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Chill Waters  by Joan Hall Hovey

He stood near the ancient gnarled apple tree that for years now had produced only sour, wizened apples, waiting for her. The hot thick air hummed with the chirping of crickets. Behind him, an occasional fat June bug bumped against the screen door, drawn by the night-light. Now and then a car passed by, seeming only to emphasize his sense of aloneness. Not much traffic on Elder Avenue since they built the thruway.

Three houses down, Nealey’s old black lab set to barking excitedly at something – a raccoon scavenging in a garbage can, most likely, but it could just as well be shadows. The mutt had a game leg and was as deaf as his mother’s turquoise plastic crucifix that hung on the wall above the TV. The old man oughta have him done away with, put the damn thing out of its misery. Maybe I’ll do it for him one of these days, he thought, a grin playing at one corner of his cruel mouth. As he retrieved the pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, he heard Nealey’s door open, heard the old man’s low, gravelly voice call the dog inside.

He gazed up at the starry sky, grin fading as he envisioned Marie and that hotshot kid in the fruity white blazer slow dancing under these very stars. Bodies molded together, the kid’s hands moving over her, groping… his breath hot in her ear…

With a muttered curse, he shook his head as if to banish the image, checked an impulse to crush the pack of cigarettes in his hand. Instead, he struck a match against the tree, but his hand was unsteady and it took a few tries before he managed to get it lit. Leaning his back against the tree he closed his eyes. The rough bark of the tree stabbed like jagged stone through his thin nylon jacket. He sucked smoke into his lungs, exhaled slowly, trying to calm himself.

He wasn’t usually a heavy smoker, but four hours later, when he finally heard the car drive up, a small mound of butts had accumulated beside him on the ground. With slow deliberation, he mashed this latest one out too, and rose to his feet. Although stiff from sitting, at the same time a power born of rage surged through his veins like electricity.

Music drifted through the open, car window – a soppy Manilow ballad about a girl named Mandy. Above the music, her laugh floated to him, high and lilting as wind chimes. Mocking him. The flirtatious note in her laugh made his throat tighten, his hands curl into fists at his sides. But it was the maddeningly long silence that followed, while the music went on playing, that made him want to fly at them, yank them both out of the car and beat that scummy kid with her until he had to crawl home through his own blood. He wanted to do it. He saw himself doing it. It took all his will to remain where he was.

At last she got out of the car. He could see the pale flair of her skirt through the leaves.

“Night, Ricky. I had a really nice time.”

“Yeah, me too. Okay if I call you tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“You wanna go to a movie? Christine’s playing at the Capital.”

“Sounds great.”

The car door closed with a solid thunk. The kid’s old man was a dentist; the car was a graduation present.

As Marie turned away and started up the path toward him, the kid gunned the motor and drove off, taillights glowing like twin rockets, swiftly disappearing into the night.

Now the only sounds were the crickets and the soft click of her shoes on the cement walk. Yet she looked to be almost floating toward him, her white, strapless dress blue in the moonlight.

When she left the house tonight, her black glossy hair had been swept up into a satiny swirl, a few wispy curls trailing down past her ears; now it was messed up. The muscle in his jaw ticked as he moved deeper into the shadows.

Her pearl drop earrings swayed lightly above her bare shoulders as she walked. He knew how smooth those shoulders would feel beneath his hands because he’d touched them before. He had touched her. Had tasted the warm, throbbing hollow of her traitorous throat, crushed her mouth beneath his own, sometimes to silence her crying. Even now, he could taste her salty tears on his tongue.

As she drew nearer to where he stood in the clot of darkness, she touched her fingertips to her mouth, a small secret smile on her lips like the goddamn Mona Lisa. Face all soft and dreamy – all of it for someone else – never for him.

He waited until she was directly parallel to him, then stepped out of the shadows. He enjoyed hearing her gasp of shock, in seeing her hand leap to her breast in fright, the smile vanish as she stumbled on the walkway, nearly falling.

“Damn you! You scared me half to death. What’s wrong with you? Why are you always sneaking around? Always watching me. Can’t I have one normal…”

His hand clamped hard and sudden over her mouth, cutting off her words. It made him feel good to see those lovely eyes widen with shock, then fear. Fear that turned swiftly to terror, then to pleading. But it was too late for that. Too late. The beast had risen up in him.

“It’s midnight, Cinderella,” he whispered.

Buy Link:  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1/178-0374046-4672020?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=Chill+Waters

What a Bargain!!!

Considering the price of some ebooks, it's quite refreshing to be able to purchase reasonably priced reads, and even get freebies every day.  To say my Kindle is bulging is an understatement, and I imagine your's is too.  Good news, though...I'm not the only BWL author with three combined novels.  I'll list the links to others below, and highly recommend each of them as I've read most of them.  So far, I haven't found one I didn't love.

I hope you can find room for my newest release, which is a combination of three of my best selling novels...and all for just $5.95 and available this week on Amazon.  Here's the link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0094A9OWC

I can always use some positive reviews. (hint, hint).  :)

Here's the link to the other newly-released collections:

Jamie Hill:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009515V3Q

Renee Simons:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00951B3OM

Joan Hall Hovey:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00951DKJ8

Sydell Voeller:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00942J1BY/

Ann Herrick:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009511VDK

Shirley Martin:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009511SWE

All of the covers will look like mine, but are color coded to indicate the genres.  Aren't they beauties?  Michelle Lee is awesome with all the covers she's done for us.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0094A9OWC#reader_B0094A9OWC

Welcome, Joan Hall Hovey - Queen of Suspense

WRITING FROM THE PSYCHE

By

Joan Hall Hovey

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” -Willa Cather

We’re told to write with passion or write from the heart, and while this is good advice, I take it further. I suggest you write from the Psyche.

When I say that, I mean writing from those places inside your memory that stay with you, that delight you, and even haunt you. The memory can be a joyful one, like a trip to the carnival at night when you were a child, with all the lights, the smell of candied apple and french fries in the air, the musical rides, the lure of the sideshow barker. Can you still feel that excitement churning in your stomach?

Or maybe it was a darker memory- a time when you were chased down the street by a stalker. Can you still hear those running footsteps behind you? Feel your heart thudding in your breast?

What memories haunt you? 

 The seeds for my latest suspense novel Night Corridor were planted in my childhood. On Sundays, I accompanied my grandmother to visit an aunt in the New Brunswick Provincal Hospital, later changed to Centracare, once called The Lunatic Asylum. She’d spent much of her life within those walls. They said she was ‘melancholy’.

That sprawling, prison-like building with bars on the windows, has long since been torn down, the sights, sounds and smells of the place infiltrated the senses of the 12 year old girl I was, and never left. Recently, a local paper did a story on Night Corridor. They included an old postcard photo of the mental institution taken in 1905, and it looked almost like a pleasant rest home with trees in front. A clever photographer had managed to capture a small piece of the building shot at an attractive angle, not at all how it really looked.

She was always so glad to see us. She wore makeup, and beads and read poetry to me. She seemed like a movie star, but of course I knew better. I didn’t really understand why she couldn’t come home.

Further research led me to a diary I read written by a woman named Mary Heustis Pengilly, in 1885.

 But while Night Corridor was inspired by my aunt, and influenced by Mrs. Pengilly, it is not about them. Fiction can be drawn from life, but it is filtered through the writer’s imagination. Your characters are not you. They are people in their own right with their own hearts and minds. You breathe life into them by infusing them with your own emotions, based on your life experiences. In this way you are connected to them.

I don’t try to force those connections, but I do invite them, long before I begin the novel. Something that I can grasp in my writer’s imagination and make something of. A kind of alchemy, turning lead into gold. At least that’s the intention. I’m not aware that I’m working out childhood issues, but I’m sure they play a part. Once I begin to relive that memory, complete with sensory details – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, I invite the character into that world. It helps that I can remember with more vividness my childhood, then I can tell you what happened last Tuesday. This method may not work for every writer, but it works for me.

This is the building in my memory. And it is how Caroline Hill sees it in Night Corridor.

From Chapter 3:

“Pretty fall day,” the cab driver said over his shoulder, and Caroline jumped at the sound of his voice and turned around in the seat. She’d been looking out the back window, watching the prison-like structure of Bayshore Mental Institution, gray and sprawling against the cornflower blue of the sky, grow smaller and smaller. The man’s voice had startled her. But for Doctor Rosen, no man had spoken to her in a very long time.

The cab driver’s shoulders were wide in a maroon blazer of some soft material. His hair was a mass of gray curls and he wore dark sunglasses; she could see them in the rearview mirror.

She couldn’t see his eyes but knew he was looking at her, waiting for her response.

She must say something. It wasn’t like he’d asked her some difficult or personal question, only commented on the weather. Speak up, Dr. Rosen had told her. Hearing your own voice strong in your ears will give you confidence.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it’s very lovely.”

She settled back in the blue-gray plush seat, enjoying its soft, luxurious feel. The car smelled of new leather, pleasant and mildly reminiscent of something that nudged the edge of her mind. Ah yes, William’s leather jacket. William’s leather jacket. So long ago.

Then I ask myself, What If? What if you were in a mental institution for years, and suddenly put out onto the street.

What would it be like to be Caroline Hill who’d been in Bayshore Mental Institution for nine years. And then to complicate matters, and further threaten her fragile emotional health, to find herself being stalked by a deadly predator.

But who will believe her? She’s a crazy woman, after all.

When writers talk about the magic or mystery in novel writing, this, in my opinion, is what they’re talking about – the subconscious working away and offering up gems for our use. Or what Stephen King calls in his splendid book On Writing, ‘the boys in the basement’. Though writing is a craft in as much as housebuilding is a craft, you have to work at it. You have to put seat in chair everyday. You need to develop the skills to turn your story into a publishable manuscript. But assuming you’re doing that, the subsconscious is the cleverest part of us. It knows things we can’t even guess at.

Have you noticed that the best ideas don’t always come when you’re consciously trying to come up with something, but when you’re out walking, soaking in the bath, or even while lying in bed at night. Which is why I always recommend to students that they keep a notebook and pen handy whenever possible.

When you make a connection with that memory from your childhood that is so vivid to you, so present that you can transport yourself back to that time and place in an instant, use it. It is fodder for the imagination. And it makes no difference what genre you’re working in – romance, suspense, horror, whatever your cup of tea, you can make something of that memory. It’s impossible to say exactly how it all works. Enough that it does. You can take that memory in different directions. Transplant it to a different time and place. Use those emotional memories as a spider uses its spinneret glands to weave a web.

So the next time you’re stuck for an idea, what about that memory you could never shake? Maybe it’s time to exorcise it by using it in your next novel. Give it to one of your characters.

You can find your own copy of Night Corridor on Amazon, and while you're there, check out her other amazing books.

Welcome Joan Hall Hovey

THE ROAD TO PUBLICATION

BY JOAN HALL HOVEY

(Previously published in The Writer Magazine)

Like you, I started out as a story 'listener'. Both my parents were avid storytellers, and I needed only to hear the words, "I remember the time when..." to feel that rare and exquisite pleasure in the anticipation of a new story. The dark, scary ones were best - stories my father told of the man with the cloven foot who showed up at the card game, or the discovery of a young girl's body in the woods behind the school ... the town drunk found dead in the cemetery, his face as granite-white with frost as the tombstones surrounding him...

From the time I could find my way to the Saint John Library, I was a constant visitor. For me, the library was a magical place - a hushed, warm haven where, through the pages of a book I could travel to far off exotic places in my imagination. I could experience vicariously all the joy, romance, terror, tragedy and triumph of the characters in the stories.

Among my favorite authors were Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Bronte, Shirley Jackson and Phyllis Whitney. Far too many to list here. I am forever grateful to them all, for it was through reading their works that the seed to be a writer was planted in me. I wanted to join the ranks of those authors who had given me so much pleasure, and in turn tell my own stories. I had learned about the power of words.

Reading is, of course, where it all begins for all writers. Although it might surprise you to know that a number of aspiring writers have told me they didn't have time to read. Or that they didn't read because they didn't want anything in their own work to be totally original. Sadly, I don't expect to read much of their work in published form. So the first key to publication is to Read! Read! Read! Nothing you didn't already know. But it's true; we learn by osmosis. And we learn by doing.

When I first set pen to paper with thought of publication, I didn't know bad literature from good. I devoured it all, and learned from it all. I came across the True Confessions in the market section of a copy of Writer's Digest Magazine, and it seemed possible to me that I could write one. I was right. That first story was titled: I Didn't Kill My Husband, But I Might As Well Have. Pretty bad, I know. But looking at the models on the page portraying the characters in my story, not to mention my cheque for $125.00, I felt like I'd won the lottery. The only downside was that my name wasn't on my story. You don't get a bi-line from the confessions. The stories are supposed to be true. Or at least read like they're true.  Everyone I wrote sold.  I seemed to have a knack.  But I never approached the writing of these little stories lightly, or with tongue in cheek; I always wrote from my heart, in all seriousness.   When I could no longer do that, I stopped writing them.

My children were small then, three under six years of age, and I was squeezing in writing time when I could find it. Usually, in the evenings after they were in bed. (Ah, to be so young again! ) Later, I wrote while holding down a full-time job. You do what you have to do.  John Grisham rose at 4:00 a.m. to get in his stint of writing before going off to his law office. 

My second story, God's Special Gift, made the rounds for a time and finally sold to Home Life magazine in Nashville. It was about my grandmother, who died in a house fire when I was 15. Writing that story, albeit many years later, was very cathartic for me. And I got a bi-line.  My work soon found its way into the now defunct, (unfortunate, because it was a fine magazine) Atlantic Advocate, both fiction and non-fiction, and various other magazines and newspapers. 

Pregnant with my fourth child, I determined to pursue my lifelong dream of writing a novel. That summer, I sat on our back deck and read a stack of suspense novels of the sort I wanted to write. I reread Poe, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson and many of the new authors who were also becoming my favorites. In the fall, I began writing my own suspense novel, The Strawman. (Later Zebra Books would change the title to Listen to the Shadows.) I wrote it at our kitchen table in longhand, and the book took a long time to write. I worked on it off and on over a period of maybe four years.

Finally the novel was finished. I'd already gone through my Writer's Market, as well as checking out the books on the shelves of our local bookstore, and Zebra seemed right for The Strawman. I sent it off. It came flying back within a few weeks, but the attached slip of paper wasn't quite a rejection. Anne Lafarge, acquisitions editor at the time, had scribbled a note saying she liked the book, but it was too short. They needed 100,000 words; mine was about 75,000 words.

I settled down to work. It took another four months to add the other 25,000 words, which I did by weaving in a couple of subplots. In November I sent the manuscript off again, addressing it to Anne LaFarge. On the outside of the package, in bold black marker, I printed: Requested Material, just in case she forgot me, which I'm sure she did.

One day in February the phone rang. I knew intuitively that it was Zebra. They wanted to publish The Strawman. (Which became Listen to the Shadows.) When my husband came home that night I was at the stove cooking spaghetti. He took one look at my face, and said, "You sold your book."

It was a dream come true. I felt weepy and humbled. And very happy.

Nowhere To Hide sold on the heels of Listen To The Shadows, on the basis of an outline. I managed easily to get an agent to negotiate the contract. Zebra wanted to publish a book a year with me.   Both books garnered heart-warming reviews. Nowhere To Hide even won a couple of writer awards.

End of story? Hardly. I completed and sent out the third manuscript and it was returned. I was told Zebra was no longer publishing suspense. At least the kind of psychological suspense I like to write.  More sex, they said.  That sort of book had little appeal for me.  And I'm convinced you should only write what you really want to write. Otherwise, it's just too damn hard.  The moral of the story: You're never there. (Unless you're Stephen King, but he's a genius.)

Back to square one? Well, not quite. What I have now is a track record. Publishers tend to give my work a longer look before they turn it down.

Chill Waters took a little longer to find a home.  It too, received good reviews.  For the most part.  Not everybody will love you.

This is a precarious business, with no guarantees for any of us.  So you must love the actual process of writing. In the end, the only thing we have any control over is the writing itself. It takes courage to be a writer, to put our work (ourselves) out there, never knowing if it will be praised or ridiculed. We must rise above the fear, and do what we know we can when all cylinders are firing. 

So give that critical editor on your shoulder the bum's rush (He gets called in for work later.) and write your novel. Enjoy the writing; give yourself to it like a lover. Get out of your own way by focusing on the characters and their story. And know that you are not alone. All around the globe, at this very moment, writers are sitting at kitchen tables with pen and paper, or at their computers, struggling to write their own novels.

Lastly, no matter your genre, be it romance, mystery, horror or science fiction, go where the passion, the pain, is. Write with joy! And believe in yourself. No one can tell your stories but you. No one. And if you need a little inspiration, check out the books on my site.  My latest two suspense novel are Night Corridor

 and The Abduction of Mary Rose, both for Kindle/other and in Paperback.  The books are published by Books We Love.

Good luck!

Joan Hall Hovey

www.joanhallhovey.com

 As well as penning suspense novels, Joan Hall Hovey's articles and short stories have appeared in such diverse publications as The Toronto Star, The Writer Magazine, Atlantic Advocate, Seek, Home Life Magazine, The New Brunswick Reader, Fredericton Gleaner, New Freeman and Kings County Record. Her short story, Dark Reunion was selected for the anthology Investigating Women, published by Simon & Pierre.

Note from Ginger:  Joan Hall Hovey writes the best mysteries ever.  She's an EPIC award winner, and if you love being on the edge of your seat, then you need a dose of JHH.  :)