Janice MacDonald's Blog: Notes on writing

Dear Readers,

My latest (and perhaps last) Randy Craig Mystery novel is out in the world and beginning to connect with readers. The Eye of the Beholder is set in both Edmonton, Alberta, Canada -- hometown of the series' heroine -- and sunny Puerto vallarta, jalisco, Mexico -- where Miranda "Randy" Craig manages to get caught up in a murder mystery while on her honeymoon! The book is out in paperback and as an e-book from all the major online vendors, and I am eager to know what you all think of it. We've got one review so far here on Goodreads... who will be next?

The Eye of the Beholder

Happy reading,
Janice

10 rules for writers

1. read everything
2. grammar and spelling is crucial
3. support your fellow writers
4. marry well
5. set targets and meet them
6. avoid present tense
7. don't discuss your work-in-process
8. respect your antecedents
9. buy books
10. submit only your best

A 2018 release, The Eye of the Beholder takes reluctant sleuth and sessional university lecturer Miranda “Randy” Craig from Mexico’s Pacific coast to Edmonton’s visual art scene while retaining the trademark suspense and humour that have made the series so popular with lovers of academic mystery.

Randy and Steve have finally tied the knot and headed south to Puerto Vallarta to celebrate. When a fellow traveller is found dead, Randy’s romantic beach walks and candlelit dinners will have to wait. Randy and Steve will have to find meaning in the murder to catch the culprit. If they don’t, the honeymoon just might be over.

Highlights:

• eagerly awaited follow-up to four recent best-sellers — 2014’s The Roar of the Crowd, 2013’s Condemned to Repeat, 2011’s Hang Down Your Head, and 2015’s Another Margaret

• set in and around the University of Alberta as well as Edmonton’s visual arts scene and sunny Puerto Vallarta, Jalísco, Mexico

• simultaneous release in trade paperback and e-book formats

Audreys Books is hosting a launch party in Edmonton on Tuesday night, October 16, and I will be reading from the new book, signing copies, and providing a few other fun surprises as well. More details about the launch on my Goodreads page or at http://www.janicemacdonald.net. Hope to see you there!

A 2017 release, Confederation Drive is an utterly original work of creative non-fiction… part memoir, part travelogue, part rumination on Canada at 150.

In the summer of 1967 Janice MacDonald and her mother Joyce jumped into their Plymouth Barracuda and drove across Canada to celebrate Canada’s 100th birthday and Expo in Montreal. Fifty years later she recreates this road trip with her husband to experience the same magic that defined her childhood.

Janice MacDonald’s Confederation Drive looks at how Expo was Canada’s coming out party to the rest of the world and how we are seen by the global community fifty years later. It’s a love letter to her beloved mother. It’s lobster dinners and Anne of Green Gables and Saskatchewan rest stops and Manitoba detours.

As Canada’s 150th birthday is right around the corner there is no more Canadian thing to do than curl up with this book and reflect on where we’ve been as a country and, more importantly, where we’re going.

The book's official launch party is happening at Audreys Books (10702 Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton) beginning at 7:00 PM. This is a free event and will be an author reading, book signing, refreshments, and some fun surprises. See you there!

Great news, mystery lovers! Ravenstone Books/Turnstone Press, publisher of the Randy Craig Mystery series, is sponsoring a giveaway right here on Goodreads!

Get all the details and enter for your chance to win a copy of the new novel at this link:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

My husband and I been binge-watching some television series recently, and we've noticed that it somehow feels much easier to live in the world of a British series than it does an American one. Much of this I think has to do with the level of authenticity offered. British actors, on the whole, seem less airbrushed, don't you think?

Authenticity may be an odd thing to wish for in fiction, and yet even though we know it's make believe, there needs to be a knell of truth to the experience. That is why Randy Craig ages over the span of her stories, from a young-ish grad student in her first adventure to a middle-aged woman in her latest. It's also why she worries about her choices and decisions, and why she doubles back on herself on occasion. Many of those elements of characterization are incremental layers to the formula, as well. It is important to take the audience along on the quest, but a quest that goes in a straight line is satisfying to no one, neither detective reader or football fan. Real people second guess themselves five or six times a day, if not an hour. (I almost erased this whole page three times already.)

Vulnerability in our heroes is something we embrace warily. We think we want Superman. More often, though, we veer to the tortured Batman. Contemporary detective fiction is a world without the astonishing August Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Philo Vance — who seem impossibly outrageous if placed in a modern context — and without their stalwart if duller sidekicks. It is a world in which ordinary people pit themselves against extraordinary circumstances. If you are lucky, a writer will enhance that formula with explorations of that detective's psyche, circumstances or political position in the world. That is when it becomes really fun to immerse yourself in their world.

I'm not saying we need to read a shelf full of anti-heroes, that characters have to be representative of some great political ideal, or that we can’t make our detectives into attractive figures. If you're asking a reader to live with them for a while, though, it helps to make your characters into someone they'd like to have a cup of coffee and some bread pudding with. I’m looking for someone who isn't airbrushed and who, like me, will have to walk off that last dessert.

Janice has contributed a guest blog entitled "The Smell of the Grease Paint" to Type M for Murder, an excellent site run by top Canadian crime writers. Thanks especially to writerly pal Barbara Fradkin for the invitation!

Read Janice's piece here:
"The Smell of the Grease Paint"

On Thursday, May 29, 2014, I attended the YWCA of Edmonton's 2014 Women of Distinction Awards, having been nominated in the "Arts and Culture" category. It was a lovely party -- a sincere honour to be nominated, a thrilling experience to be in the presence of so many incredible women, and a delight to spend the evening with a posse of very vocal supporters. It also jogged some of my earliest memories of the organization.

When I was four, my mother signed me up for swimming lessons at the YWCA downtown, in a building which is long gone now. The swimming pool was in the basement, and I recall exposed pipes alternating with lines of little trident flags on a rather dark, low ceiling. I am not sure if there was even the height necessary for a small diving board in that pool.

There were bleachers along one side, though, and my mother sat there along with other mothers, breathing in the chlorine, reading her book, and waiting for this particular Saturday morning chore to be over so she could do the many other things crammed into her short weekends.

I am not by nature a floating sort of person. I wasn't when I was smaller and I still am not. I have to work to stay buoyant. While I am hard-wired to learn new skills with eagerness and joy, try as I might, the whole getting across the pool without touching the bottom of the pool never happened. The lessons went on, and I grew more and more sad every Saturday morning. Still, on we went, splash splash with the legs, cup and pull with the arms. Knowing how to swim could save a life, after all.

The last Saturday of the series of lessons was to be a celebration, and each class was to show their abilities to the full complement of parents in bleachers. The whole day-long roster of lessons were brought together to perform in a circus-themed performance. We had costumes and music. Of course we did. Those were the days that tulle was invented for, and if you weren’t twirling a baton, you were tap dancing like a grim little trouper.

Our class of little Esther Williamses were to be lions. We would dog-paddle in a line to the centre, swim in a circle and then dogpaddle, and stretch out into starfish. We had orange tulle ruffs for our heads, and we were told to look fierce. I was great at the looking fierce part, but the teacher wisely tapped another reluctant floater and me to be the central cubs. While the real swimmers did their circle, she and I -- who had trailed along with our paws fiercely parting the water, but our feet walking boldly along the bottom of the pool, stood in the centre of the swimmers and gamely growled and pawed the water.

My mother was sitting there, giggling, and the woman next to her said, "Which one is yours?" Mom pointed and said, "One of those two in the middle." The other mother said, "Oh thank God, mine is the other one1" When it was all over, I think we went out to lunch, to celebrate what my mom used to call "the art of showing up."

So, while I eventually learned to tread water and do a passable crawl that could take me the length of a pool, I didn't learn that at the YWCA. But the Y was where I learned one of the big lessons: how to grin and look fierce, even when you're not managing the right steps. And knowing how to do that can save a life, after all.

Grrrrr!

We just mailed an autographed copy of Sticks and Stones: A Randy Craig Mystery off to new reader named Holly in Etowah, Tennessee -- the wrap-up of our first Goodreads book giveaway! It's such fun to connect with mystery lovers in far-off places who are eager to discover the adventures of Edmonton, Alberta's reluctant sleuth Miranda "Randy" Craig.

We're only just getting started with the book giveaways through Goodreads. This week (till Sunday, February 23) we have an autographed copy of The Monitor up for grabs. Hang Down Your Head is next (week of February 24 through March 2) and finally Condemned to Repeat (week of March 3-9), all signed by the author!

We’re incredibly excited about the launch of the next Randy Craig adventure, The Roar of the Crowd, which is coming in June of this year. Stay tuned for details about the publication -- who knows, maybe there will even be some more autographed books to give away!

In the meantime, get all the details on the current Goodreads giveaway at the link below:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

There is very little glamour in writing a book, if you happen to be me. I drag myself out of bed on weekend mornings at 5:30 a.m. Dressed in comfy pants, a cozy sweater and fuzzy socks, I brew a pot of French Market Chicory Coffee (thank you Ron and Jeff!) and curl up in one of the chairs in our living room to knock out five pages minimum. When I eventually have a decent draft to send off to my editor, she and I volley it back and forth (she's in Winnipeg, so I end up face-to-face with her maybe once every couple of years) and at long last I'll see cover art and page proofs, while rising to knock out five pages on the next manuscript.

In between, my husband updates the website, my friends meet for lunch to commiserate about our compulsion to pursue writing careers, and I buy other people's books, read about other people's books in glossy magazines and listen to national broadcasters gush about other people's books. Oh yes, and I clock in at my day job, which is challenging, stimulating, and filled with wonderful colleagues. Which is a good thing, eh?

But every once in a while, the magic happens.

And last night on June 15th, at the Rutherford House Provincial Historic Site, I felt like a princess. The new book, Condemned to Repeat: A Randy Craig Mystery, was piled up in a glorious display on the Rutherfords' shiny dining table, people I love and respect kept piling in through the door, and party food and drink was laid out in the tea room. The new book begins at Rutherford House, with a mystery dinner theatre event based on a magicians' reunion, so our friend Stephen Dafoe (who in an earlier incarnation had been a touring professional magician) whipped up a short magic act to entertain after my reading. After the entertainment, I signed books at Premier Alexander Rutherford's desk... it was all very heady.

Kelly Hewson, my best friend from grad school, drove up from Calgary to help us celebrate. All my friends from work were there. People I admire, who have shaped me into who I am, were there in droves: Tom Peacocke, Jim de Felice, Margaret Van de Pitte, Nancy Gibson and John Whittaker, and many more. Family like Randy Williams, Larry Reese, Ruth Kindree and Jossie Mant were on hand. And friends! Stalwart pals through thick and thin showed up to share in the celebration.

Sharon and Steve Budnarchuk, who own Audreys Books and have been so supportive over the years, managed the sales and food. Sharon Caseburg, my darling editor, spent time and energy conspiring with Olga Fowler of Rutherford House Provincial Historic Site to put the whole event together. Masani St. Rose-Toth and her husband Justin provided glorious fruity iced tea.

Also, excitingly, several fans of the series I didn't know till last night were there and introduced themselves to me. There were more than sixty people there, and various people who couldn’t make it sent lovely notes and promises of lunch dates ahead. I wore splendid red shoes and shiny red nail polish and my new Simon Chang dress and was toasted and feted and awash in good cheer. I could hardly sleep last night, reliving and reverberating.

And this morning, I rolled out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to work on the next manuscript. It's okay, it's what I do. Another few thousand words, another few drafts, another few revisions, some more solitary Saturday and Sunday mornings, and there'll be another marvelous party.