R.E. Donald

Just like everyone else, I studied English grammar and usage in school.  I was taught that using the word ain’t would brand me as a hillbilly (not such an awful thing, after all) and when to use who and whom.  I’m sure it gave me great delight to correct other students who were using lay and lie incorrectly.  I still take pains to make sure I use the words right, although not quite as religiously as in the past.

You see, I also studied English literature, starting with Beowulf and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, moving along past the works of Shakespeare and Donne, Dryden and Swift.  Only snippets of each, mind you, but the message was clear.  “Ek gret effect men write in place lite; Th’ entente is al, and nat the lettres space” was perfectly good English in 1400 AD, while “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man” was well said in 1614.

And I studied Latin for at least a year in high school, which is so long ago now that I don’t remember exactly if it was for one year or two, but I do remember that the energetic vice-principal, Mr. Todd, taught the class and that he was a very entertaining speaker.  I learned, of course, that Latin is a dead language.  It is no longer living, because it is not being used outside of academia and the church.  Because it’s no longer living, it doesn’t change, or perhaps the other way around.

Then in university, I studied several other languages: French, Russian, German and Serbo-Croatian.  I also took what was called Slavonic Studies as part of the Russian major program.  One of the courses was in linguistics, and that was very enlightening indeed.  The course traced some of the European languages back to their roots, and illustrated the connections between them depending on who conquered whom (ha!) or which peoples migrated where.  Germanic, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French, Greek, Scandanavian, Turkish, Hungarian – a whole smorgasbord of languages and dialects in close proximity, sharing words and expressions and sentence construction over centuries.

Studying linguistics in general made me want to explore the evolution of English spelling and grammar.  It made me wonder if English could possibly have stopped changing when they published my high school English textbook in the 1960’s, or if it stopped changing when I graduated from university in the 1970’s, or if it stopped changing in 1984, or perhaps at the end of the millenium.  The only conclusion that I can come to is that it hasn’t stopped changing at all.  It’s still a living language.  English isn’t dead!

So what does that mean?  Obviously common usage has dictated the rules of grammar, and not the other way around.  Words – their spelling and their use – and grammar, the way sentences are constructed, changed over the centuries as they began being used differently.  Ergo, common usage trumps a rule.  As a writer, and a speaker, and an ordinary everday English speaking person, I feel tremendously empowered by that thought.  Here we are, on Facebook and Twitter and in ebooks and blogs, shaping the English language of the future by the way we use it today.

I know, I know.  That’s no excuse to get sloppy with my spelling and grammar.  As Hemingway once lamented, “all our words from loose using have lost their edge”.   So I’ll do my best not to annoy the academics by murdering the English language in my writings and speech, whilst bearing in mind that changes in usage are the very thing that’s keeping it alive.

(Did I say that correctly?)

I am a reader. That’s what made me a writer, and I may choose one day not to write, but I will never stop being a reader. My 94 year old father is in a home, and cannot carry on an intelligent conversation, but put words in front of him, and he will read them aloud. My uncle is 96 years old. He can hardly see, and hardly hear, but he always has a book going. He is still a reader.

It was my uncle who introduced me to the mystery.  I was on my way to becoming a teenaged literary snob, hooked at the time on the classic Russian, French and English novels, but whenever I went to visit my uncle at Shuswap Lake in British Columbia’s Thompson-Okanagan, I would devour the mystery novels he had by the hundreds on the bookshelves in his cabin.  Rex Stout, John D. MacDonald, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen, Raymond Chandler, Dick Francis – my days sitting on the dock watching the waves dance and listening to the call of the loons were filled with mysteries.

My family has always shared a passion for mysteries, although our tastes may have changed and diverged over the years.  In the 80’s, I discovered Dorothy Sayers, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Georges Simenon and Tony Hillerman.  In the library, I always headed straight for the mystery section looking for new series.  After my mother’s death in 1990, my father and I used to buy and share their books with each other.  My favorite writers were Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George, then John Grisham and Michael Connelly were added to the list.  We exchanged “The Cat Who …” novels by Lillian Jackson Braun (we had a Siamese cat at the time!) and my father loved the Sue Grafton series.  I was also a fan of Minette Walters and Edna Buchanan, and read many novels by Canadian crime writers Laurali (Bunny) Wright,  Laurence Gough and Peter Robinson.

My current favorites, although I still read all of Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George’s novels, are John Lescroart, Michael Connelly and John Grisham.  John Lescroart is probably at the top of my list. There are writers that I’ve read and admire, like the Kellermans, James Lee Burke, Robert Crais and Patricia Cornwell, but for one reason or another, their novels have less appeal for me.  Perhaps because I am not fond of “fantasy”, (although all fiction is fantasy, isn’t it?)  I most enjoy stories that seem real to me.  (The subtitle on John Lescroart’s website is: “Real people…real suspense”.)  When there’s an overload of violence, weird villains or too perfect heroes, my “too far-fetched” alarm goes off and I’m thrown out of the story. (Sorry, but I don’t like horror or vampire stories for the same reason.)

“Write what you like to read.” Or as Toni Morrison said, “”If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”  I’ve also heard it said, “Write what you know.”  I took both suggestions to heart, and created a mystery series set in a world I’m familiar with, featuring characters that seem real to me, characters that have flaws and foibles, loneliness and self-doubt, loves and hates and prejudices that they must learn to deal with.  I try to craft a mystery that will keep the reader guessing, and hopefully surprise him or her at the end.  My characters could be you or me, your brother, your husband or your father, your co-worker, high school pal or your boss. In the end, I hope my main characters will be your friends.

I’d love to hear what you, the reader, think about my main characters, J. Hunter Rayne and Elspeth Watson, as well as Dan “Sorry” Sorenson, the jolly biker from Slow Curve on the Coquihalla and Russell Kupka, the L.A. County cop, from Ice on the Grapevine.  I’m writing the next book in the series for you.

Since publishing my first two mystery novels as ebooks on Amazon.com and Smashwords.com, I’ve given a lot of thought to the whole digital publishing concept.  Of course, originally I was trying to get published the way everyone else was doing it, back in the mid to late ’90’s when the Kindle was just a twinkle in cyberspace. My first novel got shipped to New York in manuscript form a number of times, and I was rewarded for my weeks of nervous anticipation with mild encouragement from a number of agents and publishers.

A few Bouchercons, writers’ conferences, and a weeklong novel writing workshop with Elizabeth George at the Book Passage in Corte Madera, California and it was back to the computer for a complete revision of Slow Curve on the Coquihalla, with a better understanding of how to construct scenes that rewarded the reader with enhanced entertainment.  Off it went to a few more agents, with less enthusiasm on my part as I worked on my second novel.  More rejection letters, but soon my second novel was also ready to be sent out into the world to seek my fortune.

Ice on the Grapevine, in my own humble opinion and that of most of my new readers, was better than my first novel, more dynamic somehow.  (I owe that to Elizabeth George and Diana Gabaldon.  Although I don’t always enjoy their books, they know the craft and teach it well.)  Again, some encouraging remarks from some very successful agents:  “I like your writing.”  “I like your protaganist.”  “I like your idea.”  “You write good action scenes.”  “I enjoyed reading your novel but I couldn’t sell it.”  “I just don’t feel excited enough about it.”  … but again, no takers.   It made me wonder what I was doing wrong.

I’ve often seen it written and heard it said that fiction writers should write the kind of books they love to read, and also write about what they know.  I’m a woman, but often feel that I was blessed with an androgynous life view.  I write about characters and stories that appeal to me, and try to create mysteries complex enough to keep the reader guessing.  That’s what I like to read.  What do I know well enough to write about?  I’m not a lawyer, I’ve never been a police detective or a private eye, but I did work in the transportation industry for a couple of decades and was married to a special man who, at one time, was an undercover operative for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  Driving a truck was his cover.  Great concept for a character!  Or so I thought.

Perhaps it came down to dollars: a long novel is more expensive to publish than a short novel, and I like a novel you can sink your teeth into.  Perhaps the truck driver character was too much of a novelty to take a chance on.  Perhaps there were just so many other mystery novels that used a tried and true formula so were less of a risk.  Perhaps the agents (mainly men) who liked the truck driver idea wanted more action, more of a thriller, and those who like character driven mysteries (mainly women) didn’t like the idea of a trucker hero.  Perhaps I just didn’t get my query letter to the right agent at the right time.  Or perhaps I just didn’t write as well as I thought.

Enter the Kindle and all the e-readers that have followed.  There would be no expense to publish my novels, so no financial risk to take (only my ego).  No trees will die in order for my stories to reach interested readers.  My story and my characters have not been modified to suit the tastes of an editor (which may be a bad or a good thing) so they are mine all mine from beginning to end.  I like that.  I like it a lot.  I am sharing something I have labored over and cared about with people who are like me, and who like to read what I like to read.

Do I care that my books won’t ever be published on paper?  At first I did.  I thought that digital publishing was a second best outcome, that it was an admission of failure.  (Although my novels would still be languishing in my virtual desk drawer because I’d long ago grown tired of sending out query letters and waiting weeks for what would sometimes be no answer at all, and I’d stopped writing, which was truly a failure.)  I do admire authors who have become successful in print, and the agents and editors who have carved out careers in the traditional publishing industry – they have paid their dues and they all deserve a cut of the $15 or so that a pbook costs a reader.  However …

The more I think about it, the happier I am with being one of the legion of pioneers in the brave new world of digital self-publishing.  Yes, there are many self-published works available on-line of the unpolished quality that used to reside solely in student notebooks.  Yes, there is an ever swelling ocean of stories out there that will make it difficult for my novels to be found by the readers who will appreciate them.  But when my books do reach the right readers, it’s a joy to hear back from them how much they enjoyed my novels and how much they are looking forward to my next one.

After several years of lying dormant, my characters are coming back to life and the joy of writing has come back to me.  I feel like I’m doing what I was born to do, and I am grateful for the chance.