I had a slow start to my morning. I had missed Tai Chi (yay), some sponsorship rooms, morning speed dating sessions to link people in Column A of the industry with people in Column B of the industry, and alas, half of the fourth set of big panels. I had hoped to catch “Hooking the Reader” with great first lines, but I needed breakfast first. You can see the non-conference portion of my day on my ThePolyBlog site at https://www.thepolyblog.ca/day-2-of-bouchercon2025-in-new-orleans/

I made it to the fifth set of panels at 10:30, and went to Panel 5-4: Kickass Female Protagonists: Prince Charming Is Out of a Job. The panelists were Steph Cha, Tori Eldridge, J.T. Ellison, Taylor Stevens, and Nina Wachsman. I knew of J.T. Ellison’s work in advance, and my brain is mush as I didn’t realize Tori Eldridge writes the Lily Wong Ninja series (I’ve only read two of them). Steph Cha was new to me but she’s written the new series called Butterfly (Amazon Prime). I’ve heard of the show as it has Daniel Dae Kim in it, but I haven’t checked it out yet.

So, I’ve been thinking about something over the last two days of being here. People ask me if I’m a writer, and my answer is generally no. I blog, I’ve written my HR guide in web form, but I don’t consider myself entirely a writer. Not by MY standards, at least. I have written short stories, was in a writer’s group, honed them, and even submitted a play for a contest. By some definitions, that is enough. I wrote something, I submitted it. But it’s not really what I consider true writing. Which is more a question of degree for me. I don’t mean I’m not a writer until I sell something. Writers write. That’s the defining situation. But until I complete a whole book, fully packaged, where I say “It’s done”, I won’t consider myself a writer.

And when I talk about writing anywhere, I generally do not admit to many about my fiction goals. I have strong plans for writing in my retirement related to non-fiction, and I’m completely open about that. However, I am not normally open about two fiction “universes” or “worlds” that I intend to create. The first is fiction in a modern world, and I thought I would never be able to do it. I had a big breakthrough mentally last year, and now it is on like Donkey Kong when I retire. The second world is an interconnected one, centring around a lawyer turned investigator for a law firm, a friend from elementary school who dances on both sides of the law “line”, and two women they interact with during their investigations. Both are bad ass, in my view, but in totally different ways. One will be very physical while the other will be more methodical and cerebral; one is a rookie cop, one is a local P.I.

Sooooo, extrapolating back to my interest in strong women characters, I wanted to hear what they had to say about women who kick ass.

They talked about physicality being one component, but also how they focused on work ethic, importance of family, perhaps subterfuge of hiding skills and abilities to fit in, the importance perhaps of redefining it in terms of empowerment or more particularly agency and choice. They also discussed the importance of getting the tone and motivations right, particularly if they are amateurs, otherwise people are left wondering, “Why aren’t they deferring to the police?”. Tori Eldrige had an interesting take about how she saw Lily Wong as a combination of Skills (huge skills) + Motivation (strong) + a moral code (which drives choices but in turn also shows the impact of the choices made). The moderator asked them if the goals of their characters change throughout the series or even a book, and they framed it more as a layer of goals, with some staying static over several books, some being more dynamic, and some just being more narrowed/defined with sub-objectives for the problem-of-the-episode.

I confess that I have not spent as much time on one of the women characters in the series as the other three are in it from day one, and she doesn’t show up until book 4 probably. It’s a long way away, I know, but I also am a plotter, not a pantser (i.e., I will plot the arcs in advance, not write by the seat of my pants). For the one series, I have to plot out a 12 episode arc before I can even write a word as I have to be sure I have the rules of the world right from book one before I risk getting to book four and realizing I screwed up. It’s hard to describe, and I don’t need ALL the details plotted, but there are two serious issues that could go either way, and I don’t know which is the right answer yet. For lack of a better transparency, think of it like deciding in Harry Potter if all spells have a visual component or not or require verbal commands — can you “think” a spell and have the result happen or does it have to be verbal and a “spark” will fly from the wand to the destination? There are no spells in my plans, but you get the drift.

Anyway, I found their approaches to their characters interesting for not only the second woman, but gave me ideas on how to re-“form” the first one with more depth and backstory. A really interesting panel, and I like the sounds of some of their characters enough to check out their books soon.

At 12:30, the sixth set of panels started, and I opted for Panel 6-5: Suspense, Action, Conflict: Prime Elements of Mysteries and Thrillers with Colin Campbell, Bruce Robert Coffin, Audrey J. Cole, Jeffrey James Higgins, and Carter Wilson. Their moderator was a no-show for some reason, so they just did a bit of winging of the session. Carter raised early on the frequency of forms of violence in this type of writing, and he said it frequently drove him nuts when someone would get shot in the leg and then kept running. He recommended STRONGLY that anyone writing fight scenes etc to get Violence: A Writers Guide from a correctional officer to talk about what really happens during violent encounters. I’ve added it to my wish list from Amazon.

I confess that I didn’t really get what I hoped for out of the session. Audrey came closest at one point. She talked about how in one of her books, she did a flashback to an event 20 years before, and how people remembered it differently or at least had told it differently officially. But when she was done, she reviewed each section separately to see if the two stories were “complete” on their own. Extrapolating from that, I was wondering about mysteries in particular…if you took out the suspense and the action, does the mystery still work? Because if it doesn’t, the book doesn’t work for me. My books won’t be thrillers, and while one of them might have some suspense, the core is mystery and problem-solving. There might be some physical conflict situations, particularly for two of the characters, but they aren’t action films.

Instead, they talked more about the thriller aspects. This included the interesting consequences that can come from violence, the goals of the protagonist if they choose violence (hoping to achieve something), the nature of remote locations as pseudo-locked-room mysteries, extending suspense for the last 25% of the book with tone and psychological or emotional suspense more than physical, etc. Audrey also talked about the idea of not protecting your characters — put them in big, challenging situations, otherwise you’re not really taking risks with them or for them.

I confess that I was very disappointed with my next two panels, although not for any fault of the participants. They were all informed and helpful, just not in my areas of interest.

I attended Panel 7-2: Writing a Series: Avoiding the Pitfalls, moderated by Diana Catt, and including panelists Michael J Cooper, Margaret Fenton, Danielle Girard, Sulari Gentill, and Jon Land. As a future writer of two series, I was hoping for a list of things to avoid. Instead, it was more about how they handle their series, and often, the strengths of the form. To the extent that every strength is also a weakness, or a pitfall, I will be able to use some of it, but I took only a handful of notes. They talked about the need for episodic books to both standalone and propel the series, the risks of long series going stale if the main character can’t grow or overcome anything (not their example, but there’s a reason why sequels to Superman rarely do as well as the one where Clark becomes Superman), the time between books in series requiring some exposition to catch up the old and new readers vs. standalone books not needing that extra layer, and experiences with prequels (which were more often easier as the framing often built itself to include some things and exlude other things, particularly people they haven’t met yet). Even for historical fiction, both writers who wrote HistFic saw it as a strength not a pitfall, that the constraints of history helped them more than hurt them.

I was also disappointed with Panel 8-4: Need to Know: The Business of Writing, moderated by Marty Ludlum, Leslie S. Klinger, R. C. Reid, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Alice Speilburg. I really liked the opening line by one of the panelists, I forget who, who quoted another that you either think of writing as a business or you let someone else spend your money. Like most of the sessions, everyone is in good humour, everyone is trying to be helpful without being potentially rude to anyone else, and I confess the tone wasn’t working for me. They talked about taxes or the need to be involved in promotion, but I found two things particularly disturbing. First, as someone else pointed out, all of this assumes the person is agented and going through traditional presses with contracts; nothing on self- or independent- publishing. Fair enough, the whole conference suffers from that complaint, it’s part of the Bouchercon world. Even 10-20 years ago, members were arguing about whether non-traditionally published authors could be on panels. That is an old issue, and while some want to raise it, it doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t care how THEY (the authors talking) got published, I know what my route will look like in the future. Second, something one of the writers said was indicative of some assumptions in the business world where I vastly prefer the teachings of Kristin Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. He noted that his wife was a she-wolf looking over his shoulder with his contract, protecting him, but she relaxed when she got to know the people. KKR in particular has written about this recently with digests — it doesn’t matter if the person you’re dealing with is a good person and would never abuse the intent of the contract against your interest; it only matters what the contract says. Because that person can die or get bought out, and suddenly the next person through the door decides to exploit that clause in ways you thought it would never be used. Every contract should be scrutinized from the lens of “How can this be used against me in the future if something goes catastrophically wrong?”. It’s a risk analysis, although that isn’t how KKR describes it, that’s my term. Probability is half of that analysis, sure, but the other half is “if this happens, how big an impact is it?”. Yet I think the biggest piece I found disturbing was that I tried to put the cat amongst the pigeons and start a rumble, so I asked what they as lawyer, writer, publisher and agent thought the other groups didn’t understand well enough about their piece of the business. Everyone laughed, as they should, but it is a serious question. What bothered me most though was the round-up that they are all part of the team supporting the author, which is great, but then they said the agent should be in charge of relatively minor negotiations and the lawyer just tells you what it says, but don’t worry too much because it’s all boilerplate and it “ain’t going to change much, if at all.” Yep, I can see why authors get screwed if the three entities — publisher, agent and lawyer — all agree that the author cannot negotiate any of the terms. The old “trust us, we’re publishers and we’re here to work with you” mantra is alive and well. I know that’s harsh, but I went to law school, I studied business at university, I read KKR’s blogs, the disasters at Romance houses, and I used to follow ThePassiveGuy when he was blogging. Plus I saw what happened to Paul McCartney, 1000s of other musicians, and most visibly of late, Taylor Swift. All people who sold their souls for standard language contracts they couldn’t negotiate. Not a good look, and a dangerous world to encourage people to embrace with their resting trust face on. They were all nice, I liked all of them, I would work with any of them in a heartbeat, but I would absolutely negotiate the contract clauses I care about, and if they have rights grabs, as most do, they wouldn’t be in any version I would sign. Even if that meant no deal. But it also most likely why I will never go that route for my business model. I would rather have no deal than a bad deal. To quote Lawrence Sanders’ Archy McNally, my flabber is gasted that anyone in 2025 thinks that’s a practical business model for any author to accept.

I was hoping for more insightful comments than general hopeful comments. However, one thing I really found interesting was the agent’s view about taking authors on who do not have social media platforms. For fiction, her view was that was okay; for non-fiction, they really want to see that right away and know where, how much, if you’re blogging, etc. I never realized that the NF side was so interested in that. I have mentioned that I have great plans for NF when I retire, and I have a decent following on my guides to date. I assumed no one would be interested in my musings in a publishing house, but perhaps I should explore before I take alternate routes.

At 5:30, Alafair Burke was doing an interview with Michael Connelly in the big ballroom. I was a bit surprised that it wasn’t even more full, but there were a fair number. She did a great job, and at the start, I had a brain fart. First, I didn’t even remember Michael Connelly had also done the Lincoln Lawyer…I remembered Bosch, of course, but my brain blocked Haller. And then when they were first talking, Michael mentioned that he liked to read series too, including those of Alafair’s father. Father, huh? Who is her father? Oh dear. How did I not register that Alafair Burke is the daughter of James Lee Burke and the king of Louisiana mystery fiction? Sigh. I will blame the antihistamines.

She did a great interview, obviously comfortable with him and with the loveletter style interview, walking him through much of his career. I knew very little of it, which is common for most authors I read. I read their books, not their bios. I found four things really interesting in the interview.

First, he had been taking engineering and not doing very well at it at school, and he decided he’d rather be Raymond Chandler, so his father advised him to switch to journalism to get on a crime beat and see how crime really worked. Second, he had some cute Hollywood linkage stories…He saw a movie at age 19 starring Elliott Gould that started him towards becoming a writer, and then with the Lincoln Lawyer show, Elliott Gould is playing in it. Equally, the real guy that gave Connelly the inspiration for a lawyer working out of a car said that he did well and lived in Malibu near Matthew McConaughey, only for MM to play the Lincoln Lawyer in the movie version. Third, he regularly stated over and over that he isn’t that creative. Much of the examples he used are almost 1:1 inspirations from real people. Lastly, as a softball question from me, I asked if he had any other acting plans after his cameo on Castle, where he seemed to be having fun. I had hoped he might talk about that a bit, open up a bit more. He did respond to say that one interesting thing from Castle was that he got to be a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild for playing himself, which he found amusing.

However, I think the most interesting thing he talked about was working as a screenwriter on the TV series. Alafair asked if he felt he was “exercising different muscles” and he said, “No, it was more like he was missing a muscle.” He found the inability to write what Bosch was thinking a huge challenge to write in just about every scene he did.

The night concluded with a Second Line Parade to the WWII monument, followed by opening ceremony remarks and the launch of the conference anthology. I didn’t feel up to going, so I spent a quiet evening at the hotel.

And just to prove I was there for the interview tonight, here is a terrible shot of Michael Connelly and Alafair Burke.

Let the conference keep rolling…