by Ritter Ames
Want to get an email alert when the next Organized Mystery is available? Sign up for Ritter Ames's newsletter today!
Please read on for more organizing tips and for a sneak peek at the next book available in the series—chapter one of
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
USA TODAY bestselling author Ritter Ames writes the Organized Mysteries series and the Bodies of Art Mysteries, and will soon be releasing the first title in her Frugal Lissa cozy mystery series. These series and their varied locations give Ritter more opportunity to coax her husband into additional travel for “research.” For more information about her and her books, visit her website at www.ritterames.com Subscribe to Ritter's Newsletterto learn when books are released or she’s running special giveaways for her fans.
KEEP READING FOR TIPS for planning Halloween events & parties and the recipe for Kate’s jack-o-lantern cookies.
BOOKS BY RITTER AMES
ORGANIZED MYSTERIES:
Organized for Murder
Organized for Homicide
Organized for Scheduled Sabotage
Organized for S'more Death
Organized for Masked Motives
Bodies of Art Mysteries:
Counterfeit Conspiracies
Marked Masters
Abstract Aliases
Fatal Forgeries
Bronzed Betrayals
BONUS – Cookie Recipe
KATE MCKENZIE’S SUGAR & Sweet Jack-O-Lantern Cookies
Ingredients:
1 cup softened butter (use cubed butter, not soft spread)
3 ounces softened cream cheese
1 cup sugar
1 egg yolk
¾ tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp almond extract
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
¼ tsp baking soda
Extras for decorating:
¼ tsp orange gel food coloring
Orange and green colored sugars for details on cookies
Instructions:
Cream together the butter, cream cheese and sugar in a medium sized bowl. Next beat in the egg yolk, vanilla extract, almond extract and the orange food coloring. In another bowl, combine flour, salt, and baking soda, then gradually add this dry mixture to the creamed mixture. When all is thoroughly mixed together, cover the bowl and set in the refrigerator for at least three hours to make the mixture easier to handle for rolling and cutting.
Prepare a space for rolling the dough by lightly flouring the surface, then roll the cookie dough so it’s no less than an eighth-inch thick. Dip cookie cutter in flour and cut out jack-o-lantern shapes with cookie cutters, then transfer to parchment lined baking sheets leaving an inch between each cookie. Use orange sugars in the curved rims in the pumpkin body of the jack-o-lantern design and the green sugars to cover the stems completely. Cookies bake quickly at 375 degrees and will be ready to take out of the over in 8 to 10 minutes, or as the edges begin to turn brown. Let the jack-o-lanterns cool 2 to 5 minutes before transferring from the parchment to wire racks so they can finish cooling.
Fun Fall Festival Ideas for School Carnivals
HAVING SEVERAL BOOTHS to buy tickets to the events help keep activities moving smoother. Have at least one free event, like a storytelling corner.
EVENT IDEAS
*Games of Skill—
Individual competitions where kids throw toward a target or pick items that have numbers marked on them, but aren’t competing against other kids, are fun for school carnivals, especially if the participants are young children. Have different tubs or boxes of small prizes so the winning depends on the number the child comes up with, or if they hit their target. There are lots of options, and besides the game booths Kate and Meg worked at their Halloween event, here are a few more ideas—
Ring around the Pumpkin – set up three medium sized pumpkins in a row and kids throw hoops just a little larger than the pumpkins. Getting a hoop completely over a pumpkin is a win.
Grab an Apple – no bobbing necessary. This comes with two options. Either hide a small prize (like a colorful eraser) inside a waterproof floating apple or mark numbers with a Sharpie on the bottom of floatable plastic apples and award prizes based on the number on the apple. Either way, put the floatable plastic apples in a water-filled tub and let kids fish out their favorite apple with a small fish net. For the apples with the prize inside, kids can open to find their win (then adult can refill the apple with a new prize and toss it back into the tub). For apples marked with numbers, kids grab their pick and the number tells what their prize is and the adult awards one from the numbered win-bin—then the apple is tossed back into the tub.
Apple Toss – set up small metal or plastic containers in three rows of three. Kids stand a few feet away and toss foam apples toward the containers. Three in a row gets a grand prize.
*Creative Pursuits for all ages—
Painting Pumpkins – set up small pumpkins and gourds and kids decorate with WASHABLE paint.
Face-painting is always popular, and often high school art students volunteer to help with this phase of the event.
*It’s a Cake Walk—
Don’t forget the always favorite Cake Walk event. Mothers bring the cakes early, and event volunteers cut out cardboard ghosts or pumpkins. Number the cutouts 1 through 20 or 30 (depending on the size of the space used for the cake walk). Tape the pumpkins to the floor in a big circle and have some kind of music ready to keep kids moving. As the music plays, the kids walk the circle. When the music stops they all hurry to get a number they can stand on as their own. The winning number is drawn, and the person on that numbered pumpkin takes home a cake. Yum!
*Kids Love a Good Scary Story—
Don’t be afraid to tell a scary story, especially at Halloween. People through the ages have spent favorite evenings sitting in the dark, around a campfire or a lantern, and telling tales designed to make everyone shiver. Think about your audience, what they can handle (and despite their shrieks, kids love a ghoulish tale), and fashion your story to incorporate things they can relate to—this will make it all the more interesting and elicit even louder squeals.
Choose your tale by refamiliarizing yourself with the classics, like the Brothers Grimm. You can find a lot of the Grimm tales online or in your library. You can also search for American folklore to find other stories to adapt and retell.
After thinking about the story points, read the story/stories again a few times, then start thinking about how to make a tale your own. Vary your tone, change your voice for each of the characters. Think about large arm movements and facial expressions to use to convey the story buildup, alarm, and climaxes. Remember, if the story doesn’t affect you, it won’t affect the adults and children sitting in the dark listening to you.
Make the characters likeable, and you can change things to make the story unexpected and a little uncanny. Contemporize it with characters who are kids with backpacks instead of travelers with knapsacks or change horseback riders to dirt bike racers, for instance.
By the time you’re finished, even if a lot of the audience had to crawl into their mothers’ laps, remember that they stayed because they enjoyed the fear and their imaginations were engaged.
SNEAK PEEK
IF YOU LIKE THE ORGANIZED Mysteries series, I invite you to take a look at the following excerpt from the new Frugal Lissa Mysteries series. The first book in the series, Frugal Lissa Finds a Body, is set to arrive at booksellers soon. Let me know what you think about the excerpt below.
Frugal Lissa Finds a Body
By Ritter Ames
CHAPTER ONE
“Welcome to the neighborhood.” I pushed the lemon Bundt cake toward the graying man in the doorway as I tried—and failed—to stop staring at his bushy eyebrows. It looked like a caterpillar tête-à-tête on his forehead. “I'm Melissa Eller, but everyone just calls me Lissa. I live in the noisy two-story across the street.”
“Noisy?” The caterpillars wobbled upward.
“I have t
wo young sons.” I shrugged. “I may as well start apologizing now.”
Gorgeous Abby, my best friend despite the pulled-together look she always wore without effort—today in a DKNY silk t-shirt and black peplum slacks she snagged the last time we shopped at the outlet store because they fit her but not post-pregnancy me—stepped up and held out a hand to shake his. “Abby Newman. I don't live in the neighborhood, but I'm a family friend so I'm here a lot. Don't mind Lissa. She tends to worry too much.”
“Worry?” The caterpillars shifted close together again.
“About the boys and their antics,” Abby added. “They're actually very sweet.”
He took the cake from my hands and said, “We're the Harpers, John and Jane.”
I attempted my own handshake, but he kept a firm hold on each side of the cake plate. Apparently the floral-print J. Jill shirred tee I’d grabbed on that same outlet trip, the one I thought made me look trustworthy and friendly, wasn’t doing its job. His gaze darted to someplace over my left shoulder instead of meeting my smile.
“The wife is still unpacking, you know.” He kept watch over the landscape behind us as he spoke. “We have a lot to do.”
“Absolutely,” I said a little too brightly, and shoved my hands into my jeans pockets. “Been there, done that. Not a lot of fun. We just wanted to come by and let you know if you need anything you only need to ask.”
The caterpillars gave each other a bit of distance as some tension left his expression and voice, and he almost looked at my face. “I'll let my wife know. Appreciate it.”
I took a step back and nearly fell down the stoop. Abby grabbed my arm and saved me from an ungraceful fall.
“We'll be going,” Abby said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yes. Be looking for you,” he said.
More likely he’d be looking out for us and running the other way. Not trusting myself to answer and just make it worse, I waved and kept flashing what I knew was my idiotic grin.
We crossed the street with me slightly behind Abby. The soft highlights in her shoulder-length chestnut hair made me wonder what a salon could do to help the sadly overlong cut I’d recently given up on in favor of simply putting mine into a thick coffee-colored side-braid every day. I was frowning at the ragged tail below the rubber band that hung a bit below my collar bone, so almost missed when Abby said, “Remember, you only get what you expect out of life.”
“What? How did you know what I was thinking?”
She laughed. “Lissa, you’re an open book.”
We hit my front yard, and she reached over and gave me a one-armed hug, reprimanding, “Don't expect people to be annoyed at your children and they won't be.”
Okay, so she didn’t mean my hair and wasn’t a mind-reader. Thank goodness. There were some secrets I kept even from Abby.
“Fat chance of that. You haven't heard the complaints through the years,” I replied.
“They're just rambunctious boys.”
Abby skipped up the steps ahead of me to push open the front door, then gasped and leaned against the wooden frame. I kept walking, dazed as I surveyed the carnage. We'd only been gone for five minutes. I swear, only five minutes. The boys were under orders to start cleaning their room. As we left, we’d heard them thundering up the stairs, and our blonde Labrador retriever, Honey, galloped right behind them. We had actually chuckled over the booming noise.
I never expected the complete chaos now enveloping the living room, but it did prove the point I'd been making only moments before. Apparently, the boys didn't believe me when I told them earlier in the week that they couldn't fly by attaching their Batman capes to the ceiling fan. Said ceiling fan, denuded of two blades, currently wobbled valiantly in a drunken rotation above our heads. A chair and one end table were knocked over, and I presumed staked a claim to where each of the boys landed. Wood slivers littered the durable gray carpet, as well as what I took to be fallout from the tops of the fan blades. I admit it, I don’t dust my ceiling fans often enough. Maybe the mini-dust bunnies helped cushion their fall.
Abby continued making gasp-like sounds. I looked for blood. I found the blades, but not my two sons.
“Boys! Front and center!”
Wide-eyed faces topped by tousled brunette hair popped up between second floor banisters, with Honey padding in close to anchor the far end. Thin sunlight streaked through the upstairs sidelight and washed over the boys to give each a glowing halo. Like that was going to help anything. I pointed to my feet. “Down here. Immediately!”
Longest trek downstairs I'd ever witnessed. Even the dog moved in slow motion. Three heads and faces downcast. All eyes focused on every single step.
I didn't see any bruises, but a torn cape came to light behind one chair when Jamey, the oldest, let his gaze stray in that direction.
“Take a tumble, did we?”
The boys nodded.
“Anyone hurt?”
My five-year-old Mac, short for Mackenzie, my maiden name, rubbed his elbow. Both boys gave me a negative head shake. I figured it would be enough to watch for limps, but just in case I ran a hand over each head to feel for lumps. A second later I checked the dog, too. She didn’t yelp, so I figured she’d been smart enough to stay out of the way of the flying siblings.
“Going to do it again?” I asked my Batboys.
They shook their heads once more, eyes still cast downward.
I HOPE YOU’VE ENJOYED this excerpt from my new cozy mystery series that will be out soon. If you’d like to be notified about this release, or would like more news on me and my books, please sign up for my newsletter at http://smarturl.it/NewsltrSubcribe
.
Happy Halloween! Boo!
Don't miss out!
Click the button below and you can sign up to receive emails whenever Ritter Ames publishes a new book. There's no charge and no obligation.
https://books2read.com/r/B-A-SNFC-OYXU
Connecting independent readers to independent writers.
Also by Ritter Ames
Organized Mysteries
Organized for Scheduled Sabotage
Organized for Masked Motives
Watch for more at Ritter Ames’s site.