HOW A HANDWRITING ANALYST CAME TO BE A MYSTERY WRITER
On my eighth birthday, my favorite gift was a book by beloved British children’s author, Enid Blyton. The Rockingdown Mystery was part of a series featuring four kids a little older than me, who had all sorts of scary, mysterious, wonderful adventures. That’s when my lifelong love of mystery fiction was born.
I was fourteen when my family moved to America and I started writing my own stories. The Beatles were just getting famous and as I was an insane Beatlemaniac, my stories were about the Fab Four, and I was married to Ringo. Yeah, man, grotty. My new friends at Fremont junior high in Anaheim were impressed with my fishnet stockings and Carnaby Street togs, and they champed at the bit, waiting for each installment—heady praise, gave me an inflated sense of my own worth, no doubt, but loads of fun.
Throughout my high school years I read a gothic mystery a day—no wonder my grades were lagging—and along the way, a desire to write my own mystery novel began to simmer. I tried my hand at a historical mystery-romance, thinking that my writing followed the style of my favorite author of the time, Victoria Holt (don’t laugh!). Fast-forward a lot of years...About ten years after having two non-fiction books published on handwriting analysis, which is my main profession, I finally got my wish to publish a mystery. Well, that makes it sound easy, and it was anything but.
Some of the thousands of handwriting samples I’ve analyzed for psychologists, attorneys, law enforcement, businesses, and just plain folk were novel-worthy tales that contained the seeds of a good mystery, and I found one that particularly resonated. Still, it was another seven years of rejections, revisions, and heartbreaks before that first mystery, Poison Pen, saw print. But when it did it got a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, and that led to a contract with a big publishing house, and here we are, three years later with the fourth book in the series, Last Writes, about to be released on July 6th. My love of mystery reading continues unabated and so does my love of writing them.Thanks so much for joining us today, Sheila!
Remember, if you’d like a chance to win a copy of your choice of a book from Sheila’s Claudia Rose series, post a comment to the blog. And don’t forget to check back tomorrow to find out if you’re the winner. -- AP
