Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We're delighted that our featured author is Well member Miriam
Zellnik as our guest for the next two weeks, discussing her new book
_The Vaudeville Murders: A Libby Seale Mystery_, which she co-wrote
with her brother.

Miriam and Joseph Zellnik are a bicoastal brother-sister writing
team. When not writing mysteries, Miriam (based in Portland, OR) has
also written such hard-hitting reportage as "The Magic 8-Ball Book"
and "Vampire in a Box" for Running Press. By day, she works as a
technical writer. She's been on the well since 1997, and even though
she joined as a young adult, in some ways she would even say she
grew up here.

In addition to the Libby Seale books, Joseph (based in New York) is
also author of "The Sound of Murder," first in the new Musicals Are
Murder series. He's also co-author of the upcoming "Periodic Table
of Broadway Musicals", from Hachette. As a composer, Joseph has
written the scores for numerous musicals, including the off-Broadway
hit "Yank," which has been produced across the country and around
the world.
  

    
Miriam, thanks for being a guest in Inkwell. Can you tell us a bit
about the genesis of this new edition, and why you decided to self
publish it?
  

    

Happy to. The genesis was really that our original publisher (Midnight 
Ink, a subsidiary of Llewellyn Press) folded, and we got word a few years 
ago that all rights, including the ebook version, reverted to us. At that 
time, we tossed around the idea of republishing those existing versions as 
kindle books, but when we actually sat down and read the two books, we saw 
several things -- from small typos to larger plot points -- that we 
thought could be better, so we decided not to self-publish until we had a 
chance to really get in there and create better versions.

In some ways, it's a writer's dream -- to get to go back with the benefit 
of 20 years more of experience and fix the things that bugged you with an 
already-published book.

I will say that the first book, Murder at the Portland variety -- now The 
Vaudeville Murders -- was a lot cleaner, and really most of what we did 
was trim down incredibly long sentences (we do have a way of going on and 
ON, my brother and I, having never met a parenthetical aside we didn't 
love). We made a few small changes to the action, but for anyone who read 
the orginally-published 2005 version, this new one is basically the same 
but better.

Original: 105,000 words
Current book: 78,000 words
Kind of amazing we found so much to prune, but there you go. We both 
think it reads so much better this time round. 

The second book (Death at the Rose Paperworks) had a lot more things we'd 
consider outright structural issues and plot holes, and that is taking us 
much more time to get in a state where we'll be happy to share a new 
version with the world -- Title still in flux, but we hope to release that 
in late 2025.
  

    

BTW I feel compelled to issue a disclaimer: I am a HORRIBLE typist and 
sicne I post to the well using a text-based interface without spell check, 
I need to apologize up front that there WILL be typos. I am trying my best 
to use a bit more care than usual.
  

    
Mim, how did the self-publishing process differ from your work with
Midnight Ink? 
  

    

Dramatically, because we were resonsible for everything this time round -- 
cover image (good thing Joe's a graphic designer among his many talents), 
layout, creating the actual kindle and print files, and of course, any 
publicity. Not that our publisher was really all that helpful in the 
publicity department last time, but they did set up a few book release 
events and helped find me a few places to sign books. And of course, they 
had an in-house cover designer and book design person so we didn't have to 
do any of that last time.
  

    
That is a LOT of editorial pruning, my friend. Roughly 25 percent?
Editors would love you.

I'm interested that your original publisher allowed the rights to
revert to the authors. My sense is that that's kinda of unusual,
given the evolution of platforms unforeseen in the original
contracts and the possibility of further revenues. I wonder if
Midnight Ink only did so because it was folding. 
  

    

I am sure that was the only reason. I seem to recall they had let the print rights revert to us about 10 yrs after 
publication (by then the books were officially out of print), but they held the digital rights and our agent said 
they'd probably keep them forever, I mean, why not? If the occasional Kndle book sold 15 yrs after publication, 
they would reap the profits, not us.
  

    
At the halfway point (Kindle says 50% read), Mrs Greenblatt appears.
Guess I should have wondered what a single, Jewish woman without
local roots or relatives is doing in Portland, Oregon of all places?
I’m guessing most readers will know what a “get” is (easy enough to
Google).  That is quite a segue from an interesting but somewhat
conventional mystery into something else entirely. I presume that
development was in the original?  Was it halfway or placed
differently?  
  

    

Oh interesting question. I'm not sure what point of the original his existance was revealed. Let me go look.

(pause as I dig up old drafts)

Interesting, still at the halfway point, almost exactly. In my word doc of the 1st boook, first mention of 
Greenblatt on p. 126 of 256 pages total. 
  

    
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Congrats on your renewed book, mim! This is so exciting. 

Many of my writer friends have self-published, either alongside more
conventional publishing or in place of it. I know that everyone's
main concern in the battle for attention these days is in how to get
your work in front of people's eyeballs.

Do you have any particular plans in that regard?
  

    
I'm enjoying imagining, while I read, the challenge of inventing
what the characters think and say within the context of late 19th
century mores and manners. Now I wonder about the distance between
how people would talk to themselves and to each other back then
versus what writers would/ ould publish.
  

    
Repeating pspan's amazement at pruning 25% of the old manuscript. That is
a remarkable achievement that only an author could do.
  

    

jnfr -- We haven't really done much work in the self-promo department. I
mean, here I am, this is about it!

Part of the issue is that sicne this is not a "NEW new" book it's hard to
really put out PR since it's really a republishing of an older work. I do
want to send something out to local Portland media outlets, just have to
figure out whyat to say. And of course we are posting on our own personal
social media platforms, but neither of us is an infleuncer of note. Hoping
word of mouth helps, and we also signed up for Kindle Unlimited so anyone
who uses that can read the book for free.

We may try to use bookbub or another similar service to get the title in
front of likely customers, but we're still researching how it all works.
  

    

also, oops, Just sent this discussion link to Joe and he pointed out I had
the wrong word count for the current boook -- it's 94K, not 78K (I must have
opened the wrong draft when checking). So while we DID do quite a heavy
edit, I made it sound a bit more extreme than it actually was. Sorry!
  

    

So what WAS the state of Variety performance in Portland around
the time of the novel.  Were you able to research via historical
records? Was it entirely made up? I'm only in the beginning,
but I'm also wondering about having the action take place on
the east side of the river.

Wouldn't most of downtown have been on the west side?
Or was there evidence of vaudeville-type places on the
east side?
  

    
And were there really tunnels?
  

    

I have read about similar in Seattle. 
  

    
There apparently were similar in Tijuana and Prescott, AZ.
  

    

There were a few theatres in Portland then, although not a dedicated
vaudeville theater quite like the one in our book.

nanlev, most of the action takes place downtown, on the west side, but we do have Libby's boardinghouse on the 
east side; she takes a trolley across the river. My 1890, there were the first stretcars going between the west 
side and Mt Tabor area on the east side.

There were indeed tunnels. Fun fact: the genesis of this book was when I
wrote an article for a now-defunct Portland magazine (Anodyne Magazine)
where I had a chance to tour the tunnels with a personal guide. The article
lives on on my old website, if anyone wants to read it:

http://mim.our.net/tunnel.html

I thought, hey, this would make a great setting for a mystery novel. But it
wasn't until I had a long talk with my brother about it that the book really
started th be more than a dream.
  

    

I did a bunch of research at the Oregon Historical Society, which has a
library filled with folders of old press clippings (on paper!) and photos. I
also used the Oregonian archives at the library on microfiche. It was very
old-school research -- Of course it was in the early 2000's. By now, maybe
all that stuff has finally been digitized.
  

    
Do you and your brother have a particular process? Or is it more
casual?
  

    

The first book we wrote most of a first draft in 2000. After our dad died, 
Joe was planning a trip to London to sublet a friend's flat who would be 
traveling a few months, and I was able to take a leave of absence from my 
job at the time, and we spent something like 6 weeks living together in a 
(studio!) apartment in Elephant and Castle, working on the book. Our 
general process was talk through a plan for the next few chapters (we 
started with an outline we had hashed out before leaving, via email and 
phone). Then we'd split up scenes for first pass -- you write Peter going 
to the bar to interview the bartender, I'll write Libby going to 
Crowther's house. Then we'd pass along our parts to the other for 
edits/feedback. Then we'd smush all the scenes together and voila, a 
chapter!

It helps that we both have a very similar sensibility and way of wording 
things, and I think the end result really does feel like it was written by 
one person.

After that initial in-person time when we ended up with maybe 3/4 of the 
fiurst book, everything else was done via email and phone calls, except 
for a week or so that Joe visited me in Portland. All these years later, 
ther are a few things I remember mostly writing, and I'm sure he does as 
well, but an awful lot of it we genuinely don't recall who did the first 
pass of this or that scene.
  

    

The second book was much more shared doc and phone calls, very little time
in the same place at the same time.
  

    
I'm only a quarter of the way into the book, but I _am_ struck by
the racism of the time - something that has been in the news lately,
what with current racist activity and the realization that Oregon
was, essentially, a "whites only" state, written into its
constitution, back then.

What I don't have is any clear sense of the social mores back then,
and in particular, what conversation would have sounded like. How
did you get your sense of how people would speak to each other back
then?