WICKED WEDNESDAYS

Editing Yourself

On a recent two week voyage from Greenland to Ungava Bay, around the northern tip of Labrador and down the Labrador and Newfoundland coast ending up in St. John’s I considered editing.

Faced with 108 fellow passengers I had the opportunity to create myself. What would I choose to tell and what would it reveal about who I’d chosen to be?

With four books and many short stories to my name I should be an old hand at this. After all writers have to know their characters. What does she wear? How does she speak? What obsessions does she have? The list goes on and on. The importance of knowing your character and how she will behave cannot be overemphasized. Without taking the care to make sure your characters behave in ways compatible with their personalities you jeopardize the believability of your story.

Because I have created many characters and enjoy thinking about them and their lives long before I write a word I thought I’d be good at deciding who I’d be and what facts about myself I’d choose to share.

Not so easy.

In the first place, a small voice in your head goes into critical overdrive.

If you say where you’ve chosen to travel will the listener think it’s interesting or not. If you tell people your age will they write you off as a little old lady off on a trip? If you reveal that you’re a writer when Margaret Atwood, Graham Gibson and Kevin Major are on the trip will it seem presumptuous? If you mention that you’re planning to paint for three months and plan to use your photos as reference material will they think you want them to ask for jpegs when the paintings are done? If you wear fancy ear rings and bracelets will they think you aren’t really a traveller but a tourist?

And so it went. Every time I thought of something to add or introduce in a conversation my inner voice questioned why I wanted to say it and asked what impression I was trying to make.

The result. I found the first few days challenging. All that changed one evening when I looked across the dinner table at a man sitting opposite and asked him his surname. Turned out he and his wife had gone to university with me as had another man on the ship. No hiding or creating a new persona. They knew me.

It was a relief.

Editing myself had proved a daunting task, much harder than creating fictional characters. But it might have been fun to present myself as a retired juggler, bank robber or secret romantic interest of some nefarious character. I expect that people on trips do invent exciting lives for themselves knowing they are unlikely to ever see their fellow passengers again.

Next time.

A member of the Ladies Killing Circle, Joan Boswell co-edited four of their short story anthologies: Fit to Die, Bone Dance, Boomers Go Bad and Going Out With a Bang. Her three mysteries, Cut Off His Tale, Cut to the Quick and, Cut and Run were published in 2005, 2007 and 2007. The latest in the series, Cut to the Bone, will be published by Dundurn in November. In 2000 she won the $10,000 Toronto Star’s short story contest. Joan lives in Toronto with three flat-coated retrievers.

CRIME ON MY MIND

Countdown to Bloody Words

I'm starting my countdown to Bloody Words 2011 today because I'm heading out to Victoria for extra days to visit with family and friends. My first request is, somebody turn up the thermostat out there!

Packing is always a stressor, even though I start the process a day earlier for each trip. There's the first pack to make sure everything fits, then the re-pack when it doesn't. This might meant downsizing or upgrading to a larger suitcase. Of course, there's the hourly perusal of WeatherNetwork.com to see if maybe they were just kidding about the temperatures. Never mind, I say to Erika, my alter ego, it's a beautiful city!

So, when you combine a visit and a conference, that requires two wardrobes. Plus all the conference material, like business cards, books, answers to questions for the panel, cheque book in order to buy a registration for next year's conference at the special rate, and all those things that have been added to the packing list in the past week.

Of course, I have my handy Travel Checklist, purloined from Audrey Jessup so many years ago. It's soothing to see all those check marks being added. And soon, all that's waiting are the last minutes items. Also listed because as you probably know, the brain isn't in gear during that last hour before leaving for the airport.

Along with packing for Bloody Words, there's the Arthur Ellis Awards Banquet to be considered. Jeans will not do at this event! Especially when there's a lot of cheering to be done for Mary Jane Maffini (nominated for Best Short Story) and C.B. Forrest (nominated for Best Novel). These are the Ottawa nominees, so we'll show the colours for them. It's always an exciting night though, schmoozing with so many authors and so many winners.

Last but not least, pack all the writing gear because this can't be all play and no work!

Paper stopped? Email answered? Cat feeder/attention giver at the ready? Check, check and check.

I think I'm ready. Are you?


Linda Wiken/Erika Chase
A Killer Read coming in April, 2012
from Berkley Prime Crime

LADIES' KILLING THURSDAYS

Armchair Traveller

Is there anything more spectacular than the Nahanni River in Canada’s Northwest Territories? A world Heritage site and a National Park Reserve, it has some of the most incredible natural diversity and scenery in the entire world. Miles and miles of wilderness with canyons, whitewater, waterfalls, hot springs, lazy, meandering flat water, and ragged glacial mountains. It is home to caribou, grizzlies, swans, eagles, mountain goats and sheep. Brilliant pink wild flowers cling to its gravel shores, while alpine meadows and jagged spruce forests rise up the slopes around it.

Why am I going on like this? Because this is the setting for my next Inspector Green novel. Yes, that’s Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green, the inner city boy who loves crumbling asphalt and diesel fumes, and who struggles to learn the suburban “dad” skills of mowing the lawn and firing up the barbeque. Inspector Green is going on the Nahanni.

Only one thing could possibly pry him loose from his safe urban world and send him up into one of the last true wildernesses on earth. One of his children has disappeared. His spirited, independent daughter Hannah has gone on a wilderness canoe trip down the Nahanni with a group of friends, and they have failed to show up at their take-out point.

Canoeing the Nahanni has always been a dream of mine, but with the tight timeline of this book and with this summer (not to mention this year’s budget) already spoken for, I will have to content myself with researching from afar. Luckily I have been on a wilderness rafting trip in the Yukon, a very different river and a raft instead of a canoe, but at least I have scanned the distant slopes in search of mountain sheep and watched a grizzly prowl along the gravel shoreline in search of food. I have seen the wild flowers and heard the rush of river current. Along with my research, those memories will have to do.

At the moment my dining room table is completely taken over by topographical maps as I attempt to trace the route his daughter took and decide where she would have gone astray. I will use these maps when I write the search scenes and when Green tries desperately to figure out where she has gone. It is wonderful fun to try to recreate the real wilderness from these lines and squiggles on the page, with the rapids, moraines and creek beds marked. The topographical maps even show the old mining roads and the trappers’ cabins left decades ago by explorers and prospectors who ventured and died in this stunning land.

I am at the beginning of my journey, so stay tuned as I give periodic updates on my progress. With any luck, by the end Faint Hope, Green’s latest adventure, will be born.



Barbara Fradkin is a child psychologist with a fascination for how we turn bad. In addition to her darkly haunting short stories in the Ladies Killing Circle anthologies, she writes the gritty, Ottawa-based Inspector Green novels which have
won back to back Arthur Ellis Awards for Best Novel from Crime Writers of Canada. The eighth in the series, Beautiful Lie the Dead, explores love in all its complications. And, her new Rapid Read from Orca, The Fall Guy, is being launched Sun. May 15th.

TUESDAY BRINGS TROUBLE

Read a mystery and travel.

I’ve been an avid mystery reader since I was a child. And one of the aspects that attracted me to crime fiction was I got to travel without having to move from the comfort of my chair. I traveled to England with Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, to France with Georges Simenon , to China with Robert van Gulik and to Mediterranean Islands with Dorothy Dunnett. On a cold winter’s day, I loved nothing better than to visit the sun-filled beaches of Florida with John D. MacDonald or a sweltering Louisiana bayou of a James Lee Burke novel.

But I wasn’t able to visit the far-flung delights of my own country, Canada, for there were few Canadian mystery writers available in my early reading days. But within the last fifteen years or so Canadian Crime writing has finally come into its own with a hundred or more established writers and new ones emerging everyday.

Now I can visit the rainforests of Vancouver Island in a Lou Allin novel, the seamy side of Vancouver with Michael Blair, the heady gold rush days of the Yukon with Vicki Delany, the flat prairie of Saskatchewan with Anthony Bidulka and Gail Bowen, 19th century Toronto with Maureen Jenning’s Inspector Murdoch or a northern Ontario town with Giles Blunt. I particularly enjoy visiting my own city of Ottawa through the eyes of Barbara Fradkin’s Inspector Green or Mary Jane Maffini’s Camilla MacPhee. And the cross Canada traveling doesn’t stop, but continues into small town Quebec with Louise Penny and on to Newfoundland through the eyes of Thomas Rendell Curran’s Inspector Eric Stride.

When I set out to write the Meg Harris mystery series, I decided I wanted my readers to travel too, perhaps to a place they’d never been to before or to one they knew well and wanted to revisit. Deciding on the destination was easy. It was where I spend half my time; in the wilds of West Quebec, where lakes out number people a thousand to one and trees a million to one.

I’ve always had a particular fondness for the Great Canadian Outdoors having spent many a childhood summer vacation at friends’ cottages, camping with my father or attending summer camp. I’ve since graduated to multi-day canoe trips along both rushing and still waterways, hiking along forested trails and in winter, skiing through silent, snow-drenched woods. I wanted to bring its magic alive to my readers, have them hear the haunting laugh of a loon on a still summer night, the chilling howl of a lone wolf or feel a frisson of fear at a sudden strange sight in the depths of a dark forest.

In the Death’s Golden Whisper, the first book in the Meg Harris series, I have my readers experience the vibrancy of a Quebec fall in full autumnal regalia. In Red Ice for a Shroud, you can shiver along with Meg as her world turns to ice during a once-in-a-lifetime Ice Storm. Or you can come paddling with Meg in The River Runs Orange, as she battles the swirling whitewater of a rapid filled river. In the fourth book, Arctic Blue Death, Meg travels to Canada’s Far North, where you can experience days of endless sunlight on the bleak, rocky tundra of Baffin Island.

In the next Meg Harris mystery, A Green Place for Dying, to be released in Spring 2011, Meg returns to her isolated West Quebec cottage, Three Deer Point, overlooking the crystal clear waters of Echo Lake. Through Meg’s eyes, you will experience the mysticism of a moon-filled night as you sit by the lake in a ceremonial circle, listening to the chants of an Algonquin elder. Your nostrils will tingle with the smudge of burning sweetgrass, while your eyes will follow the moon’s shimmering path over the water.

So if you feel like a bit of traveling, read a mystery novel, preferably a Canadian one and enjoy.



Described by the Ottawa Citizen as “one of the best new voices in the
mystery business”, Ottawa author, RJ Harlick, writes the Meg Harris
mystery series set in the wilds of West Quebec. And like her heroine
Meg Harris, RJ loves nothing better than to roam the forests
surrounding her own wilderness cabin or paddle the endless lakes and
rivers. But unlike Meg, she doesn’t find a body at every twist and
turn, although she certainly likes to put them in Meg’s way. There
are currently four books in the series. The fifth, A Green Place for
Dying, will be published in Spring 2011.