Guest Post by Carl Brookins

More Random Musings from a writer.

On the second hottest day of the summer, I opened an email query. Essentially, the writer wanted to know how one of my plots had surfaced. I told him the truth. I couldn’t remember precisely, so I temporized. Now, new plot ideas are flitting around.

So far, we’ve had a hot and fruitful summer and now the days are shorter, rainy and colder. Is it out of the ordinary? I don’t actually know. We seem to have attracted more birds than usual. Not long ago I observed two hummingbirds, flying wing to wing like fighter planes in formation. They roared in across the yard like a scene from one of those old black and white films about dog fights during WWII. I was about to duck when they diverted and whisked away overhead. Impossible to follow against the hot blue sky. I think they were checking out the feeders, although I don’t expect to find hummers at the seed feeders. Impertinent little buggers.

I sometimes like to read, relaxing on our deck. One day I glanced up from the page to find a humming bird hovering about a foot from my forehead. I am not hummingbird food. Did the bird want me to read it a story? No hawks so far this summer, so when I sit outside in the heat to read, the critters, aloft and underfoot show up. It isn’t me that attracts them, it’s the seed and old bread. When the popcorn I supply to my writers’ critique group grows stale, I cast small handfuls on our deck and lo, overnight it is gone. Rabbits.

Crows sometimes visit. Since they are shy or skittish, we rarely see them up close. Crows are fierce-looking creatures. It is fun to watch them maneuver about the yard. First one or two sail silently to perch up in the big pine. After a few minutes of observing the many cardinals, finches, sparrows and woodpeckers in the yard, one makes a pass over the deck, scattering the smaller birds to the bushes and sending chipmunks and red squirrels under cover. The lead crow lands and struts about, picking up corn and sunflower seeds. It lifts its head, eyes me through the glass of the sliding door and calls. Its companion, waiting in the tree, repeats the call. There is a raucous response from overhead and suddenly a dozen of the big black, sharp-eyed avians are all over the yard, the trees, the grass, the deck. Noisy, strutting, picking at seeds, flowers, grubs and worms in the long grass. And overhead, maybe two hundred feet in the air a black crow circles, silently, watching. It is obviously looking for danger. Two days ago I went into the yard to move some trash to the compost. A crow high overhead began to cry. The calls went on for the entire time I was in the yard, at least twenty minutes. I wonder if the crows ever get hoarse.\ Time passes. The lookout notices something. What, I don’t know. These are urban crows, used to traffic and close human interactions. The circling crow dips a wing, sends out a loud call, and the dark flock rises almost as a single creature and swiftly departs for places unseen. Plot points abound.

I recall some of our encounters with gulls on the seas and lakes where we sailed. It was not unusual for a gull to roost on the gunwale or cabin of our sailboat for several minutes as we went along, hitching a ride for a time.

The crows will be back, and meanwhile, the populace of smaller birds and the unwinged return to their feast. The scene suggests a story plot. I noodle it a bit and make a note for reference. A robin, thrashing about in a basin, reminds me it’s time to refresh the birdbaths.

Now, fall has descended and the days are shorter, colder and at times more depressing. But winter with sparkling crisp snow and ice will soon appear, and the cycle will renew. Its time to start a new book.

Author Bio

Before he became a mystery writer and reviewer, Carl Brookins was a counselor and faculty member at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Brookins and his wife are avid recreational sailors. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Private Eye Writers of America. He can frequently be found touring bookstores and libraries with his companions-in-crime, The Minnesota Crime Wave.

He writes the sailing adventure series featuring Michael Tanner and Mary Whitney. The third novel is Old Silver. His new private investigator series features Sean NMI Sean, a short P.I. The first is titled The Case of the Greedy Lawyers. Brookins received a liberal arts degree from the University of Minnesota and studied for a MA in Communications at Michigan State University.

http://www.carlbrookins.com/

https://www.facebook.com/carl.brookins?fref=ts

@carlbrookins

Buy links:

The Case of the Yellow Diamond http://www.amazon.com/Case-Yellow-Diamond-Sean-Mystery/dp/0878398163/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448218939&sr=8-1&keywords=the+case+of+the+yellow+diamond

Come and enjoy a time of conversation with author Carl Brookins as he talks about translating his sailing adventures to fiction and creating fictional characters that feel like old friends. Brookins is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Private Eye Writers of America. He can frequently be found touring bookstores and libraries with his companions-in-crime, The Minnesota Crime Wave.

Edge the Bare Garden by Roseanne Chen

Genre: Young Adult, Realistic Fiction

Source: I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

My Thoughts

Agnes has never fit in. She has accepted this. She is bullied. When she finally reaches her breaking point, she takes matters into her own hands. She starts a blog where she starts telling secrets she knows about those who have tormented her. However, as things usually happen, things get out of hand. I would start the reading of this book by asking my students to answer the question; is it ever okay to seek revenge? What are some possible consequences of taking matters into your own hands?

I have decided to promote this throughout my school. This is a book that needs to be in each of my department’s classroom. As a middle grade English teacher I definitely could see this happening to any of my students. I have seen some of the things they post online to each other. It is so easy to be so nasty to each other. Teens today don’t consider it is the same as walking up to that person and saying it to their face. The major difference is that online, it is open for anyone and everyone to see. It becomes very public. They detach themselves from what they have written.  I understand why Agnes did what she did. However, I think she could have handled things differently. Once something is out there online, you can’t take it back.  This comes with questions in the back which help out the teacher.  Every parent should read this with their child or along with them to facilitate those all important discussions.

Guest Post: Clyde Linsley

“Tinkering” with History

I was in a large bookstore a few months ago and had one of those unfortunate experiences that are commonplace among us “midlist” authors. (“Midlist” is, incidentally, a common euphemism in the publishing business; it’s a relatively nice way to say “bottom of the pecking order, and apparently it applies to everyone who has had a book published but who cannot retire in luxury from the proceeds.)

In other words: nearly all of us.

We who reside on the midlist are doomed to haunting the bookstore aisles in search of prospective readers who seem to be searching for reading matter, with an eye toward enticing them into picking up our latest effort and, perhaps, falling in love with it. It happens just often enough to raise our hopes and fails to happen just enough to plunge us into despair.

She followed me eagerly as I led her to the books that had my name on them.

“I think my books might interest you,” I said. “I wrote a number of books with historical settings, mostly American and mostly set before the Civil War. My protagonist is a New England lawyer, a friend of Andrew Jackson, who . . .”

“Oh, I don’t care for historicals,” she said. “I want a nice murder mystery!” And off she went.

Um. Well.

By the time I had formulated a suitable response, she was gone. I’m still unsure that I would have come up with a suitable response, but it seemed appropriate at the time. I’d be interested in what – if anything – I might have said. In any event, I doubt that it would have mattered.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve come up against this objection. Readers of cozies (as traditional mysteries are sometimes characterized) seem to think historicals lack the requisite romance element, as if the whole boy-girl thing began with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Readers of romances apparently believe that historical mysteries produce an insufficient number of ripped bodices.

Of course, murder is a fact of life today, as it was in the past. Regardless of what we may believe about the “rightness” of it, murder happened, and it happened frequently.

The fact is that we are all to some extent the products of our previous thoughts and actions. And not only our thoughts and actions.

 Everyone’s past is our present. As an example, I present to you the subject of my current book, the Mississippi River.

The Mississippi River: native Americans called it the “Father of Waters.” It served the youthful United States as a major transportation artery in a time before the existence of railroads, aircraft and Interstate highways. It fostered territorial expansion, watered any number of farms, and developed international trade. It also led to the development of steam-powered railroads and riverboats and made the United States a major exporter of agricultural commodities.

But Americans are tinkerers by disposition, and we couldn’t leave well-enough alone. We took over the river and systematically “improved” it by removing logjams, deepening channels, and straightening many of the river’s twists and turns – in the service of efficiency.

In the process, we very nearly destroyed it. We didn’t foresee the inevitable consequences of our efforts, which would have been disastrous for New Orleans – not to mention for the millions of people who depended on the river for their livelihood.  

The Army Corps of Engineers recognized the problem, fortunately, and cobbled together a solution that has held the river in check for half a century. But it’s only a temporary solution, and it could easily be reversed. My new book, Old River, is a fictional conjecture about an attempt to do just that.  I think (he said modestly) that, in telling a fictional story. it explains the problem and the possible consequences of inaction.

Old River, as I said, is fiction. But it could be fact with a little bit of tinkering. And Americans – as I believe I’ve said – are tinkerers.

Author Bio:

Clyde Linsley was born 1942 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He graduated from Little Rock Central High School in 1960 (at the height of the desegregation controversy). Linsley attended Little Rock University (one year), then transferred to the University of Missouri. There, he received a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the Missouri School of Journalism in 1964. That was followed by two years of graduate study in theology and social ethics at Colgate Rochester Divinity School where he didn’t get a degree but gained interesting knowledge and significant expenses and considered it worth every penny.

When asked what inspires his writing, Clyde quotes a favorite writer:

“William Faulkner wrote that the past isn’t irrelevant, and that it is “not even past.” As a Southerner who has lived most of his adult life in the east, I keep finding the past encroaching on the present, wherever I go. If there is a single theme to my books, it’s probably that what happens tomorrow is directly related to what happened yesterday. Europeans are probably more aware of this, because they have so much more history, but it’s just as true on this side of the pond.”

Most of his stories have echoes from the past.

After school, he worked on state and national political campaigns, two presidential inaugurations, and wrote radio news for a small New Hampshire broadcaster. He was also a reporter for a (now defunct) daily newspaper, a freelance writer and a mystery novelist. Clyde is married with three offspring (now adults) and lives with his wife in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.