My Grandfather's Influence

Crime Writers' Chronicle is happy to welcome guest blogger Lois Winston, USA Today bestselling and award-winning author.

Lois makes me look like a real slacker. She writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and non-fiction under her own name and her Emma Carlyle pen name. Her latest Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, A Stitch to Die For, has just been published.

Kirkus Reviews called her series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” Lois is an award-winning craft and needlework designer as well, who often draws source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry.

The inspiration for the series came from within her own family, as she shares with us today. 

— Sheila York

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I started out writing romance and eventually also wrote romantic suspense and chick lit. Several years and seven books later I wrote my first mystery, settling into a genre where I discovered I felt the most comfortable. I’m not sure why I didn’t think to write mystery from the start. Given my family history, it should have been a logical genre for me, but I never gave it a thought until an editor asked my agent if she had any authors who wrote crafting mysteries. Based on my career as a designer in the crafts industry, my agent suggested I try my hand at writing a cozy mystery with a crafting protagonist.

What my agent didn’t know at the time was my familial connection to the world of organized crime. My grandfather spent his entire career as one of the good guys, working to bring down some really badass bad guys associated with Murder, Inc. Climbing his way up the ladder from patrolman to Detective Captain of Essex County, New Jersey, he spent the decades of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties on a quest to lock up many a name you might know from various gangster movies.

On October 24, 1935 he was the first officer on the scene when mobster Dutch Schultz was gunned down at the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. Schultz didn’t die on the scene. He lingered for nearly a full day before he eventually died from peritonitis. During that time, police questioned him at his beside in an attempt to obtain useful information about the shooting and his gangland associates.

I’m assuming my grandfather was one of those officers. I have no way of knowing. He died when I was six years old. I would have loved to learn more about his illustrious career directly from him. Most of what I know is secondhand from relatives or the little I’ve been able to discover on the Internet, such as the attached news clipping about a talk he gave in 1957.

My own personal memories are of a loving, gentle man who would read me the Sunday funnies. It was years before I had any inkling of his statewide fame, but I do have one memory of sitting with him front and center in the grandstand at a Thanksgiving Day parade. I was probably no more than three or four at the time.

New Jersey has always had the reputation of being a corrupt state. My grandfather spent his life countering that reputation. His own reputation was so stellar that he was often approached to run for office, but he declined each time. He felt he served his state much better doing what he did best—rooting out evil.

I’ve often wondered, had my grandfather lived longer, would I have chosen a career in law enforcement? Probably not, given when I came of age, and I’m not sure he would have wanted me to take that path. I doubt he was that forward thinking when it came to women in the workforce. Neither my mother nor my aunt attended college. Few women did back then. However, I hope my grandfather is smiling down from Heaven, watching me deal with badass bad guys in my own “novel” way.

Lois Winston
www.loiswinston.com

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A Stitch to Die For

Ever since her husband died and left her in debt equal to the gross national product of Uzbekistan, magazine crafts editor and reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack has stumbled across one dead body after another—but always in work-related settings. When a killer targets the elderly nasty neighbor who lives across the street from her, murder strikes too close to home. Couple that with a series of unsettling events days before Halloween, and Anastasia begins to wonder if someone is sending her a deadly message.

Keeping Three Career Balls in the Air

How Many Hats Do You Wear?

Crime writers are rarely monolithic beings. Creatures who wear only one hat. Many are fascinating creatures who seem to function with several brains, are proficient on diverse levels and create in several cerebral spheres.

The nature of crime itself is so multi-faceted it evades simple scrutiny. So the chroniclers of its universe have to be more daring than chameleons!

Today's guest, Lois Winston, usually dons a minimum of Three Hats - writer, agent, designer. A longtime friend of CWC, (see her posts Jan. 31, 2012 and Aug. 26, 2012) she has graciously stopped by to share her triple-persona with us.

After you read her article, tell us how many hats YOU usually wear, when, how, where—and share your mental/creative chapeaux with us!

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

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I juggle three full-time careers. I’m a published author, a literary agent, and a designer in the consumer crafts industry. Most people think I’m either nuts or rolling in money. The first is probably true, although for other reasons; the second couldn’t be further from the truth. I juggle three full-time jobs because I couldn’t live on what I make on one, let alone two of those careers. Heck, truth be told, it’s a good thing my husband has a steady job because there’s no way I could support both of us on what I earn.

That wasn’t always the case. My design career came first, and at one point I was the sole breadwinner for much of a three year period. During that time, we had one son in college and another in private high school. We ate a lot of mac and cheese during those years, but all the bills were paid each month, thanks to a booming consumer crafts industry and a demand for my designs.

Those days are long gone. People still craft, but the industry is much smaller now. Many of the companies I once worked for have gone out of business or been bought up by their competitors. The complex needlework projects I design have fallen out of favor, replaced mostly by instant gratification crafts that consumer can finish in an evening. Designers don’t make money on those types of projects, at least not the kind of money I command designing needlework. I now make in a year what I once made in a good month.

Around the time the crafts industry began shrinking, I began writing. Naïve innocent that I was at the time, I thought it quite realistic to expect to earn around thirty thousand dollars a year from my books. I sold my first book in 2005. To date I’ve published five traditional novels, five indie novels, a novella, two novelettes, an anthology of short stories, one non-fiction book, and been part of a non-fiction collection of essays. Altogether I haven’t earned thirty thousand dollars from my writing.

Some of that is due to bad luck. My first publisher went bankrupt, owing me and many other authors thousands of dollars in royalties. I only began indie publishing a little over a year ago, and I don’t write the super-sexy or erotic books that seem to rake in the most e-dollars. I also entered indie publishing at a time when it’s becoming very hard to stand out in an extremely crowded field.

But I mentioned three careers, didn’t I? Shortly after my first book sold, the agency that represents me invited me to become an associate. This was due in part to the fact that over the years while I waited for my own publishing break, I had helped several friends get published by rewriting their proposals for them. With my two other careers not producing much in the way of income, I jumped at the chance. After all, who needs sleep?

I began by reading queries and slush, eventually working my way up to having my own clients. I’ve sold books to both large New York publishing houses and medium-sized independent presses. However, with an ever-shrinking industry and writers turning more and more to publishing their own works, agents are no longer earning what they used to, either.

Sometimes I think I’m the Typhoid Mary of business. Each time I enter a new profession, it begins to suffer. And it’s not just the crafts industry and publishing. I began my working life as a layout artist for John Wanamaker. For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Wanamaker’s, headquartered in Philadelphia, was the first department store in the world. However, department stores are a dying breed, soon to become extinct, thanks to big box stores like Walmart and buying clubs like Costco. Anyone remember Gimbel’s? Altman’s? Bonwit Teller? Bamberger’s? Hess? They’re all gone, either bankrupt or gobbled up by their competitors. Just like the crafts industry. Just like the publishing industry.

So that’s why I spend my days attempting to keep three career balls in the air. I’m not nuts, and I’m not rolling in Benjamins, although I’d love to know the feeling. I even buy lottery tickets occasionally. (I’ve never won more than seven dollars!) I’m simply trying to keep ahead of the bill collectors, much like Anastasia Pollack, the reluctant amateur sleuth star of my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series and the companion ebook-only Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mysteries. Mosaic Mayhem, the latest Mini-Mystery recently released, and this time I’ve sent Anastasia off on an adventure in Barcelona:

So much for a romantic getaway...When cash-strapped mom and reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack is offered an all-expense paid three-day trip to Barcelona, her only worries are whether her passport is still valid and arranging care for her semi-invalid mother-in-law during her absence. However, within hours of landing in Europe, she finds herself staring down the barrel of a gun and needing to convince a Spanish crime syndicate they’ve kidnapped the wrong woman. Why do people on both sides of the Atlantic keep trying to kill this pear-shaped, middle-aged single mom, and magazine crafts editor?

Lois Winston

www.loiswinston.com
www.emmacarlyle.com
www.anastasiapollack.blogspot.com
follow her on Twitter: @anasleuth
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/anasleuth/crafts-and-recipes-from-killer-crafts-crafty-kille/

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

by Lois Winston

We authors are often asked where we get our ideas. “Write What You Know” is such a well-known maxim that even non-writers have heard of it and assume that all authors must have some personal experience in regard to their characters and plots.

Disclaimer: No, my husband didn’t gamble away our life’s savings, max out our credit cards, and borrow fifty grand from a loan shark before dropping dead at a casino in Las Vegas. He’s very much alive and a nice guy.

Disclaimer: No, I have never stumbled across a dead body in my office or anywhere else.

Disclaimer: No, my mother is not descended (nor did she believe she was) from Russian royalty.

Disclaimer: Yes, I have worked as a crafts editor but for a book publisher, not a women’s magazine.

Disclaimer: Yes, my mother-in-law was a communist.

Sometimes authors do mine their own backgrounds and the people they know for source material, but most often we make things up. That’s because we’re writing fiction. And fiction by definition is stuff that isn’t true.

So where do I get most of my ideas?

I’m a news junkie. I read the newspaper every morning while I’m getting my first of many caffeine fixes throughout the day. The daily news is an author’s best friend. Why? Because the old adage TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION really is true. That belief is reaffirmed every time I pick up a newspaper or turn on the evening news. And from all that truth I glean a wealth of ideas for my books.

For me the daily news becomes a wonderful source for plots, subplots, main characters, and secondary characters. Newspapers are incredibly cheap resources. They’re also a tax deduction if you’re using them for research. The reason I like the newspaper over the nightly news is because the newspaper has the luxury of going into greater detail about a story. Ninety second news bites can only give the broad picture of a newsworthy event. Often it’s the nuances not told on the evening news that will trigger a brainstorm.

I don’t always take the news story at face value, though. I brainstorm from them. Many news stories on the surface seem like they’d only be the catalyst for a suspense, thriller, or mystery, most – if not all – can actually be used as a spring board for all fiction genres.

Here’s an example:

The sidebar headline in the morning newspaper awhile back was “7 SOLDIERS DIE IN IRAQ AS SURGE CONTINUES.” This could certainly be used as the basis of a thriller plot about a group of soldiers fighting in Iraq. But how else could this story be used to generate plot for other genres? Here are a few I came up with off the top of my head:

– As a soldier lies dying after a roadside bombing, he makes his friend promise to take care of his pregnant wife. Because the dying soldier saved his friend’s life on an earlier expedition, the surviving soldier feels honor bound to carry out his friend’s last request. There’s one not so minor hitch, though – he hates kids, and she’s pregnant with triplets. – romantic comedy or woman’s fiction

– A roadside bombing in Iraq leaves three survivors who are captured and held by terrorists demanding the release of a leader they don’t know has been murdered by a rogue officer. – thriller

– After a roadside bombing in Iraq that leaves all but three members of a squad dead, one is captured, one is injured, and one is missing. Soon after, the region is struck by the same plagues visited upon Egypt during the time of Moses. – horror

– When a roadside bomb goes off during a foot patrol in Iraq, seven soldiers are killed. One survives, but he wakes up in ancient Mesopotamia to find a very beautiful woman tending his wounds. – time travel or erotica

– After surviving a roadside bombing that killed the other members of his squad, a young soldier is nursed back to health by a local woman. There’s only one problem: In order to save his life, she’s had to turn him into a werewolf. – paranormal

– Same premise as above with a slight twist: She’s turned him into a werewolf, and he’s allergic to animals. – humorous paranormal

Other sections of the newspaper as well as magazines can be used to generate ideas. Don’t overlook the human interest stories, editorials, advice columns, and op-ed columns. You can find a wealth of plot and characters in every section of the newspaper and between the covers of any magazine, including the ads, especially those found in the backs of magazines.

Here are two ads I came across that just might make their way into one of my mysteries some day:

– Did you know that imaginary girlfriends and boyfriends are up for sale on eBay? For the right amount of money you can pay to have someone send you emails, letters, and photos from pretend lovers.

– You can purchase panties with a hidden computer chip that will keep tabs on a girlfriend, wife, or daughter 24 hours a day via satellite transmissions to your computer, cell phone or PDA.

Even the most unlikely reading material can produce idea gold.

Bio: Lois Winston is the author of the critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries published by Midnight Ink. Assault With a Deadly Glue Gun, the first book in the series, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist and was recently nominated for a Readers Choice Award by the Salt Lake City Library System. The new year brings with it the release of Death By Killer Mop Doll, the second book in the series. Read an excerpt at http://www.loiswinston.com/excerptap2.html. Visit Lois at her website: http://www.loiswinston.com and Anastasia at the Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers blog: http://www.anastasiapollack.blogspot.com. You can also follow Lois and Anastasia on Twitter @anasleuth.

Lois is currently winding up a month-long blog tour where she’s giving away five signed copies of Death By Killer Mop Doll. To enter the drawing, post a comment to this blog or any of the others on the tour. You can find the complete schedule at her website and Anastasia’s blog. In addition, she’s giving away 3 copies of Death By Killer Mop Doll on Goodreads, http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/15173-death-by-killer-mop-doll