AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR LYNN SLAUGHTER

Today we sit down for a chat with adult mystery, YA romantic mystery, and middle-grade fiction author Lynn Slaughter. Learn more about Lynn and her books at her website and blog.

When did you realize you wanted to write novels?

Following my retirement from a long career in dance, I got this idea for a story about a young aspiring ballet dancer intent upon unraveling secrets both her friends and her parents are keeping from her. That became my first young adult novel, While I Danced. Working on it got me hooked on writing fiction, and I returned to school to earn my MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. I just kept going after that!

 

How long did it take you to realize your dream of publication?

That’s sort of a two-part question for me. While I was still dancing, I was moonlighting as a freelance magazine writer. I’d taken some correspondence classes in magazine writing from Writer’s Digest, and it didn’t take too long before I was getting some article acceptances. However, in terms of fiction writing, I worked on my first novel on and off for close to a decade before it was finally published.

 

Are you traditionally published, indie published, or a hybrid author?

I’m traditionally published with a small press, Melange Books.

 

Where do you write?

I’m fortunate to have a home office where I can shut the door to write!

 

Is silence golden, or do you need music to write by? What kind?

I often write to music. When I was working on Missed Cue, I listened to a lot of jazz because my protagonist is a huge jazz fan.

 

How much of your plots and characters are drawn from real life? From your life in particular?

Bits and pieces of plots and characters have been inspired by my real-life experiences. For example, in Missed Cue, the protagonist encounters a lot of drama at the ballet company the victim danced with—intense rivalries, love affairs, infidelity, and an obsessed, driven artistic director. As an ex-dancer, I’m familiar with the intensity of behind-the-scenes relationships in a dance company. Thankfully, I never encountered a murder!

 

Describe your process for naming your character.

I have a baby names book that I love looking through when I’m trying to name a character because it includes origins and meanings of names. I wanted Caitlin to have an Irish name because having grown up in Connecticut, I’d encountered a lot of policemen and women who came from immigrant Irish families.

 

Real settings or fictional towns?

I’ve done both, but in the case of Missed Cue, the setting is a real city, New Haven, Connecticut.

 

What’s the quirkiest quirk one of your characters has?

My protagonist in Missed Cue has furnished her apartment with finds from garage sales, consignment shops, and Goodwill that include her 50s style red plaid armchair, Danish contemporary coffee table, and side table painted with flowers. Absolutely nothing matches, and she likes it that way.

 

What’s your quirkiest quirk?

I’m a winter holiday fanatic. I have holiday lights strung up year-round in my office and start playing Frank Sinatra singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” in July.

 

If you could have written any book (one that someone else has already written), which one would it be? Why?

Wonder by RJ Palacio. It’s a beautiful story about a ten-year-old boy with a facial deformity who longs for acceptance and friendship. It is so moving and poignant, and the voice of the main character, Auggie, is unforgettable.

 

Everyone at some point wishes for a do-over. What’s yours?

Probably marrying my first husband. We were not well matched, and in retrospect, I married him to please my parents, who adored him. Fortunately, both of us went on to have very happy and successful second marriages.

 

What’s your biggest pet peeve?

Lack of kindness and compassion, especially toward children

 

You’re stranded on a deserted island. What are your three must-haves?

My husband, lots of books, and my computer (Food and water might be nice, too.)

 

What was the worst job you’ve ever held?

One summer during college, I worked at a publishing company where I sat in a tiny room by myself for eight hours a day typing change-of-address labels. It made me really appreciate being able to go to college and look forward to work that wasn’t mind-numbing.

 

What’s your all-time favorite literary character (any genre)? Why?

I don’t really have a favorite, but I do love humor and distinctive voices. For example, I adore the character of Lula in the Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich.

 

Ocean or mountains?

Definitely ocean! I grew up on the coast of New York and Connecticut. Anytime I’m near the ocean, I’m home.

 

City girl/guy or country girl/guy?

I prefer cities, especially New York City

 

What’s on the horizon for you?

I’m currently working on a young adult novel, Missing Mom, about a seventeen-year-old whose mother disappears. The authorities rule it a probable suicide, but my protagonist doesn’t believe her mother would ever have checked out on her and her little sister and undertakes her own investigation.

 

I’m also in the process of seeking a publishing home for my middle grade novel, an identity-swapping tale called The Big Switch: Varney and Cedric. 

 

Anything else you’d like to tell us about yourself and/or your books?

Except for my middle grade novel, my books have all featured folks involved in the performing arts in some way, since that’s the world I’m most familiar with.

 

For all my novels, I’m interested in the personal growth and change of my protagonists. As both a writer and reader, characters I care about matter to me more than anything else.

 

Missed Cue

Lieutenant Caitlin O’Connor prides herself on being a crackerjack homicide detective with the highest close case record in the department. But the onstage death of ballerina Lydia Miseau has her thoroughly stumped.Why did the apparently healthy Miseau drop dead? The autopsy reveals no clear cause of death. Convinced foul play was involved, Caitlin’s investigation takes her into the world of a ballet company where suspects abound who had reasons to want to harm the company star.

 

Meantime, Caitlin’s dealing with a partner on the job who’s addicted to alcohol, a married lover she’s addicted to, and mysterious threatening phone calls. To make matters worse, two more people associated with the company are murdered, and Caitlin has to face the humiliating possibility she arrested the wrong person. Time is running out, as she races to identify a killer who will stop at nothing to avoid detection. 

 

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YA MYSTERY AUTHOR LYNN SLAUGHTER CONFESSES SHE'S A NOSY WRITER

After a long career in dance, Lynn Slaughter earned her MFA in Writing from Seton Hill University. She’s the author of four coming-of-age romantic mysteries, including the forthcoming Deadly Setup and the award-winning Leisha’s Song. Learn more about Lynn and her books at her website. 

Confessions of a Nosy Writer

The other night, I participated in a writers’ panel on Big Blend Radio. One of the questions the moderators asked us to think about ahead of time was: What inspires you?

 

What immediately came to my mind was people’s stories. I am absolutely fascinated by the folks I encounter. Which is a nice way of saying I am incredibly nosy! What I observe, what folks share with me, and even what I overhear or read about people has a way of sparking ideas for characters and plots in my coming-of-age romantic mysteries.

 

Take Deadly Setup, for example, my YA novel due out July 5th. The protagonist, seventeen-year-old Samantha (Sam), is the daughter of a widowed, fabulously wealthy New England heiress. Sam has a strained relationship with her mother who is incredibly self-absorbed and preoccupied, both with her writing career and her serial romances. Sam is more or less the forgotten daughter.

 

Where did these characters come from? Well, when I was in sixth grade, my dad moved our family to an apartment in Greenwich, Connecticut. While our apartment was a modest rental in the downtown area, Greenwich was an ultra-wealthy community. Over the years, I developed friendships with kids who lived in mansions and enjoyed every possible financial advantage. While a handful were close to their parents, I was amazed at how many were basically neglected, growing up with parents who were so involved in their social, charity, and professional lives that they had remarkably little time for their children. Often, my friends were closer to their nannies and other household help than they were to their own parents. This is certainly true for Sam who is devoted to Hilda, the family’s longtime housekeeper.

  

There is an additional complication in Sam’s relationship with her mother in that to some extent, she is a parentified child, meaning she is trying to parent her mother, who tends to be wildly impulsive in her private life. When Sam’s dad was dying of cancer, he asked twelve-year-old Sam to “take care of your mother for me,” a role that Sam should never have been asked to play and which her mother resents. I witnessed a number of friends trying their best to take care of alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional parents, and to some extent, their stories inspired Sam’s as well.

 

Fortunately for Sam, she has close friends and is passionate about music. She loves playing piano, especially standards from the American Songbook (her paternal grandfather played in the orchestra pit for Broadway musicals, and her late father was a huge fan). Where did the idea of making Sam a pianist crazy about old-time music come from? My own life! My dad’s cousins were jazz musicians, and I grew up listening to Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter. 

 

I should also mention that Sam has a lovely boyfriend who’s into musical theater and loves serenading her. He was partially inspired by a boy I dated the summer after my senior year of high school. He’d had the lead in a local production of the Bells are Ringing and unannounced, regularly broke into songs from the show!

 

The major premise of Deadly Setup is that Sam goes on trial for the murder of her mother’s fiancée. I’ve always loved courtroom dramas and wanted to write one, but I think the specific idea of Sam getting accused of shooting her mother’s love interest actually stems from a case that transfixed the nation in the late 1950s. The daughter of the movie star Lana Turner stabbed her mother’s boyfriend to death.

 

So, there you have it, bits and pieces of Deadly Setup inspired by my overall fascination with people, otherwise known as my acute nosiness. In my defense, it’s not such a bad quality to have for a storyteller.

 

Deadly Setup (available July 5th)

Seventeen-year-old Samantha (Sam) is horrified when her New England heiress mom announces she’s marrying a younger man whose last heiress wife died under suspicious circumstances.

 

And then Sam’s life implodes. Her mom’s fiancé turns up dead, and a mountain of circumstantial evidence points to Sam as the killer. On trial for murder, she fights to prove her innocence with the help of her boyfriend’s dad, an ex-homicide cop.

#BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--AN INTERVIEW WITH ROMANTIC MYSTERY AUTHOR LYNN SLAUGHTER

Today we sit down for a chat with Lynn Slaughter, author of adult contemporary romantic mystery. Learn more about Lynn and her books at her website. 

When did you realize you wanted to write novels? 

Throughout my adult life, I continued to love and read young adult fiction. But I didn’t think I had the fiction gene! While I was still dancing, I moonlighted as a freelancer and wrote magazine articles. Initially, I wrote mainly about dance, but then I switched to specializing in writing about the joys and challenges of parenting adolescents for regional parenting magazines. When age and injury led to my retirement from dance, I got an idea for a young adult novel about an aspiring dancer with romantic and family troubles. Honestly, I think it started out as a therapy project for me. I was grieving the loss of dance in my life and writing about a dancer felt like a way to connect to the world I’d loved for so long. Once I started writing what became While I Danced, I was hooked and ended up returning to school in my sixties to earn my MFA in Popular Writing from Seton Hill University. 

 

How long did it take you to realize your dream of publication? 

I worked on my first novel, While I Danced, on and off for a decade before it was published.

 

Are you traditionally published, indie published, or a hybrid author? 

Traditionally published

 

Where do you write? 

Mainly in my home office. I also love writing on trains.

 

Is silence golden, or do you need music to write by? What kind? 

I love the American Songbook as well as classical music. As I’m writing this, I’m listening to Sarah Vaughan, one of my all-time favorite vocalists.

 

How much of your plots and characters are drawn from real life? From your life in particular? 

I think there are pieces of me and others I’ve known or worked with in my characters, but I’ve never written a character who’s a twin of anyone from real life. The closest novel to reflecting my own experience is undoubtedly my first in which Cass, the protagonist, is an aspiring dancer. Like me, her strengths are her musicality and expressiveness. But she also struggles with learning movement sequences quickly. Also like me, she has a father who doesn’t approve of her pursuing a career in dance and doesn’t want to talk about her absent mother. Cass’s father, however, has very different reasons for his behavior.

 

A theme that runs through my work is the need to create an “intentional family” when your family of origin does not support who you are and who you dream of becoming. That’s undoubtedly a reflection of having counseled so many teens who’ve struggled with family issues.

   

Describe your process for naming your character: 

I have a book of baby names which not only gives their origins, but what they mean. I love pouring through it and choosing names that seem to fit my characters. I also sometimes use parts of names of people from my childhood. I’ve used favorite teachers’ names, neighbors’ last names, etc.

 

Real settings or fictional towns? 

I’ve done both. Leisha’s Song is set at a fictional boarding school in a fictional New England town within driving distance of Boston.

 

What’s the quirkiest quirk one of your characters has? 

In Leisha’s Song, Cody, a cellist (with a tendency to walk around with bed hair), will do just about anything to break down Leisha’s resolve not to date him—including dressing up as a country singer and playing one of Kenny Chesney’s love songs on the cello for her.

 

What’s your quirkiest quirk? 

I love the holidays and start playing Christmas music by the end of August!

 

If you could have written any book (one that someone else has already written) which one would it be? Why? 

I absolutely loved the children’s book, Wonder, by RJ Pallacio. August, a ten-year-old boy with a facial deformity, longs to be a regular kid accepted by his peers. This book touched me so deeply, and the character’s voice is unforgettable.

 

Everyone at some point wishes for a do-over. What’s yours? 

I married my first husband right out of college to please my father. My first husband was a wonderful man, but we were not a good match. Needless to say, the marriage didn’t last. On the other hand, had I not married him, I never would have had my firstborn son, who has brought such joy and meaning to my life.

 

 What’s your biggest pet peeve? 

Intolerant, unkind people.

 

You’re stranded on a deserted island. What are your three must-haves? 

My husband, enough food and drink to survive, and a boatload of books.

 

What was the worst job you’ve ever held? 

I once worked in a bookstore where the manager repeatedly lectured me on proper vacuuming techniques and wouldn’t allow me to read, even if there were no customers.

 

What’s the best book you’ve ever read?  

See above- Wonder!

 

Ocean or mountains? 

Ocean

 

City girl or country girl? 

City girl

 

What’s on the horizon for you? 

I’m thrilled that my fourth YA novel, Deadly Setup, will come out from Fire and Ice in 2022.

 

Anything else you’d like to tell us about yourself and/or your books? 

I’m a hopeless romantic! Also, I love paying it forward and supporting other writers.

 

Leisha’s Song

Leisha has always been the ultimate pleaser. She never intended to fall in love with classical singing, become an amateur detective, or get involved with Cody Harrington. But now she finds herself on a direct collision course with her African American grandfather, the only parent she’s ever known. But a more immediate danger looms as she draws closer to uncovering the truth about her mentor’s disappearance, putting her life in grave danger.

 

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