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We had another fun and productive chapter meeting this past Saturday and welcomed visitor Leanne Edelen.

We started out by critiquing Jeanette Pope’s new work. While we had suggestions for ways to make it even stronger, everyone agreed that Jeanette’s story was gripping, and her characterizations were especially strong! We can’t wait to read her next submission. At our May meeting, we’ll critique work by Miki Reilly-Howe and Elaine Munsch.

At our business meeting, we discussed the exciting news that Susan Bell and Elaine Munsch met with Sara Volpi Woods (Director of the Kentucky Book Festival, Kentucky Humanities), and she verbally indicated that they would be invited to the November 5-6 festival to represent the anthology they co-edited, Mystery with a Splash of Bourbon. Although the anthology is not an official chapter publication, its editors and many of its contributors have been affiliated with our chapter. This will be a good opportunity not only to market the anthology, but to network with others in Kentucky’s writing community and spread the word about Derby Rotten Scoundrels. There is a possibility that Susan and Elaine would also participate in a panel at the festival, perhaps with other writers, to talk about getting published for the first time.

Meantime, Jeanette Pope and Susan Bell have been working on the final polishing of our murder mystery play, Iced at the Easy, based on a story idea by Jeanette. Along with mover and shaker Elaine Munsch, they’ll be contacting the Frazier to set up a meeting to discuss the possibility of producing the play at the museum’s speakeasy exhibit.

In other news, V-P Carol Preflatish has been working hard organizing the logistics of our chapter retreat at General Butler State Park. The retreat is open to all members of both Sisters in Crime and our chapter. It will take place from 9 AM-5 PM on Saturday, June 5. We voted to have the chapter pay for our room reservation, coffee, and lunch. Some chapter members plan to spend the night there as well.

In other welcome news, I learned this past week that we’ll be receiving $400 from the national organization to help us with activities for our chapter. Treasurer Debi Huff has already submitted the paperwork to receive the funds.

Following our business meeting, I talked about “Writing Realistic Young Adult Fiction,” a topic obviously near and dear to my heart.

I also wanted to share exciting publishing news from our members:

Our immediate past president, Beth Henderson, has a new novel out! Released on April 5, UNTIL… , a historical romantic mystery, is Beth’s eighth historical work and her 32^nd novel! How’s that for amazing productivity? Beth reports that UNTIL… features a heroine in jail for most of the book, while the hero tries to solve the murder she’s accused of committing. In the process, he stumbles upon more murders in the small gold mining camp in Idaho Territory.

The reviews have been super. Here’s an excerpt from N.N. Light’s review:

            Until… is a character-driven story with descriptive narration peppered with taut emotional tension. Beth Henderson is masterful in her writing, drawing the reader in. Once I started, I couldn’t stop reading…The plot is equal parts historical mystery and historical western romance/ Highly recommend! 

Buy Links

Until. . . purchase at Amazon

Until . . purchase at Barnes and Noble

Also coming out next month is Jeanette Pope’s Desperate Angles, a sequel to her first novel Double Triangles. Danielle and her husband, Lieutenant Kevin Williams, have rekindled their passionate but sometimes turbulent relationship and are now husband and wife. But ghosts dead and alive threaten to wipe out their entire family. Kevin and Danny are in danger way over their heads, but can they survive long enough to save their baby?

Jeanette also has a new website she’d love you to check out: https://jeanettecpope.com/

 

New chapter member Gloria  Casale reports that she is in the final edits of her next book, a mystery thriller called Counting Down. For the past few class reunions, held every five years in late November, a woman goes missing from a group of friends who lived in the same neighborhood as children. At the 40-year class reunion, another classmate learns of the mysterious disappearances and is determined to solve the mystery.

And finally, my website has a new look in honor of the forthcoming June 22^nd publication of my third YA novel, Leisha’s Song. I’d love for you to take a look:

https://lynnslaughter.com/

Our next meeting will take placed online on May 8^th. Our speaker will be our very own Lynda Rees who will talk to us about writing romance and suspense.

And that’s my news for now!

 

 

 

We had a lively monthly meeting this past Saturday!

We started out critiquing Susan Bell’s short story, “Autumn Picnic,” and the first two chapters of my work-in-progress, Missed Cue. The feedback we got was encouraging and helpful. And I have to say I am in awe of Susan’s ability to vividly create a setting which becomes a character in and of itself. I can’t wait to read more of her work! At our April meeting, we’ll critique additional chapters of Missed Cue and the first chapter of Linda Rees’s Unwilling Donor.

Next came our business meeting, in which we tentatively decided that we’ll hold our one-day spring retreat from 10am to 4pm on June 5^th at General Butler State Park. V-P Carol Preflatish is coordinating. At the meeting, we’ll work on visioning for our chapter—where we want to go from here and how we can get there! We’ll also do some writing, and Carol has suggested the possibility of a speaker as well.

We voted to offer all speakers a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble or an honorarium to cover gas for out-of-town speakers.

We discussed the national membership requirement for local chapter members and decided to table the issue. I’m going to follow up with the liaison for SinC’s local chapters and see how we can best approach this. Carol and I both spoke up about the benefits we’ve received from being part of the national organization. We appreciate, however, that not everyone wants to join the national organization ($40 a year for active members and $50 a year for professional members) and we want to be welcoming to all and grow our membership. I suggested that we have a Friends of Derby Rotten Scoundrels’ category for those reluctant to join the national organization, but I’m going to research this further before we make a decision.

In addition, there’s a question Elaine brought up about whether chapters have a “honeymoon” period in which potentially interested folks can attend a certain number of meetings before being asked to join both the local chapter and the national organization.

Following our business meeting, we had a fascinating talk by Elaine Munsch on the history of women crime writers.  Elaine took us all the way from Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent, published in 1861, through the Golden Age of Mysteries in the 1920s and 1930s, and all the way up into the 1970s. She also gave us a handout listing notable titles and reference works about women crime writers.

Next month, our guest speaker is me! Here’s the blurb about my talk on “Writing Realistic Young Adult Fiction: Some Dos and Don’ts”

Have a hankering to pen a young adult novel? The teenage years are rife with drama, conflict, angst, and plenty of humor—all great ingredients for fiction. But keep in mind that the world in which young people are coming of age now is dramatically different from the one we grew up in. And the fiction today’s teens are reading is a far cry from the novels of our youth where characters were almost always white, middle class, and heterosexual, and the biggest problem  was finding a date for prom.

We’ll talk about dos and don’ts for writing realistic fiction for teens, as well as ways to get started on your own young adult novel.

I hope you’ll join us for our April 10^th on-line meeting. Our secretary, Susan Bell, will be sending out a Zoom invitation and an agenda for the meeting ahead of time.

Until next month…

Lynn

On Saturday, February 13, fourteen of us met for our second online chapter meeting. While Zoom can never match the pleasures of meeting face-to-face, it was still wonderful to be together.

Highlights included the chance to offer feedback to Elaine Munsch on the opening of her new series centered around Annie, a recurring character in her Dash Hammond series. Talk about a wonderful premise! A celebrated mystery author sets up a demonstration crime scene for a talk he’s giving at Annie’s bookstore, only to end up as a corpse at the scene. Needless to say, we all can’t wait to read more!

Susan Bell followed up with a helpful tutorial on using tracking in Word to comment on one another’s work. Speaking of Susan, her interview on my web site went up on Saturday. Susan has had such an eclectic and interesting career, and I’d love for you to read about it at: https://lynnslaughter.com/2021/02/13/meet-susan-bell/

At our business meeting, we talked about having a one-day retreat in June to address where we want to go as a chapter. V-P Carol Preflatish is taking the leadership in setting this up and is investigating General Butler State Park as a possible meeting place.

Our delightful guest speaker was M.J. Downing, author of Sherlock Holmes, the Case of the Undead Client and The Werewolves of Edinburgh. A third book in the series will come out next year.

Unlike the original series, Mark chose to focus on the point of view of John Watson and to explore his growth as a character. He was particularly interested in showing motivation through dialogue and noted that compared to other Victorian authors, Arthur Conan Doyle’s style was more linear and relied more heavily on dialogue.

Whereas Holmes avoided emotional entanglements, Watson was interested in women, and Mark included a romantic triangle and its attendant suffering as a part of Watson’s growth. “He learns about himself through his adventures,” he explained, “and the consequences to his choices.”
He also discussed his writing process. He uses a whiteboard for plotting and looks at the ending and then plots backwards. But he also takes great joy in making discoveries about characters in the process of his writing.

You can watch his presentation right here on our website and can learn more about Mark and his other writing projects on his personal website. Go to: https://mjdowningsplace.com/

In other news, our former chapter president, Beth Henderson, has an upcoming release on

April 5th of her historical romantic mystery, Until . . ., set in the Idaho mining country in 1863. Congratulations, Beth!

That’s it for now, and I sure hope you’ll join us for our next meeting on Saturday, March 13.

P.S. Both at the meeting and in subsequent emails, we all shared information about upcoming writing conferences. They include:

Sleuth Fest
March 19-21, 2021, online this year, sponsored by Florida chapter of the

Mystery Writers of America
https://sleuthfest.com/

Malice Domestic
April 30- May 2, 2021, Bethesda, Maryland
https://www.malicedomestic.org/

Imaginarium
July 9-11, 2021, Louisville, KY
https://www.entertheimaginarium.com/

Killer Nashville
August 19-22, 2021, Franklin, TN
https://killernashville.com/

Prime Crime
formerly Magna cum Murder, October 22-24, Indianapolis,IN
https://www.facebook.com/groups/308844470155156

Legendary Book Bash
in case anyone in the membership wants to join or attend. The manager is: Michelle Areaux at: michelle@kingstonpublishing.com
When: August 28th, 20201
Where: DoubleTree Suites by Hilton Hotel Lexington
2601 Richmond Road
Lexington, KY 40509
Eventbrite Link:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/readers-envy-lexington-legendary-book-bash-tickets-64420405166?aff=ebdssbeac
Author Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmMbwFvbHbqqVrmiZxZDQ4LZmdK4vRWWsk5blN4D29VI5foQ/viewform

From Lynn Slaughter

After months of being unable to meet due to Co-Vid, our chapter met on-line last Saturday, January 9^th, 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!

by Lynn Slaughter

I’m honored to serve as the next president of Derby Rotten Scoundrels. My term will begin on January 1 of 2021. With multi-published author Beth Henderson opting to step down from the presidency, I have big shoes to fill. We are all so grateful to Beth for her wonderful work on our behalf.

Speaking personally, I’ve always found change hard. We have a brand new board  in the middle of a global pandemic! But change also offers us an opportunity to evaluate where we’ve been, and where we hope to go as a chapter.

Our first order of business is to resume meeting, albeit via Zoom. On Saturday, January 9^th, we’ll meet from noon to 12:50 for a welcome back meeting and then at one P.M., we have an exciting guest speaker, courtesy of the Sisters in Crime Speakers Bureau. Award-winning thriller writer Libby Fischer Hellmann will speak to us about “Building Suspense.” (see Events Calendar for details).  Regardless of what genre we write in, we all want to keep readers turning the pages, and suspense is an essential element. In her interactive workshop, Hellmann will illustrate techniques we writers can apply to our own work immediately.

Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago where she began writing gritty crime fiction. Sixteen thrillers and twenty-five short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and crime writing community and says she’s even won a few! A past president of Sisters in Crime, she’s also a member of MWA, CWA, and the Society of Midland Authors.

Susan Bell, our new secretary of the board, will be sending an invitation and a link to all chapter members. We also plan to invite other interested writers and readers to join us free of charge. If you’re interested in attending, please email Susan for the link at susancbell@yahoo.com. We have Zoom capacity for 100, so get your request in to Susan as soon as possible.

In addition to Hellmann’s presentation, our new program chair, Elaine Munsch, has an exciting array of speakers lined up for the coming year. Meantime, we’ll resume the critique portion of our meetings in February with a slightly altered format. But more on that in our January welcome back meeting.

I should also mention that I’ve begun hosting guest authors once or twice a month on my weekly blog at www.lynnslaughter.com. I’m beginning by featuring chapter members. I’d love for you to take a look at my December 5^th guest blog by new member Lynda Rees at https://lynnslaughter.com/2020/12/05/meet-author-lynda-rees/ Coming up is a guest blog by outgoing president Beth Henderson on December 19^th and another by Elaine Munsch, author of the Dash Hammond comedic mystery series, on January 9^th.

I’ve missed our chapter meetings so much and look forward to seeing you on January 9^th!