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Carolyn Mulford

Carolyn Mulford

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Monthly Archives: December 2013

What This Writer Did in 2013

Carolyn Mulford Posted on December 29, 2013 by CarolynDecember 29, 2013

Making notes for my annual letter, I realized almost everything I did in 2013 involved my Show Me mystery series. The series—with four books in different stages—took over the year.

In January I submitted the third book, Show Me the Gold, to the publisher. A day or two later the content editor emailed her comments on the second book, Show Me the Deadly Deer. Only minor points, but they took time and care. In warm weather that manuscript came back to me two more times, for a check of the copyediting and for proofing before it went to the printer.

The first book, Show Me the Murder, came out in hardcover February 15. (The Kindle edition was released in August.) In early February came the year’s biggest thrill for me: reading the first review. It appeared in Kirkus Reviews. Just the fact that Kirkus bothered to review my book was positive, and so was the review.  Then came good reviews in Library Journal and other publications. Happy times.

After struggling to find a publisher for years, I was relieved and gratified by the reviewers’ comments. I put snippets of those on the invitations to my book launch in March.

From then on I spent a lot of time promoting Show Me the Murder. One bonus for those efforts: I introduced The Feedsack Dress to new readers. While promoting challenged and rewarded me, the process bores anyone else. I’ll just say that I sent out review copies to Missouri publications (the publisher sends to national ones), gave talks at libraries and other places, served on panels at three mystery conferences, taught three writing workshops, and did signings with and without readings. I’m used to public speaking and always prepare well, so these events were no big deal.

Only one appearance worried me, a regional Young Authors’ Day in Warrensburg. The organizer sent me 10 second graders’ winning stories, essays, and poems to comment on both in writing and orally after each child read his or her piece before peers and parents. Plus I had to invent a writing exercise for them. I really dreaded opening the envelope containing their work and coming up with helpful, positive comments.

To my relief, they wrote much better than I expected. I was able to write genuine editorial comments. I consulted with friends who had taught elementary school. They warned me some kids would be afraid to read in front of strangers. No one suggested a great writing exercise. I really wanted to back out.

It went great, though one little girl faced me rather than the audience and read so softly that only I who could hear her. And none of the kids knew what I was talking about when I mentioned a teeter-totter in an analogy. Apparently it has been banned from playgrounds.

Through the winter and spring I stewed over the next book until a plot and theme held my interest. I made notes, did some research, named characters, and, in May, started to write Show Me the Ashes. I’m still writing.

In November, Kirkus gave Deadly Deer, its first review, a good one. I was happy but not overjoyed. Nothing equals that first time.

—Carolyn Mulford

Posted in Events, Mysteries, News, Show Me Series

Show Me the Deadly Deer Released

Carolyn Mulford Posted on December 23, 2013 by CarolynDecember 23, 2013

 

The second book in the Show Me mystery series has been released in Kindle and hardcover editions. I’ve already received a reader’s comment on the Kindle edition (my cousin loved it), but the hardcover won’t reach stores and libraries for a few days.

Show Me the Deadly Deer features the main characters introduced in Show Me the Murder. Former CIA covert operative Phoenix Smith tells the story, which begins when Acting Sheriff Annalynn Carr Keyser enlists Phoenix’s help in looking for a missing farmer.

You can read a teaser summary and the first chapter on the Show Me the Deadly Deer page.

Kirkus Reviews published the first review, its summary saying, “Small-town Missouri again proves almost as dangerous to a former CIA agent as European back alleys. Mulford’s second provides plenty of excitement as readers wend their ways through a slew of suspects.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch reviewer Harry Levins notes that the book depicts the murder rate in rural Missouri as urban high but says, “Still, the local color can be colorful indeed.”

Hardcover prices at online bookstores vary from day to day, so if you want to order a copy online, check more than one site.

—Carolyn Mulford

Posted in Mysteries, News, Show Me Series

Interview: Judy Hogan Shares Her Writing Techniques

Carolyn Mulford Posted on December 18, 2013 by CarolynDecember 18, 2013
Judy Hogan; Photo by Mark Schmerling

Judy Hogan; Photo by Mark Schmerling

Judy Hogan has led the writing life for fifty years. In October 2013 one publisher released her second mystery, Farm Fresh and Fatal, and another her fifth book of poetry, Beaver Soul. She also has written two nonfiction books, founded and served as editor of Carolina Wren Press (1976-1991), and continues to teach courses in writing fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction (e.g., diary/memoir).Her mystery series reflects her deep roots in social activism and in North Carolina. The first book, Killer Frost (Mainly Murder Press, 2012), involves educational and financial fraud on a historically black college campus, a setting she knows well. Farm Fresh and Fatal focuses on another familiar place, a farmers’ market, with vendors holding different views on sustainable agriculture and genetically modified produce.

I interviewed Judy about why and how she writes mysteries.

Q: You’ve written poetry and prose, nonfiction and fiction. Why did you choose to write traditional mysteries?

I started reading mysteries in 1981, when I was forty-four. My eldest child had gone off to college, and I had a little more time in the evening when I was too tired to work. I began with Golden Age authors my father recommended. He’d been reading them all his adult life, and I’d never understood why. He was a minister who escaped by reading mysteries? A puzzle I now understand. I read Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, P.D. James.

In 1990, I was having a writing vacation (to write poetry) on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, and instead of ranging around the cliffs, I was housebound with a sprained ankle. My landlady in the B&B, who could never get me to watch the telly because I wanted to read mysteries, said, “Judy, why don’t you write a murder?” I began to plot one set in a B&B, with my landlady as a character.

I didn’t know I was writing a traditional mystery. It was later in a workshop with Margaret Maron that I learned that. I did try to publish The Sands of Gower. I even had a nice rejection letter from Ruth Cavin, the legendary editor at St. Martin’s. I had always thought that writing poetry was my best genre, and maybe that’s true, but I found mysteries fun to write, and in them I was able to do some things that I couldn’t do in my nonfiction writing. I could invent characters and put them together and see what they would do, and in this way learn things I didn’t know I knew about myself and other people. That’s the magic of fiction for me. I also like happy endings. Some books have tragedy, but there’s still a sense of completion and a transformation.

Q: How did your experience writing essays, memoir, and poetry help you in writing your mysteries?

I think all writing you do helps other writing. I keep a diary, write in it every morning, and that has proved a good way to clear out my mind of trivia. Then I write a poem, an essay, or get ready to write fiction. I had learned in those other forms that I wrote better and more effectively, in a way to touch other people more, if I went deeper, and the part of me that I call the Muse, or the true creativity, came into play. So I came closer to my writing goals. I don’t usually have characters wake me up, but they definitely come alive in my mind. Over the years I had already developed a good relationship with my Muse, and pen to paper had become natural, comfortable.

Mainly Murder Press, 2013

Mainly Murder Press, 2013

Q: You present issues important to you in your mysteries. Those issues help propel the plot, motivate the characters, and establish the setting. Even so, the mystery dominates the message, and your endings surprise readers. What techniques did you use in conceiving and writing Farm Fresh and Fatal to assure storytelling didn’t cross over into preaching?

The thing about fiction and mysteries in particular is that you have a moral universe. I have a heroine and various admirable characters, and then I have a killer and some characters who are annoying in one way or another. My killers aren’t usually purely evil, but they have become desperate or in some way, lost their perspective or become obsessed. So the basic plot of the mystery serves me to highlight problems in the community that in some way “spawn” a killer.

Once I have my idea of the problem I want to focus on (and I’ve worked on all the ones I take up with the activist side of my personality) and set up the good and bad characters, the murderer and the suspects, the plot tends to highlight the situation in the community that worries me. I like speaking this way about issues, and after being involved in local politics, this suits me better. I often upset people in a grassroots effort because I tend to be blunt, and even the good guys sometimes become pompous and don’t like to hear someone speak the truth. I can speak all the truth I want in my books and make fun of people who annoy me, even kill them off!

Q: You introduce a lot of characters in the early chapters but manage to make each one distinctive. How do you go about choosing and creating characters?

I have an ongoing heroine/sleuth, Penny Weaver, loosely based on me, my age, a poet, with many of my interests, but her voice is a little more satirical than mine. Her lover/husband Kenneth was her first sidekick, and then a character I wholly invented, Sammie Hargrave, an African American, came to life, and I liked her so much that I found her an ideal sidekick, more even than Kenneth, who tends to worry about Penny’s always seeming to end up face to face with the murderer. Sammie also balances Penny’s usually good behavior. Sammie will deceive, take on criminals with karate moves, and is generally ready for anything.

I use Elizabeth George’s Write Away strategies for character and plot development. I write down all the characters I need. After this many books, I already have a lot to choose from, since an interracial group of activists works on issues in my fictional Riverdell.

Actual people sometimes get me going. People are each so different when you get to know them, and their quirks help me make them unique and provide humor, hopefully. My goal is that each one lives individually for the reader. I still work at that, but they come alive better if I know how they talk, behave, what their background is, what their “core need” is and what they do when they can’t have what they believe they need. The Muse helps. I often ask her questions re characters and plot, and she makes suggestions, which I almost always follow. Knowing the characters well helps me plot.

Q: One of your ongoing themes is rocky relationships between mothers and their adult daughters. Are you taking a personal risk here? What do your daughters think of the scenes between Penny, the main character, and her somewhat unstable daughter Sarah?

Oh, my. I’ve given my books to my two daughters, and I don’t think either one has read them, and perhaps they won’t recognize themselves, though they have both, and my son, too, given me pause over the years. In the end my life is richer because my kids gave me a hard time, even to our needing some therapy as a divorced family, to get them raised. Those conflicts are still vivid to me. It’s easy for me to write scenes between adult children and their parents. My oldest is fifty-one, and my youngest is forty-one, and I hope they don’t take offense if/when they read the books. I’m taking the risk.

Mainly Murder Press, 2012

Mainly Murder Press, 2012

Q: What are you writing now? What’s next?

Saturday, December 7, I wrote the last words of the first draft of Pernicious Poll. It’s about North Carolina’s new harsh voting law, which in its effects is quite discriminatory against African Americans and the poor.

I hope to get the very first mystery I wrote out next. I’ve revised The Sands of Gower, and I think readers will like to go back to when Penny met Kenneth. Tormentil Hall, which comes after Farm Fresh, also takes place on Gower in Wales, and I think the readers need the first novel to enjoy fully the eighth. My publishing sequence is going to be mixed up, but that’s already true.

Q: Many people look forward to leaving their day job and writing mysteries as a second (or even primary) career. What’s the single most important advice you give the person who wants to become a mystery writer?

Love doing it, do it because it makes you happy, whether you sell it or not. Write what you wish to write–the advice of Virginia Woolf, Louise Penny, Carolyn Hart, Elizabeth George. Go for broke, and then get good feedback you trust. It might be a group, or one person. I didn’t find that critique groups worked for me, but I now have two readers. Both love to read mysteries, both are honest but essentially like what I do. That is helping tremendously. They find the things I miss or didn’t make clear. Of course, read good books. The best models make the best writers.

Q: What have been the most satisfying comments on Farm Fresh and Fatal?

I was fortunate to have a blurb from Carolyn Hart: “Farm Fresh and Fatal features an appealing protagonist, an intriguing background, and well-realized characters. Readers will enjoy these characters and empathize with their successes and failures. In the tradition of Margaret Maron.”

A writer friend of mine, Sharon Ewing, wrote one. Your close friends sometimes aren’t that impressed with your writing, but Sharon reviewed the book, quite thoughtfully and appreciatively, on Amazon. She said, “The first sentence of the book plunges into the action that will carry the reader to the fast-paced turns and twists of the final chapter.”

Then recently, November 30, Ruth Moose reviewed it in a little paper in Southern Pines, The Pilot. She wrote, “Hogan writes with passion and knowledge about genetically modified foods that can produce ‘tomatoes that bounce like ping pong balls,’ and the community of those who know and love the earth.” She made my day. Newspaper reviews are hard to get in these times. You can read the full review at http://www.thepilot.com/search/?t=article&s=start_time&sd=desc&d1=5+years+ago&q=Book+Review%3A+Farm+Fresh+and+Fatal.

Judy, thanks you for sharing your expertise.

—Carolyn Mulford

Finishing Line Press, 2013

Finishing Line Press, 2013

For information on ordering autographed copies of her mysteries and poetry, email judyhogan at mindspring.com or visit her website (http://judyhogan.home.mindspring.com) or blog (http://postmenopausalzest.blogspot.com).

Copies of her mysteries (in paper and e-book format) are available from major online bookstores and mainlymurderpress.com

Copies of Beaver Soul may be ordered from Amazon (search Finishing Line Press chapbooks) and Finishing Line Press.

 

 

Posted in Mysteries, Mysterious Ways, Uncategorized

Personal Experience Prompted My Historical Novel

Carolyn Mulford Posted on December 3, 2013 by CarolynDecember 3, 2013

For many years I made my living as a nonfiction writer, striving to gather the essential facts and present material objectively.

Then, after traveling around the world, I came home and marveled at how life in rural Missouri had changed. My generation was the last to grow up in a nation made up of small, diversified, family farms, the ones growing most of their own food (vegetables, fruit, and meat) and a variety of crops to feed their animals and to sell for what they couldn’t produce.

I wanted to preserve the record of what life had been like in the mid 20th century, but what could I write that people would read? The topic exceeded the bounds of a feature article. I lacked both the expertise and the desire to write a socio-economic tome about the country’s transition. My childhood was too uneventful for a memoir in the mode of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.

That left fiction. I had vivid memories of edging from childhood toward adulthood in the 1950s, and I wanted to reach readers going through that mix of elation and misery. I read social histories of the period that brought home how much the whole nation changed after World War II.

On our farm, the big change came with the arrival of electricity in the late 1940s. I decided to focus on that period, a time of transition for our farm and for the nation. Then my story should feature a transition for the main character. The big one came when a g country kid finished the eighth grade at a one-room rural school and entered a much larger junior high in town.

The idea for The Feedsack Dress began to form. I began to make a slow transition from nonfiction to fiction.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

Posted in News, The Feedsack Dress, Young Adult

Workshop: Writing Your Past Into Fiction

Carolyn Mulford Posted on December 3, 2013 by CarolynDecember 3, 2013

Our lives are part of the long continuum of human history, but how do you use your tiny fragment in a novel?

At 10:30 a.m., Saturday, December 7, I’ll answer that question during a workshop in the Columbia (MO) Public Library. I’ll talk about how I drew on memory, others’ memories, library research, and imagination in writing The Feedsack Dress, an MG/YA novel set in northeast Missouri in 1949. Using short readings, I’ll illustrate such points as incorporating real life into your plot and c haracterizations.

We draw on our experience no matter what we write. I’ll touch on how I’ve done that in writing my Show Me mystery series.

To register, call 573-443-3161.

—Carolyn Mulford

Posted in Events, News, The Feedsack Dress

Latest Postings


I Am a River

Carolyn Mulford Posted on April 19, 2025 by CarolynApril 19, 2025

Each week I lunch with a group of friends and discuss a topic. Last time the coordinator posed this question: What is the shape of your life? The answers included a rectangle, a vase, a cloud, and an octagon. Usually I wing it, but this time I wrote my response. The Shape of My Life I am a river, Birthed in a puddle, Nourished by rain, Pushed to overflow And grow broader And deeper.   Springs and creeks fed my flow. Widening waters gathered force, Thrusting me against unyielding barriers And cascading me over rocky falls.   Other streams joined … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized

Where to Find My Books

Carolyn Mulford Posted on April 1, 2025 by CarolynApril 1, 2025

While only one of my books, Show Me the Sinister Snowman, continues to be published in print and electronic editions, several of my novels are available from online sellers. Most of the copies are used, but columbiabooksonline.com, my supportive local bookstore, has a small stock of new Show Me hardbacks and paperbacks. I also have a few copies of all my novels except The Feedsack Dress, my historical children’s book, and Show Me the Murder, the first in my mystery series featuring a former spy returning   home and solving crimes with old friends. Fortunately e-editions still exist. Barnes and Noble … Continue reading →

Posted in Mysteries, The Feedsack Dress, Uncategorized

Looking Forward 60 Years Ago

Carolyn Mulford Posted on February 28, 2025 by CarolynFebruary 28, 2025

Reminders of my attempts to start my writing career arrived last Christmas. A friend, Joyce Campbell, sent me letters I had written to her while we were serving as Peace Corps Volunteers (teaching English) in Ethiopia from September 1962 to July 1964 and in the months after we returned home (Chattanooga, Tennessee, for her and Kirksville, Missouri, for me) after traveling through Europe. On December 21, 1964, I wrote, “Has anything turned up for you yet? People don’t seem terribly impressed with Peace Corps experience for job qualifications it seems to me. I’m going down to the University Placement Bureau … Continue reading →

Posted in Writing

Mid-Continent Earthquakes, Past and Future

Carolyn Mulford Posted on December 16, 2024 by CarolynDecember 16, 2024

About 2:30 a.m. December 16, 1811, an earthquake threw people in New Madrid, Missouri Territory, out of bed and crumbled brick houses and cabin chimneys, forced the Mississippi River to run backward and change course, disturbed sleep along most of the East Coast, and toppled dishes from shelves in the White House. That marked the beginning of some of the most powerful, prolonged quakes the United States has experienced. These weren’t the first in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which is centered near where Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky come together. Geologists and other scientists have found indications that powerful … Continue reading →

Posted in Historicals, News, Thunder Beneath My Feet

The Turkey That Bullied Me

Carolyn Mulford Posted on November 26, 2024 by CarolynNovember 26, 2024

I grew up with animals as friends, the first being our dog Roamer. He and I wandered around the yard, the barnyard, and the garden. Roamer barked at squirrels and chased rabbits from our vegetables. He made me ponder one of life’s great puzzles: Is it okay to sympathize with Peter Rabbit in the story but condemn him when your own carrots are at risk? Roamer knew not to chase our chickens or cows or pigs, and he joined me in playing with an orphaned lamb and the kittens whose parents kept the barn free of mice. What he didn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized

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