THIS WEEK'S BOOK WINNER

Thanks to all who stopped by this week at Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers. We hope you'll come back often and also tell your friends about us. We have lots of exciting posts and guests planned for the months ahead. I’d also like to thank Sheila Lowe for being our Book Club Friday guest author and for offering a copy of one of her books to one of our readers who posted a comment this week. The winner this week is Pennyt. Pennyt, please email your mailing address to me at anastasiapollack@gmail.com. I’ll forward your address to Sheila, and she’ll mail your book to you. Happy reading! -- Anastasia

BOOK CLUB FRIDAY -- GUEST AUTHOR SHEILA LOWE

Our guest author today at Book Club Friday is Sheila Lowe. Sheila has one of the most interesting professions I’ve ever come across. She’s a handwriting analyst and has given that profession to the amateur sleuth she created in her Claudia Rose mystery series. Sheila is giving away the book of your choice from her series to someone who posts a comment this week. You can learn more about Sheila at either of her two websites, Www.claudiaroseseries.com or Www.sheilalowe.com, and you can follow her on Twitter: @sheila_lowe. -- AP

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