Writer Pals

by Gigi Pandian

Far from being a solitary pursuit, writing wasn't something I was able to do well until I surrounded myself with other writers. Shortly after I moved to the Bay Area, everything in my life began to fall into place: wonderful friends, a great guy, an amazing job. But something was missing. Writing a book was still one of those things people say they really want to accomplish but don't actually find a way to do. 

A couple of years after setting into my life in Berkeley, a woman who had recently completed her MFA in creative writing moved to my neighborhood. Emberly Nesbitt was the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and we discovered we were both working on novels. Em and I wrote together during my first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and the momentum stuck. We met frequently at local cafes to motivate each other.

NaNoWriMo with Emberly Nesbitt

Everything snowballed from there:

It was through Em's encouragement that I sent my NaNoWriMo novel to the Malice Domestic Grants competition, which fosters the next generation of traditional mystery writers by giving grants to promising unpublished writers. When I found out I was being awarded one of their grants for Artifact, I attended Malice Domestic -- my very first mystery convention. It was there I met Juliet Blackwell.

Gigi Pandian and Juliet Blackwell

It turned out Juliet was the president of my local Sisters in Crime Northern California chapter. Since I hadn't previously known any local mystery writers, I would never have attended a meeting without her recommendation. Juliet and I became friends, and I also found myself serving on the board doing the chapter newsletter. 

Sisters in Crime NorCal Board in 2010

I learned about another group at that Malice Domestic convention: the Guppies Chapter of Sisters in Crime, a chapter set up for unpublished authors to have an online community. It was there that I learned how much time and effort it takes to learn to write a good novel, how to query an agent once your work is ready, and also how to not get discouraged in this crazy business.

Guppies Avery Aames (Daryl Wood Gerber) and Gigi Pandian.

I continued to write with Em at cafes, attended events in the mystery writer community, and signed with an agent I love working with. It was then that Sophie Littlefield rounded up a group of writers she thought would be a good fit for a group blog.

Juliet Blackwell, Gigi Pandian, Sophie Littlefield at Bouchercon

Since we wrote across genres, we hadn't all met each other before. I only knew Sophie and Juliet. Yet somehow we instantly clicked. (Sophie, to this day I don't know how you did it!) We picked a blog name, then got together for a photo shoot at a local cemetery (hey, many of us are mystery writers, after all).

Pens Fatales photo shoot in 2009

 
I didn't realize at the time how much of a community the group would become. Not only for writing, but for life in general. When your friends take you wig shopping and buy you a fun wig after you've been diagnosed with breast cancer, and then throw a big dinner party, you know you've chosen wisely.

A Pens Fatales dinner party

   

The Pens Fatales after wig shopping for Gigi

Last month at Left Coast Crime: Gigi Pandian, Sophie Littlefield, Juliet Blackwell

If you're a writer, definitely surround yourself with other writers. It doesn't have to be in person. Some of my best friends and critique partners are people I primarily know online, a couple of whom I've never even met. Even if you're an introvert, having at least a few writer pals who understand will make all the difference.

Gargoyles and Locked Rooms: Gigi's Short Stories

by Gigi

This week, my short story "The Shadow of the River" was published in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology.

"The Shadow of the River" is the first short story I've had published, and the second short story I've written. Though it sounds counterintuitive, I used to think that writing a short story would be more difficult than writing a novel.

Whenever I began to write a story, the idea would get away from me and grow into a plot that needed to become a whole novel. I didn't know what I was doing wrong. I understood the idea that a short story needed to be grounded in a twist, but I wasn't able to put that idea into practice -- until I realized that my favorite short stories are locked room mysteries.

Locked room mysteries are those puzzles involving seemingly impossible crimes -- a dead body in a room locked from the inside with no way for the murderer to have escaped. Edgar Allan Poe's "Murder in the Rue Morgue" is an early example of the genre. John Dickson Carr, one of my favorite authors, wrote dozens of locked room mysteries.

The resolution of these mysteries is when the detective shows how the seemingly-impossible crime was carried out. That revelation of making the impossible possible is the twist. If it's a good story, it'll leave you slapping your forehead saying "Of course! Why didn't I see that!?".

Once I decided to write a locked room mystery, the short story finally clicked for me. I wrote an entire locked room mystery story in one afternoon. I started with a gargoyle on the first line, and ended 3,500 words later with what I hope will make people smack their foreheads that they should have guessed the puzzle but didn't. (Since that story features a gargoyle, I haven't yet figured out a venue in which to place it. Any ideas? It's a fair-play mystery even though it has a tinge of the paranormal.)

When the Fish Tales anthology was open to submissions, I sat down to write my second locked room mystery -- this time, without a gargoyle.

I began with Jaya Jones, the historian protagonist of my mystery series. I put her back in time in graduate school to solve the locked room murder of one of the professors in her department. The story became "The Shadow of the River" and was accepted into the anthology.

The Fish Tales anthology is a project of the Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime. Since we're "guppies," the broad theme of the anthology is bodies of water. And since Jaya is a historian, the body of water in my story is a historic map of rivers that converge in India. How does this ancient map lead to a locked room murder? Jaya Jones solves the baffling crime.

I'll leave you with a teaser from the jacket of the anthology:

22 tales of murder and mayhem by the rising stars of mystery.

Fish Tales, The Guppy Anthology, casts a wide net across the mystery genre, delivering thrills, chills, and gills. This water-themed collection features locked room puzzles, police procedurals, cozy characters and hardboiled detectives... Come on in, the water’s fine. But be careful or you might find yourself sleeping with the fishes! 

It's fun to see it in print!