August has been a busy month for congressional staffer Kit Marshall. She hit the road with her boss, Congresswoman Maeve Dixon, who is considering running for the United States Senate in North Carolina. After endless town halls and meet-and-greets, Kit is happy to end the tour in Duck, an upscale beach town in the Outer Banks.
Before Kit can relax on her much-deserved vacation with her husband Doug, brother Sebastian, best friend Meg, and beagle mutt Clarence, the body of Duck’s mayor is found floating in the shallow waters of the Currituck Sound.
Kit’s brother Sebastian, who got in a public kerfuffle with the victim the day before, becomes the prime suspect. Solving the mystery takes her to popular hotspots in the Outer Banks, including a private tour featuring the wild horses of Corolla.
Kit must sacrifice sun-filled days of relaxation to clear her brother. In the end, Kit and Sebastian put their own lives on the line to secure a confession from the killer and make sure justice is served.
Colleen J. Shogan
Washington Whodunits
Colleen J. Shogan has been reading mysteries since the age of six. A political scientist by training, Colleen has taught American politics at numerous universities. She previously worked on Capitol Hill as a legislative staffer in the United States Senate and as a senior executive at the Library of Congress. Currently, she’s a Senior Vice President at the White House Historical Association. A member of Sisters in Crime, Colleen splits her time between Arlington, VA and Duck, NC.
The organizers have rustled up plenty of surprises for the literary conference at Tattered Star Ranch. But the murder of an influential scholar wasn’t on the program—someone has clearly taken the theme of Malice in the Mountains to heart. This shocking crime is only the beginning: Other dangers and deceptions are soon revealed.
English professor Lila Maclean has a full agenda: She must convince a press to publish her book (possibly), ace her panel presentations (hopefully), and deal with her nemesis (regrettably).
However, when Detective Lex Archer requests Lila’s academic expertise, she agrees to consult on the case. While her contributions earn high marks from her partner, it could be too late; the killer is already taking aim at the next subject.
As Lila races to keep her colleagues alive, publish or perish takes on new meaning.
About the Author
Cynthia Kuhn writes the Lila Maclean Academic Mysteries: The Semester of Our Discontent,The Art of Vanishing, The Spirit in Question, and The Subject of Malice. Honors include an Agatha Award for best first novel and Lefty Award nominations for best humorous mystery. She blogs with Chicks on the Case and is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. For more information, please visit cynthiakuhn.net.
After her boss narrowly escaped political defeat, Kit Marshall is settling into life as a busy congressional staffer. While attending an evening reception at the United States Botanic Garden, Kit’s best friend stumbles upon the body of a high-ranking government official.
The chairwoman of a congressional committee asks Kit to investigate, and she finds herself once again in the thick of a murder investigation. The complications keep coming with the unexpected arrival of Kit’s younger brother Sebastian, a hippie protestor who seems more concerned about corporate greed than the professional problems he causes for his sister. To make matters even worse, the romantic lives of Kit’s closest friends are driving her crazy, diverting her attention from the mystery she’s been tasked to solve. The search for the killer requires her to tussle with an investigative journalist right out of a noir novel, a congresswoman fixated on getting a statue of James Madison installed on the Capitol grounds and a bossy botanist who would do anything to protect the plants he loves. When the murderer sends a threatening message to Kit via a highly unusual delivery mechanism, Kit knows she must find the killer or risk the lives of her friends and loved ones.
About the Author
Colleen Shogan has been reading mysteries since the age of six. A political scientist by training, Colleen has taught American politics at Yale, George Mason, Georgetown, and Penn. She previously worked in the United States Senate and for the Congressional Research Service. She’s currently a senior executive at the Library of Congress, working on great outreach initiatives such as the National Book Festival. She lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband Rob Raffety and their beagle mutt, Conan.
Another Washington Whodunit from Colleen Shogan, author of the wonderful Calamity at the Continental Club!
It’s the height of campaign season, and instead of relishing newlywed bliss with her husband Doug Hollingsworth, Capitol Hill staffer Kit Marshall is busy with a tough reelection fight for her boss, member of Congress Maeve Dixon. Before Maeve and her staff–Kit included–leave Washington, D.C. to campaign full time in North Carolina, they have one last fundraising engagement.
On the iconic rooftop of a restaurant overlooking the Capitol and the Washington monument, Kit and her best pal Meg do their best to woo wealthy lobbyists for sizable campaign donations. Everyone’s enjoying the evening soiree… until a powerful K Street tycoon mysteriously tumbles off the rooftop.
Even with claims the fall must be suicide, Detective Maggie Glass and Kit aren’t so easily convinced foul play isn’t at work. While balancing Doug’s mid-life career crisis, Kit must spring into action to discover who killed the notorious Van Parker before Dixon’s candidacy sputters, even if it means investigating Meg’s handsome new beau, the victim’s conniving widow, and a bicycle advocate hell-bent on settling a long-standing grudge. When threatening note is left on Kit’s car, warning her to back off the investigation, she knows she’s closing in on the true story of what happened. Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card!
About the Author
Colleen Shogan has been reading mysteries since the age of six. A political scientist by training, Colleen has taught American politics at Yale, George Mason, Georgetown, and Penn. She previously worked in the United States Senate and for the Congressional Research Service. She’s currently a senior executive at the Library of Congress, working on great outreach initiatives such as the National Book Festival. She lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband Rob Raffety and their beagle mutt, Conan.
Well documented problems exist in the funding and prioritisation of research, the conduct of trials, the withholding of results, the dissemination of evidence, and its implementation with patients. Here we briefly examine six domains where the academy could call for simple practical improvements that would address legitimate concerns.
Publication bias—We conduct trials to detect modest differences, and spend vast amounts of money specifically to exclude bias, yet we allow that bias to flood back in through selective publication.3 4 Eminent bodies writing reports will not fix this, but practical action will. We need new funding for simple systematic work to audit which trials are unreported, to highlight the best and worst performers, and to shine a light on withheld studies.5
Independent trials—A recent cohort study found that 97% of head to head trials sponsored by industry give results that favour the sponsor’s drug.6 Doctors and patients are right to want independent trials. On statins and oseltamivir, there are two clear opportunities, and here we declare our own conflicts. With colleagues, one of us (CH) first proposed a trial of oseltamivir in a pandemic in 2009; the other (BG) first proposed a trial of statins examining side effects over a year ago. In both cases we could have the answer by now.
Cost of trials—Replication will be possible only if the cost of conducting trials is radically reduced. Much of this cost is driven by disproportionate regulation around trials of routinely used treatments.7 The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s guidance on cholesterol argues for head to head trials in low risk populations; this would require over 100 000 participants, followed up for a decade. Such trials can practically be delivered only by reducing the expensive and disproportionate regulatory burden,7 embedding them in everyday clinical care and gathering follow-up data from existing electronic health records.8
Better evidence—Treatments are routinely approved after trials with only surrogate outcomes.9 Drugs are then extensively promoted, at the moment of approval, when evidence on real world outcomes is paradoxically at its weakest. We could encourage better evidence by, for example, compelling companies to follow-up all phase III trial participants until real world benefits emerge, considering routine randomisation for newly approved drugs when benefits are unclear, and bartering with either patent extension or choice of the start date for market exclusivity. These suggestions would come at minimal cost and deliver more comprehensive data on treatment effects.
Shared decision making—Concern over statins has recently been reawakened by the introduction of a financial incentive for general practitioners to prescribe the drugs to low risk patients. This is ill judged because patients’ informed choices vary widely.10 11 An incentive to prescribe a treatment that many adequately informed patients do not want undermines informed decision making and inflicts avoidable reputational harm on the profession. If instead we incentivise shared decision making then—for the same financial outlay—best practice will be recognised, rewarded, and laid down in the everyday templates of what doctors do.12
Declare conflicts of interest—Declaration of conflicts of interest is currently chaotic, inconsistent, and incomplete. We clearly need a central system of declarations, ideally maintained by the General Medical Council.13 Conflicts, however, become particularly salient when evidence is unclear: when decisions about which treatment works best are made on the basis of a speculative, superficially plausible narrative about a drug’s mechanism of action, or on the interpretation of weak, confounded, observational data when randomised trials are feasible. If we are able to generate better evidence and ensure that we see the complete evidence, then competing interests—although they must always be declared—will become less salient.
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
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.
“Health was an influential cue across all scenarios, while intelligence only had an effect in half of the presented scenarios. “
Well, at least intelligence wasn’t a negative predictor (The study was done in the Netherlands; I wonder how the same experiment might turn out in the US).
And yes, apparently there is a way to manipulate “intelligent-looking.”
“[H]igh and low apparent intelligence prototypes were created as described in Moore et al. (2011). Briefly, these prototypes were created by regressing ratings of attractiveness, masculinity, health, and perceived age against ratings of perceived intelligence. The faces with the largest positive and negative residuals (i.e., those who were rated as looking much more or less intelligent than predicted by their age, attractiveness, masculinity, and health) were “averaged” using Psychomorph software to create composite high and low perceived intelligence faces…”
Also, if you can figure out a way to make yourself look taller, that helps too.
On January 21, Dr. Chris Frueh (who writes as Christopher Bartley) gave a talk on some of the upcoming innovations in mental health care. You can watch the whole thing here (starts at about 14:30).
There are all kinds of new treatments on the horizon, like microbiome testing, Ketamine infusion and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS).
Of course most of us don’t (yet) have the opportunity to hop into one of these when the mood strikes:
“Just a little off the top, please.”
So the first line of defense against depression and anxiety is to attend to lifestyle:
I was relieved to note that I’m doing pretty well on most of these (assuming we’re not going to get all picky and literal about what constitutes “moderation”).
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