Posted on - 5 Comments on Using Food to Flavor Your Fiction, by guest blogger Stacy Allbritton — and yet another writing contest!

Using Food to Flavor Your Fiction, by guest blogger Stacy Allbritton — and yet another writing contest!

Happy Independence Day, campers!

Normally, I would open with a few remarks on the occasion — observing, perhaps, that the actual vote on independence in 1776 occurred on July 2, not July 4 — but given that I actually intended to post news about the summer’s second Author! Author! writing competition a good a week and a half ago, who am I to quibble about dates? Just because the nastiest head cold ever to visit a North American intervened between the announcement of our first literary contest of the season, aimed at adult writers and writers for the adult market, and what I had planned as the next day’s revelation of the rules for a competition devoted exclusively to young writers and those that write YA doesn’t mean that I should equivocate for a few more seconds now.

Except that I should say a few words about today’s guest blogger — and, not entirely coincidentally, the author that is going to be graciously giving away some copies of the charming middle-grade reader novel you see above. Since her book’s protagonist is in fact a writer who is herself very young when the story begins, young Marie has inspired me to create a contest that not only rewards good writing in YA, but great writing by writers currently in middle school and high school.

Well might you champ at the bit. Trust me, though, today’s guest blogger is here to help you polish up the writing skills you will want to have bright and shiny before you construct a contest entry.

Continuing what would have been a logical progression to self-evident to require explanation had my sinuses permitted me to post these two contest announcements back-to-back, I asked today’s guest, Stacy Demoran Allbritton, author of the recently-released The Diary of Marie Landry, Acadian Exile, to share her thoughts on how to write well about food in fiction. Not just in any fiction, mind you: in prose intended for young readers.

I see some of you purists scrunching up your noses, do I not? “But Anne,” you cry, “isn’t good, showing-not-telling writing pretty much the same, regardless of the intended audience?”

Heavens, no, campers. Good writing takes its target readership into account, always.

And before anyone wrinkles so much as a single proboscis at me, let me hasten to add: no, that’s not sacrificing art to market concerns. It’s simply good writing courtesy to craft one’s novel in such a way that the reader will enjoy it.

While being familiar with the conventions and overall vocabulary expectations of one’s chosen book category is, of course, one of the first steps a writer serious about treating potential readers politely is to familiarize herself with what’s currently being published for that readership. (Conveniently, that also happens to be excellent marketing strategy, too.) For all stripes of YA, though, writers also have to be extremely sensitive to presenting age-appropriate vocabulary and situations.

Which is precisely why I asked Stacy to blog on the subject: she has taken some quite dark historical subject matter and transformed it into a debut novel I was completely comfortable giving my 10-year-old neighbor. That’s quite a trick. Take a gander at the publisher’s blurb:

During the Great Upheaval of 1755, the British forced the Acadians to leave their homes in the Canadian provinces. After having lived in exile in Maryland for ten years, fourteen-year-old Marie Landry and her family prepare to join a mass exodus to Louisiana. In her diary, Marie describes the Acadians’ journey to Louisiana while simultaneously including the details of their removal from Acadia ten years earlier. This historically accurate account of Louisiana’s Cajuns depicts tales of hardship and friendship, anguish and hope. Because of their perseverance and faith, Marie and her loved ones are able to survive and find happiness in Louisiana. Illustrations enhance this engaging portrayal of human strength.

An intriguing bit of American and Canadian history to tackle for a young readership, isn’t it? Stacy does it both sensitively and surprisingly unblinkingly. I love it when YA authors respect their youthful readers’ intelligence enough not to sugarcoat tough reality.

She also did something quite clever on the vocabulary front: although the writing overall is age-appropriate, she peppered the manuscript with slightly higher-level vocabulary — and added a glossary of those terms to the back. I wish writers for the young would do this more often; one does not always have a dictionary handy at any age, after all.

The other reason that I blandished Stacy into writing on this particular topic is that her novel includes some actual recipes. Since I know that many of you that write about food in fiction have at least toyed with the concept of writing a cookbook, I thought it might be both fun and useful to ask her to show you the same recipe formatted to appear in a nonfiction manuscript and to show how she might write about the resulting foodstuff for a young readership.

Why might that particular distinction come in handy? Glad you asked. Once again, in the fine tradition of the Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence, then, and as part of my ongoing quest to provide good writers with much-needed Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy (which, let’s face it, is harder for young writers to accumulate), I am proud to announce:

The Make Us Want to Eat It Literary Competition of 2012

As I mentioned when I announced the previous contest for adult writing, although people experience life via all of their senses — sight, sound, taste, smell, touch — many, many of the manuscripts those of us who read them for a living see on a daily basis seem to assume that characters can only see and hear. Or that readers expect to know nothing about a character’s sensations except what an actor might be able to convey to us if we saw him playing that character on T.V.

But you’re a better writer than that, aren’t you? And you’re certainly a better reader.

Because I’m pretty confident that my readers are good at writing about what it’s like to be alive, I’m calling for young writers and adults that write for young readers to enter short scenes — anywhere from 2 to 8 pages in length — that present food in a manner that incorporates more than two senses.

Here’s the catch: the scene can’t take place in a kitchen — or at a dining table.

Why? Because I’d love to see you exercise your creativity, that’s why. That’s my idea of a proper reader-oriented spectator sport.

In order to give young writers more freedom to stretch those creative limbs, you may enter either fiction or nonfiction. (Sorry, adult writers: you may enter only YA fiction. You can always enter your memoir in this summer’s adult contest ) If you are entering memoir and don’t want to use your real name, it’s fine to use a fake one; just make sure that you let us know, so we announce the right name when you win.

Either way, no profanity, please — and please have all of your characters fully clothed. I want to keep this site accessible for young writers whose parents have set up content filters on their computers. So if you wouldn’t want your parents to find a YouTube video of you doing something your characters do, give it a pass in the entry, okay?

Winners will not only receive fabulous prizes (hold your horses; we’re getting to those), but may have their scenes and accompanying synopses both published and critiqued in a post here at Author! Author! for all the world to see and admire. And, if you’re a student, we’re going to recognize the teacher you feel has helped you most with your writing as well.

The grand prize winner in each category will receive a half-hour Mini Consult in order to discuss any aspect of writing. That means I will read up to 20 pages of your writing — a query? A synopsis? The opening pages of the manuscript you’ve been writing? — and call or Skype you in order to have a lovely, long talk about it. I’m also going to post your winning entry here on Author! Author! and tell everyone you know just how terrific your writing is.

First and second place winners will have their entries posted and critiqued on this blog.

Third place winners will receive copies of The Diary of Marie Landry, Acadian Exile

All winners will also be asked to nominate the teacher that they feel helped them most in their quest to become a writer. Choose carefully: if the nominated teachers agree, I shall posting their names, a short bio, and a photograph here at Author! Author!, thanking them publicly for having done such a good job with these students. The judges and I shall also be putting our heads together on a pretty fabulous certificate of appreciation, recognizing the teacher as one of the great encouragers of future authors.

And yes, I do mean all winners, even in the adult writers of YA category. You think their favorite teachers shouldn’t be recognized? I couldn’t disagree more.

Hadn’t I mentioned that my mother was not only an editor, but also my junior high school librarian? Or that my completely fabulous seventh-grade English teacher is still one of my heroes?

Here are the specific steps required to win. Do read them all carefully, and post any questions you may have. And if you would like to see me walk through each and every requirement of contest entry, showing you step-by-step visual examples, all you need to is click here.

1. Write or select a scene no more than eight pages in length from your manuscript or manuscript-in-progress that best shows off a sense-based description of food.

How will you figure length? Glad you asked.

2. Pages must be double-spaced in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier., with one-inch margins and a slug line at the top containing your last name/title/page #.

All pages must be numbered, in accordance with standard format for book manuscripts. You’ll find examples of it in the guest post below. (And don’t worry — next week, I shall be showing you precisely what standard format would look like in a contest entry.)

3. All entries must be in English.

Whether you choose to write in American English, Canadian English, or U.K. English, however, is entirely up to you. Just let us know which — and make sure it’s spelled correctly.

4. The scene must center on food, but it cannot take place in a kitchen or at a dining table.

That should sound familiar, right?

5. The scene must include depictions of at least two human senses, but cannot include any profanity or references to sexual activity.

No exceptions. Humans have a lot of other senses. Remember, too, that the judges will be looking for a variety of senses to be addressed in the scene.

6. Polish your scene to a high gloss and save it as a Word document, as a .doc file

Only .doc entries in Word will be accepted — not TextEdit, PDF, or any other formats, please. Please title the Word file your name and the abbreviated title of your book (Austen Pride & Prejudice), not just as contest entry or the ever-popular Anne Mini contest (The last time I ran a contest like this, I received 42 entries with one of the other file name.)

7. In a separate Word document, give your name, state (or country, if entering from outside the U.S.), age, name of your school (if you are enrolled in one), and e-mail address, as well as the category you are entering.

Telling the judges the category will save a lot of confusion. The possible categories are:

Category I: Fiction on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in middle school

Category II: Nonfiction/Memoir on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in middle school

Category III: Fiction on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in high school

Category IV: Nonfiction/Memoir on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in high school

Category V: YA fiction on food by adult writers

If you are entering Category V, please see Rules #8 and #9. Everyone else can skip to Rule #10.

8. If you are entering in the adult writer category, on the same page as the material in Rule #7, please include a 1-paragraph explanation of how the scene you are entering fits into the overall story of the book.

This is the only chance you’re going to get to set up the scene for the judges, so make it count!

9. If you are entering in the adult writer category, on the second page of the document described in #7, please include a synopsis of no more than 1 page, giving the judges an overview of the book’s premise, its main characters, and its central conflict.

Again, this synopsis must be in standard format. If you are unfamiliar with either standard format or how to write a 1-page synopsis, you will find explanations (along with examples) under the HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK MANUSCRIPT and HOW TO WRITE A 1-PAGE SYNOPSIS categories on the archive list located on the right-hand side of this page.

10. Make sure that both documents are properly formatted: precisely as they would appear in a manuscript submission.

Part of the goal here is to help young writers learn how to submit their work professionally. If it is not double-spaced, in 12-point type, and featuring a slug line (Author’s last name/book title/page #) in each page’s header, the judges will not consider the entry.

11. Attach both Word documents to an e-mail.

Please include FOOD! and the category number in the subject line. Please also mention the category In the body of the e-mail. (It makes it easier to process the entries.)

Make sure to say who you are, too, so we don’t get entries mixed up. It’s also a nice touch to say something pleasant (like “Howdy, Anne!”) in the e-mail itself. Just a nice habit for a writer to have acquired before starting to work with an agent.

12. E-mail the whole shebang to contest(at)annemini(dot)com by Sunday, September 30, 2012, at midnight in your time zone. If you are entering more than one category, please submit each entry in a separate e-mail.

Do I need to explain that the (at) should be typed as @, or that (dot) should appear as a period? Nah, probably not; you all understand why reasonable people don’t post their e-mail addresses online.

13. Because winners will also be awarded life-long bragging rights and coveted ECQLC , the judges reserve the right to award as many (or as few) prizes as the quality and quantity of the entry pool in any given category warrants.

That’s a fancy way of saying that if we don’t receive enough wonderful entries in one of the categories, we may not give an award for it. So you might want to urge your friends to enter.

Those are the rules! Please follow them closely. As I said, I shall be writing a post next week that goes over them in detail, with visual examples, but in the meantime, you might to bookmark this page. As well as “the one on which I provide examples of how to follow each and every rule. (Oh, you thought I would leave my young readers to guess? How little you know me!)

And seriously, please ask if anything at all seems puzzling. It’s actually very helpful to know what could use more explanation.

And do read the guest post that follows. As I said above, I think you’re going to find Stacy’s insights into food writing very thought-provoking. You might even want to ask her some questions in the comments.

One last word before we begin: my apologies about the blurriness of the page shots here; I had asked Stacy to show you all how to format a recipe in a manuscript — because, presumably, some of you would-be cookbook writers would like to know — but the shots she sent me were exceedingly blurry. No one’s fault, as nearly as I can tell. I’ve fixed them the best I can, but if you would like to see the details better, I would suggest holding down the COMMAND key and pressing the + key repeatedly to enlarge the image.

Take it away, Stacy!

When you think back on a Christmas dinner, a birthday party, or a crawfish boil, the festivities were centered on food, but the experience was so much more than food. They involved the people who shared that food with you; the circumstances in which you ate that food; where you were, and when.

That is what makes writing about food in fiction so flavorful — the story, the emotion, the people surrounding the fare.

The use of food and recipes in fiction can be a tool by which you define and develop your characters, and by which you move your plot forward. Food can also expose your readers to a different world. So, though the scene might be focused on dining, it is what the food brings to the table, so to speak, that opens the window to an entirely new dimension — both for your character and for your readers.

In my novel for middle-grade readers, The Diary of Marie Landry, Acadian Exile, the multi-layered capabilities of food propel the story and reveal character. For example, on the surface, the cook Bernardine teaches Marie some Creole recipes, but more than learning about the food itself, Marie is able to learn about another life and another way of life. Through these recipes, she is able to share a piece of herself as well.

Let me give you some very concrete suggestions on how to use food in fiction to achieve such goals.

1. Use memory

I think almost everyone recognizes how memories can resurface simply from the taste of something long-since forgotten, or from a smell that morphs us back to another time and place. The most notable example I can give (from Remembrance of Things Past) is Marcel Proust’s biting into a petite Madeleine cake after he had dunked it into a cup of tea — the way he remembered doing at his aunt’s house when he was a child. Memories flood the forefront of his mind based on that simple act of tasting a tea-soaked cake.

Anne here: the passage to which Stacy refers is so wonderful that I cannot resist breaking in to share it with you, at least in part. If you’re not in a frantically Proustian frame of mind, feel free to skip past everything in boldface: Stacy’s guest blog resumes at the first plain text.

“I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

“And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

“Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colorless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life.

“Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.

“And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt L?onie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

“And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on color and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”

This very phenomenon happened to me as an adult one year at a Christmastime cookie swap. When I bit into a cookie that a colleague had shared, memories of my childhood summers spent with my grandmother in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi demanded my attention. So important were those memories that I never again wanted to forget the taste of that cookie — and everything that I associated with it.

I just had to have that recipe! I’m happy to report that my colleague was not stingy with her recipe, and to this day I still bake that cookie every Christmas.

Paulette Rittenberg, a columnist with The Times Picayune in New Orleans understands the importance of stories connected to recipes: her food column includes the stories inextricably linked to the recipes she publishes. Lucky me, she included my cookie story in her column years ago. Her column will give you many examples of using memories of food to fuel a story.

What recollections do you have that revolve around a particularly meaningful food to you? Ask yourself a series of questions, and listen to your answers.

Where did you first taste it?

With whom?

How old were you?

What did you think of it –- liked it, hated it?

Be as specific as you can, then put the most evocative details into your tale.

As for me, many of my fondest memories go way back to when I learned how to cook the summer I was twelve years old. Thinking that my maternal grandmother was ancient at sixty-two years of age, I figured that time was of the essence — I needed to get those recipes out of her head, and soon!

That’s not entirely true. My biggest motivations for learning to cook were that I loved spending time in the kitchen with her, and I thought that she was the greatest cook on the planet. The lagniappe — the little bit extra — that I got when learning to cook from my grandmother was all those wonderful memories that became fodder for stories.

I so enjoyed cooking with my grandmother that I based Bernardine the Cook on her and turned those memories into scenes in my novel. Cooking was a natural way for my protagonist, Marie, to make a new friend. It was also the catalyst by which she was able to adapt to a new environment, to feel less frightened in unfamiliar surroundings, and to learn new ways of doing things. Food is her path to finding familiarity and acceptance in a new environment, in a different culture.

Using your own memories of food can help reveal your character’s values and personality traits in an oblique manner. How? Take a look at my grandmother’s recipe for drop biscuits — delicious hunks of dough, I assure you — and then, later in this post, I’ll show you how I turn it into a story for young readers.

Quick note from Anne to those of you planning on using this page shot as a guideline for formatting a cookbook manuscript: many publishers prefer that at the submission stage, abbreviations be written out. Do check small publishers’ submission requirements before you send so much as a page; if they do not specify that the standard American measurement abbreviations are acceptable, I would advise writing everything out.

Try to think about the difference between this example and the next as a matter of audience. As a recipe, this page contains all of the elements someone would need to bake this delicious biscuit, right? But novel readers are looking for more than that: they want to feel they are there.

2. Use all five senses

Let’s face it — eating is more than just a gustatory experience. Not only do we taste it: we see food, smell food, enjoy (or not) the texture of food. And when we are in the kitchen, the sounds of preparing and cooking it can entice us. We anticipate the act of eating for more reasons than just filling our bellies.

Every scene with food does not have to include every sense, of course, but you should give your readers more than just a description of what is being served. Let them in on the sensory indulgence that your character is experiencing.

Another way to think of it is allowing the reader to feel what it was like to be in your character’s body at that moment. To take an example from my novel, is Marie’s first experience of seafood gumbo:

[Bernardine] leaned her ample arms on the table as she pushed herself up and said, “Come see. I’ll show you just what gumbo is.” She limped slightly as she shambled over to the hearth. Then she swung the kettle out of the fire and grabbed her paddle without taking her eyes off of the pot. As she stirred the thick soup, steam whirled past my nose, and I unconsciously said, ‘Ummmm,’ and closed my eyes to savor the luscious smell.

Anne here again: sorry to keep interrupting, but since Stacy’s example is taken from a middle-grade fiction work, I do feel compelled to point out that in YA or adult fiction, this passage would be considered a bit skeletal, as food descriptions go. Why? Well, let me ask you: if you had never smelled gumbo before, what specific scents would you think Marie was experiencing in this moment?

Not to criticize Stacy’s choice of example, of course: it’s a great illustration of something that aspiring writers are all too prone to forget, that the prevailing style standards and expectations for one type of fiction are not necessarily what prevail in another. I’m grateful for the opportunity to show that important reality so explicitly. I’ll shut up now.

Eating is a multi-sensory experience, and a universal one to boot, so use what is naturally at your disposal to develop your characters. And I’m not just talking about culinary knowledge. Remember that bare-bones drop biscuit recipe? Here it is again as the opening to a story I’ve entitled Camelia’s Christmas Day Biscuits.

Notice how Camelia’s senses are tickled throughout the experience. And why not consider it an example of how to properly format a manuscript, while we’re at it? (Yes, this is a short story, but for the sake of usefulness, let’s imagine that it’s a novel I plan to submit to an agent.)


3. Use Details

Writing about food is more than just description — it was bland; it was spicy. Where is it? On the table? How did it get there? Who put it there and why?

If you are going to write a recipe into the scene, remember that if it is your character who is conveying the recipe to someone else, you must make sure that the retelling of it on the page is appropriate for the character’s personality, age, gender, etc. A ten-year-old girl would not have the same recollection of baking gingerbread cookies as a world-renowned gourmet chef.

You can propel the plot (and/or teach the lesson) through detailed preparation, consumption, and discussion of a particular dish or recipe. In my novel, for example, I don’t just have Marie and Maman discuss beignets: my readers learn that Marie has a remembrance of them, but she needs Maman’s validation of this memory because she was too young to recall them vividly. She wants to be sure, because she has discovered a recipe that had faded from her family’s daily life because of circumstances beyond their control. She learns that she loved this confection when her family was intact, when life was full of promise for them. For her, poignant emotion is attached to the taste of a doughnut.

But she didn’t understand this until she had a conversation about it with Maman. It is much more believable for Marie — a teenager — to understand her feelings by accident through food than through calculated introspection.

To show you how this dynamic might play out on the manuscript page, let’s take a look at rest of “Camelia’s Christmas Day Biscuits.” As you are reading, ponder what you learn about Camelia and her grandmother through the story’s food details. What is their relationship? How old do you think Camelia is? What kind of man is her father? What, if anything, did she learn here — about herself, about baking, about life?


Did you notice how the answers the questions above were not addressed overtly on the page? Instead, they are revealed to the reader only through details. That’s the essence of showing, not telling.

4. Read!

When it comes to writing about food in fiction (or writing about anything, for that matter), my last piece of practical advice is to read, read, read. Find out what you do and don’t like on the page. Good readers make good writers. And how!

Stacy Demoran Allbritton, a New Orleans native, has always been fascinated by the multi-faceted history of her home state. She holds a B.A. in French and an M.A. in Romance Languages from the University of New Orleans, where she received the 2005 James Whitlow Award for Excellence in Romance Languages. She was a high school French and English teacher in Louisiana until 2009, when she decided to pursue opportunities in writing and travel. The Diary of Marie Landry, Acadian Exile is her first published novel. She is currently working on her second novel in the Louisiana Heritage series. Stacy and her husband divide their time between Monroe, Louisiana and Paris, France. You can visit her on her blog.

Posted on - 3 Comments on Writing a single mystery is difficult; writing a series can be murder by guest bloggers Stan Trollip and Michael Sears, better known to mystery aficionados as Michael Stanley

Writing a single mystery is difficult; writing a series can be murder by guest bloggers Stan Trollip and Michael Sears, better known to mystery aficionados as Michael Stanley



Ah, the first long weekend of the warm months, a time perfect for relaxing with family, dawdling on a beach, and/or driving that 50+ miles that news organizations always seem so excited to report U.S. residents are planning on embarking upon this weekend every year. Or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know about it, really: writers tend to spend long weekends working on their books. If their kith and kin are out relaxing, beach-combing, or getting stuck in traffic, how would we know? We’re where we always are whenever we can grab a spare minute: wrestling with story, plot, and characterization.

God bless us all, every one.

In that spirit of laudable endeavor, I’ve planned a two-sided treat of all of you stalwart souls plugging away at your computers this weekend, rather than roasting something hefty on a gas-powered grill. Beginning today, I shall be posting a series of guest blogs by hardworking authors about the ins and outs of constructing a series — or making that always surprisingly tough transition from a first book to a second.

Emphasis on hardworking: in pulling together this series, I made a point of asking authors that had paid their dues, and then some. These are the folks that did everything right for years on end. In these days of ostensible overnight successes and surprise bestsellers by authors who have privately been working feverishly for ten or twenty years on craft, I think it’s vital for aspiring writers to understand that publishing is one of the few artistic endeavors where slow and steady not only wins the race in the long run, but tends to produce better books.

Case in point: today’s guest bloggers, the prolific writing team of Stanley Trollip and Michael Sears, better known to awards committees around the nation as mystery novelist Michael Stanley, author of the acclaimed Detective Kubu series. Those of you who have been hanging around the Author! Author! community for a while may remember his earlier excellent guest posts on book tours, the publication process, and writing with a partner.

This pair is among the most dedicated mystery-writing teams on the planet — and lest you think that’s an exaggeration, let me hasten to add that they live in two different hemispheres, presenting collaboration challenges of which stateside co-authors can only have shuddering nightmares. Yet when I contacted Stan to beg implore ask him to contribute a post to this series on series-writing — and reached him the day before he and his collaborator were slated to complete their fourth novel — he not only instantly said yes, but asked how best to focus the post to assist those of you in the Author! Author! community currently writing series.

That’s what I like to see in an author: generosity, professionalism, and a strong understanding that being an author means being part of a writing community. One never stops paying dues to that community, admittedly, but the rewards are pretty delightful.

Something else I like to see in authors that this team has in spades, doubled and redoubled: a talent for keeping the reader constantly guessing. I’m not the only one to recognize this rare gift, either: their most recent release, Death of the Mantis (also available as an audio book at Audiobookstand), has been racking up accolades like Lincoln logs since its release last year. An entirely representative sample:

Shortlisted for Edgar — Best paperback original
Shortlisted for A Minnesota Book Award — Genre Fiction
Shortlisted for a Barry — Best paperback original
The Strand Magazine 12 best mysteries of 2011.
Library Journal top 10 mysteries for 2011

“Impossible to put down, this immensely readable third entry from (Michael Stanley) delivers the goods. Kubu’s painstaking detecting skills make him a sort of Hercule Poirot of the desert.”

Starred Review, Library Journal

“…a must-read for anyone who enjoys clever plotting, terrific writing, and a fascinating glimpse of today’s Africa.”

Charles Todd, New York Times bestselling mystery author

“…the best book yet in one of the best series going… I loved this book.”

Timothy Hallinan, author of The Queen of Patpong and A Nail Through the Heart

“…the best book I’ve read in a very long time…DEATH OF THE MANTIS is a fantastic read. Brilliant!”

Louise Penny, multiple award-winning author of the Inspector Gamache mysteries

Is this where I get to say I told you so? Seriously, in my humble, notoriously-critical-of-English-prose opinion, this is their best book so far. Take a gander at the publisher’s blurb:

Surrounded by a group of Bushmen, a ranger at a game reserve in the Kalahari is discovered at the bottom of a ravine. At first it is assumed that he fell, but it turns out that he was attacked. Although they claim to have chanced upon the injured man, the Bushmen are arrested.

Khumanego, Kubu’s Bushman school friend and now an advocate for the Bushman people, approaches Kubu and asks him to intervene. Khumanego claims the men are innocent and that their arrest is due to racist antagonism from the local police. Kubu investigates the case, resulting in the release of the suspects. But then another man is found murdered in a similar fashion — this time a visitor from neighboring Namibia. The body is discovered by another touring Namibian — an odd coincidence in Kubu’s view — motivating him to follow the clues to Namibia.

Then a third man is murdered and Kubu realizes that the key to the mystery must lie in the depths of the Kalahari itself. And there it is unraveled in a most unpleasant way…

One of the things I like best about Stan and Michael’s work — and in case I haven’t yet made it clear, there are many, many things I like about it — is the impeccable level of detail. These are the kings of show, don’t tell, and that, my friends, takes serious research in a series like this.

I felt some of you twitching at the mention of the r-word, but honestly, you would not believe how often our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, sees stories with mystery storylines (and, let’s face it, many, if not most, fiction storylines contain mysteries of one sort or another) that practically shout, “Hey, Millie, this manuscript needs a fact-checker!” Although experts abound in fiction, it’s actually rare that a protagonist wielding major credentials comes across as genuinely credible.

So says the lady with the Ph.D. Half the doctorate-sporting characters floating around the fictional ether make me cringe with embarrassment and make me want to mail my diploma back to the university. (Then I remember how very becoming my royal purple doctoral Renaissance cap is, and I resist. I worked hard to look that good.)

Speaking of looking good, I am also not the only professional reader that has noticed Stan and Michael’s incredibly nuanced attention to detail. Take a gander at some reviews by those who know stories about Africa far better than I do:

“The information on the Bushmen…is fascinating. Stanley does an exceedingly good job of presenting their plight and culture in an interesting and sympathetic manner. He also conveys the other characters, both black and white, in rich, multi-layered dimensions… a very readable novel that offers fascinating reflections on life in modern Botswana.”

The Canberra Times, November 5, 2011

“…DEATH OF THE MANTIS is a wonderful piece of work, a novel that is quietly perfect in every way…one of those rare books that transcends its rich genre. While there is a mystery at its core, it is also a study of the human condition, of the best and worst of people who do what they do for the best and worst of reasons. And Kubu is one of the best friends you will make between the pages of a book.”

Bookreporter, October 27, 2011

Yes, those are the kinds of plaudits of which every writer dreams, but let me tell you, it did not come without a tremendous amount of persistent, hard work. These are authors that built their writer’s tool kits, just as you are doing now, and my, has it paid off.

Bear that in mind, please, whenever you find your faith in your writing teetering a bit. It can be done. But you’re going to have to pay your dues — and it’s going to be a lot of hard work.

Join me, please, in welcoming a team of authors that help show all of us why this endeavor is so worthwhile. Take it away, Stan and Michael!

When we started writing our first book in 2003, we had no idea that it was going to turn into a series. We actually had no idea that we would even finish the book. This was our first venture into writing fiction, so we were complete novices.

Our initial idea had formed about 15 years earlier when we and four friends were on a flying safari in Botswana. (Stanley is a private pilot) One evening we saw a pack of hyenas attack and kill a wildebeest. By morning there was nothing left except the horns and hooves. Yes, hyenas eat the bones as well as the flesh.

That evening, over a glass or two of wine, we had the idea that should we ever want to get rid of a body, we would leave it out for hyenas. No body, no case!

When we eventually decided to write a novel with that as the premise, our opening scene had a professor (of Ecology) and a game ranger stumbling upon a hyena just before it finished devouring the remains of a human being. The perfect murder was no longer perfect.

You may wonder why there was a professor with the game ranger. Well, we’d been told that we should write what we knew. We were both professors, so we planned to have our professor be our protagonist. However, even in third world countries like Botswana, where our mysteries are set, the police need to be involved. So we sent a Botswana Police detective, David “Kubu” Bengu, from the country’s capital, Gaborone, to the remote tourist camp where the remains of the body lay waiting. By the time Kubu arrived at the camp, he had taken over as the main character.

This was our first lesson — authors aren’t always in charge of the novels they write. Sometimes, the characters take over.

Researching the Okavango Delta in a local dugout, called a mokoro

It took us three years to finish our manuscript. We quite liked it, so decided to try to have it published. After considerable research, it became obvious that we needed an agent to represent us. After some of the usual disappointments, we eventually found an excellent agent in New York. To our complete surprise, she sold the book, titled A CARRION DEATH, to HarperCollins. To our greater surprise, she actually sold a two-book contract.

Yikes! That meant we had to write a second book with the same protagonist, Detective Kubu.

By the way, Kubu means hippopotamus in his native language, Setswana, the common language of Botswana. Hippos are large, normally placid, and the most dangerous mammals in Africa.
So Kubu is a large man. He enjoys eating a great deal and loves good wine, when he can afford it. Surprisingly, he is also happily married. Like hippos, he is slow to anger, but when crossed is very dangerous.

Little did we realize what additional difficulties would surface as we started on the second book. Some became apparent as soon as we started plotting, others sneaked up on us at unexpected times during the writing. Here are some issues we discovered during the course of writing our second book, titled THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU in North America, and A DEADLY TRADE elsewhere.

First, the characters from the first book who carried over to the second would have to be adequately introduced for readers who hadn’t read A CARRION DEATH. But not overly so, otherwise readers who had started with A CARRION DEATH may be bored with the repetition.

This wasn’t easy. For example, in A CARRION DEATH, Kubu recalls a time when he went into the desert with a Bushman friend of his, Khumanego. It was Khumanego who taught Kubu to see what was behind the obvious — that what appeared to be a boring patch of sand was actually a world teeming with interesting flora and fauna.

It was this experience that caused Kubu to want to become a detective. In the second book, we obviously needed to provide new readers with the same background, but it had to be done carefully so as not to put previous Kubu readers off. This is obviously true of all characters.

Establishing a sense of place

Second, even though the action in THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU takes place only a few years after that in A CARRION DEATH, the characters needed to evolve. People who read a series in order want to see characters, particularly the protagonist, grow. They want to see the impact of important events on character and outlook. One thing we did in the second book was to put Kubu’s wife in danger, which allowed us to show a different side of Kubu’s normally placid character.

Third, and perhaps the most difficult, we had to remember all the habits, looks, interactions, etc., of the characters in the first book, so we didn’t contradict ourselves in the second. One of the unexpected revelations from our initial book tour was how well many readers knew A CARRION DEATH. We often felt that they knew more than we did — and they certainly remembered more of the detail than we did. So we realized that any slips would be caught immediately by our eagle-eyed readers.

We couldn’t afford to have Kubu look or behave fundamentally differently in the second book — the habits he had shown in the first book needed to carry over. Similarly he couldn’t interact differently with the people in his life — boss, wife, parents, and colleagues — except because of the ways he had matured. For example, because of the passage of time and because of his successes as a detective, the previously prickly relationship with his boss, Director Mabaku, has mellowed a little. Mabaku continues to be testy, but slivers of softness begin to show.

So, as we wrote THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU, we found ourselves going back to A CARRION DEATH time and time again to ensure that we were getting things right.

A supporting character in Chobe National Park

Then we started the third book, DEATH OF THE MANTIS, and most of the issues discussed above grew in importance. How could we make Kubu, for example, interesting to those people who had already read two books about him? Obviously, he continues to have success as a detective, but we did two things differently.

First, he is now a father — unexpectedly, I might say. This provided us the chance to bring out a previously untapped aspect of his character, namely how to deal with pressures at home, as well as pressures at work. It also allowed us to explore some quirks in his character. Specifically, parts of his traditional upbringing clash with his self-image of being a liberated New Age man.

Second, through his own fault, blinded by assumptions, Kubu finds himself in a situation that nearly ends his life. How does he handle himself as he realizes he has been a fool and, as a consequence, is likely to die?

We also realized that it would have been a very good idea to build a biography of the main characters as we wrote. That would have made it easy to find out such things as how much does he weigh, how old is he, what schools did he go to, what did his parents do before retirement, when did he get married, and so on and so on? It would also help us to keep track of when things happened in our characters’ lives, particularly Kubu’s. When did the various cases take place? What was he doing in his private life at the time? How long has he been married? Has he aged chronologically in our books as time has passed?

As we write, we have to know or have access to this sort of information, otherwise we make mistakes. And one thing I can promise is that there will be numerous readers who will catch the errors.

Actually, in order to make our writing easier, we are seriously considering trying to find someone who would prepare a biography for us, perhaps as part of a university project or paper. We think it would be an interesting project.

On the fly in pursuit of new material at Tsodilo Hills

We have just finished writing the fourth Kubu mystery, tentatively called POTIONS OF DEATH. Again the same issues arise. How does one write a book that will be the fourth in a series for some and the first for others? I think we now have shifted the balance a little towards first-time readers — the book has to be compelling on its own.

We hope, of course, that new readers will like it enough that they will go back and read the earlier books. Readers of our earlier books, fortunately for us, really like Kubu and his family, and look forward to new ones. So far, we have had no pushback that later books are repetitious.

How did we maintain interest for series’ readers in POTIONS OF DEATH? Among other things, we introduced the first female detective into the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department — a woman who is driven to bring to justice witch doctors who sell potions made from body parts of people they have killed. Her obsession is fueled by the fact that one of her childhood friends was murdered for just such a reason.

In real life, this is something that happens in parts of Africa, and prosecutions are few and far between because the clients are usually influential politicians or businessmen and because of the very real fear amongst the police that any witch doctor under suspicion would cast a spell on them.

In some ways, we have concerns about how the whole notion of witch doctors will be received by Western readers. We hope the story is not pooh-poohed. The reality is, of course, that witch doctors are real. And many, if not most, people in Africa believe in them, to the extent that there are instances of people dying purely because they believed a spell had been put on them.

Bushman painting at Tsodilo

The final issue that we keep in mind is not to be formulaic. We think interest in a series will wane if readers feel that our new books are basically the same as earlier ones. Our way around this is to change the backstory for each book. A CARRION DEATH is a mystery built on the back-story of blood diamonds. The background of THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU is the nasty civil war in Rhodesia in the 1970s and the impact it had on neighboring countries. DEATH OF THE MANTIS puts Kubu in the middle of the fight for survival of the traditional Bushman peoples of Botswana, and POTIONS OF DEATH is about witch doctors who kill people.

These different back-stories allow us to move the location of the mysteries to different parts of Botswana, as well as providing totally different motivations and environments for the characters and stories.

We are about to start the fifth Detective Kubu mystery. This time, Kubu will be involved in the unpleasant results of a cultural clash between the local Batswana people and Chinese laborers who have been brought in to build paved roads. This is another issue of contemporary significance. Throughout Africa, the Chinese are bartering construction projects for access to Africa’s resource riches — oil, iron, coal, gold, diamonds, platinum, etc. Almost everywhere you travel in Africa today, you will see Chinese people. Our observation is that they do not integrate well or easily with local communities — a perfect back-story for murder and mayhem.

Tim and Vaughn Pearson with Nosipho Qolo showing off Kubu t-shirts

Our last comment about writing a series concerns the protagonist. He or she has to be able to keep readers’ attention over many books. If, after your first book, your main character hasn’t garnered your readers’ affection, or at least attention, you may find a series difficult to sustain.
Think about Agatha Christie’s Hercules Poirot, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, etc. It is almost always the case that it is these characters that make people continue reading the series, not the plots or stories, although these may also be appealing.

We lucked into Kubu — our readers have a real passion for him and can’t wait to find out about his next exploits, about his family life, and whether any of his diets will ever be successful. Please visit our website at http://www.detectivekubu.com to find out more about Kubu and his colleagues. You can also sign up for a newsletter we send out a few times a year.

By the way, if you are going to write a series, a website is an excellent way to keep faithful readers up to date with what is happening to their favorite character. Browse through our site to see how we provide additional information about ourselves, about upcoming books and events, as well as photos and stories related to our books.

We wish you good luck (which is usually needed) and good writing.

Michael Stanley smiling with catMichael Stanley is the writing team of Stanley Trollip and Michael Sears

Both are retired professors who have worked in academia and business. They were both born in South Africa. Michael is a mathematician, specializing in geological remote sensing. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a tournament bridge player. Stanley is an educational psychologist, specializing in the application of computers to teaching and learning, and a pilot. He splits his time between Knysna, South Africa, and Minneapolis in the United States. He is an avid golfer.

Their first novel, A CARRION DEATH, featuring Detective David “Kubu” Bengu, was published in 2008 and received critical acclaim. The Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its top ten crime novels of 2008. It is a nominee for the Minnesota Book Award, Strand Magazine’s Critics Award for Best First Novel, and Mystery Readers International Macavity Award for Best First Novel.

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Bursting the boundaries: Author! Author! Rings True freestyle category winners John Turley and Fiona Maddock


John, author of Macondo 20/20


Fiona, author of Infinite Loop

Welcome to the second group of winning entries in the Author! Author! Rings True literary competition. Today, I am delighted to be bringing you the extremely interesting top entries Category III: fiction that could legitimately fit into several book categories, John Turley and Fiona Maddock. Well done, both!

As shall be the case with those who carried off top honors in each of the Rings True categories, I shall be discussing page 1 and a synopsis with Heidi Durrow, author of the recent literary fiction debut, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, now available in paperback. Heidi was generous enough to help me critique these intriguing pages.

We shall be approaching today’s winners slightly differently than our last set, however. Because the author’s personality (or, more accurately, public persona plus platform) is part of what is being pitched in memoir, we began the previous prize post with each winner’s bio, then moved on to her first page and synopsis. With fiction, however, the writer’s platform is significantly less important at the querying and submission stages — or, to put it as bluntly as our old pal Millicent the agency screener might, all the charm in the world won’t make up for a story that doesn’t grab her on page 1.

As they say in the biz, what matters is the writing. Oh, and the query’s being aimed at an agent or editor with a solid track record of handling books in that manuscript’s book category.

Why? Chant it with me now, long-time readers of this blog: since no agent represents every kind of book, it’s a waste of time to query those who do not habitually handle books like yours. Queries addressed to agents who do not represent the book category in question get rejected automatically; pervasive writerly fantasy to the contrary, Millicent will not make an exception for a submission that happens to be well-written. Therefore, selecting the appropriate category for your manuscript is vital.

As the gargantuan wail of writerly angst can attest, many, if not most, aspiring writers find this imperative a tad stressful. “What if I get it wrong?” they fret, and who can blame them? “I hate the idea of my work being pigeonholed.”

While this attitude is completely understandable, it also represents a fairly complete lack of comprehension for how books are marketed. All books currently published in the United States have been pigeonholed — that’s how the hardworking employees of Barnes & Noble and other brick-and-mortar bookstores know where to shelve them. It’s also how book buyers for those stores look for what to stock, how book distributors describe their current offerings, how publishers think of their lists, and how editors’ job descriptions limit what they can acquire. It thus follows as night the day that if agents want to pitch books, they must also adhere to the prevailing practice of assigning each client’s projects to already-established book categories.

Which is to say: a book category is nothing but a conceptual container, intended to help a manuscript end up on the desk of someone who can actually bring it to publication. Basically, these categories exist to save everyone time and effort, including the writer.

Still don’t believe me? All right, let’s take a gander at today’s category-defying entries. Image that you are sitting in Millicent’s desk chair: if you want to recommend these manuscripts to your boss, the agent, you will need to be able to tell her in a sentence or two what each book is about. You will also have to assign it to a category.

Everyone clear on the brief? Excellent. First, here is the first page of John Turley’s MACONDO 20-20. Ready, set, screen!

How did you do? Were you able to categorize it? Or — and I hope this is the case, given how much attention we’ve devoted in recent weeks to learning to spot small problems on manuscript pages — were you too distracted by these details to focus on book category?

On the off chance that some of you were not as distracted by them as Millicent would have been, here’s that first page again with the formatting, punctuation, and word use problems corrected. Notice how much correcting these minuscule matters changes how it reads.

Amazing what a difference those small revisions make, is it not? Now, we may return to our initial question: how would Millicent categorize this book?

If you’re having some trouble, step back and ask yourself an even more basic question: based on this page alone, is this book fiction or nonfiction?

Oh, you may laugh, but you would be surprised at how often it’s not possible to tell from an opening page — or how frequently queriers leave this pertinent fact out of their queries. But since there is no such thing in the publishing world as a book that’s sort of fiction, sort of nonfiction, it’s honestly not in a writer’s interest to make Millicent guess which a manuscript is.

Of course, I already know which, because I have John’s synopsis sitting in front of me. Before we get to it, however, let’s keep our nit-picking hats on and peruse Fiona Maddock’s entry. Much to Millicent’s relief, it’s substantially simpler to categorize — or is it?

If you found your focus shifting from questions of category, spelling, and even writing almost immediately, congratulations: you’re starting to read like a pro. (And if you instantly noted the missing slug line, you’re reading like Millicent.)

If not — which would be quite understandable in this case; it’s one heck of an opening — here’s that page again as a professional reader would have preferred to see it, so you may compare formatting and punctuation directly.

If you did not catch the problems the first time around, do not despair — you’re not only like the overwhelming majority of submitters, but very much like the general reading public. These days, we’re also used to the pervasive typos brought on by the rise in on-screen editing that small things like using dashes correctly or adding commas where they are necessary may well seem like piddling details, unworthy of contemplation.

To those who love literature and have devoted their lives to its publications, however, these seemingly small gaffes are far from irrelevant. In these days of dwindling staffs, prose-polishing is the writer’s responsibility, an essential part of the job description. These manuscript faux pas are also important because to a professional’s eye, they indicate that the author is either too busy to proofread her own work between revisions or just isn’t very attentive to detail.

Either way, the Millicent can predict pretty confidently from page 1 that the rest of the manuscript will contain similar problems — and thus that this writer would be more time-consuming (and therefore expensive) to represent than others with similarly compelling stories and talent. They know from long experience that if a writer does not consistently produce clean manuscripts, some luckless soul at the agency and/or publishing house will have to invest valuable hours in polishing the prose.

They also tend to suspect that a submitter who has not invested the time in learning the rules of standard format — which, lest we forget, people in the publishing world believe to be so pervasive that a writer would have to be deliberately avoiding in order not to apprehend them — is going to have difficulty following directions from an agent or editor. So while forgetting (or, more commonly, not being aware) that standard format requires a space at either end of a dash, or that dashes in manuscripts should be doubled, or that each page needs a slug line may be easy for an aspiring writer to overlook, to Millicent, it’s all part of the diagnosis of the submission.

I’m bringing this up not to chide today’s winners, but because I couldn’t resist the object lesson: even when the writing and the premise is this good, presentation matters. Please, for your book’s sake, don’t ever assume that a professional reader is going to cut your manuscript slack because s/he likes the writing or considers the subject matter intriguing.

Speaking of diagnosis and subject matter, how have you been coming with your categorization projects? Let’s turn to our winners’ 1-page synopses and bios to see if they offer any clues.

Ah, a forest of hands just shot into the air out there. “But Anne,” those who were paying close attention at the beginning of this post protest, and rightly so. “You said that for fiction, the writer’s platform does not matter nearly so much as for nonfiction. I don’t expect that every police procedural to be written by a police officer, any more than I would expect a middle-grade novel about an undersea soccer league to be penned by a mermaid. So why would a fiction-screening Millicent glance at a bio at all until her agency had already decided to pick up a client, much less after reading only the first page of a submission?”

You’re probably right, oh attentive ones — generally speaking, even a professional reader who really loves a fiction manuscript will not read the bio until fairly late in the game. After Millie has finished the submission, she might well scan the bio for additional selling points to mention to her boss. (“This safari novel is great — and the writer once had three toes bitten off by a lion!”)

In the case of John’s manuscript, any expertise he might have in offshore drilling or marine biology might well render his take on a certain recent oil spill more credible for readers. That’s going to be especially true if the book is nonfiction, but because any major event in the news is likely to generate a few novels, an extensive background in the subject matter would help set his book apart from the rest.

Then, too, our goal here is to establish these books’ respective categories, right? Although most of you have probably made an educated guess that Fiona’s book category would fall into the fiction range, from her first page alone, it’s also possible that she’s written a memoir about being a plastic surgery survivor.

The suspense is killing me. Let’s take a gander at her synopsis and bio.

Fiona Maddock is a self-taught artist and writer. She’s a secret scribbler and a closet geek. She’s travelled across Europe, India and round the world. She’s tinkered around with web sites and built on-line art galleries for her work. In 2010, she graduated from the University of Reading with a BSc in Information Technology and this experience inspired her to write science fiction. She lives in Reading, United Kingdom and spends her time on her fiction writing, blogging and supporting disabled students at uni. Contact her through her blog, Novel Thinking.

Eureka! Although she’s just come out and told us what her chosen book category is in her bio — an unusual choice, and one that I think is an inefficient use of page space in what is already a rather information-light bio by U.S. standards — actually, the synopsis renders it perfectly clear. There’s no reason to hesitate for even a moment in assigning this book permanently to the science fiction category.

I have to confess, it always strikes me as a trifle apologetic when writers insist upon including the information that they are self-taught in their bios — or queries, where that fact pops up with astonishing frequency. It’s a statement guaranteed to perplex Millicent: the vast majority of published writers were self-taught; while an M.F.A. in writing makes for some nice ECQLC (Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy), and thus might render Millicent a trifle more likely to ask to see pages, it won’t help necessarily help a submission’s chances. The knowledge that a writer taught herself the ropes, however, isn’t unusual enough to strike Millicent one way or the other. Besides, to a pro, the mere fact that the bio mentions no writing credentials implies that the writer has not had any formal training.

That’s mere quibbling, however, over a quite exciting first page and synopsis — and a sultry authorial voice that draws the reader into the story, pronto. Here’s what Heidi and I had to say about them.