Category: memoirs

It’s Academic: September 2023 Newsletter

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

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.

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!

A Father’s Day Remembrance

My Father’s Gardens, a Remembrance

Typically, my gardens are puny things. Besides flowers, they usually include herbs like basil, mint, chives, parsley, and occasionally a tomato plant in pots on our patio. But my father’s gardens were often superb.

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 over twenty years for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, my father always had a garden. Until his last summer, he grew at least a little something, maybe vibrant begonias, a geranium in a big pot, a climbing rose, possibly hollyhocks, and 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 that Mom canned, made juice with, or begged neighbors to haul away.

Maybe the secret of Dad’s tomatoes lay in his compost pile that he researched, constructed, 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 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.

After we moved into town, Dad scaled his gardens small, but back in the late forties when we lived in the aptly named Garden Court over in Ohio, 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 he planted I’ve forgotten now, but I still love to recite exotic names like zucchini, kohlrabi, and cocozelle.

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 picture 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.

 

 

 

December 2021 Newsletter

The Old and the New

Out with the old and in with the new isn’t working so well for me this year. For example, at a time when some of my friends send virtual Christmas cards, this year I decided to send out real stamped cards. For me, the process involves looking back at the cards I received last year and circling the years when I received responses in the address book that I’ve kept for twenty years. I used to send as many as fifty, this year about half that for one reason or another.

As it happens, this year the day I did my Christmas cards, I woke up at 4 AM as my interminable Ya Gotta List rattled through my head. So, I ended up getting only two and a half hours of sleep, an insomnia record for me, and awoke in a terrible mood. But later, the process of looking at last year’s cards and newsletters, locating current addresses for a couple of my nieces and a nephew on Facebook, writing Hi along with a specific name and Love, Juliet and Jess inside the cards, addressing them, and putting on stamps and return address labels made me feel better. Plus, most of the cards I sent this year featured two dozen cats gathered around a piano. The joy of that card became my joy as well and healed my head.

From the topic of the old tradition of sending holiday cards, let’s move on to the new . . .

Not long ago I crashed my old computer by opening too many apps at once. And my daughter Jess decreed that its days were numbered because the hard drive was dying. (Ten years is old for computers.) So, I bought a new one. That meant that I needed to get used to a new computer, a new version of Microsoft Word, and a new version of Photoshop. (For instance, the new version of Word somehow put Calibri in my font box instead of the Times New Roman I’ve used in the past and I haven’t figured out how it did that.) Also, these things required new user names and new passwords. I don’t especially care for the passwords some alien AI app assigns because I just can’t remember those jumbles of letters and numbers. Instead, I like to devise my own with phrases I can recall and put together with a variety of upper and lower cases, numbers, and possibly a special character now and then.

All this stuff takes time and leads me to my last WiP Report of 2021. It looks like I won’t complete the current draft of Die by the Sword this year after all and move on to revising and editing. But when things settle down, I will.

Have a happy, healthy, and safe New Year, my friends, and I’ll get back to you in 2022. All the best, Juliet

Continue reading

“New China Special”

In “New China Special,” a Memoir of a Marriage, a brief, intimate piece that combines personal memoir with creative nonfiction, a mother shares with her child a series of vignettes – all related to Chinese restaurants in some way – about events that occurred before the child was born or not old enough to remember.

 

 

Here’s an excerpt from the first vignette:

Outside in the fire lane, your daddy waited in the Beetle, my first car. (I hate to say it, but I can’t remember its color now. Peacock blue? Emerald green? One of those.)

I slid onto the passenger seat as your daddy put the car in gear. He drove straight down the fire lane, right off campus and down the avenue due west eight blocks. In Huntington, WV, laid out along the Ohio River by a railroad engineer in the 1870’s, this meant the university and the restaurant were precisely eight-tenths of a mile apart.

On the way, your daddy said, “Bet I can do it faster than you.”

“Bet you can’t,” I said.

Your daddy parked a couple of spaces past the restaurant and we scooted out of the car.

The green pagoda sign was on and New China was serving lunch.

My stomach growled as we sashayed arm in arm in the door between the display windows. The one on the right contained what looked like an orange tree, only tiny. Sometimes its scrawny branches held white blossoms or knobby little fruit. The left window featured an arrangement of packaged Taiwanese tea and fossilized egg rolls.

Menus tucked under his left elbow, the maître d’ met us by the front counter. “Hello, how are you?” he said, stressing the lo and the you.

The maître d’ was a middle-aged Asian with a nearly bald head. He wore a gray cotton jacket over his shoulders that rounded forward and tan pants. As we walked by him, he bowed and launched his usual question after us: “Uh, a booth or a table?”

He should have known the answer. We always asked for a booth. In New China a booth was a little room made of rickety partitions about seven feet high and, for a door, a curtain on a rod across the opening. (He didn’t know the reason why we always wanted a booth. At least, we hoped he didn’t know.)

“New China Special” is now available for only $0.99 as a Kindle Short Read at www.amazon.com/dp/B07ND5F9X9 (and it’s free on Kindle Unlimited.)

Legacy

Hello, Everyone!

Gosh, it’s been a long time since I talked to some of you, so this will serve as a catch-up about my activities as an indie author in 2018. It was very busy for me, partly because I made an ambitious resolution at the start of the year to bring out something new, free or discounted every month. And I did it! Here are highlights of the new stuff.

 

In April, I finished and published a brand new calendar mystery short story called “The 9th Street Gang.” It features Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price pursuing a pesky young gang in Kansas City in February 1900 just after they became engaged in Mischief in March. Click on the cover  to buy it for only $0.99.

 

In May, I published another short, “Detectives’ Honeymoon” that picks up exactly where Mischief in March leaves off. It resolves that little cliffhanger at the end of the novel and follows what turns out to be an unusual honeymoon. Click on the cover to buy it for only $0.99.

In July, I published Old Time Stories, a collection of fiction and nonfiction. It includes six calendar mystery short stories like the two mentioned earlier plus the previously unpublished story called “The Shackleton Ghost.” It also includes nonfiction pieces about the people and places that inspired my fiction. Click on the cover to buy the eBook for $3.99. (The print version is available for $10.)

And for those of you Minty and Daniel fans who wondered what happened to the April calendar mystery novel, I drafted it in November as a NaNoWriMo2018 project. I hope to publish it in April 2019.

 

(Note: the digital version of January Jinx, in which my heroine Minty Wilcox confronts all sorts of problems trying to get a suitable job for a woman in old Kansas City, will cost you only $0.99 in the U. S. at www.amazon.com/dp/B00HSSSBE4 or in the UK for £0.99 at www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00HSSSBE4 from December 27, 2018 to January 3, 2019. It’s also available in print.

 

The project I completed and published in 2018 that I’m proudest of isn’t fiction at all. It’s Novel Basics, an Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel, and very close to my heart as a longtime novel reader, writer, and teacher. Here’s a brief description of that book:

Let Dr. Juliet Kincaid talk you through her unique method of brainstorming a novel with twenty cards in the first part of Novel Basics. Then follow through with her expert guidance on time management, as well as drafting and revising a novel. Altogether, Novel Basics provides a compact yet complete practical guide to writing a novel, whether it’s your first or your fifteenth.

In this book, I describe the novel as a tool of infinite possibilities, a sort of Swiss Army knife with a million blades. And I view the book as my legacy for future novelists no matter who you are or where or when you write your novels.

Novel Basics is now available as an eBook at www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2LXFRP for $3.99 and in print (9781730833991) for $8.99.

Best, Juliet (aka Dr. J)

FREE SHORT

Two Birthdays

After Minty Wilcox has worked for six months or so at Price Investigations as a stenographer/typist, the dashing detective Daniel Price appears in the office and carries her off to take notes on a new case the agency has been hired for. But once he starts filling Minty in on the details of the case, some of the information sounds strangely familiar. And she begins to wonder what he’s really up to on her twentieth birthday, June 22, 1899. This fun short story also includes a ride through old Kansas City to the not-yet-open Electric Park, soon to become a favorite spot for visitors.

The digital version of “Two Birthdays” is FREE October 13 – 14, 2018 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B076JS3D2Y

“Two Birthdays” is just one of the six historical mystery short stories included in Old Time Stories that feature Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price sleuthing, getting to know each other and falling in love before, between, and after the three novels in Juliet Kincaid’s Calendar Mystery series: January Jinx, Fatal February and Mischief in March. Old Time Stories, that also includes nonfiction pieces about the people and places that inspired Juliet’s fiction, is now available as a trade paperback and also as an eBook at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F4JL8D5

Old Time Stories Now in Print

Join business girl Minty Wilcox and detective Daniel Price in old Kansas City as they sleuth, get to know each other, and fall in love in six stories that occur before, between or after JANUARY JINX, FATAL FEBRUARY, and MISCHIEF IN MARCH, the first three novels in the Calendar Mystery series. Included are “Detectives’ Honeymoon” which starts exactly where Book 3 ends and “The Shackleton Ghost,” published here for the very first time. OLD TIME STORIES also includes eleven nonfiction pieces about the real people and places that inspired Juliet Kincaid to tell the story of Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price from newly met to newly wed and beyond in Kansas City, a place that could downright deadly a hundred years or so ago.

Five-Star Review of “The Barn Door”
“This short prequel story to the first book, JANUARY JINX, is fun and introduces us to the two main characters, Daniel and Minty, before they actually meet. I especially like the descriptions of Kansas City in the 1900’s as well as the vivid descriptions of the characters. Read ‘The Barn Door’ and you will not be disappointed.” Amazon Reviewer.

Five-Star Review of “Lost Dog”
“What a delight to find myself in ‘old’ Kansas City again with such wonderfully drawn characters. I feel I know them and would love to follow them along the street while looking for the lost dog’s owner and I could just push that old neighbor back into the bushes after rescuing the poor dog from her vicious beating. Oh, this author brings them so alive and that is what keeps me reading her stories.” Amazon Reviewer

 

 

OLD TIME STORIES is now available as an EBOOK at www.amazon.com/dp/B07F4JL8D5 and a TRADE PAPERBACK exclusively from Amazon.