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Meeting Report: April 2005

by Patrick Lufkin
STC Senior Member

Patrick Lufkin is a Senior STC member of both the East Bay and San Francisco chapters. He is currently co-chair of the Kenneth M. Gordon Scholarship.

Silver Lies
Author: Ann Parker
Poisoned Pen Press
650 pages
ISBN: 1-59058-084-2
$22.95 Suggested List Price

“It’s a Mystery… The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Getting Published”

Ann Parker

If you have ever wondered if there is life after technical writing, take heart from Ann Parker. A science writer with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the past 27 years, she has just published a novel she wrote in her spare time.

In April she attended the monthly meeting of EBSTC to tell us how she did it.

By day she writes for the Laboratory’s Science and Technology Review, which has often received awards in STC technical publication competitions. (If you’d care to see her work, free subscriptions are available at the Lab’s web site.)

Parker said she began entertaining the idea of writing a novel when a friend at the Lab launched a successful sideline writing mysteries about a female physicist who solves crimes.

Family Intrigue

What started as a vague intention took on life when she attended a family reunion in Colorado. There she learned that her maternal grandmother had been raised not in Denver, as she had thought, but in Leadville, Colorado.

Grabbing a guidebook, Parker learned that in the late 1800s Leadville, then in the midst of a silver boom, was as wild a town as any in the West. Like Deadwood, Tombstone, and many another boomtown, Leadville was awash in saloons, brothels, guns, and greed. At 10,000 feet, monumentally harsh winters added to the mix.

Against this background, Parker crafted Silver Lies, a Western/murder mystery that critics are calling a superb debut novel. When a popular ore assayer is found murdered in the snow behind a saloon, the saloon keeper, a strong-minded woman, takes it upon herself to find out what happened, only to—well, you get the idea.

Parker recommends the mystery form for those who are attempting to break into fiction. There is a ready readership, and the form comes with a tried and true structure. “You’ve got a body at the beginning, clues along the way, and it all wraps up at the end and justice is done.”

To date Silver Lies has won a Willa Literary Award from Women Writing the West, and was named a Spur Award Finalist by the Western Writers of America.

The Road to Leadville

In preparation for the actual writing, Parker took a class from a local mystery author, Penny Warner. What became the novel’s prologue was first written for the class. She also joined a critique group for additional feedback.

For authenticity, she did a great deal of historical research, haunting libraries, bookstores, and even eBay in search of information on Leadville, mining, and frontier culture. It soon became evident that Leadville had so much history—gold in the 1860s, silver in the 1880s, followed by a succession of other mining ventures and finally tourism—she decided to focus her study on just three months, December 1879 to February 1880.

Finally she took a trip to Leadville, and was glad she did. Even though she had seen lots of photographs, she says she still got some of the topography wrong. (She had imagined a deep valley, where there is actually a broad plain between two ranges.) This led to some quick rewriting. There is no substitute for actual observation and primary sources, she says.

The trip also led to a string of fortuitous events. Using the interviewing skills she had cultivated over the years as a science writer, she began going places and asking questions. Her search led her to a long-time resident named Bob Elder. After answering her questions on mining and assaying techniques, Elder told her that his grandfather had arrived in Leadville as a young man in his twenties, at just the time period Parker was interested in. Not only that, Elder volunteered to share a large collection of letters the young man had written home to his mother—letters chock-full of authentic details on what life was like at the time.

When she was done, she had a 600-page book, 160,000 words—way too long. (For publication, Parker says a mystery should be 80,000 to 100,000 words.) This led to several rounds of cutting before her book was finally accepted by Poisoned Pen Press.

If you write genre fiction, Parker says there are many support communities you can join. Of these, Mystery Writers of America, Western Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Women Writing the West are among the better known. There are also online critiquing groups, such as American Night Writers Association (ANWA). Joining groups is a great way to stay abreast of what is going on in the industry, Parker says.

The Waiting Game

The work doesn’t end with the writing. You can expect to spend a year or so working with agents and waiting for publishers’ reviewers to make up their minds. Even after acceptance and publication, the work doesn’t end. You will be expected to do promotional book tours on your own nickel, which can also be time consuming.

“Writing fiction probably won’t pay the mortgage,” she says, “but it is great fun.”

Parker is currently working on a sequel to Silver Lies, which she expects to finish by June.

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