Starting Over – Again!
I had been with Poisoned Pen Press since 2004. When the company was bought by Sourcebooks, Sourcebooks did not want to continue either of my two series even though I had many more books to go. As you can imagine, this was a blow, but I was still a Poisoned Pen author, and they would accept a standalone. So I had to start over.
This was more of a challenge than I thought. I had been writing the Madeline Maclin Mysteries and the Grace Street Mystery Series since 1995 and loved all those characters. To start over with a new cast was daunting. What would I write about? Where could I set this story? What was something I knew about that I could have fun with?
The answer to that was community theater. I’d been in community theater productions for over forty years, so I had a lot of experience to drawn upon. Talk about drama. It is definitely in the theater, especially amateur theater with long-standing feuds and clashing egos. Not only that, there are a boatload of theater superstitions to play with. Now I just needed some characters.
When I’m writing, as soon as I have the right name, I have a character. This happens all the time, and I can’t explain it. I name them, and there they are. So I came up with the name Theodosia “Teddy” Ballard. Teddy stepped right up and began to tell me her story. Her neighbor’s cat accidentally burned down her apartment building. She missed her latest job interview, a job she really didn’t want. Her dear grandmother who raised her was going into a retirement facility, and her scheming cousin had taken grandmother’s house. She didn’t have a job or a place to live.
So I thought of the name of her best friend and actor, Will Selms. When Will arrived, he had the perfect solution. Paula Norwood, stage manager at the local community theater, had recently fallen down the costume loft stairs and died from her injuries. The show desperately needed a stage manager. Teddy could have the job and live in the cottage behind the theater. Problem solved.
Only Teddy didn’t know the first thing about being a stage manager. But with Will’s help, she learned all the terms and the superstitions. And of course, every theater is haunted, and before long, Teddy made the acquaintance of George, the theater ghost. George saw Paula fall and tells Teddy it was not an accident. She decided to solve the mystery. George says he will help, but he has his own agenda.
Something very unexpected happened during the writing of this book. Teddy and Will started to have a typical love scene when Teddy said to me, “I don’t really want this.” To my surprise, I didn’t want it, either. That’s when I realized I had never wanted it. And then, like Teddy, I found a word for this feeling. Asexual. This opened a whole new part of Teddy’s character and gave me a chance to work through what had puzzled me about relationships practically my whole life. Like any other sexual orientation, there is a vast spectrum of feelings. In Teddy’s case, she is still romantically attracted to Will and fears revealing her secret might ruin their relationship.
A ghost light is the one light left on in the theater at night. Superstition says it keeps the harmful ghosts away and lets the friendly spirits come onto the stage to act once again. When I turned on the ghost light for this book, I turned on the light for Teddy and for me. Yes, I was starting over, but it was a brand-new act and a chance to discover more about myself and my characters.
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Theodosia "Teddy" Ballard knows nothing about community theater, but when the stage manager for “Little Shop of Horrors” takes a tragic header down the costume-loft stairs, she agrees to fill in for the sake of her actor friend, Will. Teddy takes the superstitions and swelled heads of The Stage in stride—till she meets George Clancy Everhart, the theater ghost, who informs her that the previous stage manager was murdered and demands that she find the killer. Both investigation and rehearsals are complicated when she makes a surprising discovery about her relationship with Will—and learns that George has his own dramatic agenda.
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