#CHRISTMAS MEMORIES WITH AUTHOR JANIS PATERSON

Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson is a 7th-generation Texan and a 3rd-generation wordsmith who writes in mystery, romance, and horror. Learn more about her and her books at her websites: www.JanisSusanMayAuthor.com and www.JanisPattersonMysteries.com.

Christmas Memories

Christmas! Just the mention of the word evokes images of snow and family togetherness and a decorated tree and presents... Some people don't like Christmas for reasons of their own, but I love Christmas because of all the happy memories involved.

When I was a child the entire family - aunts, uncles, cousins of several generations - would gather for Christmas day at my grandparents' house in a small town in North Texas. The house was built in the 1880s and was very cold, but we didn't care. Each family had had their 'tree' as we called presents and Santa in their own home, either on Christmas Eve or early Christmas morning, then all would trek up to the family home. My grandmother didn't decorate beyond a tree - usually a small one set on a table in the corner of the seldom-used parlor. One year it was made of blue net, which was very strange.

We had presents, but not very many and not very grand. Usually the children under 10 or so got presents from everyone, but the rest drew names. We weren't a wealthy family, at least not in money. What I remember most fondly, though, is not the presents - I cherish the memories of love and fun and togetherness... and the food. Especially the food.

Every family brought a dish and the old round table from the 1840s in the kitchen (which is now my breakfast table) couldn't hold it all, so the dishes spread out over the counters and stove. My mother made superb pies and always took six or eight - and none of them ever came home. Our cuisine was ample, but basically simple. Ambrosia salad. Green bean casserole. Several kinds of stuffing. Corn, either plain or in casserole, sometimes both. Turkey. Ham. Occasionally a roast. Sweet potatoes - yes, with pineapple and marshmallows. Green peas and pearl onions. Irish potatoes cooked in several ways. Sometimes fried okra, freshly cooked just before we started to eat. And of course, iced tea to drink. There was no alcohol of any kind at any gathering at my grandparents' house.

We had the tree first, all of us oohing and aahing over everyone's gifts no matter what they were, and then we migrated to the kitchen. Dinner usually lasted most of the day. After the first heaping plateful we would all sit around, talking primarily - ours was a 'talking' family - while our dinner 'settled,' then we would mosey back to the kitchen for a little snack. Sometimes several times.

So many children today miss the wonderful experience of an extended family. We did not. My grandparents' siblings came to dinner, and sometimes some of their children if they were in town. Some members brought friends who would have no place else to go. Boyfriends and girlfriends were welcome. My grandmother's sister had died in the Spanish influenza epidemic right after World War I, but her widower - and his second wife! - came to our Christmas regularly, and were very welcome. I was nearly grown before I figured out that neither of them was a blood relation!

There were games, too. We children spent hours playing cards or Chinese checkers on an ancient board that had been my grandfather's as a boy. Sometimes the men played gin rummy. The women talked. If the weather was nice, we children would run off our energy playing games outside, either in the yard or in the old barn on the back of the property.

When it finally got into late afternoon, the women would go into the kitchen; some would clean up while others divided the leftovers (usually enough for two meals for a family - I said there was a lot!) so each group would have some to take home. No leftovers since have ever tasted so good.

Lois asked for a photograph germane to my post, but there isn't one. Few of us had cameras, and if there were pictures made, I don't know of any that have survived. It's a pity, but the images in my heart can never fade. So - I must ask you to use your imagination to picture the scene; a Norman Rockwell-type image would do nicely, because it was just that lovely.

My grandparents' generation is gone now, as is my parents'. I am now the oldest on both sides of my family - a fact that never ceases to astonish me. The old house was sold long ago, and the younger generations have scattered across the world. Which is the way of things, and is perhaps good, because there is no way we could ever recapture that feeling of wonder, of family, of hope, of love.

By the way, my Christmas release this year is a tasty little novella of murder and mayhem called Killing Harvey, where on Christmas morning the most unpleasant family member was discovered stabbed. And garrotted. And possibly poisoned. It's sort of a funny story. However - please rest assured that my family was nothing like that one!

Merry Christmas!

Killing Harvey

It was a killer Christmas…

By all accounts it should have been a perfect holiday. A beautiful, elegant house. Rebecca’s future relatives all together, talking happily about her upcoming Christmas afternoon wedding to Peter. A gorgeous tree surrounded by presents. A Christmas-card perfect snowfall.

But the snowfall turned into a freak blizzard, trapping Rebecca and Peter in with his family. Then, once the house was completely isolated and no one could enter or leave, the most obnoxious member of the family is found stabbed. And garroted. And perhaps poisoned. Who really killed Harvey… and how?

Can Rebecca solve this murder? More importantly, does she really want to?

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AUTHOR JANIS SUSAN MAY/JANIS PATTERSON ON STOLEN ANTIQUITIES

Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson is a 7th-generation Texan who writes mystery, romance, and horror. She’s also an enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist whose husband proposed to her in a moonlit garden near the Pyramids of Giza. Today she stops by to talk about her passion for antiquities. Learn more about Janis and her books at her two websites, www.JanisSusanMay.com and www.JanisPattersonMysteries.com.

Graves and Robbers

What is an antiquity? Generally accepted, it means an artifact from an ancient civilization – sort of like an antique antique. While in eras gone past, some governments gave away their antiquities for one reason or another, usually political – such as the Egyptian obelisks in New York and Paris, or the Elgin Marbles in London – or lost them as spoils of war, nowadays governments are very careful about what happens to these artifacts of their history.

Unfortunately, this does not make people stop wanting them. While in modern times antiquities as large as the obelisks or marble sculptures pretty much stay in their home countries, there is unfortunately a brisk illegal trade in smaller antiquities. Statues, boxes, pieces of pictures, even potsherds and parts of broken artifacts quietly vanish from their rightful place and disappear into a shadowy world of antiquities smuggling and black markets.

Earlier this year I went to Egypt to research A Killing at El Kab, my new mystery novel. One of the characters in this story lost his reputation and chances of ever getting another job in his field (Egyptology) simply because some of the men he worked with were caught smuggling antiquities. He was innocent, but no one believed him except one friend, a man who risked his own reputation to help him get his back.

A country’s artifacts are their history, and they belong to the country and its people. Unfortunately, though, some people don’t get the message. I’ll talk about Egypt, simply because I know the situation there the best, but this kind of history-theft is common all over the world – including in our own country which continues to see theft from our Southwestern Native American sites.

There is poverty in Egypt, and while most of the population reveres their heritage and abhors any kind of theft, there are those who are tempted by the huge sums some will pay for a true Egyptian antiquity, especially one in very good condition. I am not talking about a tiny, undistinguished potsherd, either. (My personal opinion is that the Egyptian government is missing a bet by not selling these chunks of broken pottery, as there are literally billions of them lying around, sometimes in hills the size of a football field and as high as a two story house.) I’m talking about beautiful, singular works of art. Statues. Jewelry. Votive objects. One-of-a-kind things. Even scenes painted on tomb walls, pictures cut from the living rock and as often as not broken, ruined and discarded in the process.

These works of art, these pieces of history, then vanish from the country by means both simple and arcane. Some are covered in plaster and sent out in the middle of a shipment of tourist souvenirs. Others are smuggled out across an unguarded strip of border. There are unscheduled, low-altitude flights of private planes over desolate wastes. Sometimes officials hired to protect these treasures succumb to the lure of bribery. Some brave souls simply tuck their booty into a roll of dirty socks and carry it out in a suitcase – though in these days of heightened security this way is quickly becoming both obsolete and dangerous. The truth is, though, if a buyer with enough money wants an artifact, a way will be found to get it. Then this treasured piece of the past will probably vanish, either never to be seen again, or for many, many years. People who buy smuggled antiquities usually don’t share them with the rest of the world.

The final tragedy is that if the antiquity is ever recovered, it is useless scientifically. Without a provenance – a record of where, when and how it was found in relation to what and by whom – the artifact becomes just a pretty thing lost in time.

And that isn’t the worst. Archaeologists have been apostrophized as being grave robbers and desecrators of the dead, but that’s not true. Real archaeologists treat human remains and ancient cultures with great respect. They are there to study the lives and civilization of the peoples whom they excavate and in a way make them live again. Not so the artifact seeking grave robbers whose only motive is profit.

Archaeology is a respectful science. Black market antiquities collectors respect nothing but their own wants. A country loses its heritage and for what? So that a criminal who thinks nothing of defiling not only his own heritage but his ancestors’ graves can earn a little money? Antiquities theft and smuggling are obscenities that must be stopped.

Curse of the Exile

Born in Italy the year Victoria ascended to the throne, then sent to a servants’ school in England by a vengeful aunt, Angelina Barstow has finally found what she thinks is her life’s calling – working as an assistant to her feckless librarian father.

Even as she longs for a home and love Angelina survives, dealing with life as it comes to her, enduring the deliberate cruelty of her aunt, the put-downs of their latest employer’s snobbish aunt, her rakish father’s addiction to women and the sudden, unwanted reappearance of the bounder who broke her heart years before. When the laird who has employed them appears to return her unspoken feelings Angelina is overjoyed even though she knows theirs is a love that cannot be. A poor laird cannot marry a penniless librarian’s assistant and Angelina can consider nothing less than marriage.

Hidden treasure, an ancient haunting, two tragic deaths and a curse from long ago all combine not only to threaten Angelina’s life but to give her a chance at unimagined happiness.

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BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR JANIS PATTERSON

Today we welcome back Janis Patterson who writes mysteries as Janis Patterson, romances and other things as Janis Susan May, children’s books as Janis Susan Patterson, and non-fiction and scholarly works as J.S.M. Patterson. Learn more about Janis and her books at her website. -- AP 

The Perils of Having A Writing Wife

I married late, well after my writing career was started, so The Husband knew exactly what he was getting. Sort of.

A down-to-earth and sublimely practical man of science well into a long and honorable military career, he knew I was a writer of fiction. He also knew that writers were thought to be eccentric. He just didn’t know how much.

Luckily he is a courageous and adaptable man, for as our marriage progressed, he learned more than I think he ever wanted to know about the unknown side of writing.

For example, he will leave in the morning after kissing a pajama-clad me in my office, already sitting eye-to-eye with the computer. He will come home some eight or nine hours later to find a pajama-clad me in my office, exhausted and emotional, sitting eye-to-eye with the computer. The laundry is undone, the bed unmade, dinner is a frozen lump still in the freezer, and I will look up in surprise, asking if he didn’t leave just a little while ago.

He has gotten used to me murmuring the name of my hero (or villain) in my sleep.

He has finally learned to accept that when I am asked what I do, I smile sweetly, give the questioner my best grandmotherly twinkle and say in soft, mellifluous tones, “I kill people.”

He no longer becomes alarmed when he finds books on poisons larded among my cookbooks.

He has become accustomed to my handing out business cards (with my websites only – no phone or address) prodigiously and has even learned to carry a few of them in his wallet. Apparently being married to a multi-published novelist carries a certain cachet.

I’m glad, because on retrospect I’m not sure writing is a lifestyle I would have chosen. I believe that almost anyone can write, given enough time, training and work, but that writers cannot help but write – it is an inescapable part of them, like some sort of birth defect. He has learned that when I stop in mid-word, my face goes blank and my eyes focus on some distant point that I am not having a fit, merely an idea. This is usually followed by a frantic scribbling on anything around, from a cocktail napkin to the back of my hand. He now realizes that I carry enormous purses not for make-up or other feminine junk, but to accommodate my tiny notebook computer, which he calls my ‘purse computer.’

Unfortunately, the creation of worlds and populations on little more than caffeine and imagination can be an unsettling process for a non-writer. Currently I am working on a book set in contemporary Egypt about the race to find a lost tomb. One of the side effects is a profusion of photographs of obscure archaeological sites blooming all over my office. Another is that our dinner menu has suddenly leaned heavily towards kushari, kibbe, hummus and tabouli. Luckily The Husband is as big an Egyptophile as I (doesn’t everyone know by now that he proposed to me in Egypt?) and he takes this with equanimity.

I’m not always that lucky. While writing Dark Music before my marriage, I lived in an apartment. The hero was a concert pianist who specialized in Chopin. I played Chopin almost 24/7 for the three months it took to write the novel. Though I tried to be quiet and respectful, before long my neighbors were begging to know when I would finish the book.

When I was writing The Hallow House, a cozy mystery set in 1919, I pestered The Husband about WWI and suitable firearms. Being something of a WWI/WWII historian, he happily complied.

He was less happy when, at a very crowded local gun show, we saw an automatic M96 Mauser Pistol Rifle, the firearm I had decided on for my villain to use. It’s a very distinctive and rather rare piece. I pointed it out gleefully and said to The Husband, “Look, darling, isn’t that what I used to kill Jake?” The gun show might have been packed, but suddenly there wasn’t a single person within arm’s length of me for a long time.

Due to several ancient accidents, I sometimes have a slight limp, especially when I’m tired. In Exercise is Murder, my latest release, the heroine has a severe limp, though hers was caused by a bullet wound. As my tattered and beloved sweatshirt says, “It’s All Research.” The Husband has become accustomed to my asking all kinds of sometimes bizarre questions wherever we go.

I’d like to say I’m strong-minded enough to keep control of my characters, to keep them on the page instead of letting them seep into my life, but I’m not. As every character, good and bad, shares at least a few aspects of its creator, so does the creator reflect – at least temporarily – a modicum of the character. We create our characters from the inside out, and I believe the scientific fact that when two things touch, there is inevitable transfer from each to the other, however small. 

I realized that The Husband has not only learned but accepted this, for when I am in full damn-the-torpedoes-and-write-mode, so submerged in the story that I never get out of my pajamas and we survive on take-out suppers, he has developed the habit of peering around my office door and asking, “And who are we today?”

Maybe he’s lucky. He remains faithful, but still gets to live with a wide variety of women, all in one package.  He married a writer.

  

Exercise is Murder

Invalided out of the police, Rebecca Cloudwebb has become an antiques dealer. While delivering some earrings, Rebecca witnesses the brutal murder of Laura Tyler, a harmless widow. Almost everyone connected with the murder has multiple reasons to kill everyone else connected with the murder, but no one had any motive to poison Laura Tyler. A mad mix of politics, big money, extra-marital affairs, blackmail, strong personalities, gambling and assorted secrets, the mystery proves almost impossible to solve, but solve it Rebecca does, and in the process learns something about her own problems since the shooting that crippled her.

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BOOK CLUB FRIDAY -- GUEST AUTHOR JANIS SUSAN MAY PATTERSON

Our guest author today is Janis Susan May Patterson who writes mysteries as Janis Patterson, romances and other things as Janis Susan May, children’s books as Janis Susan Patterson and scholarly works as J.S.M. Patterson. Learn more about Janis and her books by visiting her websites: www.JanisSusanMay.com and www.JanisPattersonMysteries.com. -- AP

Who, What, When, Where, Why and How: Roadmap for a Story

Back in my long-ago journalism days we had a mantra of questions that had to be used on every story – Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. I was raised in a newspapering family, so that was drilled into me from toddler years.

When I decided to start writing novels, I was pleasantly surprised to find that those same queries – with just a little rearranging of emphasis and timing – fit quite well into books of any genre, be it romance, mystery, whatever. Those six questions are the backbone of a story.

They fit especially well into mystery. In The Hollow House, an historical cozy murder mystery, I had two ‘Who’ questions – Who was the killer, and Who was the heroine? As she admitted from the first, she was using another name and running away from something. What was equally split – What happened at the Stubbs mansion and What was the heroine hiding from?

When was pretty obvious; the action in the Stubbs mansion unfolded in front of the reader. The When (and the What and the Why) of the heroine’s past was doled out in small bites. The Where of the story was again fairly obvious, but done with care. I am a firm believer that the location of a story is as much a character in the action as any of the breathing participants. Sometimes more. Nearly all the action in The Hollow House takes place inside the Stubbs mansion, and I did that for two reasons. First, that was the only logical place I could get and keep all my disparate characters in one place long enough to interact. Second, it was a crafty bit of subtext and nuance to show how constrained and restricted women’s lives were at the time. The Hollow House takes place in 1919.

Why and How are usually the biggies and they wind up the story. The cause of death may have been a simple gunshot, but How did the murderer get into a position to do that and not get caught – at least until the end of the book? Or, to use a different twist, How asks which way was the murder committed and How was it done. Why is pretty much self explanatory, as it is part of the reasoning process by which the sleuth solves the mystery as well – in many cases – the reason for the story itself.

In other genres the correlations are still there, but not necessarily quite so straightforward. In my March 12 release, Inheritance of Shadows, a traditional Gothic romance, there are two mysteries – What happened to the heroine’s father, an author of high fantasy novels, twenty five years ago and What is happening to the heroine now? Who is responsible and Why is he/she/they/it doing it? (I’m not giving away any hints!) Where is again as important as any human character, in this case a grand Connecticut estate and a small, exclusive college.

When again is two-fold; What happened twenty-five years ago and How does it correlate to what is happening now? In the case of Inheritance of Shadows, the heroine’s very perception of reality is challenged; is the fantasy world her father created, the world that still draws fans to his books and inspires costumed conventions, truly and absolutely fictitious?

I’m not telling the solution to either book. When you read, use Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How to see if you can see the author’s thread of thought. If you write, try Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How as a starting point for your outline. It works.

Thanks for joining us today, Janis! -- AP