A chat with Avery Aames, Krista Davis, and Elizabeth Zelvin

Solitary scribblers? Not so much

 

Avery Aames

Krista Davis

Liz Zelvin

Mystery writers Elizabeth Zelvin, Krista Davis, and Avery Aames met online ten years ago in the Guppies chapter (at the time, a haven for the Great UnPublished) of Sisters in Crime and have been friends ever since. Liz’s first published work, “Death Will Clean Your Closet” (2007), and two subsequent stories were Agatha Award nominees for Best Short Story. Krista’s first novel, The Diva Runs Out of Thyme (2008), was nominated for the Agatha for Best First Novel. Avery’s first novel, The Long Quiche Goodbye (2009), won the Agatha in the same category. This year, Krista had two Agatha nominations, for Best Novel and Best Short Story, while Avery was nominated for Best Short Story under her real name, Daryl Wood Gerber. Liz, Krista, and Avery all have new books in 2012.

How important is contact with other writers to your craft and your success as published writers?

Liz:  Essential! I’ve been writing my whole life, and in retrospect, I can see that the reason it took me so long to get my first novel published is that for almost fifty years I tried to do it alone. I learned almost everything I know about both the craft and the business of mystery writing in Guppies, and the rest in Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. I would have given up many times—“quit five minutes before the miracle”—if not for the support of fellow writers like Krista and Avery.

Krista: Publishing is a field unlike any other.  Joining the Guppies was a turning point for me because I finally found instant answers to simple questions.  You wouldn’t think something like the correct font would be important, but it is.  Before the Guppies were online, I recall browsing in a Borders in search of a book about the proper format for a manuscript.  

We’ve come a long way since those days, but contact with other writers is still vital to me.  Writing is very solitary, but email has changed that.  In an instant, I’m at the cyber water cooler, catching up on news or discussing an issue.  Since mystery writers often have somewhat bizarre conversations like – so how fast does foxglove kill someone? – it’s doubly important to be able to connect with people who think that’s, well, normal!

There are also frustrations that only other writers understand.  Rejections come with the territory.  In the beginning, most writers toil away receiving rejection after rejection but not much in the way of positive reinforcement.  Not only is it reassuring to know that you’re not the only one, but family and friends outside of the business start to doubt your abilities, while writing friends know that it’s perfectly normal.

Avery:  I need to chat a couple of times a week with my Internet buddies who are writers. They understand the business. They understand the angst that writers go through when writing chapters, creating characters, running into roadblocks, and the snags and woes of publishing. My published authors buddies also understand the PR requirements that sneak in and attack our ability to focus on the writing.

Krista:  I have learned so much from other writers. Avery and I have been in a critique group with Janet Bolin for ten years.  We do less critiquing these days, but I still appreciate their input and opinions.  I know that Liz and Avery are just an email away if I need some advice, or even if I just need to whine a little bit!

What’s the difference between networking and friendship? Which matters more?

Avery:  Networking is when you converse with authors that have information about the business. They can put you in contact with agents, publishers, tell you about conferences, give you heads up about PR people, scams, and good and bad websites. Friends are the authors who truly understand the angst that writers go through and will listen (via the Internet or in person) and give advice as to how to cope with these issues. They might offer suggestions or solutions. They might brainstorm. But most importantly they care. Truly care.

Krista: Both have their place.  It’s wonderful to have friends, but like any other business, networking opens doors.  I get a lot of information about the publishing business through networking contacts and some of those contacts lead to new friendships! 

The days of the lonely writer are long gone, especially since social media has become such a major part of our lives.  In addition to talking about writing, we’re exchanging a lot of information about marketing.  Facebook, Twitter, blogging – what will be next?  It’s hard to keep up with everything. 

The publishing business has gone through some whopping changes and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  Networking is more important than ever, just to keep up with the business.

Liz:  I believe the most effective way to network is to act as if each contact is a potential friend. That means I do everything I can to make every relationship a two-way street. My first question to myself all along is “What can I give?” rather than “What can I get?” Networking is an extended and cumulative process. With a potential reader whom I meet online, say, on DorothyL, I might have an extended email discussion about a book we both love. I might encourage an aspiring writer to join Sisters in Crime and MWA and offer to answer any questions they have about how to get the most out of membership in these organizations. I’ve met some of the successful authors I admire most by asking if I could interview them for Poe’s Deadly Daughters (a certain amount of work for me and a promo opp for them). A year or two down the line, the pre-existing relationship might give me the courage to ask such an author for a blurb for my book. But that kind of reward is a bonus, not an agenda. It all adds up, and in the meantime, I’ve made a lot of delightful friends who love mysteries as much as I do. And when I attend conferences and conventions, instead of feeling shy and lonely, I give and get a lot of hugs.

What impact has your friendship with each other had?

Avery:  I have known Krista and Liz for many years because of the Guppies. I think that without them (and numerous others) and their encouragement to keep at it (when all aspects of the business were screaming at me to quit) I would not have continued to persevere. I hope that I have been just as good a cheerleader for them. I try to remain positive in all situations. I try to remain calm. I’m better at remaining calm to meet my friends' challenges than to meet my own. LOL

Liz:  Avery, you’ve been a great cheerleader. Both of you, Avery and Krista, are outstanding exemplars of positive attitude.

I met both Krista and Avery in my early days in Guppies, and we all had our first novels published within a year or two or each other, so we’re all in the same cohort of writing peers. That makes these relationships very special. If you read between the lines of the Acknowledgments pages of various authors’ books, you’ll find these cohorts for different generations of writers. Krista and Avery are to me as Nancy Pickard is to Carolyn Hart and Sara Paretsky to Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller. They’ve also become trusted friends. I first met Krista in an otherwise disastrous (for me) critique group and Avery in a little support group we called Agent Hunt. We’ve shared a lot of triumphs and disappointments. They’re both on my short list of fellow writers I can always be completely candid with, and that’s very precious to me. I hope our friendship will continue regardless of what happens in our mystery writing careers.

Krista:  It has definitely saved me from pulling out my own hair.  Thank goodness they’re around (in a cyber kind of way) when things go wrong.  They have both acted as my confidantes, which every writer needs!  I can honestly say that if Liz hadn’t invited me along one day, I never would have been privy to one of the most brutally honest and enlightening conversations between writers that I have ever heard. 

Liz:  I remember that conversation, but I’m not telling. I can’t stress enough that both established and aspiring authors need to have peers they can be candid with. I tried to do it alone for half a century, and it didn’t work.

What does each of you admire most about the other two, as writers and as people?

Krista:  I have to say that Avery and Liz are women with whom I would have been friends no matter how we met.  The fact that we’re in the same business is just a nice bonus.  They’re both wonderful, warm women and terrific writers, too.  I can trust them to be honest.  If something stinks, they’ll say so, but in a very nice way. They’re both goal-oriented and had to persevere to get where they are.  I think you’ll find that trait in a lot of authors.  Sometimes it’s hard not to give up.

Liz:  Krista is very calm and unflappable when there’s some kind of hoopla going on in the mystery world or one of the groups we’re all in. She’s great at acquiring information about publishing, which is always in a state of flux these days. Avery is always bubbling with enthusiasm, and she’s demonstrated an inspiring amount of persistence and adaptability in the quest for publication.

Krista: I only wish I had Avery’s self-discipline and energy.  Seriously, she accomplishes more on one day than I manage in a week.

Liz: Both Krista and Avery are marvelous critique partners who have helped me turn a first draft into a publishable work. In fact, both of them are models of perseverance and also incredibly generous to fellow writers, including the not yet published, and to their readers.

Avery:  I love Liz’s passion for dark material. She digs in deeply to issues and doesn’t shy away from them. I love her ability to write wonderful prose and beautiful short stories, too. She was the first I knew of to make a trailer for her book. Cleverly she used her husband to play the part of the dead body.

Liz:  That’s funny, because I think my work is hilarious. I don’t think the novels and stories about recovering alcoholics are dark at all, because I see recovery as a passage from hell into the light, like Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso.

 

Krista:  Liz has amazing insights into human nature.  We were walking along the street one day and she said something so profound that it stopped me in my tracks! 

Liz:  It had to do with how you can’t get other people to change, which is a commonplace of my life as a therapist. Even as a shrink, all I can do is try to help my clients identify parts of themselves that trouble them or aren’t working for them and empower them to change from within.

How would you rate online relationships with other writers vs face to face contact? Or is it apples and oranges?

Avery:  It is definitely apples and oranges. I can keep in contact with my online writer friends daily, in a short sentence or two in an email. We can stay in touch, answer a question, send out a tweet of support.  The face to face meetings can last longer and be much more fruitful for brainstorming and talking about deeper publishing issues. Both are so worthwhile. I think that’s why conferences work. Often we meet our online buddies in person and the friendships deepen at those times.

Liz:  I think they’re equally important, because each way of connecting has its strengths. I live in New York City. Krista lives in Western Virginia, while Avery has moved twice since we met and currently lives in Southern California.

Krista:  It’s probably easier for writers in New York or LA to find other people who write in the same genre.  That’s really not an option for me.  If  I lived in a place where Sisters In Crime or Mystery Writers of America had regular meetings, I would love to participate.  I always look forward to catching up with Liz and Avery at writing conventions.  Even though we’re in touch online, it’s nice to sit back with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and talk.

Liz:  It’s funny, but I was going to say just the opposite. We became close friends more quickly than, say, friends I see monthly at meetings of the New York chapters of MWA and Sisters in Crime, because on the Guppies e-list, we could communicate daily. One to one, the Internet lends itself to the exchange of manuscript critiques or publishing tips. Since we all express ourselves well in written words, we can even lend each other a virtual shoulder to cry on when we hit a creative or professional obstacle. On the other hand, when we see each other f2f at Malice or Bouchercon, a certain amount of squealing and hugging goes on, and I treasure that.

Tell us about your latest work and upcoming projects.

Liz:  Death Will Extend Your Vacation is just out. It’s the third novel in my series about recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler and his friends, Barbara the world-class codependent and Jimmy the computer genius. In this one, they take shares in a lethal clean and sober group house in the Hamptons. I think it’s a lot of fun. I also have a novella-length paranormal whodunit, “Shifting Is for the Goyim,” up on Untreed Reads (available in all e-formats and with various e-booksellers) and a story about art theft at the Metropolitan Museum coming out soon in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The other just-out project I’m immensely proud of is Outrageous Older Woman, my album of original songs (available as CD and mp3 download on cdbaby.com and my music site at lizzelvin.com). It’s a bargain at $10, and I hope all my reader and writer friends will take a chance on it. :)

Avery:  My latest book is Clobbered by Camembert, the third in A Cheese Shop Mystery series. It launched February 7, 2012 and has done very well. I have been contracted to write five in the series, so far, and all five have been turned in to the publisher. Currently, I am working on a new cozy mystery series, which will be published under my real name, Daryl Wood Gerber. It is also for Berkley and will debut the summer of 2013.

Krista:  The sixth book in the Domestic Diva Mystery series,  The Diva Digs Up the Dirt, will be released on June 5th.  My previous book, The Diva Haunts the House, crawled up to number twenty-seven on the New York Times bestseller list, surprising everyone – especially me!






Avery, me, Liz and Krista at the Agatha Awards Banquet, Malice Domestic - May 2012

How a Poet Became a Mystery Writer by Elizabeth Zelvin

 Elizabeth Zelvin is a New York City psychotherapist whose story, “The Green Cross,” is up for an Agatha Award for Best Short Story, her third nomination in this category. Her mystery series about recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler includes Death Will Get You Sober, Death Will Help You Leave Him, and the forthcoming Death Will Extend Your Vacation.  You can read “The Green Cross” and learn more about Liz and her writing at www.elizabethzelvin.com. She blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters. 

 

How a Poet Became a Mystery Writer

Elizabeth Zelvin

I found out my host today, Kaye Barley, liked poetry when she mentioned on Facebook that she’d been reading the work of former poet laureate Billy Collins. She, in turn, didn’t know that I’d been a poet for more than thirty years. I sent her a copy of my second book of poetry, Gifts and Secrets: Poems of the Therapeutic Relationship. And voilà! I knew what I’d write about for my guest appearance on her blog.

Although I became a poet long before getting my first mystery published, I discovered mysteries a decade before I started reading poetry. I was a college English major who chose the field because I loved reading novels. I remember saying, “I don’t have a poetic sensibility,” meaning that I had to study poetry but didn’t get it, probably because my male professors never taught the accessible, deeply felt poetry I could have related to. My conversion to mystery reader came right after college, when someone handed me a copy of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise. And I started writing poetry a decade later, eventually having many poems in journals and two books published by a good small press. I wrote three mysteries during the same period, but none of them found a publisher, which is probably a good thing.

For me, poetry and fiction are connected in a number of crucial ways: story telling, voice, and accessibility. I’m proud to say that nobody has ever said, “I didn’t understand your poem.” My poems are about people (myself or others) to whom something happens. So are my novels and short stories. My goal as both poet and fiction writer is to move readers (or listeners) to laughter and tears. On occasion, I’ve achieved that goal, and it means far more to me than financial success—luckily! Many of my poems end with a punch line, often a line taken from real life speech. That’s not too different from the proverbial “twist at the end” of a good short story. When I discovered flash fiction, I was confident that I could meet the challenge of telling a story in less than a thousand words because, as a poet, I’d told stories in a hundred or two hundred words.

I’ve written both poetry and fiction on the themes I feel passionate about, including alcoholism and recovery, relationships, being a woman, and being Jewish. With Passover only a week away, I’ll share two poems that I like to read at our family’s Seder. The first, “Passover,” recounts some of my own family’s history and appeared in my first book of poems, I Am the Daughter. The second, “Miriam,” turns an incident from the Exodus involving the sister of Moses into a character-driven story. It first appeared in the journal Poetica, and I would be delighted for readers to incorporate it into their own Seder.

Passover

my father revels in his role of patriarch

in velvet skullcap and white turtleneck

he looks, by some irony, like the pope:

He works for one of our boys, says my father

this is his night in this house of women

who snub patriarchy on all occasions

whose strength overflows the crucible

of faith and family it is his night

to make it sing

we break unleavened bread together

without politics

he is telling it for all of us

the only grandchild

(Do I have to listen to the boring part?)

my mother, the proud Hungarian

with her doctorate and law degree

for whom even the prayer over the candles

—women’s work—remains a mystery

for me, who never went to synagogue

who never suffered as a Jew

for my Irish lover, here for the first time

to whom I am serving up my childhood

on the Pesach plates

for Aunt Hilda, who married out

and Uncle Bud, who was my friend who isn’t Jewish

thirty years ago

at 79 my father has forgotten stories

muffs the accent sometimes the punchline

no longer knows the name of every lawyer in New York

but tonight he is clear as wine fresh as a photograph

confident and plump as the turkey itself

awaiting its turn in the kitchen

tonight he is the raconteur I remember

as cherished and familiar as the books the cloth the china

the Hebrew words I cannot understand

the melody I miss at anybody else’s Seder

that my father and Aunt Anna with her trained soprano

learned in Hebrew school as children

all I have traveled back, back to see and hear

measuring his audience

expanding in the warm room like love

my father pours the wine

skips the prosy rabbis arguing

and tells instead the illustrated Bible story:

Moses in the bulrushes cruel Pharaoh the Red Sea parting

Let my people go

or I’ll give you what for

says my father

Miriam

the men sit perched on rocks

their faces grimed

furrowed with runnels of sweat

their sandals crusted in Red Sea salt

stunned by their change of fortune

the power in Moses’ staff

the thunder of the sea overrunning Pharoah

the scream of terrified horses

the crack of chariots breaking up

the wall of water at their heels

they stare outward into the desert

will not meet one another’s eyes

Miriam moves among the women

offering one the water skin

another a cloth to wipe her dusty feet

a quiet word here

there a hand pressed gently on a shoulder

crouched where they dropped when Moses called a halt

they have instinctively formed a circle

Miriam completes her round

pours the last few drops of water

on a corner of her shawl

passes it across her face

shaking off weariness like a scratchy cloak

she gathers them with her eyes

her slow smile blossoms

“Ladies,” she says, “we’re free!”

“Who wants to dance?”

A Trip to Boone by Elizabeth Zelvin

Elizabeth Zelvin is a New York City psychotherapist who writes mysteries about recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler and his friends. The new one, DEATH WILL HELP YOU LEAVE HIM, is in stores now. The first was DEATH WILL GET YOU SOBER. The series includes three published short stories, one nominated for an Agatha award. Liz’s author website is www.elizabethzelvin.com. She blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters.

(where Liz does her writing)

A Trip to Boone by Elizabeth Zelvin

Everybody on DorothyL, where I met Kaye Barley, knows that Kaye lives on a mountaintop in Boone. I don’t know why I assumed she lived in Kentucky, unless it’s the legendary Daniel Boone’s connection with that state. There’s a Boone County, Kentucky, but no town of that name. Nope, our Kaye lives in Boone, North Carolina, one of my favorite states and one that nowadays is chock full of writers. It’s in the mountains at the western end of the state, around two hours’ drive from Asheville and twenty minutes or so from Blowing Rock.

I got this straight after a couple of North Carolina writer friends, Maggie Bishop and Schuyler Kaufman, got me invited to Boone to speak to a group called High Country Writers in November, during my tour of North Carolina to promote my new mystery, DEATH WILL HELP YOU LEAVE HIM. It was a flying visit—is there any other kind on a book tour?—and Kaye, as it happened, was slated to be out of town for the twenty-four hours I was there. But more than thirty writers showed up to hear me talk about how to write about social issues—without getting preachy.

I write about recovery from alcoholism and codependency—or in the vernacular, booze and bad relationships, which I’m sure are as endemic in North Carolina as in my own New York or anywhere else on the planet. Social issues? Well, no one can deny that addictions and domestic violence are social issues. But they’re always deeply personal as well. On topics I’m passionate about, I’m tempted as I write to mount my hobby horse and ride madly off in all directions (to paraphrase Stephen Leacock). My first drafts are preachy as all get-out. So the one word “how-to” on the subject is: Revise! Being a gabby New Yorker, luckily, I found lots more to say.















My honorarium for the event was a night on a mountaintop, not in Boone, but in Blowing Rock, a spectacularly beautiful dot on the map with a 360 degree view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and winds so fierce that it’s said that in winter, the snow flies upward. The rock itself comes with a legend that involves the ubiquitous Indian maiden—though I liked the local twist, which included the boyfriend, not the maiden, plunging off the rock and a happy ending when the updraft blows him back into her arms.



















I stayed at Gideon Ridge Inn, an upscale hostelry a short stroll away from the actual rock, where my private stone terrace had a breathtaking mountain view. I spent most of the rainy afternoon curled up in a wing chair by the fire with a pot of tea and a plate of little sandwiches and homemade mini pastries close at hand. The massive carving in the picture isn’t a totem pole, it’s the southwest post of my four-poster bed. And the photo shows no more than one-quarter of my room.

In the morning, the rain had stopped, and I got a good look at Blowing Rock with plenty of photo ops. Then I drove down to Boone to give my talk. Afterward, the writers took me out to lunch in town. I’d expressed a preference for the local cuisine, ie barbecue, so a bunch of us piled into a down-home bistro with a snarling representative of the local fauna hanging over us as we ate. He must have been a critic in another life. My only regret on leaving Boone was that I couldn’t stay longer. I’ll have to go back some day—and if I’m lucky, Kaye will be home.