Picking up the stitches

Well, that’s it – I’ve written ‘The End’ on ‘Death at the Happiness Club’. I don’t feel morally obliged to write any more this month, but as I’ve started to go back and pick up some dropped stitches I might as well finish doing that before I abandon the novel for a while. I’ve got quite a nice scene at a bowling alley lined up to write this weekend. If anyone who reads this is waiting for the next Pitkirtly novel to come out, I think I should say it could be ready by the middle of next year, all being well. Somehow the editing process always takes quite a bit longer than the initial writing.
But don’t despair – in December I will be adding my Christmas short story to my Pitkirtly collection at smashwords.com. If you’ve ever wondered what sort of Christmas present Christopher might give Amaryllis, you’ll find out if you read this!
I will also be releasing a different kind of novel before Christmas. ‘Murder in the MIdi’ is in the romantic suspense genre and is set in the south of France, because sometimes I need to escape from the chilly east coast of Scotland and follow the sun.

And by the way, due to the absolute dearth of almost anything worth watching on UK television (including cable channels) lately, I have immersed myself in romantic fiction instead, so I will almost certainly be migrating overseas again next summer and writing more escapist drama.

timelines

I’m not sure how much time the average quirky mystery covers. Is the action typically all over within a few days or is it drawn out over weeks or even months?

My instinct is to rush through all the action as quickly as possible before I forget where I’m going with it. Sometimes this is because I’m writing the first draft during November and have a deadline to meet, but I think this just reflects an existing preference.  In some ways this suits the mystery genre well. As far as I know, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot never took very long to solve their murder cases.  But sometimes it’s good to draw things out a little, not so that you can pad out the extra time with more descriptions, but so that the reader gets a sense of time passing at a leisurely pace and not rushing by so fast that you just see one big blur.

Apart from that, as I’ve discovered on numerous occasions, timelines can be tricky. This is a particular problem when you write from more than one point of view and cover concurrent events. It’s easy to let one character or group of characters get out of step with another, so that it’s almost impossible for their stories ever to converge. Another issue is when days of the week are mentioned but you have no idea of what happened on which day. One of my recent chapters began ‘Christopher had planned a quiet Sunday’,  but when I actually got round to making a chapter list and trying to extrapolate the days of the week from it, I found it couldn’t possibly be Sunday yet because the day before had been designated as Tuesday for some reason.

I suppose this is what plot outlines are for!

On a different subject, congratulations to the cast and production team of ‘The King’s Speech’ on winning so many awards. Just my kind of film.

Happy New Year 2011!

Cecilia knits her way into the New Year

Just to prove I am a fitting writer of cosy mysteries (or ‘quirkies’ as I am starting a campaign to call them), this is what I was doing last night while other more foolish people were out in the cold watching fireworks. Sometimes untangling the wool is similar to untangling my plots!

And by the way, it wasn’t really worth switching the television on – 73 channels (or thereabouts) and nothing to watch on any of them.

The World of Cecilia Peartree

As befits a mystery writer, I live in a quiet suburb and have three cats. I like to write in the conservatory with soft piano music playing in the background. I have a season ticket for one of the theatres in town, where my friend and I attend matinees throughout the season, and when I retire I will very probably become a Friend of a local art gallery and meet people for tea in a long-established department store.

I never use bad language, not even when my Fiat Panda gets cut up at Holy Corner by one of these fiendish bicycle taxi contraptions. The characters in my mystery novels, therefore, don’t use bad language either. And there is very little blood, or at least very little that is visible in my writing. Sometimes bad things happen to the characters, but they suffer in silent dignity, without needing to have their suffering described in minute and sickening detail. Readers do need to use their imaginations sometimes, you know. This isn’t television or a film.

And speaking of television,why are there hardly any programmes worth watching? And so few films worth going to see? On television it’s a choice between so-called reality shows (depicting realities which Icertainly wouldn’t want to inhabit) and inferior drama, while at the cinema it’s either a meagre diet of cartoons or a feast of bad language and violence.

Well, you won’t find any of the above in my writing, that’s for sure!