Celebrating the Arts through Mystery and Mayhem

The Mackenzie Griffin Arts Mysteries

Earlier this year, my Mackenzie Griffin mysteries – Star Gazer, Artist Unknown, and Finales and Overtures, all originally published in the 90s – made their eBook debut on Kindle.  I’m happy to announce a special week-long Kindle Countdown promotion.  If you act fast, you can get each book for as little as 99¢!  

A brief description for you: Dr. Mackenzie Griffin is a criminal psychologist on faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She occasionally serves as a consultant the NYPD where she’s a favorite of Lieutenant Mario Buratti.  The first mystery, Star Gazer (amzn.to/1cRBRDx), involves a rising pop music star and someone who appears to be patterning murders after scenes from his music videos.

Artist Unknown, the second in the series,  (amzn.to/1bo5jwx) begins when the body of the local art gallery owner washes up on the beach not far from the home of Mac’s parents. This investigation becomes personal, since her brother Chad had purchased the gallery only days before, and now he appears to be a target as well. 

The third, Finales and Overtures (amzn.to/1k8FgSn) is set in the company of a new musical about to open in New York.  The show is the big break Sylvie Morgan, Mackenzie’s long-time friend from college days, has been waiting for. But when the musical’s director is found dead, Sylvie immediately becomes the prime suspect. Buratti alerts Mac to her friend’s predicament – and impending arrest.

Hmmm…mysteries about music, about art, and about theatre.  Any wonder why I’m calling them The Mackenzie Griffin Arts Mysteries?  

I hope you’ll look for them on Amazon with the handy links I’ve included, and remember, you don’t need to have a Kindle to read Kindle editions.  You can get the Kindle app for your iPad, your iPhone or iPod touch, your Mac or PC, your Android device – phone, tablet, power toothbrush or whatever. 

Thanks so much – and happy reading!

Twitter: A ToC for the Internet – Both Highbrow and Lowbrow

Some people of my acquaintance have expressed surprise for my acceptance of/ fondness for/ almost daily references to Twitter. 

 

My headline gives it away a bit: I think of Twitter as a daily, ever-updating Table of Contents for my own personal Internet.  The feeds that I follow reflect my professional interests and some personal passions: books and publishing, writers and writing, arts education, films, music, NPR, news, and politics – and notice how one topic nicely blends into the next.  (Demonstrating the blend is my favorite tweet of recent days, from Kelly McBride (@kellymcb) “NPR has totally owned this 100-year-anniversary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring”; I love a centennial of classical music being celebrated in such contemporary language.) Through Twitter I’ve been to websites I might never have come across, read the work of writers I might never have discovered, and learned of breaking news well before the broadcast and cable outlets have it on screen. 

I have to give credit to Scott Simon, host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, for convincing me to sign up for Twitter. I was firmly entrenched in the camp then pooh-poohing the 140 character limit and the reports of people tweeting their sandwich selection for lunch.  I was a bit dismayed when Mr. Simon first announced one Saturday morning ‘you can follow us on Twitter @nprscottsimon.’ Convinced he’d gone over to the dark side, it was some months – maybe a year or more - before I finally decided to explore it for myself.  Now it’s an indispensable part of my online day.  

Now let’s get to the Highbrow / Lowbrow part. Joyce Carol Oates joined Twitter last fall, and it wasn’t too long before someone mused that in the twittification of her deep thoughts, she might be writing the first Twitter novel. (Jason Boog of MediaBistro’s invaluable Galley Cat blog posted a Storyboard of her early tweets that you can see here http://bit.ly/14cNYSY.)

I haven’t seen a novel developing, but when I saw the succession of tweets she posted last week about an Op-Ed by James Atlas, the aggregate of these posts struck as a new form of essay. I’ve story-fied her tweets (via Storify) to make it easier to read, and you can see that aggregation here http://sfy.co/cJsw.  

The original piece by James Atlas, which had appeared in The New York Times the previous Sunday (May 19), was an unexpected paean to cable television series and the joys of binge viewing.  And since I’m guessing you’ll be as intrigued to read it as I was, you can find it here: http://nyti.ms/10L329u .

Somehow I never expected these titans of literature (that’s the highbrow component) to be so fluent in television series – from the described glories of Breaking Bad to high-water marks of The Sopranos and Oz to the apparently lesser Elementary.  Despite the fact that I have long argued that television as a medium does far more to engage the adult market than the vast majority of films do, I have still carried that prejudice from childhood that television viewing is lowbrow, the ‘vast wasteland’ with only occasionally redeeming oases. Perhaps the titans have given me the equivalent of a hall pass.

I’m sure that Mr. Atlas has convinced me to watch Breaking Bad - finally.  And Ms. Oates has captured for me one of the joys of reading in a way I hadn’t identified it before: “the silence of print”. What a wonderful phrase.

Jeanne McCafferty is an editor, writer and book designer.  You can see samples  of her work and learn how to contact her at www.jeannemccafferty.com.  She is on Twitter @IrishCabrini.

Is This the First Twitter Short Story?

A week ago tonight, on Wednesday May 8^th, it was already late evening here on the West Coast when I saw a tweet alerting me to a story unfolding online out of Washington, DC. It was the Twitter feed of John R. Stanton (@dcbigjohn) whose profile describes him as the DC Bureau Chief of BuzzFeed, plus “reporter, former bouncer and all around dc bama.” (This last term will be explained shortly.)

I started following the series and tweets and as I did, found myself sitting up straighter, waiting for the next.  It was a riveting story – complete with questions and comments from interlocutors in the Twittersphere – and when it ended after 44 tweets (by my count) I felt like I had read something. 
 

The next morning I was trying to figure out how to share it with a friend, one who is not on Twitter, and I had the idea just to do a few screen grabs and then give the always odd-sounding ‘read from the bottom up’ direction.  But when I checked @dcbigjohn’s feed again, he had tweeted that Clinton Yates (@clintonyates) had ‘storified’ his ‘tweeter rantings’ of the previous evening.  When I clicked through, this is what I found: http://bit.ly/10x7aIZ

I’ll give you a moment to click on that link to read through the Storification. But before you do, here is where the explanation of ‘bama’ comes in: ‘bama’ is apparently an idiom specific to the DC area, originally describing a countrified Southerner (as in Alabama) whose dress, manner, etc. made them conspicuous in the big city.  Now it’s apparently taken on the additional connotation of street person – a ‘whack-ass’ according to one of the definitions I read.  Just FYI…

Here’s your reading break.  Click on that link above, read through the tweets, and join me back here.

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And we’re back. Isn’t that something? The story John Stanton has written is remarkable.  In somewhere around a thousand words, he introduces a distinct setting, then with deft strokes of detail gives the reader fully fleshed-out characters. Next is the main dramatic incident, the injury of the main character, and in the telling of that, Stanton widens the story with more characters, giving us a sense of the community in which these events are unfolding. Then to another crisis, and a resolution aided by the storyteller himself (letting the reader know he is apparently aptly named as dcbigjohn). Last is a denouement that updates us on the main character and the community in which this took place – and the writer’s concerns about both.

That’s a lot of story for a thousand words.  And when I found myself thinking about it repeatedly, I realized it would be an excellent exercise for writers, because telling your story in a succession of 140 characters bursts forces you to distill the elements to their essence.  

Not that you have to go ahead and post the tweets, but just give it a try.  How much story can you tell in less than a thousand words, 140 characters at a time?  And let me know how it goes. 

In the meantime, I'm going to be checking out the wonders of Storify.com.

Jeanne McCafferty is an editor, writer and book designer.  You can see samples of some of her work and learn how to contact her at www.jeannemccafferty.com.  She is on Twitter @IrishCabrini.