First book in the Ellen and Geoffrey Fletcher Mystery series, Fit to Curve was published 1n 2010.
Ellen is on assignment to Asheville, North Carolina, to do a followup on a story she wrote a year before. Geoff is reluctant to come until he learns his college girlfriend and new husband will be staying at the same bed-and-breakfast.
Their trip turns deadly, but the police see only accidents. They’re on their own if they want to solve the killings before there are more victims, before they become victims themselves. Fortunately their fellow guests pitch in.
Available for purchase for the Kindle Family of E-Readers.
#1 by Pauline Whitesides on 16 June 14 - 6:08 pm
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I don’t know whether it’s just me or if everyone else is experiencing issues with your blog. It looks like some of the text on your content rns off the screen. Can someone else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them too? This might be a issue with my browser because I’ve had this happen before, but not for a long time.
Thank you
#2 by Bud on 28 April 13 - 8:08 pm
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Hi, Sadie:
Thanks for your comment. I’m glad you liked Fit to Curve and I hope you will like Heart Attack, too. The third book (Ghost Walk) is just about ready to publish, the forth (Little Fishes) is finished, first draft, but needs cleaning. I’m currently working on the fifth (Drosselymeyer Chronicles).
The twin/triplet subplot sort of grew by itself. The sisters engage in lots of coming and going, often concealed, and they see(and can comment on) the comings and goings of the other characters. They helped to uncover and connect. They came from a woman I met who talked about her “twin sister” and got me truly confused because there seemed, from her stories, to be more than one. I asked if she had two sisters, who were twins (not including her), thinking I had figured out the only explanation. No, she said, they were all twins, also her fourth sister, but whenever they said triplet or quadruplet people pulled away, because it made them freaks. So they all just said “twin,” because it was true, and kept people from having weird reactions. One of those filed away things.
English is funny with second person plurals. You/your/yours used to be plural, with thee/thy/thine for singular. When you became both, 4-500 years ago, it could be confusing whether somebody meant one person or more than one. Now we use a bunch of plural versions: youse, you guys, you all, you-all, y’all, ya’ll, yawl, all y’all. They tend to be regional, but move around over time. What I like about you-all is that the meaning is clear. A yawl is also a little boat, ya’ll sometimes means “you will” (ya’ll have to buy some new tires). The pronunciation I intend is yawl. You’re right that anybody who sounds out the you in you-all is a non-southerner being condescending or trying to sound chummy. There’s always a tiny bit of another vowel sound in y’all: yi’all, ye’all, yu’all but it’s so tiny a catch sound it gets weird and wrong if you try to spell it out. I think it varies from place to place around the south, but I couldn’t begin to say which goes where. You’ve lived in more southern places than I have. Does this last make any sense?
My wife agrees with you, and tried to get me to use y’all several years ago. I think, between her arguments (she’s an Atlanta girl) and now you, that I was wrong. There’s still the sticky business of y’all versus ya’ll. The second one has strong champions, even though it’s clearly the underdog. The argument is that it comes from ya or ye for you, joined to all. Besides which, it was favored by Faulkner and Hemingway and McCullers. I think I’ll stick with y’all unless I mean to mark someone as not southern (neither of my main characters is, by birth; Ellen’s ear is good, Geoff’s not so much, he could get it wrong).
All of this is moot, in the part of the south my wife and I moved to thirty-five years ago, from Massatusets. Up here, in the hills, it’s not y’all at all, but yu-uns and yur-uns and (my favorite) yursensus. This is the land of chimleys and bullnozers and bob-war, where visitors told it’s time to go home hear “yu-uns stay with us now.” and people “kindly like” things and other people.
On “couple things” versus “couple of things,” I’ll have think about that. I say and write both. I think “couple of” is more correct expository writing, not necessarily so in conversation. “Couple things I need to know: is the gun loaded, are you left-handed?” But if you’re right about “a lot of ‘couple things,'” that’s a tic, and that’s lazy, and not good. Thanks for noticing. And thanks again for taking the trouble to write.
Bud
#3 by Sadie K. Osburn on 28 April 13 - 8:02 pm
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Mr. Crawford–
I just completed reading “Fit to Curve” I have never contacted an author before, but I was compelled to write you as soon as I finished the book. Two things—the first is that I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It was well written, the plot was intricate but believable, and the characters came to life on the pages. I did wonder about the inclusion of the little side mystery of the twins who turned out to be triplets, but of course that is your prerogative as the author and did not make my enjoyment of the book any more or any less. There was something that bothered me throughout the book, though, and that is what prompted me to write to you. Before contacting you, I looked up your background to verify that you are not a native southerner. I see that you are presently living in North Carolina, but I have to tell you I was really put off throughout the book by your use of the term “you-all”. If you have lived in North Carolina any length of time, you have to have noticed that in that state as well as most, if not all, southeastern states, the form of address for a group of two or more people is “y’all”, pronounced “yawl”. While my home state is Alabama, I have lived in Georgia and Virginia and have spent considerable lengths of time in every other southeastern state over the last 65+ years. The only time I have heard the term “you-all” is from non-southerners who just do not hear the distinction between the two terms. I am aware that the contraction “y’all” is a shortening of the term “you-all”, but it is still a shortened version that is used extensively, and it just bothers me to see it written incorrectly. One other thing, there is also a colloquialism that I’m thinking is a southern thing. I really don’t know what the correct grammatical version is, but we generally speak of “two things” but a “couple of things” rather than a “couple things”. I only bring this up because there were a lot of “couple things” in the book.
Thank you for providing me with enjoyment and entertainment, sans an obvious agenda, political or otherwise, other than entertainment. I am assuming “Fit to Curve” was your first book, and I look forward to reading the remaining ones. When I read a new author who has more than one publication, I try to read the books in order of publication. Please think about a possible correction concerning the “you-all” term, though.
Sadie K. Osburn
#4 by cassio marin on 4 April 13 - 10:00 am
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i love it, it’s very good.
#5 by Enoch Jeopardy on 20 November 12 - 1:51 pm
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There is certainly wedding without need of like, and you will find like without need of wedding.
#6 by sinaapp on 22 October 12 - 2:38 pm
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I’ve come to comply with you on this subject. Which is not something I typically do! I really like reading a post that will make people think. Also, thanks for allowing me to comment!
#7 by Bud Crawford on 26 June 12 - 6:23 pm
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Thank you, Sibyl, for the kind words. Coal for the furnace.
Thanks also for the riddling comments.
Once upon a time, an age ago, a writer engaged an agent who found a publisher who provided an editor who proofed away errors and checked facts and the final copy emerged without blemish. The publisher printed and promoted and distributed, and paid the author.
In the new brave universe of self-publishing a writer can slip work past the guards, straight to readers. The writer then is also the editor and the checker and the peddler, and pedals the whole process alone. The flood of royalty income pays for the electricity that that powered the composing device, perhaps. There are not funds for hired editors.
Spell-checkers, of course, cannot detect homonyms. Dessert and desert are both acceptable to the checker and aren’t flagged. Fingers fumble on the keys, and then the fixing begins.
I’m actually a good proofreader. Give me five dirty pages, I’ll return them clean. With 400 pages, the game changes, your brain glazes over. You catch all you can, hundreds, thousands of typos, but not all. Proofing is a lateral non-sense reading. If you get distracted by character or voice or plot or pace, the rest of the mind engages and the proofing function flutters. You must focus only on unclosed quotations, absent punctuation, misspellings, typos. The highest level of engagement allowed is detecting the sentences where fragments of competing versions still clutter and wreck the sense. It’s difficult and draining work.
There’s also the format fight. Fonts, plain text, embedded styles, formatted text, Word documents, html code, the Kindle proprietary file type. Your chapter heads disappear into the text, paragraphs twitch among justifying options, ordinary punctuation presents as alchemical formulae. You want an ellipsis or an acute accent or an em-dash and you get &%^J.@. The available viewers and checkers help sometimes, sometimes add their own layer of garble.
It can take three or four uploadings to get a version that is passably presentable. You don’t know whether you have improved things or made them worse for several days, the percolation interval.
When you have got all this done well enough that what people see is not gibberish, that the story can come through, that there are not distracting tics, that it’s pretty clean, you hesitate to take it down and republish, because you may contaminate the file with bad code (most author/kindle communication is in html) and transform tolerable into incomprehensible.
Meanwhile you want to get on to the next story. When writing is not your supporting income, when there are only a couple dozen hours a week to work, you want to go forward.
Clearly though, from your comments and many others, I need to do a better job proofing. I thought I had got things to an acceptable point, clearly not. Any specific stuff, your two annoyances for instance, are easy to fix, with global search and replace, monitored and judiciously applied. The random errors are harder, because they have to be caught and killed each by each.
It’s enough to make a body want to go somewhere really dry for a bottle of bier and a peas of pi.
Thanks again, for reading my book, for saying nice things and for providing actionable criticism.
#8 by Sibyl Smirl on 25 June 12 - 3:49 pm
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“Fit to Curve” is too fine a novel as a novel to fit into the “Mystery” genre, though it does have all the elements.
Buttttt….. What it really needs is a good proofreader: it’s _riddled_ with errors. Many plain ordinary typos, but then many that show that the writer relied on spellcheck (which should have caught the typos if used consistently), and can’t himself spell the difference between homonyms. Two especially irritating (to me) examples: A little girl peddling down the sidewalk on her tricycle must have a tray or bag of wares that she is hawking (a bake sale, perhaps?), not ignoring everyone but herself except as obstacles; and if you’re staying for desert, you must be intending either to abandon the company, or to go out the door into a large, extremely arid piece of geography.
Oddly enough, the part between 60% and 70% is practically perfect. Even pedaling is spelled correctly (and was earlier and later in reference to Geoff’s bicycle), and so was dessert, which was otherwise consistently wrong in the rest of the novel. And then it goes back to being riddled with mistakes.
I have downloaded “Heart Attack”. I do hope that that one had a competent editor or proofreader.