Suicide Notes: Fact and Fallacy

Suicide notes can be a valuable tool in a fiction novel. They can tell you a great deal about the individual, motives, and even provide clues that the suicide was staged. Unfortunately, there is some misunderstanding of suicide notes, their forms, and prevalence. Some people believe suicide notes are commonly found at such scenes. No suicide note? It must not be a suicide. The fact of the matter is that studies (from industrial countries) have shown that only about 35% of suicides involve notes or other forms of communication. Generally speaking, this percentage is influenced by a number of predictable and unpredictable factors.

One factor is the purpose or message of the note and its intended audience. As you might imagine most notes are of a remorseful tone. The language expresses regret, sorrow, frustration, and sometimes humility. In contrast, some notes attempt to lay blame for the act on a third party. It may be a spouse, child, parent, or institution. In rare cases the notes may devote more content to excusing others (like a spouse) for having any influence on their decision to end their lives. In these notes the language typically suggests an eccentric author (i.e. third party). Other clues suggesting another author include use of syntax, punctuation, certain phrases or expressions just to name a few. These clues may provide a red flag to investigators indicating a staged scene.

Individuals with higher levels of education may be more likely to leave a note as would an extrovert personality type. People with a history of past suicide attempts may also be more likely to leave a note because their depression or mental state is already known. In contrast, individuals who tend to “bottle in” their feelings may continue that trend. I imagine some people just don’t know what to say and assume their motivations are understood.

Another factor to consider is the reason for the suicide. Is the decision to commit suicide impulsive or the last in a series of such decision? Is there a single significant event such as a romantic or financial failing that had just occurred? We call that event a trigger and they can be exacerbated by alcohol or drug use. Individuals making impulsive decisions may be less likely to leave a note as opposed to someone who has come to their decision over a longer period of time.

Aside from frequency, another fallacy some laymen hold is that a note will be lengthy and comprehensive. While this certainly can occur it is not always the case. I have seen everything from a post-it note with the single word “sorry” to lengthy letters individually addressed to multiple family members and friends. Suicide notes are not always in handwritten form either. Modern “notes” may include phone messages, e-mails, text messages, or even Tweets. In fact, family members may receive these notes days or weeks after the persons death (especially if they live in foreign countries or if accompanied by family heirlooms). They can be drawings or even books (like the bible) opened to certain significant passages. Sometimes these passages have obvious meaning and other times they do not.

I once investigated a suicide in which the victim video-taped the event. The camera was facing the victim who was sitting on a couch. In the background (off camera) a television was playing a tape from an action blockbuster. The man was watching the film during a particular scene that seemed to bear no relationship to anything related to his life (or suicide). Looking back and forth between the television and the camera, gun in mouth, the victim appeared to get distracted and became visibly annoyed that this scene had passed. He put the gun down hurried over to the VCR and rewound the tape. He then sat and waited for that precise moment that meant something to him and pulled the trigger. We never could determine the significance of that scene.

So how can you use this information to the benefit of your stories? Notes are simply a tool for communication and as authors you are experts in communication. It’s all about the message you want your reader to take away. These messages can be most powerful when created as part of a staging. Obviously, this note would have to be either typewritten or convincingly forged (i.e. known exemplar writings supplied by the stager). Ideally it will serve to temporarily confuse law enforcement until your protagonist can find that one element that reveals the truth.However you choose to use these tools keep them confusing. Give their message more than one meaning and force your characters to work them out. What may seem like a simple message (such as a bible verse) may hold dual meanings to the victim or the stager.

Cutting and Slashing is Not Always a Crime

by Allan Leverone, novelist

This is my second guest appearance at Crime Fiction Collective, and I’d like to thank Jodie Renner for giving me the opportunity to be here today, while she’s off on another trip. And what the hell, I didn’t put you guys out of business back in July, so what are the odds I’ll do so today?

If you’re a regular reader of Crime Fiction Collective, you know Jodie is a professional editor. As such, most of her posts are about writing and editing effective fiction, a subject near and dear to my heart as an author.

When I signed the contract with Medallion Press for publication of my first thriller, Final Vector, I was absolutely certain I had submitted to them a tight, suspenseful thriller. And I had. But going through the editing process with my editor at Medallion, Lorie Popp, was an eye-opening experience. Together we took a good book and made it outstanding.

I elected to approach a different Indie publisher, StoneHouse Ink, with my next thriller, The Lonely Mile, after hearing my friend, bestselling author Vincent Zandri, rave about how those folks at StoneHouse/StoneGate were doing everything right. But I knew I would only have one chance to impress them, and I couldn’t get out of my mind what a difference Lorie Popp had made with Final Vector over at Medallion. 

So I researched freelance editors, eventually approaching Jodie Renner, who specializes, as you know, in thrillers. Again, I felt I had written a tight, suspenseful book. And again, I had. But working with Jodie resulted in even tighter writing, a faster pace, and tenser, more suspenseful scenes, which allowed me to submit to StoneHouse a manuscript that would stand out against the many outstanding books being submitted by many outstanding authors.

It didn’t take long to receive an enthusiastic response from StoneHouse regarding my submission. I signed a contract for publication of The Lonely Mile in e-book form, and the novel was released in July, receiving virtually all outstanding reviews. The paperback edition was just released in October.

The most gratifying part of having worked with Jodie? When the manuscript went through the editing process at StoneHouse, it emerged virtually unchanged from the product she and I worked so hard on a few months prior, with the exception of a couple of scene changes to permit the book to better fit the target audience at StoneHouse.

With the onslaught of self-published books available now, thanks to the e-book revolution, I believe it is incumbent upon anyone interested in establishing a career as a professional novelist to produce the highest-quality work possible. It’s probably more important now than it was ten years ago. The moment an author gets branded as an amateur in this market, he’s done.

Is working with an editor easy? No. Ask any writer, and she’ll tell you letting go of those precious words she has worked so hard to create can be agonizing. But it’s also necessary. As the creator of the project, the author is far too invested in it to see the work objectively. The editor has no such investment in those words, and is (or should be) only interested in helping the author create the best possible product.

Is working with an editor cheap? Again, no. Freelance editors are in business to make money, just like any other professional. If your goal as an author is to rush your work into the marketplace in order to “make a killing” by selling an inferior product or a product not ready for prime time, good luck with that. You might make some money initially, but readers are not stupid, and they don’t appreciate being taken advantage of. You’ll find out pretty quickly the only killing being done is to your career. It’s going to be short-lived.

But if your goal as an author is to create quality work, which will stand the test of time and which readers will not feel cheated plunking their hard-earned money down to buy, the investment of time and money into professional editing is irreplaceable.

So there’s my rant for today. And to answer your question, no, Jodie did not have anything to do with this post! She gave me free rein and did not suggest any potential topics. I owe a lot to my positive editorial experience with Lorie at Medallion Press and with freelance editor Jodie Renner, and I thought this might be the perfect forum to express my gratitude and acknowledge how critical their help was in producing work of which I could be proud.

Allan Leverone is a three-time Derringer Award finalist, as well as a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee. He is the author of the thrillers Final Vector and The Lonely Mile, as well as the novella Darkness Falls. His paranormal suspense novel, Paskagankee, will be released soon by StoneGate Ink.

Jodie Renner, a freelance fiction editor specializing in thrillers and other fast-paced fiction, has published two books to date in her series, An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: WRITING A KILLER THRILLER and STYLE THAT SIZZLES & PACING FOR POWER. Both titles are available in e-book and paperback.

For more info, please visit Jodie’s author website or editor website, or find her on Facebook or Twitter.

The Future Makes a Comeback

by L.J. Sellers, author of provocative mysteries & thrillers

We’ve all seen the ads for the new book When She Woke (by Hilary Jordan), a futuristic novel in which a criminal's skin is dyed to reflect her crime, a story that’s been compared to the classic, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. In recent years, other similar novels have been wildly popular too, such as The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. These novels are dystopian and reflect a society that has completely broken down and morphed into something ugly.

As a reader, my love of futuristic thrillers—which I distinguish from dystopian novels—started long ago with a terrific novel by Lawrence Sanders called The Tomorrow File. For the record, he’s my all-time favorite author, and TTF may be one of the best books I’ve ever read, or at least that’s how I remember it.

The story was written in 1975—and takes place in the year 1998. I read it in college and was captivated by Sanders’ vision of the future, in which genetic classifications are based on whether one is natural, produced by artificial insemination, artificial inovulation, cloned, or otherwise created without the necessity for sexual intercourse. The objects (people) of tomorrow eat food synthesized from petroleum and soybeans, and enjoy unrestricted using (sex) and an addictive soft drink called Smack.

The new language took some getting used to, but the story was so engaging with so many twists that it was hard to put down. Most important, the book triggered my fascination with well-told futuristic thrillers.

Another of my favorite novels set in the future is The Handmaid’s Tale, published ten years after The Tomorrow File. The book won numerous awards, was made into a film, and is so well known I won’t bother with the details, except to say it’s a feminist portrayal of the dangers of a conservative society. I admire Atwood immensely for tackling the subject. (I took a stab at that issue when I wrote The Sex Club…but that’s another story.) Reading The Handmaid’s Tale further inspired me to someday write a thriller set in the future.

Interestingly enough, yesterday a blogger posted comparative reviews of The Catcher in the Rye, The Handmaid’s Tale and my futuristic thriller, The Arranger. The blogger focused on insecurities as the theme, both social and personal, and concluded they were necessary in fiction. First, I find it interesting that people are reading or re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale from 1985 because of the advertising for When She Woke. It’s fun to see the novel resurrected.

Second, it's an honor to be listed in the same company as works by J.D. Salinger and Margaret Atwood.

I don’t mean to imply The Arranger compares to any of the brilliant works I’ve mentioned, most of which imagine a shockingly different future. (I’m still not sure why Catcher in the Rye is in there, but that was the blogger’s choice.) My story is set only 13 years in the future, and I don’t consider it dystopian. It presents a bleak vision of the United States, in that the economy is stagnant, government has shrunk, and people without health insurance are left to fend for themselves. But all that seems quite realistic to me and didn’t require much imagination.

The Gauntlet, however, is an intense physical and mental competition that provides a backdrop for my novel and required me to create entirely fictitious scenarios.

Overall, I'm excited for the revived interest in futuristic novels. Does it represent a dissatisfaction with our current state of affairs or a fear of what is waiting for us? Or both?

Do you read futuristic novels? What are your favorites? What themes do like to see?

Man or Machine?

By C.J. West, author of Addicted To Love

Last week in the seventh game of the world series an umpire made a mistake that could have turned the course of the most important baseball game of the year. The count was three balls, two strikes when Yadier Molina took his final pitch. The umpire called it a ball. Molina was awarded first and since the bases were loaded, the Cardinals scored a critical run late in the game.

It is well known in baseball circles that umpires tend to call strikes a certain way, meaning their calls might not be consistent with the actual strike zone according to the rules. Pitchers and hitters know this and try to figure out where the strike zone is for that night.

Why does this happen? Where the umpire stands behind the catcher can affect the way he sees balls cross the plate. The umpire also knows when a $10 million player is at bat against a rookie pitcher and vice versa. In a fair world, these things wouldn’t come into play. A strike would be a strike. But umpires are only human.

Before the explosion of electronic technology, umpires were the best way to assure a fair game. Unfortunately for human umpires, we now have instant replay and technologies like the Amica Pitch Zone that can immediately tell us whether the umpire made the right call or not. Television announcers regularly highlight umpire mistakes and some think it is only a matter of time before machines replace the sharp-eyed men behind the plate.

This got me thinking about machines replacing judges of all sorts. Clearly baseball would be fairer if we allowed machines to call balls and strikes. But can machines help us choose books?

I had an interesting experience about two years ago with a recommendation I received from Amazon. The company’s computer algorithm recommended Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This was really strange because the only books I’d ever purchased from Amazon were mysteries, thrillers and some computer software books. So how did a computer at Amazon get the crazy idea to recommend a book about consumer economics?

What was more surprising to me is that I loved Freakonomics. I started thinking about how exciting it would be if a computer could judge books as impartially as the Amica Pitch Zone and make recommendations that you would absolutely love?

If you’d like to read a discussion about how the Amazon algorithm works, you can start here. 

I’m going to speculate that Amazon is doing what is called data mining. They have lots and lots of data about which books customers buy. They know which of these the customers reviewed favorably and which they did not. When we shop at Amazon they also have lots of information about us and can compare us to other shoppers with similar tastes and suggest books they liked that we haven’t read yet. It seems pretty simple, though the technology underneath is certainly complex.

Amazon collects the input of thousands of human reviewers. Their open platform for reviews has its own set of problems, but let’s put those problems aside for now and take this one step further.

Imagine a search tool that actually looks inside books the way Google scans the web for the best page when we search for a toaster oven, swim fins, or a digital camera. It may seem far-fetched, but couldn’t a program analyze a writer’s use of language, settings, and subject matter?

Sometimes I wonder if we really know what it is about a book that makes it unputdownable. Certainly a computer program can’t quantify that, but maybe if the right metrics were combined with reviewer data, those recommendations might help us find hit after hit (for our own personal taste). Since so many books are available in electronic format, the content is readily available to a scanning tool.

We’ve seen the decline of reviews in print media and an explosion of book bloggers. Will the next big thing in books be a computer program that can scan millions of books and point out the next great thing?

Beginning of Book 3

Hi, folks,

Below is the very beginning of my third Skeeter Hughes Mystery, yet to be titled. I'm taking a huge risk throwing it out there for you all to see this early draft, but I figure all of publishing is risk-taking, ya know? And, well, the mantra of what we do is "show, don't tell" so I figure this is about as telling as I can get.

All opinions gratefully accepted. 

By Judith Yates Borger

Rachel Rand James left happy hour a little early and headed home on the light rail. She was up for reelection and didn’t need headlines that she’d been arrested for drinking and driving. Besides, she needed to be seen on public transportation, which had been one of her campaign issues.

She’d been downtown with her best friend, Skeeter Hughes, and their buddy Buzzy Brewster. Skeeter, Rachel and Buzzy had started working at the newspaper within a month of each other, and soon began going out drinking after deadline. Over several pitchers of beer they’d argue about everything, politics, body image and men. Skeeter always took positions on the left and Rachel on the right. Buzzy usually landed somewhere in the middle, always the arbiter. By last call they were still best friends even if neither had convinced the others of anything. Now, Skeeter was a newspaper reporter,  Buzzy was a copy editor and Rachel,who had always had higher ambitions, was mayor of Minneapolis. 

The mayor liked to document how taxpayer money was spent. She pulled out her iPhone and snapped a couple pictures of the scene on the train: Office workers heading home. Moms shushing babies. Young folks dressed in the black-pants-and-white-shirts uniform of the evening shift at the hotels. Travelers on their way to the airport, tugging wheeled suit cases. The Hiawatha Light Rail, which the mayor had championed, was packed. Maybe one of the shots would be good enough to use in her new campaign literature, she thought. 

As the train pulled into the Cedar Riverside stop Rachel glanced at the platform as people disembarked. A guy in a gold and marroon  University of Minnesota hoody and jeans, a couple of giggling Somali girls covered head to toe  in jeweled-colored hajibs, an older white man in a blazer and tie talking to a young Somali man in black pants and a tan zipped jacket. A picture of diversity, she thought, and  snapped another shot. Then she sent an email to Skeeter and Buzzy.

“Love ya,” she wrote in the subject line, and, “Had a great time tonight” in the body of the email. 

They were her last words. 

Chapter 1

Rachel had called it quits on her third beer and headed home. I was nursing my second and swapping newspaper gossip with Buzzy, my all-time favorite copy editor who, like me, had the night off. We were talking about ordering a pizza when our cell phones sounded simultaneously.

“Uh Oh,” Buzzy said. “This can’t  be good.”

The messages went to all staff: “Light rail bombed. Everyone to newsroom.”

“I’m heading in,” Buzzy said. 

“I’m not,” I said. “If I go to the newsroom they’re just going to send me right out. I’m closer to the tracks now anyway.”

We had been slogging down the beers at the Loon, a zillion-year-old watering hole kitty corner from the First Avenue light rail stop in downtown Minneapolis. Buzzy stood, gave me a quick nod, threw money on the table and left. I did the same.

 I ran to my little red Honda Civic del Sol, which I had parked at a meter, and roared away until I was within a half mile of the Hiawatha Light Rail line. Road construction had traffic backed up, so I ditched my car in a no-parking zone. I grabbed my personal iPhone, the newspaper’s piece-of-crap issued cell phone and my notebook and took off running. I ran up a pile of dirt then did a face plant running down the other side. Damn, I wish I were in better shape, I thought as I wiped grit from my eyes, nose and mouth.  Nearby construction workers were so busy watching the smoke billowing to the sky that no one noticed as I pulled myself up, brushed off, and kept running. 

The smell of the disaster hung in the air. Acrid. Electrical. Like a hair dryer that’s been working too hard. Then the overpowering stench of burning oil. Fire engines wailed as flames shot to the sky. I figured it would be minutes before the police set up a perimeter impervious to everyone, especially reporters. I had to get as close a possible to see what was going on before the boundary went up. 

Half a dozen pickup trucks were parked on a residential street  a block away and well within sight of the disaster scene. They probably belong to the construction workers, I thought. Figuring no one would notice me, I climbed into the bed of the black, mud-spattered Ford Ranger and kneeled on top of a blue tarp that covered something hard and lumpy. 

The heat from the explosion hit me like an ocean wave. Even though smoke obscured the scene I could see that both cars on the light rail had been destroyed. I needed to get word to the newsroom.

Barely catching my breath, I whipped out my iPhone and hit the speed dial for what the newsroom calls “the Bat Phone,” a dedicated line that the editors monitor twenty-four/seven. Circuits must have been overloaded because l kept getting a busy signal. Same with the piece-of-crap phone. I tried to text. That didn’t work either. I sent an email to content@Citizen.com, a general address monitored by many editors. But emails can be slow. That left Twitter. 

The tweet needed to be worded carefully. I didn’t want to tip off the TV stations. I knew they monitored Twitter to keep tabs on the competition because we did the same to keep an eye on them.

“I’m here. Talk to Buzzy.” I tweeted directly to my editor, knowing Buzzy would tell her I had taken off toward the train.

By now the distance between me and the burning train was swarming with cops and firefighters. Sirens wailed. A Hennepin County sherriff’s helicopter whoop, whoop, whooped overhead. But I didn’t see any other media. 

“Ours alone, I think,” I tweeted.

The rule on a breaking story like this is you don’t take the time to write full paragraphs. It’s better to shoot just one sentence back to the newsroom as soon as you have a detail. An editor will pull it all together, hopefully taking out all the typos. Keep it comin’, they say. So I did.

“Counting 20 trucks from all firehouses. Sheriff chopper overhead. City, county cops everywhere.”

“Two cars on train fully engulfed. Smells like hair burning.”

“Pop, pop, pop. Don’t know what. Electrical something?”

“Ads on train for Citizen and Metro Transit bubbled, melted on sides of cars.”

I hope someone in the newsroom, our newsroom, is getting all this, I thought, and kept texting.

“Cops set up command center. ”

“Hear no cries for help from train; only rush of fire.”

“Windows pop out on train.”

“More sirens. Maybe 6 ambulances pulling up.”

“They’re not hurrying. Doubt anyone survived.”

Just then one of the half dozen cops at the command center turned in my direction so I ducked under the tarp in the truck bed, finding myself nose-to-nose with a giant wrench. When I poked my head up seconds later I found myself in the steady gaze of Minneapolis Sgt. Victoria Olson, her feet planted like the roots of an oak, her face as impassive as bark. She gave me a slight nod, then said something to one of the other cops at the command center. 

“Busted by Sgt. V. Olson.”

Someone was going to roust me, and soon, I figured, so I had to send back as much detail as possible because, as far as I could tell, I was the only representative from the public on the scene. 

“Smoke clearing a bit. Most damage in 2^nd car. Front of train seems only scorched.”

“Grass around train burned for about 30 feet.”

“Looks like cops evacuating nearby houses. ”

Finally I saw that my tweets were getting through.

“U R doing good. Keep it comin,” came a reply.

I couldn’t tell who sent it but it didn’t matter. Someone in the newsroom was receiving. Thank God.

Another explosion. I ducked under the tarp again, this time to protect myself. Good thing, too, because I felt the ping, ping, ping of shards of glass and metal raining down on me. Unfortunately, I moved so fast that I banged my noggin on a pile of hammers. As I rubbed my forehead someone snapped the tarp away.

“What exactly are you doing, Ms. Hughes?” said the white guy with the close-cropped haircut and the FBI badge hanging around his neck. 

Pilcrow No-No's, Part II

When last we left off, I was rather pathetically attempting to explain the mysteries of the Pilcrow (the infamous reverse P, seen here:  ¶), and, more importantly, why being able to see it with ease matters.  A picture being worth a thousand words, let’s start with this:

A Plain Word file--looks perfectly normal, right?

 

Now, as you look at it, you’ll see that it looks perfectly normal; nothing out of the ordinary.  If Blogger will allow me to upload this in a large enough size, (It doesn't; for full-size and readable images, please see this link:  http://screencast.com/t/Hw46kxs40Npe)  the sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that something is a bit off—all the words at the beginning of each line appear to be either grammatically incorrect, or misspelled, according to Word’s built-in checker—they’re all underlined in squiggly green.

But what Word is really telling you is that the words aren't “misspelled,” per se; the problem is that they are not capitalized.  Why would Word think that they require capitalization, though?  Most of these are, to our eyes, in the midst of a sentence.  But to Word’s “eyes,” they are not in the middle of a sentence—they’re at the beginning of a new paragraph.

To see what I (and Word) mean, I’ll turn on the Pilcrow (click on the backwards P on the Word toolbar or Ribbon in the Home tab for Word 2007 and 2010) and show you what this really looks like—and what’s really encoded:

Aha!  The Culprits appear!

 

And that’s what Word sees—a page full of one-line-long paragraphs.  (Again, for a full-size image, please see this link:  http://screencast.com/t/IPUxVZmv) No wonder it thinks that all those words at the beginning of each line need capitalization!  More importantly, if you tried to reformat this manuscript—even just to type in it, what you would get would be one line that would word-wrap properly (so you’d see the teeny-weeny “dot” at the end of each line, floating directly after the last word in that line), but the rest of the sentence would end prematurely on the next line, without the wrapping carrying throughout the document, as you are accustomed to Word doing.  (In Ye Olden Times, when Dinosaurs Walked the Earth, “repagination.”).

To try to search and replace all these pilcrows is not a task for the faint of heart.  There are over 8,000 errant paragraph marks in the (from scan & OCR) document I used for this demonstration.  Having to go through your ms and search-and-replace those one at a time would be a time-consuming task, and while there are faster methods for folks with some training in html, it’s not that easy to do; after all, you can’t just tell Word to search and replace the paragraph mark with a space—or all your paragraphs will disappear, leaving you with a single, very, very long paragraph in your story.  You can’t simply tell it to search for paragraph marks surrounded by letters, either; for some of those are “real” paragraphs, as well.  However, through the simple expedient of turning on your Pilcrow, and scanning the right-hand edge of your document, you’ll at least be able to spot and identify any stragglers quickly and easily.

Hope this helped!

This post contributed by Kimberly A. Hitchens ("Hitch"), Owner and founder of Booknook.biz, one of the premiere Indy eBook production companies in North America.  

Angels Among Us?

Angel Condemned by Mary Stanton.

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.

Brianna Winston-Beaufort has two law practices. The "temporal" office, the one that pays the bills, is located in an office building on Savannah's Bay Street. The celestial office is located in a house on Angelus Street, and can only be found by Bree and the Company who work there with her, and perhaps the occasional client.

The staff and clients of the Angelus office are not living humans. The staff are what is commonly known as angels, while the clients are the souls of the dead who believe they've been wrongly condemned to Hell.

In this, the fifth installment in the series, Bree's aunt asks her to represent her fiancé Prosper White. Prosper is being sued by an antiques dealer for allegedly stealing a valuable magazine cover for a museum display. Bree hopes to settle out of court, but before she has a chance to do much, Prosper is murdered and Cissy is the prime suspect, although there is no shortage of people who disliked Prosper.

Meanwhile, Bree is trying to ignore the summons of a celestial client, who also claims to have been wronged by Prosper as well as Allard Chambers, the antique dealer.

Mary Stanton has created a believable protagonist in Bree, who understands the task she has inherited, but sometimes wants to decline, and is always frustrated by bureaucracy, whether temporal or celestial. And although all the elements of a horror story are here: evil attorneys opposing Bree, mirrors that reflect demons and paintings that portray reality, this is not a frightening tale.

Rather, the philosophy underlying this unputdownable book, that there is someone working to correct divine mistakes, is a comfort.

*FTC Full Disclosure: Many thanks to the publisher, who sent me a copy of the book for review purposes.

All Hallow's Eve giveaway!

CFC is giving away two thrillers as a Hallowe'en treat. Andrew E. Kaufman and L.J. Sellers have each offered an e-book to a commenter (one to each of two people) on today's post.

Drew's treat is While the Savage Sleeps

and L.J.'s is Secrets to Die For.

Comments must be posted by midnight on October 31st. The drawing for each book will be made by its author.

When we last left Gayle, she was forgetting something...

I had an entire essay to post for my turn last Thursday, then forgot to actually post the darn thing, so LJ told me to just post it on Saturday. I thought I would rework it slightly to cover why I got so befuddled Wednesday evening. As they say, when life hands you lemons, squeeze the crap out of them. Then stick the peels down the garbage disposal to remove odors, and trade the juice for chocolate.

My brain flew out the window on Wednesday because my new book finally hit Amazon and I needed to let everyone know. It's not a mystery book, it's another humor book. I now have two humor books and two mysteries.

By quantity, I write more humor than mystery, simply because, since 2005, I've provided the Placentia News-Times with 600 words every week, telling some story about my family in the most exaggerated, and hopefully funniest, way possible. And yet, when people ask me what I write, I tell them I write murder mysteries.

I try to say that with a demure smile.

I'm guessing there are probably 100 mystery writers to every 1 humor writer. Just go into any bookstore and look around. "Mystery" gets its own section "Humor" gets one shelf. So why do I want to align myself with an ocean of writers, instead of trying to be the big fish in the smaller pond?

The problem with being a humor writer is that comedy is so subjective. Everyone recognizes that Hamlet is a tragedy, even if they are not moved to tears. However, if I walked across the room, tripped spectacularly and fell in a heap, some people would gasp and rush to my side, and some people would help me eventually, after they stopped laughing.

Because some people laugh at slapstick. Others laugh at erudite, New Yorker stories. There are people who love bawdy humor, who love puns, who love knock-knock jokes, etc. If you write something which appeals to one of these groups, they will pronounce you funny. The rest of the folks, however, will not say, "Yes, I recognize it as humor, but it's really not my style."

They will say, "I didn't laugh, therefore, it wasn't funny."

Therefore, you are not funny. You big loser.

Even if you feel confident in being humorous within your group, and you are a good writer, humor is very difficult to write. When I'm writing my mysteries, my character can trip over a table or the table without too much trouble. Action is more forgiving. In humor, though, one word can make or break the joke. One example:

Erma Bombeck released a book of her columns called, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression. Funny title, yes? What if the word "the" was replaced by "my"? Suddenly, I Lost Everything in My Post-Natal Depression isn't so funny. It's now a sad, yet ultimately redeeming memoir (that we've all seen before).

So now I'm consumed with my new book, checking to see if it's on Amazon yet, and now is it on Barnes & Noble? I'm doing a Goodreads giveaway, and I put a Media Release on my website. I'll be talking about it briefly on my own little two-cents-worth blog. If you're a writer, you know the drill, and how everything else falls away while you're taking care of the bird in your hand.

So how do you market humor? Ideally, you're looking for that subset of people who laugh at the things you find funny, and trying to avoid the people who don't get you. The straight approach of "Read this book, it'll make you laugh," doesn't always work. Maybe some people will think it's funny, but others will take it as a dare. I love to laugh, but when I see ads for books or movies that tell me they're "uproarious", "hilarious", "gut-bustingly funny", etc, I want to run the other way. Mention "zany" or "wacky" and I'm in the next county.

Here are some of my rules for marketing.

1. If you're writing humor within a genre, market the genre. My mysteries have a lot of humor, but I'm afraid if I brag about how hilarious they are, I am just begging for a snarky beatdown. Instead, I describe my mysteries as fun romps. I allude to the humor, as in, "it's got a little humor in it." That way, either readers like the story and don't get the humor, or think it's funny and I'm being too modest, or don't like the story anyway, making it a moot point.

2. If you're writing straight humor, compare it to someone else's style. This doesn't mean you're copying them. It means you write in the tradition of Robert Benchley, or David Sedaris, or Tina Fey, etc. Or perhaps, like me, you write Erma Bombeck-style, slice-of-life humor. It's like saying the password, opening the door, and finding your people.

3. Market your sense of humor. This means writing your ad copy, your press releases, and all other marketing materials in your "funny" voice. If you write a blog, you should include your humor there. If you have a website, same thing applies. This goes back to the first rule of writing: show, don't tell. Don't tell your reader they'll laugh if they read your book. Show them the funny!

4. Last, your marketing kit should include plenty of steel wool. Scrub yourself with it on a daily basis. You're gonna need thick skin for this business.

Hope you enjoyed my little rant, and if you don't get my kind of humor, it's okay. If you can't say something kind, say something snarky, right?