Marilyn's Musings

I just finished re-editing No Bells.  I love this book. This is Gordon Butler story. He's a favorite among the Rocky Bluff P.D. readers. Nothing seems to go right for Gordon despite being an upstanding, honest, and likeable police officer. Things don't change much for him in this offering. He gets all the odd-ball calls to investigate from poop to a menacing seagull.  Cellphones finally make an appearance. The economy at that particular time period plays a part in the plot.  He has fallen for the woman of his dreams--and she becomes the major suspect in a murder case. He's determined to clear her name. A young man with Down syndrome is an important witness. The title, No Bells , came from something one of my son's girlfriends said to him. There is no cover as yet because the new publisher is changing them all. I am so grateful to Mike Orenduff of Aakenbaaken & Kent for bringing this series back to life. Marilyn aka F. M. Mered...

Fool that I am, yes, I'm working on another blog tour for my latest Rocky Bluff P.D. mystery, Violent Departures . The first step is to find people willing to host me. I've reached out to several and also asked other Oak Tree Press authors if they'd like to be one of my hosts. Some have given me ideas about the subject for the post--others have left it up to me. One big decision I made was to keep the tour a bit shorter than the last one--this will have 20 stops, beginning April 1. I'll have two prizes--one will be to have a character named after him or her in the next RBPD mystery and the other, to choose an earlier book in the series--either paper or for Kindle. Next step, of course, is always to start writing the posts with the goal to make them interesting enough for people to want to read them--but to keep them fairly short. This is always more work than I realize and especially hard when I'm also trying to write a book in my other series. S...

The next book in the Rocky Bluff P.D. mystery series is called Violent Departures . I'm not going to tell you much about it yet. My writing process is always a bit strange. I begin with some carry-over from the previous book which was Murder in the Worst Degree. The men and women of the Rocky Bluff P.D. have ongoing lives and I try to pick up more-or-less where I left off with them. Then of course I have to have a collection of crimes that confront the men and women while they are on the job. And as I've always done, I want to show how what's happening at work affects what's going on with the family and vice versa. I like to collect photos of houses that people in Rocky Bluff live in. One of many Craftsman style homes in Rocky Bluff. Love this one. Her'es the old pier in Rocky Bluff. See, here's another  Craftsman -style house. Merely looking at these photos give me ideas. I like to imagine what kind of people live inside. F.M.  aka Mari...

Both of my series are with small presses: Oak Tree Press and Mundania. I've been with many others before these two. I was fortunate to meet both of these publishers at writing conferences. I met Dan Rietz, Mundania's publisher at Epicon and Billie Johnson, who owns Oak Tree, at Public Safety Writers Association's conference. At these first meetings I had other publishers. As fate would have it, both of my publishers quit the business later on. It wasn't too hard to figure out where I should go next. Because I had a track record, successful books behind me, I didn't have to go through the whole querying process. With Mundania, I saw the publisher at yet another conference and he told me to send my next manuscript. I spoke at a conference OTP put on, and signed a contract during that time period. Querying and submitting a manuscript is so much easier nowadays. Most of it is done via the Internet. When you submit a manuscript you want to make sure it is clean a...

Or at least that's what I should be doing. I've had so many distractions, it's going to take a bit of doing to get my mind set right. I need to immerse myself in Rocky Bluff--the small beach community somewhere between Ventura and Santa Barbara. When I'm there in my mind, it seems like a very real place with the bluff that's give the town it's name, the battered rental houses on the beach front, the rotted pier, the homes that climb the sloping hillside leading to the freeway, the ranches and orange groves on the other side of the freeway, and the businesses that line the main drag, Valley Blvd. Oh, I was going to tell you what story lines I need to continue, but I can't do that because it would spoil the book that is coming in 2013, Dangerous Impulses . Sometimes this whole writing process is weird. One book at the publishers while writing the next one. And in my case, I'm also working on the edits for my next Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery which I...

The birth of No Bells is nearing. I love the cover. I've gone over the PDF file twice now and found those pesky errors that the gremlins stick in. Though I have to confess that some of the errors were mine. Because some of them were consistency errors despite what I thought was good note taking for my timeline, before I sent another book off to my publisher, I'm going to get another reader to go over it. For some reason my critique group didn't catch these kind of errors. And I really shouldn't expect them to since they only hear one chapter at a time. All I can do now is hope that I caught them all. Marilyn aka F. M. Meredith