 Well, thank you. Thank you all for being here, and thanks to the friends of the library. Everybody should support the Friends of the Library, because all Friends of the Library groups are wonderful organizations, so wherever you live, support your friends' group. You may have wondered why I was introduced, but not either of these two lovely ladies on the side. That's because I'm going to be the moderator of sorts of our little panel tonight, and I would like to welcome you all, and thank you for coming. I'm going to let Joanne on this side and Kate on this side briefly introduce themselves, and I will begin with Joanne. I'm Joanne Smith-Ainsworth. I'm the author of six published novels. The first four are historical romances. The last two are Paranormal Suspense, set in World War II, where the U.S. government recruits psychics to find Nazi spies. I'm happy to say that Expect Trouble, book one of this group, is now an audiobook, and it also won the runner-up position in Shelf and Bound, and the semi-finalist position for first chapter award from East Texas Writer's Guild, and Expect Deception over there also won from East Texas, but it got finalist position, and it got in finalist position also in the 2016 Best Book Award in the category of Mystery and Suspense. And Kate? My name's Kate Raphael, and I am a legal word processor by day, and a novelist, activist, journalist, and radio producer by night and weekends. I've written two novels now, two published novels, working on the third. It's a series set in Palestine. I proudly claim, having done no research on the subject, but being absolutely confident that I'm correct, that it's the first English language mystery series with a Palestinian police woman as protagonist. I've been saying that now for three or four years, and nobody's ever contradicted me, so I think you can put it in the bank. These are based on my experiences as a volunteer in Palestine. I lived there off and on for about two years, and when I came back, I had a thousand pages of journals, and I thought, well, probably nobody would want to read a memoir, but maybe I could do something different with my writings. And the first Murder Under the Bridge was the first. It won a couple of awards, as well as Joanne's did, and Murder Under the Bridge is the second in the series, and just came out in September. Okay. All right, I'm going to, since we're introducing our books as well as ourselves, I'm just going to say a word or two about mine. It was mentioned that Snow Angel just came out. It features, my sleuth is a private eye, and she works as a detective to support her art habit. She has two professions that are equally important in her life. She's an artist, and she's an investigator, and she becomes involved in, she's based in San Francisco. She becomes involved in this particular case when a little girl disappears the night before her father is set to testify in a high-profile murder case. And she has been teaching art lessons to this little girl and becomes involved in a search that takes place in San Francisco's wintertime, and it's raining, so it's not this winter, more like last winter. But it takes her from San Francisco to the snowbound Sierra, and deep into the hearts of two shattered families. This one's a bit different. It takes place in Marin County. It is a ghost story, and my sleuth in that one is an amateur sleuth. She's a real estate agent who discovers that she has the ability to sense things when she goes into certain houses that nobody else experiences, and that leads her, in this case, to solving the mystery of what happened when she's given a house as a listing that nobody else will touch because of murders that had occurred there. And a second volume in this series is going to be coming out along about the end of the year. So, I welcome applause. Thank you all. Okay. So what led you to mystery, Joanne? You started with writing in a different genre, and you've come to, you define your books as paranormal suspense. My sense of the mystery category is that it's very broad, and if there's a crime in it that is central to what's going on and people are trying to figure out what happened, that makes it a mystery. Not everybody quite agrees with that. If you look on the shelves, you'll see the thriller category and the suspense category and the cozy category and the hard-boiled categories, but it's all mystery to me. It's all a mystery to me. So much is a mystery to me. What drew you to mystery? I started out writing romance, but I always had a touch of something that was suspenseful in it, and I found after four books that a mystery was not for me because I wasn't good at putting clues in, and my critique partners would keep telling me, you're giving it away, Joanne. Don't do that. Put it in later. So I decided I would write suspense, and what I do is I put you all into the heads of my characters, my main characters, and I also have my villain be one of the main characters. So you have that point of view, and since I write in what's called deep point of view, you get not only a third person that I'm writing in, but you're getting the emotions of that particular point of view character, so it's almost like writing in first as well as third. And that's how I do my suspense and build up my suspense. You all know what's going on all the way through, but the characters themselves don't. When I put this in a romance, it was that the woman farmer taking her wagon of goods into the town, the reader knew that along one road to the left were the outlaws, and the other one was clear, all into town, and of course she'd go left. I do that same kind of thing now. I write historical because I'm older. I started writing as I came into retirement, and I haven't a clue what's going on now, especially the technology, so I couldn't write a contemporary like they do. I take historical words already done, and I can deal with it. Okay, so Kate, you came home with these thousand pages of journaling about your experience in Palestine. Why did you decide that a mystery or a mystery series was the right way to distill that experience down for yourself and for the readers? Well, I should say, first of all, that I didn't know I was writing a series when I started. I had, shortly before I left Palestine for the last time, I was deported in 2005, meaning I can't really go back there deported by the Israelis, but arrested in Palestine. Shortly before that happened, I was traveling late at night with some friends, and I saw a scene where there seemed to be an abandoned car up on an overpass on an Israeli road that passes over a Palestinian road, and I just thought, oh, this would be a great way for a mystery to start. And I mentioned that to a friend of mine who was with me, and then the next day she was out, Olive picking with some other volunteers, and she mentioned it to them, and they had all these ideas, oh, and the body could be there, and this person could be coming by and not see it, and so I thought people seemed to be excited about this idea. I mean, I love mysteries, and I have been reading them since my mid-20s, I guess, and I love the figuring it out aspect. I don't love the figuring out how to help people figure it out, like the figuring out how to write a part I don't love so much, but I love it when it works, and so I just felt that it would be a fun way, would hopefully be fun for me, and it would hopefully be fun for people reading it and maybe reach an audience that wouldn't be necessarily drawn to a nonfiction book about Palestine because there's so many people who love mysteries and especially international mysteries. Well, I think sometimes fiction is a better way to get at the truth than nonfiction. You can get a lot of facts into nonfiction, but fiction gives you the opportunity to provide people, readers with the experience of the place and of what the people are going through and give them insights in a whole different way. So, Joanne denies writing mysteries, it's suspense, but it's all under this crime fiction umbrella, and we have Mystery Writers of America here in the States, which is the professional organization for mystery writers, but they define it very broadly as well, and put almost all kinds of crime fiction under that umbrella. The Brits, who always seem to have a way of solving all of these problems, just call theirs the Crime Writers Association, and that takes in everybody. But one of the things that is true is, I mentioned earlier, the cozies at one hand and the hard boiled at the other, and while that often applies to detective stories, it's kind of a way, a shorthand of describing what kind of mood you've got, whether it's lighter or darker, whether it's less violent or more violent, and I don't think of these as different types, I personally think of them as sort of a scale, and on the scale between the cozy, light-hearted, less violent at one end and the super hard boiled, very dark, very violent at the other, and my books fall about here. Where would you say yours fall, Joanne? The marketing line that I have is that my Paranormal Suspense series is for readers who love Paranormal Suspense set in historical settings with other worldly experiences that have the pace of a thriller in the feel of an Agatha Christie cozy. So I'm fast in the thriller part, but I've got that atmosphere and feel of a cozy. So the thriller part in your definition of how it applies to your books has to do with pace, not to have to do with, you know... The blood that comes in in my books are very tastefully done. Well, blood is very tasty, right? Tastefully. Where do yours fall, Kate? You know, they're definitely not cozy, though interestingly, when I started writing them, I sort of, writing the first one, I sort of thought it would be. You know, it has certain things in common with them, like that takes place in villages and they often are set in villages, and there's not a lot of blood. I try to avoid a lot of graphic violence, but I just think they're very noirish. Like Palestine itself has a very noir feel. There's always this blanket of tension hanging over the place, and I think that my books are infused with that to the point where they... It's not a curling up with your cat kind of a read, per se. It's a little more serious than that. I mean, fortunately, the global genre, I think, is sort of, or subgenre, is kind of its own thing, so you can get away with just saying, oh, I write international mysteries. I mean, I used to say I write character-centered mysteries, but then I decided that that's ridiculous because all fiction is character-centered. I mean, what is a story if it doesn't revolve around characters, so I sort of think that that's a cop-out. But it's got a little of the police procedural as well, because I do have a police protagonist, but on the other hand, I really have to say that I did not get a chance to thoroughly research the way that Palestinian police work. I unfortunately do know a fair amount about how Israeli police work, so that part I think is pretty fact-based, but nobody should quote this as evidence of how the Palestinian police work. Okay. I know with mine, as I said, they're sort of in the middle there, maybe a little bit toward the lighter end. One of the things that I was striving for in mine that I find sometimes is lacking at both ends of the scale is the emotional impact that these events, because at both ends of the scale, you're still dealing most of the time with murder, with violence, even if it's offstage, with events that are pretty terrible and that are definitely going to have an impact on the people around them. And one of the things that I have sometimes not liked about mysteries that I've read is that the emotions don't ring true to me. At the hard-boiled end, you've got people, I remember reading one where 50 people were blown away in the last scene and the main character who was doing a large part of that blowing away didn't seem to feel anything about it at all other than, that justice was done. But I would think it would kind of make you feel a little weird. And at the other end, I remember reading a cozy. I read the first couple of chapters. I set it aside because here's a young woman in a small town and she's taking a walk in the park and she becomes upon the body of a woman she knows. She's not friends with her, but she recognizes who it is and is acquainted with it. And, you know, we have that scene of the discovery. We have the scene where the police are called and the next scene is when she's home having dinner with her husband and her reaction was, oh boy, we have a murder mystery right here in our little town. And I'm saying, no, that's not right. On a day like that, what you would do is you would go home, you would crawl into bed and you would pull the covers over your head and you would just lie there quivering for a long time. And there was no sign that she had any kind of reaction or that this made any impact on her. So that's one of the things that's important to me in writing that, my books. Do you bring the emotion in? Oh yes, you have to. Especially when I write from the deep point of view because you're in the person's head and you know what it is that they're doing. And it's a way to build up the suspense and how you put your words together to show the tension building. Okay. What would you say is the EQ or emotional quotient of your books, Kate? I mean, I definitely think that it's important that people make an emotional connection with the protagonists or with the characters. And I think I'm more or less successful at that sometimes. And not everybody gets, especially my American Jewish American protagonist. I don't think people always get what drives her. If they don't know anybody like that, she can come off as a little bit macabre or something. But I definitely hear you. I mean, I sort of can't stand in TV mysteries, especially the kind of, the scene will wrap up and the last scene is almost always people sort of standing around joking or sort of having a wedding or something. And they don't ever seem to reference the fact that like five people just, that they knew intimately were just killed and I always think that that's very inappropriate. Okay. Yes? A little bit louder if you can. It's a good question. I mean, to the Palestinians there sure is. You know, when I first heard people talking about Palestine, I thought that it was kind of an abstraction. But it's not. I mean, that's what their country, to the Palestinians that's where they live. If you ask a Palestinian kid where they're from, they say, Adam and Palestine, I'm from Palestine. And that's, you know, it's their land. Well, it has ever changing parameters, mainly shrinking based on Israeli facts on the ground. I mean, under the Oslo Accords, which we're in, sorry to do a little history digression here, but under the Oslo Accords in 1994, there were supposed to be borders drawn. It was supposed to be the West Bank Gaza and East Jerusalem. And there were supposed to be borders. There were borders that had been proposed. They were never agreed on. The problem with that is that what is the West Bank and what is East Jerusalem is a matter that to the Israelis is in dispute. Because they want the Israeli settlements that were constructed there since they captured that territory in 1967 to be considered not Palestine, to not be part of those borders. And so they're always wanting to draw sort of these weird borders that carve out little isolated enclaves and the Palestinians are not really having that. No, the books are set in Palestine. They take place there in that terrain, that contested terrain, the settlements, the existence of settlements. I mean, it's set in the area where I lived, which is the area of Palestine. Actually, it's called Salfit. It's a small district smack in the middle of the West Bank and quite near the Israeli border, the green line. And it's the area that has the highest concentration of settlements, mostly because it also has the highest concentration of arable land, of fertile land. So it's always an issue. I mean, the presence of the settlements and checkpoints and where people can go and where they can't go and the wall that Israel started to construct in 2003, all of that is present in my book. I mean, that's kind of what my books are about. There are maps. Yeah, each book has a map. I had this great map maker do a really good job of kind of depicting where the story is taking place. I appreciate that question. We're going to move at this point. We've been actually talking about this to some degree. But it's said that the most common question asked of writers to the point where some writers get annoyed by it. So I'm going to annoy these two by asking them this, which is where do you get your ideas? Kate, you've addressed that to some extent. You saw that event. You're distilling your Palestine experience in your novels. Do you have a further thought on that question? Well, I mean, just I'm always getting ideas from the newspaper, you know, from things that happen there. And I'll constantly read about a friend sent me an article, like, well, after I'd written the first draft of Murder Under the Bridge or the first several drafts and people were reading it, a friend who had read a draft sent me an article from the New York Times about a squad being formed, a police squad being formed in Gaza of only women. That was going to be sort of like a vice squad. And so I got to thinking, oh, I wonder what my character, Rania, who's a detective, would think about this. So that made its way into my second book. Now, because I know I can really only probably write one more book set in Palestine, I keep seeing things that seem like they belong in my books and thinking, well, I have to get that in and I have to get that in. My first draft of the Thurman has way too many subplots. So, Joanne, you mentioned that rather than deal with all this modern life and contemporary technology, you've made your books historical, but there has to be more to it than just, oh, I'm going to write a historical novel. So what are the sources of your ideas? I started writing late in life and so I started doing it my own way. I don't know how others do it, but I actually choose a time period first. My first two romances were medieval only because the last name is Ainsworth and that's an Anglo-Saxon name. My other two were set in Wyoming in 1895 only because medieval went out of fashion and I had spent four months in Buffalo, Wyoming. So I set my stories there and these latest two, which are World War II with the U.S. government recruiting psychics to find Nazi spies, I wrote them in World War II because I was a child in World War II. I remember that experience. Also, I set them in Philadelphia and I lived in the 1950s in Philadelphia and I brought in paranormal suspense because in one of my romance novels, my character was blinded. She had her sight till eight and then a disease blinded her and there were some parts where we couldn't get her where she could logically get herself around a castle. And I brought in a ghostly grandmother that when she touched a charm, the grandmother would point the way for her to go. And I found I liked that and also in 1974 to 78, I attended the Berkeley Psychic Institute for psychic healing and it's still in Berkeley and has its website. I brought some of those ideas in. I couldn't bring much in besides it's pretty much in the past so I don't remember as much but when you write a novel, you have to write according to the needs of the novel. And I have two critique partners who are very clever and we have to bring in the psychic and the suspense to keep the novel going. But I don't have to worry about real life because I'm setting up my own story world and they'll say, well, this is a little flat, Joanne. Can you bring in some aromas so it's the villains or bring in something that's rotted? Or they'll say, how about some color here and I'll put some bright colors into the thought waves that my clairvoyant wave over here, the US wave is sending out. I build my stories first from my setting, my time period and then I say what is my story question in that time period? My story question for this is can psychics find Nazi spies? Then I say what kind of characters do I need in order to find these? And since I come out of writing romance, I of course have a heroine and a hero as my protagonist and always a villain. And once I get to that point, then I start my research and I plot and I have an Excel chart that I put in all my scenes, the description of it, the point of view character, the timeline, how they're going to change, all those kinds of things. That takes me about a month or two and then I start to write. What about you? We'll take the question first and then I'll get to how I do it. It's only the psychic abilities. The US government recruited the clairvoyant to lead this team. Her other team partners, one is a medium, one is a crystal ball reader, one is a nurse with healing hands and one is a man who sees ghosts. Each of them have their reason for being because I did anticipate making this a series. Consequently, I am going to move my characters around as I write more books. This third book that I'm writing now for this series will complete this series and I will use another one of the team in my other novel. Yes, sir. You know, he's not good. And it has to me, talking about the dimensions between light and dark, that part, that strategy creating an antagonist who is supposed to be familiar and comfortable to, who's to hold on. You've got to wake that psychic up. And of course she does become alert to the danger, but that's the suspense that we know, the reader knows before the antagonist does what's really going on if you hope that she does the right thing. Well, thank you. That's why I believe it won in the category of mystery suspense because I was able to build up that suspense. And for me, it's a big chart that I make before I ever start writing. It keeps track of everything and helps me to build the suspense. Paranormal, I think, as it's used as a label for books, because this one is a paranormal also, or is referred to that way, refers to almost any kind of element of sort of other worldliness. There's a lot of... This is a ghost story. It doesn't have... My main character has abilities that I would call psychic, but there's many kinds of psychic. If you have vampires and werewolves in your story, it'll probably be lumped as paranormal. This does not have any of that. I think when people ask me, well, why are you writing that? And do you believe in the ghosts that you write in? Do you believe in ghosts? And my answer is no. I don't believe that they operate in the world, and if they do, it's not the way I describe. But I do believe that the boundaries of reality are a bit larger than we give them credit for. And it's those boundaries that I'm trying to push a little and consider what some of the possibilities might be. So they're very close to the real world, but there is this element that is outside of our usual experience that can be a little hard to explain and bothers my main character that she has these. Yes, sir. I let her walk into the room and have the experience of what the heck just happened, and then she has to deal with that, especially when she realizes it's only happening to her, or at least it's only happening, she's the only one who perceives it. And so this grew out of a conversation that I had with an editor and another writer as we were doing this great game that writers play called What If. Oh, here's a thought. What if this happens? Well, what if that happens? What if we did this over here instead? It's set in Marin County because I know Marin County and find it a very interesting place. This one began, I had done some writing about this, my artist detective before in an earlier book and in a couple of short stories, and there was a recurring policeman, police officer, police detective character, and I was sitting, speaking of where you're getting your ideas, they sometimes just pop in. I was sitting on my deck on a day that was as beautiful as today. I was reading a book that was totally else, not related to what this became at all, and all of a sudden, as I'm reaching for my T-mug to take a sip, the little voice in my head says, in the next novel, Gardino's daughter goes missing. And I'm going, oh, he has a daughter? And it sort of evolved from there. You sort of think, okay, we have this missing child. What are the circumstances? What could have happened? Why would somebody have taken her? Or was she taken at all? Or was she just wandered off and gotten lost in the woods? You start asking, you come up with that first idea, you start asking questions, and I think that often it's the second idea that occurs to you. The thing that comes together to go snap, oh, this is where it could go, that really is what begins the creative process. And you're a plotter too, are you not? She just asked me, and you're a plotter too, are you not? And there's this terminology that floats around. I first ran into it in the mystery community. I've heard other fiction writers use it as well. And it's the plotters versus panzers debate. Are any of you familiar with these terms? Well, plotter is a fairly obvious term. That's plotter P-L-O-T-T, not P-L-O-D-D-E-R-S. Although many of us are that. Although many of us are that. The panzers are the ones who just sit down and start writing, you write by the seat of your pants, you don't know what's going to happen next. The theory as well, if I'm surprised, the reader will be surprised. If I plan out the story in advance, then why bother to write the story at all because they already know what, knows what happens. And so those are kind of the two extremes. I personally think that there are only plotters. It's just that the panzers don't call their plot outline a plot outline, they call it the first draft. We've heard about Joanne's Excel spreadsheets and her detailed plotting. How about you? I recently did, last November, I did something called National Novel Writing Month. I don't know if people know it, NaNoWriMo. It's my favorite tool for writing a first draft. And basically you try to write 50,000 words in 30 days. And the point of that or the way you manage that is that you just write it and you don't stop to think about whether it's any good, which it never is. And you also don't use contractions and you give all your characters double first names. Peggy Sue and Bobby Joe and many names. And Palestinian names are really good for that because everybody has like four names, plus there's the name that they're actually called, which is two names, usually a boo something, so or um something. So yeah, you can add a lot of words that way. But during that time, I was reading some stuff that they sent out and I learned to call myself a plancer, which is somewhere in between a planner and a pancer. I mean, I sort of, I started out thinking, okay, the first few days I'm just going to do a quick outline or really what I thought was going to be a treatment, like kind of a quick first present tense summary and then I was going to go back and fill it in. But then it didn't happen that way. I just sort of, I got some scenes and I started writing them and so then I ended up just sort of staying with that and writing this bad first draft. But I mean, I definitely have to, I have to have the story. So because I'm terrified that I'll get halfway through and not be able to figure out where it's going and lose it and just stop. So I try to tear through something and you know, I have quoted that line of Peggy's many times but we all outline, it's just some of us call it our first draft. I would say for sure I'm that. And I do kind of an in-between process too. When I was writing my first novel, I wrote, I outlined about a third of it but then I got impatient to start writing. And so I wrote as much as I had or almost to that point and then I realized I had no clue what was going to happen next. So I outlined the next third and as I got to then wrote that and then as I got to the point where I had left off on the outline, I'm going, I have no idea where this is going. I know what the very end is going to be but I don't know how to get there so I did that third section of outline and I've done, that's how this book was done as well. This one I had sold in advance and the editor wanted a synopsis and the only way I could figure out, before I started writing it, and the only way I could figure out how to give a synopsis for a book I had not started writing yet was to come up with an outline for the whole thing because otherwise I would have no idea what to put in the synopsis. So I did and then I boiled it down and this book was very, very easy to write. I have a sequel to this that will probably be out by the end of this year called House of Desire which takes place in San Francisco and the haunted house in question there is based somewhat loosely on the Haas-Lillianthal house here in San Francisco. If any of you are familiar with that wonderful old Victorian mansion I worked there for about three years and learned a lot of its nooks and crannies. It's on Franklin Street. It's between Washington and Jackson right in there. It's one in from a corner. And what did you do there? I was the communications director for what was called at the time the Foundation for San Francisco's Architectural Heritage which is a historic preservation organization which still exists and still based there. And our offices were in the upstairs of the house above the part that was open for tours. Yes. I heard somebody telling me about that and I haven't had a chance to go by. See it's like ghosts. It's on Franklin. It's just past Jackson, I think. It sounds like Pacific. And so at Pacific maybe the next one I sort of forget. It's where it levels off. It's at the top of the hill. It goes up a hill. Franklin does. It levels off. There's the Haas-Lillianthal house that goes, the straight pledges down to the marina. Well you can see we writers all have our different styles of writing and our different ways that we get at things. One thing though is that we're all older writers and we write empowered characters. Our female heroine is empowered. And I would like to know Kate how you get to your empowered. Oh yes. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah that's a good question. I mean I think the feminist novel, the feminist mystery as a genre, a subgenre and also the lesbian mystery. You know it's kind of interesting because after when I thought I had a pretty solid draft of this first one, Murder Under the Bridge, and I wanted to start shopping it and I wanted to see how it played on the lesbian street. So I put out a call to people I knew for what did I call them, random lesbian readers or something and I had some criteria, you know, like they had to be political but not know too much about the Middle East and some other things. And I got some, I got a few. It was a really good experience and actually a couple of them came from Blue and Julie. And that was really helpful and one of those readers asked me, do you think of this as a lesbian novel? A lesbian mystery or a mystery with a lesbian protagonist? And I was like, oh, what's the difference? And she said, well if it's a lesbian mystery then I would expect there to be more about the relationship. And I hadn't really thought about that and I definitely think that, like I did know that you had to have sex. That if you want lesbians to read your mystery you gotta have lesbian sex. So I made sure that there's sex in this first one. But I didn't maybe set up that particular element as artfully as I might have and some people are kind of shocked by it. I mean people are shocked good, shocked bad, but I definitely in this one you know I really tried to weave the relationships in more but there's also the fact that it occurred to me that in this one the lesbians kind of have a lot of sex in the straight protagonist doesn't, like she's very not sexualized and it's also you know because she's Palestinian I think that I was a little reluctant to get quite that into the business of Palestinians and maybe it felt not so respectful and she's Muslim but then I felt like I don't like it when the lesbians are asexual and everybody's having sex around them and they're not having sex so I thought so in this one I like challenged myself to write I won't call them sex scenes they're really not but love scenes between the straight people the straight Palestinian couple so then I think well but does that make it less of a lesbian novel and it's also interesting because when I went to apply for lambda for the lambda literary awards they have you can and the categories are lesbian mystery or gay mystery and there's not LGBT mystery and I was like I started to check lesbian mystery and then I thought well wait a minute like because the murder is more gay like the central storyline in a certain way is more around gay men but then there's this lesbian couple but the sex there's gay sex and lesbian sex but I ended up deciding it's a lesbian mystery because one I'm a lesbian and two the relationship is lesbian so but we'll see my theory about why I didn't win last time because it couldn't be because the book wasn't good enough was that maybe it wasn't lesbian enough so we'll see if this one's lesbian enough because again no way is it not good enough which is part of the problem I think with trying to label books as this kind of book or that kind of book the only real useful label I think is it a good one or is it not a good one I once went to a fiction bookstore in Boston which I really enjoyed I don't know whether it's still there or not it was all fiction but it shelved all the books alphabetically by author that was the only distinction they made and the science fiction and the romance and the literary novels and the mysteries were all right next to each other and the bookseller said well I figure you know this way people are more likely to discover something that they might not ordinarily read and discover that they fall in love with it about empowered heroines I think it's hard for anyone to go through the process of trying to solve a mystery fight a crime overcome the kind of situation that we find in our this kind of fiction without feeling having a certain level of independence confidence in the case of Claire the heroine in this one that's part of what she is discovering about herself through her coming to terms with this psychic ability that she has it's part of what I think Jess the heroine of this one already suspects about herself it also gives us as authors a chance to expand our own power a bit I was at a panel one time where the authors on the panel were asked how do your heroines resemble yourselves and where do they differ and everybody basically said well our heroines are thinner younger and braver than we are and I think in my case certainly the braver part makes a difference because I couldn't imagine myself actually going out and doing some of these things that my heroines do but I like the fact that they're out in the world doing them and my characters are set in world war two the forties were very restrictive on women however the war broke down a lot of that restriction consequently my very shy wall flower heroine who is a part she's like the she's with a wealthy family but she's the one that has no money she comes into being a wave out of duty by going through that training she gets more experience and strength then she becomes head of this team that the government appoints her to and she gains more but it has to be gradual you can't just plop it in there you have to work it out and that's why my excel excel chart works so well for me my spreadsheet because I can decide when I'm going to make her take the next step where she gets confidence in what she does go ahead we're going to open it for questions now so they're actually both real pictures they're free pictures that come from world war two government photos and the covers were done by the publishers I only had a little bit of input into that and it looks like it's the same woman but it's not it's different they put big glasses because my heroine has glasses and that changed the photo yes yeah I don't have header titles or roll titles what I do is I start out with my scene one oh I already had told you that I plot everything out before I start writing so I always know how things are going to end it starts when the shoe drops and I know what it's going to end so I've already figured out my major crisis points along the way is that what you use this excel for is in order to keep my time out and then put them in the excel oh no the excel chart helps me pull it together as I go along so my columns are first the chapter and the scene but then I describe what's going to happen in that particular scene I usually have about three scenes for each of my chapters and I choose what my location will be what my point of view character will be I choose then how I have another column that says how the change is going to come about and another column that says how the emotional impact because I'm writing from deep point of view so they will go from insecurity to feeling confident that's how I break it down I do that every line is a scene and I am able to move things around as I need to I don't always follow what I put in that chart but it really helps me a lot when she did her synopsis the writing went a lot faster it helps me out that way and I use excel also and I have the same kind of approach as Joanne but I also have like so I'll have the point of view character but also the minor characters so I can sort of keep track of you know how often somebody's showing up and if somebody is in chapter three and then doesn't come back until chapter 22 I know that could be a problem or at least if I want to keep it that way I need to make sure to remind people who that is or you know see if I can intersperse that person somewhere else every scene and I also do something I rate every scene on attention level from one to five and then eventually I'll like make a graph that sort of will show me how the tension is so I can see if I have parts that are going too much like this or you know like if it like you kind of want it to go like this and if you have parts that are too flat or or to you know even if the tension is really high for too long and you don't have a dip that's I think not good either these people are so organized well that comes after quite a while of muddling around I just like Excel intensely and we're going to wrap up here in just a moment but I just I will I will write a paragraph describing what happens in a scene up as far as I get around you know to the point where I get tired of outlining and want to start writing but just to answer the do you do it by scene or by chapter I think it's much easier to write a novel to think in terms of scenes the scenes may turn out to be chapters or a chapter as Joanne said may have several scenes and they can sort themselves into chapters later but it's much easier to think of what is happening now what action is taking place in this time in this moment in this point of view rather than to think of them as chapters yes there's also chocolate in the back there's chocolate in the back okay thank you thank you very much thank you Joan great questions everybody