Author: susancbell

A Bourbon Anthology Toast

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If it is worth having, it is worth waiting for. If it is worth attaining, it is worth fighting for.

— Oscar Wilde

Joseph Beth BooksellerOver twelve years in the making, our bourbon anthology finally saw the light of day (publication) in June 2020. Just in time for a pandemic that shut down the world. 2021 brought better news – we were asked to participate in the 2021 Kentucky Book Festival!

It was, in effect, our release party, and it was fabulous. Fellow Scoundrels Lorena Peter and Karen Block came down to help. Our publishers, and fellow authors, Gwen Mayo and Sarah Glenn came up from Florida to participate. Mike Bradford, another anthology author, also showed up to help. It was gratifying to have the support of these folks and it was invigorating to have customers come up to the table to show their interest in the book.

Joseph Beth Bookseller was so pleased with our results they asked us back for a signing on December 18. Elaine and I made the trek down to Lexington in a driving rain (no pun intended). Fellow author Milton Toby, out of Georgetown, joined us for the signing. We had a good time, though the crowd was much smaller. We met some nice people, and I enjoyed meeting Milton in person.

To cap off a year of hard work – really, 3 years of hard work – compiling, editing, publishing, promoting – for the anthology, my brother and sister-in-law very graciously threw a soiree to celebrate ‘the launch’ of the anthology.

Held at the 800 Tower Apartments in downtown Louisville, with a spectacular view from the Penthouse lounge, a group of friends gathered in fellowship to laugh, drink, eat great food, and listen to a handful of Scoundrel authors and friends read excerpts from our stories. We even sold some books. It was grand.

 

 

Thank you again, Elaine, for persevering through years of preparation, long drives, endless phone calls, and countless emails from me.

Thank you, Patience, for agreeing to read from Shirley Jump’s Take the Fall, and Elaine Munsch’s The Long and the Shorter of It.

 

Thanks to Lorena Peter for reading from her article, The Spirits of Buffalo Trace.

Thanks to my sister, Whitney Vale, for reading from Heidi Saunders’ Backdoor Bourbon.

And I’ll take a brief bow for reading from my story, A Summer’s End.

It takes a lot of work to get a book written, edited, published, and marketed. Writing is just half the battle. Showing up – to get it to a publisher, get it promoted, get it in front of the public, that’s the other half of the battle. Some of us have the scars to prove it!

Let’s raise a glass of bourbon to welcome in the new year, hopefully a better, healthier year for all of us.

Our Trip to the 2021 Kentucky Book Festival

We were very honored to have our anthology of crime stories, Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon, be selected to participate in the 2021 Kentucky Book Festival.

The anthology was a project of love that took many years to complete: 22 authors; 18 short stories ranging from historical adventure to gritty realism; 20 non-fiction articles on Prohibition, moonshining, medicinal alcohol and profiles of distilleries and the booming Whiskey Row district in downtown Louisville; getting published during the middle of the worst pandemic since the Great Influenza of 1918. There were many obstacles in our path to publication, and post-publication, so being one of the books included in this year’s festival was indeed a blessing.

We sold out our stockpile by mid afternoon, in no small part due to the incredible salesmanship of two of our contributing authors: Lorena Peter and Karen Block. A special thank you to them for showing up and drumming up sales for the book.

Read more about the anthology and author bios here: Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon.

 

 

 

We want to thank all of the contributing authors who took the time to participate:

Lorena Peter and Karen Block, of course

Gwen Mayo and Sarah Glenn, who flew up from Florida to be at the event. Gwen and Sarah own publishing house Mystery and Horror, LLC. They were not only contributing authors to the anthology, they published the book!

Also in attendance was Mike Bradford, a former member of our chapter. He came over from his home in Bardstown. And last, our intrepid editors of the anthology, Susan Bell and Elaine Munsch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elaine was invited to participate on a panel, Building a Writing Community.

Do you struggle to get motivated or set goals in your writing? Getting together with like-minded writers who encourage each other on their way can be a big help, but sometimes finding them can be difficult. Lisa Haneberg, author of Stiff Lizard and a founding board member of the Lexington Writer’s Room, and Elaine Munsch, co-editor of Mystery with a Splash of Bourbon and member of the Derby Rotten Scoundrels writing group, will discuss what it takes to build a writing community with Lisa M. Miller, author of The Heart of Leadership for Women in the Writer’s Room. Be sure to visit the authors in the Signing Gallery (downstairs in Joseph-Beth Booksellers) to get books signed after this talk!

Elaine was joined on the panel by Lisa Haneberg and Lisa M. Miller. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elaine did a wonderful job!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The audience enjoyed it, too!

We’re Invited to the Kentucky Book Festival

We are excited to announce that our crime anthology, Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon, has been selected for the 40th annual Kentucky Book Festival (formerly Kentucky Book Fair) on November 6 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington.

Read about the festival here: Kentucky Book Festival

 

 

Read more about the anthology and our authors here:  Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon

Lynn Slaughter – We’re Back!

From Lynn Slaughter

After months of being unable to meet due to Co-Vid, our chapter met on-line last Saturday, January 9th, followed by a fabulous workshop presented by award-winning crime thriller writer Libby Fischer Hellmann. I felt like a kid wanting to scream from the rooftops, “WE’RE BACK!”

It was so good to see familiar faces I hadn’t laid eyes on in months and to introduce our new board members who’ve been working hard behind the scenes: V-P Carol Preflatish; Secretary Susan Bell; Program Coordinator Elaine Munsch; Treasurer Sheila Shumate; and at-large board member Linda Rees (who got us on YouTube!).

I miss seeing members in person so much, but I have to say that the advantage of going on-line for meetings and events has meant we can include other chapter members and interested writers. Within twenty-four hours of announcing Libby’s workshop, we had well over our 100-person Zoom limit wanting to sign up. Thank goodness we were able to make a recording of the workshop available to all those interested (view recording here Libby Fischer Hellman Workshop).  Special thanks go to Susan Bell who handled registration and made this all possible technically. Linda Rees also helped me get the word out—and out it went!

Libby’s workshop was chock full of strategies to build suspense in our work. In addition to paying attention to hooking our readers with strong opening sentences and chapter endings, she advised continuously raising the stakes in the body of our works to increase readers’ emotional investment. She advised paying attention to:

  • creating complications
  • using time limits (the ticking bomb, etc.)
  • thinking of the worst-case scenario and making it worse
  • tempting protagonists with situations involving morality, ethics, and values
  • isolating the protagonist with no help around
  • including the antagonist’s POV from time-to-time
  • avoiding all-good, all-bad characters (“The bad guy always thinks he’s a hero in his own story”)
  • avoiding sudden resolution (deus ex machina) that comes out of nowhere
  • using structural misdirection, such as red herrings in mystery fiction
  • stretching time in dramatic scenes
  • using variations in pacing so that there are “pools of calm” between action sequences
  • limiting back story
  • creating urgency in action scenes using short sentences, no adverbs, and crisp dialogue
  • avoiding dwelling on violence (“A little goes a long way”)

Libby included interactive writing exercises, and I loved working on them and listening to the creative responses of several volunteer participants. All in all, it was a super-stimulating event, and I am very grateful to the Speakers Bureau of Sisters in Crime for making her appearance possible—not to mention our former president, Beth Henderson, and all others who worked on the grant that brought us Libby!

Meantime, a small group coordinated by the amazing Susan Bell has been spending Sunday afternoons working on scripts for three short “who-done-it” plays set in a 1920s Speakeasy. If all goes well, we hope to present these at the Frazier museum once we get through the current pandemic. Currently, Susan Bell, Elaine Munsch, Linda Rees, Patience Martin, Lorena Peter, Jeanette Pope, Miki Reilly-Howe, and I are working on a script called “Iced at the Easy,” with a premise created by Jeanette Pope. I think this may be the closest I’ll ever get to working in the writing room of a television show! Everyone throws ideas in, and somehow, the work gets done, interspersed with a whole lot of laughter.

Our next chapter meeting will be on Saturday, February 13. At eleven, we’ll critique new work by Elaine Munsch and get a tutorial from Susan Bell on how to track changes in documents. Then, at twelve, we’ll have our business meeting, in which we’ll discuss our spring retreat to address where we go from here as a chapter.  At one, program coordinator Elaine Munsch has arranged for a guest speaker presentation by Mark J. Downing, local author of a paranormal Sherlock Holmes series. Mark will talk to us about “putting on the Sherlock hat to write in the Victorian frame of mind.” Susan will be sending out the Zoom link to members. If you’re a visitor and would like to attend, please contact Susan at: susancbell@yahoo.com

I also want to encourage anyone who hasn’t yet bought a copy of the anthology, Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon, to pick one up. Edited by Susan Bell and Elaine Munsch, it includes stories from several of our members. It’s available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, and wherever good books are sold.

Finally, if you’d like to learn more about some of our author members, I’d love for you to go to my website, www.lynnslaughter.com, and check out their guest blogs. So far, they include: Linda Rees, Beth Henderson, and Carol Preflatish. Upcoming blogs will feature: Elaine Munsch (January 23), Susan Bell (February 13), and Jeanette Pope (February 27).

And that’s all I have to say for now. To think that when I started writing this “endless blog,” I doubted I had much to say!