Author: RebeccaFrostWrites

To outline or not to outline: that is the question

I know I’ve already shared how I, personally, outline books – or, at least, how I outlined Ripper’s Victims specifically – but since I’ve also pointed out that each new project can feel like learning to write all over again (and since that first post is pretty darn old by now) I thought I’d come back to this question with a broader scope.

Yes, I outlined Ripper’s Victims using sticky notes before I ever started writing it. Yes, I’ve still got that poster board. And there are a lot of times I use sticky notes and poster boards to organize my ideas in the early phases, especially of nonfiction projects, but of course that’s not the only way.

I have friends who:

  • jump right into a project without any notes or outline or anything. She just sits down, goes “Hmmm,” and writes the first page. And it works. She’s written entire novels this way.
  • come to the first page with a pretty detailed world and the first couple scenes in mind, then see where that takes them.
  • outline everything very meticulously. And I mean very. To the point where it’s less of an outline and more … nearly-completed scenes. But she doesn’t like revising, and she can manage to keep up the energy not only of these outlines, but also then writing the book.

They’ve also all written more than one project, so these methods are the ones they’ve figured out to help them keep moving forward. It’s like Stephen King‘s “Write every day” advice (I wrote my own thoughts on that here): it works for him because he knows what doesn’t work for him. My outlining friend does so much work before “officially” writing because she’s seen what happens if she doesn’t. The friend who writes by the seat of her pants hasn’t had to change her method because it works for her.

And along with the “each project is new” aspect of it, I’ve also realize that – shock, I know – there are major differences between my nonfiction and my fiction approach.

I don’t outline my fiction with sticky notes.

Sorry. I should’ve warned you. That one’s probably a big shocker.

For Not Your Mary Sue, I don’t think I have any written notes … at all … before starting it for NaNoWriMo (at 12:01am November 1, because I’ll force myself to wait for November, but no longer). Even though the idea had been in my head since February that year.

I’d been thinking about Marcy, and her family, and her background, and how she’d react to waking up on that island, but I don’t have any character sheets written down. No timelines drawn out. I “cast” Jay in my head but I had even less on his background than Marcy’s.

Since it’s from Marcy’s POV, she was the one I needed to know better. I also knew Jay’s main goal would be talking and telling her all about himself, so … I figured that I’d be able to learn along with her. (Hey, it’s a first draft. Nobody ever has to see your first draft. If it crashed and burned, nobody ever had to know.)

And the thing is, the story I thought I’d be writing ended up being only about half of what actually came out. I saw where it could go, to a specific point, and assumed I’d then write a little tag scene to sort of wrap things up, but … the story didn’t want to be wrapped up there. I knew who Marcy was by then, had spent so much time with her, and realized her story wasn’t done yet.

So I had even less of an idea of how the second half of the book would go, but I followed her anyway and let her do her things and live her life, and followed her like Joe Goldberg and wrote it all down. (Maybe someday I’ll share how I thought Marcy’s story “should” have ended, before she told me how wrong I was.) But I was like my first friend and had no idea at all what was going to happen next until I typed it, and … it still worked. The story came out. It made a complete arc.

Okay but that’s a success story.

I get it – there are plenty of ways to outline a story or not, and they all work for different people, and look at how well they worked for me! Whee! But what about when something doesn’t work? What about all the failures and the discards and …?

Next post, I promise. We’ll talk about about the failures next. I’m going to need a lot of space for those.

12 Challenge, book two – State of Terror

Late last December, I decided to go ahead and do the “12 Challenge” that was going around Twitter: 12 months to read 12 books recommended by 12 friends. I specifically requested true crime and thrillers, looking for good books I haven’t read yet. Book one was Dark River: The Bloody Reign Of The Ohio River Pirates, and book two is State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny.

So, first: I don’t usually read political thrillers. Expanding reading horizons is part of the challenge, and the friend who recommended it pointed out that maybe it’s a stretch.

That being said, it reminded me a lot of Dan Brown‘s Robert Langdon books. You know. Angels and Demons? The Da Vinci Code? There’s a lot of globetrotting and seeing the sights, calling out different locations and well-known sights. There’s also the sort of “very few people in the world even know what I’m telling you” aspect to it that always made me wonder how, exactly, Dan Brown learned this secret information (and why it’d be safe to just tell the world in a best-seller if the information is indeed secret) but, in State of Terror, makes you remember who one of the authors is.

I spent a lot of time being very aware who one of the authors is.

The main character is, after all, the Secretary of State. She’s just come on board after a very awful president who gets a bunch of jibes thrown his way. Ellen Adams is also blonde and gets called names that quickly go viral – it’s not “nasty woman,” but … you know it totally is. So clearly any state secrets Ellen Adams reveals to readers can’t actually be real, but … I mean, it makes you wonder.

If I hadn’t known Hillary Rodham Clinton was one of the authors, some of those things probably wouldn’t have jumped out at me like they did. It’s all “write what you know” until “what you know” happens to be about a high-ranking informants’ council but I do trust that, when Ellen Adams says something in Washington, DC is a ten minute walk, it’s a ten minute walk.

I did struggle some with the chronology. I’ve talked about narrative timelines before, but this wasn’t an issue of how all travel takes place between chapters, with a single turn of the page. They sleep on flights or hey, nothing interesting happens, and then they go for hours and hours without sleeping. They’re running on adrenaline. That’s fine.

What really threw me – and it’s something that happened for the first time on page one – was how a chapter would open with a line of dialogue, bang, in media res, and then the narration would back up so we knew where we were, who was there, and what was going on … but that dialogue never showed up again to place it in proper context.

If a chapter opened at 8:00 PM sharp, the narration would back up to 7:30, where we’d last left everyone, and then apparently go until 7:59 … but skip ahead to 8:01? Maybe? I’m still not entirely sure, but until I caught on to what was happening, I was just forcing myself along and hoping it would make sense later. (Which happens a lot when I read large cast books for the first time. Stephen King, I’m looking at you.)

There’s also the fact that, as I said, I don’t read political thrillers, so maybe that’s a genre thing. You get the snappy dialogue immediately and then have to sort out all the rest as you go.

There was also a fair amount of head-hopping. It’s totally the bane of a lot of writers’ existence. It’s really easy to do subtly – have your point of view character understand what someone else is thinking, oops – but this was jarring at times. You’re following Ellen and suddenly you’re in someone else’s head, looking at Ellen and reading about her in terms she wouldn’t use for herself.

But those are structural things. Maybe generic things. (As in, specifically genre-related.) Was it a good book?

Wait, how do we define a good book?

I don’t like rating books for this very reason. I just keep a list of which ones I’ve read and that’s that. But if, for whatever reason, I want to keep reading to figure out how it all turns out – even if it’s because I want to know if the author’s actually going to give a good explanation (cough Stephen King again cough) then I consider it a good book. It did what I wanted it to do: took me away from whatever’s going on in the world or my life at the moment and made me care about something else for a bit.

So, by that standards: yes, State of Terror is a good book. I read it in a day. I’m a fast reader, sure, but if I don’t like a book, it’s slower than molasses. I wanted to know what was happening with Ellen, and to see if I figured out the FSO’s secret, and how some of the other characters’ relationships would shake out in the end. Plus I wanted to know the big whodunit, and there were a couple times I doubted my original impression, which is major for me. I read so many thrillers that it’s rare for a twist to truly shake me.

But I still don’t think I’m much of a political thriller fan.

Have you read State of Terror? Or do you read political thrillers and have some answers for me?

so you want to talk about flesh prisons (aka characters’ physical descriptions)

The other night at dinner, my husband was talking about Ready Player One. He read the book (in English) first shortly after it came out, then saw the movie, and now he’s reading the book in Italian. (Which he’s taught himself, because this is the guy I married.) He commented on how, since he’s seen the movie, he kept picturing the character Art3mis as her on-screen version and not the book version.

Which got me going about describing characters and using the phrase “flesh prisons” (yes, while we were eating) and he asked a) if I’d write it up, and b) if I’d use the phrase “flesh prisons” in my post.

So. Here we are.

I’m even going to throw in the asterisk that I gave him before going on my rant: this doesn’t work for all genres. If you’re writing romance, for example, you’re going to go right ahead and slow down while focusing on the love interest. There are times, be it in genres or just scenes, when more description matters. Just bear in mind that longer descriptions do slow down the action, so they’re more suited to certain places in your book than others.

Okay. Asterisk out of the way. When boiled down, my own personal decision on how much to describe my characters is this:

What do we decide to do with our meat prisons?

Bearing in mind that my characters are contemporary figures who get put into “basically today, usually Michigan” for their thriller settings, they’re humans. And human beings can be interesting, but part of what I’ve come to realize about myself is that physical appearance is most interesting to me when it ties into characterization.

Maybe also that I’m just not good at in-depth character descriptions. Anyway.

Let’s take Jay for a minute. I know, I know, only a handful of people have read Not Your Mary Sue so far since it’s not out until June, but you can meet him in the opening pages here. And most of the description comes when you first meet a character, right? So we can see some elements of Jay’s appearance: reddish hair (currently messy instead of purposefully tousled); blue eyes; tall; has a smile that lights up his entire face. I’ve even dropped in a clue about whether he’s right- or left-handed, but that’s not really a physical descriptor.

The thing is, in the first draft of the novel (from NaNoWriMo 2017) I did something that made me cringe a little when I went back over it: I described him based on which actor would play him in the movie version. It made sense within the book itself – Jay wants his story to be told and become a bestseller, so it’s not a stretch to imagine it then getting turned into a movie, the way both Mark Harmon and Zac Efron have played Ted Bundy – but I ended up cutting it.

Naming a well-known actor basically locks us all in to the same Jay, forever and ever, amen, the way my husband’s been picturing the Art3mis from the movie while reading the book. If I describe someone as “Avengers-era Chris Evans” (not my Jay model, in case you were trying to make it work), then we’re all stuck with Avengers-era Chris Evans in our head. We might not complain, but … we’re still all picturing the exact same thing.

I want to give you some leeway.

Pick whatever kind of nose you want for Jay. Imagine his eyebrows. Fill in the rest of his face.

You’ll learn later about why his smile maybe isn’t such a welcome thing, and Marcy has her own reasons to focus on his physique in the early pages of the book, but there’s enough to play with so that your Jay doesn’t have to be my Jay. And I’ve gone for sort of the low-hanging fruit: hair color, eye color, and height. Basically sketched in a roughly humanoid figure.

The rest of what you learn about Jay has to do with his character: who he is as a person. When Marcy describes his physique, it’s in comparison to what she associates with his favorite hobby. (Spoilers there, so that’s vague. No, it’s not serial killing.) His hair matters because it is messy instead of deliberately tousled, each of which says something different about a person.

What I like to describe about my characters’ physical selves are the things that tell us something about them as people.

It’s usually not something they had no control over – whatever genes blessed or didn’t bless them from birth – but the things they do: hair style. Tattoos or piercings. Hair dye. Clothing. Hobbies and learned skills that show themselves physically, like a guitar player’s calluses. Sometimes things they didn’t necessarily have control over, but tell us about their lives, like scars.

In the Ready Player One example, Art3mis is encountered first – and for the vast majority of the book – as an avatar. Cline spends a lot of time having his main character describe that avatar, in part for those romance novel reasons (Wade knows who Art3mis is before encountering her “in person” so he already knows she’s interesting) but also because the avatar was entirely created. Art3mis chose not only her screenname, but every element of her avatar. Everything about her appearance is therefore a deliberate choice that tells Wade something about her before he ever meets her.

And to be fair, I have wondered if character descriptions are one of my weakest points. (If you’re going to tell me I’m right, please be kind while you do so.) Maybe it’s something to do with being ace and just not looking at people the “usual” way. Or maybe I just think motivations and internal aspects of character are more interesting than flesh prisons.

How do you approach describing characters’ physical appearances? Do you have any favorite authors who seem to be really good at it?

Learning to write all over again

Writing can feel really isolating: just you and your computer as you stare at the blinking cursor and wonder when the document is going to have the desired word count. How you get from 0 to that word count is pretty much up to you. If you’ve got a deadline, you just have to be faster and figuring it out.

It’s also one of those things where you don’t always realize what you know or how valuable your own struggles – uh, experiences – might be until you’re talking to another writer and someone says “OMG, me too!” in clear tones of relief.

In grad school, we didn’t really talk about the writing process. It was like everyone assumed we already knew how to write and just had to be told the assignment parameters. When I submitted for my first conference, I felt like I was winging it. Same for my first chapter. We didn’t talk about writing, and it didn’t seem acceptable to ask anyone about writing. It was just this weird taboo.

So it was hard to tell if my own experience actually related to anyone else’s, or if mine was somehow … subpar. Like I’d missed a bunch of key information that everyone else somehow magically knew.

Part of my intent with this blog is to share the things that get me the “OMG, me too!” responses so I don’t play into the secret-keeping aspects. I’m (somehow) at a point in my career where people look up to me and think I’m a real writer (imposter syndrome what?) and there are so many things I wish I’d heard from someone when those positions were reversed, so …

Starting a new project can feel like learning how to write again from scratch.

There. It’s out.

You’d think, or maybe hope, that after you write one book, you’ve got it down. You’ve managed to go from 0 to 80k or so, get it passed editors and proofreaders and through the printing process, and you’ve learned a bunch of lessons along the way. All of which can be applied to Book #2. Right?

Uh. Well.

To be fair, at first I thought maybe I was just making things harder for myself by not approaching a new book project the same way I’d gone about the first. Like I was just reinventing the wheel to keep my stress level high for the fun of it. Except each book project is different, so why should the process look exactly the same?

For me, Book #1 was about Jack the Ripper. Book #2 was about H. H. Holmes. Two nineteenth century serial killers, right? Well, yes. But …

Ripper’s Victims came out in 2018, but I’d started reading about the Ripper in 2007. I’d already racked up a respectable number of books by the time I signed the contract, and bought even more in the process of researching it. But it wasn’t like I’d only looked into the Ripper from the moment of signing the contract. I’d already had a better part of a decade not only reading about the Ripper, but writing a paper on the women for a graduate independent study course and then presenting that paper for my first conference. I had this whole history with the Ripper, and there was such a huge bibliography to make my way through.

Take a look at this:

I know you can’t read it, but the framed poster board at the bottom with all the neon sticky notes is my outline for Ripper’s Victims. I went through and wrote down the titles of books about the Ripper and organized them chronologically. Which worked quite well until the 1990s, which spilled over, and then for the 2000s I ended up parsing out different themes because yowza. The Ripper was popular and still gaining.

Holmes isn’t that popular. I’ve had people hear I do true crime and name Holmes as their sort of “gotcha” killer, because apparently we’re gatekeeping true crime now. (Also apparently Erik Larson’s book, despite selling so many copies, hasn’t made Holmes mainstream. Who knew? Maybe everybody reads it for the architecture.)

But already straight off you can see I couldn’t start the same way with Holmes as I had with the Ripper. I’d read I think three books about Holmes when my editor asked if I’d be interested in writing my own, and three compared to my Ripper history seemed kind of pitiful. Except … there aren’t over 100 books about Holmes. My bibliography didn’t stay at three, but it certainly didn’t explode like my Ripper posterboard.

That’s just one major difference. Another is the subjects themselves: the Ripper was never named, but Holmes was. He’d been identified, put on trial, and even wrote both an autobiography and a confession before his execution. You can’t approach them the same way. It makes no sense to try.

And still I thought maybe I was just trying to make life difficult for myself.

Is this a case of form following function? (That’s for you architecture fans out there.) Granted, the final form – a book – looks very much like any other book. There’s a different cover, but … sentences and chapters and pages.

I think the biggest takeaway here is flexibility.

When you’ve written a book, you’ve learned one way to write a book, but it’s not the only way for anyone to write a book … and it’s not even the only way for you to write a book. The tips and tricks you’ve amassed are certainly there in your toolbox to be used as often as you need them, but they’re not the only tips and tricks in the world. And they might not always work on a new project. (I’d try for another architecture metaphor, but I personally read Devil in the White City for the serial killer.)

I’ll revert to Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey: he says that the hero has to find his own path into the woods. If the journey’s easy, then you’re on a path someone else has made, and you’re not going to be a hero.

Writers have to find their own path into the woods … for each book. Maybe you can make some headway on a path you’ve made before, but not always. Sometimes you have to reassess your approach and start hacking away in a different direction, because this book isn’t the same as the last one. You’re not looking to end up in exactly the same place, and you’re probably not starting from the same place, either.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep … and enormous. Starting a new book can feel like learning to write all over again, and that’s not a bad thing. It can be frustrating, but it can also be thrilling and rewarding.

What do you think? Do you find yourself still learning how to write, no matter how much you’ve written before?

book review: Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson, out August 16

I was able to get an advance copy of Love in the Time of Serial Killers via NetGalley, so let’s start with the book summary:

Turns out that reading nothing but true crime isn’t exactly conducive to modern dating—and one woman is going to have to learn how to give love a chance when she’s used to suspecting the worst.
 
PhD candidate Phoebe Walsh has always been obsessed with true crime. She’s even analyzing the genre in her dissertation—if she can manage to finish writing it. It’s hard to find the time while she spends the summer in Florida, cleaning out her childhood home, dealing with her obnoxiously good-natured younger brother, and grappling with the complicated feelings of mourning a father she hadn’t had a relationship with for years.
 
It doesn’t help that she’s low-key convinced that her new neighbor, Sam Dennings, is a serial killer (he may dress business casual by day, but at night he’s clearly up to something). But it’s not long before Phoebe realizes that Sam might be something much scarier—a genuinely nice guy who can pierce her armor to reach her vulnerable heart.

And my official review:

I devoured this book in a single day because I just HAD to see how it all came out.

Phoebe Walsh has carefully bricked her heart in behind a wall of true crime facts and boy band lyrics, but they can’t save her from her current situation. She’s dealing with her estranged father’s death, her younger brother’s attempts to reconnect, and an intriguing new neighbor who might be a serial killer (see Phoebe’s wall of true crime facts).

I spent much of the book wanting to save Phoebe from her choices (and her insistence on relating every. single. thing. to a serial killer) but also rooting for her to figure it out herself. There were times I wanted to shake her and demand some more introspection, please, and not her usual avoidance, but Phoebe’s Phoebe. She’ll reference whatever she darn well pleases and avoid the rest, and if you experience second-hand embarrassment, maybe it’s because you recognize the tactic from personal experience.

This makes for some awkward interactions with others, including her younger brother and that possibly-a-serial-killer next-door neighbor, who’s not exactly a social butterfly himself. But Phoebe needs those difficult interactions to wear away some of her defenses and – hopefully – give her a second chance to look at so many people in her life with new eyes … if it isn’t too late.

… because there’s more to say than just “Pre-order Love in the Time of Serial Killers and follow Alicia on her socials!”

About a year and a half ago, I got an email from someone who asked if I’d be willing to talk about the process of writing a true crime dissertation, as background information for her character. See where this is going?

I was nervous about reading the book, both because Alicia and I have become internet friends and because I’m the one in the best position to read any of the background information about the dissertation and say uh, that’s not how this works.

Academia is its own world. So many things happen that just don’t make sense to people who haven’t been there, and it can be hard to explain what, exactly, the whole process feels like. How it works, or how it maybe doesn’t.

I ended up emailing Alicia back instead of taking her up on the offer for a phone call because I typed up this absolutely enormous document about my personal experience. It’s over 3,000 words, and yes, I saved it. If anyone else wants to know, I didn’t want to have to type it all up again.

I also figured that Alicia wouldn’t need or use anywhere near all of it, because she had a story she wanted to tell. If something didn’t fit, then she could ignore it. After all, it’s fiction, and she probably already had most, if not all, of the book drafted. There might not be much wiggle room. But, actually … wow. She used a lot.

Much of it is probably minor and nobody but me would catch it, but I spent a lot of the book nodding. At the true crime references, yes – I’m not sure if Alicia knew some of them before we chatted, but some of the ones I mentioned in that humungous word dump made it into the book – but also a number of Phoebe’s PhD experiences. And I definitely laughed out loud at one line that I’d sent her, which made it into the book as a piece of dialogue. No spoilers, but Alicia: I noticed.

Also, for the record, I’m not a romance reader. It’s not my usual genre. And I still read the whole book in one day and liked it, in spite of my initial concerns about … well, everything. The genre and the subject and the very specific experiences of the main character.

So I was a little surprised, and very relieved, to like the book as much as I did. You should pre-order it from your favorite indie bookstore. If you don’t have a favorite indie bookstore, you can borrow mine. And then, come August, we can talk some more about Phoebe.

“Do you ever get into a writing funk where you just can’t summon the energy to write?”

If you google “write every day,” you get over a million results. I mean, it’s Google, so there are usually tons of responses, but … it’s common advice. I don’t know if it’s the most common, exactly, but it’s out there enough that people who don’t write everyday are worried, or even convinced, that they’re doing it wrong. To the point where someone I know, who is in no way a slacker, asked me this question: do you ever get into a writing funk where you just can’t summon the energy to write? Because maybe she assumed that, being a “real” writer, my answer would be “no.”

How accepted is this idea? I wrote back “YES” and she responded “THANK GOD.” (We proceeded without shouting after that.)

The thing is, we get people like Stephen King telling us to write every day. And you’d think he knows what he’s talking about, right? World-famous bestselling author, and he says:

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop, and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind … I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace.

Stephen King

So … write every day. Right?

Not according to Cal Newport. Or Kristen Simental. Or Luke Eldredge.

I’d like to pick apart King’s quote, because even though it often gets repeated as the simple “Write every day,” he actually tells us more than that. In fact, he reveals a bit about his own writing pitfalls. Once he starts a project (so presumably not 365 days a year), he feels that he, personally, has to write everyday because otherwise he sees issues in characters, plotting, and pacing.

Remember how not all writing advice is universal? How there are so many books about writing out there, and they all have different advice? We call come from different backgrounds and have our own potential pitfalls. Not all advice is for every writer, and not all advice is shared in a way that’s actually helpful.

That’s why we need the full quote: to see what, exactly, “write every day” means to King, and why he stands by it. He’s noticed, in his own many decades of experience, that he, personally, has to write every day once he starts a project, or else these issues arise. He’s not “writing every day” because it’s been repeated so often, but because he knows what’s likely to happen if he doesn’t. For King, writing every day is the solution.

I’d say I more or less align with King here: once I get started on a project, I’m likely to write something in it every day until I hit my goal. Sometimes the goal is a completed draft; other times it’s a completed section of a draft. If I’m at the very beginning and I’m excited, then “every day” means 7 days a week. Other times it means 5 days a week, because even people with “real” jobs get weekends. (Mine aren’t always Saturday and Sunday, or two days in a row, but they’re still days when I don’t expect myself to write.)

The biggest argument I hear for “writing every day” is that writing is a job. If you’re serious about it, then of course you’ll do it every day.

Think for a moment about what you do every single day of your life. Breathe, eat, sleep. Take care of other humans or pets in our household. But even exercise plans have rest days built in. Work limits your hours if only because they don’t want to pay you overtime. We recognize the need for rest, recovery, and making space for other things when it’s not writing, so …

If writing every day burns you out, then it’s bad advice for you. Like all other writing advice, it’s something you need to consider for both practicality and personal adaptation. If you’ve never tried it, maybe it’s time to pick a project and adhere to the advice for a set amount of time – say, a month. Give yourself long enough to figure out if it’s working, and maybe long enough to become a habit. Maybe you’re a big don’t break the chain kind of person. But even then, remember that the true test of your chain is missing a day … and getting right back into it on the next.

You might mess around with expectations. Are you trying to write a specific number of words each day, or carve out a specific amount of time for writing? When you say “writing,” do you mean “putting words on the page” or will you count research, plotting, daydreaming, and so on? Are you willing to switch up your goals and your schedule to better match your actual daily output? Is this a 24/7/365 sort of goal, or a project-based goal?

So no, I don’t put words on the page every day. I don’t sit in front of my laptop for a set amount of time every day, either. When I’m working toward a deadline, it’s far more likely – but even then I remember that weekends are a thing. And, like King, I’ve been doing this for a while, so I have a pretty good idea of what works for me and how to avoid my worst pitfalls. But that doesn’t mean you have to do exactly what I do.

Sometimes I get into a funk and can’t summon the energy to write. It happens. I’ve barely worked on my book projects all month because so many other things have come up. Stress is real, and burnout is real. If writing every day adds to either of those, then it’s probably not your best solution right now. Because that’s what writing advice should be: a solution, not stress or shame.

How was your January? Were you more productive, word-wise, then I was?

12 Challenge, book one – Dark River: The Bloody Reign Of The Ohio River Pirates

Late last December, I decided to go ahead and do the “12 Challenge” that was going around Twitter: 12 months to read 12 books recommended by 12 friends. I specifically requested true crime and thrillers, looking for good books I haven’t read yet. I’ve finished my first selection from that list: Dark River: The Bloody Reign Of The Ohio River Pirates, by Robert Walsh and Wayne Clingman, recommended to me by Robert himself.

It’s a subject I knew nothing about. I read a lot of true crime, sure, from various centuries, but river pirates were new to me. I even looked through the indices of some of the surveys of murder in America that I’ve read to check for some of the names Walsh and Clingman mention, and nothing popped up. So at least I didn’t already read about these people and then forget them.

They cover multiple groups that worked along the Ohio River prior to 1850, and they all seem to be groups. River piracy wasn’t for loners, and it died out with the paddle steamers. Pirates depended on outnumbering their victims and being able to make a quick getaway.

There are different chapters for different groups, and some highlights include:

The Harpes, brothers – or maybe they were cousins – who get presented as “often been called America’s first serial killers.” This is where I first went to my other books, because … who? I’d never heard of them. But apparently river piracy wasn’t just for men who wanted to rob the rich. It was a good profession for men who just wanted to kill people.

James Ford, who was either “Lucky Luciano or Fagin with a Southern accent.” A lot of these pirates have a very mobster feel to them, and I don’t usually read books about the mob. The way to get around the law – aside from crossing the river and moving to land under control of another country entirely – was being the law, or at least paying those who had high positions.

The Potts Hill Gang, who may or may not have been fictional, but who had a very interesting story. Possible spoilers here: a son who had been kicked out of the gang decided to return years later, in disguise, to surprise his family. A “spotter,” sent out to gage the apparent wealth of travelers so the gang would take an unnecessary risk killing a poor man, decided the son looked like a good target. When the “stranger” came along, the father killed him. Which seemed fine, until rumors started that the son was supposed to have come back. In order to keep his wife from wailing that he’d committed filicide, the father dug up his latest victim so she could have a look … and positively identify her son. (Moral of the story: don’t try to trick pirates.)

There’s also some interesting information about forgery, a crime I also don’t usually read about. It’s very much situated in the time and place, between different countries and with changing/emerging laws to contend with, along with Regulators and lawmen and the rest.

It was an interesting read, although I think it’s pretty niche – these stories aren’t usually covered even in lengthy surveys of the history of crime in America. If that’s a crevice you’re interested in exploring, pick up a copy and dive in.

Remember to look back

Sometimes things just come together for inspiration. Take this tweet from a friend of mine:

Dan’s clearly a skilled maker – he’s also a fiber artist as well as doing woodwork – and he’s got this striking visual example of his progress. We can see how intricate his work gets, even if we’ve never made spindles ourselves. And we can see it at a quick glance.

I’m connecting this back to writing. Of course I’m connecting this back to writing. Because lately I’ve been a lot more involved in communities of writers, which involves things like feedback and support and beta reading.

Beta reader (n.) A beta reader is a test reader of an unreleased work of literature or other writing (similar to beta testing in software), giving feedback with the angle of an average reader to the author about remaining issues.

definition from Cali Bird

For authors, beta readers are a sort of reality check. Is the piece doing what you think it’s doing? Is that loveable rapscallion of a character actually loveable? Does that tender scene between your main character and the love interest actually bog the plot down and make readers yawn instead of sigh with heart eyes? Betas help us figure out what’s working, what’s not, and which darlings need to be killed. (Sob!)

Now, not all beta readers are “right.” We’re all coming from our own backgrounds, with our own impressions and preconceived notions and references and all the rest. Just because I interpret something in a specific way doesn’t mean everybody will. That’s why there’s usually more than one beta reader in the process: if all of them say something’s not working, then it’s probably not working. Sorry. But if one says the darling needs to be murdered and the others don’t … author’s choice.

I’ve been writing all my life. I can’t remember not engaging in reading and writing. I do know that I wrote my first original “novel” (okay, it’s more the length of a novella) when I was 15, and that’s a couple decades ago by now. I’ve been writing more than half my life. I’ve had, and even taught, classes on writing. If you have to write a million words before you get to the good ones (who first said that? it’s complicated), I had them all down at quite a young age.

The thing about those first million is that you’re supposed to discard them, because they’re crap. Did I? Well, not all of them. Like Dan, I can look back over my work from bygone years and compare it to what I produce today. (Unlike Dan, I can’t convey this in a short video, since you’d actually have to read my stuff. Also unlike Dan, I don’t feel like sharing some of that past work, thanks.)

But I do have it. In fact, I have a lot of it on my Kindle right now, next to my current WIPs, so I can easily revisit them. It helps to remember where I am in my own journey especially when I’m volunteering to be a beta reader for someone who’s in a different place on theirs.

There’s a lot that goes into being a good beta reader, and I think part of it is the recognition that it’s not just the words on the page that’s a work in progress. I mean, that’s the whole point of sharing a piece with betas: to get feedback, because you know it’s not quite there yet, wherever “there” is. As authors we probably also feel like we’re not quite “there,” either. There’s always something to learn, and we only learn to write by writing. Hence the million words. You don’t have to count every single one, but the writing has to happen. There’s no shortcut there: to be a writer, you have to write. (But that’s also the only step: to be a writer, you have to write.)

I think it’s good for all of us to take a look back at something we’re good at doing (now) to remember when we weren’t. Especially if we’re remembering a time we totally thought we were good, until we revisited it at a later date and … well. It’s good to remember, and to help each other along our journeys the way other people helped us along our own.

It’s good to look back and recognize our progress, too, even if that might feel a bit more selfish. Maybe we want to get better, but there should still be room to measure the distance between where we were before, and where we are now.

H. H. Holmes’ downfall: Detective Frank Geyer

I’ve been going through the 27 victims Holmes claimed to have murdered in his newspaper confession, but we have to remember that Holmes was executed on May 7, 1896 for one murder and one murder only: that of Benjamin Pitezel. He wasn’t ever put on trial for any of the other murders – or even suspected of a lot of the ones he confessed. (And especially not the ones where the supposed victim turned out to be alive – Kate Durkee, for example.) Now we know that Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City accuses Holmes of far more than 27 murders, and Adam Selzer’s True History of the White City Devil puts the number at maybe 9, but … was there ever enough evidence to conclusively conclude Holmes murdered anyone other than Benjamin Pitezel?

We need a bit of a timeline to set up the answer to that question. Holmes, along with Carrie Pitezel, was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894. He gave his first confession: Benjamin Pitezel was alive, and his three middle children were with him. Then, after it seemed inevitable that Pitezel would be disinterred once again for identification purposes, Holmes changed his story to say that yes, that was Pitezel who had died, and the three middle children were abroad with Miss Minnie Williams. Outside elements – the insurance company’s plan to determine the identity of the man who had been buried as B. F. Perry – influenced this change.

As Holmes sat in Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia, awaiting trial for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, Detective Frank Geyer decided to see if he could discover what had happened to the absent Pitzel children.

First note that months had passed between Holmes’ and Carrie’s arrest and this attempt to find the children. Seriously nobody thought that Holmes could have murdered them – they wanted to believe that the children were abroad and in hiding, safe with someone else. It was only after Miss Williams failed to present them that the worries began.

Geyer faced the confusing task of trying to follow Holmes’ backtrail during his circuitous travels of the Midwest and Canada. This was when Holmes was moving Carrie Pitezel and two of her children, the three middle children (Alice, Nellie, and Howard), and his third wife (Georgiana Yoke) in three separate groups; finding them lodging in various cities; and registering everyone under different names. On top of various hotels and other lodging houses, Geyer also had to look for any houses Holmes might have rented in the various cities – or their outlying suburbs. It was a daunting task.

Geyer later wrote about it in his book The Holmes-Pitezel Case: A History of the Greatest Crime of the Century and of the Search for the Missing Pitezel Children, which is available as a reprint for anyone interested in reading his personal account. The vast scope of his task was almost overwhelming. In Toronto, where Holmes had been most recently, he and his assistants spent a long day visiting various rental partners to go over their spiel: last year, did you rent a home to a man who may or may not have looked like this photo? He may or may not have had children with him: two girls and a boy. He may also have given a story about his sister’s ill health, or just generally … well, have you seen this man?

The problem was that, at every stop, they had to not only go through the whole story, but wear down any misgivings the rental agents might have over discussing past clients. It was frustrating, and time consuming, considering how long of a list they had still to go. That was when Geyer got his brilliant idea, calling together a press conference so he could make the front page of the next day’s paper, answering all of those questions. When he went out the following morning, he was able to get his answers much more quickly, since agents had seen the paper and already consulted their records.

This was how Geyer discovered the remains of Alice and Nellie Pitezel in Toronto and, using the same technique as he traced Holmes’ backtrail, Howard’s remains in a house outside of Indianapolis. They finally had hard evidence of the children’s deaths and descriptions of a man who did indeed look like Holmes renting out the house and furnishing it during the given timeline. Geyer’s case looked solid.

Unfortunately for all involved, Holmes received the daily paper while in prison, and the paper reported the discoveries to him before he could be questioned and surprised with the news. This was when Holmes first told the story of one Edward Hatch, who was Miss Williams’ lover and possible husband … and who looked almost identical to Holmes himself. Because of his access to the newspapers, Holmes’ defense for the murders of the three Pitezel children was heard for the first time.

Holmes was never charged for the murders of Alice, Nellie, and Howard. Even though evidence – including part of Howard’s jawbone – had been brought to Philadelphia, it wasn’t allowed in the courtroom. Guilt in one murder is not evidence for guilt in another, even, the judge ruled, when the murders are family members and they seem to all be part of an overarching scheme. Only in Holmes’ newspaper confession did he admit to murdering Alice, Nellie, and Howard – and confess that he apparently also tried to kill Carrie and her two remaining children.

On the scaffold, right before his execution, Holmes retracted all of it and charged his listeners with the task of finding Benjamin Pitezel’s real killer.

Thanks to the hard work of Detective Frank Geyer, though, Carrie Pitezel learned what had happened to her children, and the world learned who was responsible.

Not Your Mary Sue – preorder links

Not Your Mary Sue releases on June 7 from Aesthetic Press, and the preorder links are here!

Amazon – Kobo – Google Play

A not so classic girl meets boy story begins when a televangelist’s adult daughter, Marcy, journeys to a secluded island resort where she awakens a captive of the handsome, charming, notorious Fresh Coast Killer who requests she pen his autobiography explaining all of his intentions and crimes in detail. She finds herself horrified that she is intrigued by him and maybe even…infatuated by him. He has more control than she realizes as he slowly begins to brainwash her just as the autobiography is completed. Once she is rescued and he is arrested, Marcy begins to pull her life back together only for her captor to escape and her brother becomes a new suspect in a cold case that alters what she thought she knew about her family.

If you missed my intro and reading of the opening, you can find that here, both as an audio track and the written transcript.

Rest assured that there will be teasers and more discussion over the coming months. I’m so excited to share this story!

(Did I specifically time this announcement to be my 100th post on my blog? No … but sometimes things just work out.)