Thirty-five of the dialogue paragraphs are single-line. The other dialogue paragraphs run mostly to two lines. The longest paragraph, about halfway, is descriptive. (I’ll come back to this observation when I make my second point.)

Now, what all does Parker accomplish with the dialogue?

He establishes what the overall book is about: the Spare Change Killer.

He gives background on the crimes committed in the past and recently.

He shows Sunny’s intelligence by having her ask her dad the right questions about the crime and criminal and making valid conclusions on the basis of what her dad tells her.

He characterizes Phil Randall as laconic. Phil shakes his head when words aren’t required. He gives all but one of the five single-word responses in the chapter.

Parker establishes the relationship between Sunny and her dad, not just as father and daughter, but also as two detectives who respect each other.

He shows they’re comfortable with each other by having them joke with each other about Sunny’s getting her prettiness from him, a short, heavy set guy.

Though the scene has little overt conflict between father and daughter, Sunny’s mention of boys hints at her recurrent inner conflict in regards to men.

He establishes a major theme of the book: Sunny’s problems with “boys,” stemming from her relationship with her father and their relationships with Sunny’s mother and sister.

While Parker does all these things, he shows Phil Randall achieving his purpose in the scene, to ask Sunny to help him with the reopened case. (Reminder: every scene needs a “who wants what?” with the “what” resolved by the end.)

For all this brief chapter is packed with information, it’s easy to read. Why? It’s mostly dialogue, and we’re used to talking and listening to each other talk. We do it all the time. Plus, we use short words and a few words at a time when we talk to each other.

So this is the second good reason to do it with dialogue as often as possible, and thus leavening your prose with the ample white space dialogue requires: your books will be easier to read, find a bigger readership and therefore be more marketable.

But then there is a downside to Parker’s novels being so easy to read: they go really fast. Zip. Zip. Page by page. Chapter by chapter. It’s three in the morning and in the mystery I’m reading the Spare Change Killer holds a gun on Sunny Randall. And where’s her dad? You can’t possibly stop reading, so you snarf up the rest of the book. Then you say to yourself, Oh darn, I can’t believe I read the whole thing so fast, and now I have to wait at least year for the next one.

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 As most fans know, Robert B. Parker died in January 2010. He died writing, working perhaps on the five pages his publisher said he wrote most days.

At first I feared there would be no more Spencer novels after Sixkill. But Ace Atkins has continued the Spencer series with Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby and the forthcoming Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland. What’s more, Michael Brandman, who wrote scripts for the Jesse Stone television series, has continued that series with Robert B. Parker’s Fool Me Twice. And Robert Knott is continuing Parker’s Western series with Robert B. Parker’s Ironhorse. This just goes to show that it’s taking three authors to replace the Master, maybe four if someone continues the Sunny Randall series.

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You can find my fairy tale mystery short stories (that contain lots of dialogue) in Amazon’s Kindle eBook store. Here’s the link to the prize-winning “Cinderella, P. I.,” the story that started it all.

http://www.amazon.com/Cinderella-Fairy-Mystery-Stories-ebook/dp/B00BAZPXEM/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1361658395&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Juliet+Kincaid

Best, Juliet

You can email me at jkincaid4@kc.rr.com; tweet me at https//twitter.com/JulietKincaid; or friend me at https//www.facebook.com/juliet.kincaid.

 (Among the first of my “fiction addict” blogs and originally posted in August 2010, this entry explores novel and short story structure in McCall Smith’s charming novel.)

Some time ago, upon the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend, I tried to read The No. 1 Ladies’ detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. I didn’t get far into it before I said, “What is this?” Not a mystery for sure. Where’s the body for crying out loud? Where’s the smoking gun? So I returned the book to the library without reading it all the way through.

Then last year, when HBO did a production of this novel, I thought, Better look at it again, J. You must have missed something. Actually, I missed several things including the book’s enormous charm, the wisdom and compassion of Precious Ramotswe, and a whole lot of mystery.

The problem was I didn’t read far enough to find the mystery. Let me explain.

The typical mystery novel takes its overall plot from the discovery of and resolving of one central mystery. Usually the book starts with the set-up of that mystery. Personal stories about the sleuth’s personal relationships, for example, appear as subplots once the major plot line is established and are subordinate to it. (Very often these subplots continue from one book to another in a series and keep readers coming back for more. Think about Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum caught between Ranger and Joe Morelli for a great example of how well that can work.)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, “Like duh, Juliet,” I hear you saying. Please read on.

Here’s the important thing I learned from reading The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: Alexander McCall Smith turns the typical mystery structure inside out, so the more personal story of how Mma Ramotswe becomes a detective provides the overall story arc for the book. Several individual mystery stories, all but one quickly resolved, provide subplots and show Mma Ramotswe’s developing confidence and detecting skills.

Specifically, the first chapter talks about how she set up the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and the second tells the story of how her father came to have the resources Mma Ramotswe used to start her agency. Chapters Three and Four present Precious’s back story, thus developing the personal or overall story arc. Only in Chapter 5 or after 65 pages does she get her first case. Chapter 6 sets up the case of the missing boy that McCall Smith doesn’t resolve until Chapter Twenty-one, or page 230 (out of 235), thus helping to tie the plot together. Some of the mid-book chapters concern Mma Ramotswe’s personal life. These provide the links to the overall story arc and let us get to know her better. And in other mid-book chapters, Precious takes on and resolves individual cases. These read lots like individual short mystery stories.

Eureka!  Oh joy!  I jump up and dance around.“What’s the fuss about?” you ask.

Well, I’ll tell you. Recognizing the structure of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency changed my life. (Sorry for the sweeping generalization.)

You see, over the space of several years, when I was busy with teaching and life, I entertained myself and my friends by writing twenty-nine humorous, fantasy mystery stories about Cinderella, “twenty years, three kids, and a few extra pounds after the ball,” called collectively Cinderella, P. I.

Now, standard wisdom says the way to break into publishing is not with a story collection, but with novels. Though I vaguely thought about writing a Cinderella novel, I didn’t know how, but worked on several other full-length mystery novels, including the first two in a series of historical mysteries. (“January through December, living in Kansas City a hundred years ago could be MURDER.”)

By the time I got around to reading No. 1, I’d seriously derailed on that project and fallen into a funk about my writing. “I quit. I’ll never write another novel. It’s too hard. It’s too much work. Life’s too. . . .” Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Back to the Eureka moment: Precious Ramotswe’s story showed me how I could write a Cinderella novel. Turn the plot inside out, use a more personal story to provide the overall story arc, and fit other stories inside.

So I began writing Cinderella, P. I., the novel. “Twenty years, three kids, and a few extra pounds after the ball, Cinderella, exiled for the attempted assassination by enchantment of Prince Charming, must escape and rescue the man she loves, her kids, and her kingdom from the perils of an insidious foe.”

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 Since posting this entry, the Cinderella, P. I. novel grew too large for one book and became two. I’ve nearly completed the first and will complete the second soon. Also I’ve published some of the Cinderella, P. I. stories as eBooks. You’ll find them in Amazon’s Kindle eBook store. Here’s the link to the first story, “Cinderella, P. I.”

 http://www.amazon.com/Cinderella-Fairy-Mystery-Stories-ebook/dp/B00BAZPXEM/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1361658395&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Juliet+Kincaid

Best, Juliet

You can write me at jkincaid4@kc.rr.com

Tweet me at https//twitter.com/JulietKincaid

Or friend me at https//www.facebook.com/juliet.kincaid

Most of my friends who self-publish their work use Clip Art for their covers. Not me. After fifteen years of art classes, I said to myself, “Hey, why don’t you do your own covers?”

No little voice popped up in my head and said, “Are you crazy? Do you know how much work that will be? And what makes you think you can paint people anyway? After all, you’ve mostly done landscapes, trees, flowers and a few basenjis.”

These things are true, but luckily I know lots of people and I’ve drafted many of them into helping me do the covers for my stories.

My first helper and my model for most of my reference photos has also been my strongest cheerleader. “You can do it, Mom,” my daughter has said to me over and over again. “And it’ll be great. Your covers will stand out from all of those done with Clip Art.”

Okay. . . .

For our first photo shoot, my daughter wore a dark red and deep blue floral-print dress and a pair of high-heeled shoes she’d glued rhinestones onto. My heroine has long blond hair with something of a curl while my daughter’s hair is light brown, fairly short and fairly straight. No problem. She tied a long scarf with a gold and brown giraffe print and let the ends string down her back. I handed her a magnifying glass and asked her to semi-recline on the couch with her back to me. Many more poses followed and several more photo shoots after the first one. My daughter is both patient and encouraging with me.

Thanks so much, Jess.

Armed with my reference photos and my watercolors, I went to my on-going art class to do the cover for the first story, “Cinderella, P. I.” I started by running around the classroom with printouts of the photos and sketches for the cover to get feedback on my ideas. Almost right away, Betty S., one of my art class pals, said, “So she’s looking at herself in a mirror.”

“No, it’s a magnifying. . . . Well, I guess, it does look like a mirror.” That’s when I figured out that the magnifying glass had to be magnifying something and I decided to have Ella hold it over the letter I in P. I.

Thanks, Betty

That day, farther along in the process of painting the cover for my first story, I discovered that the couch slipcover had obscured the view of Jess’s supporting hand in the reference photo. So I enlisted the class instructor Barbara O’ to sit on a table with her back to me while I sketched her right hand. Poor Barbara, she was trying to help another student at the time and I was saying, “Just move it a little bit to the right. No, no, I don’t want the thumb to show. Oh and could you just. . . .”

Thanks, Barbara

These are just the first three people I drafted to help me with my cover art. There are at least more.

For a photo shoot for a painting that I call “Little Red Riding Hoodie meets Big Bad Wolf in the woods,” I asked my neighbor’s son to pose with Jess. The cedar tree in our back yard stood in for the woods. And when I knelt for one shot, the forced perspective made Tim D., a strapping big young man, look like he was two feet taller than Jess instead of a foot and a quarter. Such a good sport.

Thanks, Tim

When I needed a Prince Charming for a Cinderella, P. I. fairy tale mystery yet to come, I asked my friend Dave B., a very faithful member of my on-going writers’ group, if he’d pose. He said yes. I handed him the cardboard crown I’d cut out and that one of the other people at the meeting said looked like Archie’s hat from the comic books. Dave struck a pose or two in the coffee house where we meet and the pictures were perfect.

Thanks, Dave

But eventually came the time when I had to turn my painting into the cover for “Cinderella, P. I.” and publish the story. And of course, my hi tec anxiety paralyzed me. (See my blog on that subject archived in July 2012.) I did what I could with scissors, tape, our color printer, and our laser printer. And then I hired Gordon K. to help. Gordon went way, way beyond merely tweaking the formats of the document file and the cover jpeg.

Thank you so much, Gordon, for finessing the cover of “Cinderella, P. I.” in ways I could never manage.

And so I’ve learned a valuable lesson. With help from my friends, I can indeed self-publish my stories as eBooks with decent covers.

Next time: “‘Drive!’ He said,” an original Cinderella, P. I. fairy tale mystery short story right here for free.

Meanwhile, you can read “Cinderella, P. I.” and “Cinderella, Undercover,” a new fairy tale mystery story, as Kindle eBooks on Amazon.com. They’re only $0.99 most days but sometimes they’re free. Follow me on Twitter @JulietKincaid and I’ll tell you when and give you the link.

Best, Juliet