When did you realize you wanted to write novels?
I had blended careers as an interior designer along with luxury real estate sales. The money was great, but I wasn’t satisfied. It seems like a lifetime ago, but our children were all at universities and my husband was and remains passionate about his work. I felt empty until I remembered the strongbox stored away in a closet. Inside was a note from my fifth-grade teacher suggesting to me that I should consider a career in writing. One day my husband arrived home from work to find me under our garden tent with a dozen books on writing on the table in front of me. I never looked back.
Is silence golden, or do you need music to write by? What kind?
I’m revealing an embarrassing skeleton in my closet! I need background noise and most often it’s the television shows and movies. I don’t really listen. I don’t even know the plots per se, but I guess the sound of voices somehow gives me comfort. When it’s time for me to do the rewrites and editing, I put on music without lyrics. Yanni, in particular. Rachmaninoff if I need to feel more solemn.
How much of your plots and characters are drawn from real life? From your life in particular?
I’ve certainly had some colorful persons in my life but tend to draw from composites of all. I strive to make characters multi-dimensional, for this is what we are as humans. They may be perspicacious in one moment and stupid and clueless in another scene. And while I write of a few dead bodies here and there, I’ve never been the victim of a violent crime. I can write bloody scenes that are darn good, but I literally pass out at the sight of over a teaspoon of that red liquid.
Anything else you’d like to tell us about yourself and/or your books?
Having grown up under the influence of my mother’s love of suspense, I will never leave my world of murders, espionage, and kidnappings behind, but for several years I felt like I wanted to diversify into a genre that might be more uplifting. One problem. I didn’t have a story.
Enter my father, who in a rush to catch his flight to visit me inadvertently left his cane behind. While at the gate and early, he asked the ticket agent if there was any store in all of Denver International Airport that sold canes. She said none that she knew of and my dad thanked her and turned to return to his chair. The agent called him back, exclaiming that someone had left a cane there months earlier. She gave it to Dad. And thus, this became the conception for my first in a series of books of magical realism. The Traveling Cane. Told in the first person of the cane, he finds himself at the right place at the right time for the right person in need of his assistance. He has a soul, after all.
A Cassidy Clark Novel, Book 3
The patriarch and owner of a two-billion-dollar NFL franchise is dying. Paul Childs, whether in wisdom or wickedness, leaves behind an unusually cruel family trust. A trust that contains a Last Man Standing clause; only the single strongest and most capable of his seven children will be heir to his fortune.
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Thank you, Lois Winston, for the most intelligent interview questions and the opportunity for me to share my thoughts!
ReplyDeleteHappy to have you visit, Lala!
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