And we have a winner!

Our friend Susan Shea wrote a post for us a couple of weeks back, and offered a signed copy of MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT for one lucky commenter. Barbara won! Congratulations!

(Barbara, Susan will be in touch with you directly by email.)

And thanks again, Susan, for stopping by Pensfatales -- it's always a pleasure.

Susan C Shea is a former non-profit executive. MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT was her first mystery novel. THE KING'S JAR is the second in the series. She's active in Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and lives in northern California. Visit her at www.susancshea.com
"...A series to watch." - Booklist

"Oops."

Say hello to our friend Susan Shea: author, mystery booster, all-around bon vivant. It's always great to have you on the blog, Susan!

“Oops.”

First, thanks to one of my favorite authors, Sophie Littlefield, for offering me a chance to rub elbows with the fantastic writers on Pens Fatales. To say thanks to the blog readers for checking it out, I’m offering a signed hard cover copy of MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT, the first in a series of mysteries featuring Dani O’Rourke. Leave a comment on this post with an email address by July 22. We’ll throw all the responses in a hat and pick one entirely at random. Good luck!

“Oops” sounds like dumb moves, and I could list some of my own, but that would be lengthy, tedious, and uncomfortable. In real life, mistakes frequently lead to unhappy consequences, everything from running out of gas on the freeway to finding yourself standing in a corner at a party because you realize that sweet salesperson was lying through her teeth when she assured you orange was your best color.

In crime fiction, the stakes are often a lot higher. The protagonist doesn’t tell anyone she’s headed into the abandoned building in search of a man with a knife. The detective gets distracted by the obvious suspect and misses a vital clue to a serial killer. The petty crook gets dragged into a homicide by his stupider-than-dirt brother. Oops.

Why does this happen? Why would a sane woman tiptoe up the stairs in a dark house where she’s just stumbled across a dead body? Because she heard footsteps? Is she crazy? Are we crazy to keep reading? Why do supposedly smart people do things that, in real life, no one would dream of doing?

It’s a fair question for readers to ask, and one that can make us squirm as we’re writing our stories. The bottom line is, of course, we authors need the characters to precipitate action, to challenge the status quo, to ramp up suspense and confusion, and ultimately to lead us to the villain. If our protagonists merely dialed 911 and continued on to the grocery store or the movies, we wouldn’t sell a lot of books. But we have an obligation to answer the question of why as persuasively as we can, to create reasons that entice you, the reader, to suspend belief long enough to get caught up in the drama.


I think it’s one of the hardest tricks to pull off and I salute those who do it well. I remember one of Sue Grafton’s masterful moments when Kinsey, running away from a bad guy, jumps into a trash can and pulls the lid down on her head. She has to crouch there, seemingly for ages, waiting for the agonizing possibility that the man saw her and will suddenly whip the lid off and beat her up. My heart was pounding and I couldn’t read fast enough. I never stopped to think, Why would a savvy private detective put herself in such a vulnerable position? Why not keep running until she found a tree or a gas station, some place where she might have an option to defend herself? Grafton did that magical thing – she seduced me entirely into suspending disbelief.

I don’t remember the details of Kinsey’s internal dialogue, but it’s not hard to imagine her saying, limbs tangled, breath coming fast, “Oops, not a great move.”

-Susan C Shea

www.susancshea.com

Susan C Shea is a former non-profit executive. MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT was her first mystery novel. THE KING'S JAR is the second in the series. She's active in Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and lives in northern California.

Susan Shea's Rules

Today the Pens are happy to welcome Susan Shea, a lovely member of our local writing community and someone who writes a clever, twisting, mysterious tale about one of my favorite subjects: the clever, twisted, mysterious ways of the art world. Susan has her first novel coming out THIS MONTH: Murder in the Abstract (an Avalon Mystery). Booklist calls it: "...a series to watch."

Plus: Susan is generously offering a signed copy of Murder in the Abstract to a randomly chosen commenter! So leave a comment (with your email in the text) and answer this question: what rule(s) make YOU freeze?

“Rules.”

Immediately, I’m suspicious. Oh, yeah? Who says?

Next, I’m nervous. What happens if I mess up?

Then, I’m confused. What are they? Who has them?

Clearly, I don’t do rules well. I don’t have the traffic tickets or IRS penalty notices to prove it because I’m not stupid. Those kinds of rules cost more time and money to thwart than I want to spend unless there’s a moral issue involved. However, this wonderful blog site is about writing and writers, and I’m a guest, so I’ll stick with rules for writing and why they only sometimes make sense to me.

Here’s a recent, true demonstration of my attempt to follow the rules. I’m having trouble with the pacing of my second book, especially because the end is sort of tricky. I like the scenes and the order in which they take place. But fitting them into chapters is getting awkward, never mind into three acts. See, someone smarter than I am told me to divide my book into three acts. There’s a crisis at the end of the first act. There’s a defining situation at the end of the second act that makes the pursuit of the villain a personal quest - no turning back from this point on. And, of course, there’s the climax and resolution at the end of the third act. So far, so good.

But another, equally successful author wrote that the big moment comes halfway through the book, which brings up another of my weak points: math. What’s half of a third and does that mean the highest drama comes before the second act’s climax? I’m now completely frozen. Never mind chapters – I’m not sure where the periods go! So I call yet another smarter-than-me author who obviously understands this stuff. She’s patient and I almost get it after a half hour.

Two weeks later, any clarity I had has evaporated. So I scrap all the rules and decide to reread the entire manuscript in hard copy and do it by instinct. End the chapters with a flourish where my protagonist sticks out her tongue, metaphorically. Consider a third to be a moveable point at which someone brandishes a knife or finds a body. And the midpoint? Oh, well, it’s in there somewhere. Maybe a kind editor will point it out to me during revisions. I’m going with my gut and remembering that the point of all these rules is to establish and maintain a rhythm, mounting tension, and belief in the characters and their intentions, good and bad.

The writers who host this site have proven they can do all of that and, if they follow rules, they do it so gracefully that I’m not aware of the structure, just caught up in their stories. Maybe one rule we authors can all follow, even if we’re not so good at fractions, is just that: write a great story and make the hard work invisible to the reader.

Thanks for letting me visit Pen Fatales!

Susan C. Shea is the author of MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT, the first in a series of crime novels. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Romance Writers of America and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.susancshea.com