Author: julietkc

It’s Academic: September 2023 Newsletter

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Recently, I decided to apply the subtitle an academic murder mystery to my current work-in-progress, Death in Shining Armor that features foul play and funny business at a Renaissance fair and beyond. I’ve also decided to make it Book 1 in a series of an academic murder mysteries

Almost immediately I ran into the sort of huh? reflex to the term academic mystery.

For instance, one member of my writers’ support said, “Well, that’s literary then.” Maybe she was thinking of the common place association of the term academic with pedantry.

So I  find it necessary to define the term academic mystery and clear up misconceptions.

Fairly obviously, the academic mystery novel is set on a college or university campus at least in part. And it’s been around for a while. For example, in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night, her female detective goes undercover at her Alma Mater to discover who’s writing poisoned pen letters. Several of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse mysteries would qualify as well with their Cambridge settings.

A quick search for the genre on Amazon results in my finding ten academic mystery series and several other individual books that take place at least in part on college or university campuses.

Perhaps the most familiar example of academic mysteries around today are the Professor T television series now showing on PBS. Though not based on books, this show rather abounds in the clichés of the sub-genre: a university setting complete with a classroom; the brilliant yet eccentric professor/detective; his cheeky, comic relief administrative assistant; the bumbling administrator; and the brilliant, stand-out (former) student whom he mentors.

None of these things really explains what drew me to the sub-sub-genre. The story of my life does.

In high school, I was doomed to the back row of most of my classes because my maiden name started with W. And mostly I was quiet, kept my mouth shut, got ignored, made A’s, graduated third in my class, and didn’t get any awards except maybe for a citizenship award.

But my 18th birthday on September 11 (I’m not telling you the year), I registered at Marshall University in my home town of Huntington, WV. And I loved it from the get-go.

I blossomed there. When I graduated at the top of my class with three hours of B out of the 142 I took, I got many awards including copies of Shakespeare’s Love Poems and Sonnets and the Webster’s Third Edition so heavy that it made the heels of my shoes sink into the dirt when I took it. I also got my name as the top of my class inscribed way up high near the ceiling in the frieze in the front hall of old Main, an experience I share with the protagonist of Death in Shining Armor.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Why did I love college?

For one thing, in most classes I got to sit where I wanted to, often on the first row where I could answer the professor’s questions. For instance, in the English history class I took my freshman year, I identified the professor’s quotation from Robert Browning’s play Pippa Passes, the one that ends “God’s in his heaven/All’s right with the world.” (Most students were so intimidated by the professor’s reputation that they saved the class for their senior year.)

For another, I had more leeway in choosing the classes I took.

In college, I chose General Math instead of Algebra and the other high mathematics I would have no use for as an English major.

In high school, as a college prep student, I had to take Chemistry. I went through that class terrified that I’d accidentally blow the lab up. I hated Physics in my senior year of high school. So, at Marshall, I elected to take natural sciences. I successfully persuaded my lab partner to dissect the frog in Botany. And I loved Geology. And again, I caught the attention of the professor. In my Geology Lab, when the professor threw a rock at the class, my friend in the front row ducked. But sitting in the second row, I reached out, caught the rock and correctly identified it as pumice.

My freshman year I also had a paralyzing crush on my advisor, a handsome man with silver hair. But eventually I got over it. And in my sophomore year, at age nineteen, I got my first pair of contact lenses and my first car. Also, I made my first adult decision: to become a college professor when I grew up.

And so, I did (though it wasn’t always a straight forward process.) I went to the University of Colorado for my master’s. I got my doctorate from Ohio State. I taught literature and writing at the college level for thirty-five years. Also, along the way, I worked in two registrar’s offices and for a brief while in the acquisitions department of the library at Marshall.

So, I know academia extremely well. And it felt very natural to place the protagonist of Death in Shining Armor with a day job in a college registrar’s office and to give her the same ambition as I had, to make a career for herself in that world.

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Death in Shining Armor, an academic murder mystery, is now available for you to order in advance for the special price of only $2.99 from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH7DXGPC

My Father’s Gardens: June 2023 Newsletter

My father, Homer Dale Willman, Sr., used to say, “When the Corps hired me, they took a great farmer and made him into a half-assed engineer.”

Still, though he worked for over twenty years for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, my father always had a garden if only three strips around the patio. Until his last summer, he grew at least a little something, maybe a crimson geranium in a big pot, a climbing red rose, possibly pink hollyhocks, usually mint so he could watch the telecast of the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May with an icy julep in hand. And always, always, he had a tomato plant or two.
Back in the fifties and sixties, the prime years of his backyard gardens, he put lots of effort into his tomatoes. We lived in the tri-state region of Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia where winters were mild though Dad always hoped for some snow to put nitrogen into the dirt. After the ground warmed and softened along about Easter, Dad took his shovel out to his garden patch to prepare the soil.
My mom used to kid my dad about “digging to China” because to him preparation meant digging a pit eighteen inches across and three feet deep for each tomato plant. He partially refilled each hole with compost, manure and other nourishing substances mixed with loose dirt.
The newly planted tomato plants—named Big Boy, Better Boy, Early Boy and Rutgers—looked scrawny so far apart, their sparse leaves insufficient to fuel growth. They did grow though. Usually by the Fourth of July, Dad would push aside those leaves, releasing the acrid odor that set our stomachs to growling, and with a gentle tug, pick the first tomato of the season. Mom, Dad, my brother Dale, and I fought over that first tomato, so ripe the skin peeled off clean and biting the tongue with its acidity. By late summer, the plants, lovingly tied to their stakes with strips of old sheets, stood eight feet high and loaded with tomatoes Mom canned, made juice with, or begged our neighbors to haul away.
Maybe the secret of Dad’s tomatoes lay in his compost pile that he researched, built and maintained like a true engineer. The compost pile I remember best was a four-foot cube of vegetable peels and melon rinds, musty grass clippings, twigs, lime, and the goat manure he got as partial payment for a ship model he built for a friend who owned a herd of goats.
Dad made a hole in the center of the compost pile so air got inside and furthered the controlled decay. Once, out of curiosity, he tied some string to a thermometer and lowered it into the hole. In less than a minute, the thermometer broke. Later, with Mom’s candy thermometer, Dad discovered that the compost pile had reached 135 degrees.
Usually, Dad scaled his gardens small, but back in the late forties when we lived in the aptly named Garden Court, he almost filled the back yard with his vegetable plot. Forty by sixty feet, it ran from the house back almost to the tree-lined creek. Pieces of string stretched between sticks defined the plot so meticulously it looked like Dad had laid the garden out with a surveyor’s transit.
Dad bragged about that garden having fifty different varieties of plants. They included tomatoes of course, potatoes, corn, green peppers, red peppers, scallions, onions, cucumbers, and Black-seeded Simpson leaf lettuce. Instead of cantaloupe that Dad said didn’t prosper in our climate, he grew muskmelons. Radishes started the growing season and beets finished it. Many of the vegetables I’ve forgotten now, but I still love to recite exotic names like zucchini, kohlrabi, and cocazelle.
We all got involved in Dad’s gardens. One year we had so much cabbage that Mom canned it. Dad paid Dale a penny a hundred head to pick bugs and beetles out of the garden. Dad never let me forget that those pretty yellow hollyhocks I picked one year were actually squash blossoms. Once, we tried to shell tough-hulled soybeans by putting them through Mom’s washer wringer. The beans popped out the other side and Dale and I chased them as they bounced around the kitchen floor.
My father’s gardens . . . Whenever I think of them, I see a picture of him in my mind.
Small-boned, with a mustache, my father wears a billed cap to keep his scalp from burning, a tan shirt dark with sweat under the arms, tan pants cut off and neatly hemmed above his knobby knees, and muddy shoes too worn to wear to work anymore. He leans against a shovel stuck into a pile of dirt. And dreaming of fresh tomatoes by the Fourth of July, he grins.
Happy Father’s Day 2023, Daddy
My dad made the sketch of the door opening on to a row of hollyhocks on November 16, 1939
“My Father’s Gardens” appears in OLD TIME STORIES along with other essays and short stories. This collection is available as an eBook $3.99 from several retailers including Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/cu532z62
Apple: https://tinyurl.com/yzach763
B&N: https://tinyurl.com/43rsj4d7
Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/yntxxbsv
Smashwords: https://tinyurl.com/yc3hkfye
OLD TIME STORIES is also available in paperback for $10 from Amazon: ISBN-13 978-1725898707
In the month of July 2023 you will find my entire eBook collection for 25% off for the books and FREE for the short stories at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! Find my books and many more at https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/ all month! #SWSale2023 #Smashwords

Dither for Fitness: May 2023 Newsletter

DITHER FOR FITNESS!

Hey, Senior Friends!

Do you have trouble meeting your daily goals on your fitness tracker? Well, worry no more. With Dr. Juliet Kincaid’s unique Dithering for Fitness tips, you will meet them all with ease.

dither intr v To walk back and forth without going anywhere.

Inherent Dithering

Your home will provide you with a surprising number of opportunities to dither.

For instance, most daily chores like making your bed and preparing meals inherently give you steps. My mom Susie Willman used to dust around, that is, run a cloth over the tops of chest of drawers, etc. every morning. My dad Homer D. ran a dust mop around the kitchen floor daily. Mom lived to the age of 94, and Dad to 87.

A personal favorite dithering method of mine is doing the wash. My home office where I am writing this advice column is a mere thirty-two steps away from the washing machine in the laundry room. But these steps add up with three loads, especially if I vigorously pump my arms for aerobic benefit.

 Accidental Dithering

Accidental dithering often involves forgetfulness.

Undoubtedly, you know these moments. For example, you walk from your living room to your bedroom. But by the time you arrive at your destination, you’ve forgotten what you wanted to do there. So, you have to retrace your steps in hopes you’ll see some clue that will remind you of what you wanted to do. (Extra benefits if you have to climb stairs!)

Sometimes, you lose things. Now where did I put my  . . . ? you ask yourself. This happens to me very often. I own at least ten pairs of reading glasses. I keep a pair in the living room, a pair in the kitchen, and two pairs on the family room. But about once a day on average, I get up from my computer in the home office and dither through the house, perhaps to answer the buzzing summons of the clothes dryer. When I come back, I realize that I took off my glasses and set them down somewhere. So off again I must go in search of them.

Like the other kinds of dithering, accidental dithering can have health benefits. These dithering steps can be aerobic and add to your active minutes, especially if you pump your arms. And misplacing your mobile phone very well might make your heart pound extra hard.

Another place I often accidentally dither is while shopping at the grocery store. Fairly often, I get as far as the frozen foods department when I realize that I forgot to get the romaine lettuce that I need for the dinner salads. So, all the way back across the store back to the produce department I dither.

But I’ve quit beating myself up for accidental dithering. All steps are good steps. All active minutes are good active minutes. Your fitness tracker doesn’t care where they come from.

And this brings us to the third type of dithering for fitness . . .

Intentional Dithering

I’ll close with a few examples.

Every morning, I dither out to the garage to fill the bird feeders before I dither out to the back yard to hang the feeders up. Every evening, I dither out in the back yard to get the bird feeders and bring them in. (I can’t leave them out at night because the squirrels and racoons destroy them.) 

On Trash Day, I dither back and forth between the house and the recycle bin at the curb with a forgotten item or two at a time.

At least once every day, when prompted by my fitness tracker to get a few more steps, I go out and, enthusiastically pumping my arms, dither up and down the sidewalk to the corner and back.

To your good health, my senior friends, and happy dithering. Best, Juliet

P. S. For listings of Juliet Kincaid’s books and stories, go to her author’s pages on

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/2z9z3b2y

Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/57k5d6dj

Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/43x5fa7n

Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/hpn5dp8b

Spring in Progress: April 2023 Newsletter

Before I get into giving a report on my current Work-in-Progress, I want to say that I love spring. It’s my favorite season. A neighbor’s blooming magnolia butterflies tree is just one reason why. (A Facebook friend called this image “sunshine on a stick.”)

WiP Report: “I feel like you have been working on Death in Shining Armor almost since I’ve known you,” my good friend Gail F said recently. This sounds about right. I first met her in a creative writing class I taught in the fall of 1991 and I had a draft of this book in an earlier version to take to Bouchercon in October 1993. (I’ve even blogged about this project before in a newsletter called “My Once and Future Novel.”)

I love spring for its surprises. One recent morning I looked out my kitchen window and saw that the crab apple tree behind the house had burst into bloom overnight.

WiP Report: I’m really happy with my take on the book this time. You see, this time I took some of the advice I give in Novel Basics: An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel and asked the question, “What if?”

Not all of spring’s surprises are pleasant though, like the pea-sized hail we had recently. (The flecks of color that look like pink snowflakes mixed with the hail came from the crab apple tree.)

WiP Report: Specifically, I asked myself the question what if my protagonist Vanessa Mathison, aka Van the Potter at a Renaissance Festival sort of thing, speaks directly to the reader in first person (“Startled, I dropped my basket filled with new cups”) instead of third (Startled, Van dropped her basket . . .”)? When I did that, Van came alive in ways she hadn’t before and she started talking to me.

I love spring because my favorites return. For instance, the other day when I saw the flailing and flaring of chestnut wings and tail feathers on the feeder in the back year, I realized the Brown Thrasher had come back. And oh, I see two of them now browsing around the bird food fallen from the feeders over the patio. You know what that means . . .

WiP Report: I also changed Van’s age from mid-twenties to thirty-nine and gave her a kid, an ex-husband, and the  goal that drove a big part of my life: to have a career as a college professor. I was thirty-nine the year I began teaching at the college where I taught for twenty-five years. This helped me identify with the protagonist of this novel.

Another delight of spring is the Pink Moon. I’m considering using part of this image on the cover of Death in Shining Armor. It’s really pretty blurry though. What do you think?

WiP Report: Along with those changes came some realizations. 1) I should now call the book an academic murder mystery since Van works in a registrar’s office as did I before I went back to school to become a college professor. 2) And since that might take Van quite a while due to life’s little interruptions as it did me, Death in Shining Armor might be Book 1 of a series instead of a standalone. But we’ll see.

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I am very happy to announce that most of my novels, collections, and short stories in both the Calendar Mystery series and Cinderella, P. I. series plus the expanded version of Novel Basics: An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel currently are available from several different retailers and services including the following:

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/2z9z3b2y

Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/57k5d6dj

Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/43x5fa7n

Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/hpn5dp8b

Smashwords: https://tinyurl.com/yc3hkfye

My books including the expanded edition of Novel Basics are available in paperback from Amazon.com.

Time Change Sunday: March 2023 Newsletter

 

Time Change Sunday: March 2023 Newsletter

Today, I did a little research in Wikipedia about the origins of DST and discovered that clever founding father Ben Franklin first suggested it way back in 1784 as a way to save money on candle use.

He also suggested people tax window shutters, ration candles, and wake people up at dawn by ringing church bells and firing cannons. To me, this seems a bit counter-productive as far as saving money goes due to the high price of cannon shells and other ammunition. But then, apparently old Ben had his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek when he wrote that letter to the editor of The Journal of Paris.

The notion of pushing the clock hands forward in the spring and backwards in the fall took a while to catch on. But it finally did in the United States during World War 1 as a way to save on coal.

Personally, when I was growing up in the 1950’s, people always said we needed that extra hour of daylight in spring and summer so guys could have more time to play golf after their 9-to-5 workdays and kids could play outside longer. Presumably, the wives and mothers would happily accommodate those activities by getting supper on the table in a timely fashion.

Also personally, I’m rather against DST. For one thing, springing forward never been consistent in this country, let alone in the world, so sometimes while traveling, through Indiana on I-70, for instance, where at least one county was a hold-out to DST, I’ve gotten confused about what time it is.

One argument in favor of DST is it’s good for livestock. Farmers vehemently deny this. I don’t know much about cows and such, but I can say that our cat, the only animal around the place, is oblivious to clock time, so he continues getting up with the birds no matter exactly when by the clock they start chirping outside.

It can get confusing. My daughter just came to ask me if I wanted to do Jazzercise this afternoon, but she didn’t realize that it was an hour later in the day than she thought because she hadn’t changed the time on the clock on her work table.

As an old person, I can attest to feeling a little off today with one less hour of rest last night though my fitness tracker claims I got 7 hours. (Liar!) So, I’ve been dithering around the house even more than usual today.

And once upon a time in the autumn, my mom and dad came home from the mall furious that they couldn’t get into Macy’s to begin their daily walk because the doors were bolted shut and there it was not even 10 o’clock! They were pretty embarrassed when I reminded them of the time change.

Recently, there’s been talk of putting the United States on DST year around or not bothering with it at all because spring forward and falling back messes big time with people’s circadian cycles and leads to more heart attacks and car wrecks. It’s like going through jet lag twice a year. Apparently two thirds of Americans agree. But we’ll see . . .

 

New for Juliet: February 2023 Newsletter

What’s new at our house includes the air fryer my daughter Jess bought me for a surprise Valentine’s Day present.

It turns out that it’s requiring lots more thought than I expected it to including where to put it. In fact, even that was a problem given the lay-out of our kitchen in our house built in the late 1940’s and added onto sometime before 1960 before the microwave started becoming popular in 1967 and wildly popular by 1975. My daughter and I soon learned that if we ran the toaster and the microwave at the same time, we would pop a circuit breaker and the lights would go out in the kitchen.

So, we wanted to avoid loading up the rather limited outlets in the kitchen and ended up moving Mr. Coffee out of his place on the counter by the door to the family room where he’d long ruled to the other counter next to the narrow door to the hall to the front bathroom and bedrooms. And of course, the coffee bean grinder, the jar of coffee beans, the filters, and the two Brita water carafes had to go there, too. Mr. Coffee and the grinder now have an outlet a piece. Still, I ended up tweaking that arrangement when I realized that the jar of beans logically needs to sit next to the grinder not on the other side of Mr. Coffee by the water carafes.

As for our new 16” wide, 14” high, 14” deep shiny behemoth that bakes, toasts, grills, and dehydrates fruits and veggies in addition to air frying . . . We parked it at the end of the counter by the door to the family room. A plus: there’s no cabinet above it and it has plenty of room to breathe in air on the sides and blow it out in the exhaust in the back. But plugging it in had issues. The maker of our air flyer gave it a super short cord that doesn’t actually reach to the outlet by the kitchen window above the sink. So, we had to plug in the power strip we’d used for Mr. Coffee and the grinder. We also plugged in the electric can opener that Jess bought me to replace the hand-cranked openers I had trouble with due to the arthritis in my fingers.

We also had to move some things. For example, we no longer had room for the Rolodex, coupons, grocery lists, and pencil cups on the counter, so we moved them into my dad’s old desk in the family room. To have a parking place for hot food, we moved the cutting board we used to keep by the sink over to the left of the air fryer and got out our extra cutting board for the spot close to the sink.

We spent quite a bit of time the day we got our air fryer educating ourselves about it. We read the Air Fryer + Oven Quick Start and User Guides. We perused the air fryer cookbook that I bought when I went to the store that day. I sent out a call to my Facebook friends for tips and recipes. Some of them happily obliged. Soon I discovered that an air fryer doesn’t actually fry. It works by sucking moisture out of food. We also found out that air fryers get so hot that probably we should cook our favorite dishes for less time and at lower temperatures than our old recipes stipulate.

The day after we got the air fryer, we tried it out, And, sure enough, we discovered that the medium setting makes toast too dark for us. (Our old finicky toaster-oven hasn’t been the same since one morning the toast caught fire. It was an alarming sight to see flames stand up in the back of that toaster. “Shut the door,” Jess shouted. And when I did, the flames went out for lack of oxygen. We banished that toaster, with its permanently darkened front door, to the room next to the kitchen from which it might depart on our next Trash Day.)

Using our cookbook, we’ve made tasty chicken tenders and a breakfast frittata. I did learn that really you should choose the lower of the baking times suggested by your cookbook after I cooked the mozzarella cheese bites an extra two minutes and the cheese oozed out all over the air fry basket and the bake pan below.

I’ll do better next time. And I must say that this old girl enjoys learning new tricks at her advanced age.

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Also new from Juliet: trade paperbacks of the expanded edition of Novel Basics, An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel and of Cinderella, P. I. First Case to Last. Both cost $9.99 exclusively from Amazon and have easy-on-the-eyes 14-point font.

If you prefer digital versions, they’re available wide from a large range of retailers including for Novel Basics

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/u3fmrjku

Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/4jd9a9w3

Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/3zr54p6k

Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/yetuh8bc

And for Cinderella, P. I., First Case to Last

Amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/327m8md2

Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/uutf6ud8

Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/mvch3err

Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/2p9fdhj2

Until next time, all the best, Juliet

Works-in-Progress: January 2023 Newsletter

Gee whiz, it’s only January 8. And already I have an enormous to-do list for 2023 that includes aspects of my life as an indie author, as a person, and as a home owner. (There’s always something going on with a house, so I won’t talk about that here.) I’ll limit the topics of my life as a writer  to three specific projects.

Currently, I’m redoing Novel Basics, An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel, in an expanded version that includes advice on self-publishing. I hope to publish the eBook of it wide so people can read it on Nooks and other devices in addition to Kindles or through the Kindle app. I also plan on publishing the new version as a paperback soon and possibly as a workbook this fall for National Novel Writing Month in November.

During the holidays, I set aside Death in Shining Armor, a book I’ve worked on in several different versions for over thirty years. I would very much like to finish it and publish it in 2023, partly so I can move on to other projects.

And I’m working on my memoir. This fun little project stews on a back burner in my head. I drop a slice of life here or chunk of memories in it from time to time. Still, inside my head, the combined voices of my mother, the father of my child, and the woman I once thought of as my best friend, say, “What? You write your memoirs?” [Insert derisive laugh here.] “You insignificant little nobody! Who could possibly want to read about your life?” Quick, quick, I counter with the voice of a friend, a notable children’s author who died in 2022. “You’ve got the gift, Juliet,” she once told me. “Keep on writing.” And shortly before her death, she said, Don’t you dare quit writing!” Yes, ma’am! Besides that, the very thought of writing my memoirs gives me joy. And that’s enough of a reason for me to keep it on my Works-in-Progress list.

Moving to a set of personal items on my to-do list, I’m happy to say that my wonky knee has improved. My fitness tracker says I reach my goal of 7,000 steps a day pretty often. I’ve resumed my yoga routine of two Salutation to the Sun routines pretty much every morning. Purists might snicker at the way I crawl back to my feet, but at least I’m doing it. I’m happy about this because I thought I’d permanently crippled myself somehow and doomed myself to a sedentary life in front of the tube.

New Year’s Resolution (you know I had to have one): my usual one of putting in twenty hours or about three hours a day to some aspect of my writing. Last year, my weekly average was 18.83 or 2.69 hours a day. My actual writing work averaged less than that because my tally includes webinars, meetings, creating ads for my books, and promoting my work through social media. But I’m happy to report that reached my twenty hours writing goal for the first week of 2023. Whoop. Whoop.

FYI: all the mental activity of reading and writing novels, reaching out to others through social media, and physically exercising keeps the brain of this old girl alive. For after all, I’m a Work-in-Progress. How about you?

Best, Juliet

P. S. Right now, I’m running a countdown promotion of the boxed set of January Jinx, Fatal February, and Mischief in March, the first three novels of my historical mystery series, and “Detectives’ Honeymoon,” a fun short story. You can get it for reduced prices for the American and British versions from now through midnight of January 12 when it returns to the original prices of $8.97 in the U. S. and whatever they are in Britain. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the exact prices for the levels of the countdown when I set it up. But this is all part of the learning process to enhance my Work-in-Progress publishing skills. 

P. S. S. Safa, the adorable, says, “Happy New Year!

Wounded Knee: November 2022 Newsletter

Sometime in August, I wounded my right knee, perhaps by twisting it inwards too fast during an exercise routine. Regardless, this simple little injury has pretty much dominated my life ever since. How did it do that? Let me count the ways.

Appointments have taken away considerable time from the thing I love to do—write. These include a visit with a nurse practitioner; a visit to the hospital for x-rays on my newly injured knee and my chronically achy left foot; a trip to the drug store for a prescription grade pain-killer; a visit to an orthopedist; and two visits to a psychologist to talk about my depression about no longer being able to exercise by dancing with my daughter Jess four times a week, take long walks, and do yard work. Even dealing with the doctors’ office phone system was frustrating and time-consuming.

But like many things in life, this experience had its lessons. For one thing, I learned to deal with the nurse practitioner via the patient portal instead of the phone. For another, I learned to be patient with myself and listen to the experts when they tell me to wear a brace on my knee so it won’t buckle out from under me and to ice the knee up after I’ve been active.

(It was a bit of a shock when the NP and the joint specialist disagreed on what pain-killer I should take. After some research, I discovered all pain-killers can kill you via your kidneys or your liver, or your mind through depression and suicide, and I backed off on all of them. But recently, I went back on the pain med with the fewest lethal side effects.)

Also, I’ve made adjustments to my life. For example, for a while, I backed off of most exercise including my morning yoga routine that I’ve faithfully done for at least fifty years. Since I no longer can put pressure on that knee, when I get down on the floor, I often can’t get back up again without dragging myself across the living room to the closest chair, placing my hands on the seat of the chair, pushing my butt into the air to get my feet under me, and then slowly straightening up.

And my poor wounded knee has improved. I’ve worked my way back up to taking 7,000 steps a day. Sometimes I shuffle around the family room behind Jess during a streamed dance-exercise routine. And instead of getting down on the floor to exercise my core, I sit on a chair. Also I try to warm up to my day with some exercises I learned from the tai chi class I joined a few weeks ago. (Millions of old Chinese people can’t be wrong.)

I’m so not trying to walk to the park right now, but a trip around a block or two or three, preferably hand in hand with Jess, is quite feasible. When I can’t kneel to reach around in the back of a cabinet, I ask my daughter for help. Ditto when I need to climb on a chair to reach something high up in a cabinet.

So, my life goes on, slightly revised. And still, in spite of all this trouble from my wounded knee, I am VERY HAPPY to report that I’ve finished the most recent draft of Death in Shining Armor, my current WiP, in exactly two months from my birthday on 9/11 until November 11. And the book looks good. But I’ve temporarily set it aside to mellow while I deal with all the seasonal stuff. This year, the stuff includes a holiday giveaway I’m participating in. Here’s the deal.

You need gifts and we’ve got books.

The Kansas City authors who make up Of Books and Nooks are giving you a chance to win eight amazing books to enjoy for yourself or give as gifts! Just enter our holiday book giveaway for a multi-author, multi-genre book collection!
The winner will be selected at random on Dec. 11, 2022. Enter by Dec. 10, 2022. Your entry automatically puts you on each author’s email list for future giveaways, newsletters and release announcements! You will also receive updates on new posts on Of Books and Nooks. Winner must have a valid mailing address in the United States. No books will be shipped outside the U.S.
Good luck, and happy holidays to all!

A New Beginning: Fall 2022 Newsletter

A New Beginning: Fall 2022 Newsletter

  A New Beginning to Die by the Sword aka To Die by the Sword aka Death in Shining Armor

Night . . .

Saturday, September 10, 1988

The Medieval Fair Site . . .

I didn’t want much that night, just to go out to the shop on the Med Fair site to drop off some pots and cups and mugs that had finally cooled off enough to pick up from the Ceramics Department of  the City College of Art and Design back in town.

Now let me tell you why I decided to open Ye Old Oddities Shoppe and sell my pottery at Med Fair that fall. It was because there I was, pushing forty, and still working in the Registrar’s Office at C-CAD where I graduated with highest honors way too many years before. (Not going into the life-happens events that kept me working there for so long right now.) And I didn’t want to still be at C-CAD when I turned forty the next year.

Instead, I wanted to make and save enough money from Med Fair and other ways that I could go to the university the next fall, get a job as a teaching assistant and get experience in the classroom, get my master’s, and become a professor of ceramics at some college or university for the rest of my life. It would be ideal, I thought, to teach the same thing that I loved to do.

But . . .

BUT, thanks to some crazy person wearing armor from head to shiny toes, I about got myself killed that night, the first of several attempts to murder me.

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Something interesting happened recently after I revised my Novel Basics, An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel. I noticed that I didn’t follow my own advice in writing Death in Shining Armor, a novel that I’ve worked on for decades in several different forms. That is, I didn’t establish early what the protagonist wants to accomplish in her journey. I mean the very first card in the brainstorming system I describe in Novel Basics is called the heart card for a novel and asks the question “Who wants what?” for goodness’ sake. And I blew the beginning of my own novel. Oops! So I figured out what my protagonist wanted and put it on the first page.

 I also took some of my own advice presented in my concise yet complete guide to writing a novel: If you’re having trouble with a novel, play around with the point of view, that is, the perspective in time and space of the narrator. Most of the earlier versions of the book were in what’s called third person point of view (she/he/they, her/his/their, etc.) limited to three characters. But when I restricted the perspective of Death in Shining Armor to only one character, the novel’s protagonist Vanessa Laura Mathison aka Van the Potter speaking directly to the reader in first person (I/me/mine), she started talking to me, too. And the novel started coming to life in ways it hadn’t done before. Propelled by that new beginning, I’m now about eighty pages into the novel.

FYI: the new eBook version of Novel Basics, An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel, that now includes a section on self-publishing, is available at www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2LXFRP for $3.99 Plus, it’s always free through Kindle Unlimited. Also, I’m offering the eBook on Amazon for only $0.99 from Friday September 30 through Thursday October 6, 2022. It’s your perfect resource to prepare for National Novel Writing Month 2022.

Best, Juliet

P. S. Currently, I’m rebooting eBook versions of some of the short stories and books in both my Calendar Mystery series and Cinderella, P. I. Fairy Tale Mystery series through several different retailers in addition to Amazon. To keep up with my publications on Amazon, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Juliet-Kincaid/e/B00DB4HWRG. And to keep up with my publications through other retailers now including Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, click on https://books2read.com/author/x/subscribe/1/305166/?preferred_retailer=0&book=927193 and complete the form.

My Friend, the Author Anne Bauman

My Friend, the author Anne Bauman

I was saddened to hear of Anne’s death a few weeks ago for I always counted her as my friend. Anne and her husband Mark were among the first to welcome me into their home after I first went to work at Johnson County Community College in 1980. We were colleagues for many years, and after I retired, she encouraged me in my second career as an indie author. For instance, about ten years ago, after I self-published my book, Walls, a Cinderella, P. I. Novel, Anne sent me a card that said in her clear, beautifully rounded handwriting,

Dear Juliet – 

A million sorries to you for my first congratulations note going to the USPS’s limbo of lost mail. (I probably wrote something wrong in the address.)

So-o, a belated congratulations on your wonderful novel!

I enjoyed everything about it: the true-to-life characters; the tight, well-constructed plot; the consistent theme (so difficult to write); the brilliant ending, surprising to even the most sophisticated reader.

In a word, I wish I had written it.

You’ve got the gift, Juliet. Keep on writing.

Love, Anne

I have always cherished this note and have kept it pinned on my cork board behind my writing station all these years. Her words were especially precious to me because Anne herself was an author of a beloved children’s book.

And then a few weeks before her death when she was suffering terribly from constant pain, she encouraged me again. In one of my newsletters, I’d written about an encounter with an acquaintance who insulted my writing and insinuated that it was worthless because I wasn’t making enough money from it to buy a nicer house. And Anne responded to my newsletter by saying, “Don’t you dare quit writing!”

Thank you so much, Anne. I appreciate your help and I miss you.