My Weblog

Something Old, Something New

Things right now are, well, not normal. We’re in the midst of the first pandemic since the H1N1 Pandemic of 2009—and the first pandemic of the Social Media Era. (Facebook launched in 2004 and Twitter in 2006.) While social media has been valuable for getting important information about COVID-19 to the public, it has also amplified the speed at which misinformation and speculation spread in ways unimaginable even in 2009. As a result, people are afraid—afraid of getting sick, afraid of dying, afraid of losing friends and loved ones, afraid of losing their homes as livelihoods, and afraid of losing their way of life.

Although the feeling of fear is universal, the way people cope with fear is not. Some people lash out, others withdraw. Some seek out new ways to deal with a new reality (Virtual church services, anyone?) while others turn to familiarities from the past to help them navigate unfamiliar ground. Still others combine the old comforts with new methods. For example, the age-old practice of reading aloud was paired with the new technology of live-streaming audio and video to recreate the childhood joy of being read to. Probably the most viral (no pun intended) instance of this is Levar Burton taking Neil Gaiman up on his offer of the use of his stories to produce Twitter livestreams of Levar Burton Reads. (Friday at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern for adults.)

Me, I’m turning to old favorites to help me cope with a world I can’t control. (Although, come to think of it, I’m using new technology to do so, so I guess I’m in the hybrid coping camp.) I’m re-binge-watching Agatha Christie’s Marple and Agatha Christie’s Poirot on Hulu and BritBox. I know how each episode ends but the known outcome is what makes them comforting.

How about you? How are you coping? By reading? By being read to? Watching film adaptations of books? Writing your own works, pieces that deal with—or resist—the times? Comment on the blog or join the discussion on Facebook or Twitter.

'Tis The Season--To Check in the Closet and Under the Bed

by Alexia Gordon of the Femmes Fatales.

It’s October! This is my favorite month and not just because I was born in October. I know autumn officially starts in late September, but October feels like autumn really means it. Temperatures drop, at least in this part of the country, to sweater-weather range, leaves turn beautiful shades of red and gold, and spookiness takes center stage. Spooky stuff runs the gamut from kid-friendly trick-or-treat fun to Halloween fun of the adult variety to downright terrifying. There’s something for every bravery level. Lists of seasonal reading and viewing material are published, featuring books and movies and TV shows to thrill, chill, and scare the bejeezus out of their audiences. Sisters in Crime picks supernatural mysteries for its October ALA Bookclub Central list (http://www.bookclubcentral.org/2019/09/30/october-picks-from-sisters-in-crime-things-that-go-bump-in-the-night/). This year’s list, Things that Go Bump in the Night, includes Killing in C Sharp, one of my Gethsemane Brown Mysteries. Book Riot published a list of “13 Books to Keep You in a Spooky Mood All Year Round” (https://bookriot.com/2018/10/30/spooky-books-for-halloween/) last year and “10 Horror Book Series to Get You in the Halloween Spirit” (https://bookriot.com/2019/09/13/horror-book-series/) this year. They also offered a list of suggestions for bookish Halloween décor (https://bookriot.com/2019/09/27/halloween-decor-for-book-lovers/) to help readers decorate their reading nooks in the spirit of the season. And, for readers who like to play dress-up, lists of literary Halloween costumes abound (https://www.weareteachers.com/best-literary-halloween-costumes-for-teachers/, https://bookriot.com/2017/10/10/literary-halloween-costumes/, https://www.buzzfeed.com/mallorymcinnis/lets-make-trick-or-booking-a-thing).

I don’t much go in for costumes or home dec but I love a scary story. Some of my favorites are—everything by Edgar Allan Poe, the ghost stories of M.R. James, and “The Boogeyman” by Stephen King. I don’t rely solely on literature to scare myself silly. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds gives me the creeps and makes me suspicious of our fine-feathered (so-called?) friends. Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Stephen King-derived 1408 and The Shining give me second thoughts about hotels. Laura is another favorite. It’s not a horror movie but it’s such an eerily atmospheric noir film it feels at home during the spooky season. The 1963 film, The Haunting, creeps me out even more than the Shirley Jackson novel, The Haunting of Hill House, that it’s based on. I can’t leave out the 80’s slasher films, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13^th. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist makes my list, as does the 1976 version of The Omen (damn, that kid is creepy), Scream, and John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980). I must add Nicole Kidman’s The Others—about which I can say nothing without giving away the twist. The Babadook creeped me out so much it took me three tries to get through it. A more recent scary favorite is Netflix’s Malevolent. A couple of con artist siblings find out the joke’s on them when their fake ghost hunt turns out to be not-so-fake. Malevolent achieves what I love—a genuine creep-out without excessive gore.

Let me not leave out TV. “American Horror Story” disturbed me so much I couldn’t watch it. Same for the short-lived “The Exorcist” TV series and the long-running “Supernatural.” (This is a compliment.) Less disturbing (meaning I can make it all the way through episodes without turning on all the lights, checking to make sure the doors are locked and sitting with my back against the wall so no one can sneak up on me) but equally delightful (in a dark and twisted sort of way) are “unscripted” ghost hunting shows, like “The Dead Files” and “Ghost Adventures”, “The X-Files,” “Sleepy Hollow” (the Washington Irving story is fantastic, too.), “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991), and “The Twilight Zone.”

I can’t count the number of scary stories that are out there. If you need more suggestions, a Google search return lists such as, https://www.oregonlive.com/tv/2016/10/31_scary_tv_shows_ranked_from.html, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a24213055/scary-tv-shows/, and https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/top_100_horror_movies/. If you’re a fan of spooky, you probably have favorites of your own. Please share—what are some of your favorite seasonal reads and watches, from the not-so-scary to the jump-out-of-your-skin terrifying?

 

What Do You Binge Watch?

By Elaine Viets of the Femmes Fatales.

There's something about winter that calls for binge watching. On these long dark nights, I curl up by the TV with a bowl of hot popcorn and watch one show after another.
Here are some of my favorites:

Murdoch Mysteries: This Canadian series is set in Toronto in 1895. Detective William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) of the Toronto Constabulary, uses the technology of the times, including photography, fingerprints (called "fingermarks"), sound recordings and more.
The series features a strong, smart woman – Doctor Julia Ogden (Hélène Joy), as the coroner. This long-running series is in its 12th season.

Foyle's War: A World War II drama set in Britain, featuring inspector Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks as his driver. A well-written police drama and a good look at life on the home front when the country was at war. Filmed in a time when men wore great-looking hats and overcoats.

House of Cards: Yes, Kevin Spacey's actions were despicable, but he's one hell of an actor. On House of Cards, I love watching the machinations of the equally awful politician Francis Underwood and his scheming wife, Claire, Robin Wright, the former Princess Bride. I can't wait to watch the last season when (spoiler alert) Francis dies and Claire ascends to power.

 

The American House of Cards is based on the British series with the same name but a different plot. It's definitely worth a gander. The British House of Cards is only four episodes. Ian Richardson plays the conniving politician Francis Urquhart and Diane Fletcher is his wife, Elizabeth.

Columbo: If you like the classics, you must see Peter Falk's Columbo. The rumpled detective with his beat-up car and disreputable raincoat is unforgettable.

Monk: Tony Shaloub plays this OCD detective who tries to deal with his many fears (ladybugs, snakes, crowds, and germs, to name a few) while he solves crimes. A funny police procedural.

The Simpsons: Matt Groening's series is guaranteed to chase away the worst winter blues. Now in its 30th season, the adventures of the Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and baby Maggie in the fictional town of Springfield never fail to make me laugh.

Lucifer: Lately I've been spending my nights with Lucifer. The devil, played by the infernally hot Tom Ellis, gets bored in Hell and decides to vacation in Los Angeles, where he feels right at home. Lucifer Morningstar opens a nightclub, and he drinks and chases women, until there's a murder outside his club. He becomes a consultant for the LAPD, partnering with detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German). The devil has serious daddy issues, since his father cast him out of Heaven. Four seasons – the last one is on Netflix.

What's your favorite binge-watch?

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Win High Heels Are Murder, my second Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper mystery, now released as an e-book. Click Contests at www.elaineviets.com

What Happened at Midnight

 

 

The Femmes Fatales are enormously proud of our Femme emeritus, Charlaine Harris. After her Sookie Stackhouse Southern vampire series had a successful run as "True Blood," she has another TV series, "Midnight, Texas." But Midnight fans have been waiting for the news. Will the series be renewed? Here's what Charlaine has to say.

 

By Charlaine Harris

 

As most of you know, the NBC show “Midnight, Texas” had a great first season. Wonderful special effects. Great actors. Great sets. Good scripts.

And as I hope most of you know, too, this excellent show was based on my Midnight, Texas books, a trilogy.

If I can use a Texas-friendly analogy, this was not my first rodeo. I’d also had “True Blood,” based on my Sookie Stackhouse novels, and Hallmark Move and Mystery has been adapting my Aurora Teagarden mysteries as 2-hour movies for HMM. So I feel like I can spot a sure thing. The show was sure to be renewed, and I figured it would just be an automatic thing.

We waited. And we waited. By “we,” I mean the crew and cast and the producers and the writers and the directors. Even craft services, probably!

The new set had been built in Albuquerque for the last few episodes, and it was just as exactly like the actual street in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where the first episodes were filmed. (Due to Hollywood magic, it was exactly like. I visited both of them.)

The actors’ contracts expired. I gave up hoping. It was borne in on me that though I think I understand the publishing industry -– more or less -– the TV and movie industry remains inexplicable and mysterious, no matter how often I deal with it.

And then “Midnight, Texas” got renewed, months after we’d hoped and expected. BOOM! We’re all back in business. Well, most of us. Some of the writers and actors had to move on, and things had to be switched around.

I’ve read a couple of table-read scripts and I think the viewers won’t notice the difference. The writing is brisk and entertaining, and goes places I had never thought of going. We’re all happy again. But I’m not getting complacent. Now I know there’s a shark under the surface of the water. However, come October, we’ll be seeing more episodes of “Midnight, Texas.”

 Though we won’t be reading any more Midnight books, no matter how successful the TV show proves. Because I wasn’t asked to extend my contract for any more adventures of the Midnight folk. Business!

 Instead, also in October, you’ll get to read the first novel of my new series, set in an alternate America . . . and we’ll hope this series lasts for longer. And no suspense about renewal or new contracts.

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The new season of "Midnight, Texas" premiers Oct. 26 on NBC. Follow it here: www.nbc.com/midnight-texas

Ink and Blood: Death in the News Room

By Joanna Campbell Slan of the Femmes Fatales

 

Yesterday, a lone gunman walked into the newsroom of The Capital Gazette, a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, and targeted journalists. Using a pump-action shotgun, he blew out the glass window, the only barrier between the public and the editorial staff.

Experts on television and radio have been talking about soft targets, and how fragile that glass barrier was. How easily the gunman burst through it. How exposed the journalists were.

That vulnerability happens on purpose.

As a journalism graduate, I’ve worked in many daily newspapers—the Daily News at Ball State University, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Bloomington (IL) Pantagraph. No one knows the heartbeat of a town the way a working journalist does. While maintaining objectivity is paramount, knowing the community you serve is equally important. When I worked at the Post-Dispatch, people walked in all the time to talk to reporters, editors, and ad sales people. We all sat in an open bull pen. The editors and management had glass doors with blinds that could be pulled, but otherwise, there was no privacy in the newsroom. Nowhere to hide.

That was by design. We worked as a living, breathing organism. If I heard a tidbit on the street, I told my colleagues. Likewise, they shared with me. We took breaks together in a glass enclosed break room. The only space that was contained, secured, was the press room.

I loved walking back into the room that housed our printing press. Huge rolls of newsprint were off-loaded by forklifts from the train track behind our building. The paper came from Canada. It arrived on a huge spool. The press men wound it through the printing press like thread through a sewing machine. The smell of the ink and the oil hung in the air. Red lights and buzzers sounded as the press started up. Men in jumpsuits raced from one area to another, checking the impressions for clarity, adjusting ink flow, and monitoring the action.Once the press was running, the paper moved with such force and tensile strength that you could lose a limb if you got in the way. That gave a “paper cut” a whole new meaning. When the press was in action, the noise was deafening. You needed ear protection if you stayed back in the press room for any length of time. The printing press was a behemoth, a monster, that demanded feeding and tending. When it roared to life, the entire building shook.  

To think that my work was printed on that paper, that my effort was a part of that action, thrilled me. If you walked around behind our building, you could watch as the finished newspapers were bundled, tied, and tossed to news agents and carriers for distribution to our readers.

One of the men killed yesterday was Rob Hiaasen, brother of Florida author, Carl Hiaasen. On Friday morning, Carl told CNN his brother was, “the rock of our family,” who, “believed in the mission and the craft of hometown journalism."

Carl has it right. Being a journalist is much more than a job. It’s a mission. Each and every day when I worked at a newspaper, we made history, because without our efforts, so much slipped by unobserved, unremarked upon, and unrecorded. Our job was to shine a spotlight in the darkest corners of our community and demand that attention be paid. Even all these years later, I still consider myself a journalist. I still want to know why, and who, and how, and what in the world?

It’s in my blood.

Ink and blood. So we write the story of our nation today, this day, after the tragedy.

 

 

 

Murder in the Night or Conversations at the Kelner House

by Toni L.P. Kelner / Leigh Perry

I occurred to me tonight that my family has been having an odd assortment of conversations this past few days. Maybe it's been being kept inside by the dreadful weather of ludicrous cold followed by snow followed by ludicrous cold. Maybe it's having survived the holiday season followed by colds for three of the four of us. Maybe it's the fact that for a few more weeks, we will have four adult Kelners living in one house before one moves to Atlanta, and later on, another goes off to be a Monster Camper (more on that later). Maybe it's just the way we roll.

Tonight, for example, we watched and then picked apart "The White Rabbit Job," an episode of Leverage. Now Leverage is one of our favorite shows, and we've been bingeing on it during the aforementioned cold-snap/snow-storm/cold-snap period. But we agreed that "The White Rabbit Job" is problematic. If you're not familiar with the show, it's about a group of thieves--a mastermind, a hitter, a grifter, a hacker, and a thief--who help people. They pull all kinds of elaborate cons, but in this one, they were messing with a guy's mind, trying to turn him back into the nice guy he used to be. It turned out all right in the end, of course, and there's a lot of elements in the show that we admire greatly, but messing with somebody's mind? Ew! Still, we agreed that the episode demonstrated real character growth for the main characters, which is something we like to see in a show.

That segued into a discussion of how one can actually change a person, via therapy or intervention or giving survey-based feedback. Steve is a management consultant, and has given professional feedback to scores of people over the years, and talked about how even negative feedback can be given in a way that's palatable to the subject. And a lot of what he was saying, I pointed out, applied really well to giving editorial feedback.

Next up was a discussion of people we'd like to give feedback to with a stick. Really, a padded stick Valerie uses as a Monster Camper. (Really, I'll explain that soon.) Without naming names, one might say that one's co-worker could benefit from a firm talking-to, but we'd really rather use the stick. I think those violent urges in myself are a lot the reason I find mystery writing so darned satisfying. I can't really chase down a loved one's co-worker with a stick or other weapon, but I can torment them in my books. Ah, the time I killed off an ex-boyfriend.... Good times. (Country Comes to Town, if you're curious.)

From there, it went on to other uses of Val's padded stick--technically a padded bo staff she uses at her summer camp, which is a live-action role-play camp. (Think real life Dungeons and Dragons.) Valerie is a junior counselor of sorts, known as a Monster Camper. (I told you I'd explain it!) At some point, one of the younger campers yelled, "Murder in the night!" and used his own padded weapon to smack a male camper in what is known as the no-no zone. I kind of filed that away because I'm contemplating setting a Family Skeleton mystery at a similar summer camp, and that sounded like a fun piece of business. Well, not for the guy slammed in the no-no zone, of course

From there, we discussed the fact that Viking society considered all nighttime killings to be murder--a daytime killing could be manslaughter. That factoid was something Steve used in his Viking mystery short story "Death at the Althing."

As bedtime approached and broke up our erudite discussion, I realized that it wasn't totally random conversation after all. Because no matter what we were discussing, editing or character design or writing made it into the mix. It's all story telling, and that's what conversation is all about.

 

A Little Crime for Christmas

Christmas is nearly upon us, ready or not. One week to C-day as I write this. I’ve been a bit of a Grinch in years past. Despite Christmas being one of my favorite holidays, I couldn’t conjure much Christmas spirit. Bah, humbug. This year, however, my spirit has been restored, thanks in part to relocating to a town where schoolchildren gather in the market square to sing carols, the church puts on a production of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and lamp posts and building facades are bedecked with lights and greenery that give the scene a Norman Rockwell feel. Hard to be grinchy when you live in a place you didn’t believe existed outside of Hallmark movies and O. Henry stories. So, this year I strung lights in my window and put up a tree (albeit one somewhat bereft of ornaments). I hung a wreath on the door and potted some festive greenery on the porch, sang along with Christmas tunes on the radio, and read some heartwarming Christmas stories. (Actually, I read Christmas-themed murder mysteries by P.D. James so “heartwarming” may be a bit of a stretch.)

One thing I haven’t done much of this season is watch Christmas movies. I used to watch the classics like The Bells of St. Mary’s and It’s a Wonderful Life and newer favorites like The Ref. However, I cut cable and don’t have a TV (unless you count a thirteen-inch monitor hooked up to a DVD player as a TV) so I have to be more intentional about holiday viewing. I subscribe to streaming services but most of the holiday films offered seem to be a variation on “adorable but unhappily single young woman moves to small town/inner city/foreign country/back home where she clashes with everyone, makes mistakes that land her in humorous-while-simultaneously-slightly-dangerous situations, and banters with the impossibly cute man who everyone but her knows is her one true love on her inner journey to discover the true meaning of Christmas”. Yawn. I could go to the other extreme and binge on Christmas-themed slasher films—Elves (a Nazi eugenics program involving “selective breeding” and department store elves), Jack Frost (industrial accident creates mutant snowman), To All a Good Night (sorority girls versus evil Santa) being a few of many, oh-so-many—but I’m trying to tame my cynical nature, not indulge it. What I really want is a happy medium—not too saccharine but not too bloody. What I really want are Christmas-themed episodes of crime shows. 

I watch almost nothing but crime shows January through November. Why should December be different? Crime shows satisfy my love of puzzles and my need to see justice meted out and evil held in abeyance. (I tend to avoid morally ambiguous noir. I know the world is often a dark, unforgiving place. I don’t need my entertainment to remind me of it.) The juxtaposition of criminal activity against holiday merriment heightens the awfulness of the crime and heightens the stakes for the protagonist. How can such terrible things occur when people should be extending goodwill toward all? Hurry and solve the crime, expose the killer and restore peace on earth, at least until the next episode, or the day after New Year’s, whichever comes first, when we can all go back to being crappy to each other. I also have a soft spot for detectives who work Christmas. I’ve worked my share of holidays as a physician. I confess it irritates me when I see social media posts and editorials and cries from the mountain top that “everybody” should have [insert holiday here] off because I know what the champions of the workforce really mean is “everybody except doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, law, fire, rescue, and all the support people required to keep healthcare facilities, police stations and correctional facilities, and fire houses open”. I empathize with the TV crime solver who does their best to make their sad, soulless, institutional surroundings festive with tinsel and tabletop trees. I understand how a few Christmas cookies and a cup of hot chocolate can offer brief respite from grim reality and how co-workers can fill in the lonely gap caused by absent family.

So, for those of you who also prefer a bit of crime with your Christmas (or a bit of Christmas with your crime), I’ve compiled a list of Christmas-themed series episodes. A few lean more paranormal than crime, strictly speaking, but I’m all for genre-mixing. My Christmas gift to you:

The X-Files, “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas”

Veronica Mars, “An Echolls Family Christmas”

The Twilight Zone, “Night of the Meek”

The Brokenwood Mysteries, “A Merry Bloody Christmas”

Dragnet, “The Big Little Jesus”

Moonlighting, “’Twas the Episode Before Christmas”

Supernatural, “A Very Supernatural Christmas”

Monk, “Mr. Monk Meets his Dad”

Black Mirror, “White Christmas”

Doctor Who, “The Snowmen”

Agatha Christie’s Poirot, “Hercule Poirot’s Christmas”

Father Brown, “The Star of Jacob”

Midsomer Murders, “Ghosts of Christmas Past”

Midsomer Murders, “The Christmas Haunting”

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, “Murder Under the Mistletoe”

Murdoch Mysteries, “Once Upon a Murdoch Christmas”

Murdoch Mysteries, “A Merry Murdoch Christmas”

 

That should get you through Epiphany.

What other Christmas-themed episodes have I missed? Are there any Hanukkah- or Kwanzaa-themed crime show episodes?

Cartoons Are Complicated

by Leigh Perry / Toni L.P. Kelner

You remember when you were in [insert name of subject or teacher you were bored by] class in school, and you'd stay awake by doodling stick figures on the corners of your notebook, them flip through them to show movement? You were, no doubt, secure in the knowledge that you understood how animation work.

You were wrong.

Well, the basic principle was right. If you flip a series of illustrations quickly enough, persistence of vision will fool the eye into thinking you've seen a continuous stream of motion. (That's how all films work, not just animation.) But the truth beyond that principal is so much more complicated.

I admit, I considered myself reasonably knowledgeable about animation. I'm a big fan of animation, whether on TV or at the movies or for games. I watch "behind the making" videos on our Disney and Pixar DVDs. Plus I've absorbed a certain amount of know-how via my daughter Maggie, who recently graduated from SCAD Atlanta with a degree in animation. So I figured, sure, I know how this works.

Nope. A couple of weeks ago the family attended the CTN Animation eXpo in Burbank, CA, and via panels and chatting with people in the field, I learned a whole lot about how little I actually know.

I knew an animated feature has a whole team of animators, but I didn't know that animators get typecast. One panelist says he specializes in people walking determinedly as they accept their fates, usually singing as they go. Think Elsa singing "Let It Go" in Frozen or Moana in Moana running down to the shore once she realizes she knows the way. Other animators have more specialized specialities: hair, walking, background characters, and so on. There's an incredible amount of teamwork to bring it all together. One animator for Coco admitted he was iffy when his boss kept telling him to add more wrinkles to the title character, Mama Coco. He was afraid she'd look ugly, but once the scenes were lit by other artists, her beauty and character shown.

I knew there were character designers, but I had no idea how many iterations a character goes through before reaching the final version. Looking at characters-in-progress also showed how much even the smallest of details--hair style, skin color, eye shape, age--changes the way a character is perceived. And I never imagined how long that character design process takes. One 30-minute TV cartoon series has been in production for two years, and they're still refining that protagonist. Even previously existing characters--Stretch Armstrong the toy and Unikitty from The LEGO Movie required some polishing before they were ready to star in their own series.

Of course I knew that voice actors add a tremendous amount to an animated character, and I knew the voices were recorded before the animation begin. But I didn't know how many takes they record with the actors saying the words a variety of different ways because the shape is still taking shape. Josh Gad, who voices Olaf in Frozen, does quite a bit of improvisation with his lines to get the funniest jokes he can. Hours of this material is never used.

I knew about story boarding, but I didn't know how those were different from beat boards, or how story boards are used to create a rough animation called an animatic. And story boarding and story animation are wildly different. (I would explain what all that means except I'm still not sure I've got it right, and my daughter might read this and laugh at me.) Then there's scripting, which is something different. We had a chance encounter with Alex Hirsch, the show runner for the animated series Gravity Falls, which showed me that animated series can have long-reaching story arcs. There were clues in the first episode to how the series ended with the third season.

One of the most pleasant discoveries was learning how animation continues to evolve. Obviously, the switch from classic 2D animation to 3D animation has been a quantum shift for the industry, but there's still plenty of great work in 2D animation and there are other techniques like stop-action animation still in use. But sometimes there's something totally different. Loving Vincent is a remarkable piece of work in which each frame of the full-length movie is a different oil painting, most of which are based on the works of the movie's subject: Vincent van Gogh. It's just as amazing a movie as it sounds, and best of all, the team responsible is looking into the possibility of creating a horror movie using the work of Goya. If it happens, I'll be first in line at the box office!

So I came out of CTNx a lot more knowledgeable about how ignorant I am of the process of creating even the shortest piece of animation. So next time you're watching Coco or Loving Vincent or Gravity Falls or Unikitty! -- and I recommend them all -- sit through the credits and give a little love to those story artists, set dressers, renderman developers, lighting artists, and other creatives whose work I don't understand in the least, but which I appreciate so much more now.

Vive l'Ensemble!

I write series books that follow the adventures of a main character or characters, along with the secondary characters who are a part of the main characters' lives. Though the main character is always the chief focus of the story, the ensemble of secondary characters are important -- not only to the writer, but to the reader. The same thing goes with television shows. Many television shows have a central star but the ensemble cast is often greater than the one "big name" at the center.

A prime example is one of the greatest TV comedy shows of all time, I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball was one of the great comic actors of all time, and the show was obviously built around her. I Love Ethel or I Love Ricky wouldn't have worked nearly as well, because Ball had the presence and the ability to pull it all together. But she couldn't have done it by herself. She had one of the best ensembles in TV history working with her. Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley all brought their considerable talents to the mix, and what they created as a quartet was wonderful. Lucy mugging on screen with actors of lesser caliber wouldn't have made this show one of the most beloved comedies of all time.

Other memorable TV shows have benefitted -- and have longevity -- because of the same thing, a terrific ensemble. I'm sure we can all think of many examples. Ensembles are also important in mystery series, because one readers find a main character they like, they become interested in the character's life, and that means the people around him or her. People want to catch up with their "friends" -- the same principle works in TV soap operas. This is why it's important, particularly in the type of cozy mystery I write, that the main character has relatable, likeable supporting characters. The way the supporting characters relate to the main character will tell the reader much that is important about the series sleuth -- and about themselves. The ensemble cast is a staple feature of series, and rightly so, I think. What do you think?

A Skeleton is Born!

by Leigh Perry / Toni L.P. Kelner

 

People have asked how I came up with the idea for a mystery series about an ambulatory skeleton, and I'm afraid my answer isn't overly helpful. But I can tell you how that idea first started becoming a book. Even better, I can show you.

With almost every fiction project, I start out by creating a Notes file. That's where I put my initial thoughts about a character, or requirements if it's for a anthology gig, or the description of the dream I had that might be a good story some day. This is not stuff I ever show anybody, so this is a first for me. I've annotated a bit, in blue, to point stuff out. And since I put in stuff not directly related to the project -- as in, 'I'm really hungry," or "I wish the neighbors would finish the drilling or whatever the heck they're doing out there" -- I've edited this just a bit. I mean, nobody really cares which neighbor I was angry at in June of 2004.

Yeah, June of 2004. That's when I started making notes for the book that became A Skeleton in the Family, first of my Family Skeleton series, which was released in September 2013. In fact, in the notes I refer to coming up with the idea around a year earlier. So that's a genesis of ten years from idea to publication.

So here's what I wrote on June 25, 2004. (I still date my entries.)

 

BEWARE - THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD!

 

June 25, 2004

Okay, I know I've got notes for this story idea somewhere, but I can't find them on this computer. So either they're on bits of paper somewhere, or they exist only in my fevered imagination. So let's get some of this down now, even though I know I've been noodling over this idea for close to a year.

So here's the idea for Sid.  he's an ambulatory, intelligent human skeleton. And he talks. There is no particular explanation of this. There can, in fact, be no particular explanation for this. It's like My Mother, The Car or My Favorite Martian or Francis the Talking Mule. Since it can't be explained, I won't even try very hard. Though perhaps Sid will come up with his own origin story each book. Assuming that I can sell more than one in the series. Assuming that I can even sell one.

Personally, it sounds kind of strange to me. I just think it would be fun to write. I suppose I could just go for a short story, which might give me a better chance of success. Lets see what I can come up with...

Anyway, Sid lives with a youngish woman who inherited him from her family. Sort of. I'm thinking Sid was a decommissioned skeleton from a museum or teaching collection.

I ended up using only part of this explanation for Sid's origin, and the youngish woman Sid lives with got a lot older. My original thought was to have her as a grad student, but she ended up as a English professor with a teen-aged daughter.

That being said, let me check out e-mail and plug in some info from an e-mail exchange with archeologist Dana Cameron:

Since the email exchange was private, I'm only putting my emails here, not Dana's. This exchange is the oldest text I can find referring to Sid, so you see that Femme Dana was part of the gestation of Sid from pretty close to the beginning. When you're writing about a skeleton, it's incredibly helpful to have an archeologist on speed dial.

From: Toni L.P. Kelner
Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2004 5:35 PM
To: Dana Cameron
Subject: Picking your brain

Dana,

I need to pick your brain for this project I've been wanting to work on. I don't know why, because I suspect my agent will hate it, but it makes me giggle. It's woo-woo, with an ambulatory skeleton named Sid.

Sid has no memory of his pre-skeletal life, but during the book, he will be solving his own murder. I've been trying to come up with a reasonable explanation of how Sid ended up as a whole skeleton, rather than a rotting body somewhere, and your story about finding the old specimens in the basement of the Peabody-Essex inspired me. What if the killer boiled away Sid's body and hid him in a bunch of skeletons about to be removed from a collection? And instead of destroying them as he was supposed to do, an enterprising grad student sold some of the more intact skeletons as Halloween decorations. Is that something that could happen?

Yes, I know worrying about this when I've already got a walking, talking skeleton named Sid is a bit bizarre, but I figure Sid is all the willing suspension of disbelief I'm going to be able to get away with. Everything else should be reasonable.

Anyway, any ideas?

Toni

Dana replied with all kinds of nifty data, and stories about a professor which may be illegal so I'm really not putting that up! She also had some very reasonable questions.

Dana,

I'm not going to explain at all how he can move without ligaments and the like. He just does. When they first get him--they being the family of the little girl who kind of adopts him--he's wired together. He "comes to life" when she's in trouble, and stays alive as she grows up.

What if the unscrupulous collector had his ill-gotten gains stored in a mini-warehouse, and got behind on his rent? Then the stuff would be sold at auction. My mother the flea market dealer has bought lots of stuff that way. Would it be legal to buy a real skeleton? But I can see a warehouse guy who wanted to get rid of stuff saying it was a fake skeleton, and folks believing him. The reason I was thinking about the decommissioned collection was that it would kind of get around that law about selling remains, if it does exist.

A medical school might work, but it would be kind of tricky to sneak in a skeleton. Especially since we've got to get rid of all the nasty flesh and blood, too. What is a reference collection?

At some point in the book, I do want a forensic anthropologist to take a peek. Sid will play dead for the occasion. Well, he is dead.  He'll play possum. The anthropologist will wonder what's holding the bones together. Sid will then let all his pieces fall apart. (Why can he do this? Why the heck not?)

As for moving through society, he doesn't much. He lives with this girl, in a closet, of course. Her brother knows about him, and possibly her parents, but that's about it. Otherwise, he only goes out at Halloween, dressed as Death, and possibly to Mardi Gras or other costume occasions. Since he can "de-articulate" himself at will, I figure the girl can carry him in a bag if she wants him along.

I have no idea why I think this would work, but the concept amuses me mightily. Vampires, werewolves, mummies--all old hat. Who else has done a skeleton mystery?

Toni

Again, Sid originally had a younger companion. Also, the older sister Deborah was originally a brother. And it turned out that the parents knew all about Sid, and he "lives" in an attic, which is way roomier than a closet.

Dana replied with even more awesome information about the care and feeding of skeletons and a story about a professor who kept the skeletal remains of her cats. Dana knows some very interesting people.

So with that email exchange as grist for my mental mill, I went back to noodling about what the story would look like.

My thought, or perhaps theme, is that Sid came to life to protect the young woman when she was a little girl.  Maybe her bratty big brother locked her in a room with him at Halloween, and she was scared. Or, should I want to make it more serious, she was being menaced by a child molester and Sid rescued her by scaring away the molester. I'm guessing bratty brother obtained Sid, in his pre-ambulatory state, but it was the girl who brought him to life.

Why is this appropriate?  I'm thinking Sid died to protect a little girl, or at least, in trying to protect her. From a killer or rapist, perhaps, though that's pretty dark for a story about a skeleton. I'm thinking he was a grad student, and found out that a professor was up to something. I think we've got to have something pretty serious to make Sid come back to life. Maybe even a threat that the girl never realized.

What do Gloria's parents think of Sid. Yes, I just named her Gloria, and I have no idea why. It's easy enough to change if I decide to, but I've grown tired of calling her "the girl." I've got three thoughts. One, they're hippies out of time and just  went with the flow. This would work for New Agers, too. The second, that they don't know Sid is ambulatory but figured him as an imaginary friend at first and just let Gloria keep him. And third,  they're generally pretty normal, but are willing to accept a skeleton if he saved their little girl. They could be Southerners, used to dowsing and such. Though then you get the whole Bible Belt thing.

If they know about Sid, I think they'd try to do more about trying to figure out where he came from and such.  Nah,  too rational.  Let's make them New Agers who go with the flow, which leads to Bratty Brother being aggresively "normal" in reaction, and he hates that Gloria still has him around.  He's worried about publicity messing up his aggressively normal life.  Think of him as a somewhat nicer Dursley, or a Darren type.

Yes, Georgia was originally Gloria. She went through a lot of names before I settled on Georgia. I remember Garnet being a favorite for a while. Also, her New Age parents morphed into English professors somewhere along the way.

Because this whole idea is kind of informed by those bizarre sit-coms of the sixties, like I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched.

Funny how those old shows come back to haunt me.  I guess I kind of always wanted a gimmick like that of my own, something to make me special and magical.  Then again, with the success of Harry Potter,  there must be a lot of people who feel that way.

I loved those bit o' magic sitcoms movies. I could throw The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Spirit is Willing, and Blackbeard's Ghost in as influences, too.

Here's a bit of business to kind of introduce the story:

It was a dark and stormy night, and it was nearly as dark in the room, the only light the eerie glow from the computer screen. A young woman was intently watching the screen as her fingers flew over the keyboard, so she didn't see the door to the closet slowly drift open, and the noise of her typing masked the sound of movement as the skeletal figure emerged from the gaping blackness.

Had the worn oriental carpet not been there to muffle the measured footsteps, surely she would have heard the feet tapping and creaking against the floor as it stepped into the room, even though the feet were bare. In fact, those feet couldn't have been any more bare--bare of clothing, bare of skin, bare of anything--there was only bleached white bone from head to toe. Or rather, from skull to metatarcals. Like something out of a nightmare, the skeleton moved  across the floor.

It stepped toward the woman's unprotected back, one fleshless arm raising and reaching for her. An instant before that mockery of a human hand touched her shoulder, Georgia spoke. "Sid, I'm working here."

"How did you know?" the skeleton demanded.

She sighed, not even bothering to turn to look at him.  "Because you haven't tried to jump me all day."

"Hey, can you blame me for wanting to jump your bones?  Get it?  Jump your bones?"

"I got it the other thousand times you said it, Sid, and it hasn't been funny since the first five.  Now, if you don't mind, I've got work to do."

"Let me help," he said.  He deftly removed his skull from atop his shoulders, and placed it next to her more normally fleshed version.  "You know what they say?  Two heads are better than one."

"Sid!"

Gloria realized that every family had its secrets.  From her friends, she'd heard stories of family bootleggers, draft-dodgers, strippers, even Republicans. In her case, the skeleton in the closet was actually a skeleton in the closet. A skeleton named Sid, who refused to stay in his closet.

The name Georgia appears in this paragraph but just as quickly, switches back to Gloria. Other than that, and a shift to first person, the first appearance of Sid appears pretty much as is in the completed book. I wrote a few more bits and pieces, intending to put them in somewhere. Unlike many writers, I don't necessarily write in chronological order. I write a bunch of scenes, then rearrange them. A lot. It's not efficient, so I don't recommend it.

"Jeez, Glory, when are you going to get rid of that bag of bones?" Craig said.

"Hey!" Sid said indignantly. "Why don't you ever ask me when I'm going to get rid of that bag of meat?"

Craig ignored him, as usual. Glory didn't think she'd seen her brother directly address Sid since he went off to college, where he'd apparently decided that Sid's existence was impossible and therefore not worthy of conversation.

"Craig, he's not a fairy," Glory said. "He's not going to disappear if you don't believe in him."

"Yeah?  If he's not a fairy, then why does he stay in the closet?"

Glory blinked, then grinned. "Oh my God, you made a joke! Sid, put a gold star on the calendar."

"I can't," Sid grumbled, "you got the kind you have to lick."

"Right. Sorry." With no tongue, Sid wasn't any good at licking stamps either.

Now Gloria/Georgia is Glory. I had a hard time making up my mind. Craig because Deborah, and switched from a stuffed shirt businessman to a locksmith. And I lost the fairy joke, because it's offensive and even though it was Craig saying it when he was still a jerk of a character, I just couldn't leave it in. Besides, Deborah would have have said it. (I'm a little embarrassed even to have ever written it, honestly.)

"Craig? Sid's gone."

"Good. I hoped you'd come to your senses and dump him out someday."

"I didn't."

"He left? Did anybody see him leave your place? Could he be traced back to you and me?"

"He didn't leave, you incredible asshole! Somebody took him!"

"Why would anybody be stupid enough to steal a skeleton?"

"You did!" Glory reminded him. "But I don't think it was some stupid prank this time." She told him what she and Sid had learned since that encounter on Halloween. "I think that bastard QQQ has him. Sid's the only evidence that he's a killer--I think he's going to try to kill him."

"Glory, Sid's already dead. How is he going to kill him again?"

"Don't give me your damned logic! He can crush him with a sledgehammer, put him in a garbage disposal, give him to the dog pound--I don't know what he's planning and I don't care. All I know is that Sid is in trouble and I'm going to save him!"

"Sis, I know you're fond of the old... You're fond of Sid, but don't you think this is for the best?"

An icy cold came over Glory then. "Sid saved me, Craig, back when I was a kid."

"Hey now, QQQ was just trying to scare you--"

"Bullshit. QQQ was a child molester. I Googled him a couple of years ago, and found out that he was caught going after kids in his neighborhood, and after he was arrested, more victims came out of the woodwork. So you tell me why he locked him in his basement!"

There was an endless silence on the line. "You're saying Sid knew that somehow."

"I don't know, Craig, but I know he died trying to protect a little girl. Maybe he came back to life for the same reason."

There was a much shorter pause. "What do you want me to do?"

This scene kind of made it into the final version in that there was an emotional confrontation between Georgia and her sister about whether Sid should be rescued. But the stuff about child molesting was too dark for the story, so that got softened a lot, and the story of how and where Sid came to "life" changed.  Plus Craig was much less of a jerk when he became Deborah.

Georgia used to swear a lot! That's not the right thing for a cozy, particularly a light-hearted cozy, which is why Sid and Georgia don't use traditional cuss words.

That's all I wrote that day. The next few weeks were the same: notes and ideas, some of which made it into the book and many that did not. One scene got cut but eventually made it into Book 3, The Skeleton Haunts a House. And at some point, I did settle on Georgia's name.

So I still can't pinpoint the day or moment when I said, "Huh. I think I'll write a book about a skeleton." But this is a sample of the process that goes into taking an idea and making it into a book. At least it my process--I suspect most writers are considerably more methodical but I'm sticking with mine.