Moments In Crime

A thousand words

I never used to be much of a photographer.  Never much appealed to me.  For one thing, my glasses and the viewfinder never seemed to play well together.  For another, the whole process seemed complicated-- buying film, managing to get it into the camera without exposing it, then having to finish a certain number of pictures before you could take the film in to be developed.  I can recall time after time when I picked up a set of prints only to find that ninety percent of them were either badly composed or fuzzy—and yet here I had a whole set of ugly, fuzzy prints that I had a hard time throwing away because, after all, I’d taken them. 

And then there was protecting your film from the X-ray machines when you flew, and figuring out what to do with the negatives and . . . you get the idea. 

But maybe the biggest barrier to my enjoying photography was that I never seemed to get any better.  By the time I got my many badly composed, badly focused pictures and my few relative masterpieces, I had no idea what I’d done wrong on the bad pictures or right on the good ones.  Maybe I should have taken a class or two, but why, when I seemed to have absolutely no aptitude whatsoever for camera work.

Then digital cameras came along, and I got one, just to play around with, and now I’m hooked.  And I’ve finally realized . . . I wasn’t a bad photographer.  I just hadn’t found the right equipment yet.

And along with my digital camera, I discovered a new creative outlet.  Taking pictures is so completely nonverbal that it makes the perfect balance for a work life spent, for the most part, hunched over a computer, courting backache, eyestrain and carpal tunnel and pushing all the verbal centers of the brain as hard as they can go. 

One great fringe benefit of spending time with my camera is that even though the verbal part of my brain can shut down and rest while I’m taking pictures, some part of my consciousness continues to gnaw on any creative dilemmas I’ve been struggling with. And more often than not, when I get back to the computer, either I’ve solved whatever writing problem had me beating my head against the wall—or at least I’ve returned with new energy and a new sense of optimism that it can be solved.

So in celebration of the part of my creative brain that doesn’t get out in public as often as my writing does, I’ve posted a few of my favorite recent photos.

Confession time

One year at Mayhem in the Midlands, Kent Krueger moderated a fascinating panel called "The Me You Never Knew."  And among other things, I seem to recall, he asked his panelists—Margaret Maron, Nancy Pickard, Sharan Newman, Ellen Hart, and me—to 'fess up to something we’d never before revealed about ourselves.  I can’t remember what I confessed there, but I know what I should have blurted out.

I’m a recreational reader of books on organizing and time management.

There. I’ve said it.  I’m a productivity geek.

I have a whole shelf of these books in my bedroom, where they’re convenient for whiling away attacks of insomnia with a little self-improvement.  Since I bought one or two of them from Amazon, back in the days before I realized that my friendly local indies would gladly feed my habit, I get an email from Amazon every time a new book on the subject comes out.  Occasionally I do a little surfing to find out if anyone’s done a killer site on organizing. 

Ironically, people who know me through my books seem to think I’ve got this whole organizing thing down pat, because Meg is so organized.  And even friends who only know me online sometimes think I’m organized because I often mention organizing projects or ideas in my posts.  I hate to disillusion anyone, but the reason I’m so interested in the subject is that I have so much to learn.

But a couple of years ago I ran into a book that is actually starting to make a difference in my ability to get and stay organized—Getting Things Done, by David Allen. 

For anyone who hasn’t read it, Allen contends that a main source of stress and unproductivity is trying to keep everything in our heads, instead of in some system. He recommends that you:
•    Capture everything that has your attention.
•    Process it all to see what you need to do with it.
•    Organize the resulting information into a trusted system that includes a list of your projects, a list of the next actions you could take on those projects, and a "someday/maybe" list—things you can’t tacklenow but might eventually.
•    Review your system regularly.
•    And get stuff done . . . because moving all this stuff out of your head and into a trusted system can free up an enormous amount of mental bandwidth.

Long before I read Getting Things Done, I noticed both the benefits and shortcomings of to do lists.  I suffer often from insomnia of the "can't turn my brain off" kind.  I learned that by doing a brain dump--grabbing a pad of paper and writing down everything that was in my head--everything I had to do or wanted to do or didn’t want to do, everything that was nagging at me--it helped the insomnia.  Especially if I committed to start working through the list in the morning.  And if I did that regularly most nights, life got a lot less chaotic.  Especially if I kept each night’s list and updated it instead of starting from scratch.  So I started typing my list into the computer as a Word document, and . . . you get the idea.  I’d created a rudimentary version of Allen’s trusted system.  Far from perfect, but still a giant leap forward from any of my previous organizational schemes. 

At the same time, I was writing about Meg, who is superbly organized, though bad at saying no to her family. In Murder with Peacocks, she is rarely without her "notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe," as she calls her organizer.  In Murder with Puffins, she notes "For some reason, people interpret my attachment to my organizer as a sign that I am unnaturally organized. I’m not, really; just the opposite.  I long ago accepted the fact that if I write something down, I’ll probably get it done, and if I don’t, all bets are off."  And in Owls Well That Ends Well, she is juggling far too many projects, and reports that "the only thing that kept me from panicking was that they were all neatly jotted down in the notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, as I called my giant to-do list.  Once they were in the notebook, I could manage not to think of them all the time."

In other words, she’d figured out how to keep all the stuff she had to do out of her head by putting it into a system. Perhaps, unbeknownst to me, Meg had read Getting Things Done—even though at the time I wrote that, I hadn’t. Maybe I should sit down and figure out what else she’s doing that I could learn from.

I’m definitely going to keep working on implementing the GTD system, because—big insight I managed all by myself, without Meg’s help—it solves one of the biggest stumbling blocks I have to overcome in my writing—the desire to achieve a clean slate before I start.  I’ve seen a lot of people sabotage themselves by not feeling able to sit down and write if they have anything else hanging over them.  An upcoming appointment, a meeting, an undone project, a messy desk—it’s all too easy to say, "I’ll just finish these few things and then I’ll be able to concentrate better on my writing."  Maybe. But maybe, when those few things are gone, you’ll think of another few things that are equally pressing, equally urgent . . . and before you know it, your writing time is gone, eaten up by things that could have waited until after you did your day’s writing. 

I’ve learned, most of the time, to ignore the siren calls of competing projects—learned not so much how to put them out of my mind as how to shove them aside and write anyway.  But the more I work this GTD thing, the better luck I have achieving what Allen calls "mind like water'’—a mind that’s clear, empty of distractions, and ready to focus fully on the task at hand.

That’s definitely worth working on.

And as a side benefit, since discovering GTD, I’m sort of sneaking up on the idea of dumping all those other books on organization and time management. Maybe I won’t be needing them quite so much any more.

Turning over that new leaf

My first goal for tomorrow will be to recapture the territory I liberated today, territory that I expect will fall to the enemy overnight.  And then, when I’ve secured my borders, I’ll see if I can’t extend them a little.

No, I’m not moonlighting as a mercenary, and I’m not embroiled in another absorbing computer game.  I’m raking leaves.

I live far out of D.C., on a mostly wooded lot.  The only open area in my yard is the croquet field—or septic field, if you want to use the term the county would recognize.  The croquet field is about a quarter of an acre, and surrounded by towering, majestic oaks and tulip poplars, along with a fair scattering of other, smaller trees, like maples and hollies, that would put on airs and pretend to tower if the oaks weren’t around to keep them in line. Most of the time, I adore my trees.  I love the deep, cooling shade they cast, the rich vibrant green I see when I look out my windows, and the sighing sounds the leaves make when a breeze rustles through them.

Then fall comes, and I wonder whether I have a few too many trees.

Right now I often alternate between leaf-raking and writing.  Write till I run out of mental steam.  Wander out into the back yard and rake leaves till I run out of physical energy.  Repeat until my quota is done, or until I run out of leaves.  So far the latter hasn’t happened.  I usually start the day’s raking by cleaning up the areas I raked yesterday, getting them back into perfect shape before clearing new territory. More often, by the time I’ve finished one end of the cleaned up space, the other end is already disappearing under the slow, steady, inexorable rain of more leaves.

Days like today, I feel inclined to stand in the middle of the croquet field, tap the handle of my rake on the ground to get the trees’ attention and shout, "Get it over with already!  Can’t you just drop all the damn leaves at once instead of this gradual trickling down?"  But the trees rarely respond to questions like this, unless you call shaking down a few more leaves a response. Looking up at them, I can see that what I’ve raked so far probably isn’t even half of what they will eventually be showering on my yard.   Occasionally I wonder why I bother.

I know why I bother.  Last year, I was too busy to rake leaves all fall, and told myself it would be more efficient to wait until they were all down and then rake.  Bad idea.  My busy times didn’t end when the leaves stopped falling; and the vast expanse of lawn choked in several inches of leaves was so intimidating that I didn’t really get up the energy to tackle it until late winter—by which time the sodden mass of leaves had killed much of what little grass my lawn actually contains.

No, this year I’m applying the same techniques to the leaves that I do to my writing.  Writing a novel is even more intimidating to contemplate than raking a ton of leaves.  So I break it up.  I set myself a daily quota of a certain number of words, and when I finish that day’s task, I’m allowed to call that day a success, even if I haven’t done another thing all day.  And that means that in addition to a big celebration when I finish the book, I also get dozens of little celebrations all along the way.

But I try not to have too many of those days that begin and end at the keyboard.  I did too much of that a few books ago—crawled into the deadline cave for a few weeks and ignored everything other than my book.  When I crawled out again, I realized that the entire rest of my life—house, yard, filing, volunteer work, friend and family connections—was a shambles. Took a long time to put out the fires and clean up the damage.  And it dawned on me that if in addition to my quota I’d just done a little every day on those seemingly unimportant nonwriting chores, not only would life after deadline be less hellacious, life during deadline would work a lot better.  "It’s easier to keep up than catch up" became my mantra. 

So even though I’m on deadline again, I’m not ignoring the leaves.  Or the laundry, or the dishes, or the filing, or paying bills, or any of the other million and one nonwriting things that fill our days—but right now, my mind, clearly, is on the leaves.  By bedtime tomorrow, I hope to have written another 1500 words and cleared off another six or eight square feet of lawn.  If I succeed, I’ll not only be on track toward meeting my deadline, but I’ll be keeping my life on an even keel while doing so.

And if I don’t succeed, I’ll try again the next day.  The leaves aren’t going anywhere.

Christmas memories

Since Six Geese a-Slaying, my most recent book, is a Christmas mystery, while I was writing it I spent a lot of time thinking about my own Christmas memories. (Translation: "Help!  I need Christmas stuff, quick!  Let’s cannibalize everything I can think of from my own past holidays.")

I used the memory of my worst Christmas experience ever—sadist that I am, I inflicted it on Meg’s nephew, Eric.  You’ll have to read the book to hear that one. But most of my Christmas memories didn’t fit into the book at all, so I thought I’d share a couple of them here.

Take the Christmas when I didn’t get a Barbie.  All of my friends either had Barbies or were getting them for Christmas. I put in my request for a Barbie and approached the presents on Christmas morning, secure in the knowledge that Santa would come through.

Santa blew it.  Instead of a Barbie, I got some off-brand fashion doll.  She didn’t have the rather sultry, pouty look of the early Barbie dolls—I seem to recall that she had more of a baby face. She certainly didn’t have Barbie’s figure—she was shorter and plumper, with a larger head than Barbie. Heck, she probably had a more realistic figure, one less prone to inspiring anorexia. Presumably she had a wardrobe, but the only outfit I remember her wearing was a bridal gown, which had limited appeal to a tomboy like me.

In fact, apart from peer pressure, it’s hard to imagine why I wanted a Barbie doll to begin with. I don’t recall playing that much with doll. But once I finally had a Barbie doll—probably the following Christmas—I quickly found ways to have fun with her and her ever-growing family of friends and relatives—Skipper, Midge, Ken, a new Barbie with bendable legs—the whole Barbie clan.

I just never seemed to be doing what Mattel expected little girls to be doing with Barbie.  No fashion shows, no school dances, no dates.  My Barbies led a much more adventurous life. Mounted on Breyer horses they conducted adventurous guerilla warfare across the floor of my room, battling an evil oppressor—I’d been watching "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh" and "The Swamp Fox" on Disney.  "Swiss Family Robinson" inspired me to shipwreck them on a desert island in the middle of my room, where they built tree houses, raised crops, and made all their tools and household implements out of twigs.  They put in their time as slightly oversized Borrowers after I read the books by Mary Norton.  Sometimes they roamed about in a paper towel box converted into a gypsy caravan—pulled, of course, by the Breyer horses.  They often gave plays—usually Shakespearean comedies, though I was greatly hampered by the fact that I only had the one Ken doll, and Shakespeare didn’t write many female parts.

And more often than anything else, they were detectives and solved mysteries. The mysteries were more inspired by the Hardy Boys than Agatha Christie, and often featured buried treasures and sinister prowlers.  And in my scenarios, Barbie had her nemesis . . . her arch-enemy . . . indeed, her Moriarty. 

Remember the off-brand fashion doll I found under the tree on that unfortunate Christmas?  Apparently I never forgave her for not being Barbie, so once I did have a Barbie, I cast not-Barbie in the recurring role of a villainess called the Lady in White.  Clad in her increasingly tattered white wedding gown, she haunted the edges of my Barbie games like some odd amalgam of Miss Haversham and the Wicked Witch of the West.

So in the end, even my Barbieless Christmas turned out okay. You can’t have an adventure without a villain, right?

More recently, we had the Christmas when we decorated the tree fifteen or twenty times. The whole family came to my house that year, and before my nephews, then two, arrived, I made sure to have the tree all decorated for their delight.  I’d gone to a great deal of trouble to get enough plastic decorations to make sure the tree was safe, largely by buying lots of vintage metallic-colored plastic ornaments on eBay.

The boys were dazzled, all right.  They both made a beeline for the tree and began quickly and methodically undecorating it.  Within an hour, the tree was naked as far up as they could reach.  When they went down for their naps, we redecorated the tree, thinking perhaps they’d exhausted their undecorating energy.  As soon as they woke up, they began the enthralling project of denuding the tree again.

We went through this routine twice a day the whole time they were there.  We’re a little short on impressive tree pictures from that year, but everyone had a lot of fun.

Okay, the year of not-Barbie probably won’t fit into Meg’s world, but maybe I can use that undecorating thing one of these years.

People . . . people who need killing

When you’re writing a humorous mystery, one of your challenges is to find a way to knock someone off and still allow the rest of your characters—and your reader—to regain their senses of humor in relatively short order.  For me, the best way to accomplish this is to choose a victim who needs killing.  That’s a wonderful old Southern expression.  When someone who has made life hell for everyone around them finally gets his or her comeuppance, there’s a good chance someone will remark, philosophically, "Well, he needed killing."

I don’t generally kill off nuns, pregnant women, small children, hard-working do-gooders, or (of course) dogs.  I look for someone who has ticked off a whole lot of people—at least one of them so badly that that someone will decide the offender needs killing.

Sometimes I look in my own life.  For example, when I was starting to plot Owls Well That Ends Well, I remembered something that had happened a couple of decades ago.

Like so many fans of Sherlock Holmes, I turned the final page of "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" and sighed with dismay because it was, alas, the last Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle ever wrote.  Though at least in 1927, when the story was published, readers could hope that he would write more adventures. By the time I got my copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle had been dead for decades, and clearly wasn’t going to weigh in from the afterlife with new work. 

In the seventies, the BBC TV series "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" introduced me to authors whose stories might satisfy my craving for more mysteries in the Holmesian vein.  I became particularly fond of R. Austin Freeman’s John Evelyn Thorndyke.  Dr. Thorndyke is both a doctor and a lawyer and solves his cases using then-current scientific knowledge, making him one of the first forensic scientists in detective fiction.  And since between 1907 and 1942 Freeman wrote, by my count, twenty-one Thorndyke novels and thirty-eight short stories, there was a lot of good reading out there . . . if only I could get my hands on the books.

They were all out of print by that time.  Today, of course, I could search online for them—and for that matter many of them are being brought back into print in new trade paperback editions.  But Alibris and ABEBooks and their ilk came into being in the 90s. When I first began hunting for Freeman, I had to haunt used bookstores to get my Thorndyke fix.  One used book store in particular was a goldmine, as long as I didn’t mind the prices—which seemed to be escalating rapidly as my interest in Freeman continued.  Maybe I began with the cheap, relatively easy to find volumes and was now hitting the pricier ones.  Maybe I wasn’t the only reader suddenly interested in Freeman and the books’ value was escalating because of increased demand.  Or maybe, just maybe, the owner was hiking the prices to take advantage of my interest. I’ll never know.

I do know that one day, at a used book sale, I ran into the owner.  "I found something on the dollar table that you’re going to want when you see it in the store," he said.

And when I visited the store, I found he was right.  I did want that faded volume—but not at $150.  I had the presence of mind to glance over it and shrug, murmuring, "Already got that one."

Of course, I didn’t have it.  I’ve blocked out what the book was, so I have no idea if I ever found and read it.  And it wasn’t really the price that threw me—it was the fact that he’d told me he’d found it on the dollar table. If he just hadn’t said anything, maybe I’d have bought it.  I certainly didn’t begrudge the man the expertise that allowed him to recognize on the dollar table a book worth $150.  But did he have to tell me?

It rankled.  After all those years, it still rankled—until I finally decided to kill him off.  Fictionally, of course.  I gave my love of Freeman to one of my characters.  I had another character snag a sought-after volume of Dr. Thorndyke’s adventures off the dollar table at a yard sale.  And then I had my book-snatcher do a few other nasty things to ensure that, when he was found dead, there would be no shortage of suspects.

I have no idea if the real book dealer was (or is) anything like my fictional character—I didn’t know him that well and haven’t run into him in years.  Maybe I was the only person he ever annoyed.  More than likely he didn’t even come close to "needing killing."  And it doesn’t matter, because I didn’t base my character on him.  I used that one incident—ascribed the worst possible motives to its perpetrator—and in that way, created someone who did need killing.

And not only did it work in the book, but it exorcized the resentment I’d been feeling for so long.  These days, if I ran into the bookseller, I’d probably greet him as a friend. Maybe I’d even tell him about the character he accidentally inspired.

Or maybe not.  We mystery writers can kill people on paper and get all sorts of things out of our systems, making us among the mildest and mellowest of souls.  I don’t know if used booksellers have any similar form of catharsis.  Maybe I should fall back on the well-known phrase that appears at the beginning of so many novels: "This is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental."

J. Austen time

I’m writing this the way Jane Austen wrote.

Well, sort of.

I am, at least, writing by hand, my pen making faint scratching noises as it skitters across the blank surface of the page, leaving words in its wake.  I have retreated to my library, opened up the handkerchief table, and am sitting in front of the two tall windows that form the only bookless wall in the room.  When I pause to think, I can look out and see leaves drifting down from hundreds of trees outside.

This is amazing, I tell myself.  What a wonderful way to feel connected to all those generations of writers who lived and wrote before the advent of the computer or even the typewriter.  What a refreshing break from my usual stressful, plugged-in work habits.  What a relaxing, idyllic, zen way of creating.

What a load of malarkey.

I’m writing this by hand because my power went out right in the middle of working on another blog entry—an entry that is now trapped in my powerless computer.  I’ve retreated to the library—which on a floorplan of my house would be labeled as the middle-sized of the three bedrooms—because my desk does not have enough room to hold a pad of paper.  My desk holds the keyboard, the monitor, and those few odds and ends that I may need while writing.  Well, and also a much larger collection of odds and ends that somehow make their way onto my desk, to remain until I get stuck on a passage and suddenly decide that my cluttered desk is clearly the real reason for my inability to write myself out of whatever corner I’m written myself into. 

Here in the library, I have a small empty table.  I also have a good distance between me and the beeping noise my Universal Power Supply is making as it runs out of juice. And then there’s the fact that from the library I can see if any of the Dominion Power trucks return.   They arrived in force a while ago—the clocks are electric, so I have no idea precisely how long a while—and then decamped without succeeding in restoring power.  Grr.

The sad truth is that I am a electronic creature.  A writer totally dependent on the computer.  Oh, sure, if some scenario out of science fiction came to pass and all the computers in the world vanished in an instant—a sort of cyber Rapure, with all carbon-based life forms left behind—I would find a way to adapt and carry on with my writing.  But short of something like that, I write on a computer.  On a keyboard, my fingers dance and skip; the words appear at a steady pace in comfortingly legible letters—not at all like my chicken scratch handwriting.  And revisions and editing are a snap—how much easier to make needed changes when you can add, delete, and move words, sentences, paragraphs, whole pages with a few keystrokes. 

Back in college, before I’d even met my first word processing program, I was already writing in what many fellow writers thought was an odd manner.  I wrote on an old electric typewriter, on the back of used 8-1/2 by 11 paper (an early form of recycling, though economy, not ecology, was my main motivation).  If I started a sentence and didn’t like it, I’d simply do a carriage return and start the line over.  As many times as it took.  My rough drafts would look something like this:

    Eight-seven years ago
    A little less than a century ago
    Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
    continent a new country
    continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated
    to the idea
    to the notion
    to the idea that all men are created equal.
    to the perposition
    to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Then I’d cut and paste the good bits together on the back of more used 8-1/2 by 11 paper, and type my fair copy from that that rough draft—very rough, with little snippets of paper waving gaily in the air whenever I picked up a page.  A strange method, maybe, but it worked for me, and it meant that the first instant I got my hands on a word processor, I bonded with it, and have been writing on a computer ever since.  I can be amazingly productive on a computer.

And right now I need to be productive—I have a great deal of writing to do right now, more than I can possibly do by hand.  If this goes on, I will have to find someone who has power at their house and go over there to type up this entry and post it.  And then maybe I can do a little work on my book until—

Bliss.  I just heard the whoosh of my furnace going on. 

Clearly I would not have been a highly productive writer in Jane Austen’s time.  She could conceal her writing when someone entered the drawing room, and then pick it up again when the visitors left. Me, I’d spend the entire time between visitors trying to decipher my own handwriting. 

Still, I know there are excellent writers who do their first drafts in longhand.  Maybe I should give this writing by hand thing another try sometime.

Just as long as it’s my choice, not Dominion Electric’s.

Seizing opportunity

"Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans" – John Lennon

I’d noticed that St. Martins/Minotaur had started the Moments in Crime blog, and hoped that one day I’d have the opportunity to contribute.  And I knew what I’d do once asked.  I’d spend the weeks leading up to my turn planning what I’d write, making sure not only that I was entertaining and articulate, but also that I struck the right balance between serious and comic.  Seemed appropriate, since I’m a writer who works very hard at the difficult and ephemeral business of being funny.

That was my plan.  Of course, when the invitation to blog came, it was on rather shorter notice than I’d allowed for in the plan.  And instead of coming when I was between books, as I’d imagined, it arrived at a time when I’m scrambling to finish my next book while juggling all the usual preparations for a busier than usual holiday season.  This is not what opportunity is supposed to look like!

Of course, I learned long ago that opportunity rarely looks the way you want it to or expect it to, and it doesn’t pick a convenient time, either.  It shows up, and if you’re lucky, you notice in time to grab it.

Opportunity showed up some months back when St. Martins asked if I was interested in writing a Christmas book.  Christmas books have done well recently, and a good one can also bring in more new readers for the rest of a series. So was I interested in doing one?

I thought it over.  Not what I’d been planning to do next.  I had another book in mind—working title Swan for the Money--and had already laid out my schedule for the coming months—so much time to finish the research and outline, so much time to write, so much time to revise and polish. It was a comfortingly doable schedule.

But the more I thought about it, the more I saw the Christmas book as a good opportunity—even though it meant coming up with another book idea immediately and writing it on a somewhat tighter than usual schedule.  What the heck—I’ve always worked well under pressure.  So I put Swans aside and threw myself into some intense months of writing Six Geese a-Slaying.

While writing Geese, I went through moments—in fact, long stretches, days at a time—when I found myself wondering if it was such a good idea after all.  I suffered all the usual emotional stages of book writing, including the predictable impulse to chuck it all and find a day job, the typical conviction that this was the worst thing I’d ever written, and a worse than usual case of worrying that I wouldn’t be able to finish it at all, much less in time.

But that happens on every book, and once I turn in a book, it all seems worthwhile.  Even more so when I finally hold the book in my hands.  And then a few days ago I got the fabulous news that Six Geese a-Slaying was #34 on the New York Times extended best seller list.

Okay, now I’m definitely glad I seized the opportunity to write my Christmas book—not to mention grateful to St. Martins/Minotaur for giving me the opportunity in the first place.  And standing ready to seize the next opportunity, whatever it may be. 

Blogging This Week: Donna Andrews

 DONNA ANDREWS is a winner of the Agatha, Anthony, and Barry awards. She's also won a Romantic Times Award for best first novel and two Lefty's for funniest mystery. She is a member of MWA, Sisters in Crime, and the Private Investigators and Security Association. Donna lives in Reston, Virginia.

Meg and Michael's house is serving as the marshalling point for the annual Caerphilly Christmas parade. The theme is "The Twelve Days of Christmas," and features assorted Christmas-

themed floats, a live nativity scene on a flatbed truck, the Three Wise Men on real camels (courtesy of the Caerphilly zoo), and Santa Claus in a bright red horse-drawn sleigh (Eight reindeer were beyond the zoo's scope).  Meg, of course, has been volunteered to organize the parade, which is to proceed from her house to the local campus, where Santa will take up residence to hear the Christmas wishes of the town's children. Of course, getting all the camels, pipers, leapers, and drummers in order is proving every bit as difficult as Meg feared it would be. Then, her nephew, Eric, comes up to her, wide-eyed and ashen-faced. "Meg," he whispers. "Something's wrong with Santa."

And that 's not an understatement. Santa is dead. In fact, the local curmudgeon, whose beard and belly made him a natural for the role, has been murdered. Now Meg and Chief Burke, who is playing one of the wise men, are faced with the two-fold mission of solving the murder and saving Christmas!

Readers can look forward to another zany Meg Langslow mystery--this one filled with Christmas spirit, and malice.