Guest Lou Allin - Moonscape to Paradise?

Moonscape to Paradise and Back?

Canada is known for its sea-to-sea-to-sea pristine, jaw-dropping scenery, but one place has been a national joke since World War One: the moonscape around Sudbury, the Nickel Capital. At the opposite end of the country, both geographically and environmentally, is Paradise, aka Vancouver Island. They're more alike than you'd think.

I knew nothing about Sudbury in 1977 when I jumped at a job offer at the college. Surveying the core mining operations in Coniston and Copper Cliff, I saw the blackrock as vast as Manhattan which had earned it world-class shame for hosting the training astronauts on its barren hills. Lumbering, act one, had started in the 1880s. Discovery of nickel meant that the next decades brought open-pit roasting and then fifty years of acid rain. With no trees or ground cover, soil melted off the bare land, and the rocks darkened. Clear blue lakes became too acid to sustain life. Then in 1972, the Superstack (1247 feet high) was built to scrub the air pollution. Taking their cue, the entire community, business, students, government and private citizens began a monumental re-greening extending into the twenty-first century. Thanks to a cocktail of "rye (grass) on the rocks" and twenty million hardy pine seedlings, when I left in 2006, that moonscape was green again. For its unprecedented comeback, the city received an award from the Earthsummit in Rio.

As a mystery author emissary, I did my part in the Belle Palmer series to convey the chronicle, warts and all. Every book traced the long and worthy journey, even to the last, Memories are Murder, which involved the relocation of elk after an absence of eighty years. I knew I had succeeded when readers from across Canada told me that they wanted to visit.

I moved to the other end of the country to Vancouver Island. "Welcome to Paradise," everyone said. Expecting to marvel at the temperate-rainforest wilderness, I found a country under siege.
Those who keep to the streets of Victoria and ferry across the picturesque straits don't realize the dirty secret that is clear-cutting. Not that the island hasn't been logged several times in most areas over the last hundred and fifty years. Now the timber companies now have found ways to transmute that scarred land to pure gold. In a recent backroom deal, they convinced the government to let them turn their cutting leases into real estate at a million an acre.

By the time islanders woke up, considerable damage was done. A few places were saved, such as the Potholes area in Sooke. However, the surfing territory around Jordan River and back into the hills may be dotted with hundreds of vacation cabins. The government squirms in the ironic position of having to buy back land from the timber companies who were to have served as stewards, not self-servers. Clayaquot Sound, once a clarion call for activism, is one again threatened with mining as well as logging. Where I live west of Victoria, hundreds of logging trucks speed by weekly, loaded with timber barely twenty years old as well as spindly pulpwood. Raw logs sail to China, hardly a value-added proposition.

Douglas firs and the holy mother cedar are among the largest trees on the planet. Blessed by rainfall, they have found the optimal growing conditions. Why can't a tree over five feet in diameter, around when Columbus sailed, be left in threatened Avatar Grove for future generations who don't want to visit a tree museum? Imported tourists could be a far more lucrative and moral way to conserve our precious resources. Trees have become our ivory and chainsaws our poachers.

Sadly, most people never see this destruction unless they travel inland or fly over. The entire island is a poisonous patchwork quilt. My Holly Martin mysteries, And on the Surface Die and She Felt No Pain, rely heavily on setting and reveal the devastation a few metres beyond the narrowing margins. Is squandering a heritage a lesser crime than murder?


As century farms become condos, one giant housing development threatens, from Tofino to Port Hardy to Campbell River. Where the magical island once was self-sufficient, now it's on life support. Stop the ferries for one week, and we all would subsist on blackberries, eggs, and apples. The island used to provide 95% of its food. Now ships arrive in flotillas from South America with tasteless grapes and unripe avocados, burning diesel to pollute the air.

The island has lost its vision, or perhaps a hundred years ago it didn't need one. Groups such as The Land Conservancy and Dogwood Initiative are trying to stem the tide and marshal public opinion. Will this evil path be reversed in time or will Vancouver Island become another moonscape, paradise lost because of those who loved it to death?

Join Mystery Writers Ink for an Evening of Plotting

Mystery Writers Ink is delighted to host an exercise in "Plotting the Perfect Murder – Who Slew Santa?"

In this festive season, please join us to share some snacks while we have some fun, get to know each other better and explore the craft of plotting.

In "Plotting the Perfect Murder – Who Slew Santa," we will discuss plotting for a mystery story. We will look at the crime, character development, motivation and subplots. How can we weave them all together to create a page turning mystery? This is a group discussion, so bring your questions and please come prepared to do some plotting.

Thursday, December 9 

From 7 - 9 p.m.
Owl's Nest Books in Britannia Plaza

Elbow Drive and 49th Avenue SW, Calgary
(Note: the doors open at 6:45p.m.)

There will be great Ink-themed prizes and please feel free to bring some seasonal treats for our snack table.

About Mystery Writers Ink

MWI supports aspiring and emerging mystery writers in Calgary. Annual membership is $25.00.

Drop-in fee of $5.00 for non-members.

For more information, please contact:

info@mysterywritersink.com

Barbara Fradkin on the Supporting Cast

Creating and Maintaining a Supporting Cast


Ten years ago I blundered into this mystery business without a whit of foresight or experience. I had published a few short stories, but when Inspector Green first hit the bookstores in 2000, I had no idea I was creating a series.

As a reader, I was never a slave to series. I rarely read them in order, and generally sampled only a few from each writer. I love British detective novels, but there are too many other wonderful books out there for me to read all the Rebus or Dalgleish books, no matter now much I loved them.

So I didn't know a thing about how to set up a series. How to create a memorable and enduring main character, and even more important, how to surround him with a cast of characters that grew and changed as they followed him from book to book. I wrote Inspector Green as a character I would like to meet - creative, iconoclastic, intelligent, passionate and single-minded when he was on the hunt. As a result, he was a tactless superior, an unreliable husband, and a willfully deaf subordinate, but definitely someone you'd want solving your murder.

I gave him a sergeant who made up for all his flaws. Sergeant Brian Sullivan was patient, pragmatic, and fatherly with rookie cops and grieving families alike. I gave him a wife who put up with his short-comings (barely, at times) because she knew, deep down he was a good man. I rounded out the supporting cast with a boss, a few other subordinates, and a baby to make him human.

I recently launched the eighth in the series, BEAUTIFUL LIE THE DEAD. Over eight books, all these characters have grown. So have I! Mike Green is a far more complex and layered character than my initial creation. Each case has touched him and changed him, moving him forward on his quest for balance and maturity. One of the joys of writing a series is this chance to live with a character, to let him grow and to deepen and enrich his life. I think I have been lucky with Mike Green, for readers seem to enjoy this journey as well. They eagerly await the next book, wondering what he will confront this time, whether his wife will throw him out and whether he and his teenage daughter will mend their fractured bond. Readers react passionately to his transgressions, and their reactions help me to understand how he comes across. This is important to a series author. I don't mind if the reader wants to slap him upside the head for forgetting his wife. But I do mind if they want to throw the book against the wall or abandon the series, for that means the Inspector Green in my heart is not coming to life on the page.

Even more surprising to me, however, has been the power that supporting characters play in the success of a series. Again, I blundered into this discovery purely by serendipity, as readers began to voice their opinions. Different readers have their favourites, but there is always some continuing character that captures the hearts and loyalties of readers. Minor continuing characters provide novelty, opportunities for fresh conflict, and an element of unpredictability which keeps tensions high. Everyone knows that Green will live to solve another crime. But will Brian Sullivan? Will Sue Peters recover? Has Superintendent Jules truly crossed the line?

If the author listens too closely, these loyalties can have a paralyzing effect. Once I idly mused that I was thinking of shaking up Green's life with a major personal crisis. One reader immediately wagged a warning finger. "Don't you dare kill off his father!" Given that his father is edging towards ninety and has been in fragile health throughout the series, I have to face that sometime. But now I worry. Killing off Sid Green will be traumatic enough for me and Green. But for my readers too? Will they give up on the series without their favourite character to revisit?

Recently, several readers have told me they were upset about Brian Sullivan's crisis. Others worried that I was going to write Green's teenage daughter out of the series. I never know what I'm going to do ahead of time. In fact, new characters usually come into the series on the spur of the moment, to serve a purpose to that plot, and they stay around because I enjoy them. Little did I know that readers would care about them too. Or that they'd be an integral part of the appeal and success of the series. Authors, agents and publishers devote a lot of effort to creating an appealing and enduring series lead, but little to the supporting cast who make up the back story and emotional depth of the series.

To keep a series fresh, the drama high and the author entertained, new characters have to burst on the scene and old ones have to fade away. Most of us weigh how each new character will complement the existing characters, creating new contrasts, tensions and intrigue. Maybe we need to give equal thought to how to get rid of them, lest our books become populated with dozens of secondary characters with nothing to do. Getting rid of boring, annoying or inconsequential characters is easy, but those much-loved ones are a different story. We authors write them out or kill them off at our peril.

Ultimately it is our series and our story to tell, but it helps to consider the supporting characters that stir such a passionate following. To ponder what about them is so compelling and what they contribute to the power of the series. The gaping hole will have to be filled somehow, not by a similar character, but perhaps by a character who provides the same emotional context or fills the same need.

I'd love to hear people's experience with this. Any authors who've wrestled with dispatching popular characters? Readers who've been horrified to find their favourite dead at the end of a book?




Barbara Fradkin is a psychologist with a fascination for how we turn bad. Her gritty, psychological detective series featuring Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green has won two Arthur Ellis Best Novel Awards for Fifth Son and Honour Among Men. The eighth in the series, Beautiful Lie the Dead,, has just been released by Napoleon & Company.

A delightful evening with Gail Bowen

You know she’s from Saskatchewan – three days of snowstorms, -20°C weather and icy roads were no match for Canada’s mystery darling Gail Bowen. Gail’s warm and exuberant personality captivated Mystery Writer’s Ink November meeting as she shared her insights on writing and on being a writer.

On craft:

• The biggest problem with writing is that opportunities to use the basic elements of fiction are missed. Consider: theme, character, secondary characters, point of view, setting, symbolism, structure. There is interplay between all these elements which gives your characters depth and your work meaning.

• Mystery writing falls flat when plot is the primary tool used to advance the novel and the other elements of fiction are neglected.

So how do you create a robust and captivating story? Remember to:

o Give depth to your protagonist. Ask: What does she want more than anything in the world? What does she fear more than anything in the world?

o Create a secondary line of characters who’ll add depth to your protagonist, theme and plot.

Look at a book you admire – if it goes off rail, then the author has failed to use these basic elements. Understand why it didn’t work.

Good mysteries are more than just a who-dun-it and catch the criminal. Every good mystery also explores a theme. What is the larger issue behind the book? Who is your audience? What are you trying to say? For example, in Gail’s latest book of the Joanne Kilbourn series, The Nesting Dolls, the larger question or theme is one of nature versus nurture. A theme adds depth not only to primary and secondary characters, but also embellishes the other elements of fiction such as symbolism and setting. Theme can be carried along by the secondary characters which helps avoid a strictly plot driven novel.

Ask yourself what you hope to accomplish with this piece of writing. Is the genre you’re working in taking you where you want to be? If not, go somewhere else. For example, is mystery the best vehicle to explore your theme or observations on humanity? Is it romance, fantasy or a literary novel?

With a series, there are a lot of pages to develop a character – it is akin to living a human life. The character grows, changes and is affected by the world around them (especially by those secondary characters).

On being a writer:

• No manuscript is ever finished – have faith in what you’re doing and send it off.

• Consider your manuscript a university essay – after doing the best you can, hand it in and wait for the grade.

• High school is the hardest thing we’ve all done and we survived it. We’ve all been rejected in high school so what’s a rejection by an editor?

• For anyone to write anything is a miracle so never be critical of effort. It takes a lot of courage to write, to send it off and be rejected. But, it’s worse to never have taken the chance.

• Gail doesn’t read in her genre and there are many authors who don’t. Why? She doesn’t want to pick up echoes of someone else’s work in her own. As she so eloquently put it, “You always run your own race and that’s hard to do if you’re always watching the other guy.”

Find your passion and the genre to express it. Think about your themes and characters while never forgetting about the basic elements of fiction. But always remember, what writers do is special and takes a lot of courage. So, keep your courage up and run your own race. Happy writing!

For more information about Gail and her work, visit Gail's website

Summarized by Ann Cooney for Mystery Writers Ink

Gail Bowen: The Craft of Character Driven Mystery

Please note the change of time for Mystery Writers Ink Meeting on
Thursday, November 18. We will be meeting at 5:30 instead of our usual time of 7:30.

We are pleased to welcome Gail Bowen, author of the Joanne Kilbourn Mysteries, for a presentation on The Craft of Character Driven Mystery. Gail will be available before the meeting to sign copies of her books.

About Gail Bowen

Gail Bowen is the current writer in residence at the Calgary Public Library. Her latest novel, The Nesting Dolls, was released August 17, 2010. The first six books in the Joanne Kilbourn series were made into television movies. A Colder Kind of Death, released in 1994, was the winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award. In 2008, Reader's Digest named Gail as Canada's Best Mystery Novelist.

 

!!! NOTE November Meeting DATE CHANGE !!!

***Thursday, November 18: Gail Bowen, author of the Joanne Kilbourn Mysteries***

Gail will be speaking on the craft of character-driven mystery.

Note November TIME change: runs 5:30 - 7 p.m.

instead of the usual 7-9 pm.

Finger foods will be provided.

Writing Isn’t a Wholly Solitary Endeavour

There is a misconception that writing is a solitary activity. insofar as the first steps of the process are concerned, it is. The first draft and rewrites can only be done by the writer. But check out the thank you or acknowledgement pages of any published book. It lists writing groups, friends, family, editors, research contacts, mentors - in short, it's a community of support and resources which helped the author create a publishable book.

Support systems are integral to our success. Good writing groups provide the diverse range of knowledge and skill. Fellow writers inspire us. They challenge us to perfection. They help us perfect our craft. From them, we learn about the business of writing - writing the synopsis and cover letter, how to approach publishers and agents, which ones to contact, etc.

I love Mystery Writers Ink and other writing groups I belong to. The best ones, like MWI, provide awesome speakers and resources to augment my mystery writing needs while another is an awesome critiquing group. Going to meetings with great guest speakers like homicide detectives or successful mystery writers saves me hours of research and allows me to spend more time writing.

Every good writing group has members who help each other by giving advice on craft and genre. Most importantly, we need to be with like-minded people - those who understand the writing life with its successes or the struggles and crazy times. These are the people who celebrate with us when the first draft is complete. They share our angst as we rewrite and perfect the manuscript. They commiserate with us through the rejections. Then, they party with us when the manuscript becomes a published book.

The support we receive, we must give back. That is the nature of the writing life and I find that most successful writers do that. We are there for each other. So, look at the writing group you belong to. Does it feed your need for expert knowledge on craft and genre? Does it inspire and encourage you? Then, ask yourself, how can I do for this group? Writing groups succeed because of dedicated volunteers. But, those volunteers can only do so much without jeopardising their own writing. The old adage, many hands make light work, seems trite but it's true. If we all do a little, we all get a lot back.

So remember, successful authors have a community of support around them ......

Ann Cooney