The big topic of conversation before our vacation in Wisconsin was whether the ice would break in time. In Illinois, we suffered from a harsh, cold and snowy winter. Wisconsin did also, the difference being the snow stuck around much longer there because it was much colder.

So, for my husband to fish, the ice needed to thaw and break and dissipate. Fortunately, the weather turned warm about 1 1/2 weeks before we were due to arrive at the cottage. We heard reports that the ice was melting and mostly cleared. Hopefully, he'd be able to fish our lake.

When we arrived, at first the area near our cottage was clear, but we could see ice at the other end of the lake. Then the direction of the wind shifted and the ice drifted in front of the cottage, which meant no fishing.

The rain came and with it warmer weather. The ice started cracking and falling apart before our eyes. Before we knew it, the ice had completely disappeared from the entire lake. Needless to say, we were relieved. All was well and the fishing could begin!

Giving your characters secrets is a lot like ice on the lake. The reader keeps watching to see when the secret will come out. A good author provides hints along the way, like the ice cracking in spots. Then, the author will throw a curve and the ice will come rushing in the other direction, leaving the reader to wonder will the secret ever be revealed.

Then the ice breaks and the secret is revealed, usually with an outpouring of emotion. Communication flows freely, like the lake after the thaw. Good things happen as a result.

In case you're wondering, yes, my husband has caught fish and hopes to catch more, since we have until Sunday for vacation. I've not been as lucky at the casino, but have had a great time shopping and also am enjoying way too many calorie-packed meals. That's okay, vacation calories don't count. Kind of like holiday calories.

Morgan Mandel
www.morganmandel.com

Maybe because I'm getting old, or maybe because I'm just not as smart as Karen, my dreams are never plot ideas. Oh, I dream plenty--and they are usually weird. Now, I get, it my dreams are weird because I am too.

Last night I dreamt I was going on a cruise and we (some of the "we" were my grown daughters)and we were late arriving at the cruise ship and I lost my purse. New where I'd left it but wasn't allowed to go back. That was just one dream--can't remember the others.

Often I dream about the house in Oxnard where we lived for over 20 years. It never looks quite like it did then. Sometimes we're moving back into it and have lots of remodeling to do. The town around it doesn't look anything like it did back then or the way it looks now. It's a very strange town, with huge old houses, ones I've never seen before--and a bit on the spooky side.

I also dream about the house I grew up in in Los Angeles quite often. That house is no longer there. When I dream about living there, it's as a grown-up, not a child.

Though once in awhile I dream of the house I'm living in now in the foothills of the Sierra, it never looks like it really is. Sometimes it really snazzy and sometimes it looks like something out of a hillbilly movie. Those dreams more often have a nightmare quality to them.

My most frequent dreams are set most anywhere and I'm on a quest--a quest to find a bathroom and I wake up--because I really do need to find a bathroom. (That one I can figure out.)

Frankly, I'm glad I don't know how to interpret dreams because I'd probably learn I'm demented in some way.

This, of course, has nothing to do with mysteries or the writing life, but it's my contribution for today.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com

“In dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d I cried to dream again.” from “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare

A strangling had just occurred in the park. The victim? A dancer from the local scandaleux strip joint. When the local small town lieutenant, who’s longing just to go home to his new wife, goes to the nightclub to investigate, he encounters the radical personalities of the other dancers: one far-too-young-and-innocent; another older, vengeful and jaded; and a blond bombshell with unfathomable depths. What happened next took the lieutenant through a wild chase to hunt down...and capture...a killer.

When I woke from this intense dream, I immediately started writing. My pen flew over the paper as I wrote down everything I saw in my dream-movie. When it finally faded out, leaving a heaviness in my chest, I’d filled pages with in-depth notes about a book I couldn’t imagine myself ever writing. I was a romance writer who occasionally wrote writers’ reference books. I didn’t write mysteries or even psychological thrillers, though of late the occasional suspense plotline had slipped into my contemporary romances—always as a secondary element. So I put the notes into my plot cupboard where I expected it to fade from my imagination quickly. Little did I realize that it was the beginning of what would eventually open a whole new writing adventure to me. This story continued to haunt me as time passed, the plots of my romances became more suspenseful, and I sold some children’s books and poetry. I even delved into an experimental paranormal (SWEET DREAMS) that won rave reviews, became a finalist in the Daphne du Maurier Awards, and was chosen as a Top Pick of the month from Romantic Times BOOKclub. Seems my imagination didn’t want to be contained simply because I’d started out as a contemporary romance writer, and my vivid dream-stories were pushing me toward new frontiers in writing.

At the time, SWEET DREAMS was published by Avid Press (now available from Hard Shell Word Factory www.hardshell.com), which was also the publisher of a friend, Christine Spindler, who wrote an award-winning mystery series and happened to live in Auenwald, Germany. Christine and I started talking, almost casually at first, about writing a mystery novel together. My first thought was the dream I’d had about the small town detective tracking a killer in a strip joint while missing his wife. I told Christine about this idea gathering dust in my cupboard, and she told me about an idea she had about a mystery involving twin sisters.

When she sent me the notes she had on her story, I knew this was something that was meant to be. Without a break, I spent the rest of that day combining the best elements from both of our ideas, and DEGREES OF SEPARATION—a full-blown whodunnit mystery—was born. Soon two authors who had never met in person were brainstorming non-stop from our ends of the world. In under two months, we’d completed the novel, which was so much like the dream I’d had I couldn’t doubt that destiny had brought us together. We both accepted that we wouldn’t want this to be a single book. We’d become enchanted with Pete Shasta and Danny Vincent, investigators for the fictional Falcon’s Bend Police Department, and together we plan to visit often the ‘small, sleepy Wisconsin town that owns more taverns than churches but fills both on the appropriate days. A place where nothing seems to happen...except the occasional murder’.

DEGREES OF SEPARATION wasn’t the first time I dreamed what would later become a fully fleshed out story, though it was one of the few times the story came to me almost completely during the dream instead of after I woke from it. Since then, (dealing only with the Falcon’s Bend Series here since I’ve dreamed many fragments of other books, as well) I’ve also used parts of dreams to write two Falcon’s Bend short stories: “Blind Revenge” and “Fixated” from FALCON’S BEND CASE FILES, Volume I; “Retribution”, which will be in FALCON’S BEND CASE FILES, Volume II, and Book 5 of the Falcon’s Bend Series.

“Blind Revenge” (FALCON’S BEND CASE FILES, Volume I) began just as I was about to drop off to sleep one night at around 11:30 or so. In black and white in that fragile twilight of drifting, I saw a woman walking down a hall. I saw a man ahead of her. The woman kept walking past him, then she looked back at the door, and he was looking at her, too. The woman went outside, got in her convertible, and a second later the passenger door opened and the man got in. At that moment, my subconscious mind turned creepy. Suddenly this woman was blindly kissing her stranger like it was the end of the world. I knew that, for her, it was the end of the world. The witch was coming for her eyes.I would have fallen deeply asleep in another few minutes and had a disturbing nightmare along these lines, but at that moment my husband got out of bed, saying he couldn’t sleep and was going in the living room to read. I was awake now, and this idea started to bloom in my mind like Chia pet. I finally turned on the lights, put on my glasses and started writing. Less than a half hour later, I was out of bed, e-mailing my ideas to Christine.

“Fixated” (FALCON’S BEND CASE FILES, Volume I) is a much older story that I had in my story folder for several years before I took it out and used it as the basis of a Falcon’s Bend short story. I woke up after having a dream about a woman who was being stalked by someone. Only this wasn’t in the point-of-view of the woman being stalked, but in that of the man on the balcony above the woman and her stalker. The concept of a stalker being stalked stayed with me, and I wrote the dream down when I woke up.

“Retribution” (FALCON’S BEND CASE FILES, Volume II) is a story based on a dream I had about a scantily clad woman temporarily inhabiting a property and lurking in the backyard. When I woke, I was in a Falcon’s Bend mindset, and quickly worked this dream into the idea that the subdivision Lieutenants Pete Shasta and Danny Vincent live in becomes home to a very hot young mama…and their wives Lisa and Melody aren’t too happy about all the men in the neighborhood moonlighting as Peeping Toms. But it isn’t until the woman disappears, leaving her two children alone, that Lisa realizes crime is firmly afoot.

PRETTY FLY, Book 5 in the Falcon’s Bend Series, will be formed in part from a dream I had about a camping trip that turned deadly.

Is it a little...well, disturbing, to have so many disturbing dreams? Actually it is, but writers can always make lemonade out of lemons.

You can visit the Falcon’s Bend Community, too! Just point your internet browser to http://www.falconsbend.com and you’ll find information and excerpts from all currently available Falcon’s Bend Series books.

Falcon’s Bend Series by Karen Wiesner and Chris Spindler:

DEGREES OF SEPARATION
Book 1 of the Falcon’s Bend Series
978-0-7599-3979-0 (trade paperback), $14.95;
978-0-7599-3978-3 (electronic), $7
Available now from Hard Shell Word Factory!

TEARS ON STONE
Book 2 of the Falcon’s Bend Series
978-0-7599-4383-4 (trade paperback), $14.95;
978-0-7599-4382-7 (electronic), $7
Available now from Hard Shell Word Factory!

FALCON’S BEND CASE FILES, Volume I (The Early Cases)
0-7599-4371-0 (trade paperback), $10.95;
0-7599-4370-2 (electronic), $6
Available now from Hard Shell Word Factory!Includes the following novellas:
“Bugs”
“Broken Wings”
“Obsessions”
“Blind Revenge”
“Fixated”
EPPIE 2007 Finalist in the Mystery category!

THE FIFTEENTH LETTER
Book 3 of the Falcon’s Bend Series
978-0-7599-4736-8 (trade paperback); 978-0-7599-4735-1 (electronic)
Coming September 2008 from Hard Shell Word Factory!

About the Authors

Sharing more than one publisher, an interest in many different genres, and a strong mutual respect for each other's body of individual work, Karen and Chris began talking casually about writing together in 2001. After merging ideas they had for their own projects, DEGREES OF SEPARATION and the Falcon's Bend Series were born. Karen and Chris feel their partnership is as close as neighbors right across the street instead of on opposite ends of the world. Look for many more exciting books in their Falcon's Bend Series in coming years.

Karen Wiesner

Karen Wiesner is an accomplished author with 49 books published in the past 10 years, which have been nominated for and/or won 68 awards, and 18 more titles under contract. Karen’s books cover such genres as women’s fiction, romance, mystery/police procedural/cozy, suspense, paranormal, futuristic, gothic, inspirational, thriller, horror and action/adventure. She also writes children’s books, poetry, and writing reference titles such as her bestseller, First Draft in 30 Days, available from Writer’s Digest Books. Karen has also sold a second offering to Writer’s Digest Books. From First Draft to Finished Novel {A Writer’s Guide to Cohesive Story Building}, a companion to First Draft in 30 Days, will be available September 2008. It'll also be a Writer's Digest Book Club Main Selection. Check Karen’s website for more information and to register to be notified of release. Her previous writers’ reference titles focused on non-subsidy, royalty-paying electronic publishing, author promotion, and setting up a promotional group like her own, the award-winning Jewels of the Quill, which she founded in 2003. The group does two anthologies, edited by Karen and others, together per year. Karen is also a member of American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW), EPIC, Sisters in Crime Internet Chapter, BooksWeLove.net, and World Romance Writers. In addition to her writing, Karen enjoys designing Web sites, graphics, and cover art. For more information about Karen and her work, visit her Web sites at http://www.karenwiesner.com, http://www.firstdraftin30days.com, http://www.falconsbend.com and http://www.JewelsoftheQuill.com. If you would like to receive Karen’s free e-mail newsletter, Karen’s Quill, and become eligible to win her monthly book giveaways, visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KarensQuill or send a blank e-mail to
KarensQuill-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Chris Spindler

Hailing from Germany, Chris Spindler is the award-winning author of the Inspector Terry mysteries, originally published in the US by the now defunct Avid Press. The series which introduced London's Inspector Frederick Terry to high praise from critics and readers alike has been re-issued by Hard Shell Word Factory. The Inspector Terry series is also published in Germany. Published under her maiden name Tina Zang, Chris' picture books for children are available from Writer's Exchange E-Publishing. Her childrens' and YA books are very popular in Germany. Chris spent her youth surrounded by animals and books. She studied physics and languages in Heidelberg and worked at a translation agency for 15 years before she decided to become a full-time writer. She lives in a beautiful village with her family and a friendly cat. Find out more by visiting her website at http://www.christinespindler.com.

YA Author June Sproat, Mystery Turtle, Morgan Mandel, and Romantic Suspense Author, Margot Justes

Spring Fling 2008 this past weekend turned out to be a smashing success. Great panels, editor and agent pitches, a 30 author book signing, and so much more.

The Coordinators, Joelle Charbonneau-Blanco and Deb Gross did a spectacular job of organization and everything went off without a hitch.

I and other small press/e-book authors gave a panel about in the ins and outs of small presses. We were up against a session on query pitching which was hosted by an editor, and were happily surprised to receive a goodly number in attendance at our panel. Our audience asked great questions, and time flew by. I was also happy to notice some of the audience members in my line to buy books later at the autograph session.

Another role I took on was to do timing for editor appointments for an hour, not hard at all, just key in six minutes, and when the buzzer went off, knock on the door for the one minute warning. I also contributed a beach bag with a tee-shirt, sunglasses, and one of my books tucked inside for the Literacy auction.

I only played a small part in the mechanisms of the conference, and wished I could have played more, but I've been busy publicizing GIRL OF MY DREAMS, my recently released romantic comedy.

People are already wishing Chicago-North RWA would put on another Spring Fling next year, but our chapter's policy is every other year. The way time flies, it will probably come around again before we know it.

Tonight I'm participating in a library panel at the Fremont Public Library in Mundelein, Illinois, with 4 other Chicago-North RWA authors.

This afternoon I'm doing some packing. My vacation Up North in Arbor Vitae, which is near Minocqua, Wisconsin in coming up on Friday. I hope to be blogging from there, unless I encounter technical difficulties or suffer from amnesia because I'm having too much fun.

Take care,
Morgan Mandel
www.morganmandel.com

I meant to do this much earlier–but time got away from me.

Hubby and I just returned from Las Vegas and the Public Safety Writers Conference. This is a wonderful conference for anyone with a law enforcement or other public safety person as a hero or character in his or her book. It’s also a great place to do some research as the majority of the authors are somehow involved with law enforcement.

Just to give you an idea of the versatility of the group, besides being writers or wanting to be, we had still-working police officers, a dispatcher, a lawyer, an FBI agent, several retired cops, a former secretary to sheriff’s deputies, a former editor of a police magazine, an editor of an online police news magazine, 2 small press publishers, high school teacher, an holocaust survivor, and folks like me who like to write about law enforcement on hand. Next year, we’re calling the conference Crime Writers and Crime Fighters. I’ll be asking for ideas for panels and speakers. If you think you’d like to be one, you need to join the group at http://policewriter.com. When I put out the call for speakers and/or panelists, send me your ideas.

Of course, like anything else, Murphy attended. Though the hotel rooms were wonderful, for some reason our meeting room kept changing–without any advance notice. We all had to use our detective skills to find where we were going to meet next. This was particularly unnerving to me, since, as program chair, I was always the first to learn we’d been kicked out of the place we’d last been meeting.

The wonderful thing about this particular conference, is everyone buys books!

Now, back to playing catch-up.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com