MAYHEM ON MONDAYS

Let's try something different!

If you've been following this blog, you know I'm looking for something different to do with it. Full schedules, overworked brains and tired fingers have combined to make this a necessary transition.

What I've come up with, and I hope it works, is a new schedule. From today, Mystery Maven Canada will have Mayhem on Mondays with me blogging (the majority of the time); Wicked Wednesdays with rotating authors or rather, authors who rotate blogging. The dangerous dames from Ladies' Killing Circle Thursdays will be slotted in on a regular Wed. each month, with guest authors for the fourth (and fifth, if it's a long one) slots.

Fridays will be me again but mainly doing reviews of new Canadian mysteries. I'd also be pleased to post reviews done by others. If there's a book that I haven't yet reviewed and you'd like to do it, just contact me by email.

What I need is information! If you've heard anything through the publishing grapevine, know of something coming down the pike, have a launch or signing coming up, or maybe it's an idea for a blog you'd like me to do...please get in touch. My email is
mysterymaven@rogers.com. Or leave a comment at this blogsite.

If you'd like to write a guest blog, also let me know. And if you have a new book coming out, please ask your publisher to send me a paper copy.

I'm hoping these changes will help keep Mystery Maven Canada fresh and entertaining for readers, and for contributors. Please let me know how it's doing as you get used to the a new viewing schedule. Sounds like a new TV season. Maybe it will be as addictive.

Linda Wiken/Erika Chase

A KILLER READ
Berkley Prime Crime, now available
READ & BURIED, coming Dec., 2012
www.erikachase.com

TUESDAY BRINGS TROUBLE

Revisiting...revising!

When was the last time you revisited a manuscript or short story that's resided in your bottom desk drawer for at least several years? I've been thinking about my

first finished novel -- the one I dared to send out to publishers, written in the early 1990's. An earlier attempt at at manuscript did the rounds of my then-writing group but went no further. Thank God!

This one did do the rounds...and managed to garner an impressive array of rejection letters. I've saved every one of those letters, more for income tax purposes than for some grand gesture, like papering the walls of my office. It did get some
encouraging remarks and even went to the second draft stage. However, sadly or gladly, that editor left that major publishing house and my manuscript went no

further. So, it's been entombed in the figurative bottom drawer ever since. Although I did go on to finish number two in the series & start on book number three.

I've been giving it some thought lately, in these days of e-books and the like, wondering if it's time to dust it off, polish it up and do something with it. Like publish it. I still love the main character and I think the plot still holds.

However, time has not been kind to this novel. Since those days computers and the internet have become intrenched in our lives. It's hard to find anyone who doesn't have a cell phone. And even I-Pads, Playbooks and all the variations of e-readers are now common language, if not in common usage.

To update it would be a major revision -- not a bad thing in itself -- but it would also involved changes in plot points and structure. Not so good. Even one of the buildings central to the plot -- the CBC Radio studios in Ottawa -- have changed location and updated equipment. Not a nice thing to do to a writer!

The alternative, of course, is to leave it anchored in the early 1990's. And that would require a revision of some sort early on, to clue the reader into this. Had the plot been set fifty years earlier, it would be more apparent and the tone set much more easily. But this in-between time, barely two decades ago, is still so similar, and yet so different...well, you get the picture. Or the plot. I hope.

I still have time to think this through. I'm coming up to deadline with my second novel in my Ashton Corners Book Club Mystery series with Berkley Prime Crime. At least that one's firmly entrenched in current time.

Have you encountered this dilemma in your writing? And if so, what have been your solutions?


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