Bringing Dead Politicians to Life

I was working in Toronto, helping my husband run his pool hall, and not writing at all. I vaguely still dreamed of writing one day, but after trying to write one book in my twenties and junking it, I was pretty sure I had no talent and could never make it a career. To compound my negativity, I was fed up with the way local government seemed to be on a sabotage mission to put our bar out of business. Since I normally hate the helpless victim role, but for some reason at that moment I felt powerless to change things, I decided I should kill the mayor.

I have never dived more happily into a project. My fingers flew across the keyboard, creating a secret society with a murderous mandate, a young cop who could speak her mind more freely than I could, and a supporting cast I wanted to spend time with. In my fantasy world, I could kill anyone. I didn't care anymore about the socialist hypocrisy running rampant in the real world; I had my personal power back.

I wasn't a very good writer. I'd taken one writing class in high school fifteen years before. I signed up for a workshop course at Humber, and I was matched with a group of enthusiastic and honest critics. They helped me transform Clare from a beat cop into a rookie undercover, which later helped me shape the series. They suggested making her younger, so she'd blend in more convincingly with the students-another bonus, because starting her young means I can play a lot more with her learning curve. (Belligerence can be amusing at 22, but might be immature at 28.) And - probably the most significant part of the course - they took a lot of my bad writing habits, slaughtered them, and replaced them with real skills.

I also learned at Humber that writing isn't some elusive Shakespeare-or-nothing dream where you either have heaps of talent or you might as well pack it in, but a series of steps (like anything else), where we can start where we are and get better over the course of our lives.

I left that week-long course buoyed with confidence. I didn't suddenly think I was a fabulous writer, but I felt-finally-like publication was an attainable goal. I took a few night courses, moved to Vancouver (we ended up closing our fun but ill-fated pool room), and made it a mission to turn my first twenty pages into a kickass crime fiction manuscript.

This was my favourite time of all: the writing part. My amazing husband told me to take a solid block of time and devote it to just writing, and we'd figure out in a year or two if it was worth continuing. So when he went off to work, I worked, I shaped, I deleted, I despaired. I Rollerbladed into the nearby fishing village for groceries most afternoons. I stared out my window at the North Shore mountains when I couldn't figure out where to take the story. And I found out that this is exactly what I want to do with my life.

I'm thrilled that my first book is actually going to hit shelves this September. I love the people I'm meeting and the things I'm learning about the industry. But I miss the year I had to myself - the year I started writing.

Robin Spano


Don't miss Robin's great Virtual Book Tour, coming all month to blogs only a click or two away!

An editor on the editing process

One of my authors says that when I point something out as weak, he either cuts it (knowing I’m right) or re-doubles his efforts to make it work. I think that’s a great response to editorial feedback.

Andy Meisenheimer

From "Novel Journey"

What cops take along on narcotics work

From an officer with years of experience working plainclothes drug investigations. Plain clothes being, in some cases, really plain.

Officer.com

What goes in a query letter?

There's a simple way to figure out what goes in the first paragraph of a query.

1. What is your main character's name?

2. What problem/choice does the character face? (20 words or fewer)

3. Who wants to foil the main character's plan and why? (20 words or fewer)

Query Shark

Guest Nadine Doolittle: On becoming a published author

On becoming a published author...

I was just as eager (and just as desperate) to get my manuscript published as any writer. But after ICED UNDER was released in November 2008 at a wildly successful launch party hosted by my local bookstore, I was stricken with terror. I lost five pounds. I couldn't eat, had trouble sleeping, and certainly couldn't write. Not anything worth reading at any rate. What I thought would be the most exhilarating time of my life turned into an intense year of trying to understand what just happened. When I was an unpublished novelist, I knew what I wanted-to get published. Now that I was published...where did I go from here?

My publisher is a small press: advances are not paid nor does my contract extend beyond the book under contract. No three book deals here. I had a book out but I was back in the starting gate for the next. I had to earn a living, promote the book that was on the shelves and somehow write the next novel. No problem, I told myself. Getting published was the hard part.

I drew up a plan of action. I scheduled my day. Write, do "business" and somehow earn money. I sharpened my pencils, sat down at my desk to launch into the next book-and promptly developed writer's block. (Which I thought was a myth until I had it.) Writer's block doesn't prevent you from putting words down; it prevents you from wanting to. I felt physically sick every time I faced the computer.

Panic set in. If I didn't produce another book, the first book would be for nothing. All that work, the struggle to get published in the first place-for nothing. And I was broke! I'd burned every employable bridge I had to write this book. I was aging too. Starting over again in another career was out of the question-I'd already had three. I spent long hours huddled in my office, sobbing. I was suffering a severe crisis of confidence, second-guessing the intuitive voice that led me to write in the first place. If getting published was so great, then how come I was so miserable?

At this time, readers started to pop up expressing how much they enjoyed ICED UNDER. I was almost too ashamed to hear their compliments. I felt like a fraud. Until it dawned on me that the only person I had to please in all of this was the reader. If the reader liked my book, who was I to say it was a mistake?

Then I fell in with a couple of writers who wanted to form an online critique group. We would send pages to each other twice a month. I was terrified but took the leap. The process restored me to the computer. Progress!

Writers are shy to begin with when it comes to promotion, but for a writer who has lost confidence, promotion is the seventh circle of Hell. Local writers and booksellers came to my aid with advice, wisdom and common sense and a bit of promotion of their own. The best tip I received was from a savvy old author and marketer extraordinaire who said to regard my first book as my loss leader. I should do what I could do to promote it, but this one book was not the career. A weight lifted off my shoulders.

One day while rocking in front of the computer as I worked out a tricky bit of plot, I had a revelation: Writing wasn't something I chose to do-writing chose me. In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, I was a writer and there was no going back. I finally finished my second book. At this writing THE GREY LADY is with an agent in the U.K. who requested the full after reading the first ten pages. ICED UNDER continues to sell well through word of mouth and has received three decent professional reviews.

And I've plunged into my third novel.

Nadine Doolittle is an award-winning reporter formerly with the Low Down to Hull and Back News, and On Track columnist for the Ottawa Metro News covering transit issues in the nation's capital. "Iced Under" (published by Bayeux Arts Inc. in November 2008) was short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel in 2009.

Podcast on Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speaks on film about the development of his famous sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

Thanks to Janet at Mystery Fanfare.

Guest blogger Grant McKenzie

Grunt goes to Canada

By Grant McKenzie



It was likely the strong, undiluted accent, but it could have been shyness or the overwhelming heaviness of being suddenly different.

Whatever it was, to their Canadian ears, my name sounded like Grunt.

You can imagine the laughter — and the sound effects.

There I was, as Scottish as can be: orange hair so bright it practically glowed, the McKenzie nose, freckles (masses of them since it was a hot summer) and the pale white skin that comes after painful lessons learned on the sandy beaches of Troon.

Most people believe there shouldn't be any language barriers when one emigrates between English-speaking countries, but they're wrong.

This was 1976. I was thirteen years old. And I didn't speak English, I spoke Glaswegian with an East Kilbridian burr.

My working-class brogue had erased the "th" sound from my vocabulary, so words like "think" and “thought” became "fink" and “fought”. I also used such foreign phrasing as "Aye" for "Yes" and "Ta" in place of "thanks". There were even times when you would have thought I was speaking Gaelic rather than just trying to ask a teacher for permission to go to the washroom. “I’m burstin’, miss. Canna no use the loo?”

This language barrier became even more impenetrable when I attended French class at A.E. Cross Junior High. As an official bilingual country, Canada tries to place an emphasis on its second national language. Fortunately, I had a year of French at Claremont High School before leaving Scotland, and so I believed I was in with a shot. I was a good student and knew how to ask for the time, close the door and hang up my hat, all in French.

The teacher, however, thought I had been sent by Candid Camera. She was from Quebec (a province that speaks a different variety of French from France, just to confuse matters) and to her, I sounded like a tractor ripping her language up by the roots and shredding it to tatters before her ears.

My ability to master the written portion of the exams seemed to only frustrate her further as I believe she thought I was actually speaking some form of Scandinavian.

Scotland has changed dramatically since I left, but in 1976, we only had three television channels (although BBC2 barely counted) and the only American shows I can remember were a few cartoons, occasional John Wayne movie and Wizard of Oz every Christmas.

Canada didn't look or sound like any of them, even though my family landed in Calgary, the cowboy capital of the country. This wasn’t Cowboys and Indians (although there were plenty of both), this was oil country with belt buckles the size of your face and ¾-ton, extended-cab pickup trucks larger than a council flat. The city was clean and noticeably graffiti free with large blue skies and powerful Chinook winds that could pick up a small dog and carry it off to Saskatchewan.

It was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. The city sprawled, stretching itself across hills and valleys, spacing everything out so that people didn’t walk ¾ they drove. And they drove a lot. In Canada, but especially in the prairie provinces, people think nothing of driving hundreds of kilometers to find a nice spot for lunch.

But although Calgary was newer and shinier than the city I left, it still had problems that wouldn’t arrive in Scotland for several more years.

I discovered this on my first week of school when my English teacher gave the class an essay assignment to write about a “pot party”. The other students thought this was hilarious, but I was completely befuddled. The only pot party I could imagine was one where a group of people brought over their fat-blackened chip pots and made a huge load of steaming, hot chips.

Now, although that sounded like a fun time to me as I loved a good poke of vinegar-soaked chips, the teacher went on to say that our story should end with the police arriving at the door and the consequences that would entail.

I had to raise my hand.

What the heck could the criminal charges be? Too much hot fat bubbling on top of a stove at the same time?

I was clueless. Drugs just hadn’t entered the mainstream of Scottish education at that time. We had alcohol and violence ¾ I knew all about that. You would be hard pressed to find any schoolboy or girl who hadn’t been a victim and/or witness to some horrific thuggery, but drugs weren’t part of that ¾ not yet.

In Canada, however, every teenager was well versed about cannabis and all its various and colorful aliases.

It sounds horribly naive, but I didn’t even know what you did with it.

The teacher seemed dumbfounded when she had to explain to the foreign kid ¾ who, with the exception of his bright ginger hair, looked just like everyone else in class ¾ that pot was an illegal plant that grew all over Canada (but especially in British Columbia) that people dried and smoked to get high.

As you can imagine, the other students loved this and my status quickly dropped from unusual but kinda cute foreign kid to weird loser who no one could understand.

I further cemented my weird reputation when the school announced that the first theme day of the year was Greaser Day. Naturally, I once again had no clue what a greaser was, but I was determined to find out.

No one sticks out further on theme day than the kid without a costume ¾ or so I thought.

In my research of greaserdom, I discovered it was a term used to describe a 1950s-style rocker. No problem. My dad, a joiner from Burnbank, and my mum, a Glasgow seamstress, had met at the big city dancehalls that were all the rage in the ’50s and ’60s. My dad was so cool back then that he spent his carpentry paycheques on handmade suits from an Italian tailor and had even won a contest to meet Bill Haley and His Comets on their first visit to the UK.

I told my parents that I wanted to look like a ’50s rocker, and they did their best. Unfortunately, the ’50s in Glasgow was an entirely different beast from the ’50s in Canada. Canada basically stole its ’50s memories from America, or more specifically from American TV shows and movies that glamorized that era.

So while every other kid looked like The Fonz from Happy Days in black leather jacket, white T-shirt, blue jeans and greased hair, I arrived looking dapper in a collared shirt and skinny tie, suit jacket borrowed from my mum, and my unruly hair blow-dried into a giant, orange pompadour.

After that disaster, even the really weird kids started ostracizing me.

Fortunately, I switched schools at the end of that year and was given a chance to start again. This time my accent was not quite as broad (although I still cling to it even to this day); I knew what the traditional teenage delicacies of Slurpees, Hoagies and Big Macs were; I could use cool words like “keen” and “keen-o”; I had a cowboy hat for the summer and a toque for the winter; I became an avid downhill skier and I even learned how to roller-skate.

I never stopped being proud of my heritage, but I also became equally proud of growing to be more than I was, a citizen of two countries with memories in each that make me the person I am today: the weird adult with the ginger hair and a stubborn perseverance that refuses to give in even when the odds seem stacked against me.

Without that indefatigability, I would have used all those numerous rejection slips of my early work as an excuse to stop writing. Instead, they became stepping stones to become a better writer and signposts that to my stubborn, Celtic blue eyes read: Never Give Up.

Grant McKenzie is the author of SWITCH, an edge-of-your-seat thriller, available in Canada from Penguin on Aug. 3. SWITCH is already a bestseller in the UK and Germany. You can visit the author’s website