The romance of writing novels

Here's a publication day blog post I wrote for The Book Case. Enjoy!

The romance of writing novels

My holiday wishes and a gift for you...

Yesterday was Christmas and it's still Hanukkah and Kwanzaa starts today, so I'm thinking that most of you have been spending time with your friends and family, just like I have. I hope these have been warm and happy times for you, as they have been for me. I'm looking forward to a 2012 in which the Mayans were wrong and the world does not end. I also look forward to a year in which all things tend toward more peace, happiness, and harmony. We live in an imperfect world and entropy works, so I do not expect us to achieve perfect peace this year, nor in my lifetime, but I am an optimistic sort and I do think that we can work toward those goals.

I'm wrapping up a lot of small personal writing projects, preparing to begin another Faye Longchamp mystery, so my professional "new year" coincides with the calendar, for once. Until then, I've got some holiday gifts for you. Some of them are on a short-burn schedule, so act quickly.

Through tomorrow, the Kindle edition of my short story, "A Singularly Unsuitable Word," is free on Amazon. If, like me, you don't have a Kindle, you can read it on your computer.

Through midnight tonight, I'm running a contest on my Facebook Author page. The prize is your choice of a Kindle or a $100 gift certificate to an independent bookseller, Amazon or Barnes and Noble. All you have to do is go to the page and hit the "like" button. And if you read this late and miss the deadline, hit the button anyway, because I'm going to be giving away more stuff.

My wonderful publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, has marked down the ebook editions of all my Faye Longchamp mysteries. Artifacts is only $0.99 and all the others are at $4.99, so this is a huge discount off the regular ebook price of $6.99 apiece or $14.95 apiece for paperbacks. I'm not sure how long this will last, maybe till the end of the month, so you might want to grab those now. They're available on the Poisoned Pen Press site, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble:





Because of all this cool stuff going on, I've got books on a couple of bestseller lists on Amazon, and indications are that sales are going well everywhere else. I'm blessed and grateful. Along with loving relationships with friends and family, there are few things in life more satisfying than having a profession that you love. I'm grateful to all my readers and I wish you the 2012 of your dreams.

Happy reading--
Mary Anna

Sometimes you *can* go home again...

I'm going home to Mississippi next week.  I haven't lived there since 1984, but they still consider me one of their own, because they're giving me this year's Mississippi Author Award.  (Actually, it's the Mississippi Library Association who's doing the award-giving, but they're Mississippians, so please forgive the semantic softness.)  I've known about this for a month or two, but I'm still flattered, touched, and, frankly, flabbergasted.  They're flying me in for an awards banquet and everything.  Usually, I haul myself to personal appearances in my well-worn Toyota, so this feels rather like getting the royal treatment.  I'm grateful.

I've lived in Florida since April 1987.  How long is that?  More than 24 years?  It hardly seems possible.  By contrast, I lived in Mississippi for nineteen-and-a-half years, moved away for the last two years of my undergrad degree, then returned for a little more than a year for graduate school.  Let's be generous and call it twenty-one years.  Since I ain't sixty, I guess it's safe to say that I've now lived in Florida for longer than I've lived anywhere else.  Why don't I see myself as a Floridian?

Maybe it's the accent that I'll apparently never lose.  (I sound like I've got a mouthful of magnolias.)  More likely it's the six generations of my family that lived in the Magnolia State before I came along.  We were there before Misssissippi became a state.  We were there before it even became a territory.  We were there before the steamboat that would eventually take cotton north and bring money south was even invented.  We were there for the near-obliteration of the native peoples and for the Civil War and for Reconstruction and for the civil rights movement.  I'm not saying we participated in those things, for good or ill.  I have no idea.  I just know that we were there.  Since I'm pretty sure some of us were native peoples, I have a good idea that all of us weren't too keen on the Trail of Tears, but otherwise, I just don't know.  As is true of most human history, I'd guess my people's feelings and actions were...complicated.

My own feelings about that history are complicated enough that it took me three books before I got up the nerve to write a book about the place.  I was afraid I'd never be able to go home again.

Instead, that book, Effigies, got a full-page feature article in Mississippi Magazine, and the magazine has covered every book I've written since.  I should have known that my undeniably racially themed book would receive a far warmer welcome there than an outsider might have expected.  My series character, Faye Longchamp, is multiracial, so there is some degree of racial theme to all of my books, but they've been warmly welcomed in my home state from the first.  I have not heard the first discouraging word from the folks in Mississippi, not in the eight years since Artifacts first came out.  I would say that this renewed my faith in humankind, but I've never really doubted humankind, nor the good people at home.

And now they've given me this wonderful award, and I'm so deeply touched.  It's one thing to get a nice review from somebody in New York City, but it's quite another thing to know that the people who live down the street from the house where you spent your childhood appreciate what you do.  There will be an award banquet next week and I'll get to rub elbows with some of the nicest people in the world--librarians and Mississippians.

I can't wait.

Why mystery fiction matters

I'm on Day Two of my blog tour, guesting at John Hartness's blog and opining on why mystery fiction is important.  Join me...

http://johnhartness.com/2011/07/26/guest-post-mary-anna-evans/

Look for me all over the internet this week...

I'm doing a blog tour this week, spreading wisdom hither and yon. Here's the schedule, but I will obviously keep reminding you of where I'll be.

Today is a two-fer, because Speak Without Interruption has posted an excerpt of WOUNDED EARTH (and isn't Speak without Interruption a glorious title for people who have things to say, but don't always feel like they get heard?), as well as my usual bi-weekly post at The LadyKillers, where I'm talking about technology in mysteries. Check them out!

Today's posts, with links:
July 25th: Speak Without Interruption
                  The LadyKillers

I'll post links as these blogs go live:
July 26th: John Hartness.com
July 27th: Bards and Sages Group
July 28th: Word Pursuit
July 29th: No Trees Harmed

A guest post from Camille Minichino--DO THE MATH

Here's a guest post from my friend and fellow physics-and-math person Camille Minichino. She's starting a brand-new mystery series featuring Sophie Knowles, a college math teacher, and you know I'm gonna love that one. Even better, she's talking about a relic--her old slide rule--and I love relics so much that I wrote a book called Relics. Listen as Camille tells us why doing the math is so important...

Do the Math
By Camille Minichino, aka Ada Madison

Here I am with a relic—the slide rule I bought at the MIT store. It cost me a week's pay—$35—sometime in the middle of the last century. It got me through a mathematics major and a few graduate physics classes before an enormous, clunky IBM 1620 came in and took over.

My newest protagonist, Professor Sophie Knowles, math teacher at a small New England college, probably wouldn't know which end is up on the foot long slide rule, nor would she have the patience to sit for hours entering her data on error-prone punch cards.

Math education has changed since my college days. Whew. Welcome, technology!
We've also come a long way since Sophie's namesake, eighteenth-century mathematician Sophie St. Germain, had to hide behind a man's name to get the math community to pay attention to her. Or since nineteenth-century German university policy allowed Emmy Noether only to audit classes in mathematics and then, once she passed doctoral exams anyway, allowed her to teach only without pay.

The real Ada, Countess Ada Lovelace, was another story entirely. To keep her from going the creatively manic route of her father, Lord Byron, Ada's mother encouraged her to study mathematics. Ada went a little too far, trying to use her math skills to win at gambling, and . . . didn't.

So we've made some progress along gender lines, but women are still underrepresented in engineering, science, and math.

And not much has changed as far as the perception of math. It still gets bad press, from both genders. Math is thought of as a difficult subject, requiring a special brain typically belonging to boring people. Even in educated circles, math illiteracy is often worn as a badge.

The same person who would never say, "I hate reading," or "I can't do words," doesn't hesitate to say, "I can't do math," and sound proud of it.
Where does this attitude start? Maybe with dolls that say, "I don't like math." Or with celebrities like Angelina Jolie, who tells a little girl struggling with her homework, "I hate math" ("Salt," 2010). Or with the Michigan teacher I heard about who told her middle school class, "If you behave yourselves this morning, you won't have to do math this afternoon." (AAARRGH, if I knew her name; I'd make her a slimy villain in my next book.)

What can we do?

Enter Professor Sophie Knowles. I can't fix everything that's wrong with the levels of science and math literacy among our citizens, but I can certainly use my writing skills to present another option: a smart female mathematician who loves puzzles, beads, has a hot boyfriend who's an EMT pilot and an ice climber, and who applies her flair for logic to solving murders.

Here's my hope: that readers who would otherwise shun a book with math in the title will be attracted to Sophie and enjoy her stories.

Another title aimed at reaching non-math-lovers and helping them see the beauty of the subject is Mathematical Literacy in the Middle and Secondary Grades by my gracious blog host, Mary Anna Evans, coming in Spring 2012. Mary Anna and her co-author Dr. Faith Wallace have teamed to create a book that brings into the math classroom things kids love to read and do--things like computer games, social media, and popular fiction like Mary Anna's and mine--so that their teachers can help them relate mathematics to their own world. Tell all your math teacher friends to give it a look.

If you need more prompting to go all John Lennon and Give Math a Chance, consider this endorsement, uttered by no less a figure (so to speak) than Agatha Christie, in her An Autobiography:

"I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours. I found it quite enthralling."

If it's good enough to enthrall Dame Agatha, it's good enough for me.

Camille Minichino is the author of three mystery series. Her akas are Margaret Grace (The Miniature Mysteries) and Ada Madison (The Professor Sophie Knowles Mysteries). The first chapter of ‘The Square Root of Murder,” debuting July 5, is on her website: http://www.minichino.com

Don't ask me about writer's block...

The topic today at The LadyKillers blog is one that I generally avoid at all costs, but I've made an exception today. See what I have to say about writer's block:

http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/2011/07/from-mary-anna-dont-get-in-your-own-way.html