Change of Venue

 

The Thursday Writers' Group is changing its meeting place to the Barnes & Noble store in Town & Country Shopping center in Houston beginning Nov. 1.  Meeting time is still 6:30 PM

 

Here's the address for B&N:

12850 Memorial Drive, Suite 1600

Houston, TX 77024

Quick directions
One block south of I-10 in the Town & Country Shopping Center, at the corner of Beltway 8 and Kimberly.

Sewing up all the loose ends

A handful of writers have found their niche in the world of quilt mysteries

(HoustonChronicle, 10/29/12, p. D-1) 

By Maggie Galehouse

No, Earlene Fowler wouldn’t dream of using a quilt as a murder weapon. “I’d never do that!” Fowler exclaims, aghast at the idea. But wrap a quilt around a dead body? That, she’s done. And Terri Thayer? She killed somebody with a rotary cutter, which slices fabric the way a pizza cutter slices pizza. Thayer and Fowler aren’t murder-ers, really. They’re writers of that überspecific genre, quilt mysteries. And their books, along with those by Clare O’Donohue and several othe rs, are familiar to the tens of thousands expected at the International Quilt Festival Houston this week.

Thayer broke out the rotary cutter for her first quilting mystery, “Wild Goose Chase,” which introduces Dewey Pellicano, a woman who inherits a quilt shop.

“My book cover had a bloody rotary cutter by my name,” Thayer recalls. “That was nice.”

Fowler is an originator of the genre, known for her award-winning series about Benni Harper — a curator, rancher and sometime sleuth who also happens to be a quilter. Of course.

“Back in the early ’90s, Jennifer Chiaverini and I were the only people writing fiction about quilts,” says Fowler, whose fourth Benni Harper book, “Goose in the Pond,” features the corpse in the quilt. “But in the last 20 years, it has exploded.”

Both Fowler, of California, and Thayer, of Colorado, have discovered a doubly rich audience for their books. Quilters love mysteries, they’ve learned, and mystery readers love quilts.

“Quilting is an exacting, mathematical sort of thing,” says Fowler, who learned to love quilts and quilting from her Arkansas grandmother. “A lot of quilters are mystery fans. They want to solve that puzzle.”

Thayer agrees.

“With both, you start with nothing,” she says. “There’s a lot of work to do — some of it tedious — and then hopefully you’re generally happy with the outcome. … It’s about bringing order to something.” A quilt mystery should not be confused with a mystery quilt, which is a quilt made from a pattern doled out in tiny steps — like clues.

Both Fowler, 58, and Thayer, 61, have attended the International Quilt Festival Houston and understand that quilting is a major industry. Both name their books after quilting patterns and work quilting into their plots whenever possible.

In Fowler’s “Kansas Troubles,” the clue is in one of the quilts.

In “Monkey Wrench,” Thayer’s latest, the fabric becomes a clue.

Yet neither writer’s books are particularly bloody.

Thayer says that for the most part, she writes “cozy mysteries,” which means that a lot of the action occurs off the page.

“The violence in my books is off screen,” Thayer confides, “but the sex is not. It’s not graphic, but it’s a little titillating. There’s a hunky homicide detective named Buster. …” maggie.galehouse@chron.  com  .

 

Words and Pictures

Did you ever sit tensely at the keyboard staring at the screen and the next word just won’t come – let alone the next sentence?  Perhaps you need to heed the old proverb that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Three Houstonians are applying that proverb in a creative and entertaining way.  Take a look at the Phantom Hearts project (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1327401305/phantom-hearts-a-steampunk-novel ).  Reema, Micheal, and Danny are writing (composing? Creating?) a steampunk vampire novel that breaks the bounds of word-limited writing.  Their collaboration combines the traditional stream of words with interposed sections of graphic story-telling.  All of us who try to write have been told: “Don’t tell us; show us.”  Micheal and Reema do both at once.

(Disclaimer: While I have read and enjoyed some steampunk, my skeptical nature prevents suspension of disbelief – willing or not – sufficient to view vampire tales or the rest of the supernatural genres as anything other than silly, boring tripe, so I will not attempt any kind of critical assessment of this work.)

Ever since medieval monks empowered their manuscripts with illustrations, writers have tried to heighten the effect with illustration.  The very earliest printed books included woodcuts and etchings.  The comic books, and their evolutionary descendants, graphic novels, reversed the process by telling stories through pictures heightened with limited narration.  This new approach used in Phantom Hearts may move the process to new levels.

Reema, Micheal, and Danny are pioneers in another way as well.  They are funding their publication through cloud sourcing.  If you like what they are doing and think it will be successful, their web site allows you to invest in their project and share in any profits they make.  You can be an entrepreneur in a whole new direction for literature.  Take a look!

as I have been reading these it strikes me that a collection of these stories by people who have lost family members in the Mexican Drug War would make a fantastic book  -- or at least a long, major magazine article.

I don't feel competent to do itmyself, but some of you surely are.

For more information. go to www.caravanforpeace.org






---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: MAPNews <owner-mapnews@mapinc.org>
Date: Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 12:17 PM
Subject: MN: US TX: Mother Talks Of Losing Four Sons
To: mapnews@mapinc.org

Newshawk: Herb
Pubdate: Sat, 25 Aug 2012
Source: Brownsville Herald, The (TX)
Copyright: 2012 The Brownsville Herald
Contact: http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/sections/contact/
Website: http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1402
Author: Patricia Lopez
Cited: Caravan for Peace: http://www.caravanforpeace.org/caravan/
MOTHER TALKS OF LOSING FOUR SONS
Four sons of Maria Herrera Magdalena are missing.
"Two of my sons disappeared on August 28, 2008, in the state of
Guerrero," she said Thursday in a visit to the Rio Grande Valley.
"And after two years I again have the same thing happen. Two more
sons have disappeared."
Herrera Magdalena is part of the Caravan for Peace with Justice and
Dignity that is traveling across the United States to promote
bilateral efforts to end the drug violence in Mexico and along the border.
On Thursday, Brownsville was one of the caravan's two stops in the
Rio Grande Valley. The caravan began in Tijuana, Mexico, and is
scheduled to arrive in Washington on Sept. 12.
Traveling with Herrera Magdalena is a fifth son, Juan Carlos Trujillo Herrera.
The mother said in addition to her sons, 15 others from her town in
Guerrero have disappeared.
She addressed a crowd Thursday in Alamo, telling them why she and
others were traveling with the caravan.
"At this time we are not fighting for our own but for each and every
one of the children of the people who are here," she said.
Their hope is to stop the violence, she said.
"We do not want more people to go through the pain that we have been
going through," she said.
Another woman, Leticia Mora Nieto, approached a reporter to show a
photograph of a young woman.
Mora Nieto said it was her daughter.
"I come from Atizapan in the state of Mexico," she said. "I am with
the Caravan for Peace searching for justice."
Her daughter disappeared a year and four months ago, she said.
"She is 24 years old and the truth is, we have not had much of an
answer," she said. "People do not know what it is to live with this pain."
Her life, she said, has completely changed.
"My life is a different one. My family is already broken. I am over
here and they are over there," said Mora Nieto, who spoke with great anxiety.
"I am very frightened because nowadays you see a lot of people being
smuggled. Daughters are taken into prostitution. I am in this country
because there are many American clients and they go across the border
for those services," she said of her efforts to bring change.
______________________________

Build your working vocabulary (Not!):

Abecedarian insult “Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalial,
dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic,
jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial,
papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical, unguinous,
 ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte.”
The Superior Person’s Book of Words, by Peter Bowler, 1985

The Write Tips

            I read as much as I write, but my reading is far better onemight say. That being so, I'd like for my writing to excel and reach out andgrab a reader who will sing my praises to the blue sky's and eagerly await mynext novel.
            So I dream on.
            I tend to study all the writing tips that appear in thenewspapers, magazines, and study what successful novelists have to say.
            I've come to a conclusion. One that I learned as a teenagerfrom my primary doctor. Dr. J. J. Whitsett told me over and over as I left myteens and settled into my adult years something I've always remembered.
            I continually asked him questions on how to maintain ahealthy body. When I was eighteen years of age I came home from my freshmanyear at the University of Texas, severelyanemic. My hemoglobin was so low he wanted to put me in the hospital, butdecided that we'd try liquid iron for three months.
            That brought up my count and I had energy. Energy I was notaware that I lacked. I started with books and pamphlets on health and irondeficiency anemia.
The more I read the more it echoed in my head what Dr. Whitsett toldme.
            It is so very simple and I'll share it here.
            Consider this, in one week, month or year, an item will appearin our newspapers, magazines and TV.  This item will be extolling the virtuesof a wonderous cure-all ointment, pill or liquid that will make us healthy,happy and rich. With our minds so saturated with this info, we clean out ourcupboards and fill it with the new, safe stuff.
            Time will pass. It always does and soon we hear, threetimes over how we've been poisoning our bodies with the heretofore healthystuff.
            Now, I'm using the above as an example, but it can beapplied to every level in our lives. One day we hear that X is good for us.  Wego out and we fill our cabinets with X. With this accomplished, more timepasses, lots of it and we discover that X is not good for us.  We need Z. Onceagain our minds are saturated with some special or horrible information and itgoes on ad infinitum.
            Think how we banned eggs from out diet and now we can enjoyour eggs with out guilt.
            Writing hints are the same.  It depends on our voice, ourtopic and the rhythm that is natural to us. 
            I've applied thistheory to my writing.
            Just last month a new list of tips on improving one'swriting appeared in one of the magazines I read. The article compared a longopening sentence from one of our literary treasures. The sentence could haveseveral drawbacks, one being, the reader may never get to the period.
            On the other hand, there's Herman Melville's classic: 19thCentury Novel, Moby Dick.
            "Callme Ishmael." was the opening sentence. Can't get much shorter than thatexcept in the Bible.
          So, for me, I consider the flow andrhythm of the words. That may not make me a good writer, but I enjoy myrelationship with my keyboard.
          I've got to go load the coffee pot andcheck on Perry Mason, who's in the other room. Goodnight Mr. eMachine.
By: Pauline Hallard (7-11-2012)

LOOKING FOR HOUSTON WRITERS

Our group is currently interviewing potential new members in the Houston Area.

If interested email d9_dun@hotmail.com.