From Editor to Designer

The process of writing and publishing a novel has a lot of highs and lows on the highway to launch day. But one of the most exciting, the one that makes the whole thing seem real, is the writer's first look at the new cover. Good or bad, the cover is a jolt of excitement. We may mutter about the colors or praise the choice of images, or wonder if the title is too large or our name too small. But none of this matters, because it is always thrilling to see our book with a real cover.

I have been very fortunate in the covers designed for the Anita Ray series. Five Star not only chose beautiful designs but also allowed me to make comments on the first one, Under the Eye of Kali. The cover was a perfect fit for the story. The same was true for the mass market paperback edition from Harlequin Worldwide.

This raised the stakes when I decided to publish a trade paperback through Create Space. All of a sudden I was lost. Fortunately, I found an excellent graphic designer, Kathleen Valentine, who solved my problems.

Kathleen came up with a template that I can use for the entire series, making changes only in the main photographic image, color scheme, and titles. I've used this template for the first two Anita Ray novels, Under the Eye of Kali and The Wrath of Shiva, and liked the results for both. I'm now working on the third book in the series, For the Love of Parvati.

I found two photographs that worked perfectly for the first two books, so I've been scanning my photographs from my last several visits to India.

The challenge becomes choosing the best image to indicate the story or setting. In the third Anita Ray, For the Love of Parvati, the story takes place in the foothills of Kerala, in an old mansion, during the monsoon, and involves a new maidservant, the family scion, who is in trouble with his employers, and a daughter visiting her mother. Someone seems to be stalking the household, and the police have been searching the area for a presumed terrorist. Secrets abound, of course. A family servant has gone missing, and Anita finds the body of a man washed up by the flooding river.

I don't have any photographs of the monsoon in the hills, but I have a few images of old mansions. I've narrowed the choice down to three. My final choice will depend in part on how well the image accommodates the title and author name.  

I never thought about book covers when I was taking photographs in Kerala, but I've since found myself reframing an image that might serve later. I'll make a final choice in the next week or so, and then I can move on to uploading text and cover for ebooks and paperbacks.

If the choice were up to you, which one would you pick?

To purchase one of the Anita Ray novels, click on the links below.

http://www.amazon.com/Under-Kali-Anita-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B00BGH9CCS

http://www.amazon.com/Wrath-Shiva-Anita-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B00GBFISY8/

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Parvati-Five-Star-Mystery/dp/1432828568

Balance in the Writing Life

In the middle of my years in graduate school I found myself drowning in research. I loved what I was doing, studying several aspects of India, but I was definitely doing too much of it. I sat up at my desk in the library one afternoon thinking, I need to do something different.

I have often attended concerts when I needed to relax, after giving up playing a musical instrument for many years. But wanting to do something different isn't exactly the same as needing a vacation, though I probably needed one of those too. What I was sensing was the need for variety. Like many other writers, I can write twelve to eighteen hours a day for a few days in order to meet a deadline, but then I need to do something different. I need balance. I need a counterweight to writing, something to balance the activities of my life.

A good writer friend manages to write at least one book a year along with short stories and run a professional design business. But she also knits--a lot. She produces beautiful work for adults and children, and gives the creations away to members of her large extended family. Another writer friend gardens as well as any professional. Other writer friends are master chefs, painters, finished carpenters, and singers. It seems that the professional writers I know are also fully competent in other creative areas. For me it's photography.

My interest in photography is one of the reasons I made my series character Anita Ray a photographer. But writing about photography in a mystery novel is still writing. I need to step outside of the writing part of my life, and I do this by focusing on my work with a camera or someone else's. 

This month, my colleagues and I on the Matz Gallery Committee for our local library hung a juried exhibit of 23 three photographs by 21 artists. Arranging the photos on the gallery walls had a similar feel to arranging the narrative in a novel or short story. Some things worked together in a scene and others did not. We arranged, and rearranged, the photographs, until we had three walls of artwork we were happy with.

Finding this kind of balance between areas of creativity helps me replenish what I need for writing. I have just sent in the final, edited copy of the fourth Anita Ray novel. When Krishna Calls will be out in 2016, and I already have ideas for the fifth in the series. But between finishing one book and starting another, I need a break that is both creative and restful. I find that in working with photography, either as the artist or, in this case, as  a member of a team of curators.

The Artist as Detective

Almost every mystery I pick up these days includes a nugget of information I haven't encountered before, or a window into something that is new to me. I enjoy these aspects of crime fiction, and often pick a book based on the jacket promising me an unusual perspective or discovery. I especially like mysteries featuring artists in any medium, and I always look for those who use their artistic skills to solve the crime. But these mysteries are hard to find.

In most mysteries featuring artists, the description of the detective or suspect as an artist is little more than window-dressing. The skill of the artist doesn't serve the mystery. In Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh, a group of painters at a summer workshop are suspects in a murder that happens right in front of them. But their skills as artists don't influence the investigation or solve the crime. In M.M. Kaye's Death in Kashmir the solution to the mystery depends on one character's artistic talent, which the sleuth has to recognize to solve the crime. 

Two more recent books inform the reader about art forgery but the skill of the artists involved are not essential to solving the crime. In The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro, an artist shunned by the art world is drawn into the underground world of art forgery, and describes in detail how a painting is created to pass tests of authenticity. Inspector Diamond also deals with forgery in The Vault by Peter Lovesey. But only standard modes of detection lead to the guilty party.

In the Anita Ray series, one of my goals is to use Anita's talent and life as a photographer to understand and solve crime. Sometimes this means little more than questioning someone who walks into her photography gallery in the resort where she lives and works. In Under the Eye of Kali, a character sees something in the gallery that upsets her, and Anita tracks this down to help solve the crime.

Anita is concerned about art theft in The Wrath of Shiva, and this leads her more deeply into other unexpected circumstances. Her commitment to a life as an artist is part of her zeal to uncover the theft of family art but her eye as a photographer doesn't help solve the crime.

In For the Love of Parvati, Anita visits relatives who live in the hills. During a break in the monsoon, she takes a walk with her camera and discovers a body washed down in a flood. She photographs the corpse to record suspicious marks on his body, and relies on these photographs when the police later tell her that the man died from drowning during the monsoon.

As the series progresses I plan to do more with Anita's way of looking at the world, her eye as a photographer-artist. Her talent and career as an artist give her a freedom not available to other women, and a curiosity that leads her into unusual situations.

What does it mean to write what you know?

Several years ago I attended a Memorial Day neighborhood picnic, and met several newcomers to the area. One woman scowled at me when she heard I was a writer. She said, "I suppose you look around at us for characters and use what we say in your books." I've remembered her comment for its naked suspicion and hostility, as though every writer were out to exploit the people we meet. Perhaps some writers do, but for the most part writers don't misuse real people. So, what does it mean when we tell beginning writers to write what you know?

During a recent talk I tried to explain how writers use their own lives to give depth and authenticity to a

story. In the Mellingham series, Chief of Police Joe Silva is the middle of seven children. I'm only the third of four, so I don't know what such a large family feels like. But my father was the middle of nine children, and he often told stories about growing up in a large family living in a small house. He lived in a household with his parents and six sisters, two brothers, and one bathroom. The dining table couldn't seat everyone, and his father was a great reader, with a special chair in the living room by the front window. This is all I needed to imagine Joe's birth family.

Anita Ray lives in Hotel Delite, a tourist hotel in a resort in South India. I once stayed at a hotel on the beach that had been a private home. The layout ensured that all rooms viewed the sea, and when it was converted to a hotel the small size made it easy to manage. In other parts of India I encountered hotels named Delite, which I found charming, so I borrowed the name. The original home/hotel has since been greatly enlarged, the restaurant enlarged, the kitchen moved, and the dining room moved. The hotel I write about is long gone, but the atmosphere lives on.

As a photographer, I enjoy working ideas about this art, or craft, into the story, as well as pointing out how it affects the way Anita looks at things. But I have to work to learn more about photography, to keep up with Anita, who is far more expert than I am. I learn from other photographers, and include some of their insights and discoveries and practices.

Every writer overhears a conversation that is tantalizing, but as Henry James warned, we don't want to hear too much. We want just enough to spark the imaginative journey; otherwise it's just unpleasant gossip. In any city or town, we see people pass by and barely notice them. But if we did, we'd find our visual vocabulary strikingly enriched. A father and his son, the boy a perfect miniature of the man with red curly hair, slight body, pigeon-toed walk, and tipping shoulders, stroll a beach. A teenage girl wearing a black slip as a dress under a red denim jacket, purple hair and dangly earrings recites what she told her boyfriend the night before, insisting that he should behave better and act like an adult, an admonition that might have come out of her grandmother's mouth. There are no secrets here, no confidences violated and no intent to mock or demean.

Neighbors and others have every reason to feel vulnerable around their writer friends, because writers have an outlet and an audience denied to most. But responsible writers, and most are, don't use that their position to balance a perceived injustice, or exploit someone's powerlessness. The small details we pull out of real life are shimmering proof of authenticity of feeling and experience, not of one particular person's life.

Writers can protect against using anything real that might injure another. I take great care in inventing names that cannot be traced to any real person in my area. I ask friends if I can use the layout of their house or apartment for a character. I sometimes even ask if I can use a special phrase a friend uses because I suspect she'll recognize it if she reads the final book. I invent towns, street names, shops, and businesses because the point is to tell a good story, not delve into someone else's private life.

The advice to write what you know might be emended, following Hemingway, to "write what you know is true," true to life, true to your own experience, true to your perceptions of the world and its people. Anything else is false to your calling as a writer.