THE FIFTEEN-MINUTE NOVEL by Max Jason Peterson

My McIntosh produced its first tiny apple.

Time is always the issue, isn't it? I'm constantly scrambling for time for all the things I want and need to do. So often I've despaired over ever being able to finish another novel. I'll stress about the amount of time required so much that after the first few sessions on a new project, I may even give up. After all, there’s so much else I need to do right now, or want to accomplish in my life.

With attention fractured and pulled in different directions, it can be hard to focus, even for blocks of time as short as twenty-five minutes as part of the oft-recommended (and justly so: it does work) Pomodoro Technique. 

But what if you don’t have twenty-five minutes to spare? What if you find even that amount of time daunting as you stare at the blank screen or page, when you’re not sure where the plot or characters are going? What if, instead of writing, you just spin your wheels about all the sacrifices needed to make time to finish that novel?

My suggestion: try something even smaller.

It may sound counterproductive. How could one possibly get anywhere by working on a novel for only fifteen minutes, or even ten?

Yet—ten minutes might be exactly what we have, at the end of the day, before falling asleep. Fifteen minutes might be available while waiting in a parking lot, on hold for customer service, or even standing in line.

For years now, I’ve been leading micro writing workshops for Hampton Public Library as Adele Gardner. These are free, one-hour sessions via Zoom. (Adele’s Writers Café; ages 18+, free, online only, registration required, which has been through Hampton Public Library’s Eventbrite, but that might change due to changes in how Eventbrite works. I typically lead several in spring and several more in fall. You can also hear about these via the Gardner Castle listserv, where I post news about my writing and art.)

For these sessions, I devise writing prompts, and then all the participants create very short pieces of fiction or poetry during a set period of time. In between prompts, those who wish may share their creations with the group. Depending on participation, we usually cover three or four prompts per session.

After much experimentation, it seemed to work best for everyone to write in ten-minute blocks. Some people are finished earlier; many are still in the middle of writing; but it’s a comfortable length of time, permitting enough space to quickly come up with an idea and create something that captures it without having too much time to overthink things. These are necessarily rough drafts, made with the intention of coming back later to add more and/or polish the work. But people have written some amazing and beautiful things at these sessions.

The length of time seems perfect for the “micro” works we’re striving for: though we’re not counting words or lines, and often run over, the aim is to make poems/flash pieces of 20 lines/200 words or less. The timer set for ten minutes lets the brain set to work quickly, on a sprint. There’s no time for the lengthier ruminations one might fall into during twenty-five minutes. One must simply get right to work. Find the first idea that catches your fancy and go!

Yes, a good poem can take a long time to finish. I recently spent over thirteen hours writing and rewriting a longer poem (over 100 lines). But often, for me, poems and short stories have seemed like a more achievable goal, because of the time involved. However, I’ve always dreamed of writing book-length fiction. So far, I have one mystery novel written but not published; but that often happens with first novels, so I need to finish the next one, and the next. However, that first one took ten years to complete! I’ve been finding it hard to even start on the next, since I don’t want to devote that amount of time. So I’ve been stymied.

Then I wondered—how long would it really take, if I approached it the way I do in my own workshops?

Since this is a novel we’re talking about, I decided to experiment and see what would happen if I tried fifteen-minute blocks.

When writing by myself, I do get distracted—a lot—so I decided to track how long I’d been working when the first urge to check my DMs or mow the lawn struck. It’s often about seven to ten minutes into a new writing session. Perhaps it takes that long for my anxieties about time to really kick in. But if I’m only aiming to write for fifteen minutes—and I check the timer and find I have eight minutes left, or only five—I can keep going for that amount.

Try it! Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Tell yourself, “It’s only fifteen minutes.” It’s just the length of a break at work, on which you can walk outside with a notebook or your phone (do some voice typing in a note or send yourself a text or email). In fact—if you’re in the middle of a marathon yard-work session, as I was last night—you will probably find a little break in the middle to be really helpful!

I’ve come up with some really interesting new angles on my characters and plot during those fifteen minutes—especially when I had no idea what I was going to write when I sat down.

Fifteen minutes can also keep you from getting trapped in a brainstorming spiral. Or it can keep a scene short, if it turns out to be something you want to experiment with but aren’t sure yet that you want it in the book.

Typically, I can write anywhere from 250-500 words in a fifteen-minute session. Most often lately, it’s at least 350+ words. Your mileage here may vary, and that’s perfectly okay. Remember, it’s only fifteen minutes. (And you’ll probably get more words per session once you start doing it every day.) Note: Your average word count per hour won’t apply here. I write a lot more in four separate fifteen-minute sprints than I do in one solid, unbroken hour. I think our brains gear up for a short sprint and we get the words out there a lot faster.

I did the math. For a fantasy novel, I’d want my first draft to be about 90,000 words before I get in there and start rewriting and editing. Even if I only wrote fifteen minutes each day, and even if I only did an average of 250 words per session, I’d be done with the amount of rough draft I need in less than a year.

When I look at it in terms of fifteen minutes a day…it doesn’t seem like such a huge sacrifice, either. I’m not really taking anything away from my family or other commitments. It’s a between-time. As long as I take my writing device or tools with me, I can make art anywhere I happen to be. For fifteen minutes, or even five.

I do try to get in at least two fifteen-minute sessions per day—one in the morning before work; one at night before bed. That way I’ll have half the year to make my draft, and half the year to revise.

Though I do also write in longer sessions when I can, I actually find I’m coming up with some of my best ideas when I sprint this way! It’s even allowing me to explore writing scenes from the points of view of side characters. Whether or not these scenes make it into the book, it’s a helpful way to explore and learn more about their character and motivations.

Of course—you’ll want to put in more time when you can. There’s research, for instance. And for at least some of the editing sessions, you’re going to want more time to consider things beyond the sentence currently in front of you. But as a start, as a means to create the draft needed to be able to start editing in the first place—this really seems to be working for me.

I hope it helps you as well.

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For more information about Max Jason Peterson (they/them), visit maxjasonpeterson.wordpress.com or the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram links through gardnercastle.com. Here’s a recent interview as Adele, but the author goes by Max in daily life.

Jammed Up by Judy Fowler

 

 

Ah, the fruit trees of Coastal Virginia. Since I moved here from the Big Apple twenty years ago, I've met at least twenty homeowners who wished their trees would be less fruitful. 

You don't see the problem coming when buying property. I once spotted a promenade of fruit trees behind a beyond-dilapidated house in Hertford, N.C., and all I could think of was the homemade jam I'd give away at Christmas. Now I'm grateful the owner turned down my offer. 

Last summer I crossed jam-making off my bucket list. When a retired friend called to say he wanted to surprise his adult son by clearing the son's backyard of a hailstorm of purple plums, I grabbed my inherited 1947 copy of Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking and headed out.

My friend stood waiting for me to arrive. The soles of his deck shoes were stained purple. 

He accepted the five-pound bag of sugar I'd picked up on the way. "We're going to need a bigger bag."

I quickly saw the problem in the backyard. He'd collected five buckets of fallen plums but a thousand more plums—squished and not squished—blanketed the grass below one medium-sized tree.  

His son's immaculate kitchen featured a white countertop. My friend had placed ten small jars there. He turned two buckets-worth of fruit into the sink and ran water over them. My job was to find a suitable cooking pot. His son had two saucepans—one small and one medium-sized.

"We're going to need a bigger pot," I said. "Maybe there's one in the garage?"

"He'll be home by five, and it's already one-thirty. We'll use the larger saucepan. I'll cook. You read."

Our grandmothers and mothers had used Rombauer's cookbook, so faith in its author came naturally to us. I'd marked the section on jam-making with a stroke symptoms flier someone had left in the book. "Shall we make Plum Jelly, page 703, or Plum Jam, page 706?"

"Jelly's fine."

"'Plums have their own pectin,'" I read. "That's a relief because I don't know what it is. Do you?"

"Read on."

"Once the plums are washed, place them in the pot."

"How many?"

"She doesn't say." I wondered why the recipe didn't include cutting up the plums first. "'Boil them in water until soft.'"

He pushed as many plums as possible into the saucepan, filled it with water, and lit the burner. At my insistence, he poked holes in some of the fruit so they wouldn't pop open."What next?"

"'Strain when soft.'" I located a colander.

"What happens after we strain it?"

"'Put the juice through a jelly bag.'" 

Neither of us knew what a jelly bag was. "I can google it," I offered.

"Never mind," he said. "Whatever it is, we don't have one. We'll improvise."

Improvising. Red stains on the white counter. Not my son. I kept reading. "We need a two-cup measure. The recipe says, 'Empty into each cupful of juice ¾ to 1 cup of sugar. Boil four cupfuls at a time and taste each cup to be sure it's sweet enough.' Neither of us should be drinking all that sugar."

"They're boiling over. I'll turn off the heat and make the jelly bag."

"It says the jelly bag can be made of flannel."                                                                          "Unless you brought flannel pajamas or a lumberjack shirt I'll use this dishtowel." 

If the bag he fashioned failed us, his son's kitchen would end up looking like a crime scene. 

"RULE FOR MAKING JELLY, page 699 says pectin forms best in underripe fruit."

"You never said that. I'm boiling multiple levels of ripeness here."

It's taken me until retirement but I've learned not to say, 'I'm sorry,' to bossy men. "I thought Rombauer would make this a joyful experience."

"You're too optimistic as a person."

"I'm optimistic? Who's cooking five buckets of plums in a medium-sized saucepan?" 

"I've almost got this dishtowel into a funnel shape."

"I looked at the softened plums. He'd dumped in as much sugar as would fit next to them. "The recipe says none of the fruit should float. Some of these are still floating. I think you turned the heat off too soon."

He kicked one of the buckets part-way across the floor. That had to hurt. "Pour the stuff from the pan into that colander," he snarled. "I'll catch it with the rolled-up dishtowel and squeeze it into this mixing bowl." 

Only a trickle reached the bowl. I picked up the book again. "'If the jelly is to be clear and sparkling, do not squeeze the bag.'"

I'd never seen him set his teeth the way he did then. "How can I get any jelly out of the bag if I don't squeeze it?" The stains on his son's dishtowel grew. The formerly white counter was purple.

"Let's switch to jam," I said. "Jelly needs too many gadgets. Here it is. 'For Plum Jam follow the rule for Quince Jam, page 705.'"

By two-thirty, the only things we'd strained were our patience and the limits of our friendship. We had two half-filled jars. I wished I'd checked Google to see if any advances had been made in jam-making since 1947."Do you think your son would mind if I eat some of his granola?"

"This should be easier," he said. You must have skipped something."               

"Only lunch. You really needed a two-cup measure," I said. The recipe said to cook four cupfuls of jam at a time for twenty minutes. 'It should be thick and smooth.'"

"Twenty minutes after it's thick and smooth or twenty to thicken?"

"We've been at this for hours," I said. "Your brow is dripping sweat, and there's no dishtowel left to wipe it. The floor is getting sticky with jam." 

"Doesn't that book say anything helpful?"

"It says 'stir frequently from the bottom as it is apt to stick.'"  Gunk had hardened on the inside of each of our two saucepans. He tried to loosen it with a spatula.

"Try a spoon," I suggested. "My grandmother made jam and she always shooed me out of her kitchen with a spoon. Now, was her spoon wooden or metal?" 

I was playing for time. I didn't want him to know Rombauer had moved on to Fruit Butters. Once he'd found out, my friend walked the remaining buckets of plums one at a time to the end of the driveway. He hid all evidence of our jam-making disaster, including the dishtowels, in a neighbor's covered trash can. I scrubbed the counter, but I'd seen too many cop shows to think I could get it all out.  

 At five o'clock when his son walked in to say Happy Father's Day we were fighting over the remote and polishing off the last of a three-cheese pizza delivered by Door Dash. The son's dad was an OK liar. He said we'd given the fruit to a homeless shelter, which we certainly will do if there's ever a next time. 

 

 

SWEET DAYS OF SUMMER by Sheryl Jordan

Summer is just around the corner, and everyone is getting ready for some fun in the sun! There is a lot to do in the beautiful summer months. Some people will take vacations they have planned months before, while others will travel spontaneously to their destinations. Staycations are also popular choices; experiencing local outings can be a fantastic way to spend summer days.

Summer, oh, how it stirs up nostalgia in me! It is one of my favorite seasons, a time when I find myself reminiscing about summers gone by. The fun-filled days and the not-so-perfect moments—all of them are etched in my memory as wonderful experiences. From family vacations, driving to different states to visit family and friends, going to amusement parks to the bee/wasp stings I endured while playing outside, going on fishing and camping trips, to baseball games where I once sat on a red ant’s nest.

My fondest memories are the Fourth of July celebrations. As I write this, the smells and booms of fireworks shooting up in the sky, bursting to show their bright colors of red, green, blue, and orange, are vivid. It was my highlight of summer, followed four days later by my birthday celebrations.

In recent years, I traveled to various cities during the summer. This summer, I decided not to travel but to do a staycation to relax and unwind. We will attend Juneteenth and 4^th of July celebrations, watching fireworks and joining in the festivities. Some of my family will visit in July for my birthday. I look forward to spending time with them and creating new memories. I also look forward to cookouts and going to the Virginia Beach Ocean Front, Williamsburg, and Bush Gardens.

In my writer’s life, I am going to complete the first two books of a mystery series. To do so, I am setting up interviews with professional female truck drivers. Who knows, I may even be able to go on the road for research with one of them. Now, that would be an adventure! I will also finish building my author’s website and participate in many book signings. An anthology I am a contributing author in will be released soon, so I will be participating in a launch party and promotional book signings.

On the not-so-busy days this summer, I am looking forward to reading, binge-watching movies, and television shows, and just enjoying the dog days of summer.

What are some of your most memorable summers? What plans do you have for this summer?

Agatha Christie - Pick Your Poison by Teresa Inge

While participating on the Agatha Christie panel at the Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem event this year, we discussed Christie’s fascination with using poisons to kill many of her characters. Thanks to her work as a nurse and a pharmacy dispenser during World War I, her knowledge of poisons was extensive.

In her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, strychnine is featured, and it is described as an ideal poison for a writer due to its rapid onset and dramatic effects. But the poison she used most frequently is Cyanide, appearing in And Then There Were None and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. In other books, victims die from arsenic, digitalis, and morphine.

However, Christie was not the first writer to introduce poison in a mystery novel. She just used them with such incredible detail, that a reader could learn about a new poison and its effects instantly. This method made her novels quite sophisticated to readers during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, which is often referred to as the Golden Age of Poisons, largely due to Christie and her contemporaries who used toxins to dispatch characters in their novels.

The panel discussion continued with the methods of murder that mystery writers use today to bring about a character’s demise. These include stabbings, shootings, blunt objects, fire, drowning, and strangulation.

However, the use of poison still continues in culinary mysteries and other genres. Writers use plant poisons such as hemlock, lily of the valley, poisoned mushroom, Nicotine, and Oleander. Drugs and medicine include insulin, sedatives, Tylenol, and Fentanyl. All of which are fascinating to today’s mystery readers.

Since Agatha Christie was a "pick your poison" writer and most likely had fun with it, in many ways, poison became a personality in her stories which is almost a cliché today. But her novels live on due to her well-crafted plots, interesting characters, and realistic descriptions of the toxin's symptoms, which is why she is crowned "The Queen of Crime."

 

 

  

 

YOU MIGHT BE A WRITER, IF . . . By KIMBERLY THORN

If you ever start out on Google or Bing researching a topic for your book but hours later you wound up watching talking dog videos on YouTube, you might be a writer.

 

If you have ever fallen asleep with a wonderful, fully plotted novel, but you wake up with you only remembering your dream of riding on a unicorn while saving the world from miniature robots, you might be a writer.

If you have had writer’s block for a week, but get into the shower and come up with that one scene that you’ve been working on for a week, you might be a writer.

 

If you keep a notebook and pencil by your bed to write great story ideas from dreams that you have had when you wake up at 3am, but can’t read your own writing, you might be a writer.

 

If you are working on a murder mystery and have to clear your search history because your scared you may be on the FBI watch list, you might be a writer.

If out in public you find yourself listening to peoples conversations and think to yourself, oh my goodness, that is so funny, that gives me a fantastic idea, you might be a writer.

 

If you are working on a story, only have three hours left in your deadline, debating with yourself if you should or should not submit it, you might be a writer.

 

 

 

WOMEN IN WARTIME: BETSY DOWDY’S RIDE by Yvonne Saxon

December 6, 1775: The awful news comes to the Dowdy’s from a neighbor who’d just returned from Virginia: Lord Dunmore is burning homes and slaughtering the colonists’ livestock and horses. He’s now threatening the Great Bridge, the only trade route and post road the Dowdy’s and their neighbors have from their home in Corolla, on the Outer Banks of  North Carolina. Their livelihood is at stake. Sixteen year old Betsy Dowdy fears for her family, the farm animals, and even the Banker ponies, the wild horses that roam the Outer Banks. Betsy knows that there is a militia strong enough to help stop Dunmore in Perquimans County. But it’s fifty miles away.

A CLOSED CIRCLE OF SUSPECTS by Maria Hudgins

One of the most popular schemes employed by mystery writers can be described as "A Closed Circle of Suspects." This fairly well describes the story I'm working on right now. The setting for my story is a Health Spa Resort in a foreign country. But this isn't a truly closed circle because the characters can come and go if they want to. They aren't captives. I'm fully expecting someone to level this charge at me at some point. But I've learned something important about this business of categorizing fiction, especially mystery fiction. It doesn't matter! There are no rules that can't be broken; this isn't a matter of rules anyway. At most this is simply a way of looking at a story and seeing its possibilities and limitations before you start writing. 

The "Closed Circle of Suspects" category is surprisingly flexible, and successful stories certainly number in the hundreds, if not thousands. All you need is a setting that encloses a definite group of people so that, when a crime (usually murder) occurs, you know the perpetrator has to be one of that group. It would be cheating, I think, to bring in a long-lost heir to the victim's fortune in the last chapter. "Hi! I'm Malaria von Hatchet. Am I too late for Grandfather's funeral?" The suspects are well defined and don't usually number more than about eight. That's another reason my story is not a true closed circle. There are more than a hundred residents at the resort at any one time. They can't all be suspects.

A common Closed Circle mystery is the English Country House Mystery. Examples include The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Mousetrap, both by Agatha Christie, and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. But it doesn't have to be English. How about Knives Out? It's in a country house, but it's set in the USA

A Closed Circle mystery can also be set in many places other than a country house.

    A ship- Death on the Nile, The Woman in Cabin 10.

    An Island - And then there were None, The Lost Island

    A Plane - Death in the Clouds, The 12:30 from Croydon.

    A Train - Murder on the Orient Express, Strangers on a Train

You get the idea. The advantage of mystery stories with closed circles is that the list of possible perps is limited. This gets one variable under control and simplifies things a bit. So the story is usually concerned with opportunity, (Who had access to the gun cabinet? Who left the dining room before dessert?) or motive (money, jealousy, fear, etc.)

The kind of mystery I most like to read is the police procedural. I enjoy reading them because they are so different from what I write, I don't connect them with my own work. If I did, I would be constantly comparing the book with my own. In police procedurals you almost always have a a huge area, like a city, in which to find and trap your killer. It takes the skill and training of a professional sleuth to deal with the possibilities.

Many cozies are, to some extent, Closed Circle stories, like the village of St. Mary Mead. Donna Andrews's bird-themed books are set in Yorktown, VA.  Rita Mae Brown's Mrs.Murphy books are set in Crozet, VA. Crozet is such a small town, it almost qualifies as a Closed Circle. 

So. Whereas my current WIP is not strictly a Closed Circle, the story does concentrate on one particular group of guests at the spa resort. I guess that makes it An Almost Closed Circle of Suspects.