A Tidbit From A Work in Progress

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Lori Ericson

My mystery novel A Lovely County was published in January. I’m in the final stretch of writing the second in the series, tentatively titled A Lovely Murder. I’m anxious to write these last few chapters and read back through it. Over the next few months the hard part will be the editing, but I’m confident the pain will be eased with the help of my favorite editor Gil Miller, a dedicated and skilled member of the Oghma Creative Media staff.

Below is an excerpt tease from A Lovely Murder:

“She shook her head and scanned the area around her. There was nothing but trees and brush between her and the lake. Whoever she chased had to be up the hill. Had to be trying to get out of the woods.

Running again, she tripped on something hard and fell face first to the ground. Her shirt snagged on a sapling as she went down. The cotton tee shirt yanked to the side. It ripped but held and helped to break her fall, or at least slow the momentum of the tumble.

She pulled the shirt loose from the tree, rolled over on her back, and fought to catch her breath.

Her heart pounded.

The siren grew louder, then stopped.

A turkey vulture circled in the window of sky in the canopy of leaves above her. The bird arced to one side, disappeared for a few seconds above the trees, and came back into view, its graceful flight similar to a ballerina with arms wide open gliding silently across a stage.

Silence. Only her own breathing.

“Who are you?” she screamed.

“Why?” she screamed louder.

“Oh my God, why?”

A lump caught in her throat, but she didn’t cry, wouldn’t cry. Tears would make it real, not a nightmare. It had to all be a nightmare.

Holding her breath, she listened.

Nothing for a minute.

She exhaled.

A car ignition started from somewhere up the hill. Then the sound of gravel spraying behind it as it sped away.

She lay still, watching the vulture.”

Book cover by Casey Cowan, Oghma Creative Media

You can pick up A Lovely County on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Lovely-County-Lori-Ericson-ebook/dp/B00S5I1ILY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435930767&sr=1-1&keywords=lori+ericson

Also, check out Gil Miller’s blog The Book of Writing at https://gilmiller.wordpress.com. He’s got a lot of good advice on the craft. I loved his recent post on Stephen King and how we can admire but not copy his work.

Thanks for stopping by!

Daughter of the Howling Moon

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Lori Ericson

I’ve read paranormal, but it’s not my favorite genre. I may have to change my mind after reading Daughter of the Howling Moon by R.H. Burkett, but this tale is more of a mystery/thriller with some paranormal elements. I was so impressed with the writing style, the storyline and the characterization that I had to tell you about it here.

This book absolutely draws you in with the first chapter and keeps you in its claws with every turn of plot.

Here’s a taste of one of the most engaging characters I’ve ever read, Bethany Ann from Chapter 1: “Mama looked like always. Well, maybe there was hint of paleness around her mouth and a funny rattle to her breathing, but certainly not anything close to the feared shadow of Death. Then again, what was Death supposed to look like, anyway?

‘Is that you, Bethany Ann?’

‘Yes, Mama,’ I said and took her outstretched hand in mine.

Her hands looked the same too. Hard and calloused from years scrubbing clothes on the old washboard out back and permanently faded from the harsh lye soap. Washing, cooking, and cleaning, that was Mama in a nutshell. Probably would be the exact words chiseled on her tombstone too.”

I was intrigued by the synopsis and the first few pages of this book. I read on and couldn’t stop. I realized the thrill of the mystery in this story was pulling me from page to page, keeping me guessing and dying to know more. Burkett does an outstanding job of presenting her characters and immersing the reader in the story through her portrayal of those characters, making you care, root for them, against them and everything in between. When I turned to the last page, I was absolutely disappointed to have to let go of Bethany Ann and her Ben! The story was complete and Burkett did a great job of telling it, but I wanted more!

Here’s a snippet from Ben’s point of view: “Maybe he imagined it. Maybe the effects of a long day in the heat and sun coupled with a hungry gut, a tried butt and a short night of drums pounding his head had scrambled his thinking. He didn’t know. But stagnant, humid air cooled and whispered to the tree tops. Night sounds of swamp creatures hushed as if the crickets and bullfrogs were holding their breath. A shimmering, much like moonbeams on still water, danced just out of reach. He blinked, not trusting what he saw. And the girl in front of him stood taller and spoke with a dangerous, powerful voice that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention.”

The reader gets easily and totally immersed in the scenery because of the outstanding description. I was in the head of Bethany Ann and Ben with Burkett’s fine and inspiring writing style. This is without a doubt a fantastic book with a storyline that will keep you guessing until the end.

I highly recommend this read. Published by Pen-L Publishing, Daughter of the Howling Moon is a sure bet for any reader of mystery, paranormal or thriller.

Check it out on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Daughter-Howling-Moon-R-Burkett/dp/1940222710/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427400245&sr=8-1&keywords=Daughter+of+the+Howling+Moon

The Thrill of FINALLY Getting in Print

Posted on January 14, 2015 by Lori Ericson

After years, I mean decades, of working toward a goal, it’s really a great feeling to meet it. I started thinking about writing a novel based on a series of stories I wrote in 1994 about problems in the Arkansas 309 prison program. Lack of confidence, life, and other issues kept me from ever starting to work on the novel for ten to fifteen years. Then I piddled at it forever. My daughters will even tell you that I wouldn’t even call it a book for years. It was “my project.” Seven or eight years ago I got more serious about it, joined Northwest Arkansas Writers Workshop and rewrote it. Then I rewrote it again, and again, and again.

Thanks to Shannon Press, a division of Oghma Creative Media, A Lovely County has been published and released on Amazon this week!

I can’t tell you how thrilled and excited I am with this accomplishment. Yes, I am writing still. I have a thriller in the works that may turn out to be a novella, and I’m working on the second in a series about reporter Danni Edens, the protagonist in A Lovely County.

Thank you to everyone who supported me through this process, especially Sara and Hillary, my daughters, and my ever-proud husband Lloyd. Also, I doubt I’d ever get to this place without the Northwest Arkansas Writer’s Workshop. Thank you to everyone who read and critiqued and encouraged in our weekly sessions.

Here’s the link to my newly born Amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/author/loriericson

Laura Lippman Offers Another Great Read

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Lori Ericson

Photo by Lori Ericson

Laura Lippman has the ability to put together a mystery plot like a tightly stitched patchwork quilt with a mixture of fabulous fabrics that you want to wrap yourself in and never let go. I get to the end of one of her books and am always amazed at how the story comes together with twists and turns around amazingly real characters that are fleshed out in revealing layers. This is particularly the case in her 2014 novel After I’m Gone.

The story easily jumps around a time period spanning several decades of family life, albeit a unique family life. Told from the perspective of five different family members and a few additional key characters, each reveals human qualities that bring out the best and worst innermost workings of heart and soul.

It’s a story of love, greed and betrayal as Felix Brewer creates a life of luxury for Bambi Gottschalk and their three daughters with somewhat shady business dealings that eventually catch up with him. He takes the chicken’s way out, avoids the penitentiary, leaving behind his family and a lover, along with a briefcase full of instructions and clues to where enough money is stashed to keep them living in style. But his family never knows about that briefcase and are left wondering if his mistress is the only one he cared enough about to provide something to sustain her in the wake of his departure. When she disappears exactly ten years after Felix vanished, it’s assumed that she has joined him on some tropical island. Years later her body is discovered. That discovery brings out secrets the Brewer women have kept from each other that nearly cost them all, until one of Felix’s women puts it all together. She finds that long-held desire created the mess and robbed her family of a life they deserved.

After I’m Gone is an excellent read, a complex mystery that won’t disappoint. The reader is likely to be slapping their forehead as the story unfolds in the end. I find myself doing that often at the end of Lippman’s books. I particularly like her standalone novels, but her Tess Monaghan series is also worth every turn of the page.

In full disclosure here, I had the pleasure of meeting Laura Lippman years ago. I attended “Of Dark and Stormy Nights,” a conference held in Chicago by Mystery Writers of America. I was fascinated to hear one of my favorite writers explain her craft, but absolutely delighted when we happened to share a shuttle to O’Hare Airport at the end of the conference. And, of course, I took a few precious moments of her time and shared a story idea I had brewing in my brain. She told me to go for it, to write the book about a corrupt prison system, a serial killer and a reporter from the Ozark Mountains who puts it all together. That book, A Lovely County, is coming out in a few months, and I’d like to thank Laura Lippman for encouraging me to get it written. I can only hope to be a Lippman kind of writer that keeps readers enthralled until the final page.

Why I Write

Posted on July 13, 2014 by Lori Ericson

At times I’ve wondered why I bother to write. The process is daunting and the finished product a distant uncertainty. I’ve written a novel expected to be published in January, but it took me years. If I include the idea and the thinking about turning it into an actual book,

Me signing my first publication contract with Oghma Creative Media. Photo by Casey Cowen, Oghma president.

I’d have to admit it took at least two decades. My daughter, now 29 with a child of her own, talks of waking up one morning as a teenager to find me half awake and upset. I told her I’d thrown out the novel I’d started. Yes, I did. I pitched it and started over. That wasn’t the last time either. Now it’s done. It’s hard to believe sometimes that it is.

The process was long, but through the stops and starts and restarts I turned into a writer.
I had planned to start a second in a series of mysteries with the same protagonist, but while finishing the last edit an idea for a thriller came into my head. I had to start writing it before I burst.
That’s just it. I write. I write not because I dream of publication (but nice reward and validation).
I write because it’s in me now and to stop would be denying a part of who I am.

Graveyard Images and Inspiration

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Lori Ericson

My husband says he never dreamed he’d marry a woman who loves to stop at cemeteries to take photos or just admire the surroundings. He doesn’t seem to mind our little adventures, and doesn’t seem to think I’m too crazy (or he doesn’t admit it aloud anyway).

Having lived in two cemeteries as a child and visited plenty of them along the way, I find them fascinating, peaceful, and even odd. The rituals of death and how we memorialize it are a puzzle. However, I think my main reason for wanting to stop, take a picture or simply look over the grounds is all about writer’s inspiration.

The character in my first novel, like me, grew up in a cemetery. I’ve got a couple of additional plots rolling around in my head for this same character and know I will get to them. However, I’ve started another novel, a thriller that doesn’t include this character. The plot came upon me like a sudden storm, and I had no choice but to start writing it.

Despite what I may be writing at any given time, I know I will likely continue to visit cemeteries and take photos. They inspire me in some weird way. I stare at the images of headstones and lawns dedicated to the dead. I wonder about the lives that were lived and those left behind.

What inspires you to seek your passion?

Photos by Lori Ericson

Writing Progress and New Business Cards

Posted on May 31, 2014 by Lori Ericson

May has been a good month for me as an aspiring novelist! I have new business cards to help promote myself. And (drum roll here) I can finally say I am done editing my mystery novel, and I am so very pleased with the outcome. I’ve even come up with a new title that fits it really well… “Indecent Liberty.” Even if it changes prior to publication, I’m happy with the progress.

Thanks to Russell Gayer and Robin C. Stuttle at Tyson Digital Print Services for the great job, quick service and good price on the cards!

Also, thanks to my husband Lloyd Ericson for all the encouragement, and for putting up with me and my writer life.

Now time to finish another short story and move on to the next novel. I already have a plot churning in my head.

Graveyard Theft

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Lori Ericson

Running from room to room, I searched for a source. An infant’s frantic sobs drove me to throw open each door along the endless hallway, only to find dust and cobwebs, and furniture draped in white sheets. The wood floor creaked, the sound mixing with the wails that were near, but then distant. The final tall wooden door called to me.

Sweat ran down my forehead blurring my vision and a rotten stench caught in the back of my throat. The brass doorknob was cold. It took both my hands to get it to twist. The door finally creaked open.

Tall windows bowed out in a semi-circle and rain pummeled against the glass. The frantic sobs came from a white crib shrouded in shear fabric in the center of the room.

Inching forward, fear snatched my breath. The crib shook with the wails of the child I couldn’t yet see. I pulled back the shear fabric with a shaky hand.

The baby’s bonnet-covered head was just a skull, empty eye sockets stared ahead, its open mouth ready to let out another wail. Skeleton arms stretched toward me.

I’m not sure if I screamed aloud or just woke from the fright of the recurring nightmare.

They’d been coming more frequently. I’m not sure which was worse, this one of searching for the crying baby, or the other of walking through the cemetery to find ghosts of babies wailing behind each tombstone.

I had to do something and soon. The guilt of what we’d done was eating me up. It was just four a.m. and too early for rising on a Saturday morning, but there was no going back to sleep. I would not rest another night without correcting this wrong.

Within an hour, I was on my way. The small statue of the shepherd wrapped in a blanket in the trunk. I could have disposed of it years ago, yet I hung onto it from guilt. Maybe I’d always known one day I’d make this trip of shame.

The gates to the cemetery were still locked for the night, the sun not yet up. But I knew exactly where I needed to go, and it wasn’t far beyond the marble pillars framing the iron gates. That’s what had made it easy the night I took the dare and stole the statue. The raised garden in the middle of what they called the “Babyland Garden” was easy to access, even when the gates were closed from dusk to dawn.

I thought it was cool, kind of funny, that night years before. Now, the stupidity of it all made me shudder.

Stopping next to one of the pillars, I popped the trunk and pulled the statue into my arms. Making my way around the gates and through the small grove of trees I prayed to not get caught. When I got to the raised garden, I doubted my mission for the first time that morning.

The statue had been replaced with a small marble angel. I hadn’t been back inside those gates since that night and had assumed the shepherd’s platform would still be empty.

“I’m such a dumbass,” I muttered.

There was no telling what the replacement statue had cost. There was no choice but to leave my guilt-ridden token there with its stand-in. I lowered the missing shepherd boy to the rock edge of the raised garden and walked away.

I could only hope my nightmares would now be over.

Most of the preceding story is my imagination. There was a statue of a small shepherd boy with a tiny lamb at his feet stolen years ago from the cemetery my parents owned. My brother and I found it returned one morning some five or six years later. It stood next to the angel statue that we’d bought to take its place.

I’m not sure if it was simply guilt or guilt-ridden nightmares that drove the thief to return the statue so many years after we noticed it missing, but I’d like to think that those who commit such crimes against the dead are tortured for their sins.

Is there anything you feel guilty about that may be invading your dreams? What sort of nightmares do you have?

PHOTO BY Lori Ericson

For Halloween: Revisit of My True Dead Man Story

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Lori Ericson

My True Encounter with a Dead Man

I woke up to the “swish swish” sound of his arm moving against his windbreaker in the eerie green glow of the living room. His face was covered with blood, as was his chest that was exposed by the open jacket. He wore cut-off jean shorts and tennis shoes. I thought it was a dream, this stranger illuminated by the green glass lamp base. I was stretched out asleep on my stomach on the living room floor in the house next to the cemetery when I heard him. He came through the dining room and sat in my dad’s recliner a little after midnight.

He stared at me, the smeared blood making him look surreal. I put my head back down thinking I must be dreaming.

He rocked in the recliner.

Raising my head again, I could see the same image.

“Who are you,” I asked.

“I’m dead. I just crawled out of my grave.” He rocked.

“Oh, come on. Do you know my brother John?” I asked. He looked about John’s age, a few years younger than me.

“I might of, when I was alive, but I just crawled out of my grave.” He rocked again in the recliner and continued to stare.

Frozen in place on the floor in front of him, I was unsure what to do. He wasn’t a dream. I hadn’t ever seen him before. Fear caught in my throat.

His rocking stopped. He raised a hand to his face, drew it back and stared at his palm with a quizzical look on his face as if he’d never seen blood before.

Lowering his hand to his lap, he rocked and looked at me. “I’m bleeding to death.”

“You said you’re already dead. How can you be bleeding to death?” It was an obvious question, or so I thought.

“I’m bleeding to death,” he repeated in a raised voice.

That scared me. Why had I questioned this dead man, this apparition covered in blood?

I started to get up, moving backward slowly and watching him closely.

“I just crawled out of my grave,” he yelled.

I got to my feet, ran around the corner, down the hall to my parents bedroom. I heard him following. By the time my dad sat up in bed and put on his glasses, the apparition was standing in the hall. He reached into the bathroom, flipped the switch, and the light fell over this teenage boy covered in blood.

“Who the hell are you?” Dad asked.

“I just crawled out of my grave. I’m dead.”

He stared back at Dad, who repeated his question.

“I just crawled out of my grave, and I need to use your bathroom.” He stepped into the bathroom. I heard the water start in the tub.

I didn’t see him again until the police officer gently coaxed him out of the tub and escorted the boy from our home.

My dead man had apparently done a few too many drugs, entertained himself by jumping from headstone to headstone in the dark cemetery and broke his nose.