Pau hana (quit work) is here! We’re almost done. No, really!
It’s been an embarrassingly long time since we posted here. We’d like to think our silence is due to the amount of effort we’ve been putting towards our third book. Unfortunately, that’s only partially true. You all know that Life Happens in complete disregard to any plans we may have. The vagaries of making a living and making a life have limited the time we have devoted to writing. Also, we’ve been working on two short stories (that is, “expanding our literary horizons”). The good news is that the book, now officially titled With Murder You Get Sushi, will be published later this summer. Remember: summer doesn’t officially end until September 23rd. The plot and characters sing (figuratively: we haven’t written a musical, yet) and it is time for a very sharp red pencil, thesaurus, The Chicago Manual of Style and the Delete key to be dusted off and put to work.
Now for more about our short stories: we placed a short story in an anthology last year. However, the group editing and publishing the anthology had “creative differences” (the snobby literary term for “falling out”). We could have left our story with one of the editors (who did a fine job in eventually publishing the anthology); instead, we pulled the story to submit it to a different anthology more attuned to our style of writing (like italicizing the sex scenes. Okay, we made that up). We developed a second short story and submitted it, as well. We will know by next month if either story made the cut (they won’t take both).
While some authors can dash off a short story in weeks, our effort was more like a half-marathon than a dash. It took us several months to write the second short story and edit it to our standards (meaning, we both felt the victim definitely deserved what happened to him and so will the reader, hee hee).
In writing a short story, every word is important. There is no time for Jamesian flights of fancy that take the reader away from the main thread (in one of Henry James’s books, one character wanders around a room for nineteen pages or so contemplating the meaning of life, which is at least fifteen pages too many, yeesh). After writing two short stories, we feel we’ve honed our honing skills and have applied those assiduously to With Murder You Get Sushi. The good news for you, the reader, is that this mystery is crisper and clearer than the first two.
(Should I mention about how we cut nearly 20,000 words from the book and then had to amend the plot with more action so we could ensure it was long enough?)
No, don’t go into it or you’ll run on for paragraphs and bore our readers.
(Can I talk about our recent trip to O’ahu and Kaua’i to finalize our research?)
You can do than in the next blog.
(But the Mai Tai market research is critical to the plot.)
Any more market research and one of us will need a liver transplant.
(How about sharing pictures?)
Sigh. If you must. But no selfies.
Our artist, Sarah Perez, is busy developing ideas for our cover and we are eager to see what she has in mind.
(I like the one below.)
Nope, ain’t gonna happen.
So set your watches and begin the countdown to the next Miss-Information Technology Mystery. On second thought, you’d better use a calendar. Only 101 days, or less, until publication!
Maddi Davidson 