Category: Guest Post

 

Vanishing Into the 100% Dark (Bean to Bar Mysteries)
by Amber Royer

About Vanishing Into the 100% Dark

Vanishing Into the 100% Dark (Bean to Bar Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
8th in Series
Setting – Japan
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Golden Tip Press (March 4, 2025)
Print length ‏ : ‎ 324 pages
Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DT2DW97B

Bean to chocolate maker Felicity Koerber has been invited to be part of a chocolate festival in Tokyo. It’s a big deal for a Texas gal with a chocolate shop on Galveston’s historic Strand, so a whole group of her friends come along to support her. It’s intimidating enough to be giving a class on chocolate making with the help of a translator – she also stumbles across the scene of a murder, where a quirky group of international actors and stunt performers are making a monster movie. Felicity has already solved half a dozen murders back in Texas, so at this point her friends basically expect her to get involved – even before the young media influencer in Felicity’s group becomes the main suspect. Felicity has taken on the role of chaperone for Chloe, so she can’t imagine how she could explain what went wrong to the girl’s mother. Which gives her even more motivation to figure out the real killer.

In the meantime, things get complicated at the chocolate festival when a rival chocolate maker tries to get her disqualified from the awards competition – and claims that her amateur sleuth status is bringing undesirables into the festival. And things are even more complicated as the stress of being in an unfamiliar place brings out secrets about Felicity’s friends – and her fiancé.

GUEST POST

As a writer, I find myself collecting random bits of information.   A snippet of dialogue from an overheard conversation here, a random fact about book ink that just might prove to be the murder weapon in my next book there.  You have to remain open to the world, become observant, and find ways to fit new things you experience in with your treasure trove of writing information.

I find that travel offers the best possible opportunities for doing that.  When you are at home, it is easy to take passing details for granted.  But when you are in a new place – whether two towns over or halfway around the world – you are bound to notice differences in even everyday things.  Do people speak differently, using slang or idioms you haven’t heard before?  What about table manners?  The presence or absence of pets?

I was in Hawaii for a week before someone pointed out that you can’t have a billboard anywhere in the state.  But once I noticed it, I was more conscious of the views along the roadside, which were unobstructed.  That said something about what was considered most of value locally.  It’s also a detail I probably would not have learned about had I not been there.

I have visited Japan a couple of times, and each time I’ve taken notes as a sort of free-form travel journal, while I captured my favorite visual memories as Instagram posts.  I knew that I would want to do more with the information I was collecting, and that I wanted to use Tokyo as a setting for a book.  I was finally able to do that with Vanishing Into the 100% Dark.  This book takes the characters from my Bean to Bar Mysteries series and sends them on a trip to a chocolate festival in Tokyo.

I had no idea which bits of information I was going to use, so I recorded every interesting fact I came across, every important location I might want to look up again.  (If you decide to journal, but you don’t have a project, consider writing down stories that people have shared, little details about things that happened to you, especially things that aren’t funny now but might be later, names of restaurants and shops, the specific names of foods you’ve eaten, the names of flowers, birds and animals in your surroundings, and tidbits of history about the area.)

Even without a piece of fiction in mind, keeping a travel journal can be a worthwhile end itself.  It can be filled with personal memories just for you, or to be shared with a select few.  Or those notes could become a series of blog post, or even a full-blown travelogue.  This would require editing the entries into a seamless narrative that has beginning and end scenes of setting off on your adventure, bookended with your return.  Usually, the idea is to show how you are different in that return scene, having grown somehow and learned something from your travels.  (This mirrors the way novels are structured, where the character takes a literal or metaphorical journey and is somehow bettered by the experience.  Unless, of course, it is a tragedy.)  Travelogues are usually written in first person and recounted in the past tense.  Because you have in effect become the main character of your travelogue, you lend your voice to it, and it is filtered through your narrative point of view.  This makes the resulting work more personal than anything achieved in a guidebook or non-fiction work on a particular destination.  Travelogues allow for the inclusion of specific non-repeatable experiences, alongside instruction about culture and history.  You might share your reasons for traveling to the place (which may or may not feel universal to your readers) and encourage others to visit for reasons of their own.

Sometimes you wind up writing something that is semi-autobiographical.  It tips over into fiction, though there is a basis in what you actually experienced.  I feel like I did that when writing Vanishing into the 100% Dark.  It’s a mystery, so obviously most of what happens is complete invention with no basis in reality.  But the emotions underlying some of the experience of being in Japan comes from feelings I had visiting the same spots.  In the opening, Felicity turns on her phone and immediately gets hit with roaming charged before she remembers she’s supposed to install a virtual sim.  That actually happened to me.  She gets excited watching the giant 3-D cat billboard outside the train station in Shinjuku.  I felt exactly the same way, a little nervous when the cat started to bat something off the edge of the virtual frame – even though logic was telling me the object wouldn’t actually fall to the street, my senses weren’t so sure.

I felt like writing parts of the book had become a travelogue, overlaid with the exciting mystery and thriller-esque events that made up my plot.  Even things that happened to me separately and in different locations came together in a way that weirdly felt like cohesive memory, even as I blended them into a fictional scene.  Felicity visits a movie studio in the course of the book, and on one table there is Japenese-style potato salad, cucumber salad and a box each of katsu sandwiches and strawberry sandwiches.  I’ve eaten all of those things – but never in the same meal.  But I can imagine how the flavors all work and what the experience would be like.

There’s an oversized Godzilla head peeking over one of the hotels in that same area of Shinjuku, which became the loose inspiration for the hotel where my characters stay during the course of the book.  Because it is a fictional hotel, I didn’t have to worry if I was getting interior details right, but the emotion of looking up at the enormous face of a monster familiar from movies I’ve seen needed to be spot on.

It can be easier to evoke emotion in your writing by appealing to the senses.  Use at least a couple of sensory details to put the reader in the scene and then tell the reader what you – or your character – is feeling in the moment, in reaction to those details.  I feel that by doing that in Vanishing, it helps the reader understand WHY Felicity loves to travel.

About Amber Royer

Amber Royer writes the Chocoverse comic telenovela-style foodie-inspired space opera series, and the Bean to Bar Mysteries. She also teaches creative writing and is an author coach. Her workbook/textbook Story Like a Journalist and her Thoughtful Journal series allow her to connect with writers. Amber and her husband live in the DFW Area, where you can often find them at local coffee shops or taking landscape/architecture/wildlife photographs. They both love to travel, and Amber records her adventures on Instagram – along with pics of her pair of tuxedo cats. If you are very nice to Amber, she might make you cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes, of course! Amber blogs about creative writing technique and all things chocolate at www.amberroyer.com.

Author Links

Website: http://www.amberroyer.com

Blog: http://amberroyer.com/blog/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberroyerauthor/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Amber.Royer.Author/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoA_29HV2nPmRnox9LPVanw

Twitter: https://twitter.com/amber_royer

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Amber-Royer/e/B00PFV4CGM

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8144619.Amber_Royer

Purchase Links:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Kobo

Bookshop.org

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