Kiki Lowenstein and the Missing Gift, Part I

By Joanna Campbell Slan

Author's Note: I'm going crazy finishing my project for the 2016 Creatin' Contest, a dollhouse contest. But this is National Novel Writing Month, and therefore, I'm also feeling guilty for not doing more writing. So...I thought I'd challenge myself by writing an ongoing short story. I'm doing this live--and I sure hope it works! I plan to end it around Christmas. 

The sight of my scrapbook and crafting store, Time in a Bottle, always gives me a thrill, especially during the holidays. We've decorated our front  window to the hilt. The roof line is festooned with bright lights. Vibrant colors bounced off the pristine snow that had fallen overnight. I hate the cold, but I love the sights when Christmas is right around the corner.

There is so much to look forward to!

I laughed out loud thinking of all the festive activities documented on our calendar. With two small kids and a teenager, my husband, Detweiler, and I will be busy in a ho-ho-ho-happy way. Already there has been a lot of buzzing around, whispering of secrets, and giggling after lights out. The children have holiday fever. Their excitement keeps ratcheting up, as does the noise level. These days, when I'm in my car alone, I keep the radio off and savor the silence.

Slowly, I pulled into the parking lot. The fresh snow crunched under my tires in a satisfying way. I've owned the store for nearly a year, going on two. When my friend and mentor Dodie Goldfader found out that she had cancer, she sold the place to me, on contract. In the beginning, I had many sleepless nights, wondering whether I could make the payments. Somehow, by the grace of God, and with a ton of hard work, I've managed to keep this train on the rails, chugging down the tracks.

Craning my neck, I realized I wasn't the first person here. In the parking space next to the back door was Margit's car, an old white Buick. Margit also owns a portion of the store, although hers is a teensy-tiny share. I offered to buy her out, but Margit says the store gives her a reason to get up in the morning. She's a widow whose mother has Alzheimer's and is in an assisted living facility.

According to Margit, we're her family. I like it when she says that.

She's right. We have only three full-timers. There's Clancy--my right-hand woman, and a Jackie Kennedy look-alike--and Margit and me.

Margit is a seventy-something-year-old German woman, who typifies what the locals call "Scrubby Dutch." "Dutch" being a perversion of "deutsche," which means "German." My friend is incredibly precise. Her desk is a monument to the slogan, "A place for everything and everything in its place." She knows exactly how many ink pens, paper clips, and so on she has. At the end of any work day, she arranges her pencils in their cup with the lead tips facing the ceiling. Her in- and out-boxes are tidy to the point of ridiculous. She wears the same outfit each Monday. Another is specified for every Tuesday, and so on. Every part of her life is exactly that organized.

I drive her nuts.

With great care, I climbed out of my car, a black Lexus SUV we'd recently purchased. The slick surface of the snow threatened my balance. For a minute, the world seemed off-kilter. I grabbed the door handle, blinked, and realized...the world was fine.

The problem was Margit's car.

Not only was it parked crooked, but one side was noticeably higher than the other.

What on earth?

**

Part II of Kiki Lowenstein and the Missing Gift will be posted here on November 27. You'll find out what's wrong with Margit.

New Year/New Changes

As many of you know, I'm making changes. My last post on this blog will be January 6, 2013. I hope you'll plan to come and visit here on that date as I'll be giving away copies of books.

From then on, I'll be posting regularly on my personal blog http://joannaslan.blogspot.com

Why should you join me on my personal blog? Well, that's where I'll share news about the contract I'm signing for a brand new series! Here's what I can share: It's a three-book contract for a mystery series featuring a spunky female protagonist and there'll be a whole lot of crafting involved in this cozy.

As time goes on, I'll also tell you what's next for Kiki Lowenstein. And I'll continue to share my love of crafting, which isn't confined to scrapbooking. More and more, I'm interested in drawing, painting, and other papercrafts.

Over the past few days, I've taken a bit of a vacation. I've been exercising my creativity in a new way by following some of the suggestions in Drawing and Painting Imaginary Animals: A Mixed-Media Workshop with Carla Sonheim. I believe the brain is a muscle. By exercising it, by stretching it in different directions, it grows. So above is my first attempt at an imaginary beast. To Sonheim's instructions, I added several Zentangle designs. 

My idea of a vacation is a time when I can read a lot. I've finished Manhunt by Peter Bergen (about the search for bin Laden), Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (about the slums of Mumbai), and now I'm reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (about Thomas Cromwell and his relationship to Henry VIII).

I'm looking forward to 2013. It's going to be a good year. I hope you'll continue my journey with me!

PS The clicker tells me that this is our 1952 blog post! Wow!

The Tipping Point for Kiki Lowenstein

When I started my mystery series, an other author told me, "You won't know if it's a hit until book number five." That seemed odd to me, but she went on to explain that #5 is a sort of tipping point, to use Malcolm Gladwell's term. By #5, you have enough critical mass to really make a difference in the marketplace. Newcomers to your series can buy five books, not just one.

I understand that. While browsing in a bookstore, my eyes go to mystery series. I knew that if I liked one book in the series, I could settle in and enjoy a long reading experience of following characters.
My editor, Connie Hill, recently sent me the galleys of Ready, Scrap, Shoot. She also complimented me on the dramatic tensions. She told me that she had taken the manuscript home over the weekend--rather than leave it on her desk to work on it on a Monday--because she had to see how it ended.

I passed the galley to two beta readers, readers whose opinion I value. The first reported back and she loved it. She had a few questions that I hope to resolve with an edit or two. The second hasn't contacted me yet.

Meanwhile, my husband enjoyed a quick and informal reunion this weekend with his high school friends in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. After a long day of golf on Saturday, one of them turned to David and asked, "Is your wife Joanna Slan? The mystery writer? We have three of her books at our house."

Wow. Maybe I have reached a tipping point. I sure hope so!

Here's the scoop on Ready, Scrap, Shoot--

You can pre-order it at Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Scrap-Lowenstein-Scrap-N-Craft-Mystery/dp/0738727474/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317832835&sr=8-1

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet--You Could Win a Box of Books!

Argh. Every day I open my email and think: I don’t have time for all this. I especially don’t have time to update my website, to check all the posts on all the list-serves I belong to, visit every online community I need to, and comment on everyone’s blog as I should.

But I do have time to Twitter. Apparently, the rest of the world agrees. The site has reported an eight-fold rise in visitors since 2007, and in December reported 2.7 million people stopped by. At this rate, it is poised to overtake Facebook. It’s especially popular among the young and restless. One in five people between the ages of 18 and 35 with Internet access have “tweeted” or posted short messages of 140 characters on Twitter at least once.

Why do we twitter? Because we can. Because I can dash off a 140-character (that’s letters and symbols, not characters as in people who populate books!) post to update people on the release date of Cut, Crop & Die, the second book in the Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-N-Craft Mystery Series. (That’s June 1, so mark your calendars or go to Amazon.com and place your order.)

Because I can post regular journaling prompts to remind scrapbookers the world over to write about their own lives. (Check it out at twitter.com/joannaslan. If you are an author, the journaling prompts are great tools for overcoming writer’s block. Try them and you’ll see!)

Because I can follow my favorite authors, geeks, and newsmakers by hitting the FOLLOW button.

Because I can make a post to Twitter from a Blackberry. (Try doing that with a regular blog post. I mean, if you are young and have well-trained thumbs, you probably can handle this, but I can’t. Yet.)

Because Twitter will automatically take any regular URL and turn it into a tiny URL and post the link for me. Because I can quickly scan the posts and see what interests me. Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” so I think he would have LOVED Twitter.

Because Twitter fits. I can squeeze it in.

Want to see how it works? Become one of my followers on Twitter and I’ll enter your name in a contest to win a Box of Books. Yep, I did find time to cull an entire box full of mysteries from my bookshelves. (It's a BIG box.) So, add your name to my followers on Twitter by going to twitter.com/joannaslan, hitting FOLLOW, and then emailing me at savetales@aol.com and telling me you are now following me. Be sure to tell me your “twitter” name so I can see that you did it! (No cheating!) I’ll choose one follower and mail him/her that box of books. (Please include your postal address with your email to me at savetales@aol.com. If you don't include it, and if I can't email you and get it within a day or two, I'll draw another winner.)

Let’s see if this Tweeting works!

PS You can hear a live broadcast of a scrapbook crop at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/circle-of-seven/2009/02/14/readers-entertainment-radio-with-guest-joanna-slan-author-of-paper-scissors-death If you have NO idea what a “crop” is, or why women love them, this will be very, very enlightening!

The Mystique of Series

I’ve been writing for a while. My first published novels were mostly time travel romances, all of them stand-alone stories that had no sequels. I soon started writing Harlequin Intrigues, and, again, each story mostly stood by itself--although in one instance I was asked to write a book in a miniseries in which other authors wrote the related books.

And then I began writing the Kendra Ballantyne, Pet-Sitter mysteries. DOUBLE DOG DARE, which was published in June, is the sixth in the series, and Kendra will have at least three more adventures. I adore writing the Kendra books!

I’m also writing Silhouette Nocturnes. My first, ALPHA WOLF, will be a January 2009 release, and another one about a woman with Valkyrie powers will be published in June 2009 (the title isn’t certain yet). When I sold ALPHA WOLF, I had ideas for sequels, since the hero of the book is a werewolf who’s a member of a very Special Ops military unit, Alpha Force, composed largely of shapeshifters. At the time, I was told that sequels might not be in the cards, since there were already so many miniseries within Nocturne. That’s why I went to Valkyries instead of more shapeshifters. However, readers apparently like Nocturne miniseries. I’ll also have a Nocturne Bites e-published in January 2009--a novella, and my second e-story. (I did a short Kendra story for Amazon Shorts.) I haven’t written my Bites yet, but it will star a member of the Alpha Force. Perhaps there could be other Alpha Force stories to come. In any event, I’ve introduced some other Valkyrie sorts in my June 2009 book, and hope maybe to tell their stories, too. The possibility of one or more Nocturne series is a lot of fun, too.

So what’s a series? It’s more than one novel, where each follows in some way from the previous one(s). In a mystery series, there’s generally one primary protagonist who has a support cast appearing along with her (or him). In a romance series, though, each story focuses on the relationship between a different hero and heroine. There needs to be a satisfying ending regarding each relationship, in addition to whatever else happens in the plot, which also must be resolved. (I’m distinguishing a romance series from series romance here. Silhouette Nocturne, for example, is series, or category, romance. My Alpha Force novel and novella are potentially a romance miniseries which are Silhouette Nocturnes. Have I confused you enough?)

For someone who’s not the most organized person, I’ve found writing series a challenge. I have to keep track of people, pets, places, plots, time-lines, shapeshifters... lots of stuff! Thank heavens for computers. I’m able to keep lists of important details, and add to them as needed.

But I’ve always enjoyed reading other peoples’ series, and now I take great pleasure in writing them, too.

How about you--do you enjoy reading series? Writing series? What do you like most about them? Least?

--Linda