Introducing Melodie Campbell and Sugar and Vice!

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Do you know Melodie Campbell? You should! Melodie has won the Derringer, the Arthur Ellis, and eight more awards for crime fiction. She didn’t even steal them.

Perpetually witty and generous, this famous (infamous?) crime writer agreed to an interview and then turned the spotlight on me. You know how these mystery writers love to pull reversals on you!

Melissa Yi: Sugar or vice? Meaning, do you prefer sweet and cozy or edgy?

Melodie Campbell: You could have knocked me over with a cannoli when I saw people were calling “The Merry Widow Murders” a cozy!  It’s neither sweet nor cozy, with many references to the aftermath of WW1, and the deep grief felt from Lucy, my young widowed protagonist.  It is, however, the type of book I like to read myself.  A traditional mystery where the reader is challenged to race along with the protagonist to discover the murderer.  In my case, I can’t help adding a lot of comic relief, mainly in the form of Lucy’s pickpocket-turned-maid Elf, and the banter that takes place between the two of them.  

So I like a bit of an edge with my crime; a balance, so to speak.  You can’t be laughing all the time, or it becomes banal.

MY: Yes, exactly. You don’t want to turn into a laugh track. Still, as “Canada’s Queen of Comedy,” do you find it effortless to incorporate humour into your writing, or is it like a muscle you have to work?

MC: I am reminded of the old performers’ adage: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”  So I have to smile and say, no, it’s not easy, but writing serious suspense is even harder for me!  It takes me a year to write a novel.  I can’t stay in a dark head-space for that length of time.

Perhaps it’s habit.  I got my start writing comedy in the 90s; I wrote standup for comedians, and had a regular humour column in two papers.  I had 24 short stories published before I even tried to write a novel.  Surprisingly, many of them were dark, with twist endings.  But when I came to write a novel, I fell back on what I do naturally: make it funny.  To be honest, I’ve tried to write straight, but every time I do, a natural quip comes to me that I just can’t resist, and the tension breaks when it shouldn’t!  So I’ve given up, and admitted that I will never be the Margaret Atwood of Mystery.  Instead, one reviewer for Ellery Queen called me “the Carole Burnett of Crime.” 

MY: What a compliment!

MC: Melodie speaking:  Turnabout is fair play!  I have a few questions for Melissa now.

MC: First, a comment:  I absolutely love the first chapter of Sugar and Vice.  That last sentence is a textbook way to end a first chapter; perfect foreshadowing.  It also provides a terrific example of my comment above:  you need a balance between bathos and pathos.  The dialogue between Hope and friends is full of fun, but…here’s the ‘awe’ moment.  We know there is going to be something serious at stake, and Hope will be in the thick of it.  Her own self could be at risk!

MC: Melissa, like you, most of my career has been in health care.  I’ve seen a lot of things I wish I could forget.  Do you find writing humorous fiction a welcome escape from your day job?

MY: Yes! Sometimes I like to write about medicine straight up, like in the essays in The Most
Unfeeling Doctor in the World collection, which I started after a patient called me the most
unfeeling doctor he’d ever met. I do change patient details, but sometimes I want to write, “This
happened,” with or without humour.
Other times, I escape hard stories outright by writing comedy, fantasy, science fiction, or
romance with a happy ending and/or a new world. It makes life a lot more cheerful and bearable.

MC: Why crime?  I know you also write Sci-fi (as I have) but most of your fiction is steeped with crime.  What drives you to this genre?

MY: Ooh, I’ll have to read your SF too!
Crime means that no matter what happens, you end with a sense of justice. Sometimes other
writers blow my mind with the cleverness of the villain and therefore the sleuth.
Although my residency in Montreal was tough at the time, like my family medicine clinic had no
running water (I literally had to run down the hall to heat up a metal speculum), I can look back
at laugh and write about it now. I love a doctor who saves lives and fight killers.
Readers do ask for more Hope, even if they can’t pronounce her last name. Psst, it’s Sze, which
you can pronounce like the letter C.

And who says you have to choose? In Hope’s Seven Deadly Sins series, paranormal elements
infiltrate Hope’s world, starting with ghosts in The Shapes of Wrath and dragons in Sugar and Vice.

Back the Sugar and Vice Kickstarter before Sept 26th for the exclusive dragon cover!

MC: ‘Sugar and Vice’ is the best title I’ve seen in years, and spot on for our genre. I’m miffed I
didn’t think of it first!  What was your inspiration for this particular story?

MY: Thank you! I knew I’d write about gluttony as Hope’s second deadly sin, but how and why
would people would die over food? I wrestled over that for a long time.
I started researching mukbangs, videos where people livestream their meals, sometimes in
unusual ways, like discussing true crime over cheesy lasagna. Strange but true.
I also took a look at dragon boat racing.
Somehow, my brain invented the Dragon Eats festival, which combines dragon boat racing with
food competitions. I knew Hope would run into murder there!
As for title envy, nothing quite fit, and I wished I’d come up with another great title, Sugar and
Spite. While walking my dog, I realized that Sugar and Vice fit my book even better!

I have to thank cozies for the inspiration, since I named The Shapes of Wrath after reading The
Crêpes of Wrath.
I steal, I mean, get inspired, by everything. 😉

Melodie, thank you for this interview. I’ve long admired your talent and kindness, and I hope more readers get to devour your work, starting with the Merry Widow Murders. Happy reading!

P.S. The Kickstarter for Sugar and Vice has unlocked the exclusive dragon cover. That means if you love dragons like me, back now to grab Sugar and Vice in its first worldwide edition, dripping with dragons. Otherwise, wait for retailers to stock the doughnut cover in February 2024.

Thank you so much!

My Two-Legs, by Melissa Yi

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This is my Derringer Award-winning story, now a finalist for the Macavity Award, first published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in July/August 2022.

I’m including it here for the consideration of any Mystery Readers International members who want to read and vote. And for my lovely readers. Following the voting period, only the opening will remain, so read it while it’s hot. Thank you!

My two-legs is gone.
I stick my nose out the window opening and sniff, hoping to detect his unique
scent. When he slammed the car door, I enjoyed the final tang of his two-leg male sweat,
soap, and lemon shampoo. But I can no longer detect Sunil’s smell. He is too far away.
And he is gone too long. My bladder feels uncomfortably full. Even with the rain
pattering on the car roof and the cool, misty wind blowing through the snout-sized cracks
in the windows, I feel too hot in the back seat. I shake my shaggy yellow coat and
whimper twice, panting loud and fast.
I hear footsteps, the light slap of an adult female two-legs’s shoes on pavement in
the rain. She grows closer. I whine louder and paw the worn beige upholstery under the
window.
She approaches my window. She smells like garlic tomato sauce and her sweat
scent is sweeter and fainter than my two-legs. She is not Sunil. But she peers at me with
kind brown eyes. I rear up on my hind legs and scrabble my front claws on the window.
Urgent! Urgent!
The garlic two-legs seems to understand. She even says “Sunil’s dog,” so she
knows who I am. I wag my tail extra hard.
She surveys the few other cars resting in the evening shadows of the Lighthouse
Inn before she turns back to me. Her eyes linger on the black knob that locks the door.
She says “Sunil” again and some more words. Some of them I understand, like “Look for
Sunil.”
I bark, high-pitched. Right! Sunil! I can help you look for him. I can smell him. I
know his steps. I know he was wearing his old leather boots caked with mud from our
gravel driveway. His maroon sweatshirt that still smells like gasoline from the time he
spilled a drop on the right sleeve. His oldest, softest pair of jeans, that he doesn’t mind me
jumping up on, even if he scolds me. I know his voice, gravelly and irritated when he
yells “No!” and his nonsense love syllables when he rubs my stomach. I know his hands,
the firm grasp of his hands on my collar, his absent-minded pats on the head. I know
exactly how tall he is: when I jump up to say hello, my paws reach the top of his
stomach. He is shorter than the alpha male two-legs who moved in with us, but only by a
few inches.
The garlic two-legs says, “Stay, Star.”
Star. She knows my name! But she’s telling me to stay. That’s when Sunil wants
me to sit down and not move. Why would I do that when Sunil is missing?
I jump and paw the windows again, whining high and fierce.
This two-legs says some more, like “Good girl” and “I’ll be back,” but she’s
walking away! Just like Sunil did! These two-legs don’t understand anything!
I bark. Urgent! Urgent! My two-legs is gone. Urgent! Urgent! Urgent!
A couple emerges from the heavy wood front doors of the Lighthouse Inn. Not
Sunil, not garlic Two-Legs, not Sunil’s alpha male. They walk slow, clutching each
other’s waists. The female stumbles on the pavement. She falls heavily on her knees and
stays on all fours, laughing, until the male hefts her up by both elbows. Even then, it
takes them two tries for her to rise to her feet.
I keep barking. I try to rouse them from their stupor. Urgent! Urgent!
The male drops his keys on the pavement with a metal tinkle. He curses and
stoops next to my car. He smells like tomato sauce, fried chips, stale male sweat, but
mostly beer. Like Sunil’s alpha.
I know these two are hopeless, but I keep barking. They might be able to open the
door. Urgent! Urgent! Urgent!
“Damn dog,” says the woman.
The man laughs, a mean, low laugh. He presses his face against the window.
I bark. I scratch. I yelp.
The man sticks his tongue against the window, red flesh blanched dead white
against the cold glass. The smell of beer floods my nose. I whine before I bark, bark, bark
some more.
“What the hell,” says the man. I know this phrase. Sunil’s alpha male says it all
the time, usually before he does something that makes Sunil leave the room. On a good
day, Sunil will clip the leash on me and we’ll get a good, fast walk out of it, even if Sunil
is making angry noises into his metal rectangle phone the whole time.
This adult male’s fat hand reaches through the window opening, but his forearm
gets caught. His fingers are only five inches shy of the black knob. I stay very quiet,

panting my heat away, fogging up the windows while he wiggles his arm and curses, but
it’s no use. This two-legs can’t release me.
He withdraws his arm, swearing and rubbing the forearm that got caught in the
jaws of the window. I jump and bark frantically. Try again, two-legs! Try again! You can
do it!
The adult female laughs at him until he says something in a flat, low voice. She
sways on her feet and sticks her arm through the window, muttering something about
“him biting me.”
I know what biting is. Sunil shut me in a crate after I nibbled his hand when we
were playing. So I don’t bite anyone. Not even Sunil’s alpha.
I sit back on my heels and try to be very quiet, except for my panting.
The woman’s skinny arm waves through the window, poking forward hopelessly.
The man says something and she reaches downward, complaining the whole time, but her
hands brush the black knob.
I bark. She jumps and curses. But her fingers pluck the knob upward!
The man opens the door. “There, there.”
But I am already leaping past him. No leash. Feels good. Feels free. The man tries
to grab me, but I race past him, streaking through the parking lot, into the rainy darkness
and the garden at the back of the Inn. I sniff wildly, retracing our pre-dinner walk. The
patch of grass where I peed–I cannot resist squirting another hot stream of urine on the
same site, covering up the scent of a male German shepherd, who sprayed it after me.
I dash to the top of the nearby hill of sand, topped by an overturned wheelbarrow.
I find the wrapper for the piece of cheese I scavenged, and the delicious scent of squirrels
and spoiled hamburger, but no Sunil.
I’m barking. Help! Help! I sprint around the little garden, the lavender bushes, the
overhanging trees, the patio with a mermaid statue.
No Sunil. Only old Sunil smell, washing away with the rain.
My stomach growls. I whine. Sunil, Two-legs, where are you?
I tilt my nose in the air, sniff for him. My nostrils are flooded with the smell of
food. Two-leg food, the spaghetti sauce and garlic and the beer. I can’t resist. I dash to the
back door of the restaurant and sniff the open crack. Light spills on the cool patio stones.
Moist, heavy, sauce-scented air billows toward me.
I want to track Sunil and drag him back to our little cabin at the Lighthouse Inn,
with its soft red carpet, its sofa covered in my dog blanket, plus my plastic bowls of food
and water, and my bone. Our small space. Safe space.
I launch into the restaurant. Urgent! Urgent Urgent! Sunil! Sunil! Sunil!
My heart thunders in my chest. I dart around a two-legs standing next to the
closest table. A woman screams. A man shouts and jumps on a bench, hollering like I bit
him.
Crash! Someone drops a water glass, shattering five feet in front of me. Water
sprays onto my nose. I whine, bark, manage to skid to a stop, while two-legs scream and
shout around me.
“A dog! A dog!” they scream like they’ve never seen one before.
The two-legs who smells like garlic tomato sauce, the one I thought might let me
out of the car first, flies into the room. She says, “Star!” and runs straight at me with her
arms outstretched.
I veer away from her and I smell, then see, one two-legs still eating his spaghetti
in the corner like nothing’s going on.
I scramble out the back door, still barking. Worried! Worried!
Sunil’s not there. I didn’t see or smell him anywhere, even though I know he
walked through the heavy wood front doors like the rest of these people.
I am afraid.
I am running back to the sand pile, shivering and barking, tongue dry, bone tired.
Back in the restaurant, the man calmly twirling spaghetti on his fork was Sunil’s
alpha. The two-legs I thought we had left behind, along with my stainless steel water dish
and my tasty kibble.
What is he doing here? And where is my two-legs?
I should run. I still hear two-legs yelling inside. I hear the tinkle of someone
sweeping up glass. Soon someone will come and sweep me away where I can’t help
Sunil.
But first, I creep back to the back patio. A shallow puddle of water has collected
in the hollow curve of a stone tile, and I must quench my thirst.
I lick the puddle until I am licking cool, damp stone.
An adult male two-legs throws open the back door.
I retreat behind a clump of pampas grass. I don’t dare run while his light shines on
me. He yells into a phone, “ … find that damn dog!”
Garlic two-legs yells back at him from inside.
The phone two-legs surveys the courtyard. I watch him carefully between the
stalks of grass. If he chases me, I can run faster than him, but he will call other two-legs
and eventually, they will catch me.
He swears. He yells some more into his telephone. But already, he is looking over
his shoulder, back into the restaurant.
He grunts and pulls the door closed behind him.
And I am safe for one more minute.
I nose in the pampas grass. I don’t smell anything except the grass, earth, and
worms.
I need to smell Sunil two-legs. If I could smell him, I could find him.
I sit on my behind and lift my rear paw to scratch my right ear furiously. Sunil
two-legs did not come out of the front door. I was watching from the front parking lot.
He could still be in the restaurant, but I know my two-legs. If he heard me
running, he would spring to my side.
So maybe he came out the back door.
The light shines through the back door. The back door is too close to the two-legs.
They could snatch my collar. They could throw beer bottles at me, like Sunil’s alpha did
one time.
Sunil’s alpha. He could take me away in his car.
I scurry to the back door anyway.
The air smells like spaghetti and other two-leg food, but I dig my nose deep into
the prickly doormat. I smell long and hard.
Is that mud from Sunil’s boot?
Yes. A speck of old driveway mud with a bit of gravel dust and a bit of my old
pee.
Sunil was here. In the past hour.
I cast my nose around, sniffing, searching the stone patio. Even with the rain, I
should be able to smell him better than this–
And then, at the edge of the patio, I finally catch a smell of something that makes
my hackles rise.
Sunil’s blood.
Fresh blood. One spot about as big as my paw pad, hardly diluted by rain.
I whine. Two-legs! Two-legs hurt!
I circle the stone patio and the mulched earth at its edge. No more blood, but I
smell Sunil stronger now–mud, a little sweat–and something else.
Someone else.
One other adult two-legs. A new one. He smells like cigarettes and black licorice
and something wrong, something dangerous yet familiar that makes my hackles rise
again.
This licorice two-legs smells like sex. Sex with Sunil’s alpha.
I bark. Worried! Worried!
I hear a shout from the restaurant, but I keep going, nose to ground, sniff sniff
sniff run sniff sniff.
Following Sunil and Licorice Two-legs. Licorice has bigger, deeper footprints
than Sunil.
Sunil. Walking crooked. Leaning on his right. Leaning on Licorice. Here, his boot
dragged in the mud. I sniff a gum wrapper that fell out of Sunil’s pocket, but it’s empty
and smells like mint and his laundry soap. It’s already damp from the rain.
Sunil smell is very strong here.
He fell down. I nose the imprint from his body. He couldn’t walk anymore.
I nudge a clump of his hair, tangled in a stick on the ground.
Yes, Sunil collapsed here. But his scent keeps going south, out of the woods.
How?
I circle around this strong Sunil spot, check the scent trail backwards and
forwards.
Forward, I don’t find any more Sunil prints. Only Licorice boot prints, even
deeper than before. And more Sunil hair and Sunil blood.
Licorice is dragging Sunil! But where?
I bark. Sunil! Sunil!
I hear two-leg voices. I hear a car door slam near the Lighthouse Inn. I hear two-
leg footsteps.
They are tracking me.
They are coming to get me.
Sniff run run. Sniff. It’s easier to track Sunil now that his head is bumping on the
ground. More blood. More hair. More sweat.
Licorice smells stronger too, a tangy sweat. Fear sweat.
I break into the parking lot of the next building. A street light shines on me, but I
don’t care.
I can smell Sunil stronger now, mixed with fresh blood and sour vomit and wine.
I’m barking now, loud barks, alarm barks, as I race toward the big green dumpster in the
parking lot.
Wedged between the dumpster and the building, covered in rain and blood and
bruises …
Sunil.
I lunge forward, knocking a soggy cardboard box off his body. I lick his cold cold
nose, his cold cheek, his neck, his ear.
His eyelids flutter.
I lick his head. I lick the blood seeping from his scalp. His blood tastes salty and
metallic, mixed with the smell of lemon shampoo.
He groans. He shifts his head.
I keep licking.
A two-legs in uniform runs up yelling and shines a light on us. He swears and
grabs his phone. Soon I hear sirens wailing and more two-legs in uniforms screech up
with their cars and their flashing lights. But none of them are Sunil’s alpha or Licorice.
We are safe.
I curl up close to Sunil, using my body and my fur to keep him warm. I always
take care of my two-legs.

THE END

Dedicated to my bestest dogs, Olo and Roxy

Rapunzel Could Win a Prix Aurora Award

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What do you know about Rapunzel?

Here’s what I heard: her father trades her to a witch after dad stole from her garden to feed his wife’s (Rapunzel’s mother’s) pregnancy cravings. Rapunzel grows up imprisoned in a tower, and the only way in or out for anyone else is her hair, which grows so long and thick that she would toss it down as a rope for the witch to climb.

A prince hears the witch call

Rapunzel!

Rapunzel!

Let down your hair!

And does the same. He climbs up her hair. He and Rapunzel fall in love. The furious witch lops off Rapunzel’s braid. The next time the prince calls,

Rapunzel!

Rapunzel!

Let down your hair!

The witch lets him climb up on the severed hair, but when the prince sees her instead of Rapunzel, he jumps out of the tower, into thorns that blind him. He wanders the world, unable to see. Eventually, during his travels, he recognizes Rapunzel singing, and the two lovers reunite.

–> When I heard this story as a kid, the most important part was the blind prince. I needed glasses since I was six years old. Going blind was my greatest fear. I skipped straight over the tower, imprisonment, people climbing up my hair, and worried about losing my eyesight.

However, as an adult, I reread the story and was shocked that in some versions, Rapunzel and the prince have sex. When Rapunzel gets cast out, she ends up wandering the desert WITH TWINS. Not as bad as losing your eyesight, but no one would choose that fate lightly, either.

To go from a lifelong prisoner to her first sexual (? consensual) relationship to a solo twin mom in the desert? Ooh.

I decided to write about Rapunzel in this liminal space. On Spec published it (#122 VOL 32 No 4), and now, Canada, you may vote on it for the Prix Aurora Award until July 29th, 2023. For $10, you get a whole package of material. Join here and vote here. Thanks for your consideration!

Rapunzel in the Desert
by Melissa Yuan-Innes
I
My once-soft hands
Roughened by sand and wind
My breasts, continually swollen and emptied
By ravenous twin mouths
My eyes, gritty with still more sand and wind.
Still, I sing and weave
Trading for rice and dates
And the occasional bite of camel or lamb.

II
Mother Godel sheared my head.
Now I pluck the hairs myself
To make strong, fine sewing threads
Or to plait into sturdy belts or ropes
My voice, I raise in song
For the mother fatigued by hours of labour,
For the couple joined in ceremony,
Or for the soul laid to rest.

III
I trade my story to fellow-travellers.
“That tower! No stairs or doors.
Yes, my cousin told me of such a tower!”
They know of my prince who came.
“So sad. He jumped to his doom.”
“No, no. He lost the sight in both eyes and wanders,
Calling for you.”
A third jumps in. “No, he married a princess.
Of course her hair is not so fine as yours.”
My children learn to walk.
Their skin is stained blue by the clothes
Of their adopted people.
I continue to sing, to weave, to laugh and cry.
I am not the first woman to love and lose her prince
With only two new hungry mouths to show for it.
And yet my heart expands.
Instead of the stone walls of my tower,
I breathe the dry desert wind
And lift my eyes to the wide open sky.

It’s okay to outgrow your clothes

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TW: body image

When I was in university, a masters student said she outgrew her clothes. I liked that. You know, like a kid. But I struggled to accept the idea for myself.

As an female of Asian heritage, I grew up with the idea that I’m supposed to be tiny/slim or else it feels like I’m letting down the team. As a Westerner, I’m supposed to have big, sexy curves.

How to reconcile these two extremes? Starve yourself and get breast and butt implants.

I’ve always done a bit of exercise for fun. Inline skating feels like flying. Yoga’s emphasis on listening to your body and chilling out was a welcome antidote to the Go! Go! Go! attitude at school and home. But I have to admit that most of the time, I exercised because I didn’t want to get fat or to get osteoporosis later (too thin is a risk factor for that).

But I never pushed myself to exercise to excess, or even a lot. Medicine is a non-stop slog. Writing can feel that way too. My children need(ed) me 24/7, especially as babies and toddlers. I refused to add tons of exercise to my to-do list, and especially not a punitive regimen.

In elementary school, my son’s teacher drew a distinction between individual and group sports. My son and I like to do our own thing. I started the Couch to 5K in 2019, after Dr. Saroo Sharda recommended the NHS program, because I don’t have easy access to nice paved roads, but you can kind of run anywhere.

Joining Jake’s fitness community for female Canadian physicians finally got me strength training, which I try to balance with cardio Monday-Wednesday-Friday and yoga every other day.

However, I resisted dieting because it makes me crazy. My friends convinced me to log my diet and then add fibre and protein. I do like the app Chronometer, but my kids hated me monitoring every calorie. “Health nut. Mom is a health nut,” said my son.

Still, adding 10 g of fibre decreases all-cause mortality 10 percent, so I’m glad to add chia seeds and beans to my diet and let the rest go.

All that said, I still didn’t fit into my clothes and felt kind of miserable about it. The selfie above is one of a series of me trying to love my body even though my bigger, stronger glutes and quads didn’t work with my pants from residency.

Here are three comments that helped me:

“I’m too powerful for my pants,” said a friend’s little daughter.

“That’s a pants problem, not a you problem,” said Dr. Rshmi Khurana.

“The only point of exercise is to get bigger!” said my exasperated husband, Matt.

I finally bought new pants. And this picture below made me feel better. I’ve always had strong legs, but visible definition, not so much.

In yoga, we say, “Let go of the thoughts that no longer serve you.”

Trying to let go of pants and thoughts that no longer serve me, and to love myself and this body that has served me loyally for years without complaining.

Capitalism wants us to hate ourselves so it can sell us shapewear, creams, therapy, and surgery.

Give capitalism the middle finger.

Love yourself.

#FitPhysicianJune30

Terminally Ill: Taking Shape on Stage

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Elvis Will Enter the Lab O Building Saturday, May 13th, 2023, at 6:30 pm

Elvis the escape artist nearly drowns. Dr. Hope Sze struggles to save his life. And … it’s a comedy?

Terminally Ill cast: Photo front row (L-R): Melissa Yi, Eponine Lee, Stefanie Hitgano, Melissa Landry
Back row (L-R): Brandon Nguyen, Jon Dickey, Micah Jondel DeShazer (director), Richard Lee

Yes! My novel, Terminally Ill, has been transformed into a play. Come sample the opening as part of the TACTICS Development series on Saturday, May 13th at 6:30 pm (our play starts at 7).

Look at our wonderful cast!

Stefanie Hitgano (Dr. Hope Sze): Communications Assistant at the Queensway Carleton Hospital by day, playing detective doctor Hope Sze by night. Bachelor of Arts in theatre from the University of Ottawa and in her final year of Professional Writing at Algonquin College.

Richard Lee (Dr. John Tucker): winner of 3 Dora awards, two for performance, one for sound engineering, and co-founder of fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre

Eponine Lee (Dr. Tori Kameron /Kameron): fresh from the Stratford Festival, where she played Juliet in R+J. She was a finalist for the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Breakout Artist Award in 2022. And she’s only in grade 10. Imagine what she’ll do in the next ten years!

Richard jokes, “You should call the play Terminal-LEE Ill.”

You may also have heard of Richard’s wife and Eponine’s mom, Nina Lee Aquino, the award-winning Filipino-Canadian director and dramaturg, the founding artistic director at fu-GEN, who is now the Artistic Director at the NAC.

Melissa Landry (Elvis): aerial acrobatics, stilt walking, fire manipulation, poi and fan dancing skills. For her role as Elvis, she’ll break out the aerials

Jon Dickey (Archer): a University of Ottawa’s Theatre Arts graduate known for his leading role in “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” and for making Shakespeare accessible in A Company of Fools

Brandon Nguyen (Ryan Wu): Brandon graduated from Carleton in 2016 with Bachelor of Music in Performance on classical flute before he obtained a Bachelor of Education from the University of Ottawa. He also performs in musicals, including Avenue Q, Spring Awakening, and American Idiot

Micah Jondel DeShazer (Director): a performer, director, collaborator and the Co Artistic Producer at TACTICS, the Theatre Artists’ Co-operative: the Independent Collective Series. Recently he was the musical director of Memphis at Orpheus Musical Theatre

Melissa Yi/Yuan-Innes (playwright/producer/Lucia/Mrs. Bérubé): emergency physician turned playwright. Her play I Am The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World (And Other True Tales from the Emergency Room) was selected for the Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre.

This ain’t your traditional play. Micah Jondel DeShazer directs Saturday’s workshop presentation of the first half Terminally Ill, where Hope solves the near-murder of Elvis the Escape King, played by aerialist Melissa Landry.

That’s right, you can ooh and aah over the sight of Elvis “underwater” on aerial silks. You can bend your brain trying to solve the murder. You can even get up from your seat and follow characters around to try and score additional clues.

Check out the opening excerpt of Terminally Ill as part of TACTICS’ workshop series on May 13 at 1830 in Lab O!

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. What better way to celebrate than to preview Terminally Ill?

Stefanie and I are also bringing our moms for Mother’s Day. Come play with your mom!

Massive thanks to our sponsors!

Winning the Derringer Award

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Congratulations to the Derringer Award finalists of 2023:

Flash

“Catch and Release” by April Kelly (Mystery Magazine, May 2022)

“Acknowledgments” by Karen Harrington (Guilty Crime Story Magazine online flash fiction, April 2022)

“Easter Spam” by John Weagly (Shotgun Honey online flash fiction)

“The Final Chapter” by James Blakey (Yellow Mama, October 2022)

“Where Palms Sway and the Surf Pounds” by Curtis Ippolito (Shotgun Honey online flash fiction)

Short

“Double Trouble” by M.E. Proctor (Bristol Noir online, March 2022)

“Hiding Out in Cedar Key” by Sharon Marchisello (White Cat Publications online, April 2022)

“The Shape of Australia” by Christine Poulson (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2022)

“My Two-Legs” by Melissa Yi  (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2022)

“Digging In” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Black Cat Weekly #40)

Long

“The Vigil” by Toni Goodyear (Carolina Crimes: Rock, Roll and Ruin anthology)

“Tethered” by Marcelle Dubé (Crime Wave: Women of a Certain Age anthology)

“The White Calf and the Wind” by Mike Adamson (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #11)

“The Donovan Gang” by John M. Floyd (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Sept/Oct 2022)

“Negative Tilt” by Bobby Mathews (Rock and a Hard Place issue 7)

“Something Blue” by G.M. Malliet (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November/December 2022)

Novelette

“The Wraith of Bunker Hill” by Paul D. Marks (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Sept/Oct 2022)

“Two Shrimp Tacos and a .22 Ruger” by Adam Meyer (Guns & Tacos, Down & Out Books)

“Dead Men Tell No Tales” by Liz Filleul (The People’s Friend Special, issue 225)

“The Refusal Camp” by James Benn (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Sept/Oct 2022)

“Ripen” by Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier (Black Cat Weekly #48)

“The competition is fierce, and this is a big deal. Well done, especially considering the huge number of stories entered this year,” said Melodie Campbell, who should know. She won both the Derringer Award and the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence.

Checking my e-mail before taking our kids to the bus Monday morning, I received this from M.H. Callway:

Umm, what? I logged into the Short Mystery Fiction Society and blinked.

The Derringer Awards celebrate the world’s best short mysteries, in English. The international Academy Awards for mystery short stories, if you will.

I was a finalist in the flash category in 2015 with “Because.”

“My Two-Legs” is a mystery where a dog named Star solves a crime and saves her two-legs (her human, Sunil), inspired by our dog named Olo.

Winning the Derringer Award calls for getting dressed up and taking pictures with my dogs. Bell first, because Roxy had flopped on the porch. This is the first dog photo of the day.

Then Roxy, who looked good except I had to clean out her eyes. She basically fell asleep while I tried to get a decent picture of the two of us.

In addition to my wonderful dogs, my husband Matt and our kids, Max and Anastasia, I’d like to thank Kristine Kathryn Rush and Dean Wesley Smith. Kris assigned me and Cindie Geddes to write a story from the point of view of a dog at the Anchor Inn. The Staunch Prize longlisted “My Two-Legs” for best feminist thriller. The editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Linda Landrigan, published “My Two-Legs.”

The Review and the Standard Freeholder celebrated my shortlist. CBC Radio’s All in a Day’s Alan Neal asked me good questions like “How many people vote?” and “When do you find out if you win?” The Crime Writers of Canada, Capital Crime Writers, and International Thriller Writers were all proud of my nomination. And of course never forget the Mesdames of Mayhem, who are sweeping the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence!

I now know that approximately 900 people are eligible to vote. Thank you for reading and voting, Short Mystery Fiction Society Members. Thank you from me and the dogs!

Congrats to all the finalists and all the winners!

My Dog and the Derringer

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Or, how a dog saves your life

Do you know what a Derringer is? A pistol small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Small, but with a large bore. Considered effective at close range.

Hence the Derringer Awards, created to honour the best short mystery stories in the world. Short, but packing a deadly punch.

Now, I don’t own a gun. I’m an urban Canadian at heart. 😉 But I am a finalist for the Derringer Award this year for “My Two-Legs,” a story starring a dog named Star.

“My Two-Legs” started off as a writing exercise with author Kristine Kathryn Rusch in Oregon. She was teaching a bunch of writers how to shore up our writing weaknesses. There was at least one other group focusing on setting and a third group on emotion. Cindie Geddes and I had picked information flow. Kris told me before, “Your stories are powerful” and, in the same breath, “People are confused.”

Yes, that’s fair. What to do about it? Well, among other things, Kris had me and Cindie follow a cat around Oregon’s Anchor Inn. Then we wrote from the point of view of a dog. I invented a dog named Star who wanted to save her human, whom she calls her two-legs.

You can see the gentleness in Olo’s eyes

Star is inspired by our dog, Olo, the first dog I ever had, the golden retriever mix my husband and I adopted from the SPCA when we moved to the country. Olo means “surfboard of chiefs and kings” in Hawaiian. When we adopted Olo, they gave us a T-shirt that said “I have a friend for life.”

My husband found a kitten abandoned across the road, and Olo let her fall asleep between his legs

We got Olo at seven months after his previous owner put him in a kennel and never came back for him. Olo would nudge my elbow when I wrote for too long, making sure we both got exercise and fresh air. His puppy teeth fell out on the floor–excruciating to step on, worse than Lego blocks. I kept Olo on a leash at first, but when he ran, I thought, That is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and I let him go free on our dead-end road and nearby forest trails. He always found his way home, although sometimes dragging a treat with him like a deer’s skull or, most memorably, a rib cage complete with a spinal cord.

My dad with the pet bed he and my mom made for Olo

My dad with the pet bed he and my mom made for Olo

When I came home from an ER shift at 1 or two a.m., Olo would sit by the door, waiting for me. When we lost our first pregnancy at 20 weeks, I sobbed into Olo’s soft fur and he stood by, confused but ready to shoulder my tears. Olo visited my dad in the hospital when Dad got brain cancer. Olo made friends with every other dog. When we welcomed our new son Max, Olo never got jealous. I’d take both Max and Olo for stroller walks (squirrels!). Later, my husband Matt pointed out that Olo would move so he could watch Max at the sandbox, quietly keeping tabs on our toddler.

So when I wrote about Star, I made her the hero of the story. Star’s two-legs is in trouble, and Star must save that two-legs.

Me and two of my boys

I didn’t sell “My Two-Legs” for a long time. Then it was longlisted for Staunch Prize, the international feminist thriller award reserved for fiction where no women are abused or killed. A few months later, editor Linda Landrigan accepted for at Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and it was published in the Sept-Oct 2022 issue (v67 #9/10).

And now “My Two-Legs” is a finalist for the Derringer Award for the best short story of 2022.

Sadly, Olo passed away at only five years old, the year after my father died. I still miss both of them. No one will ever replace them.

However, we do have two more rescue dogs under our roof. Roxy the Rottweiler mix is my girl. As soon as we met her, she lick lick lick lick licked my hand, and I knew she would never hurt me. I didn’t expect to take home a Rottweiler, but no one had adopted her for a month, probably (unfairly) afraid of her breed. Anastasia favoured one of the other dogs. I only had eyes for Roxy.

Her only faults: Roxy would take off after squirrels no matter who was on the other end of her leash. Anastasia literally flew through the air over the porch. Max remembers getting his face dragged through gravel. But our kids are now too big to soar, and we all adore her. Roxy still “talks” and barks a lot, and she’s scared of storms.

Bell is the mouthy mountain cur on the left from North Carolina. We don’t know much of her history, but she was skinny and scared and came to us with only the stump of a tail. We’re grateful that Bell has much fewer accidents now, but if you thought Roxy was loud, whoa. Bell yells what feels like 100% of the time.

All this to say, dogs are wonderful and you can vote for the 2023 Derringer Award until April 29th if you’re a member of the Short Fiction Mystery Society.

Instructions: go to https://shortmystery.groups.io/g/main

Search for the files to download the stories and read ’em all. Then search for polls to vote. “My Two-Legs” is part of the short story category (not flash, novella, etc). Congrats to all Derringer Award finalists!

How does a dog save your life? In my story, Star literally saves Sunil’s life (spoiler in a good way). Keeping it real: my dogs have also yanked me face-down on the ice, and I see dog-walking fractures in the ER pretty often. But my dogs make me laugh, take me on walks with my husband, teach our children empathy, keep me warm, lower my blood pressure, and build bridges between my friends.

We would not be our family without our beautiful dogs. And now our dogs have inspired a story considered one of the best in the English language in 2022.

Thank you, my loves.

The St. Valentine’s Day Emergency

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I gave out valentines in the ER.

My daughter had rejected a box of 32 Shopkins valentines. I thought of passing them on to my nieces, but maybe they, too, would turn their noses up at Shopkins before next year.

The obvious solution was to hand out valentines in the emergency department. First, I laid the box on the counter and said, “Let’s give out valentines!”

The nurses paused to give me an odd look.

Ah. If it’s going to be, it’s up to me…ER edition.

I handed valentines to my patients, ages one to 71. The baby was sleeping; his mom accepted and said it was only the second valentine of his life, since he’d received one as a newborn. I passed one to a ten-year-old boy, who looked unenthusiastic, but his dad said he could give it to his niece.

Full-grown men smiled. They tended to ask for the one that said “You got style!” or “Happy Valentine’s Day!” rather than the glitter cupcakes, but they didn’t refuse.

One middle-aged woman was obviously touched. “For me?” she said.

“Yes! For you!” It made me happy to give them something in addition to medical news.

A nurse told me that a couple had been fighting in the waiting room. I had no idea, because after I handed them their valentines, they laughed and left our department smiling.

One woman whispered that this was the only valentine she’d get, and that she would treasure it.

Only one two-year-old said, who’d been running and crawling and trying to play with the slit lamp, told me straight out, “No.”

“He doesn’t like cards,” said his dad.

“Would you like a sticker?” I showed him a sheet of heart stickers.

“Stick-ah,” he said, and it calmed him right down. When I finally got his blood test result, hours later, he was playing with the heart I’d placed on his bracelet.

I gave valentines to our hard-working staff. I gave them to our unit coordinator, to phlebotomists, nurses, an emergency care attendant, and a medical resident. One nurse was off on break at the time. She’s a tough cookie. For example, when a patient said, “You look young. Do you know how to put in an IV?” she responded, “Can you let me do my job?” and socked in the IV. All that to say, I didn’t know how she’d respond to a “Have a sparkly day!” kind of valentine, but when I came back, she had taped it to the monitor of her portable computer, and I was touched.

Admittedly, it was a good shift. A steady stream of patients, but not so many that the charts piled up. A good team of people. I worked fast track, and only one case was overly involved. I had a resident I enjoyed teaching, and we clicked.

But even if it had been a brutal day, I believe it would have changed the energy in the ER. So much of the time, they patients feel beleaguered and unwanted, and we feel overwhelmed by trivial complaints and/or an onslaught of pain and trauma of all stripes. Often patients leave dissatisfied because they waited too long, or they didn’t get all the answers, or they’re still in pain. If I hand them a valentine, even if not all their problems are solved, they feel welcome.

“No one comes to the emergency room for nothing. Remember that,” a preceptor once said fiercely.

In the same vein, no one leaves my emergency room empty-handed. In the end, I give them the best medical care I can. Plus a valentine.

Originally published in The Medical Post. This will form part of a new Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World book, tentatively titled MD: Mistress of Distress. Just felt like sharing this today.

Ice Dancing and Crab Apple Sorbet

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What happens if two Olympic champions fall in love, but fall apart off the ice?

“I love this story.” Kristine Kathryn Rusch, editor

Sapporo, Japan

Olympic Ice Dance Final (February 19th)

Jacinta Pham had imagined winning the Olympics’ ice dance competition with Wes Allan thousands of times.

Every time they strapped on their skates at 5:30 a.m. Every time their breath puffed out like dragon smoke in the cool, humid air of the rink. Every time she fell on her butt, or wrist, or even nose-first onto the ice. Every second she had to learn to walk again after not one, but two separate operations on each leg.

Reality was better.

She stared down at Wes—he had “died” in her arms during their free skate to Bizet’s “Carmen”—while the crowd roared around them and pelted the ice with roses and teddy bears. She knew that media and fans filmed their faces, their hands, their every gesture.

But this moment was for them. No one else would intrude for a few precious seconds.

She could still feel Wes’s hands imprinted on her back, arms, and thighs.

No matter what happened next, they would always have this. No judge could steal the magic they had woven with their music and their ice dance.

No one.

Not even her or Wes.

Carmen

#

Ottawa, Canada

6 Months later (August 15th)

Can you come over?

Jacinta stared at her phone.

She and Wes had stopped talking after their triumphant post-Olympic gold skating tour of Japan and North America.

Of course, during the media frenzy that followed, they’d scored dozens of interviews and media takeovers. They’d kept up a good show on Instagram and Twitter for a few months. Well, she had, while Wes had mostly ignored social media.

But offline, when they didn’t have an event scheduled for them to smile and wave at the cameras, they’d fallen strangely silent. To the point where it felt awkward to text and truly uncomfortable to call each other.

Jacinta heart beat so hard, she could feel it in her throat as she began to type. What’s up?

He answered right away. Bert got pneumonia.

Jacinta’s stomach squeezed. When they were kids, Bert Allen, Wes’s grandfather, used to pick them up from the rink sometimes when their parents were in a pinch. Bert smelled like pipe tobacco and offered them apples, because he and his wife owned an apple orchard in Navan, Ontario, just east of Canada’s capital. In the Fall, they sold apples and pressed apple cider and apple-cinnamon donuts. In the summer, they were famous for their crab apple sorbet. Everyone loved Bert, especially Wes.

Jacinta glanced at the clock now, which read 5 p.m. The clock sat on a French provincial dresser near her room’s south-facing window. She’d curled up with a romance novel in her tiny, white bedroom with its antique metal bed frame.

Even this room reminded her of Wes. She’d modelled it after an apartment she’d loved in Paris, after Wes had said, “This is totally you.”

But she couldn’t think about that now. Wes needed her. As a friend. Nothing more.

She called him back, walking to the kitchen, trying not to notice the little apple charm on the windowsill, a gift from Wes’s grandmother. “Oh, Wes, that’s awful. How’s he doing?”

“Hey, J, I don’t want to worry you. The doctor said that he could go home on antibiotics, but he’s a bit confused. He wants to check the McIntosh and Honeycrisp trees, and he said your name.”

“Really? He said Jacinta?” It was an odd name in Canada. It meant hyacinth flower, and until she and Wes started placing at competitions, she kept having to explain that she pronounced her name as Ja-sin-ta Fam.

“Yeah, we’re pretty sure. I know it seems a bit random, and my grandma doesn’t know what to make of it, but do you think you could come to Navan? I’ll text you the address. I know you’re busy, and you’ve got all these sponsorship deals … ”

She blinked back a few tears. He had to ask? If it had been the other way around, Wes would have broken the time-space continuum to zip to her side. It was one of the things she lo—appreciated about him. Not only his broad shoulders, his yeasty smell, and the way he managed to joke before either of them had sipped their morning coffee, but his loyalty. Nothing mattered more than his family. He’d once said that he’d die for his two brothers, and she knew he meant it.

“I’m on my way,” she said, already grabbing her keys and shutting off the lights.

Roxanne

The rest of “Ice Dancers and Crab Apple Sorbet” is available through WMG’s Holiday Spectacular.

Ahhh. I became a Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir superfan after they won the Olympics for the second time. When Kris Rusch asked for “a romance short story for a pretend anthology called First Loves, Lost Loves,” I jumped at my chance to give my fictional ice dance heroes a happily ever after together.

This story cheers me up. I relate so hard to Jacinta’s “perfect” image and uncertainty. I’d love to write about Wes’s brothers finding their partners in related stories. I can imagine creating grace and beauty on the ice, and becoming tongue-tied before, during, and after falling in love.

But I worried about ever selling this story. Magazines don’t publish romance short stories.

Thank goodness for WMG’s Holiday Spectacular.

What is WMG’s Holiday Spectacular?

Kris loves holiday stories so much that WMG will send out 39 stories, one to your inbox every day during the holiday season. Mine will appear in Candy Cane Kisses, the romance anthology, but of course I’m excited about Crooked Little Christmas and Time Travel Holidays too.

If you want to subscribe to WMG’s Holiday Spectacular, you can still do so here: https://www.wmgpublishinginc.com/project/spectacular/.

AND they let me share “Ice Dancing and Crab Apple Sorbet” here until Dec 5/22 at 1300.

Plus I already got a note of appreciation:

From: Filip Wiltgren
Subject: Thank you for Ice Dancing and Crab Apple Sorbet


Dear Dr. Yi,

I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to read your Ice Dancing and Crab Apple Sorbet in this year’s Holiday Spectacular. You carry the routine strongly through the entire story and stick the landing hard enough to make me cry! Thank you for sharing the story with us.

Respectfully Yours,
Filip Wiltgren

Thanks, Filip. Thank you, Kris and Dean and WMG! Thank you, readers. Ho ho ho!

My last holiday sale in person:

Saturday, December 3, 10 am-3 pm, 19641 County Rd 19, St. Mary’s Centre, Williamstown

Glengarry Happenings

https://www.facebook.com/events/485216303645303/489884426511824/

Maple Leaf Mystery Conference online

“Get Shorty” Panel: 9:30 a.m. Saturday, December 3

Our panel talks short stories. I look forward to interviews and other panels with Canadian crime authors!

You can still register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/mystery-writing-conference-tickets-422123531847

Last one!

12 days of Page Turners online

Tune in on December 10th at 7 pm Central (that’s 8 pm ET) on your platform of choice:

https://www.facebook.com/aimee.ravichandran

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aimee-ravichandran-353848124/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmQ6-7yys-9ifqdGm6eydgA

https://www.facebook.com/AbundantlySocial

Aimee Ravichandran will interview
Andrea Christian
Fern Brady
Jocie Mckdae
Kristin Martinez
Melissa Yi (<–me)

And to all a good night!

Fairy Tales and Wrath: an interview with Kate Wolford, the Editor of A Fairy Tale Magazine

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I’ve always loved fairy tales, so I cannot resist A Fairy Tale Magazine, formerly called Enchanted Conversation. “I want to be published there,” I said as soon as I saw it. Now you can meet the editor, Kate Wolford.

As part of my Kickstarter for The Shapes of Wrath, I’m interviewing interesting people about anger. Let’s go!

Melissa Yuan-Innes: What makes you angry?

Kate Wolford: I’m not an especially angry person as I think it’s almost always an unproductive emotion, but, of course, I do get angry. One thing that makes me furious is the way people condescend to those of us who live in the world of fairy tale writing and retelling. I mean, fairy tales focus on power, love and money, the things that motivate humans the most. They deal with loss and family trauma and transformation. Why is it so funny or lightweight to write fantastical stories that plumb the depths of human needs? Or to study those stories? Why is that trivial? Yes, this makes me mad, and even after more than 15 years at this, I get angry and hurt when people laugh at what I do. Who wouldn’t?

MYI: Unfortunately, anything connected to women gets trivialized, even today. I’m glad we can tell our own stories more easily nowadays. How do you deal with that anger?

KW: I usually read. That’s how I cope with everything—I read my way out of it. I don’t have a specific genre that I read, I just pick up a book and focus on the story, and let the feeling pass. That’s probably not the greatest way to do it, but it’s the method I have.

MYI: 100%. I wish more of the world had this response. Instead of invading other countries or beating people up, start reading! I love it. Would you like to add anything?

KW: I loved that the voices in Chinese Cinderella, Fairy Godfathers & Beastly Beauty: Feminist Fairy Tales from Ancient China to Contemporary North America were fresh, yet familiar. The book reconnected me with the important truth that people experience the same emotions the world over, no matter where their family tree first grew.

At the same time, in the West we do not see nearly enough fairy tales with Chinese protagonists, so the stories felt new. I read a lot of fairy tale retellings and fairy-tale inspired stories, and it’s hard for me to find something fresh, but these stores feel new even though they deal with very old ideas. Plus, I liked all of the characters (even when I didn’t).

MYI: Wow. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions about anger and fairy tales, and compliment my new collection of fairy tales!

For any writers, you can see how editors yearn for new interpretations and voices. A prosaic but memorable expression I’ve heard is “Old meat on new forks.” Make sure you submit and publish your work, especially if you have a perspective the world doesn’t usually hear. Innovative readers want exciting interpretations they’ve never heard before.

Readers, please do check out A Fairy Tale Magazine. They’re always innovating. I especially like the article about enchanted fridge magnet poetry. They’re also building a community, including Solstice celebrations and Zoom meetings.

I do love Chinese Cinderella, Fairy Godfathers & Beastly Beauty. Four pieces were originally published in FTM, including “Death and the Mother,” where Snow White’s mother plays a key role in holding Death at bay, and “A Half Century of Beauty,” where we visit Beauty and the Beast on their 50th wedding anniversary.

As for wrath, dudes, please stop trivializing fairy tales to try and make your dick look bigger. It doesn’t work and it’s not a good look.

Agree or disagree below. 🙂 And please check out my Kickstarter for The Shapes of Wrath! Not only does Dr Hope Sze explore a haunted hospital in the first thriller in a brand new series, but we’re unlocking cool goals. Today we unlocked the mini wrath cookbook!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/192734199X?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=httpmelissaco-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=429bd13db82d166c2220681219c53bd8&camp=1789&creative=9325″

The Shapes of Wrath Prologue

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Author’s note: Yes! A NEW Hope Sze medical thriller in a brand spanking new Hope series tied to the seven deadly sins, with paranormal elements! (See Hope’s red eyes?)

The Kickstarter launches TODAY at 1 pm. Please support me! It’s my birthday, and you can contribute as little as $1. I’ll tempt you with a free sample of the prologue below.

Everyone else waits until February 1st, but you can preorder The Shapes of Wrath outside of Kickstarter at this universal link.

And now the preview!

PROLOGUE

GORDON

University College Hospital, September 14, 07:58

Gordon Cole didn’t expect anyone to die that day.
He’d chosen anesthesia as a specialty one year ago partly because 99 percent of the time, everything flowed smoothly in the operating room.
As a junior resident doctor, Gordon helped put patients to sleep for surgery, kept them alive during the procedure, and gently brought them back to consciousness afterward. His epidurals eased the pain of childbirth so much that one new mother named her baby after him. Gordon helped wean chronic pain patients off dangerously high doses of narcotics. Ninety-nine percent of the time, anesthesia stayed calm and well-controlled.
The other one percent of the time, the patient crashed before his eyes. A woman’s airway swelled shut, blocking her breathing. A man bled out after a stab wound to his heart. Worst of all, a baby with an abnormal connection between her trachea and esophagus had choked in front of him.
Then anesthesia had to control the airway and breathing, support the circulation, and take control of the situation.
That terrified Gordon. Luckily, today’s attending physician, Dr. Burns, handled pretty much everything.
Everything except the world’s meanest surgeon.
Gordon got along with most surgeons. Some of them joked non-stop. Nearly all saved lives on the regular. Gordon especially admired the skill of two female attending surgeons.
But the one dinosaur left in Canada dwelled at Montreal’s University College Hospital.
“Come on, Singlit!” shouted Dr. Vrac before kicking the OR table hard enough to jostle the unconscious patient, Joan Finn.
Mrs. Finn’s sedated body didn’t stir more than a centimetre, but the scrub nurse, Trent, gasped.
“I’m right here,” replied Raj Singh, the general surgery chief resident at Dr. Vrac’s side.
“I’m getting old waiting for the all-clear,” said Dr. Vrac. He watched the anesthesiologist, eyes glittering, without picking on Dr. Burns directly.
Dr. Burns kept his lips pressed together as he double-checked the patient’s endotracheal tube, the tube that allowed Mrs. Finn to breathe during the surgery, and the CO2 monitor that measured her carbon dioxide level.
“Stinks in here, gas docs,” Dr. Vrac told the anaesthesia team, sniffing the air through his mask while the surgical staff gathered around Mrs. Finn’s lower half on the operating room table. “I haven’t even used the cautery yet. Anyone else smell that?”
The stench filled the confines of their white-walled room. It didn’t smell like inhalational agents like Sevoflurane, nor like cauterized, or burnt, tissue. Gordon shifted side to side and held his breath as he stood with Dr. Burns at the patient’s head and neck on one side of the blue drape. The surgical staff on the opposite side of the drape didn’t flinch at the smell of … well, human gas.
Dr. Burns privately called the blue drape the “blood-brain barrier,” a joke both about the membrane separating the brain from the rest of the body and the fact that surgeons might deal with the flesh and blood, but anesthesiologists considered themselves the true brains of the OR.
“Someone’s got a bad case of the farts today,” said Dr. Vrac. “As a general surgeon, I’m an expert in that. Pus, guts, or cancer, I’m your man!” He turned to his chief resident. “Too much daal, eh, Dr. Singh?”
Gordon winced. The curly-haired medical student tsked, but the scrub nurse, Trent, snorted and laughed. Singh shook his head and kept his gloved hands sterile by pressing his palms together as if in prayer.
“Running behind today?” Tammy called from the doorway. As the charge nurse, she made sure every OR ran on time.
“No way,” Vrac shot back. “Just about to blow the belly up.” He cackled as if no one had ever heard his slang for inflating the abdomen with carbon dioxide for laparoscopic surgery.
“Almost there,” said Dr. Burns, double checking a wire.
Gordon knew better than to elbow his way in as a first year anesthesia resident. He’d run cases alone, but never with Dr. Vrac. Dr. Burns—who didn’t invite Gordon to call him by his first name, Bob—would tell Gordon if he wanted his help. Right now, Gordon stayed out of the way.
“Might be done faster if we had an RT today, Tammy,” said Dr. Vrac.
Gordon scowled behind his blue surgical mask. At UC Hospital, the respiratory therapist often assisted on the airway, but the ORs ran one RT short today. Dr. Burns had told Tammy that he and Gordon could manage on their own.
“Want me to donate another 20K to the foundation to speed this up? Consider it done. I can always make more money.” Dr. Vrac wiggled his gloved fingers in the air. “Surgical hands. Magic hands. Girls love ’em. That’s why I’ve got more women than cars.”
“So magical that he has no wife,” Dr. Burns whispered. He and Gordon exchanged a silent moment of understanding on their side of the drape before the older anesthesiologist let out an unmistakable ripping noise.
“Fart attack!” Dr. Vrac laughed so hard that he almost fell onto the unconscious patient.
“Excuse me,” Dr. Burns muttered, but no one else heard him while Dr. Vrac shouted, “Instead of Robbie Burns day, it’s Farty Burns day!”
The humiliation writ large on Dr. Burns’s face was Gordon’s first clue that someone might die today.

__

End of prologue. Let me know what you think. Surgeons pointed out that the negative stereotyping of their profession, which I do address in the novel.

Hope to see you on Kickstarter at 1 p.m. ET!

(The Shapes of Wrath is also available for preorder if that’s your preference, but fingers crossed I can gain a new audience on Kickstarter!)

How do you know you’ve “made it” as a writer? (Part 1)

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Written by

Today I won’t talk about awards or bestseller lists. I’m doing deeper.

I’ve been learning from Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith since 2003, when I managed to cut together one week’s vacation and another rotation’s conference week out of my emergency medicine fellowship year to attend their two-week Master Class.

“They broke me down and built me back up again,” said Ilsa Bick, who had won Writers of the Future with me.

“I’m coming back to ICU. I don’t have time to get broken down and built back down again,” I replied. I also lived in Montreal, three time zones away from Kris and Dean in Oregon. So although they explained that a big part of learning was staying up late and talking, I’d already spent something like six hours in class per day, plus the writing exercises and technical assignments, including writing a 10,000-word story and two stories that were minimum 3000 words each (up to 8000 words, I think, but I never hit the upper limit). The second class ended at 10 p.m. their time, or 1 a.m. my time. The group would chat and learn from each other while I’d wave and hit the bed immediately.

Look how happy we are! I can’t even keep my eyes open!

I kept coming back to Oregon, and then Las Vegas when they moved. I kept learning. For example, at the first class, Kris told me flat out for a pre-printed story, “Your font is too small. I don’t care if it’s 12-point. An editor’s livelihood is her eyes. I could not read this story.” (Everything is paraphrased because it took place so long ago.)

We bought Kris a bell to summon us

Weird Tales had told me the same thing and asked me to use a 12-point font. But since it was already 12-point Times New Roman, I had continued to send out stories in the same font, destroying editors’ eyes.

And ensuring the rejection of my stories.

That was only a font issue. I endured two weeks of other writers tearing apart my words, or not reading my story past the second page.

Kris explained at the end of the Master Class, in her one-on-one session with me, that I was extremely different from other writers. “Publishing will have to create a new category for you. You’re not supposed to compare to other writers, but Robert Jeshonek is someone that, if they ask for a story about a spaceship mission, he’ll write from the point of view of the spaceship. You’re not like that. You’re extremely direct, to the point where it almost makes people uncomfortable. But you need to develop your toolbox. Read Jeffrey Deaver’s short stories.”

Kris and Dean talk about character, setting, plot, emotion, punctuation, etc. as tools in your writing toolbox. So I read Deaver’s short stories, as well as my fellow writers’ work, and was amazed at how theirs had improved. In fact, I burst into tears after one workshop at 3 a.m. PT (6 a.m. ET) because they had written so well that I felt inadequate, and the lovely and talented fellow WOTF winner Leslie Claire Walker had to talk me down and assure me that I, too, had levelled up. (Leslie also never shared a room with me after that, which I choose to think of as coincidence. I also do love the book that emerged from that conference, Dancing Through the Chaos)

Leslie Claire Walker in Oregon, before we knew that you can’t sit on Oregon Coast logs in case you get swept out to sea (no joke).

Kris mentioned that she’d looked up from one of my early stories and said, “She’s brilliant.”

“I don’t understand her,” Dean said.

Nevertheless, I contributed to the fruit basket Dean is admiring 🙂

Kris instructed me that my level of detail was either way too vague or way too detailed. “People are confused.” I spent years fine-tuning that skill.

More pearls of wisdom from Kris and Dean:

Have fun. Go play.

You are responsible for your own career.

Me: Everyone else here wants to quit their day job. I’m not even finished becoming a doctor, and I don’t know if I’ll ever quit. I worked too hard to become a doctor.

Kris: [smile] That’s a good thing to know. Good for you.

I kind of stared at her, waiting for her to order me to fall in line with everyone else, but she continued to smile without adding anything.

Permission granted to continue my own path instead of following anyone else’s.

Lisa Silverthorne (middle) treated me and Leslie to breakfast. So kind of her.

Dean: Kris won the Hugo … and then the Hugo again … so much success with the Smokey Dalton series …

Me, afterward: Does this mean you’ve done everything you ever wanted in writing?

Kris: Not even close.

Me: I get that. So you’re going to concentrate on the Smokey Dalton series now?

Kris: No! I need my sweet romances after I write Smokey.

Cool. More mountains to climb for all of us.

And permission to write multiple genres, when everyone else told me to choose one or I’d never succeed in publishing.

I e-mailed Kris I couldn’t write fiction after we lost our first pregnancy at 20 weeks. I thought she’d yell at me to be more efficient.

She said something to the effect of, I’m surprised you’re writing at all. You need to grieve. Don’t force it.

Wow. Permission to grieve. How about that? I worked hard to experience what was happening without trying to control it.

Eventually, I wrote again. Kris said that my writing had come back stronger and more heartfelt than ever. But first, and periodically, I waded through sorrow and anger and self-recrimination. I eventually wrote Your Baby Is Safe and Buddhish. It helped me understand my fellow humans with empathy. But as one woman told Sylvia Boorstein in It’s Easier Than You Think, “Cancer has made me a better person. But I would rather not have cancer.”

Max, my dad, and my mom

When I finally had a healthy baby named Max, I cut back on my writing and assumed Kris would fault me for it.

Kris: You will never get this time back. I love my nephew. He’s a wonderful young man. But I still miss that little boy.

I miss baby and toddler Max and Anastasia now too. As they were growing up, I tried to write enough to keep me sane, while spending time watching baby TV (staring at them), nursing them, and introducing them to the world.

I still remember visibly startling baby Anastasia by opening the cabinet door to reveal stuff behind it, including our rice container. And then the whoosh of rice as I poured it into the rice cooker. Her entire tiny body wavered in the air as she processed the wonder of the world.

The next time I made rice, she didn’t react. Old hat already.

Pema Chodrön pointed out, Babies are impermanence.

Much of this is not the actual mechanics of writing. Kris was instrumental in helping me fine-tune my left of detail, how to let information flow, how to integrate and even enjoy writing setting. Yet what I remember most is how to live, not how to write.

I also knew that Dean didn’t “get” my writing even before Kris told me, which didn’t bother me too much. You can’t write for everyone. Write for yourself. Write for your tribe.

Still, I was touched when Dean invited me to the Past Crimes Storybundle and called me a “rising star.”

Another sign that, even if I haven’t “made it,” at least I’m climbing the ladder.

The New York Times featured me in their business section, a spot I earned in part by my writing. They asked for financial stories, and I answered, knowing that the way I express myself would probably catch their attention, in addition to them likely wanting more diverse testimony. My financial approach is outlined in my three webinars. The first is an overview, the second explains exactly how to move to low cost exchange-traded funds, and the third describes FIRE, or financial independence and retiring early. You can buy all three at once. I’m not a licensed financial advisor, but we are financially independent, which means we walk the walk.

These accomplishments aren’t money. They’re not rankings. But when The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World first hit the bestseller list, money didn’t make me happy. It made me anxious, wondering if it would continue. I can make money faster and more reliably through medicine if I want. I decided instead then and there that my goal was to have writing to connect me to “people, places, and things that excite me.”

Elizabeth Gilbert promised her writing that she would always take care of it. She didn’t mind working other jobs so her creativity could relax. “But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that,” she wrote in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.

Of course I want to reach more readers, which means making more money. But I also want to relax and enjoy my summer and see my children.

So please pick up the Past Crimes Storybundle if it pleases you to read excellent books at a price you set, and you want to support both authors and a worthwhile charity.

And keep reading and writing!