When Reality Strikes, or Incorporating Social Issues into Your Story

When is it appropriate or even advisable to incorporate current social issues and problems into your mystery story? Should you do it and how can you do it with sensitivity? Have you ever wanted to but felt constrained from for whatever reason, from feeling awkward in doing so to fearing that it might affect your getting published or, if published, affect your book sales? Have current social issues affected your sales?
Susan Daly, Peter Pontsa, Lorne Tepperman, Sylvia Warsh (moderator)

Artistic Licence vs Reality Check

Factual accuracy is important in a mystery, lest sharp-eyed readers, always ready to gloat over a writer’s mistakes, descend upon you. But sometimes it may be necessary to fudge the facts to make the story work. When is it appropriate to do so? What kind of facts can you tinker with? How far can you go with ignoring what is accurate? What do you do when you find that truth is stranger than fiction? How can you justify a character to do something unrelentingly stupid because you need this stupid action as a plot device?
Alice Fitzpatrick, Scott McKinnon, Angela van Breemen, Lis Angus (moderator)

Writing the “Other”

Last year, we had a panel on writing what you know, drawing from your own experiences to create characters and come up with plot. In this panel, authors discuss how they develop characters and events that are completely outside their realm of experience. How do they make the “other” believable? How do they avoid stereotypes? How do they ensure they are sensitive in portraying experiences and events that are alien to them?
Carol Newhouse, Caro Soles, Joyce Woollcott, Marilyn Kay (moderator)

Funny You Should Say That

The humour panel. How do you build humour into what is essentially something that is the ultimate in violence: murder? What is the nature of this humour? Where is it appropriate in your story? How much funny stuff is OK before it takes away from the plot (i.e., solving the crime)? How appropriate is graveyard humour? Where does it come from: characters, situation, both, neither?
Ryan Aldred, Mike Martin, Des Ryan, Rickie Blair (moderator)

Cozying Up to Cozies

What is a cozy? While rules and conventions for writing cozies have been around for years, are they still appropriate or even relevant? Do different countries have different rules for cozies?  Are cozy sleuths changing from the traditional young woman with an on-again, off-again relationship with a lawman? Is the nature of cozies changing or have you had your manuscript rejected because it doesn’t follow adhere to convention?
Melodie Campbell, Vicki Delany, Gina X. Grant, Kate Freiman (moderator)

The Dark Is Rising

Murder, the ultimate crime for most people, is a very dark subject, but how dark is too dark in a mystery novel? How much sex and violence is appropriate in a mystery or does this depend on the mystery subgenre? How dark are your books and why do you write this way? Where does this darkness come from for you? Do you ever find the darkness too much for you to continue writing?
Lisa de Nikolits, Jim McDonald, Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson, Madeleine Callway (moderator)