Laura Pauling writes about spies, murder and mystery. She’s the author of the young adult Circle of Spies Series, the Prom Impossible Series, the time travel mysteries, Heist and A Royal Heist, and the Holly Hart Cozy Mystery Series: Footprints in the Frosting and Deadly Independence with more coming.
She lives the cover of a suburban mom/author perfectly, from the minivan to the home-baked snickerdoodles, while hiding her secret missions and covert operations. But shh. Don’t tell anyone. And she may or may not actually bake cookies. You decide.
Laura Pauling
Laura stopped by to chat about cheesecake, love, and other mysteries.
cheesecake, love, & other mysteries
I wanted to write a cozy mystery. That much I knew. All I needed was inspiration in the form of an amateur sleuth. As I waited for the creative winds to blow my way, I happened to chat with a friend.
I found my inspiration.
My friend was branching out and starting her own business–selling cheesecakes! I loved it. I loved that with an already established career, kids, a husband, and two dogs, she was getting creative with her life. Pursuing a dream. Putting in the hard work and long hours it takes to launch a business. Making herself vulnerable.
Love, love, loved it. And I found my amateur sleuth. The facts that my sleuth, Holly Hart, bakes cheesecake and has red hair are the only similarities between her and the real-life inspiration.
How could I not be inspired? How could anyone not be inspired? If only in that it proves that we can do anything we put our mind to. It’s never to late to start a business or write that novel or attempt to combine what we love with what we do, whether it be for money or love.
After I found my sleuth, I dove into writing the mysteries. I have four written and two already published. Footprints in the Frosting came out in May, and Deadly Independence went live early June. If you sign up for my newsletter, you’ll receive a free mystery, Murder with a Slice of Cheesecake, which will release in July.
If you could branch out and try something new or follow a dream, what would it be?
Visit Laura at http://laurapauling.com to sign up for her newsletter and receive a free Holly Hart cozy mystery novella.
In high school, Joanne Guidoccio dabbled in poetry, but it would be over three decades before she entertained the idea of writing as a career. In 2008, she took an early retirement from teaching and decided to launch a second career that would tap into her creative side and utilize her well-honed organizational skills. Before long, Joanne was a working writer; her articles and book reviews were published in newspapers, magazines, and online. Eventually she progressed to fiction, where she finds that reinvention is a recurring theme in her novels and short stories.
Author Joanne Guidoccio
Today, Joanne came by to chat about having the right kind of skin. Rhino skin.
Writers especially will appreciate this:
It behooves you to develop a thicker skin.
Toastmaster Rosalind Scantlebury did not mince words at a recent Table Topics Contest. Responding to the prompt—Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me—she focused on an individual’s responsibility not to take things so personally. She peppered her impromptu talk with provocative comments, among them, “What other people think of you is none of your business.”
Definitely inspiring, especially for writers.
Thirty-one years of teaching adolescents thickened my skin considerably, but I faced different challenges when I embarked on a writing career. I had to learn how to deal effectively with critiques and rejection letters from agents and publishers and, most important of all, acquire that coveted rhino skin.
These are some of the strategies in my toolbox:
Get the Back Story
Whenever I attend readings, I pay special attention to the author’s back story. I like hearing the details about his or her writing journey and the challenges encountered along the way. Occasionally, I pick up valuable nuggets of advice that help me along my own journey. For example, Guelph writer Nicholas Ruddock (The Parabolist) established his platform by entering and placing in short story contests. When New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny couldn’t find a Canadian or American agent, she crossed the pond and approached a British agent.
Read Bad Reviews
If I have enjoyed reading a book, I look up the one-star reviews on Amazon. That’s right, I gravitate toward the negative. While shaking my head at the nitpicking and negative comments, I realize that no author is immune from criticism. Not even authors of best-selling novels can please everyone.
Eliminate the Negative
Some writers file and keep all their rejection letters. I suspect they refer to these letters often and get discouraged all over again. It is important to keep accurate records, but it is not necessary to keep these negative reminders around for future reference. After reading a rejection letter, I update the information on a spreadsheet and delete the file.
Throw More Irons Into the Fire
We’ve all heard the advice. Send out the manuscript and then immediately start on another one. Easier said than done. After writing 70K words and looking at multiple drafts of that manuscript, the thought of starting all over again can be daunting. Instead, I like to work on shorter pieces: book reviews, short stories, articles, more blog posts. Entering contests and taking online writing courses also keep my skills sharp. It is important not to sit around waiting for a response. Some action—any action—is needed.
Get Support
I belong to Crime Writers of Canada, Sisters in Crime, Guppies, and Romance Writers of America. I also participate in discussion boards for The Wild Rose Press and Soul Mate Publishing Authors. I try to attend writing workshops, panels and readings offered within a fifty-mile radius. While interacting with these authors, I get valuable advice and feedback about my work. I appreciate all the help I have received, especially from good friend and fellow writer Patricia Anderson. I had only request: “Let it rip!” And she did, but in a constructive way.
From Toronto based freelancer Ian Harvey… “Rejections are part of the game, but this is the only game in which rejection doesn’t mean no. It means not now, or not for me, or not for me right now. It doesn’t mean no forever.”
Get Joanne’s latest, A Season for Killing Blondes.
Historian by training, globe-trotting university project manager by necessity, and fiction writer by the skin of her teeth, Mindy Quigley has had a colorful career.
She has won a number of awards for her short stories, including the 2013 Bloody Scotland prize. Her non-fiction writing includes an academic article co-authored with the researcher who created Dolly the Sheep. More recently, she was project manager of the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, a research clinic founded in Scotland by the author J.K. Rowling. Her work as the coordinator of a pastoral services program at the Duke University Medical Center provided the inspiration for her bestselling Reverend Lindsay Harding mystery series.
Author Mindy Quigley
Mindy’s stopped by to talk about how she uses the Cocktail Party Test to guide her writing.
Intrigued? I thought so! Read on:
The Worst Possible Cocktail Party
My husband, Paul, dreads cocktail parties. He’s a mild-mannered, polite British man—a combination of traits that seems to make him easy prey for cocktail-party nutcases. You know the type. The high-strung lady who asks rhetorical questions only to give herself the opportunity to launch into what seem to be well-rehearsed, and incredibly inane, monologues. “Do you like cats? Well, I love them. When I was growing up, we had a cat named Feather who would pee on anything plastic…”
Another type of nutcase who often ends up cornering Paul, usually next to the alcohol table, are those with nutcasia temporaria (a short-term case of the disease). People who’ve recently been divorced or endured a breakup fall into this category. British men like Paul aren’t known for their ability to share their inner lives, nor are they equipped with the skills to deal with people who spew out their tales of failed romance in large, undigested chunks. When confronted with this type of nutcase, Paul often ends up staring uncomfortably into the middle distance, as if trying to endure a particularly thorough dental cleaning.
The worst offenders are the nutcases who take advantage of Paul’s soft-spokenness and good manners to “enlighten” him with their views on politics or religion. “America isn’t what it used to be. I mean look at the state of the economy/the environment/local schools/boy bands.
Those Democrats/Republicans/Hippies/Rednecks/guys from One Direction have flushed this country down the toilet.”
I cast my readers in the role of Paul at that cocktail party and myself as a stranger, approaching him near the snack table. With each chapter, I ask myself, am I being a cocktail party nutcase? Here’s what I mean. Say I’ve written a bit of dialogue that’s outrageously clever, full of nimble-minded wordplay and athletic leaps of language. I’ve peppered each sentence with ten-dollar words and Oscar Wilde-esque wit. But when I examine this brilliant bit of dialogue using the cocktail party nutcase test, I may realize that, it is a clear example of the high-strung woman cornering the unsuspecting partygoer. The dialogue probably doesn’t sound very natural, and all those big words probably impose too much unnecessary work on my readers. I’m just talking to hear the sound of my own voice.
Because my books all incorporate true historical elements, I must be careful to avoid nutcasia temporaria, too. In my case, this might manifest itself in my desire to tell my readers every detail of the blow-by-blow, honest-to-gosh true background historical events. After all, I put a lot of research into understanding those events and I want my book learnin’ to show! But the truth is, just like the gory details of some stranger’s marital breakup, the research a writer puts into her books should blend subtly into the background. If I am disgorging chunks of my research like a drunken frat boy in a Wendy’s parking lot, I’m probably suffering from nutcasia temporaria.
The last one, which is probably even more prevalent at family Thanksgiving dinners than at cocktail parties, is the know-it-all jerk, trying to ram his beliefs down your throat. Since my books have a liberal, female hospital chaplain as the main character, this can be an especially delicate dance. I’ve got to be careful to include enough informative little tidbits about her beliefs to reveal her character, but avoid any kind of posturing, proselytizing, or punditry. I want my characters’ views to feel like a finely woven part of who they are, sitting respectfully in the background of their personalities, never demanding center stage. Unless my character is a know-it-all jerk at a cocktail party. Then it’s kosher.
So that’s the cocktail party test. If I can read what I’ve written and think, yeah, Paul would like this cocktail party, I know I’ve succeeded!
Mindy lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, with her Civil War history professor husband, their daughter, and their miniature Schnauzer. You can follow her at
You Call It “Self-Exuberance”; I Call It “Bragging”
[P]eople overestimate the extent to which recipients of their self-promotion will feel proud of and happy for them, and underestimate the extent to which recipients will feel annoyed…Because people tend to promote themselves excessively when trying to make a favorable impression on others, such efforts often backfire, causing targets of self-promotion to view self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts
“Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation,” wrote John J. Rowan in 1876. Lobster was an unfamiliar, vaguely disgusting bottom feeding ocean dweller that sort of did (and does) resemble an insect, its distant relative. The very word comes from the Old English loppe, which means spider. People did eat lobster, certainly, but not happily and not, usually, openly. Through the 1940s, for instance, American customers could buy lobster meat in cans (like spam or tuna), and it was a fairly low-priced can at that. In the 19th century, when consumers could buy Boston baked beans for 53 cents a pound, canned lobster sold for just 11 cents a pound. People fed lobster to their cats.
Between 78 and 79 percent of the tuition hikes at public universities — which averaged $3,628 per student at research universities and $2,463 per student at nonresearch colleges — was due to declining state appropriations, between 5 and 6 percent was due to increased administrative spending, and another 6 percent was due to construction costs.
Disclaimer: I realize that in a sparsely-populated area, online education can be the only option a student has. I also realize that some of my fellow Miserians teach online, and are putting a great deal of effort into making the online experience as valuable as possible for their students. Any ire and snark are properly directed toward those administrators, trustees, and anecdote-besotted pundits who seem convinced that online education is either a magical money multiplier, or simply a trend not to be missed out on.
Inside Higher Ed reports a study out of California that compared students enrolled in online classes and their face to face equivalents.
The researchers found online students lagging behind face-to-face students in three critical areas:
“A senior administrator,” Mr. Harris says, “does not wake up in the morning and say, Today I am going to do something that lands me on the front page of the Chicago Tribune for the wrong reasons.” Instead, he says, what comes into play is a phenomenon known as “ethical fading,” in which the culture or structure of an organization causes those within it to lose sight of ethical considerations.
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