While snow-birding in Florida, I’ve scheduled my Author Talk at local retirement communities. Those planned events came to a screaming halt earlier this week when the governor issued suggested restrictions to tamp down the spread of this nasty little virus.
Because our elderly citizens are the most susceptible to this years flu bug, the local administrators are following the safety guidelines and cancelling outside vendors, such as authors like myself.
All we can do is stay clear of each other and avoid crowds at indoor venues. Not to mention wash our hands, wash our hands, and WASH OUR HANDS!
The silver lining of this outbreak is that I can devote the hours of self-isolation to work on my latest WIP… the 4th story in my Gwen Andrews mystery series titled ‘Wedding Interrupted’. If the plotting and writing moves along at a good clip, I have a chance at publishing this summer.
Stay well, everyone!
Every fiction writer knows the frustration of plotting their story. Especially with a mystery, such as I create, the plot not only needs to proceed logically toward the climax, but the characters, dialogue, and actions within each scene need to be believable to the reader as the clues are subtly inserted into the story.
As I settle into my third year of snow-birding in Florida, I continue to work with my writing group back in Massachusetts by emailing chapters back and forth, soliciting comments and suggestions. Our system seems to work very well, and in fact, I think we’re more productive!
Whenever the members of our writers group are unavailable for a face-to-face meeting at alternating houses or libraries located between us, we have found that emailing our chapters for critique works very well.
This Wednesday afternoon, I’m returning to Upton, MA, to participate in a follow-up interview with Jan Lewis, hostess of the Upton local cable show ‘Be My Guest’. We’ll be talking about the 3rd story in my Gwen Andrews mystery series ‘Bed, Breakfast, & Blackmail’.
I’m thrilled to announce that the 3rd story in the Gwen Andrews series is finally published!
So excited to open my inbox yesterday and find an email from my editor/publisher Stephanie Blackman, owner of Riverhaven Books in Whitman, MA! As scheduled in our contract, yesterday was the due date for her to provide me with suggestions to fine-tune ‘Bed, Breakfast, & Blackmail’.
As I approached the final edit of ‘Bed, Bath, & Blackmail’, I loaded my manuscript into a website called ‘Wordcounter.com’, a most useful tool.
There is nothing sweeter than setting up an author table at a holiday craft fair, then waiting for the browsers to wander past, stopping to chat about my characters, the setting, the storyline. If the two of us connect over my mystery series, another reader will walk away with one of my books, anxious to meet my amateur sleith Gwen Andrews.
Debi Graham-Leard 