The First Two Pages: “The Importance of Being Urnest” by Eleanor Cawood Jones

 The First Two Pages: “The Importance of Being Urnest” by Eleanor Cawood Jones

Guest Post: So Many Characters, So Few Words: Keeping Multiple Characters Memorable in Short Fiction by Eleanor Cawood Jones

Please welcome author Eleanor Cawood Jones back to the blog today as she discusses her participation in the new book, Murder in the Mountains: A Destination Murders Short Story Collection. The anthology comes out on February 1, 2022.

 

So Many Characters, So Few Words: Keeping Multiple Characters Memorable in Short Fiction

Writing is a weird gig. Sometimes you find yourself staring at a blank page, and sometimes you have so much material you don’t even know where to start. And still other times, you wind up with so many characters in your head you have to pick and choose who gets onto the pages, and how to keep them all straight for the reader—and for yourself. That was the dilemma I faced in my most recent writing binge, slated for the upcoming Murder in the Mountains.

Last year on Kevin’s blog, I talked about setting in “Cabo San Loco” (Murder on the Beach). In that story, I introduced five women characters who had bonded and become friends when they were on a sequestered jury during a traumatic trial. Afterward, one character decided to treat all of them, plus my narrator, Lorrie, to a vacation in Cabo San Lucas so they could move past it all. (Since this is mystery fiction, that vacation turned out to be a little stressful as well, as you can imagine.)

“Cabo” was well received, and I was delighted when I was invited to contribute to the next book in the Destination Murders series, Murder in the Mountains. I am pleased to say all six women—Lorrie, Martha, Bean, Book, Karin, and Ashley—are back for another vacation in “The Lyin’ Witch in the Wardrobe.”

On any jury, you’ll find a variety of ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds among the jurors, and our friends are no different. The youngest, Ashley, is 24, and Karin is a proud senior grandma. Three characters are in their thirties and one—celebrity Cidne “Bean” Dupont—in her forties. It’s fun to play with the life experiences of such a varied cast, but challenging to help the reader remember who they all are throughout a novelette-length story.

In “Cabo,” all the characters listed bucket list items at the beginning of the story, to create differences among them. I also gave a few of them nicknames. Bean for example, gets her well-deserved nickname because she always introduces herself as “Cidne, rhymes with kidney, like the bean.” But for Mountains, I needed to bring fresh identifiers to distinguish everyone. You can’t just repeat the same information from story one when you’re expecting most readers will already have read it.

I’m going to stop right here and salute every writer who has an ongoing series and faces this with every book. Kudos, hugs, gifts, etc. to you all.

The answer of how to keep old characters fresh and unique came in the form of a pretty weird place. A Wizard of Oz convention.

Back when I was a kid, there was this amazing theme park in the gorgeous mountains of Western North Carolina called Land of Oz. It went defunct in 1980, but enough people loved it that the owners began having reunion weekends each September, and it’s turned into a pretty big thing. I went there for research in September and stayed nearby in a castle hotel—and went to a touristy gem mine to boot. It’s the stuff dream settings are made of, and all those places have a key role in “The Lyin’ Witch in the Wardrobe.”

I didn’t find an actual Oz convention on my research trip, but I did invent one, and I finally decided the best way to tell the characters apart was to put them in costume for the weekend. The story opens in the castle hotel with the narrator, Lorrie George, enjoying her sparkly Glinda costume, while her bestie Martha McBain is mad about having to be the Wicked Witch of the West, complete with green makeup. They’re having a loud argument, and the other characters in costume enter one by one to find out what’s going on.

Glinda, the Wicked Witch, Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion are all in costume because they’re getting ready for a photo op before the convention. I thought it would be tricky inventing reasons to keep them in costume for most of the weekend, but it’s such an over-the-top scenario it turned out to be easy.

It then became logical to introduce more characters and also put them in costume. There’s an entire bevy of wicked witches staying in the castle, including one sporting an extra-large pair of ruby slippers with real stones that she never takes off, and those slippers are coveted by all her witch friends. Her nickname turned out to be Squatch, short for Sasquatch (because we’re in bigfoot country here, people). Another character, Uncle Gummy, has ill-fitting dentures and sports a winged-monkey suit.

And just as I thought I had it figured out, in my head trouble showed up when a tour bus pulled up to the castle containing a celebrity who had heard about the Oz convention and was crashing the party. She wants the ruby slippers most of all, and she’s creating a LOT of jealousy for one of my jurors as well. I tried to make her memorable too, but will skip the details here in the interest of not creating a spoiler. I will report though, that happily beta readers found the banter about her quite amusing.

I think I succeeded in making everyone at the castle and in Oz memorable. They have their own personalities, opinions and romances—quite a bit of romance in this whodunnit—and I enjoyed tremendously seeing the story unfold. (That’s a punster thing; when you don’t plot thoroughly, you often find out what’s happening the same time the reader does. I get a lot of joy out of that, because I’m not committed to one direction. But that’s another subject for another day.)

Along the way, I changed my mind about both the murder and murderee and who wore what shoes. So I had to edit myself before the editor edited me, if you know what I mean. But these things happen and the story is better for it.

I can only hope readers have as much fun with this crazy cast as I did dreaming them up and walking them onto paper. If so, my job is done. This is my fourth story featuring Lorrie and Martha, reluctant amateur sleuths, and, if response is good, I look forward to writing a fifth. (Okay, fine. I’m already writing it.)

Murder in the Mountains comes out Feb. 1 and is set for a pre-order price of 99 cents on ebook. There will be a print version as well. Over the moon to share my eight co-authors: Gretchen Archer, Leslie Budewitz, Karen Cantwell, Barb Goffman, Tina Kashian, Shari Randall, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Cathy Wiley. The stories are novelette length, cover all four seasons, and set in a variety of gorgeous mountain settings around the world. 

 

Eleanor Cawood Jones ©2022

Eleanor Cawood Jones is a self-proclaimed romance novelist who somehow only writes short crime fiction. She won a 2021 Derringer Award for “The Great Bedbug Incident and the Invitation of Doom” (Chesapeake Crimes: Invitation to Murder). Her character Lorrie George has previously appeared in “Brayking Glass” (Murder by the Glass), “Cabo San Loco” (Murder on the Beach), and The Importance of Being Unrest (Wildside Press).

A former newspaper reporter and reformed marketing director, Tennessee native Eleanor lives in Virginia and travels frequently.

 

 

Guest Post: Inspiration on Demand: Where do you go when there’s nowhere to go? by Eleanor Cawood Jones

Please welcome author Eleanor Cawood Jones today to the blog as she discusses her participation in the new book, Murder on the Beach: A Destination Murders Short Story Collection.

 

 

Inspiration on Demand: Where do you go when there’s nowhere to go?

I admit it. When it comes to firm commitments, this short story writer has gotten a bit spoiled by entering anthology calls for submissions. Look! An open call for a neat looking subject! And, hey! The deadline is coming, but it’s not technically my deadline. It’s only my deadline if I want it to be. No one is sitting around waiting for me to enter (except the voices in my head, which want to enter everything).

Inspiration doesn’t strike by deadline? No problem. Don’t try out for that one; there’s another one coming up with a different cool theme, and for that I’m grateful.

It's a distinct lack of pressure.

But when that magic moment comes and you’re actually invited to contribute to a book, the editors smile at you and hand you a deadline and it’s alarmingly real. Deadline? What’s that? An entire new set of emotions arrives and sets up camp in your frontal lobe. You must perform! You must come up with an idea, and not just any idea, but the best idea ever! Everyone’s waiting for you to send in a story which will be a good fit with your colleagues’ work, which you already know will be excellent because you’ve read every one of them.

The deadline is six months off! Then Five. Four. Do I hear three?

Two and a half?

Recently, I was invited to join a group of writers to create Murder on the Beach, Book 1 in the Destination Murders series. And even though I was wild about the cozy, humorous concept, my co-writers, and even the book cover—plus, I’m a beach lover—when I sat down to write, something terrible happened: nothing. Even though I’d recently visited Cabo San Lucas, which is a place screaming for a mystery if there ever was one, no characters showed up to talk in my head, no potential crime reared its ugly head, no clever plot twist showed up, and panic was starting to set in.

I talked it over with co-author Barb Goffman and narrowed down with her that the deadline pressure was what was getting to me and that I wasn’t the only one, I took long walks, I made Alexa play ocean noises, I interviewed friends for weird beach stories, I flipped through twenty billion beach photos on my phone. I even asked customers at work, “Hey! What’s a great way to kill someone in Mexico on the beach? (After a few weird looks, I added the word “imaginary” between “great” and “way.”) I even tried the old standby, just sit back down and write and see what happens. Or blow something up.

Nothing.

Then something completely unrelated happened. I got called to jury duty. It was for a truly horrific crime—a gang-related kidnapping and murder—and, even though I ultimately didn’t get selected to sit on the jury, I understood how traumatic it would be to do so and live through what the victim and families had experienced. I wasn’t about to write about the trial itself, but as I stood in line waiting for yet another round of panel selection, I looked out the window and thought about how the jury members would bond as they sat through the trial, and how possibly some of them would become friends, share meals together, and ultimately even go to the beach together and put some of the trauma behind them. Because, seriously, what could go wrong in paradise?

They wouldn’t have much in common except the shared jury experience. They would be all ages and ethnicities. They would be…a really fun, caring, personable, did I mention fun, group of women to take to the beach.

And finally, the characters started to arrive in my head, and 12,000 words later, they’d been to the beach and taken the trip of their lives. I had a ball hanging out with these women and writing their story. It’s called Cabo San Loco.

Whew! I made deadline.

In hindsight, I realize that so often inspiration has struck with small happenings that have nothing to do with the story theme. I once overheard someone say, “It seemed like the most convenient place at the time,” and ended up writing a whole story based inside a convenience store. When struggling to fit a plot into a pets theme and walking through the little park behind my condo, I saw a fallen tree with a hollowed end and suddenly envisioned a pet rabbit escaping into the park and its owner following and going right to the…well, you know. I wrote a four-story Christmas book once based around the first stanza of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” which, as I interpret it, is a song that has very little to do with murder. (Just thought of two reasons why that’s wrong, so look for more feel-good Christmas stories.)

So, next time I need inspiration, I’m going to do something completely unrelated. I’ll find it by taking a walk in a strange neighborhood, listening to conversations at the grocery store, watching a sitcom,  or reading some random song lyrics. I’ll add notes to my little notebook where I write down funny things people say. But I’m keeping up with those ocean noises on Alexa. Turns out it’s great writing background noise.

Surely lots of writers struggle with inspiration on demand. I’d love to hear from some folks who’ve experienced this and how you conquered it.

Murder on the Beach comes out May 28 and is set for a pre-order price of 99 cents. My beachy co-authors are Ritter Ames, Karen Cantwell, Lucy Carol, Barb Goffman, Shari Randall, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Cathy Wiley. (Turns out you can bond over a shared writing experience, too.) The stories are all novelette length and set at eight different beach locales.

 

 

Eleanor Cawood Jones ©2021

Eleanor Cawood Jones’ work appears in several mystery anthologies as well as two solo books, and she won a 2021 Derringer Award for "The Great Bedbug Incident and the Invitation of Doom" in Chesapeake Crimes: Invitation to Murder. She's an avid reader, people watcher, world traveler, and remodeling show addict who spends her spare time telling people how to pronounce Cawood (Kay'-wood) and making up long and elaborate story titles.