Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness 
by Peter Godfrey-Smith 
Peter Godfrey Smith writes that studying the octopus is probably the closest any of us will get to studying the alien mind. He poses questions: what makes a life sentient, why do cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish and squid) exhibit a wild range of colors and patterns—are the patterns thought, mood or communication? I finished the book not really certain of any answers regarding these fascinating animals, but content to live with the questions.

If you haven’t read A Bitch Called Hope, this is the time! Now for 99¢

ALL IN is the third noir mystery published by Diversion Books featuring the flinty ex-cop poker playing detective, Lennox Cooper. Lennox stands alone in championing Tomek Jagoda, darling son of a Portland crime family, accused of murdering his high-living girlfriend.

The cops have proof that will send Tomek to prison for life. Prosecuting the case is a Viking goddess of a woman, as smart as she is stunning. Next to her, Lennox feels like a garden gnome. Everyone’s hot for the prosecutor including Lennox’s boss and Tomek’s defense attorney who’s willing to throw Tomek under the bus in a plea deal that carries a ten-year sentence.

Big as a tool shed and twice as dumb—what is it about Tomek that convinces Lennox of his innocence? As Lennox unwinds all the lies surrounding the case, she sees deeper into Tomek’s humanity and into her own as well. She realizes that she’s in love with the defense attorney who’s in lust with the prosecutor. Lennox bets her job, her love and her own safety to find the killer. She’s all in.

​Start with a What If
My inspiration in Betting Blind was a story on the radio about a therapist who fell in love with a robot on a computer dating site. Their “affair” lasted for months before he realized that the woman he’d fallen in love with was a computer program from Chechnya. Was there a story in the news that corralled your interest? A man in his nineties who won’t let go of his control on a vast business? A cop whose wife files a restraining order on him that threatens to derail his career?
 
Location
I’ve always been a fan of noir movies, both old and neo-noir. And I love reading Nordic noir. Lucky for me I live in Portland, Oregon. It’s not so much that it rains all the time, but we can go for over 30 days without ever seeing the sun. The darkness creates a subtle oppression that my characters move through or fall into depression or substance abuse.
 
Detective
Male or female? Policewoman, private eye or amateur sleuth? What is her back story? I deliberately made my detective, Lennox Cooper, very different from myself. If you’re a typical writer, you’ll play hell trying to make a detective out of your own personality. That is unless you’re the tough, reckless type who never backs down from conflict. If that’s your deal, chances are you’re probably not sitting at a desk writing books.
 
Where is that hole in your detective’s heart that drives her into danger to solve the murder? Is she bipolar like Carrie Mathison in Homeland? Or physically disabled like the one-legged Cormoran Strike in the Robert Galbraith mysteries? Whether your detective is a series character or a stand-alone character, she needs some skin in the game. In A Bitch Called Hope, Lennox needed to solve the murder proving her investigative chops to the police community and regaining her self-respect. In Betting Blind, Lennox’s friend and poker partner is disgraced and indicted for murder. Lennox needs to prove his innocence and save his shredded reputation.
 
Victim
My murder victim in Betting Blind is a woman who preys on computer dating sites. Naturally, she’s going to have enemies. But she also needs people who loved her, who care deeply that she’s been murdered. By writing about who loves the victim, the murder victim becomes human and not just a prop in a story.
 
The Murderer and Other Suspects
How did the murderer kill his victim and why? Assemble a cast of characters so that each suspect has a workable means, motive and enough word count to be a credible murderer. I have to admit that I changed my murderer in both Betting Blind and A Bitch Called Hope after I’d completed the manuscripts. It’s my devout hope that I’ll be able to successfully hide my intended murderer in All In, the third book in the series.
 
I try to orchestrate my characters so that each is distinct. And I work on making their motives as different as their personalities.
 
I have a great trick for building distinct characters. I free write from prompts. The prompts are slips of paper like in a fortune cookie without the cookie. The prompt can be a word, like “yellow” or a phrase like “dirty rotten bastard.” I pull a prompt from a jar and time the writing for ten minutes. How does pulling a prompt create characters, you ask? Say the prompt is “yellow.” Hobby Glover, a character from Betting Blind, wears yellow socks. When he sits down his pants leg rides up. Brown pants and yellow socks—it’s too ugly. The kids at the high school where he’s vice principal laugh at him. Glover’s form of anger management involves a virtual reality game. I’ll leave it there…
 
I keep free writing until the characters emerge in my imagination. By their very natures they suggest plot and sub-plot.
 
On to the Plotline
I have the murder and I’ve tasked my detective with solving it. What secrets does she uncover? Do the suspects know each other, do they blame each other? What is Lennox doing when she’s not solving the crime? Does she fall in love? Lose all her money playing poker? Eventually she confronts the murderer in the climax. And solves the murder. Justice is served. Ta da!
 
Sorry. Unless you’re a totally different writer from me, you’re not going to make it through a plotline with one strategy.
 
This is what I did: I began writing Betting Blind by telling myself the story in quite a bit of detail: Location, snatches of dialogue, whatever came to mind. Each scene became a chapter. That worked great for the first 15 chapters, but then I grew slower and slower until I felt like I was marching knee deep in mud. The upside was by this time the story was real for me, and most of the characters had come to life.
 
Build a Bridge
Bridges are constructed by building from both ends. I used that to finish the outline. I knew several events that happened in the last quarter of the book, so I wrote each event on an index card in a couple of sentences per card. Then I gave the first 15 chapters each an index card. I lined them out on my dining room table and what needed to happen materialized. It also showed me where certain characters needed more play in the story and suggested plot twists that I wouldn’t have been able to conjure if I would’ve outlined from beginning to end.
 
This whole process is fluid. There are over a dozen versions of my outline for Betting Blind, but plotting the book saved me a ton of work. If you don’t like throwing away whole chapters of your mystery, or ending up with a story with no narrative tension, then begin with a plot outline.
 
Rewrite
This is the easiest part for me. Which is a good thing because there’s a whole lot of it. I belong to two critique groups, one that meets weekly and one monthly. Then there’s a critique class with my teacher, Jim Frey, twice a year. When I’ve done all I can, the manuscript goes to Liz Kracht, my agent, eventually ending up with Randall Kline from Diversion Books for his edit.
 
There. Wasn’t that easy?
 
 

A beautiful blonde con-woman has been blackmailing her parole officer, Fulin Chen. Just when Fulin is ready to come clean, she disappears. Bad news for Fulin because once she’s arrested for breaking parole she’ll show the photos she has on him and end his career. Fulin turns to his longtime friend and poker buddy, Lennox Cooper, PI.

Get your copy for free on Instafreebie:  https://www.instafreebie.com/free/IEzSS

And if you like it, please consider writing a review on Amazon and Goodreads.
Cheers!
​Lily

Who doesn’t like a story read to them? It’s such a great way to spend the time on a commute or going to sleep at night. I feel like a little kid again when our teacher used to read to us if we were good. Now that I’m older, I don’t have to be good,  I have audible.com. I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to have Jennywren Walker read my latest mystery, Betting Blind, for audible.com. She really rocks it.
 
Jennywren is an actress, a singer in a rock band, The Awesomes, and a film director. You can read more about her on IMDb.
 
Thank you Jennywren!

Publishing Day at last!!! I’m thrilled to announce that my second book in the Lennox Cooper series is available at Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Powell’s, Kobo, ITunes, Annie Bloom’s Books and Diversion Books: http://diversionbooks.com/ebooks/betting-blind
​Happy Reading!

There are more subgenres in murder mysteries than you can wave a gun at: police procedurals, historical, comic, puzzle, legal, medical, cat and Christmas. I’m sure there’s at least a dozen more. Then there’s the detective: police, amateur sleuth and private eye. But I would guess that there is more difference between fictional detectives than their real counterparts. Think Agatha Christie’s Poirot versus George Pelecanos’s Derek Strange. Mystery lovers label the differences between detectives as soft-boiled or hard-boiled. Why is that important? If you favor a beautiful countryside or a small village where everyone is pleasant to one another except—you know—the murderer, don’t read hard-boiled mysteries.
 
Hard-boiled mysteries typically take place in the city with a loner detective who is this side of broke. The hard-boiled detective will face getting assaulted, kidnapped or even murdered to achieve justice. Expect violence, gritty language and possibly graphic sex (some writers who are happy with gore pull the curtain when the romance gets too hot.) Even though morality is ambiguous in a hard-boiled story, justice will prevail.
 
Not necessarily so with noir mysteries. Noir dwells at the far end of hard-boiled. The purest noir stories are told from the criminal’s point of view. Fate plays an important role, and there’s never a happy ending.
 
Soft-boiled mysteries are strictly small town. The reader won’t get a glimpse of the murder victim. If there’s violence beyond the murder (and often there isn’t) it will happen off-page. Soft-boiled characters don’t swear or use slang. When the characters have sex it’s so off the page, it happens in a different part of the library.
 
Just as noir stories dwell at the far end of hard-boiled stories, the cozy dwells at the far end of soft-boiled. The great aunt of the cozy is Miss Marple, and just as she had her knitting, the modern cozy sleuth has her cats, her catering business, or her ability to feng shui her solution to the murder.
 
Noir to cozy detectives exist on a spectrum with stories falling between hard-boiled and soft-boiled. Aren’t you a little curious what I write? Hard-boiled. Definitely.
 
 
 

Interview with Author Lily Gardner
Lily Gardner plays cards and writes noir mysteries in the rainy city of Portland, Oregon. She’s a big fan of noir film, Scandinavian noir and American murder mysteries, both hard and soft-boiled. 

A Bitch Called Hope is the first book in Gardner’s Lennox Cooper series, a story about a poker playing detective who only catches a break at the card table. Her second book in the series, Betting Blind, is coming out on March 29, 2016.

The Interview 
Your novel, A Bitch Called Hope, ruled the B&N bestseller list. Did you know you wanted to do the sequel, Betting Blind, even before the first one became a hit?
When I found my detective, Lennox Cooper’s character, I knew I wanted to continue to tell stories with her voice. A story is one thin slice of a human life, so there’s dozens of stories that could be told.

Did you find writing the sequel to be harder or easier than writing the first Lennox Cooper novel.
Both.  I found it difficult to reveal the backstory for Lennox and her poker buddies in a new and artful way from A Bitch Called Hope. That said, having a protagonist and supporting cast with developed characters and voices is a wonderful thing. I also had the confidence of having written a novel from start to finish, so I knew I could do it again.

When do you let your friends and family read your novels, pre or post release?
The problem is readers’ fatigue. My books change with every critique and edit, and I go through this process over and over. Which version do I give my friends and family? The best version—the published version. 

Lennox is a a strong, capable woman, as well as a seasoned card player, and you are too. How and when did you start playing?
I started playing Pitch my freshman year in college. I’d like to say I played during my lunch hour, but the truth is I skipped a lot of classes to keep playing. When I moved to the country post college, I played hours and hours of Hearts and Canasta. I’m pretty solid with those games, but I suck at poker. I have the worst card luck when I’m playing with my own money.

Are there other parts of Lennox that you identify yourself with?
We both have potty mouths, and our thoughts about Luck and Chance are identical. Otherwise we’re very different. Lennox is little and tough and never stands down from a confrontation, whereas I am tall and timid. She puts her work before her love life. Yeah. Well. All her friends are men. All my friends are women. She has only her mother. My family is the size of a small village. It’s wonderful imagining a character so unlike me.

​What is your most, and least favorite part of writing?
Building a new scene is the most difficult stage of writing for me. Accomplishing my scene goals; creating conflict between my characters; and placing them in an interesting setting that is so vivid that the reader feels she’s there in the story is really freaking hard. My favorite part of writing is re-writing. Once I have the raw prose on the page, I can make it better.

How will Betting Blind differ from its predecessor?
In A Bitch Called Hope, Lennox’s primary motive for solving Bill Pike’s murder is to prove to her cop community that she still has the investigative chops she had as a homicide detective in the Portland Police Bureau. In Betting Blind, Lennox is fighting with all her skill to clear her dear friend from a murder charge.
A Bitch Called Hope is a world of wealth and entitlement. Betting Blind is a world of cyber crime, a place where people prey on the lonely.

A big, big thanks to Lily for letting me interview her!

If you’re yet to read the best-selling first book in the Lennox Cooper series, A Bitch Called Hope, you can sample on this site.
Betting Blind comes out on March, 29, 2016 through Diversion Books.

Mia Thompson is the international bestseller of YA  thrillers starring sassy Sapphire Dubois. Check her out at  http://www.authormiathompson.com, or better yet, purchase her novels wherever fine books are sold.

Posted by Mia Thompson at 3:30 PM

At last! I’m so very pleased to announce that BETTING BLIND will be on sale in both electronic and print versions March 29, 2016. It’s available now for pre-order at Diversion Books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo and Google.

I love this story and hope you do, too. The cover is a picture the Portland Esplanade, a series of boardwalks, floating docks, benches and sculpture that border the Willamette River’s east side. In the background is the Steel Bridge. The city of Portland is a prominent character in both of my books.