Carole Sojka: Author Idol

Welcome to the California Crime Writers Conference Blogtail Party! Hope you'll join us in June in Culver City, CA.

Carole Sojka: Author Idol

I found the program called Author Idol a truly exciting panel at the 2013 California Crime Writers Conference. The panel consisted of all the agents at the conference, and the moderator was Harley Jane Kozak, actress and writer.

The program was supposed to be a test of agent interest. Any of the conference attendees could submit a page from a work in progress. The rules didn’t specify the first page, so it could be from further along in the work. Harley Jane’s job was to pull a page out at random, and without looking it over, simply read it out to the audience. She was fabulous: introduced the page by giving the title, indicated whether it appeared to be a first page or part of the rest of the story, and then read the page with feeling and wit.

The job of the agents was to listen closely and indicate by raising a hand when each of them would have stopped reading a submission they had received. Some pages made it all the way to the end, some barely made it past the first paragraph. Agents run a cut-throat business.

I had submitted a page and waited hopefully while Harley Jane picked page after page. Most of the submitted pages were very good, and I was impressed by the quality of the writing and the imagination shown.

Was my submission picked and did Harley Jane read it? Did she make it all the way to the end of the page, and did the agents all wait until she was finished before raising their hands? Did I get an agent who was crazy about my work from this exercise?

Well, no. My page wasn’t selected, and I didn’t have agents fighting to represent me. Still I found it a really fun exercise, and I’ll submit a page again this year. You never know!

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Carole Sojka graduated from Queens College before earning a Master’s Degree from the University of Southern California. She spent two years in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer and later worked as a law office administrator. Now a mystery writer, she is the author of A REASON TO KILL and the forthcoming SO MANY REASONS TO DIE.

Accidental Mystery Writer: Kim Fay

Welcome to the California Crime Writers Conference Blogtail Party! Hope you'll join us in June in Culver City, CA.

Kim Fay: Accidental Mystery Writer

I am an accidental mystery writer.

My debut novel was published in 2012, and the marketing people sold it as literary, adventure, historical … everything but mystery. Then, out of the blue, it was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Voila! The Map of Lost Memories became a mystery, and I was swept into a world I hadn’t known existed: the world of mystery writers.

Obviously, I knew that people wrote mysteries. I became a writer to follow in the footsteps of Carolyn Keene. But I didn’t know the depth and breadth of the world that mystery writers inhabited until the Genre Fairy tapped me on the shoulder with her magic wand, sprinkled fairy dust over me and declared, “You are no longer this. You are now that. Enjoy!”

It’s hard to explain how I felt. It was as if I’d been waiting all my life to become that without knowing it. But once I did know it, I followed the Genre Fairy’s advice and enjoyed my little heart out. I joined Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, attended the Edgar awards and Bouchercon. But my first true understanding of the new world I’d become a part of happened at the 2013 California Crime Writers Conference.

By this time The Map of Lost Memories had been out almost a year, and I knew that I wanted to write a more traditional mystery as well as incorporate mystery elements into my novel-in-progress. So I focused on the craft and forensic sections of the conference. I learned tips on plotting based on screenplay structure. I learned that I did not have the stomach to write about infanticide. I learned that plot is important, but it’s the characters that make or break a mystery. I listened with great respect to Sue Grafton and Elizabeth George, I met the creator of Columbo (wow!), I met two fans (super flattering!), I discovered that writing a mystery is not an easy thing to do, and most importantly, I made friends.

More supportive and buoyant than any other group of writers I’ve met, mystery writers are also the most serious. By serious I do not mean snooty. I mean committed and passionate. It’s this commitment and passion that make them so generous and inclusive. This is something I continue to rediscover at every meeting, reading and conference I attend, but I will always have a soft spot for CCWC because it was here that I realized that it wasn’t an accident. It had taken me a while, but I was finally where I belonged all along.

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Kim Fay was born in Seattle and raised throughout the small towns of Washington State. After working as a bookseller for more than five years at the Elliott Bay Book Company, she moved to Vietnam in the mid-1990s. She lived in Saigon for four years and have been traveling regularly to Southeast Asia for more than twenty. Kim is the author of the historical novel The Map of Lost Memories, a 2013 Edgar Award finalist for Best First Novel by an American Author, and the food memoir Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam, winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards’ Best Asian Cuisine Book in the United States. She is also the creator/​editor of the To Asia With Love guidebook series.

Register now for CCWC, June 6-7, 2015