Please join us

Members of Sisters in Crime ~
Heart of Texas Chapter 

will read and sign at

Malvern Books 

619 W. 29th Street
Austin, Texas
info@malvernbooks.com

Sunday, October 30, 2016
1:00 – 2:30 p.m.

Among those reading will be 

Alexandra Burt
Noreen Cedeno
Valerie Chandler
Helen Currie Foster
K.P. Gresham
Eugenia Parish
Kathy Waller
Manning Wolfe

Some of the books written by our HOTXSINC authors include
MURDER ON WHEELS, winner of the 2016 Silver Falchion Award
for best short story anthology at Killer Nashville
Noreen Cedeno’s FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN, finalist for
the East Texas Writers Guild Book Award in the Mystery/Thriller category 
Manning Wolfe’s DOLLAR SIGNS 
Helen Currie Foster’s GHOST LETTER
Eugenia Parrish’s A COLD BLUE KILLING 
K.P. Gresham’s HARDSCRABBLE HOMECOMING

The mission of Sisters in Crime is to promote the professional development and advancement of women crime writers to achieve equality in the industry.

Heart of Texas Chapter meets the second Sunday of each month–with the exception of November 2016, when it meets the third Sunday–at the Yarborough Branch of the Austin Public Library, 2200 Hancock Drive, Austin, Texas, at 2:15. An informal gathering is held at La Mancha Tex-Mex Tavern after the meeting.

By Gale Albright

There are many articles about writing, but perhaps not so many about writing organizations.

As current president of Sisters in Crime: Heart of Texas chapter in Austin, I find myself constantly coming and going, requesting favors, soliciting ideas, applying for grants, arranging programs, and asking if someone wants to do something.

Sisters in Crime was founded in 1987 during Edgars Week by Sara Paretsky and other female crime writers, in an attempt to close the gap between the treatment of women crime novelists and their male counterparts. Women weren’t getting enough book reviews, or not getting the right kind of reviews. Female crime writers weren’t taken as seriously as men.

Since that time, Sisters in Crime chapters have proliferated across the United States and Canada, encouraging women writers in their craft and their self-esteem. I consider it an honor to be a part of the nuts and bolts machinery of this effort.

We have a monthly meeting at the Yarborough branch of the Austin Public Library, where we showcase authors and forensic experts. In addition to our meetings, we are expanding into the community to network with writers, libraries, and book festivals.

For example, our chapter steering committee wanted to have a presence at the Texas Book Festival, slated for Nov. 5-6 this fall. The national Sisters in Crime organization awarded us a grant to pay for our display table. We now have a TBF committee composed of volunteers who are making schedules and organizing local Sisters in Crime authors who want to sell books at our table. Authors and readers and book buyers meeting one another always creates a positive situation for those in the writing community.

Another opportunity to reach out presented itself when National Sisters in Crime “We Love Libraries” Coordinator Andrea Smith, asked me, as the closest SINC chapter president in Austin, if I would present a $1000 check to the Lake Travis Community Library, which was just awarded the May 2016 “We Love our Libraries” grant. I’m happy I was asked to show up and be of service to the organization. The program starts at 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 8 at the Lake Travis Community Library, 1938 Lohmans Crossing in Lakeway. I’ll present the check and give a brief presentation on the advantages of joining Sisters in Crime. Pat Dunlap Evans will then present a program on her new mystery thriller, Out and In. Community outreach is a good way to recruit new members and make new friends. That’s what you do when you work at strengthening a writing organization. You make contact, you make plans, you bring people and projects together.

Our chapter has collaborated with Malvern Books, at 613 W. 29^th St. in Austin to put on a reading of Sisters in Crime: Heart of Texas writers’ books at 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 30. Malvern will offer our books for sale and give us a venue to promote our authors.

At its best, a writing organization provides shelter, stimulation, ideas, encouragement, and an opportunity for growth. If the building blocks are sound, there will a supportive matrix to enrich writers and readers alike.

(Alexandra Burt is our guest author today. Born in Germany, she moved to Texas, married, and worked as a freelance translator. Determined to acknowledge the voice in the back of her head prompting her to break into literary translations, the union never panned out. She decided to tell her own stories. Her books include Remember Mia and The Good Daughter. She is working on  her third novel.)

I feel awkward telling my readers that growing up I never had an inclination toward becoming a writer. Too often I’ve heard of authors writing since they were children. Jane Austen is known to have flexed her creative muscle as a teenager, writing sentimental stories to entertain her family and Virginia Woolf produced magazines about family outings. Their early efforts prepared them for dozens of novels they would write later in life.

I had never written a single word until about seven years ago. Reading a particularly bad book, I thought I could do better as if armed with my love of reading was enough to write a breakout novel. I spare you the details. Let me just say it became apparent that much was to be learned and it took years to pen a story that was remotely well crafted, coherent, and entertaining.

If you want to write, there’s good news and bad news. The good news first: you can become a solid and successful writer without coming from any sort of literary DNA or being born with a pen in your little clumsy hand destined to take the world by storm. The bad news is that you have to put in the time and learning the craft of writing is hard work. Like… hard work.

I went after it with a baseball bat. Hours a day. Every day. I read, I enrolled in classes, studied books on writing, and I wrote. Every day. I still wrote badly and did so for a very long time. See, epiphanies and experience take time, no ifs, ands, and buts about it, but eventually my stories became coherent. What I learned along the way was that craft was nothing more than using the tools of the trade and we all know what a good story calls for: a hook, a compelling setup, a killer plot, thrilling beginnings followed by perfect middles, completed by satisfying endings. The tools of the trade are nothing more than the application of POV, tense, dialogue and action, narrative and exposition. All those tools at your disposal allow you to masterly lure the reader into the worlds of your characters.

But having those tools does not a book make.

A novel is like a wristwatch; there’s the rather unassuming case that houses the watch mechanism, a clock face, and two hands. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it? But crack open that case and intricate parts and mechanisms become apparent; there are springs controlled by more springs, unwinding into a controlled and periodic release of time. A force is transmitted through a series of gears which oscillate back and forth and with each swing of the balance wheel the hands move forward at a constant rate. And in the background you hear a constant ‘ticking’ sound. Like a wrist watch uses a mechanical apparatus to measure the passage of time, a writer—unbeknownst to the reader—aligns the elements of an intricate story at a certain pace and in the end, if the writer times it just right, the reader will rejoice and give you their time and feel as if they’ve been in good hands.

But there’s more. There’s a part of writing I call art. If craft is execution, art is the design of the novel. If craft is the metal case that houses the watch mechanism, the clock face and the hands, the screws that hold it all together, the springs and gears, then art is the way you put the parts together, the way they connect with fickle timing, and the constant ticking in the background. Like every single component inside a watch, the individual parts must be assembled just right to tell time accurately, to produce that tick tick tick. It’s nothing you do overtly. It’s not like you sit down and tell yourself I’m going to produce a work of art. It’s just you telling a story the way only you can. So in a way you are your art.

See, you are all you have and if you are so inclined, take the leap and tell a story. Steady and balanced, combine craft and art, build something that causes a ticking sound in the background, alive like the beat of a heart.

Go!

By Gale Albright

It’s been a treat to see Kaye George again.

She flew into town last week to visit grown children and to see us of course, her Austin Mystery Writers “branch” of the family.

We met at our BookPeople haunt last Thursday to hug and laugh and talk about many things, most of them involving writing. And a lot of other stuff.

I first met Kaye George several years ago through Kathy Waller, who had just joined Austin Mystery Writers. Kathy asked Kaye, who was the head poohbah, if I could join as well. It was a critique group with several members. But, as is often the case with critique groups, members faded away for various reasons, and at one point the group consisted of Kathy, Kaye, and me.

I remember the vicarious thrill I felt when Kaye’s mystery novel, Choke, received a publishing contract. After ten years of patiently slogging away at her writing, Kaye was a professional! We were all giddy with delight. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.

When you have a really good critique group, the heartstrings are involved. It’s not just about writing. You start to genuinely care about all the people in your group in a personal and  professional way. Kaye’s victory was our victory as well.

Kaye’s first three mysteries in her Immy Duckworthy series (Choke, Smoke, and Broke) were published, followed by three Berkley Prime Crime Fat Cat who-done-its (under the nom de plume Janet Cantrell), the Cressa Carraway series, the Neanderthal mystery Death in the Time of Ice (Untreed Reads), as well as various short stories. She was on a roll.

Unfortunately for us, she was also gone. First, she and her husband moved to Waco, then on to Knoxville, TN, where they now reside.

Kathy and I were members of a two-person critique group for a bit, but luckily we acquired fabulous new members for Austin Mystery Writers, gleaned from the ranks of the Sisters in Crime: Heart of Texas chapter—Valerie Chandler, Laura Oles, and Elizabeth Buhmann.

Now for the fun part.

Thanks to Kaye, who had the original idea and pushed it to fruition, Austin Mystery Writers’ first crime anthology, Murder on Wheels, got published by Wildside Press in 2015. Flash forward a year. Murder on Wheels just won the Silver Falchion Award for best fiction short-story mystery anthology at the Killer Nashville writing conference for 2016.

On top of that, we are hard at work on our second crime anthology, whose title is a bit up in the air at the moment. It’s about Texas and crime. Enough said.

Although we all worked very hard on Murder on Wheels, I give Kaye the credit for riding herd on the project. I thank her for her vision and guidance.

We all wish Kaye would move back to the Austin area. She’s just too far away. But, thanks to the miracle of e-mail attachments, digital photography, and FB posting, we can still create our dreams together.

Each writers’ conference has its own personality. If I were to summarize Killer Nashville, I would describe it as a broad embrace of mystery sub genres with an inclusion of indie, hybrid and traditionally published authors, all carried by an undercurrent of noir appreciation and a love of Nashville music culture.

I know. I’m casting a wide net.

My favorite traveling companion..

The first night kicked off with a Wine & Shine event, which after a full day of hustling kids to school and flying from Austin, left me with more whine and no shine. My efforts in networking resulted in little more than two sips of merlot paired with a chocolate chip cookie while slouched on a chair in the hotel lobby.

With fellow Claymore finalist Mercedes King

The next two days were packed with learning sessions and special events. Killer Nashville’s panel schedule offered five options per time slot, leaving many attendees to make tough decisions regarding which discussion to attend. Programs ranging from “How to Write Effective Plot Twists” to “Law Enforcement, Soldiers and PTSD” demonstrate the range in programming. Topics covering technique, marketing, publishing and collaboration were also offered, along with breakout sessions with bestselling authors Janet Evanovich, Anne Perry, Kevin O’Brien, William Kent Krueger and Robert J. Randisi. I attended as many panels as I could fit in my schedule and left with several pages of notes and insight. I still don’t know how Robert Randisi, co-founder of Mystery Scene Magazine and founder of the Private Eye Writers of America (and the coveted Shamus award), writes 25 books a year. Like many things in our profession, this remains a mystery.

With authors Janet Evanovich and Gretchen Archer

Janet Evanovich’s lunch program was both fun and fascinating. She is open with her advice and opinions, both of which were appreciated by the audience she addressed. Her honesty about the empire she’s building–she currently writes or co-authors four books per year with the support of her husband and children– made me tired just listening to her talk about it. She. Never. Takes. A. Break.

The Mock Crime Scene was exceptionally well done. Its primary architect, Tennessee Bureau of Investigations Special Agent Dan Royse, composed a puzzle well supported by clues, evidence and online interviews. Attendees had their work cut for them out in identifying the culprit. The smile on Dan’s face told us all we needed to know–he was going to make us work. Hard.

Laura Oles with author Anne Perry

The awards banquet was a sold out event and included a buffet-style dinner and some fantastic live music. I had the opportunity to meet several authors, including fellow Claymore nominee Mercedes King. Before long, attentions turned to the awards portion of the evening. I was honored to accept, on behalf of Austin Mystery Writers, the Silver Falchion award for Best Fiction Short Story Anthology, presented by Anne Perry.

The Claymore was awarded to R.G. Belsky for Forget Me Not. It was an honor to make the short list for the Claymore, and I was grateful to be amongst such talented writers. I’m interested in seeing how these authors’ careers unfold over the next few years. I imagine some fabulous stories will be shared, and I’m looking forward to adding them to my reading list.

With Killer Nashville 2016 now over, I’m back to my daily grind but with a new perspective on both my own work and the industry in general. Most important, I’m reminded how lucky I am to be able to tell stories and spend my time around others who love to do the same thing.

–Laura Oles

Lately, the topic of critique groups has reared its head. Valerie Chandler represented both Austin Mystery Writers and Sisters in Crime: Heart of Texas chapter at the Third Thursday meeting of the Writers League of Texas at BookPeople on July 21.  Valerie was invited to join local critique group leaders/members to make announcements about their organizations before the main panel discussion of the evening.

I was privileged to moderate a panel of local authors and members of Sisters in Crime: Heart of Texas chapter on our July 10 meeting at the  Yarborough branch of the Austin Public Library. Included in the wide-ranging discussion was a ringing endorsement of critique groups and how they helped writers. The panel was composed of writers Doris Christian (writing as Sara Caudell), Francine Paino, Noreen Cedeno, and Martha Carr.

Below, see a post I wrote some years ago about the difference between being critical and being helpful in a critique situation. It appeared in one of the Sisters in Crime: Heart of Texas chapter’s HOTSHOTS! newsletter. I thought it would be helpful to resurrect it.

By Gale Albright

I grew up admiring critics.

Critics like Dorothy Parker and Rex Reed. Their comments were witty, dry, often acerbic. For many years, Rex Reed has been known for his acidic movie reviews. Just a small example among many is this one, from the New York Observer, July 13, 2010:

“At the movies, incomprehensible gibberish has become a way of life, but it usually takes time before it’s clear that a movie really stinks. Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest assault on rational coherence, wastes no time. It cuts straight to the chase that leads to the junkpile without passing go, although before it drags its sorry butt to a merciful finale, you’ll be desperately in need of a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”

Pretty funny, eh? And then there’s the iconic Dorothy Parker, whose critique of a youthful Katharine Hepburn’s performance on Broadway has become legendary: “Miss Hepburn runs the emotional gamut from A to B,” Miss Parker was supposed to have said to a colleague during the play’s intermission.

So, naturally, I thought you were supposed to basically heap scorn on books and movies and performances you didn’t like. As long as you were witty, dry, and often acerbic. A good critic made expert use of sarcasm and unkind jokes and metaphors.

I thought the critic was the center of attention. The bringer of wit and laughter.

I learned that the origin of the word sarcasm was from Latin for rending the flesh. Apt indeed.

The trouble is, when your flesh is rended, it doesn’t feel very good. As a person who thought cheap shots and ill-considered comebacks were the height of wit, I discovered how devastating it was to be on the receiving end of those oh-so-clever comments and witticisms.

Especially when it involved something I had written.

When I went back to college after intervening years of Real Life, I decided to major in English Writing and Rhetoric. To my chagrin, I had to take some classes in which, among other things, we had to learn the proper manner of critique. Critique etiquette, as it were.

I found I was not the second coming of Rex Reed or Dorothy Parker. Nasty, witty comments were strictly taboo. I had to learn how to give constructive criticism to classmates.

At first, I had a very hard time. What if I just hated what the other person wrote? What if it was stupid, boring, idiotic, or insane? Too bad.  And I had to do it over and over again. In short, I hated it. I felt totally out of my depth.

It was pure torture. Witticisms leaped to my tongue, only to die a stillborn death within my mouth. It was discipline. It was a change of habit. It was hard.

Then I understood. A critic is a star. She is the center of the universe. She earns her money by saying clever, often unkind things. But a person who offers a critique is not a star. To offer a critique is to offer a somewhat educated opinion, encouragement, and suggestions. One endeavors to be honest without being cruel or funny. I had to learn that I was not the director of the show. My lofty pronouncements did not come straight from Mount Olympus. I was merely a handmaid in the service of some other writer’s creative birthing.

At school I was told to start out a critique by telling the writer “what worked” in the piece. Sometimes I had to look pretty hard to find something “that worked.” It was like your mother telling you that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Except, the catch was, you couldn’t abstain. You had to give feedback.

After stressing the positive parts of a piece of writing, the critiquer would then write down “What didn’t work so well was ….” And say it without making a cruel comment at the writer’s expense.

All the critiquer has to offer is a personal opinion. It is to be hoped that critiquers in writers’ groups are people who love reading and writing, so that their opinions might have some literary weight. But it’s still just a solitary opinion.

As a critiquer, I’m not writing a syndicated column. I’m not an agent or an editor. I’m a fellow writer who needs another pair of eyes to look at my work. I want feedback, gentle feedback. It’s a balancing act.

I can’t lie and say something is great when it’s not. That’s evading one’s responsibility as a critiquer. But I’m not mean. The aim, I should think, of a writing group, is to keep the writers writing and coming back to the critique group. You don’t want to be so witty and sarcastic and cruel that a writer quits the group, shreds all her writings, shoots her laptop and treks off to Tibet in search of the spiritual peace of which you robbed her.

If a writer seeks out a critique group, obviously said writer, number one, wants to be read and, number two, wants feedback. Number three, said writer probably wants to continue writing.

A writer puts his heart and soul and ego on the page. A writer needs tender treatment. Tell the truth, but do it in a constructive manner. To critique is to help a fellow writer improve, not implode.

What goes around comes around. Yesterday’s witty, cruel comments may come back to haunt you when your own heart and soul are exposed on the page.

Writers.  Handle them with care.