A First

Been on a lot of shelves in my time, but this is the first time I'm next to Grisham on a display table, at Chapters/Indigo books.  (And to make it clear before Jayne makes some smart-ass comment, I'm ON the table, not under it)

Why Book Tours are Expensive (more comedy on the road...)

It's rerun season!  

I dug into the archives, and found my third ever column for Sleuthsayers, from NINE YEARS AGO, to the month.  

It also happens to be a favourite of mine (which usually points to loopy comedy.)  There have been ten books since The Goddaughter's Revenge, would you believe.

by Melodie Campbell 

I’ve recently been on a book tour for my latest crime comedy, The Goddaughter’s Revenge (winner of the 2014 Derringer and Arthur Ellis Awards for Best Novella. There. I got it in.  My publisher can relax now.)

Book tours are expensive.  You travel around to independent book stores and you sell some books and sign them. 

It’s fun.  You meet a lot of great people.  But it’s expensive.  And I’m not talking about the hotel bill and the bar tab.

I should have just stayed in the bar.  It was leaving the bar that become expensive.

Nice night.  We decided to go for a walk.  It was dark, but I had on my brand new expensive progressive eye-glasses, so not a problem, right?

One second I was walking and talking.  The next, I was flying through the air.

Someone screamed. 

WHOMP.  (That was me, doing a face plant.)

“OHMYGOD! Are you okay?”  said my colleague.

I was clearly not okay.  In fact, I was splat on the sidewalk and could not move. 

“Fine!” I yelled into the flagstone.  “I’m Fine!”

I tried to lift my head.  Ouch.

“That must have hurt,” said someone helpfully.

I write about a mob Goddaughter. So I know a bit about mob take-outs.  It may come in handy.

A crowd had gathered.  Not the sort of crowd that gently lifts you off the ground.  More the sort of crowd that gawks.

“Couldn’t figure out why you were running ahead of us.” My colleague shook his head.

I wasn’t running.  I was tripping and falling.

“That sidewalk is uneven.  Your heel must have caught on it.”

No shit, Sherlock.

By now I had tested various body parts.  Knees were numb.  Hands, scraped.  Chin, a little sore. 

But here’s the thing.  I hit in this order: knees, tummy, boobs, palms.  My boobs cushioned the fall and saved my face. 

Yes, this was going through my mind as I pushed back with my tender palms to balance on my bloody knees.

“Ouch!”  I said.  No, that’s a lie.  I said something else.

I stood up.  Surveyed the damage.  My knees were a bloody mess, but the dress survived without a scratch.  It was made in China, of course.  Of plastic.

The crowd was dispersing.  But the pain wasn’t over.

Next day, I hobbled to the clinic.  The doctor, who probably isn’t old enough to drive a car, shook his head.

“Progressive glasses are the number one reason seniors fall.  They are looking through the reading part of their glasses when they walk, and can’t see the ground properly.”

Seniors?  I’ve still got my baby fat.

“Get some distance-only glasses,” he advised.

So I did.  Another 350 bucks later, I have a third pair of glasses to carry around in my purse.
Which means my purse isn’t big enough.

So I need to buy a new purse.

And that’s why book tours are so expensive.

Melodie Campbell is an infant Sleuthsayer, and this is her third column.  She writes comedies (No shit, Sherlock.)  You can find them at www.melodiecampbell.com and all the usual book places.

Update!  Melodie Campbell is a veteran Sleuthsayer now, with seventeen books and a few more years on the bod.  Might even admit to being a senior now, if a senior means over 55.  Hope to be around to rerun this humour column in another nine years.  Hope you are too!

(cartoon of me with offending shoes)

Thank you Dru! "A Day in My Life" by Lady Lucy Revelstoke

 

On a terrific blog site today, with a unique take: A day in the life of your main character! Such a lively way to introduce your book to readers. Great fun being hosted by Dru...

 

click here:

 

https://drusbookmusing.com/lucy-revelstoke/?fbclid=IwAR0o-eRP8UYxn_wF6TDk9rNPeci2Jwuc1NJ-0RsGb6OWRWO9a9UvOBWhtSc 

A preview...

drusbookmusing.com

A Day In My Life ~ Lady Lucy Revelstoke by Melodie Campbell

“Who put a bloody lifeboat there?” That was my maid, Elf, talking. Mind you, calling her a maid is a trifle optimistic. It’s 1928. Height of the modern age, and here we are, all at sea. Really at sea…

Change of Date!

 SEPT IS THE NEW JUNE! (change of Different Drummer event date with Vicki Delany) Friends and readers: please take June 17 off your calendar, and replace it with Sept 9! Ian at Different Drummer has been informed by the town that the Sound of Music festival at Burlington waterfront next Saturday will make parking near his store impossible. Vicki and I are rebooked for Sept. 9. Cake will be a feature (I know...a long time to wait for cake)

Terrific MOTIVE crime and mystery festival panel with Sam Shelstad and Jonathan Whitelaw!

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF AUTHORS

Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, June 4 2023

 (note to self:  find a bra with winches)

The Globe and Mail, June 3, 2023

 

"Why don't you write about Gina Gallo's Grandmother?" or Where do you get your ideas?

 

 Ah, the timeless question.  Where do you get your ideas?

I think it was Stephen King who talked about a little mail-order store in small town America...

I've never been able to find that store myself.  Stephen keeps it a close secret (I hope you're smiling.)

But I had reason to experience that dilemma about two years ago, a year into the pandemic, and a year after my husband David died.

Damn that covid, and what it's done to publishing.  When Orca Books told me that they were capping the line that carried my Goddaughter series (translation: still selling the books in the line, but closing it to future books, at least for now)  I was in a tight spot.

What to write next?  I'd had 10 contracts in a row from Orca!  That series garnered three major awards!  How could I leave it behind?

Put another way:  what the poop was I going to write next?

The Goddaughter series featured a present day mob goddaughter who didn't want to be one.  Gina Gallo had a beloved fiance who thought she had gone straight.  But of course, in each book she would get blackmailed into helping the family pull off heists or capers that would inevitably go wrong.  It allowed for a lot of madcap comedy.

Some would say I was a natural to write a series about a mob goddaughter (we'll just leave it at that.)  And I liked the serious theme behind the comedy:  You're supposed to love and support your family.  But what if your family is this one? 

Issues of grey have always interested me.  We want things to be black and white in life, but quite often, they are more complex than that.  I like exploring justice outside of the law in my novels.  But I digress...

The Goddaughter books brought me to the attention of Don Graves, a well-known newspaper book reviewer up here.  He commiserated with the end of the Goddaughter series, and immediately suggested the following:

"Why don't you write about her grandmother?  Prohibition days, when the mob was becoming big in Hamilton."

The idea burned in me.  Except it wouldn't be her grandmother.  (Don is older than me.)  It would be her great-grandmother!  Coming to age in the time of Rocco Perri and Bessie Starkman...

I settled on 1928, because that was the year women finally got the vote in England.  The status of women features very much in this novel.  The time frame also allowed me to use the aftermath of WW1, including lives of men like my own grandfather, wounded by gas, and shell-shocked.  I would make the protagonist a young widow, because I knew grief - oh man, did I know grief.  My own husband had died way before his time, the year before.  I could write convincingly about that.

But I would also use bathos to lighten the tale. (I seem incapable of writing anything straight.)  The comedy of the Goddaughter books finds its way into The Merry Widow Murders, and so far, has generated smiles for prepub reviewers.

The book took me over a year to write, working full time on it.  It helped me to channel my grief.  It forced me to step out of my comfort zone and write something with considerable depth.  

And it taught me that - even widowed - I wasn't entirely alone.  That ideas are beautiful things that can come from friendship, and the good hearts of readers and reviewers you are fortunate to meet along your publishing journey.

Thank you, Don!

 "Delightful...Not to be missed"  Maureen Jennings, 

author of  the Murdoch Mysteries on TV

and the Paradise Cafe series

The Merry Widow Murders  

Now available!  

Barnes&Noble, Chapters

Amazon, independents

and all the usual suspects

from Cormorant Books

 

 1928, At Sea  

When an inconvenient body shows up in her stateroom, Lady Revelstoke and her pickpocket-turned-maid Elf know how to make it disappear--and find the killer.

"Miss Fisher meets Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry. The perfect escapist read!"  Anne R. Allen

 on Amazon