Macavity!!!

mainly sunny, mild, temps 17

Lovely day. Wayne came to mow. It's his 70th birthday!!! Yippee. He said he's quite stunned to find himself 70. But as we all know, people are living healthy, active lives easily into their 90'. So 70 is the new 50.

Wonderful news yesterday. Indeed, it was Marjorie from Connecticut who wrote to congratulate me. I'm afraid I didn't quite believe it...until poor woman sent me the link to Janet Rudolph's blog. She's the head of Mystery Reader's international.

The Brutal Telling has now been nominated for a Macavity award! Here's the announcement and the other nominees....

Macavity Award Nominations 2010

The Macavity Awards are nominated and voted on by members of Mystery Readers International. The 2010 Macavity Nominations are for books and stories published in 2009. Mystery Readers Journal is MRI's publication. The winners will be announced at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, in October. Bouchercon will be held in San Francisco in 2010. This award is named for the "mystery cat" of T.S. Eliot (Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats).

Congratulations to all!

Best Mystery Novel
• Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
• Tower by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman (Busted Flush Press)
• Necessary as Blood by Deborah Crombie (Wm. Morrow)
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett (HarperCollins)
• The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan (Minotaur)

Best First Mystery Novel
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Delacorte)
• Running from the Devil by Jamie Freveletti (Wm. Morrow)
• A Bad Day for Sorry by Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur)
• The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime)
• A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Picador)

Best Mystery Nonfiction
• L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City by John Buntin (Random House: Harmony Books)
• Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life by Craig McDonald (Bleak House Books)
• The Line Up: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown & Co)
• Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo (Penguin Press)
• Dame Agatha’s Shorts: An Agatha Christie Short Story Companion by Elena Santangelo (Bella Rosa Books)

Best Mystery Short Story
• “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Ace Atkins in Crossroad Blues (Busted Flush Press)
• “Femme Sole” by Dana Cameron in Boston Noir (Akashic Books)
• “Digby, Attorney at Law” by Jim Fusilli, (AHMM, May 2009)
• “Your Turn” by Carolyn Hart in Two of the Deadliest (Harper)
• “On the House” by Hank Phillippi Ryan in Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writers (Level Best Books)
• “The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away” by Marcus Sakey in Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can’t Put Down (Mira)
• “Amapola” by Luis Alberto Urrea in Phoenix Noir (Akashic Books)

Sue Feder Historical Mystery
• A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge)
• In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur)
• A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd (Wm. Morrow)
• Serpent in the Thorns by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear (Henry Holt)

Lots of fabulous reading.

And thank you all for your messages and celebrations. I feel sort of overwhelemed...both joyous and perhaps a little shy about this embarrassment of riches!!! But I'm sure I'll get over that shyness! But not the joy.

And what a list! Wonderful books and authors.

Must go. Globe calling in a few minutes to interview about the new book. Love your comments about the Karmann Ghias. As kids that was our dream car. I think we mostly liked the name. So exotic. Made us feel very 'in the know' and mature.

Have to drive into Sutton to do a Skype test. Fingers crossed we can find a highspeed link there.

I'm sorry, I just have to go back to the Macavity! I really am so happy about that. All that work on the book, all alone. for a year - every day. Like all the other nominees. And then to have this happen. It sure feels great!!!

Yippeee....

Speak to you tomorrow! Oh, am up to 125 pages (out of what is now 248 pages - halfway)...and the wordcount is now 110,400. Yay. The lower the better, I figure. Within reason, of course. But sure don't want to fall into the trap of getting more and more wordy and self-indulgent as the series goes on. Indeed, I need to become more and more disciplined. Not bloated.