My cold limited some of my conference going for the day, but if you want to read about the non-conference portion, you can over on my personal blog at https://www.thepolyblog.ca/day-3-of-boucheron2025-in-new-orleans/.

But if today is Friday, it must be day 3 of #Boucheron2025 in New Orleans!

The ninth set of panels started at 9:00 a.m., and I was all set for Panel 9-1: Multiple Series: Maintaining Storyline Silos. As I mentioned yesterday, I have plans for one pseudo-fantasy series and it will not interact with anything else. However, I am interested in a second series where a bunch of the characters WILL intersect, and there might be three or four mini-series within a larger series universe (yeah, kind of like the Avengers movies without superheroes of course). So, I was keen for the topic. But I also stalk Lee Goldberg online and I was really looking forward to what he had to say about his various series — Monk, Diagnosis Murder, stuff with Janet Evanovich, three active series now, TV shows out the wazoo, he’s got it going on. And his Facebook posts are frequently amusing. This week’s was about the word benippled. 🙂 A little fanboy-ish, I suppose, on my part.

Lee set the tone for the panel; he’s very articulate and way more type-A than I expected. For him, he very clearly couched most of his answers to almost any question from the lens of “It’s a business”, and the answer is invariably “whichever option helps you sell more books and make more money.” So, for example, when talking about various series and the potential to keep a series going on your own if your publisher didn’t want to support it anymore, he basically asked back, “Why would you waste time doing that?”. If it isn’t going to sell, you have more lucrative things you can be doing. It wasn’t exactly his terminology, but it comes to RoI on his time. He wants to spend it on the most lucrative series of the moment, or if necessary, the hottest deadline he has. The rest of the panel agreed with him, and, as most of the traditionally published authors in the building, who are all published, generally hold the view that whether to continue a series or not was never up to the author, they feel that they have almost no say in it. If you have two series, A and B, the publisher will inform you which series they would like another book for and when.

Some of the other topics in the session included concerns about time between books being a pressure while you’re working on a different series (aka the cadence between book drops); that historical novels generally take way more research and thus take longer between books; cross-promotion between books such as Lee has done recently (I asked if that was hard for PoV, and he said no, it was fun to write Eve Ronin but not from Eve’s point of view); sometimes there is pressure to go back to the old concerns about saturation or brand confusion and thus the usage of different names for different series.

I think I like one particular quote from the moderator, perhaps quoting Connelly, that the “character doesn’t work the case, the case works the character.” There’s a deep nugget in there, and I’ll have to give it a lot more thought.

I confess that my introversion today was at an all-time high. I wanted to go up and quickly introduce myself to Lee, “Hey, I’m the frog avatar that interacts with you occasionally online from Canada”, but there were other conference goers who wanted to network and get signings, etc. For many of the panels, I’ve gone up afterwards to at least one to say thank you, almost a mini commitment from myself that I will not just be a lump of flesh in the cheap seats having no more interaction than if I was at home. Anyway, I chickened out today and just drifted away as they headed to the book signing area.

As an aside, I have a dirty confession to make. (Looking left, looking right). I don’t want to get books signed. Do you know why? Cuz then I have to keep them. I’m also trying to be a paper-free household. I have way too many books still in my house; I vastly prefer the smaller physical footprint of digital copies. So I’ll read them and pass them along to someone else; if someone signs it, I feel a bit more invested in keeping it. Even if I didn’t like the book. But I digress. It was a good panel, and their views helped a bit with my conundrums. Gave me some direction…

As one of my series is legal-based, I would have loved to check out Panel 9-2: Objection! More Courtroom Drama, Please! It was one of the few panel sets where I was torn. Lee was an obvious draw, so I went that way, but would have been more conflicted without his presence.

The tenth panels started at 10:30, and I was a bit conflicted again. I considered Panel 10-3: Dialog Matters: Slang, Concise, or Verbose? as I need to improve my dialogue skills, and Bruce DeSilva was part of the list of panelists. I like his work a lot.

However, I decided to make a non-technical, totally emotional commitment as a fan. Panel 10-6: Elementary! The Sherlock Effect had Liese Sherwood-Fabre as moderator, and panelists Elizabeth Crowens, Kate Hohl, Kathleen Kaska, and Leslie S. Klinger. They did a great job, good background for the conversation, but let’s be honest. I was there solely for the fifth panelist — Nicholas Meyer. In the panel, sure, he’s the author of the Seven Percent Solution, one of the first truly successful non-original Holmes stories. Add in his other writing, directing of Star Trek movies, and a long career of creative pursuits, almost all legendary in their own right, and hell yeah, I had to go to that session.

The overall intent of the panel was to talk about what effects Sherlock Holmes as a character had on the genre of mystery writing, and there were lots of questions about who played him best, who was the best Watson, did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle know what he was creating when he started, etc. As you can imagine, there are differing views on all of that, and Meyer was hysterical with his very dry wit about certain aspects. Then, he would follow up his humour with an elegant reference to how Holmes and Watson were really just a reimagining of Cervantes’ characters, or how Oedipus was really a detective. I confess that I took very little in the way of notes; that was not my reason for attending. It was just to watch and be entertained. And to watch how the rest of the crowd and panelists reacted to Meyer, too. Such an icon.

I did find something interesting, almost unrelated. They were talking about whether Holmes’ “flaws” were important to the character, and arguably made him human. And I got to thinking about the classic issue in personal development for careers…how every strength can become a weakness due to over-reliance and every weakness a strength. And I started to wonder if they are indeed separate traits…was his hyper-cerebral deductive skills merely the strength that leads to his weakness with people skills? Could you have one without the other? On a completely unrelated note, it got me thinking in part about management styles. I’ve always believed that whatever traits a manager displays in crisis are their natural traits aka their natural management style. For me, I stop delegating, I stop trusting, I focus on what needs to get done and a lot of the time I focus on doing it myself, even when I have a team member standing right there who could help. I don’t think of delegation in the same way as I do when I have more time, or am less pressed. But in that strange unrelated consciousness, I was wondering if that is a natural state aka your minimum / reduced management style or is it just either a reflection of your strength/weaknesses in other situations or even unrelated, just simply the style you use in a crisis. I don’t know why a discussion of Sherlock Holmes’ flaws would lead me there, but that’s where my brain went.

After lunch, it was time for Panel 11-5: Publishing Undercover, moderated by Clay Stafford. I love this Texan’s voice and mannerisms. He is incredibly smooth and soothing to listen to, so I was happy to realize that he was the moderator. The panel was a bit of an echo to the panel yesterday about it being a business, and this was a discussion with professionals in the industry in non-writing roles (although they are also writers). The panelists included Juliet Grames (editor), Joshua Kendall (publisher, who arrived late because of flights), Neil Nyren (retired editor), Brian Sweany (audio acquisitions), and Helen Thornton-Gussy (editor).

I liked this session, for the most part, better than yesterdays so-called business panel. They had a general philosophy that publishing is a business run by non-business people. And so many of the internal stuff makes no sense to anyone. I confess I didn’t take a lot of notes, I would have skipped except as I said it was Clay moderating and he kept them on track.

There was an interesting perspective or idea shared by Juliet that was intriguing about early work by an author. Connelly had noted the other night that his first two novels were in a drawer, never to be read, because he knew they weren’t good. It’s a popular trope in the biz, that you should write a book, finish it, and then deaddrop it so you can move on to the next one. That it was a “trial” run at writing a book, and most people’s first books (not first DRAFTS, but first BOOKS) were not publishable. Juliet used the idea of Malcolm Gladwell that you build your expertise over time, the proverbial 10,000 hours of work, so that you know what you’re doing.

But I also found a few of the anecdotes interesting — from Neil, stories about books that they didn’t get and went on to be huge successes while others were books they got that nobody else saw the potential for and they subsequently went big. Juliet and Helen backed each other up as editors, with similar stories about intimate relations between authors and editors that have to go untold; Juliet summed it up as the in-baseball language of “We work for reviews, we live for acknowledgements”. Yet there’s a huge disconnect in the framework. Brian openly trotted out the classic “we are gatekeepers, hear us roar” mantra that they ensure quality, while Neil, Helen and Juliet basically showed that they don’t care much about the initial quality as they can fix that if there is a sense of control from the author, they know what they’re doing, they can build rapport with them, and that they show signs of a sustainable passion that will provide sustenance through all the

For the twelfth panel set, I loved the premise of most of them. Getting Forensics Right could be cool, and useful, although few of my books will contain much in the way of forensics. Another was on Damaged Heroes: Protagonists with Flaws, which could have dovetailed nicely with my thoughts about Holmes. My one series has a main character with a flaw that isn’t terminal or fatal, but it is mild compared to the trauma he’ll experience in book 1. The other series has a character with some hidden stuff going on, and that will generally remain unexplained for 12 books by which time he will have processed most of it off-screen, so to speak, or at least not in an explained on-screen way.

I was really curious to see what they might have had to say in the panel on AI – Enhancing or Replacing Human Creativity? Except I’ve read a ton of stuff online from the mainstream publishing industry and, well, I think they totally get it wrong. I didn’t want to waste my time having people complain about AI using LLMs that weren’t licensed, or people using it to simulate their style, or infringement of future copyrights, etc. That’s whitenoise compared to the real work that AI is going to just get better and better at doing.

I’ve written a bit about my experience before, but one of my series involves a really complex world-building component. So much so, that I almost need to plot out the arc over 12 books to make sure it will hold together. I feared I would never write it, as that much research before I ever write word 1 in book 1 is daunting. But about a year ago now, I was playing with an AI tool that had just been updated and released, and I gave it the basics of my world structure. Then I had it do some research summary against some of the parameters. It looked pretty decent. So I tweaked and played, tweaked and played. I had no intent at the time other than to give it a real world test to see what it could do. It blew me away. In about an hour of work, maybe less, I had condensed about a year of solid research into probably a day. Now, it’s not perfect, I’ll have to fact-check the crap out of all of it. But it let me test my “world-build” to see if it would hold together, and it did. It won’t replace all of my research, but it will give me a way to further test and poke the world to see if it will be sustainable over the series, letting me go back to researching book 1 and writing it, researching book 2 and writing it, etc. I don’t need to spend a year or two of full research just to get to book 1. It won’t write anything for me, never that, but it allowed me to test something in a way that never existed before.

Equally, I use it regularly to brainstorm. I work alone on a lot of my stuff, rarely interacting with others in the development stage. I haven’t found the right tribe yet. But I had an idea for something small a while ago, and I tested it with the AI prompt. I basically described what I was trying to write, gave it some good parameters, and asked it to give me back a logline equivalent. In fact, I asked for 25 logline options. Of the 25, I’d say about 10 were pedantic and pedestrian. Another 5 to 6 went in really weird directions that seemed almost like a language / translation issue. But of the remaining 10 or so, some were half-way decent. More importantly, though, a snippet from #3 could be merged with a snippet from #17, and another from #24, and voila, I had a logline that was camera-ready. Could I have got there on my own? Well, to be honest, I did. But instead of using thesaurus entries and a series of weird google searches, I had the AI tool give me some ideas to work with. It wasn’t enough to get me all the way there, but it was enough to fire off my original synapses and get me to see, “Hey, THAT’s a great element to highlight”, for example.

I would like to think there were more examples of that type of positive usage, but I haven’t seen any of it online in over 200 stories about authors and AI, so I wasn’t optimistic.

Instead, I went sideways. One of my series has a “will they or won’t they” romance component. I know how they meet, I know how their romance will develop over several books, I know how it will initially simmer over, I know the right turn it will take, I know the trauma that will follow for both of them. And I have absolutely no freaking clue how it will be fixed, but I know it will have several false starts. That’s a lot to know, right? So, why was I so interested in Panel 12-4: Romance in Crime Fiction: Essential or Distraction?

Mainly because I wanted to know about false starts and wrong directions. And who better to talk about that than Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse books that served as inspiration for the TV series, True Blood. The moderator of the panel was Teresa Michael, and the other panelists were Mary Dixie Carter (yes, the daughter of Dixie Carter), Celeste Connally, Jenny Dandy, and Jenny Milchman. I’m unsure why I know Jenny Milchman’s name. None of her books are ones that I have read, I’m not even sure I recognize their titles or the series, but her name is very familiar to me. Maybe she’s in my TBR pile, but I digress. I really wanted to hear Charlaine talk about what happens when a meet-cute goes badly afterwards.

Cuz Sookie Stackhouse? She’s a disaster. My characters are NOT that damaged or cursed, but any insights there would be welcome. Alas, Ms. Harris was ill today and unable to attend. Well, fudgicles. I was very disappointed, I confess. Although the moderator at one point referred to Bill and Sookie as a “meet cute” and the transcription service translated it as “meat cute”, which is a fantastic image for the Stackhouse books.

Without Charlaine, I expected the panel to be disappointing but it wasn’t. I liked the way they talked about a number of issues that my characters will face. For example, they quickly noted that romance may or may not be the right term. Partly as for some books, it is more of a spectrum almost of intimacy. Extrapolating from what they noted, sometimes it isn’t romance, it’s just sex. Or sex with a goal or end in mind (blackmail, seduction, manipulation). Or maybe it is a distraction, literally and figuratively in the plot. Or something that is “extra” in the book, but delightedly so. Or a core element that is integral to the plot.

Another idea was that you could also see it as either two plots (A and B), where one stream was the main story and one stream where it is the subplot that might continue in the series. Or that it is the backstory that reveals character development rather than simply who they are at work. Alternatively, it could be a plot device to drive a story…protagonist A loves character B, and B is put in jeopardy and must be saved aka the heightened motivation. Intriguing too was the idea if there are two plot streams, they have totally different goals…plot A is almost always seeking Justice, while plot B might be hopefully/happily ever after (Romancing the Stone’s Joan Wilder, a hopeFUL romantic at the end).

Finally, they also noted something incredibly empowering. Since it isn’t a romance novel, it can use any of the romance tropes, and then completely bust all of the rules of that trope. Cuz it’s a mystery, not a romance. TBH, I never even thought of it as following any trope, let alone knowing the difference between Grumpy Sunshine (?), Frenemies to Friends, Golden Retriever (?), Meet Cutes, Sexual Tension, etc. I need to do more research on that to help me fleshout what rules I’m breaking and why.

My last panel of the day was Panel 13-3: Tips and Tricks for Keeping a Series Fresh. It was moderated by Deborah Dobbs with panelists Anne Cleeland, Marcy McCreary, Jeffrey Siger, Charles Todd, and Tessa Wegert. As much as I was interested in their various stories (including some series with 20+ books), this was more of a smash-and-grab — I was willing to pillage to steal any ideas I could from them since one series will have a minimum of 12 books but with a set of 12 villains that almost write themselves (hah!), but the other series will run about 10 books or so and I’m not entirely sure about the crimes in each of those. So I’m looking for ways to keep any series fresh.

Here’s what I pillaged as ideas — change locations in the book (one in Greece is all over Greece; one in England is all over England); change the initial setup so new characters can enter and exit (one is a child advocate); change and modify the family dynamics over time (mother in book 1, father in book 2, mother and father in book 3); stretch some element of the backstory and dig into it in a future book (mining for hidden gold!); add a prequel; do a flashback with multiple storylines; or go the opposite way and freeze time (so they don’t age at same rate as publication, like Sue Grafton with Kinsey Milhone). One element that struck me as risky was experimenting with different sub-genres. I get the premise, and it will keep the books fresh, but it also seems to me like a really good way to tick off a bunch of fans who come for the “noir” and don’t want a “cozy”, or came for the mystery and got a humourous rom-com subplot instead. Jeffrey Siger talked about knowing what your audience wants and giving it to them, in a different point, otherwise you’re wasting time writing what won’t sell (sort of like Lee Goldberg’s point earlier).

I skipped Murder Mystery Almost Dinner Theatre hosted by Heather Graham with a cast of mystery authors putting on a soft whodunnit, mostly cuz I hadn’t decided if I was going or not — one of the guaranteed social interaction events that I suck at anyway — but I ended up sleeping well past the start of it.

There was an underrepresented authors’ dessert / cocktail at 9:30, and I had planned to go. I wanted to show support, of course, and I am particularly supportive of gay and lesbian representation, it seems to resonate more with me (perhaps because of my time at Trent or UVic, I don’t know). It’s a little weird as a white male, but some of the groups resonate cognitively, like colour, others don’t resonate at all like disability as I see that as more individualistic than a group (mostly because of greater involvement with health issues for my own family, I think), and then some that resonate emotionally like gay and lesbian. There’s something perhaps more insidious to me in that, like discrimination combined with gaslighting or something. I can’t really explain it but it resonates more strongly for me. Some of my favourite mysteries are Tony Farrelly books set in New Orleans itself with gay protagonists, and I’m disappointed that she doesn’t seem to be writing anymore Margot Fortier stories. Now, if I knew SHE was going to be there, that would have been full-on fanboy time. Instead, I was still tired, and I just wanted a quiet night to read and regroup for tomorrow, which is my last day here.

Let the good reads roll…I’m a bit conferenced out. There were times today when I had my introvert response of “Ewww, people.” It’s time to wrap it up and go home. Is it cheesy to say I miss my wife and son? Oh well, I’m cheesy, nice to meet you.