FARGO

Monday, April 23, at 4 pm, Ellen Kuhfeld, Joan Marie Verba, and I (as Mary Monica Pulver) will be at the University of Minnesota – Minneapolis bookstore for a reading and discussion.

On Tuesday at 2 pm, I (as Monica Ferris) will come to a book club at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in St. Louis Park to talk about the Betsy Devonshire series. The members have decided to open the meeting to the public.

On Saturday, April 28, from 1 to 5 pm, St. Peter, Minnesota, will hold a Book Festival at their Community Center. Put on by Gustavus Adolphus College, the event will feature readings, panels, and appearances by more than a dozen area authors – including me. (http://www.vita.mn/event_detail.php?event_id=130526) St. Peter is a pretty little town on the Minnesota River, once proposed as the capitol of Minnesota. I used it as the scene of a murder in Thai Die.

This past Friday and Saturday I was in Fargo, North Dakota, attending the tenth annual stitching event put on by Nordic Needle. About eighty people came, their capacity – it is so popular that they announce it and all the slots are taken literally within an hour or two. They offer lots of classes, many in very advanced kinds of stitchery. Nordic Needle was featured in my current mystery Threadbare, and I spent a couple of hours Saturday evening signing LOTS of copies sold to attendees by the store. Stitchers are among the nicest people on earth and it was an extremely pleasant experience for several reasons. One was that I met a woman who shares my interest in English history. She and I sat down later and had a wonderful gossip about the Kings and Queens past, present and future. Another was a bookmark display. Nordic Needle asks stitchers to make bookmarks for a contest, and distributes all entries to an organization that encourages children to read. There were a lot of beautiful, simple, clever, inspiring, funny, cute, amazing entries put on display at the event. It would be wonderful to think that a child who gets one of the bookmarks is inspired to take up needlework. A woman from Bermuda – did I mention that people come from all over the world to this event? – came and did a demonstration of bobbin lace. There’s a good look at bobbin lace being made in this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiTqdr38tTU. I donated two copies of Threadbare to be given as door prizes at the Saturday morning breakfast, and one winner was from Norway. She was a very sweet senior woman who, with her husband, has gone all over the world doing work for the Salvation Army. Her daughter is a physician in London. It was an honor to meet her!

My cat Snaps is having digestive problems. Normally when he throws up, the result is a pile of partly-digested food. Lately it’s been a cream-colored liquid, and it’s happening almost every day. I’ve put in a call to the vet, but meanwhile, do any of you have any idea what the problem might be? He remains lively and interested in everything.

Also Known As

Saturday, April 7, is the tenth annual Write of Spring at the wonderful, Mystery Writers of America Raven Award Winning, mystery book store, Once Upon A Crime. Minnesota crime authors will attend in staggered blocks all day long. My group’s session starts at 1 pm. There will also be on sale a new anthology, Writes of Spring, put together by Pat and Gary, owners of Once Upon A Crime, and featuring stories by authors who have come to the annual event. I’ve got a short story in it, written as Mary Monica Pulver. I have my author’s copy of the book, and am pleased to be in such terrific company. The bookstore is donating the proceeds to the Memorial Blood Centers. The event will also mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the bookstore.

Mary Monica Pulver is my maiden name and the name I used when I first turned pro. My father was dying of bone cancer and I wanted to get something published under the family name. I made it, but barely, selling a couple of stories to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Later I sold five mystery novels under that name, and more short stories. My husband and I sold some short stories we wrote together as Al and Mary Kuhfeld. Then a friend and I started a collaboration as Margaret Frazer, writing six novels in the Dame Frevisse medieval mystery series – she continued the series on her own when the collaboration broke up and is currently writing a spin-off series about a set of wandering play-actors. And I am writing the Betsy Devonshire needlework mysteries as Monica Ferris. It sounds a bit complicated, but it all evolved naturally.

Pseudonyms are rather fun. One of my new favorite mysteries is a mother-son collaboration written under the name Charles Todd. I was wildly fond of Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder series, but he had another, much darker, series under a different name I didn’t like at all. I understand there are authors who write one kind of novel under one name and a very different kind – erotica – under another. What name might you choose if you were writing hard-boiled noir? Romance? Science fiction? Vampire? Western? Erotica?

Book Signings

One of the more pleasant duties of being a published author is doing signings. It’s a time when I actually get to meet face to face with the people who are reading my books. It’s ego-boosting – which for someone engaged in an essentially lonely profession is marvelous – and sometimes useful, because I’ll get feedback about the direction I’m taking with my stories and/or characters. Even, once in a while, I’ll be offered a story idea or book title I can actually use. So I love to do book signings.

One of my favorites is an annual event, offered by a local mystery bookstore, Once Upon A Crime. Owners Pat and Gary call it Write of Spring, and this past Saturday was their ninth annual.

Minnesota is chock-a-block with authors, many of them mystery writers. No one seems sure why, but I think it has something to do with our long, dark winters. If you’re not a skier, a snowmobiler, or an ice fisherman, what else is there to do but write?

This year there were about fifty mystery authors in attendance at Write of Spring. We came in one-hour shifts, standing shoulder to shoulder behind a long table stacked with our books. The place was crowded with visitors, who munched on ginger cookies and lemonade while waiting to speak with a favorite author, buy a book or, in some cases, offer previously purchased books they brought along for autographs. At this point in my career, I have a long backlist, so I got to talk about not just my current Betsy Devonshire series, but also the Dame Frevisse medieval mystery series and even the Peter Brichter series I started with back in the 80s. One author who came in a little early for the second shift is dear friend Gail Frazer, with whom I collaborated on the Dame Frevisse series. Pat had a set of the six books we wrote together (Gail continued the series alone later) to be sent to a collector. She wanted us to autograph them, both with our mutual pseudonym and our “real name.”

That raised a question for me: What is my real name? That is, I have a legal name, the one I married into, but not many people know or use it. I have a “professional” name, my maiden name, the one I started writing under. And I have a current pseudonym, the one most of my readers know me by. I decided to go with the professional name.

One thing I noticed about the books, which began appearing in 1992 as paperback originals, is that the pages are already turning brown. Before too long, they will crumble. Now it has been my position that one problem with e-books is that, as the technology changes, the ones coming out now will be unreadable and volumes will be lost. But looking at the browning pages of Margaret Frazer’s books, I realized that time will render them unreadable, too. There’s something sad, even tragic, about that. Not that I write deathless prose, but there is value in even the common literature of a culture and its loss is real.

Falling in Love

It is not unknown for a writer to fall in love with one or more of her characters – possibly the most notorious was Dorothy Sayers' passion for Lord Peter Wimsey. I know that I become fond of many of my characters, possibly because early in my writing career I read that the afterlife of an author consists of spending eternity in a small room with the characters she has invented. There’s a warning to make them at least interesting if not actually likable.

But sometimes I develop an equally keen pleasure in spending time in a setting I have invented. When I set out to write my first mystery series, I chose to set it at a horse farm. I chose the Arabian horse because the first time I saw one in person, lost my heart to the breed. But the most fun with the setting I had was the beautiful Queen Anne house my heroine lived in. I found a photograph of one I really liked, and drew up a floor plan. A rather clumsy one – floor plans are harder than they look! – but I explained that by saying the original owner had a wife with a whim of iron who kept making demands for changes as the house went up. I subscribed to a house and garden magazine, perused Architectural Digest in doctor's and dentist's offices, and visited high-end furniture stores to interview decorators. I even started a scrapbook with clippings of furniture and architectural details.

Because the nearby town was terribly corrupt, I invented it, too; even drew a city map.

For the Dame Frevisse medieval series, I mostly used two books as sources: Eileen Powers’ Medieval English Nunneries, and Dorothy Hartley’s Lost Country Life, though there was a great deal of secondary reading, too. Having spent two years in England helped as well. Gail had her own sources (down to the names of sheriffs and weather reports from the fifteenth century!). She and I immersed ourselves so deeply in medieval customs and attitudes that I, at least, found coming back to the twentieth century at the end of a book a bit of a shock.

Now I’m writing about an actual small town, Excelsior, Minnesota, with an imaginary needlework shop in it. I have based the layout of the shop on an actual one, unfortunately now closed, and I frequent needlework shops in the area for ideas and methods. One of the pleasure of using a real town is that when I go out there for lunch or shopping, it’s a tax-deductible expense! One small problem is that, because it’s a real town, changes occur that I don’t always like. I have decided, for example, that there is a micro-brewery where the Waterfront Cafe used to stand, when actually it turned into a sushi restaurant. And I’ve kept the hardware store where actually an Irish pub now occupies
the building. But Leipold’s is still there, and Antiquity Rose, and Jim Penberthy still has his law office on Water Street.

Whenever I want to send Betsy out of town, my editor objects on the grounds that Excelsior is another of the running characters in the books. Are there books you read as much for the settings as the plot?

Got You Covered!

One surprising thing – to beginning writers – about being published is that the author doesn’t get to choose the cover. Once in a great while, after having several books published, an editor will ask an author if he or she has any suggestions for the cover. Once in an even greater while, the idea the author has will influence the cover.

The usual thing is that, as the book begins the publishing process the author will receive, in the mail or via e-mail, the “cover art,” a more-than-rough-sketch. The author’s reaction can range from “Arrrrggghhh!” to “Wow, that’s great!”

I had a good friend who wrote science fiction, and who was achieving considerable success, who was sent the cover art for her next book. She was startled when it featured a scantily-clad, well-endowed woman, because her book was about a world populated by beings who resembled bears. She remarked that very likely there was a sci-fi author out there somewhere who couldn’t understand why his well-endowed humanoid heroine was portrayed on his cover as ursine.

My first mystery series, written as Mary Monica Pulver, featured a police detective whose wife raised and bred Arabian horses. Of the five books, four featured a horse on the cover. Though the covers were attractive, in none of them was the horse an Arab.

The one cover that didn’t have a horse on it, did have another problem. The story is set at the Great Pennsic War, a Society for Creative Anachronism annual event. Rather than just describing what the event looks like, we sent the publisher some photographs. To our amazement, the cover art was taken from one of the photographs and the people on it were clearly recognizable. We had to make some hasty phone calls to warn the people involved and see if they objected. Fortunately, they didn’t.

I think all of the covers of my Betsy Devonshire mysteries are very attractive, even eye-catching – which, of course, is the idea. I can’t wait to see what they’re going to do with Threadbare.

Writing the First Novel

My first novel started out as a screen play. I had an idea for an episode of a television show, and wrote it in proper script form, trying to time it so the commercial breaks fell at the usual times. I was very proud of that script, and even had a connection to get it to the desk of the executive producer -- but the show was cancelled before he read it. I was absolutely crushed. But after a few weeks I decided perhaps it would work as a short story. I changed the characters so they no longer resembled the television show characters, but when I started to write it, it just kept getting longer and longer. Finally I realized that what I had here was a novel.

The plot was fairly complicated, and much depended on events crossing at exactly the right time. Plus, for some reason, I had to keep track of days of the week, so that there were only seven in each, and that Monday followed Sunday just like in real life. I finally went out and bought a pack of three by five cards and put a brief synopsis of a scene from the book on each card, then laid them out on the carpet. I shifted events around until they all matched up while still making sense, then labeled each scene with the day of the week. It was real work, and took days to do, but I thoroughly enjoyed doing it. Plus, when I went back to writing the novel, events fell into their proper places. That was a huge, satisfying pleasure. I still keep a stack of three-by-five cards on my desk, use them for everything from reminder notes of plot points to grocery lists.

I still sometimes find I need to print out large segments of the story. I don’t know why, but it looks different printed on a sheet of paper than it does on the computer screen. And typos are easier to spot for some reason. Back before laptops, I would print out the whole thing as I wrote it, and put it in a loose-leaf binder so I could carry it to work and do some editing on the bus or over my lunch break. Then I’d make the changes on the computer version, print out the edited pages and replace the old pages in the binder. Somewhere I found a heavy blue plastic binder that has a clear-plastic holder on the spine that holds a title and a pair of handles on the other end so I could carry it like a briefcase, and that fold down out of sight when not needed. It still holds the manuscript of a novel I never finished.

I learned how to write novels by writing, re-writing, and re-re-writing that first novel manuscript. I also learned that, without intervention, I would continue re-writing forever. My husband, an excellent editor of my work, would call a halt. “I declare this story finished,” he would say on finding I wanted to take “just one more pass” through a short story. Nowadays, with book deadlines, I no longer have the luxury of taking all the time I want on a manuscript.

I have found that my stories usually -- not always, but usually -- start with the murder. Often it’s the method that will trigger an plot, but sometimes it’s the victim. I’ll read about an unusual way of dying, or think up a person who has done something really wicked, or cruel, or who is himself or herself wicked, greedy, or cruel. Sometimes it’s the culprit who is wicked and/or greedy, though in that case, I generally need another wicked or greedy person to be another suspect. I love inventing characters, and I love it when they seem to take on a life of their own.

With the Betsy Devonshire mysteries, I also need to research different aspects of the needle crafts. With my current novel, I’m finding I have to re-visit Hardanger. Uff da!