Fictional Journeys

by Paula Gail Benson

I’m a great admirer of Charlaine Harris, Toni L.P. Kelner, and Dana Cameron, who all have seamlessly shifted between traditional mysteries and paranormal mysteries (as well as novels and short stories for each genre). I find it fascinating to delve into the worlds of creatures who coexist with humans, yet have their own infrastructure.

Maybe dipping back into mythology earlier this summer with Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and Circe was a good precursor for some paranormal reading. Also, I have to admit being intrigued when a work colleague read a recent short story I’d written and said it reminded her of Mur Lafferty’s The Shambling Guide to New York City (2013). My colleague was kind to share her copy and I found myself immersed in a familiar, yet very unique Big Apple.

Looking at the cover of the Shambling Guide gives you a flavor of what you’ll be encountering. It shows a young woman walking along a city street and passing by a man with a tail, a monster perched on the hood of a cab, and a skyscraper with a dragon at the uppermost tower. The book’s structure intersperses segments from a city guidebook with episodes in the young woman’s life.

Mur Lafferty

Mur Lafferty’s protagonist, Zoe, shares some of the author’s own background. Mur, from Durham, NC, is both a podcaster (I Should Be Writing) and award winning and nominated science fiction writer. Zoe has left a great job in a Raleigh, NC, travel publishing company (after a horrendous affair with her boss) and is trying to re-establish herself in NYC. When Zoe sees a description of an editorial position that seems tailor-made for her, she wonders why the people involved with the company encourage her not to apply. Stubbornly, she submits a proposal and is given the opportunity, which means she’ll be writing a guidebook to New York aimed at “coterie,” or vampires, zombies, dragons, sprites, fairies, death goddesses, succubi and incubi, and similar creatures. The primary reason Zoe has been warned against applying for the position is that the office is staffed with vampires, zombies, and an incubus, who consider her food. Also, the new CR (Coterie Resources) employee is a “construct” (golem or created monster, like the one in Frankenstein) who has the head of one of Zoe’s ex-boyfriends.

Zoe’s story begins as adventure, very much like Alice slipping down the rabbit hole, but it quickly becomes a thriller where Zoe, with her blunt approach to all things coterie, has to save the city itself from a rogue “zoetist” (a person who gives life to inanimate objects, like Dr. Frankenstein). In explaining zoetists and their constructs, Mur brings many different folklore traditions to the narrative, meshing them together in a manner that is both believable and informative.

At first, I wondered if the excerpts from the guidebook would be distracting from Zoe’s story. Instead, I found they enhanced and broadened it, introducing background in a manner that did not intrude upon and sometimes foreshadowed the action. Reading the Amazon reader comments, I noticed one person expressed a desire for the entire guidebook. Another commenter suggested that Mur’s book was about tolerance. I agree. The characters in the book all had many fundamental differences, but found ways to work together for the greater good.

I have to admit I've ordered the second book in the series, Ghost Train to New Orleans (2014), maybe as much from hearing about Shari Randall’s journey there as well as anticipating what Zoe and her staff will encounter as they write a supernatural tour guide for the Big Easy. The vicarious travel to both the cities and the paranormal world makes for some delightful vacation reading.

What fictional trips have you taken lately?

Bringing a Character to Televised Life

by

Paula Gail Benson

Dana Cameron

Let me begin by saying I am an unabashed, wildly enthusiastic fan of Dana Cameron and her Emma Fielding archeological mystery series. My fandom is of long duration, going back to when the first Emma Fielding novel, Site Unseen, was initially published.

For the purposes of full disclosure, I met Dana Cameron at Malice Domestic when we were standing in line to get Elizabeth Peters’ signature. Dana asked me to take her photo with Peters. When I returned home, I read Dana’s novels, devouring each as it was released and being tremendously sad after the last was published. Although, I’m glad to say Emma has appeared in short story form since the end of the series.

Dana and I stayed in contact, meeting each year at Malice. I recommended her novels to my book club and moderated a panel she appeared on at the South Carolina Book Festival. The year she served as Malice’s Toastmaster, I attended the banquet for the first time and sat at her table with Frankie Bailey, Toni Kelner, and Charlaine Harris, an experience I’ll never forget.

I love Dana’s Fangborn stories and her dark colonial noir with Anna Hoyt, but Emma Fielding remains a favorite. And, it’s not just because Dana used my name for a young karate student character in Ashes and Bones, although I did give copies of that book to everyone I knew for Christmas the year it was published.

This year, Dana has experienced the delight of having her Emma Fielding novels reach new audiences through a movie on the Hallmark Channel, an organization known for consistently producing quality mystery programing.

On social media and Dana’s website, I followed the project’s swift development. In a matter of months, filming began, and Dana had the opportunity to visit the set and meet the actors and production staff, which included such film-making veterans as Douglas Barr (familiar to viewers for playing Howie Munson on The Fall Guy) as the director and Kellie Martin (an actress who has appeared on numerous TV programs, including Life Goes On and ER) as producer.

Dana Cameron on set with Doug Barr (from Dana Cameron's website)

I don’t have cable, but a good friend does. We eagerly planned a viewing party and set up with popcorn and phones ready to tweet as the credits rolled.

How thrilling to see Dana’s name, listed not only for having written the novel, but as an executive producer! The tweeting got a little intense.

Now, let’s face the $64,000 question: how did the teleplay compare to the novel? I think it’s reasonable to say they were offspring of the same mother and each deserving of its own love.

Certainly, there were differences. Courtney Thorne-Smith (known for her roles on Melrose Place, Ally McBeal, and According to Jim), who played Emma, was older than the character in the books and a blonde instead of a redhead, but she conveyed with conviction Emma’s tenacity in getting to the bottom of an issue, her fierce love of archeology, and her eagerness to teach her students.

Dana with Courtney Thorne-Smith (from Dana Cameron's website)

In the dramatization, Emma got a love interest in the detective investigating the case. I have to say I missed Emma’s husband Brian, who appears in the novels. He’s often in the background, but always provided support and a reliable sounding board.

The movie did maintain Emma’s archeological mentor, her grandfather in the books and father on screen. As in the books, he is deceased before the start of the story, but remains an important motivator as does his research about a colony in Maine speculated to be older than Jamestown. It was a little disconcerting to know from the publicity that the movie was shot on the Canadian west coast, but it did offer some truly beautiful scenery. And, the Maine flag was raised at the building serving as the local police station.

Perhaps the thing I missed most from the novels – yet understood why it was eliminated in the movie – was the “grittiness” of the excavation scenes. I still remember vividly Dana’s description of Emma returning to her lodging from the dig, disrobing, and jumping into the shower to rid herself of the dirt and sweat from the day’s work.

In the movie, all the actors wore stylish jeans, leather jackets, and knelt on pads when working in a pit. The grueling nature of the work was completely missing, but the joy of discovery was clearly conveyed. Perhaps the nicest technique in the movie was showing how Emma visualized the complete artifact after coming across a shard remnant.

Hopefully, the other five books in the series will be made into Hallmark movies. It would be great for renewed interest in Emma to lead to more Dana Cameron archeological novels.

Which of your favorite mysteries have been made into movies, and what did you think about the cinematic result?

Dana Cameron sipping tea at the Empress Hotel (from Dana Cameron's website)

An Interview with DANA CAMERON

Photograph by James Goodwin



Dana Cameron is a wonderful individual and marvelous author (having won multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards and been nominated for an Edgar). She has the distinction of writing in at least four different genres: (1) archeological mysteries (her New England archeologist Emma Fielding is the protagonist in six novels and one short story); (2) historical and colonial noir (featuring Margaret Chase and Anna Hoyt); (3) urban fantasy (her Fangborn characters, previously showcased in short stories, make their first novel appearance in March 2013 in Seven Kinds of Hell); and (4) thriller (a new short story with assassin protagonist Jayne will appear soon).

To meet her is to come face-to-face with intellect, curiosity, wit, and intense caring for people, culture, and animals, including her husband James Goodwin (who takes fabulous photographs) and the benevolent feline overlords in their lives. She speaks with enthusiasm on a variety of diverse topics such as travel, food, music, Sherlock Holmes, and Dr. Who. Her posts on Facebook, her website (www.danacameron.com), and as a member of the Femme Fatales (www.femmesfatalesauthors.com) provide a fascinating insight into her latest discoveries as well as her writing life. She is generous to a fault in offering support and encouragement to writers, and in sharing her experiences with readers.

Dana, welcome to WWK and thank you for taking the time to tell us about yourself and your work.

Thank you so much for having me, Paula! And thank you for your warm words!

You have a distinguished background in archeology and academia. Has that part of your life ever competed with your fiction writing life and, if so, how did you resolve the competition?

There were times when I was supposed to be writing non-fiction that I was actually furiously writing one of the Emma Fielding archaeology mysteries. It made for a very busy schedule, but I still met my deadlines! There have been times working on archaeological research that I was trying to remember where I'd found this really wonderful diary or historical document...only to remember I'd made it up for one of the novels. The cross-roads came just after I got my first contract for the Emma books. I realized I could keep teaching part time, and keep applying for tenure-track jobs that would most likely take me away from the home we'd made in Massachusetts, or I could have a crack at writing full time.

I wouldn't have started writing fiction without having been an archaeologist for twenty years first. The only job I can think of that I would have traded archaeology for is writing. I've been very lucky.

Part of your education as a fiction writer was to attend the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Could you tell a little about your experience there and how it influenced your writing?

I really had no idea what I was getting into. It had been recommended to me, and seemed like a good way to get stronger, better, and more diverse criticism. I'd read Walter Mosley had been there, and that was strong incentive as I admire his writing tremendously. The campus at Middlebury is gorgeous and the program was full of people who were passionate about writing: amazing readings and workshops, writing 24/7—I loved that! But there were two things I had to overcome. One was that many of the students had a bias against genre fiction, which I wasn't expecting. The faculty was great about that: either you had a story that worked, or it didn't, and they were there to teach you how to make it better. The other thing was that because I don't come from an English background, I didn't understand the language they were using to describe writing. For about three days I floundered, until it hit me: they're talking about critical analysis! I do that all the time, but for documents other people wrote 200-300 years ago. It all fell into place, then. It was like Parris Island for writers: tough, emotionally draining, rewarding.

The two main influences: my instructor there taught me the value of honest critique—telling the truth to someone about their work (when they ask you) is one of the greatest gifts you can give someone. And I found my first agent there, who eventually sold the Emma Fielding books. It was a very important ten days for me as a writer.

You have excelled in writing both short stories and novels. How do you approach writing each discipline?

Mostly with excitement, fear, and uncertainty! I love the challenge of a new project but then, fear settles in. I've learned to make that work for me; usually, the main character is worried about something, or has a problem to solve, so I try to take the thrill of starting something new and infuse that into the story. With short stories, if I find the main POV character first, the rest follows, and a goal, the obstacles to that goal, and the theme of the story emerges. With a novel, I write the scenes as they come to me, out of order. It's like seeing scenes in a movie, and I rearrange them later. It's very exciting, writing by the seat of my pants, but it works for me.

Your writing has spanned genres and time periods (archeological mystery, historical, colonial noir, urban fantasy, and thriller). Does one type of writing fuel another or do you have to keep them compartmentalized?

They do tend to fuel each other. I'll usually have more than one project going at a time, and when I run out of steam on one, I pick up the other. And if I'm running into a problem with an element that doesn't fit into the thing I'm working on, it usually ends up that it will fit in the other WIP. Your brain is often solving problems for several projects at once, and it really refines a writer's editorial skills to figure out where the idea you've just had goes.

The Fangborn families of werewolves and vampires charged with protecting humans are your own unique creations. How would you describe them?

I've turned a lot of the conventions on their heads, and so werewolves, vampires, and oracles are secret superheroes. The werewolves are inclined to “track and tear,” and the vampires don't feed off human blood but alter its chemistry to heal and mislead humans about the existence of Fangborn. Oracles are the wild cards, and have a variety of wonky powers, from telepathy, to precognition, to simple luckiness.

I think of Seven Kinds of Hell as “Buffy meets The X-Men meets Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

The characters for your Fangborn stories arose out of short stories. How did you approach a Fangborn novel differently from writing the short stories?

Seven Kinds of Hell arose from two WIPs that were, unbeknownst to me, two halves of the same book. The main difference is that the protagonist doesn't know she's a werewolf. Part of the novel is her coming to grips with her identity and the obligations of being Fangborn, and part of it has to do with questioning what the Fangborn believe they are. Most of the short stories take place in one or two locations; Seven Kinds of Hell is a globe-trotting adventure.

In Seven Kinds of Hell, you introduce a new Fangborn character Zoe Miller and bring your archeological expertise to urban fantasy. How was this different from writing your archeological mysteries?

It's different because in the Emma Fielding archaeology mysteries, I'm really sticking close to the reality of being an archaeologist. In the Fangborn novels, I'm utilizing Zoe's skills as an archaeologist to help her unravel the history and identity of the Fangborn. Seven Kinds of Hell is a much broader canvas, and I explore bigger themes in it.

Dr. Emma Fielding, the professor archaeologist hero in your mystery series, initially appeared in novels, but recently has been featured in the Agatha nominated short story “Mischief in Mesopotamia” in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (November 2012). How did it feel returning to Emma and what were the challenges of writing about her in a short story as opposed to a novel?

It was very strange revisiting Emma because she'd clearly moved on with her life after the end of Ashes and Bones. It was easy to do a short story, because it was one brief event, the murder on the tour through Turkey. It was challenging because we'd both gone our separate ways.

Anna Hoyt, an independent and resourceful colonial woman who has appeared so far only in the short stories like “Femme Sole,” “Disarming,” and “Ardent,” is an intricate and complex character. What inspired you to write about Anna and would you like to see her as the
subject of a novel?

I was asked to contribute a story to Boston Noir, and had a very short amount of time to get the story done. Besides that deadline, I was driven by the desire to do something different, but that had all the traditional components of a noir story. I know Boston well, and chose the North End because I'd researched a lot about merchants and life in shipping communities, and decided on a story set on the 18th century because I felt comfortable writing about crime and social tension then.

Anna's hard to spend time with, but I intend to spin her life into a novel...when I have the time.

What have you learned from attending writers conferences in different genres?

That the story and characters are the most important things, no matter the genre. But you also need to honor the conventions of the genre in which you're working—or at least acknowledge them. The wonderful thing is that there's a lot of overlap in what people read, and you encounter romance and mystery panels at SF/F conventions and supernatural panels at mystery conventions.

How does music influence your writing?

I can't write without music. If a work has stalled, often I need to find different music to get it back on track. If I think something will work, and I'm wrong, I have to chuck it. I used a lot of 17th- and 18th-century music when writing my first Anna Hoyt story, “Femme Sole.”

But after I'd established the parameters of her world, I started needing music with a woman's voice, singing about a woman in danger. With Seven Kinds of Hell and its sequels, I'm listening to a lot of music with young female vocalists—almost anything by Metric—to capture Zoe's character, then a lot of movie soundtracks and electronic dance music to drive the pace and action of the story.

What words of wisdom would you offer aspiring writers?

Finish your project. Find the best criticism you can, someone who will be honest but not make it personal. Write as often as you can. Try different things. When you're reading, and you find something that you love, try to analyze it asking: why did it work? What did I like about it? How did the author do that? Edit, edit, edit. Then rack up the rejection letters, and learn from them, until you get a “yes!”

You have seen many parts of the world. Has any one of those places made an indelible impression that you have not written about yet, but feel certain you will in the future?

I use a lot of places I've traveled or lived in Seven Kinds of Hell—Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Delos, Ephesus. I'm using the experiences from my trip to Alaska during the 2007 Bouchercon in the next book—I loved visiting there! There was a trip to Scandinavia last year, and that will certainly be featured in the next book. And I'm traveling to Japan next year; I've been dying to go for decades, now, and that will certainly end up in my work.

E.B. Davis always likes to ask our guests if they prefer the mountains or the beach. Do you have a preference?

I love mountains for the amazing views and different climates you encounter, but I really prefer the beach. Staring at the horizon over the ocean puts things into perspective, and if you need inspiration, the history of humanity on the water will bring it. It's also incredibly soothing.

Thank you very much for having me at Writers Who Kill!