THE ILLUSTRIOUS CLIENT

All that reading and re-reading of THE HOUNDING as I revised and edited it, not only led me to fall back in love with Shirley Combs and Dr. Mary Watson and the original story, but it made me downright itchy to write the next adventure in the series. I promised myself that as soon as I had all my deadlines met I would launch right into The Illustrious Client, and so I have. I'm having a great time. The game is afoot: I'm lining up the characters, beginning with Colonel James Damery who made an appearance right at the end of The Hounding. Next I had to choose who the illustrious client would be, of course, and begin building a story from the dust motes of the Sherlock Holmes's story "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client." As history is picked up, shaken out, and put back down, only the dust motes remain in the room, and from them I build a story for Shirley and Mary to share with their readers.
I've written character backgrounds for Oceane Chartré [Beaudet] a 20 year old pop star from France, and for her fiance Lucas F. Hansen, a Danish playboy/businessman who looks 30, and is about to have his looks ruined by an ex-girlfriend Borbála (Bori) Eszti whose background I wrote today. She's a beauty with a Lipizzaner farm from Bana, Hungary who is going to throw acid in his face here in Portland on a yacht where he and Oceane are moored for the Rose Festival. Bori is stalking him and plans to make a quick getaway.
Unfortunately, nobody is going to get what s/he wants for awhile. This is a murder mystery. Shirley, Mary and I will be the ones having all the fun, and that only because we are working and enjoying what we do. Stay tuned if you want to read about the process. Feel free to ask questions too. And, please! Share your own process. I'd love to hear it.

The Hounding, Second Edition

My friend the filmmaker, Gabriel Darling, is at work on a teaser/trailer for the new edition of "The Hounding" but it is already up on amazon.com if you want to go buy it and read it. (If you click on the title above, it will take you straight to amazon.) I've reduced the price to $2.99, and if you are a Prime member, you can read it for FREE. Also, if you have a book blog and want to review it, contact me and I'll send you a review copy for your Kindle. As an editor myself, I am appalled by the number of errors I see every day, not only in books, but in everything I read. If you find an error of any kind in my writings, please point them out to me so I can correct them. I will consider it a great favor. I paid $17.95 for a book of poetry that I ordered from amazon.com, and when it arrived, I saw the back first. The first thing I saw was a typo. Argh. Then when I opened it to try to find my friend's poem, the contents listed only the names of the poems, not the names of the poets! There is no index. These people needed an editor, and not only a proofreader, but a developmental editor (I do both). But I digress. Please buy my book. Ha!
Read my work. If you find a mistake, please tell me and allow me to fix it. If you want your own work edited or proofread, my fees are reasonable. See my site at a1editingservices.weebly.com

Video is up: Singer Clashes with Cougar

Everyone did a brilliant job, and now you can see for yourself. I'm so pleased with everyone's work, the production crew, director, the actors were just brilliant ... they make me look good.
Please feel free to leave any comments here, or at youtube. I'm sure the actors and crew especially would love to hear what you think of their work.
If you have feedback about the script, come back and tell me. I'm always open to feedback, to doing better. Also, to hearing about YOUR work.

Performance last night SINGER CLASHES WITH COUGAR

Brilliant. My first full production in *ahem* let's just say awhile. Readings, yes. FULL productions, harder to come by. The SINGER set was so simple it contained only one black chair. Three actors, one mask, and the props were a guitar, a guitar stand, and a bottle of water. Backstage there was a crash bag. I hired a professional director and three professional actors myself when I was offered the opportunity for a staged reading on live TV. I decided I'd rather have a full production with professionals, and just went for it. So glad I did. My short script was brought to full life by lovely people that I hope to work with again and again. The singer in question, Nelda Reyes, is truly from Mexico and used her accent to provide the character with authenticity and vulnerability. Her youth and beauty didn't hurt either. Jennifer Lanier is amazing. She's tall, athletic, exotic looking because of her Native American genetics, and brought so much sensuality to the cougar, and yet was able to instantly transform herself into an aged human woman with just a kiss. David Loftus himself has exotic looks, a gorgeous man who always brings full skills to even a small role. He managed to show us a concerned, yet opportunistic theater manager in a few lines. You can catch all three of these actors on national TV, including NBC's Grimm. Jennifer has recurring roles on both Leverage and Grimm. They are all seen about town in local playhouses as well. All the time. Check out their Facebook pages for details. Director Karen Alexander-Brown is also a playwright. I was exceedingly lucky to get this ensemble together for my play.

Rehearsal today, Performance tomorrow! SINGER CLASHES WITH COUGAR

Will finally see a rehearsal today. The first rehearsal, I was stricken by a horrible migraine, the first one I'd had in 6 weeks, and it lasted for 3 days. Last week, I wasn't planning to go, and didn't. So, today's the day! They are now rehearsed, blocked, and putting on the final touches for tomorrow's performance on live TV. I have a professional director and professional actors. I will have a DVD of this performance that I can watch from now on, and can send out to potential producers of this and other work.
Since I was here last, I have published a short story on amazon: "Girl Heroes: 1956" and received a rejection of my play "The Stars Are Our Ancestors" in its first draft. I was hoping for a reading at the Alaska Conference, but will settle instead for a table read on April 3rd by the PDX Playwrights group here in town. That will give me what I need in order to refine the draft by June 1.
Many of my women playwright friends are feeling discouraged by the statistics out there. As am I. Most of us (including me) have decided to put our heads down and keep writing anyway, and to continue to send out our work. The best course is to make sure you send your work to the best fitting place. Even better is to have a relationship with the literary manager or the artistic director of the theatre company. Not everyone can have that, but it is best if you can. Some women use their travel money to go to theaters in different parts of the country and try to establish relationship in order to send their work there. Some produce their own work. I do whatever I can to get my work on the boards. When I started out, it was so much easier than it is now that I took it for granted. I had full length plays produced every year. A few plays every year. Those days are gone for now. But I do have friends who have that happen now, and I share in their joy. There is nothing more fun than having a play up.
If you are a playwright, what are you doing now to have your work heard or seen by others? When did you last have a full production of a full-length play? Or, when is your next full-length play going up?

Planning a relaunch: The Hounding

I did get a tweet from one designer about possibly designing a cover for my mystery. I decided to use my own photo and go ahead with what I have on hand, at least for now. Money is the issue, or at least an issue. Another is that I want to get this done because I have other projects standing in line, tugging at my sleeve. When I first published this novel it was the best-selling mystery novel for a major distributor of the year. As an eBook. We were WAY ahead of our time in 1999. An eBook Reader cost almost $300 and hardly anyone had them. Of course, the book was available in CD-ROM, but who wanted to read on her computer? A laptop weighed several pounds at that time. The great thing about revising this novel and spending so much time with it over the past few weeks is: I've fallen in love with it all over again. "The Hounding" is an homage to the Sherlock Holmes series. I grew up with Sherlock and loved his methods and his eccentricities even more than I loved Nancy Drew. After I moved to Portland, I often thought of Sherlock and his London. I always felt I learned so much from the character of Sherlock about observation, about noticing my surroundings, deducing what had happened in a room before I walked into it by looking at what I saw. These methods have greatly contributed to my abilities as a writer, IMHO.
One day, when I worked downtown, I was walking across busy 5th Avenue, when suddenly I had the idea of having a female detective named Shirley Combs who would have been teased about her name, but in spite of -- or maybe even because of that -- became the world's greatest living detective. One day she meets her Dr. Watson. A young naturopath, Mary Watson, who becomes Shirley's sidekick and narrator. In the beginning I thought I would write a series of their exploits. So far, I've written only the one, beginning with the curse of the hound of the Baskervilles. It isn't too late for this to become a popular book, and to spark a series. And I have no end of ideas. The characters are plenty interesting to me to keep me writing about them. And if not, I have plays to write, poems to write, and a garden to which to tend.
By the way, I also run an editing service, and am all set up to help you get your own works e-published. I'm using Scrivener for that purpose now, which can work with any word processing format you might use. Have you considered e-publishing your short stories for 99 cents? Lots of Kindle readers are looking for those. Check my rates: a1editingservices.weebly.com

Editing my own work

Today I spent the day inputting all the changes I so painstakingly made by hand awhile back to my mystery novel. I am eager to get these changes made on computer, and finally online so I can relaunch my ebook. I am always an early adopter of new media, and this book came out in 1999 as an ebook published by a press that is no longer in business. My reader at that time cost almost $300, and hardly anyone had one. Hardly anyone bought ebooks either. My novel was the best-selling mystery novel (ebook) for 1999, so that tells you how many were sold that year. Ha. Especially considering that it wasn't even published until October! Still, it did get good reviews, so I have high hopes for it in its new life. As it was written so long ago, it definitely needed to be brought into the new millennium, with cell phones and so on. Otherwise, it holds up. I'm going to need two more full days to finish the uploading.
I also want a new cover. And a marketing campaign. This will not happen overnight as much as I would like for it to. Why can't things happen more quickly? Life is too short, and yet things take too long. It has been ever thus.
Do you write mysteries? Do you have a designer you want to recommend to do my cover? I have someone in mind, but they don't specifically do mysteries. I'm open to suggestions.
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