I have been having a lot of fun writing the Abigail stories lately. So much fun, in fact, that I have left off the completion of the two Phillip Gold mystery stories entirely. I'll get back to them, no doubt, especially since one is just about ready to be printed and sent off to a mystery magazine or two in hopes of getting it published.

What has surprised me, however, is the fact that I am REALLY enjoying writing these stories for children. So far, I've written six — four of them are available on this website (click on "McAdam Station", then "Abigail" to find them) — and they're rolling off my fingers like magic. I sit down with a basic concept in mind (like, Abigail and the Skating Champion or Abigail finds a Puppy) and out they come, complete with a fairly decent plot, a nice escalation of tension and a fitting, appropriate climax and outcome. It's really quite amazing to me. No, I'm not saying they're classics of kid lit but I think they're pretty good.

I've always thought of myself as a mystery writer — a hard-boiled mystery writer, in fact — but I'm starting to see something of a pattern here. While the Phillip Gold material flows fairly well, I still have to plan it very carefully and I still run into blocks and barriers and have to pause for a day or more before I can get back on track. These Abigail stories, like the Shirtless Joe novella (click on "Fiction", then "Shirtless Joe") that I wrote in just three days for the infamous Three-Day-Novel contest last year, seem to write themselves.

And it's not just that I find the mystery stuff harder to write — my recent introduction to Dennis Lehane and others has started to make me wonder whether I'm capable of writing the kind of mystery that sells in today's market. I have patterned my writing after Raymond Chandler and his crowd and maybe I have to accept that I'm just not capable of writing the blood-soaked, bullet-ridden sadistic prose that is so popular today. And what I can write won't sell in the 21st century.

I tried to go a little more graphic in the Gold Prequel (click on "Gold Mysteries" and then "Gold Prequel") but it just doesn't feel right. Quite frankly, I'm not even that comfortable having it up on this website for people to read but I'd feel like a quitter if I took it down. I don't like reading about women being raped, tortured and maimed and I really hate feeling like I have to write about it. But it seems that you have to do that to get a sale in this day and age.

So what do I do? What would you do? All of your life, you've thought about yourself in one way and then, slowly but surely, you come to the realisation that you're actually something very different. Do I abandon Gold entirely and focus on lighter, happier stuff?

We'll have to see. Right now, the Abigail stories are just dancing around in my brain, aching to come out. I guess I'll have to see where it takes me.

Tags: Mystery, McAdam Station

A couple of weeks ago, I finished the first draft of a Phillip Gold short story under the working title "Violet". As is my wont, I circulated this draft among my writing colleagues and asked for feedback. Well, I'll be darned if I didn't get feedback — in large portions.

So what do I do now? It's easy when the feedback is consistent from all or most of the readers. You just adopt their suggestions. But what about where one says, "do A", another says, "under no circumstances do A", and a third says, "do A but with the following twist"? Or what do you do when the readers offer consistent suggestions on a particular point but you feel that the suggestions would change the story from being your own to someone else's, that the suggestions conflict with your own personal writing style.

I find the latter two situations very hard but I have developed some strategies. In the first case, I generally try to consider all of the options, think about them in terms of their contribution to the story, their consistency with the tone I've established and whether or not they seem appropriate to me from a character standpoint (would my character do or say this?). I usually go with the option that feels "right" to me and often that means I leave it more or less as I originally wrote it.

In the second case, on the other hand, I have to get into a much more philosophical examination. It usually revolves around my goals in writing the story in the first place. I like and respect my readers and know they are making comments with what they consider to be the best interests of the work in mind. I also know that, in general, they make comments with a view to helping me get my work published. So I have to decide: do I choose what feels most comfortable to me or what creates the best chance for the story to be published?

I'd like to think that the two were always in line with each other. But they're not.

And I have to accept that I want to be published. So sometimes I have to sacrifice.

It's a tough life.

Tags: Phillip Gold, Mystery

I'm experimenting. I'm working on a Phillip Gold short story and I'm writing it in the third-person format — you know, "Gold stood there, looking at his toes" — rather than in first person: "I stood there, looking at my toes". This is the first time I've tried such a thing. It seems foreign to me, odd and different. So yesterday, when I found a half hour to work on the story, I had to fight the inclination to rewrite what I have into the more familiar first-person approach.

What worries me most is that I'm not sure that my inclination to change it is coming from a good place — this is what's best for the story — and not from a bad place: this is what's most comfortable for me.

And I'm also worried that I'm going to continue to use this ridiculous em-dash, em-dash, colon construction throughout this piece. That would be truly tragic.

The third-person approach gives me options, variety, the ability to move out of the main character's mind and into the world. I can even, if I'm really clever, create a personality for my third-person narrative voice and have him/her commenting (either subtly or not so subtly) on the action and the characters. I can describe scenes at which Gold is not present, thus, perhaps, bringing the antagonist to life more effectively or building higher levels of tension. And, let's face it, even Raymond Chandler started running out of ideas on how his first-person narrator (Philip Marlowe) could describe being knocked unconscious: "I heard a bang and a curtain fell."

The first-person approach, on the other hand, lends immediacy to the action. If done well, it can heighten the suspense and bring the reader closer to the protagonist. It also tends to simplify things from a structural standpoint: the reader experiences what the main character experiences. Sometimes it means the reader is solving the mystery alongside (on the shoulder of, in the pocket of) our hero.

So I'm not sure what to do. In reviewing what I've written, I have found that I've included a fairly long scene of dialogue between Gold and his client in order to fill in the background information. I think it's fairly well written but I am also conscious of the fact that, in first person, I could simply have Gold tell us everything in the space of a single paragraph.

And that's another problem. I'm not a big fan of third-person exposition, where the narrator provides the background information to the reader. You've read it: "Gold had heard it all before. She'd grown up on a farm and gotten to know a lot about crops and livestock. When she was sixteen, she left home to open her own grain shop in the city."

I even considered writing it both ways and then letting my writing friends decide. I don't know. I'll have to give it some more thought.

But that's the beauty of writing. You have the time to think things through. Okay, okay, that's the beauty, and the tragedy, of being an unpublished writer. No one's waiting on your manuscript.

Tags: Phillip Gold, Mystery

Do you ever read a published novel and wonder — how did this get published when I can't get my own work out there? Well, I'm a third of the way through Dead and Buried, Howard Engel's 1990 Benny Cooperman mystery, and I'm wondering exactly that. This is as lifeless a book as I have ever read. I keep waiting for it to pick up, to catch a spark. The reviews on the covers are really positive but I can't find much to recommend it so far.

Then I think of what my friend, Lesley, who at that time was involved in the publishing business, said to me after reading a draft of my own first novel. I don't know if she was just being kind but she said something like, "Mark, this is good enough to be published but it is not good enough to get you published." In other words, if you had a strong publishing record, this book would be fine. But it's not good enough to convince a publisher to take a risk by taking on an unproven writer like you.

So maybe that's what is at work here. Engel's book is publishable because his publisher knows there's already an established audience for Cooperman novels that will buy it no matter what. If this were Engel's first novel, it probably wouldn't be published.

So what do I learn from this? Well, I guess the first lesson is that Howard Engel has written at least one book that is better than anything I've written. But we knew that already. The real lesson is that the first breakthrough is the toughest and you have to convince the publisher that your first book is good enough to build an audience from scratch.

I'll be writing a fuller review of this book when (and if) I finish it. So stay tuned.

Tags: Engel, cooperman, Dead and Buried

I have a friend, Ross, who manages to set aside a couple of hours every day for writing. And he's been successful — a published collection of memoirs that has sold more than 2,000 copies and now a three-novel contract with a Toronto publisher for his medical mysteries, including an excellent first novel that is due to be published in spring of 2009.

And I have a friend, John, who is now retired and is a full-time writer. He has completed several novels of exceptional quality and, I trust, is currently in the heavy marketing stage. He certainly delivers the goods and should be able to find an agent and/or publisher fairly quickly.

And then there's me. I struggle to get my life organised enough to set aside two or three hours each day (even one hour would be great) for writing. There's always something that needs to be done: the lawn mown, the dog walked, dinner made, etc. So I end up making very slow progress on my creative work. I wrote my first text book almost 10 years ago at a time when I was still young, I lived in a tiny apartment and my partner was overseas at University. I worked every night after work for two to three hours and finished the 300-page book in just under three months. Amazing, when I think of it now.

So I know I have to start playing with my schedule to figure out when I can write. Ross writes early in the morning, before his work day begins. I could try that. My partner and the dog are usually still asleep then so I would have fewer interruptions. But I already get up before 7 so how early would I have to be out of bed? Yikes.

I was successful with the text book by writing in the evenings. I could try to go back to that. But that's when life comes to call more often and I'm tired from a day at work.

I'll have to keep plugging away, trying to find a niche of time. Perhaps I should write every day through my lunch hour at work. Not a bad idea but lunch tends to get eaten up (so to speak) by phone calls and e-mails and people dropping in and projects that leak into the break.

I am recognising now that my first two Phillip Gold novels are pretty good as early efforts go but I need to get stronger and more consistent as a writer and I need to take the full-developed characters and thrust them into new adventures that help them to grow further. I like the first two novels; I'm proud of the first two novels. But maybe I have to accept that they were necessary experiences to put me into the position of writing one that will sell.

So I need to make the time to write.

Tags: Three-Day Novel, Writing, Ross Pennie

I'm currently working on two short stories and two novels featuring my hero, Phillip Gold. It's an interesting process. I created Mr. Gold about a decade ago while attending writing classes at a Canadian University. He's an homage to the great hard-boiled detectives of the past, like Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, but with the legal twist. Early in his career, Gold is finding the law thing isn't going so well but that he seems to have a knack for investigations. He solves a couple of cases and things start to snowball to the point where people seek him out as a PI rather than as a lawyer (see Sharon Kyle in The Gold Figure). Gold resists the shift but ends up having to accept the inevitable.

My plan is that, at some point, Gold will investigate and then represent in court, finally taking the first steps towards establishing his skills as a lawyer too. We'll see how that goes.

I made a major push last year to find an agent to represent me and Mr. Gold but to no avail. Although I got little feedback, I realised that the two first novels (Fleck and Glisters) don't start with enough punch. I need a flashier opening (since that's the only part most agents you approach will see) and then a more consistent tone. I'm getting contradictory feedback, however: many readers really like the sarcastic, witty, metaphor-filled style while others would like to see it go away entirely. We'll see, I guess.

In the meantime, I've decided to try to write a couple Gold short stories to see if I could get them published in a mystery magazine of some kind. It's always easier to sell your work once you've sold your work. Writing short stories is very different, however, from writing novels. The plots have to be more simple, the characters less fully developed and you have to keep the pace going throughout — no time for a reflective pause. Well, at least not much time. So it's a battle.

But I'm getting very helpful feedback from my old writing buddies, Ross and John, and my partner is amazingly good at spotting "inconsistencies" of both a minor and a major nature (like when a character sits down on a couch and gets up from a chair or when a character is shot in the side of the head and fall forward). I'll keep working. The first story is complete but in the revision stage while the second one is still being written.

Revision is something I really need to focus on. I tend toward verbosity and I often don't have the patience to set something aside, wait for a month or so, then go back and revise and edit it. That's what you have to do to end up with really polished writing. It's something I have to learn to do.

So now I've spent the last ten minutes reviewing and revising this blog. Can't start practicing too soon!

Tags: Phillip Gold, Writing, Mystery