I find myself using spreadsheets far more than I ever expected when I first started writing. Back then, I had a few lists here and there in word documents and one spread sheet. That one spread sheet documented short story submissions, with stories added to the list as I submitted them.
I still have the spread sheet documenting submissions, now divided into pages by year, but I’ve created another one for published stories with a separate page for pending publications, one for unpublished stories, and one overall submission document showing all of my stories alphabetized by title, so I can easily see how many times a story has been submitted and to whom.
The most recent addition to my collection of data is a spreadsheet tracking my private eye stories by main character. At a glance, I can see that two of my private detectives have appeared in only one story each and that I’ve written three stories featuring Dallas-based PI Cleo Jimenez, one of which, “Mirror Life Meltdown,” was published byBlack Cat Weekly in issue #255 in July 2026. Another of Cleo’s cases, “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Likes,” is scheduled to be published this year in the anthology Big Tex and Suspects: Crime at the State Fair of Texas. The third is on submission. Cleo currently has about 15,000 words in her series.
My character Jerry Milam, who lives and works in Texas in the 1950s to 1970s, appears in five stories. Two went out of print with the closure of the publisher, but the editor is working to get those anthologies republished by a new publisher. One story, “The Case of the Cabochon Ring,” was published in Black Cat Weekly #258 in August 2026. Another is supposed to be published in an anthology next year. The fifth story is on submission. Jerry currently has more than double the word count of Cleo, coming in at 31,500 words.
Then there’s Maya Laster, my genetic genealogy investigator. Maya beats Jerry and Cleo, appearing in eight stories so far. Four have already been published: in Black Cat Weekly #79, #110, and #242, and one in the anthology Crimeucopia: The Not So Frail Detective Agency (which was a finalist for the 2026 Derringer Award for Best Anthology and First Runner Up for a Silver Falchion Award for Best Anthology). Of Maya’s other four stories, one is pending publication in an anthology sometime next year, one is on submission, one needs to be resubmitted, and the other is in final edits. Maya’s stories currently total 49,875 words.
My investigative crew in the Bad Vibes Removal Services series, however, needed their own spreadsheet. That series beats Maya by more than double, with sixteen short stories and two novels. The short stories alone total almost 106,000 words. The most recently published story, “Wedding Vibes,” appeared in Black Cat Weekly #145. The next story is pending publication, and the word is that it will be published in the fall this year.
So why do I track this information, and what do I do with all this data?
I make plans.
The data tells me I have enough word count that at some point I could create a short e-book of Jerry Milam stories. Or that if I write five or six more stories, I’ll have a book length manuscript ready to create a collection that would work in a print or digital format.
I almost have enough short stories featuring Maya Laster to make a collection of her stories. If I write another two stories, I’ll have over 60,000 words, enough to create what’s considered a novel-length print book. The word count that I have right now would work well enough for a novella-length e-book, but would be too slim a volume in print for my taste.
The word count tells me that I could collect my Bad Vibes Removal Services short stories into a print book. Most of those stories only appear in digital formats right now and many readers prefer print. Having a print option available might be worthwhile. I have to decide if this is something I want to pursue right now.
The data suggests goals for me to reach, stories for me to write, and a path forward in time. Some writers worry about facing a blank page and not knowing what to write next. With this data at my fingertips, if I’m casting about for ideas, I can always write the next story for one of my detectives and move closer to the goal of completing a collection.
A final note: As mentioned above, I have several stories coming out soon. When I have publication dates and covers, I’ll post them here. Right now, only one of my non-PI stories has been scheduled for publication. “The Mocking Ones,” a story I wrote for Cryin’ Shame: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Lyle Lovett, is scheduled to be released in digital formats on December 8, 2026, with the print version to follow in early 2027.
I had a wonderful time at Killer Nashville this year. From the moment I walked in, everyone I met was warm and welcoming. One of the things I loved most about this conference was how easy it was to strike up a conversation with a total stranger and walk away with a new friend. I exchanged business cards and swapped stories with more people than I can count, and every one of those conversations reminded me why I’ll probably return.
One of the higlights for me was speaking on my panel, “Feisty Women Protagonists in Historicals.” I was in great company: Nancy Herriman (1800s San Francisco), Nina Wachsman (1600s Venice), Joy Allyson (historical French romance), and Nancy Locklin (nonfiction books about women and violence in 1700s France), plus me, mostly mucking around in the American West. Different centuries, different continents, same throughline: women have always been feisty, using wit and guile to work within, or around, the systems of their time, and sometimes using those systems to their own advantage. I also made a point of reminding the audience that a quiet woman, doing exactly what society expected of her, is no less brave for it. Women have held families and communities together through hard, unglamorous work since the beginning of time. That’s feisty too.
I also got some news at the awards ceremony: For Every Evil Under the Sun, a short story collection I contributed to, was nominated for the Silver Falchion Award for Best Short Story Collection. We didn’t take home the win, but we placed third, and honestly, that felt pretty good. It’s always nice to be noticed. (Fellow AMW member, Laura Oles was a contributor, as well as Alexandra Burt.)
But at the end of the day, what I’ll remember most isn’t the panel or the awards, it’s the people. What stayed with me is how much Killer Nashville is about writers helping writers: swapping craft advice, cheering each other on, and generally leaving each other a little more inspired than when we arrived. Conferences like this have a way of turning strangers into friends over the course of just a few days, and this year was no exception. I left with a stack of business cards, a handful of new stories to tell, and a lot of new friends I’m already looking forward to seeing again.
Below are photos of me harassing interesting people.
Molly Ivins—always a truth-teller—described the state this way: “Texas! Land of wretched excess!”
Yes, I also quoted her in a March 2025 blog. But I was describing sustained icy weather.
This time? Austin weather persons say it has not rained here this August!
And as you’ve noticed, temperatures continue to spike above 100 degrees. Outdoor house plants? In a fit of mercy, maybe you brought some back inside.
That’s what we did today for five jasmine plants, acquired in grad school, that we’ve cosseted for decades. Decades! Usually they live indoors in winter, or on the deck in summer.
But this week, walking past them, I felt a disturbance. Even with daily water, even with blossoms, I felt warning signals.
Was that just my…overheated…imagination? Plus the fact that, as eloquently sung in Kiss Me Kate, “It’s too darn hot!”?
Per Pollan: “A great many mammals, several bird species, and octopuses are now generally thought to be conscious, and there are scientists and philosophers who believe that some rudimentary form of consciousness, or sentience, reaches much further, all the way to insects and, possibly, beyond the animal kingdom.” (Id., at 1.)
Beyond animals? Yes, all the way to plants!
So, are plants sentient? One plant scientist points to “all the volatile compounds emitted by a succession of plants, from poplars and tobacco plants to peppers and olive trees. Plants emit volatile chemicals for a range of purposes: to signal distress, to alert neighboring plants to threats, to thwart or poison herbivores, and possibly even to soothe themselves (many plants emit ethylene, an anesthetic gas, for reasons not well understood.” Id., at 20.) (Please to note Pollan has inserted plants in the middle of the cover.)
So maybe our jasmines emitted a volatile alarm chemical. Was the alarm intended for humans? Who can tell? But the plants made it inside…
It’s a “hard problem,” the whole “consciousness” debate that Pollan’s book describes, and we’re in for a fascinating scientific journey.
Query for you mystery readers: would you agree that it’s premature for the unraveling of a murder mystery to depend on warnings from plants? For one thing, the science is evolving. But also, to provide a real fact-based clue in a mystery, should the plant’s warnings alert not just perhaps other plants, but a human? The detective, a witness, the victim—or the reader? The jury will be out on that for awhile.
But I ask because, in the oppressive heat, I took refuge in Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train (also titled Heart of Fire) (1928).
Woe! The author appears to have committed the sin of presenting to the reader (who, like all mystery readers, is determined to solve the mystery based on available clues) information about what appears to be a mere notion on the part of a character. Poirot reveals, at book’s end, that Miss Grey (a sensible character) “firmly believes that she felt your daughter’s presence beside her one day in the Casino Gardens at Monte Carlo, just after she had been having a talk with Knighton. She was convinced, she says, that the dead woman was urgently trying to tell her something, and it suddenly came to her that what the dead woman was trying to say was that Knighton was her murderer!” (Ch. 35.)
What? Is this a ghost story? What actual fact, what actual clue, was revealed by an already dead person to Miss Grey? Could this apparent ghostly concern, this ghostly attempt at communication, convey a real clue? Yet in the last chapter that’s how Poirot treats Miss Grey’s interpretation of the ghost’s concern––as an actual clue.
I’m not sure this accords with the sacred collaboration between the mystery writer and the mystery reader, where (as the 1930 Detection Club rules insist), every clue must be instantly produced to the reader.
And the notion of a character thinking she hears a dead victim trying to whisper the name of her murderer? What’s your reaction?
Still, given the (possible?) messages from the jasmine, I’m hoping we won’t relive the worst Texas drought, the drought of the 1950’s, so vividly described in Elmer Kelton’s classic The Time It Never Rained (1973).
Kelton’s dedication: “In a broad sense this book is dedicated to the old-time Western ranchman, whose life style gave him an inkling of Heaven and more than his proper share of Hell.”
The heat was indeed hellish. Corsicana, northeast of Austin, experienced 82 days of temperatures over 100 °F or 37.8 °C, peaking at 113 °F or 45 °C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_Texas_drought
The seven-year drought finally broke in 1957. Per NPR, “Rural Texas never fully recovered. Between 1950 and 1960, the state lost nearly 100,000 farms and ranches, and rural residents who had made up more than a third of the population dwindled to just a quarter of the population.” https://www.npr.org/2012/07/07/155995881/how-one-drought-changed-texas-agriculture-forever
Out in the pasture the grass is tan, not green. The three donkeys are disconsolate. They come to the gate to pester us for carrots.
For continued green, I’m counting on the live oaks. Cedar elms. Redbud. Peach trees. Other plant treasures—basil, sage, geraniums, lantana, plumbago, bay tree, mint––are faring okay so far. But what about the poor suffering stuck-in-the-dirt rose bushes? Water? More mulch? Crossed fingers?
I’m working now on Book 11 in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series set in the hill country…Ghost Music. No drought involved, so far! But as always in this series, water is an important character!
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party! She’s active in Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime and also Austin Shakespeare. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com
Find her books on Amazon and also at BookPeople in Austin, Texas.
Meet my newest character, Cleo Jimenez, a former Marine, former police officer, and now Dallas-based private investigator. “Mirror Life Meltdown,” in Black Cat Weekly #255, is Cleo’s first published appearance, but not the first story I wrote for her. That story is still awaiting publication later this year. Her third case is currently on submission.
Cleo is non-descript, with average height, average build, average looks. She’s a thirty-something, brown-hair-in-a-pony-tail, jeans-and-t-shirt kind of woman. She’s not into fancy clothes, fussy hair-dos, or make-up. Being average makes it easier for her to blend into the background when she is following a subject suspected of infidelity. The majority of Cleo’s cases involve family drama, from cheating spouses to crimes caused by addiction, mental illness, greed, vanity, and lust. In Cleo’s world, a bird that walks like a duck is usually a duck, not a whooping crane. Her cases stem from people doing stupid things and making bad choices, resulting in blow-ups in their personal lives.
Cleo enjoys romance novels, historical or modern. She studied communication at the local community college. She can handle a gun, but doesn’t usually need to carry one, since taking photos of cheating spouses, unseen, rarely leads to conflict. She drinks Shiner Bock beer and drives an older model Nissan.
When Cleo accepts a case surveilling a professor whose wife is concerned by his sudden inattentiveness and lack of communication, she isn’t expecting a deep dive into the world of university-level bioengineering and biochemistry research. She fully expects to photograph the professor in a sleazy motel, maybe with a grad student. Then her duck turns into a whooping crane, and the case takes on potentially earth-shattering consequences. Thank goodness Cleo is resourceful, even when out of her depth!
Where did the idea for this story come from?
I saw a call for a short story of any genre that included a mention of something potentially apocalyptic. As I was pondering the guidelines, I asked my neurodiverse college student son, who is currently working as an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin, if he could think of any possible causes of a man-made apocalypse, excluding obvious things like thermonuclear war or robots and AI. He spouted a list. (This is a fairly normal conversation in my house.) The creation of mirror life bacteria was on his list. I asked what that was. He defined it. Fortunately, I retained enough of the chemistry and organic chemistry classes that I took in college to understand his explanation.
Then I went to the internet and read several articles on mirror molecules and mirror life. In one of those odd quirks of coincidence, I even received a newsletter from UT Austin with an article about the work on mirror molecules being done at UT Dallas around that time.
Now I had an interesting topic and a setting: UT Dallas, where my oldest son attended college. Next, I needed some characters for the story.
I have another PI character who lives and works in the Dallas area. Her name is Maya Laster, and she’s a private investigator specializing in forensic and genetic genealogy. I considered how I could place Maya in a mirror-life case, but she felt wrong for the story. Then I remembered Cleo. Cleo was perfect for the case I was imagining.
In her next adventure, Cleo is hired to stand guard over a painting at the State Fair of Texas. That case, entitled “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Likes,” will appear in the anthology Big Tex and Suspects: Crime at the State Fair of Texas which is scheduled for release later this year.
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For more information on short fiction by N.M. Cedeño, visit nmcedeno.com
Fresh Golden Threads for The Emperor’s New Clothes
By Laura Oles
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” –C.S. Lewis
If you’re in search of a dark crime story, look no further than a classic fairy tale. Take a handful of jealousy, revenge, gaslighting, theft or even murder, and coat it with the sparkling exterior of a fantastical castle or a forest filled with magical beasts, and voila! You have a crystal ball full of comeuppance.
There’s a kidnap plot in “Hansel and Gretel,” attempted poisoning in “Snow White,” toxic families and unpaid labor in “Cinderella,” and several breaking and entering charges in “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”
According to the BBC, fairy tales can be traced back thousands of years. Durham University anthropologist Dr. Jamie Tehrani shared that some tales like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin” are approximately 4,000 years old. Additionally, he told the BBC, “Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than Classical mythology – some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts – but our findings suggest they are much older than that.”
Ah, the long tail of crime tales…
As an avid lover of short stories, I was thrilled to be included in the recently released Wish Upon a Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson. The opportunity to reimagine these stories in a current context was a fabulous challenge.
My contribution, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” finds itself in the center of emerging tech hustle culture. Countless cautionary tales can be found in this world of big promises and bigger pitfalls, the brass ring always barely beyond reach for all but a few with secret access to the inside track.
Oh, to be chosen.
Daniel Hayes finds himself at a crossroads after his last investment goes bust. He knows he has what it takes to strike it big—he just needs one more shot to prove himself. One more chance to quiet the chorus of naysayers and to demonstrate, once and for all, that he has what it takes make it in Big Tech.
The universe drops a golden coin in Daniel’s palm, and he knows that he’s finally found the perfect opportunity to show his family, friends, and Instagram followers that he’s made it to the top. He may need to make a few compromises, but that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it?
Wish Upon a Crime is available now.
THE TABLE OF CONTENTS
“Hansel and Gretel” by Joseph S. Walker
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by John M. Floyd
“Rapunzel” by Adam Meyer
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Laura Oles
“Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Michael Bracken
“Beauty and the Beast” by James A. Hearn
“The Bremen Musicians” by Debra H. Goldstein
“Jack and the Beanstalk” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
“Cinderella” by Donna Andrews
“The Frog Prince” by Josh Pachter
“Little Red Riding Hood” by Barb Goffman
“The Briar Patch” by Tom Milani
“King o’ the Cats” by David Dean
“The Gingerbread Man” by Stacy Woodson
Laura Oles is the award-winning author of the Jamie Rush mystery series. Her work has appeared in crime fiction anthologies, consumer magazines and business publications.She loves road trips, bookstores and any outdoor activity that doesn’t involve running.She lives in the Texas Hill Country with her family. (https://www.lauraoles.com).
I have a short story in the new anthology Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors III from Inkd Publishing entitled “The Assassination Game.” This is one of the few stories I’ve written that has been partially inspired by real events that happened in my community, many of the events taking place during my children’s high school years. I selected three unconnected events and assembled details from them like a jigsaw puzzle to create my story.
What were the incidents?
Senior Assassin!
Several years ago, I heard about the game of “Senior Assassin” being played at the high school while volunteering in the library. The game is generally played in the spring, not the winter, so I took some liberties by placing it over the Winter Holidays in my story. In “Senior Assassin,” members of the senior class sign up to play an elimination game, in which they tag each other, usually with water guns, vying for the honor of being the last one standing. The school building is off-limits for the game, which must be played outside of school hours. However, the parking lot is fair game. To move from the building to the parking lot, silly rules are employed to create safe passage. For example, to be protected from elimination, you might have to wear swimming pool floaties on your arms or a maybe a hat with animal ears. The game is generally in good fun, but it makes the news almost every spring because of someone mistaking a water gun for the real thing.
The second incident that I drew from happened over a summer, a time when bored high school students have been known to get into mischief. In this case, my daughter’s friend came over and told us about how her younger brother was riding his bike in their neighborhood when some stupid teens in a pick-up truck decided to take pot shots at him with a BB gun. He was struck in the back and bloodied. He wasn’t the only one targeted that day. A couple other children were also hit with BBs.
The third piece of the story came two years ago when I drove one of my kids two days in a row to visit a friend in the hospital, who was recovering from surgery for severe scoliosis. I learned months earlier, in the lead up to the surgery, that in some instances emergency surgery may be needed if the curvature of the spine worsens past a particular point. Unlike my protagonist, my child’s friend, to his parent’s relief, didn’t have to have emergency surgery. His surgery was done in the summer, when, I’m told, most scoliosis surgeries occur.
To be clear, the teenagers in my story bear no resemblance to the actual children at my kids’ high school, or to any of their friends or to their friends’ siblings. The story and its characters are fictional. I simply borrowed details from real life to build the story.
In “The Assassination Game,” my protagonist, JB, who is recovering from emergency scoliosis surgery, learns from friends that the seniors at his high school are playing an assassination game over Winter break. However, the game has gotten out of hand to the point that someone used a BB gun to shoot another player in the back to tag them out. JB hears that police are investigating the matter.
The story is also heavily inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. From Rear Window, I borrowed the names Lisa and Jeff, who became my protagonists. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart plays L.B. Jeffries, called Jeff by friends. My character’s name is Jeff, but his friends call him JB, and only his mother calls him Jeff. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff witnesses what he suspects to be a murder while recovering from an injury that has him stuck in his room in a cast up to his waist. My character JB sees something out his window that might or might not relate to the assassination game BB gun incident while stuck in his room recovering from emergency scoliosis surgery. As Grace Kelly’s Lisa did in the movie, my character Lisa visits her friend JB and becomes the active investigator, going to look for evidence of what might have happened.
Of course, things don’t go as the teens plan in their investigation.
One morning each year the bird genius, Jesse Huth, of Huth Avian Services, arrives from Wimberley to conduct our annual bird survey.
Every year I tiptoe along behind, hearing his soft announcements. “Green heron above the creek.” I look up, straining to spot the lovely heron in flight. While I’m wondering what it would be like to fly like that, I hear: “Red-tailed hawk.” Now Jesse’s facing a different direction, lifting his binoculars. Later, “American Redstart.” (I ask myself: what’s that?) We climb back up from the creek. Then, “Field sparrow. Lark sparrow.” (I peer, unsure of the difference.) Then off to the pasture. “Vireo, red-eyed.” “Vireo, white-eyed.” And “Vireo, yellow-throated.”
Those vireos?—I never spot them, whatever they are doing––flying, darting, twittering, disappearing.
Then—such elation! Sitting boldly at the top of a tree we see the brilliant crimson of a summer
Jesse’s an expert on birds. He has studied their voices, their habits, their preferences, their appearance. He knows how to use owl calls to draw a crowd of various birds. After Jesse departs, I grab The Sibley Guide to Birds to study those three vireos (red-eyed, white-eyed, yellow-throated).
So tiny, the differences! You have to see the eye, where the yellow is, and where it isn’t; you must notice whether it has the gray cap, or not…
Jesse has spent years with those birds under close observation, yes, and under closer observation, applying his knowledge of detail. He sees differences that escape me. He can distinguish their songs.
After two hours he’s observed, and recorded or photographed, 40 species.
Details! Writers also must choose details that work, that light up, that bring to life characters and setting. That phrase—“under close observation”—describes the writer’s job: finding just the right details of setting, just the right details of characters, to make the plot come to life and satisfy the reader, the audience.
We all know great examples. In Act I, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar closely observes Cassius:
“Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit
That could be moved to smile at anything.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.” Act I, Scene II.
Reading that, did you get a glimpse of Cassius’s face, as Caesar describes it? And hear that firm conviction, “therefore are they very dangerous”? Right away we begin to hold our breath.
I confess I do want to like the protagonist, whether in a play, a novel, a mystery, biography, autobiography. I do not need to approve entirely of that character, but, whatever the genre, I prefer to spend time reading about someone I can empathize with. So, turning to autobiography, consider these excerpts from the beginning of Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen:
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold. …
We grew coffee on my farm. The land was in itself a little too high for coffee, and it was hard work to keep it going; we were never rich on the farm. But a coffee-plantation is a thing that gets hold of you and does not let you go, and there is always something to do on it: you are generally a little behind with your work.
…Later on, when I flew in Africa, and became familiar with the appearance of my farm from the air, I was filled with admiration for my coffee-plantation, that lay quite bright green in the grey-green land, and I realized how keenly the human mind yearns for geometrical figures.
With these details Isak Dinesen makes us see the farm and the Ngong Hills, then makes us feel the air at six thousand feet… with “lipid and restful” evenings. We feel her emotional attachment—“a coffee-plantation is a thing that gets hold of you and does not let you go.” Then she catches our imagination, describing seeing her farm from the air while flying, and shares her discovery that “the human mind yearns for geometrical figures.” Her own observations of detail reveal to us the protagonist, the main character in this autobiography, as a thinker, a noticer, a person with staying power, who once (but no longer) “had a farm in Africa”—and now offers to share that adventure. Her intelligence, her sensibility, her brilliant use of detail, kept me turning the page.
Another protagonist we meet and can’t abandon: Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, of Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow. We’re introduced as the Count strides back from the Kremlin Gates to his home at the Hotel Metropol. On the way he greets the fruit seller, thanks the soldiers whose prisoner (we now perceive) he is, returns to his elegant suite—and learns that he has been dispossessed. He will spend the rest of his life in a tiny room in the hotel’s attic: “a cast-iron bed, a three-legged bureau, and a decade of dust.” He’s allowed to retrieve a few possessions. He wants “all the books” and also chooses two high-back chairs his grandmother’s oriental coffee table, porcelain plates, two table lamps, and the portrait of his sister…plus one trunk which he fills with clothes and personal effects, including his sister’s tiny scissors. We watch him take a last walk through his suite, then return to his tiny new room. A pigeon lands outside:
“Why, hello,” said the Count. “How kind of you to stop by.”
The pigeon looked back with a decidedly proprietary air. Then he scuffed the flashing with its claws and thrust its beak at the window several times in quick succession.
“Ah, yes,” conceded the Count. “There is something in what you say.”
I already liked this man, his exquisite courtesy to the pigeon, his apparent ability to laugh at himself, his apparent determination to stay himself, to refuse to give the state the satisfaction of causing him despair …despite the state’s efforts to destroy almost everything he has. Then I watch while he hosts a party for his friends in the hotel staff:
“The Count was something of a natural-born host and in the hour that ensued, as he topped a glass here and sparked a conversation there, he had an instinctive awareness of all the temperaments in the room.”
Personal tragedy, but humor, civility, sensitivity, courage—and determination. Okay, I’ll definitely keep reading.
Screenwriter Robert McKee, in his book Story about principles of screenwriting, points out that a story’s protagonist must have a conscious desire, but must also have the capacities, and at least a chance, to attain that desire. Also, according to McKee, “The protagonist must be empathetic; he may or may not be sympathetic.” Per McKee, “Empathetic means ‘like me.’ Deep within the protagonist the audience recognizes a certain shared humanity.”
McKee explains: “The unconscious logic of the audience runs like this: ‘This character is like me. Therefore, I want him to have whatever he wants, because if I were he in those circumstances, I’d want the same thing for myself.’” Amor Towles certainly accomplished that with Count Rostov.
So what details have kept you reading a book? What particular description made you think—this writer’s keeping me entertained, keeping me turning the pages? In particular, are there protagonists who—when you think about it—have some appealing characteristics you enjoy? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Now, a short report. First, no peaches. Tragically, after warm weather when the blossoms opened and tiny peaches formed, two late freezes killed the baby peaches. Sigh. Second, after unusual rain, the pastures out here in Hays County are bright green. No bluebonnets this year (well, maybe six), but we still have magenta Wine Cup, lavender Passion Flower, and so many yellow flowers—Brown-eyed Susan, Mexican Hat, Golden-Eye, Coneflowers, Sunflowers, Cowpen Daisy, Golden-Wave Coreopsis, Navajo Tea, Indian Blanket. Hard to know which is which.
I’m at work on Book 11 in the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, set in the Texas hill country. That means working on the big triumvirate—setting, characters, plot. The protagonist, Alice, definitely has a conscious desire, and the capacities to attain it—but barriers lie ahead. Yes, she’s under close observation. Stay tuned.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. She’s active with Austin Shakespeare and the Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime Chapter of the national Sisters in Crime (come join us! 2-3:30, Laura Bush Library on Bee Cave Road, second Sundays of the month).
June 25, 2026–Watch for the DSCL Author Showcase–Helen will be presenting, along with Jo Pellinore and Michael Baldwin! Social at 5:45, Panel Discussion 6-7:30. Contact Dripping Springs Community Library to register.
“One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do
is to have the daily miracle. It does come.” ~ Gertrude Stein
I’m having a hard time getting this post started. First I started a sentence about buying Natalie Goldberg’s The True Secret of Writing but stopped half-way through. Then I began a sentence about the book’s title, finished it, and realized it had nothing to do with my topic. I’m still trying to get it right.
For most of us, the first sentence isn’t easy. Neither is the second. Often, the third is troublesome. Sometimes the process just goes on and on.
Okay, scratch all that. There’s nothing new in it. The first opening sentence I composed seemed off-putting, so I wrote another, and it wasn’t any better. So I’ll dive right in:
But it’s only fair to warn you: This post is about writing and thinking. It isn’t about childhood or cotton or plaids or sewing or shopping. But if you’ll take a minute to read through some cottons and plaids, the point will become clear.
The post is also about miracles.
Below, in italics, is a draft I wrote for another group blog, Writing Wranglers and Warriors:
I’d planned to write about Shakespeare today, but a picture of a trench dress fellow Writing Wrangler Nancy Jardine shared stopped me in my tracks.
I confess I had to look up trench dress. I’d never heard the term. Imagine my surprise when I realized I’ve had trench dresses of my own. Although I love nice clothes, the technicalities have never interested me.
What caught my eye about this particular dress was the plaid. It reminded me of my childhood. There was never a plaid my mother didn’t love and wouldn’t wrap me up in.
And that brought to mind the annual back-to-school treks to Comal Cottons in New Braunfels, Texas, where we bought patterns, fabric, and notions to make back-to-school clothes. Friends from up the street and their mother came, too.
We made the trip in July, and started early, to get a jump on the summer heat. The outlet store, about thirty miles from where we lived, was filled with bolt after bolt of cloth. Mother walked slowly, running her hand across every bolt—it seemed to me she touched every bolt—and saying, “Isn’t that pretty,” or, “That color would look good on you,” or, “That would make a cute…” I followed along. My job was to chime in about the colors and patterns I liked, but I was bored stiff. I agreed with everything.
Next step, patterns: Opening long metal file drawers, pulling out packets of patterns… Simplicity and Butterick patterns were the best; McCall’s instructions could be confusing. Then, mentally matching styles with material we’d seen, taking patterns to fabrics to make sure, checking yardage and price, reconsidering… I was sure we re-examined every bolt.
By this time, my feet were killing me. (I was born with feet designed for sitting.) Comal Cottons had no chairs. Three bored tweens, one with aching feet, needed chairs. With chairs, girls can read books. Without chairs, girls stand around, one of them shuffling from foot to foot.
Then, decisions: making choices, stacking bolts on big tables, watching clerks cut material straight across, perfectly straight, and fold it.
And then, the notions: buttons, thread, bias tape, zippers, and lots more considering.
And finally we headed for the car, bearing loads of raw material that over the next six weeks would be made into our fall wardrobes. Which in my case would include a plethora plaids.
Now, like much else of my childhood, Comal Cottons itself is only a memory.
Thank you, Nancy. With just one picture of a plaid dress, you brought back part of my childhood.
Well. To quote one of my former high school students, BO-ring. And, So what?
But as I wrote that last line about memory, the Daily Miracle arrived: A treasured memory of a different piece of fabric surfaced. The memory I really wanted to write about.
And then, another miracle: I realized the story about the shopping trip was a warm-up. It was a seed of an idea starting to germinate. It was brain rubble that had to be expelled before the real subject could emerge.
Acting on the epiphany, I found my bit of fabric, snapped a photograph, and added three short paragraphs. Finally, I deleted the whole boring warm-up.
The final post read this way:
Fellow Writer and Wrangler Nancy Jardine recently shared a picture of a beautiful plaid dress that reminded me of some fabric I’ve saved for more than fifty years. After residing all that time in my mother’s cedar chest, it’s wrinkled but intact.
The fall I turned eleven, my father’s father, whom we called Dad, gave Mother some money to buy me a birthday present. She purchased the wool shown in the photo and made me a pleated skirt. When I was sixteen, she remade it into an A-line skirt and a weskit.
Opening the box at breakfast on the morning of my eleventh birthday was a bittersweet experience, because Dad had died unexpectedly the afternoon before. Mother told me she’d chosen the fabric because the blue reminded her of the color of his eyes.
Now, to prevent further strike-throughs, I’ll get to the point promised in the Warning:
Writing is Thinking.
A boring (bad, terrible, appalling, disgusting, abhorrent, loathsome, etc.) first (second, third, etc.) draft is not a Stop Writing sign. It’s a Keep Writing sign, signaling that brain rubble is loosening up, that something better is about to present itself—that the Daily Miracle will come.
Because the only way to get rid of brain rubble is to write it out.
To quote author Nancy Peacock, “If I don’t have the pages I hate I will never have the pages I love.”
I wish I had more time to work on this. It would contain less brain rubble. It might also be on an entirely different topic.
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This post appeared on the Austin Mystery Writers blog in 2015. It’s since been edited. If it appears in the future, it will be edited again. That’s part of the process. It’s always something. (Remember Gilda Radner?)
Kathy Waller’s short stories have been published in anthologies and online. She is co-author, with Manning Wolfe, of a novella, Stabbed.
A native of small-town Texas, she lives in Austin but finds that cows, horses, and rivers keep showing up in her fiction, and no amount of editing can make them leave.
Recently while writing a story set in 1968 inside a fictional, historical hotel, modeled on the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas, I ran into a question about hotel doors. Finding the answer took me down a rabbit hole of research into the safety codes and regulations governing hotel doors and locks.
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In the 1800s many hotels kept room keys on hooks behind the registration desk. A guest would be given the key when they checked in. When leaving the hotel temporarily, guests would leave the bulky, skeleton-style keys at the desk and reclaim them when they returned. Desk clerks would know at a glance if a guest was in the hotel at any given moment.
With improvements in locks and the manufacturing of smaller keys, guests began to keep room keys in their possession when leaving the hotel temporarily. Housekeepers and managers had to have master keys to be able to access rooms when guests were out or lost their key. Hotel doors in the early 1900s did not close and lock themselves. For my story I needed to know at what point the regulations changed to require hotel doors to close and lock themselves.
This turned out to be two different questions because the requirement for self-closing is separate from the issue of self-locking.
On the issue of self-closing doors, I learned that hotel fires spurred building code changes. The June 5, 1946, La Salle Hotel Fire in Chicago killed sixty-one people. The Canfield Hotel Fire in Dubuque, Iowa, on June 9, 1946, killed nineteen people. And the Winecoff Hotel Fire on December 7, 1946, in Atlanta killed one hundred nineteen people. On the heels of these 1946 fires, building codes across the United States were changed in the 1950s to require self-closing, fire-resistant doors in hotels, and enclosed stairwells to protect people escaping from fire. The regulations only required the doors to self-close, not to lock.
Additionally, in many places, older buildings were not required to meet newer safety codes. After the 1970 Ponet Square Fire, Los Angeles passed regulations requiring retrofitting older buildings over two stories tall with enclosed stairwells to provide a protected path out of the building. The Ponet Fire Door ordinance required the installation of self-closing doors that could block the spread of fire for at least one hour on rooms and stairwells. But different states and localities have different rules on retrofitting of older buildings. After the 1980 MGM Grand Fire in Los Vegas, a commission was formed in Nevada to discuss the need for making older buildings comply with newer regulations.
I still didn’t have an answer on the question on whether the door self-locked. Here Mr. John Payne, a forensic locksmith, came to my rescue. He said: “The lock side of the equation was solved earlier: Walter Schlage patented the “key shutout mechanism” — the core of what we now call the “hotel lock function” — in a series of patents beginning in 1933. The typical hotel function lock had an outside handle that did not move and a key was required to retract the latch to enter from the corridor. The door would automatically latch behind every guest who entered or departed the guest room. The combination of a self-closing door and a self-latching hotel lock cylinder meant that by the mid-20th century, a hotel guest needed to do nothing at all when leaving a room — the door closed, latched, and locked itself.” Thus, hotels built after the mid-1930s would probably have these newer door locks.
But Mr. Payne pointed out, many hotels didn’t consider functional door locks for guest security to be an important responsibility until after singer Connie Francis sued Howard Johnson Hotels in 1976. Ms. Francis was beaten and raped in her hotel room. Her attacker gained entrance through a sliding glass door that was easily opened from the outside. The hotel was aware that the door locks were not sufficient and that other incidents had occurred at the hotel. A jury found the hotel liable for the assault. Prior to this lawsuit, only the assailant had ever been held responsible for such an attack in a hotel. This lawsuit (Garzilli vs. Howard Johnson Motor Lodges, Inc.) was the first to establish that hotels are required to provide adequate security for guests, which includes functional door locks.
After this deep dive down the research rabbit hole, I had the answers I needed to make my story work. My fictional historical hotel built in 1886 might not yet have self-closing, self-locking doors in 1968, especially if it was scheduled to undergo a major renovation in 1969 to bring it up to code. My fictional hotel guests would still have to manually close and lock their own hotel room doors using the original Victorian era knobs and locks. Which means, someone might forget to lock a room, allowing for a robbery to occur. Thus, the crime in my story was plausible. Now, I won’t have people writing to tell me that the fictional thefts in my fictional hotel were impossible, and more importantly, the editor who questioned the door closing and locking situation and sent me down this research rabbit hole is satisfied.
Finally, I have a new story out in Black Cat Weekly #242. “The Case of the Dead Man’s Daughter” features genetic genealogy private detective Maya Laster. I’m thrilled for her story to be featured on the cover of the magazine.
I wrote the following post ten years ago. A fellow writer said I should repost it periodically, and over the years, I’ve done so. I’ve altered a few words, but nothing else has changed.
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So you start writing your post about the incomparable Josephine Tey’s mystery novels two weeks before it’s due but don’t finish, and then you forget, and a colleague reminds you, but the piece refuses to come together, and the day it’s due, it’s still an embarrassment, and the next day it’s not much better, and you decide, Oh heck, at this point what’s one more day? and you go to bed,
and in the middle of the night you wake to find twenty pounds of cat using you as a mattress, and you know you might as well surrender, because getting him off would be like moving Jello with your bare hands,
and you realize that not only has your own brain turned, but that your mind has become completely unhinged.
And you can’t get back to sleep, so you lie there thinking, Books, books, books. Strings and strings of words, words, words. Why do we write them, why do we read them?What are they all for?
And you remember when you were two years old, and you parroted, from memory, because you’d heard it so many times,
The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear, Public domain, via Wikipedia
And when you were five and your playmate didn’t want to sit still and listen to you read Angus and the Cat,and you made her sit still and listen anyway.
And when you were sixteen and so happy that all you could think was, O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!, and you didn’t know who wrote it but you remembered the line from a Kathy Martin book you got for Christmas when you were ten.
And when you were tramping along down by the river and a narrow fellow in the grass slithered by, and you felt a tighter breathing, and zero at the bone.
I’ll tell you how the sun rose, A ribbon at a time, The steeples swam in Amethyst The news, like Squirrels, ran – The Hills untied their Bonnets –
And when you saw cruelty and injustice, and you remembered, Perfect love casts out fear, and knew that fear rather than hate is the source of inhumanity, and love, the cure.
And when your father died unexpectedly, and you foresaw new responsibilities, and you remembered,
We never know how high we are Till we are called to rise. And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies—
And when your mother died, and you thought,
The Bustle in a House The Morning after Death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon Earth –
The Sweeping up the Heart And putting Love away We shall not want to use again Until Eternity –
And later,
Oh, if instead she’d left to me The thing she took into the grave!- That courage like a rock, which she Has no more need of, and I have.
Fentress United Methodist Church
And at church the day after your father’s funeral, when your cousins, who were officially middle-aged and should have known how to behave, sat in the front pew and dropped a hymnbook, and then something sharp stuck you in the side and you realized that when you mended a seam in your dress earlier that morning, you left the needle just hanging there and you were in danger of being punctured at every move, and somehow everything the minister said struck you as funny, and the whole family chose to displace stress by laughing throughout the service, and you were grateful for Mark Twain’s observations that
And when, just before you walked down the aisle, you handed a bridesmaid-cousin a slip of paper on which you’d written, Fourscooooorrrrrrre…, so that while you said, “I do,” she would be thinking of Mayor Shinn’s repeated attempts to recite the Gettysburg Address at River City’s July 4th celebration, and would be trying so hard not to laugh that she would forget to cry.
And when your friend died before you were ready and left an unimaginable void, and life was unfair, and you remembered that nine-year-old Leslie fell and died while trying to reach the imaginary kingdom of Terabithia, and left Jess to grieve but also to pass on the love she’d shown him.
And when the doctor said you have an illness and the outlook isn’t good, and you thought of Dr. Bernie Siegal’s writing, Do not accept that you must die in three weeks or six months because someone’s statistics say you will… Individuals are not statistics, but you also remembered what Hamlet says to Horatio just before his duel with Laertes,
And by the time you’ve thought all that, you’ve come back to what you knew all along, that books exist for pleasure, for joy, for consolation and comfort, for courage, for showing us that others have been here before, have seen what we see, felt what we feel, shared needs and wants and dreams we think belong only to us, that
And about the time you have settled the question to your satisfaction, the twenty pounds of Jello slides off, and you turn over, and he stretches out and leans so firmly against your back that you end up wedged between him and your husband, who is now clinging to the edge of the bed, as sound asleep as the Jello is, and as you’re considering your options, you think,
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar…
and by the time the Pussycat and the Elegant Fowl have been married by the Turkey who lives on the hill, and have eaten their wedding breakfast of mince and slices of quince with a runcible spoon, and are dancing by the light of the moon, the moon, you’ve decided that a turned brain has its advantages, and that you wouldn’t have your mind re-hinged even if you could.
Kathy Waller’s short stories have been published in anthologies and online. She is co-author, with Manning Wolfe, of a novella, Stabbed.
A native of small-town Texas, she lives in Austin but finds that cows, horses, and rivers keep showing up in her fiction, and no amount of editing can make them leave.
Austin Mystery Writers 