BOOK TOUR
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Twenty-eight-year-old widow Ricki James leaves Los Angeles to start a new life in New Orleans after her showboating actor husband perishes doing a stupid internet stunt. The Big Easy is where she was born and adopted by the NICU nurse who cared for her after Ricki’s teen mother disappeared from the hospital.
Ricki’s dream comes true when she joins the quirky staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum, the spectacular former Garden District home of late bon vivant Genevieve “Vee” Charbonnet, the city’s legendary restauranteur. Ricki is excited about turning her avocation – collecting vintage cookbooks – into a vocation by launching the museum’s gift shop, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware. Then she discovers that a box of donated vintage cookbooks contains the body of a cantankerous Bon Vee employee who was fired after being exposed as a book thief.
The skills Ricki has developed ferreting out hidden vintage treasures come in handy for investigations. But both her business and Bon Vee could wind up as deadstock when Ricki’s past as curator of a billionaire’s first edition collection comes back to haunt her.
Will Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware be a success … or a recipe for disaster?
Why I Outline My Mysteries
There are some people who sit down at the computer with a
few thoughts in their head – or none at all – open a document to a blank page
and begin to write. They’re called pantsers. And oh, how I envy them.
Much as I’d love for inspiration to simply pour out onto the
page, filling that empty white space black with paragraphs of lovely mystery
prose, that’s not how it works for me.
I’m a plotter – the exact opposite of a pantser. I create a
detailed outline that usually runs twenty-five to thirty-five pages. I call it
a fluid outline because I always discover new things when I go from outline to
manuscript. Chapter breaks change. A new twist presents itself. Even entirely
new characters suddenly show up. But I’d say roughly 80% of my outline remains
the same.
I wasn’t always a devout outliner. I began my writing career
as a playwright. I’d create a draft from bits of notes and dialogue written on
paper scraps and napkins, then see where the journey took me. Then I
transitioned from playwriting into a career as a television writer on shows
like Wings, Just Shoot Me, and Fairly Odd Parents. In film and
TV, you literally cannot start writing a script until your outline has been
approved, often by multiple levels. It’s written into the contracts: you’re
paid for commencement, outline, first draft, second draft, and in the case of a
TV pilot or film script, a polish. When I wrote for network shows, the outline
passed from showrunner to studio executive to network executive for approval
before I could finally get a crack at a script first draft. As with my mystery
outlines, they weren’t written in stone. But woe be to any writer who decided
to take a big detour.
Given my twenty-five-year TV career, outlining is now baked
into my writing process. Some people resist this step because they feel it’s
not writing organically. I tell them it’s absolutely writing organically, just
at a different point in the process. In fact, I’ve gotten to the point where I
consider my outline my true first draft. The bottom line is when it comes to
writing, there’s no “right” way. There’s only what works for you.
But I still wish I could pants!
About Ellen Byron
Ellen’s Cajun Country Mysteries have won the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel and multiple Lefty Awards for Best Humorous Mystery. Bayou Book Thief will be the first book in her new Vintage Cookbook Mysteries. She also writes the Catering Hall Mystery series under the name Maria DiRico.
Ellen is an award-winning playwright, and non-award-winning TV writer of comedies like Wings, Just Shoot Me, and Fairly Odd Parents. She has written over two hundred articles for national magazines but considers her most impressive credit working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart. An alum of New Orleans’ Tulane University, she blogs with Chicks on the Case, is a lifetime member of the Writers Guild of America and will be the 2023 Left Coast Crime Toastmaster. Please visit her at https://www.ellenbyron.com/
Thanks, Lisa. Happy Sunday!
ReplyDeletePat T
Thanks for this review. It sounds like a really good story.
ReplyDeleteThanks for giving me a chance to share this post!!
ReplyDeleteIt makes so much sense to me to outline a book before starting to write. I can't understand how anybody could write a book without one!
ReplyDelete