Pen M won the Walter the Pug tote.
That shadowy figure known as Victoria Abbott is a collaboration between the always very funny and creative artist, photographer and short story author, Victoria Maffini and her mother, Mary Jane Maffini, award-winning author of three mystery series and two dozen short stories. Their first book in the series, The Christie Curse, has received excellent reviews and the second, The Sayers Swindle, hit the shelves in December. They are hard at work on the third installment: The Wolfe Widow(September 2014) and haven’t killed each other yet.
You can keep up with their characters on the thirtieth of the month over at www.killercharacters.comand their culinary adventures at www.mysteryloverskitchen.comor by signing up for their newsletter at www.victoria-abbott.com or www.maryjanemaffini.com. MJ also blogs at www.cozychicksblog.com
One character – two views
By Mary Jane and Victoria Maffini
First
let us say how glad we are to visit Meanderings and Muses today. Thanks so
much, Kaye, for inviting us. Now, we’ll segue into our little ‘situation’.
Perhaps you can help us out.
We
are at the end of book three in the book collector mysteries, our mother-daughter
collaboration using the name Victoria Abbott.
With The Christie Curse and The Sayers Swindle already on the
shelves and doing well, you’d think we really knew what we were doing. People
keep asking us about our process. They
want to know how we write together. We
try not to stare at them blankly or to make things up, such as, an alien told
us what to write or we write in our sleep. The truth is that we’re not entirely
sure how it all comes together, as we seem to be using different approaches in
each book. Still we usually sing from the same hymn book. We talk, we plot, we
discuss. Sometimes we compromise. We love what we’ve created with our young
protagonist, Jordan Bingham, a grad student and the first person in her very
large family to go straight. We agree on everything about her curmudgeonly
employer, Vera Van Alst, the most hated woman in Harrison Falls, NY. We cherish
the world of book collecting we’ve created for them, the stately old home and
the quirky folks who inhabit it. We both love the classics from The Golden Age
of Detection (Christie, Sayers, and Stout) that we draw on for our stories. We
are equally fond of Walter the Pug and Cobain the whatever.
However,
every now and then, we realize that Victoria Abbott is not a single entity and
we can have very different views of the same character.
This
came to our attention when we were reworking a scene in The Wolfe Widow (book
three) just as Jordan saw her Uncle Kev show up bringing chaos and danger in
his wake, as he so often does.
One of us added
‘his pudgy face’ to the narrative.
The other
gasped. “Pudgy? What pudgy? He has cheekbones that could cut glass and he has a chiseled jaw.”
“Pudgy.”
“Chiseled.”
“No, listen to
me, definitely pudgy.”
“What? Pudgy?
This is the man that all women seem to fall for despite the fact he’s a
disaster in the making. Only chiseled could explain that.”
“I’m pretty
sure his face is pudgy. Nothing’s going to change my mind.”
“Seriously,
Victoria?”
“Really, Mum,
really?
And so it went.
The thing is, neither
of us owns Uncle Kev or any of the other characters in the series. Nor does
either one have the right to tell the other what to do, write or think. Occasionally, the mother finds this a bit
hard, but never mind.
So what did we
do?
We considered
possibilities: pudgy in one book and chiseled in the next? Pudgy on one side
and chiseled on the other? Pudgy cheeks, chiseled chin? Obviously, no solutions
there.
It was a bit
tricky as Uncle Kev had already appeared (and caused quite a bit of trouble) in
The Sayers Swindle. Was he pudgy or chiseled?
We’d have to go with whatever we’d said, despite our different visions
and memories of Kev. Apparently, there was a bit of pudginess and some chiseled
as well in The Sayers Swindle, but neither was connected to Kev’s face.
At least we
agreed on the ginger hair and wild eyebrows that all the Kellys attribute to
their Viking ancestor, Olaf, who washed up in Dublin sometime in the ninth
century and made his own kind of trouble. But we digress.
So, now we have
to decide. And soon.
How about
you? Given Kev’s appeal— his ginger hair
and wild eyebrows, not to mention the frenetic disposition and attention
deficit thingie—which would you vote for?
We may need you
to break the tie. Or we could just see
who does the ultimate set of edits …
Of course,
you’ll have to wait until September to find out. Maybe we will too.
In the meantime, leave a comment here and we’ll put your name in the
draw for a Walter the Pug tote bag. At
least we all agree on Walter.
If you had fun
with us today, please visit us at www.victoria-abbott.com
or www.maryjanemaffini.ca to sign
up for our newsletter!
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