The Simple Writer's Life by Vicki Delany

Vicki Delany writes everything from standalone novels of suspense (Burden of Memory, Scare the Light Away) to the Constable Molly Smith series, a traditional village/police procedural series set in the B.C. Interior (In the Shadow of the Glacier, Valley of the Lost), to a light-hearted historical series (Gold Fever, Gold Digger) set in the raucous heyday of the Klondike Gold Rush. Winter of Secrets, published by Poisoned Pen Press in November of 2009, received a starred review

from Publishers Weekly, which said, “She uses a bare-bones style, without literary flash, to achieve artistry as sturdy and restrained as a Shaker chair. Warmth and menace, past and present, are nicely balanced, with a denouement that’s equally plausible and startling.  This confident performance is sure to win new fans to the series.” Vicki lives in rural Prince Edward County, Ontario, where she rarely wears a watch. She blogs with five other mystery writers about the craft and business of writing at Type M for Murder (http://typem4murder.blogspot.com), about mysteries and food at Fatal Foodies (http://fatalfoodies.blogspot.com) Follow Vicki on Twitter @vickidelany. The first chapters of several of her books are posted on her web page so you can get a taste at www.vickidelany.com

The Simple Writer’s Life
By Vicki Delany


I used to be what I called a Sunday Writer. I was a single mother of three kids with a full time job as a computer programmer. I wanted to be a writer, but about the only time I had to myself to write was the occasional Sunday afternoon.

Time passed, as it does, and the children grew up. And then they moved out of the house. Yippee! I was still working, but now I was able to write every evening when I got home from the office.

In 2007 I was lucky enough to be able to take early retirement. I sold my house in the suburbs of a big city and followed my dream to a small rural property in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

And now I can write whenever I like!

I am living the writer’s life because I am content with the simple life. I don’t make much money at this – not many people do.

I don’t have fancy electronics – my TV gets one channel and I don’t have an iPhone or an iPad. I drive a five year old Corolla. I don’t eat out much or buy fast food, and do all my own cooking. I don’t need clothes any fancier than for appearances at bookstores and libraries. I keep my house at a temperature my children call bone-chilling, and rarely go to movies, preferring to read. Reading is still the best value for money you’ll get anywhere in terms of entertainment.

My writing income mostly pays for my writing out-go. Conferences (I was so pleased to meet

Kaye last year at Bouchercon in Indianapolis) and book tours, such as last year’s wonderful tour with Deborah Turrell Atkinson to Hawaii, California, Arizona, and Washington. I go on research trips – a couple of weeks ago I went to New York City to do some location research for an upcoming book - you probably don’t need me to tell you that Manhattan isn’t cheap. I’ve been to Whitehorse and Dawson City, Yukon digging up historical facts for the Gold Rush books.

When I’m at home, I write every day. Seven days a week. Usually for about three to four hours in the morning. In the summer, I then work in the garden and in the winter, don’t do much now that I think of it.

I’m enjoying life in the country. I started a vegetable patch last year, and this year I’m planning to double the size. The tomatoes on the kitchen counter in the picture were all from my garden. There is absolutely nothing in the world that tastes as good as a cherry tomatoes picked and eaten on the spot. And lettuce you’ve grown yourself? You’ll wonder what that stuff they sell in the supermarket really is. I filled the freezer with pasta sauce and soup and frozen berries I picked myself, and this year I plan to enlarge the size of my freezer.

Living in the country occasionally has its drawbacks.

There have been some surprises. Like when I came home from my vacation with my family after New Years last year to find three feet of water in the basement. Literally. The sump pump had failed and it had turned warm and all the snow had melted. My house is well over one hundred years old (the fulfillment of another dream) so the basement is just a cellar, with nothing much in it to be destroyed. Except the furnace, which was.

Furnace replaced.

A few days later the brand-new furnace stopped working. I’d run out of propane. How should I know you’re supposed to order propane? In the city this sort of stuff just arrives all by itself.

Fortunately the house has a wood burning stove as well as the furnace so I was able to use it to heat the house while waiting for propane delivery.

Get the propane tank filled and gag at the expense. Wow.

The wood burning stove worked so well, I decided to start using it more to save on propane, so I ordered more wood as the stuff the previous owners left was running out. I phoned the supplier and asked for a cord. I had absolutely no idea how much that is. He suggested that as the delivery charge was the same, I should get two cords. Okay, two cords it is.

When he pulled up with a trailer piled high with wood, I thought, “I guess he has several other deliveries to make.” He backed the trailer up in front of the garage and dumped all that wood on the driveway.

Oh dear.

I spent three days moving and stacking wood.

Life has its ups and downs, as always. But I am living my dream.

The simple writer’s life.

Dodge City Run by the NWMP by Vicki Delany

Vicki Delany writes everything from standalone novels of suspense (Burden of Memory, Scare the Light Away) to a traditional village/police procedural series set in B.C. (Valley of the Lost, In the Shadow of the Glacier) to a light-hearted historical series (Gold Digger) set during the Klondike Gold Rush. In April 2007, Vicki took early retirement from her job as a systems analyst and sold her house in Oakville, Ontario. After a year travelling across North America, she is now setting down to the rural life in Prince Edward County, where she rarely wears a watch. Her next novel is Winter of Secrets, coming in November from Poisoned Pen Press, the third in the Constable Molly Smith series. Vicki's web site is www.vickidelany.com and she blogs at Type M for Murder (http://typem4murder.blogspot.com), and Fiona MacGillivray and Constable Molly Smith blog at http://klondikeandtrafalgar.blogspot.com/

Watch the exciting trailer for Valley of the Lost,





Dodge City Run by the NWMP
By Vicki Delany


Thanks very much to Kaye for giving me space on this wonderful blog to babble away. First, I’d like to let everyone know about a fabulous little mystery-lovers event coming up. The Wolfe Island Scene of the Crime Festival is held on Wolfe Island (just outside Kingston, Ontario) every summer to celebrate Canadian crime writing. Wolfe Island is the birthplace of Grant Allen, Canada’s first crime writer, and the Grant Allen Award is given every year to recognize a pioneer in Canadian crime writing. This year’s festival is on Saturday August 15th. The guest of honour, and Grand Allen Award Recipient, will be Peter Robinson. Sandra Parshall and others of split personality would love it: the Festival is small and intimate. You need to take a short (free) ferry ride from Kingston, Ontario to get there, and your ticket gives you not only authors’ readings, a lecture on a subject of interest to mystery fans, an authors’ panel, an interview with Peter Robinson, plenty of time to meet and greet and buy books and have them signed, but you ALSO get lunch and a proper Church Supper. Can’t be beat. For more info and to buy tickets, please go to www.sceneofthecrime.ca. I am giving the workshop this year (part of the Festival, but an additional fee to attend) and the topic is Creating Fully Realized Characters: Protagonist, Villain and Everyone in Between.

Back to our regularly scheduled programme. I enjoyed the piece by Ken Lewis about how dark influences in his life are reflected in his fiction. By contrast, my newest book, Gold Digger: A Klondike Mystery, came from a happy place in my life. I was on a wilderness canoeing trip in Ontario’s Algonquin Park some years ago. Sitting around the campfire watching stars, listening to the wind in the trees and the waves lapping against the rock, we chatted about nothing in particular, as people do in those circumstances. I commented on how strange our ancestors would have thought us – to be paying good money, and using our valuable vacation time, to do what they would have thought of as sheer hardship. Several of the people on the trip were Europeans so I began telling them about the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-99 and the incredible journey over the mountains the gold-seekers had to endure to get there.

Wouldn’t that make a nice setting for a mystery novel, I thought, and the idea for Gold Digger was born.

You may have heard the phrase by the late Sir Peter Ustinov that Toronto is “New York run by the Swiss.” I like to say that Dawson, Yukon, in 1898, was Dodge City run by the North West Mounted Police.

Imagine a place in the wilderness, close to the Arctic Circle, hundreds of miles from the nearest city. A place of no roads, no cars, no trains, no telegraph. Accessible only by water, for just a few months a year, or by paths over mountains so steep that horses couldn’t make it. And then imagine tens of thousands of people arriving in this place within a matter of months.

What you would get in almost any other place and any other time would be bedlam. Chaos and anarchy and lawlessness.

But what they did have in the Yukon was the North West Mounted Police (precursors of the RCMP). The border between Canada and the U.S. was at that time still in dispute. The Canadian government had established a police presence in order to strengthen their claim. So what all those miners dance hall owners, prostitutes and pimps, bartenders and adventurers, and businessmen (respectable and shady) found when they finally arrived in the promised land, was the long arm of the law waiting for them.

At that time prostitution and gambling were illegal in all parts of Canada. But the NWMP recognized, wisely in my opinion, that some things were going to happen whether they were legal or not, and the police would be better off having some control. Thus prostitution was practiced openly and dance halls all had a gambling room. Police oversight was strict and they could, and did, close down any business stepping over the line. At the same there were things the Mounties didn’t bend on – the use of ‘vile language’ was an offence, and Sunday closing was strictly observed. People were jailed for chopping wood for their own homes on a Sunday. Guns were strictly banned. Every person coming into the Territory was required to have a year’s supply of goods with them: A lesson learned during the previous winter when the town nearly starved. Not only did all those adventure-and-gold seekers have to climb the Chilkoot Pass they had to do it about 30 or 40 times to get all their gear up. Tougher people than me I can tell you.

In 1898, the year of the height of the Gold Rush, when the town of Dawson had a population of 40,000, there was not one murder in town. Not one. Reports I have read say that people were comfortable leaving their doors unlocked and their possessions out in the open. In contrast to the nearby town of Skagway, Alaska, where gangsters such as Soapy Smith ruled and crime and corruption was rampant.

In a town where a one minute dance with a dance hall girl cost a dollar, and a bottle of champagne would set you back 40 bucks, and successful miners were known to drop a thousand, ten thousand dollars (all in 1898 funds!) in a night in the casino, a constable in the NWMP earned $1.25 a day (which was roughly the rate for a labourer in the Outside). Yet the police were largely incorruptible.

I have attempted to capture that contrast between a wild frontier settlement and a well-policed Canadian town in Gold Digger, and to largely stay in that ‘happy place’ that was the origins of the book. Because it is, after all, a mystery novel, I have had to ignore the no-murder record of the NWMP.

Sometimes, you just can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.