BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--MYSTERY AUTHOR CAROLYN J. ROSE ON WRITING WHAT SHE DOESN'T KNOW

Carolyn J. Rose grew up in New York's Catskill Mountains and emerged from the University of Arizona with a degree and a tan. Following two years with Volunteers in Service to America, a series of coincidences and chance encounters led her to TV news and 25 years as a researcher, writer, producer, and assignment editor in Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. Her substitute teaching experiences and her sometimes rocky relationship with dogs led to the Subbing isn’t for Sissies series and the creation of the canine character called Cheese Puff. Other than writing, her interests are reading, swimming, walking, gardening, and NOT cooking. Learn more about Carolyn and her books at her website.

Taking a Literary Leap and Writing What I Don’t Know

For many years I took the advice “write what you know” to heart. I set mysteries in the Catskill Mountains where I grew up, and on the Oregon Coast where I often vacationed. During my 20 years as a high school substitute teacher, I wrote a 13-book humorous mystery series featuring a younger, smarter, thinner, and more catastrophe-prone version of myself.

 

But last year, as winter closed in and the lockdown continued, I considered writing about what I didn’t know. The choices were almost limitless. I don’t know how to pilot a jet or perform brain surgery. I don’t know about life in Haiti or Honduras or Hungary. I don’t know much about physics or pastry or pottery. I know next to nothing about alchemy or actuarial tables or advanced algebra.

 

Now, I like to think I’m a fairly bright person. But I’m in my seventies, and brain cells seem to be departing from the interior of my skull at an alarming rate. Could I learn enough about a fresh topic or skill to write in a credible manner? Or would I be called out by readers who know far more than I do?

 

For the record, as a reader I often feel a guilty thrill of pleasure when I spot a protagonist displaying ignorance about a subject I grasp. But, as a writer, I cringe when I receive an email from a reader who caught me with my smarty-pants down.

 

To avoid that shame and embarrassment, I decided to pick a topic that would allow me to fictionalize for 400 pages without doing more than a lick of research. The topic I hit on was ghosts. The book I wrote is The Three Shades of Justice: Never Give Up the Ghost. It centers around three elderly women killed in a car crash who return as ghosts to help their friend Emma Preston oust the shady assistant administrator of their senior residence.

 

But first they have to learn how to develop their powers so they can get more than a few feet from Emma. It’s a steep learning curve and they’re easily distracted by the disposition of their worldly goods, the selection of their urns, the dog and cat now in Emma’s care, their desire to don outfits other than the ones they died in, and Emma’s growing friendship with Spencer Rutledge.

 

Although glad her friends are still with her, Emma is not so delighted when they read her thoughts and invade her privacy. She’s even less pleased when they bicker, quibble, butt in on conversations, badger her to eat their favorite foods, and persuade her to take in an orphaned parrot.

 

Writing this book let me play a months-long game of What If? and speculate wildly about ghosts, their potential powers, and whether the personalities they had in life would carry over to their afterlives. I asked myself who they might haunt, who might be able to see them, and whether their time as ghosts might be limited. And then I made up the answers.

 

But, although knowledge and accuracy weren’t issues when it came to ghosts, there were other things I wanted to get right. So I pointed and clicked my way to sites with information about meringue, night-vision goggles, funeral urns, what parrots eat, and the full names of four former First Ladies.

 

In the process I learned a lot. Will I remember it next week? Doubtful. Like I said earlier, too many brain cells are, well, giving up the ghost.

The Three Shades of Justice: Never Give Up the Ghost

Emma Preston’s best friends are dead.

 

But not departed.

 

Killed in a car crash, they return to their senior residence to take care of unfinished business—getting the goods on the malicious assistant administrator. Sadye Connor has been stealing supplies and skimming accounts; now she’s upping her crime game.

 

Stubborn and opinionated in life, Eddie, Ida, and Loren are no different in their afterlives. Instead of honing their haunting skills, they bicker about strategy, blow off training, belittle teamwork, and badger Emma about the quality of their urns and the care and feeding of their entitled pets. Worse yet, they read her thoughts, butt in on conversations, and allow her no privacy to pursue a budding romance.

 

Can Emma wrangle the wraiths in the direction of detection in time? Do the Three Shades of Justice have a ghost of a chance of stopping Shady Sadye? Or will the ectoplasm hit the fan?

 

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COZY MYSTERY AUTHOR SALLY HANDLEY DRAWS ON HER OWN EXPERIENCES

Sally Handley is the author of the Holly and Ivy cozy mystery series as well as one standalone suspense novel and an ongoing serial. She also blogs at “On Writing, Reading and Retirement.” Learn more about Sally and her books at her website. 

Any Similarity to Real Persons and Places is Purely on Purpose  

Murder Under Tuscan Blooms, the fourth book in my Holly and Ivy Mystery Series, begins with Holly and Nick celebrating their honeymoon at the Manelli family vineyard in Tuscany. It seems to be the perfect spot for a honeymoon until the suspicious death of a long-lost cousin who’s come to stake a claim on the vineyard. Plans for a marriage celebration are thrown into disarray as Holly, Nick and their extended family are drawn into the investigation. 

 

I’m often asked where I get my ideas and whether my characters and stories have any basis in real life experiences. You may or may not know that Holly and Ivy are loosely based on my sister and me, and the character Kate Farmer is based on my dear friend, Nina Augello. Many of the things that happen stem from personal experiences that I use as jumping off points in my books. The idea for Murder Under Tuscan Bloomscame to me after a trip to Tuscany.

 

Two years ago, another dear friend of mine, Janet Adams Strong, called me to say she and her husband Bruce were renting a villa in Tuscany for a month and they wanted to invite me to come visit them. Well, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, I don’t think I can do that.” But after about 10 seconds, that reaction shifted to, “How can I not do that?” And so, I made reservations and spent a glorious week with them in a little village not far from Pisa.

 

Sometime after that trip, I was invited to write a guest blog post on cozy settings. Now the setting for a cozy mystery is usually a small town where all the characters more or less know one another. The first two books in the Holly and Ivy series are set in the fictitious town of Pineland Park, NJ. Book three, Full Bloom, takes place in Kate Farmer’s hometown of Reddington Manor in the Catskills, oddly similar to my friend Nina’s place in Livingston Manor, NY.

 

Now just before I wrote the blog on setting, our local Sisters in Crime Mystery Book Club had just read three mysteries set in foreign countries: on the Cornish Coast of England; Venice, Italy; and Paris, France. So I wrote about how the setting impacted the reader’s experience. That’s when I started thinking there was no reason Holly and Ivy couldn’t take a trip to an exotic locale.

 

Now, if you’ve read Full BLoom, [SPOILER ALERT], you know Holly married Nick Manelli. As I reflected on that, it hit me. Why not have Holly and Nick honeymoon in Tuscany? No setting could be cozier than the villa with the adjoining guest house where I stayed on my visit there.

 

So what else from personal experience shaped this book? One day Janet, Bruce, and I visited a vineyard called Fattoria San Vito where the owner Matteo took us on a tour of the vineyard followed by a wine tasting on the back patio. As book four started to take shape in my mind, I decided to smoosh together the villa where we stayed and the vineyard we visited, and, in true cozy style, I made Nick’s family the owners of the Fattoria Manelli. I even named a character Matteo.

 

And if that isn’t enough, one of the things I pondered was who would be the murder victim and how was I going to write about crime in a foreign country. So again, my friend Nina aka Kate Farmer said that land disputes were a major issue in Italy. Believe it or not, another good friend of mine had just returned from a trip to visit her family in Sicily. On that trip she learned when her brother had visited a few years earlier, he made a claim on some family property there which did not endear him to family members. And so, an American cousin coming back to Italy to stake a claim in the family vineyard became the starting point of Murder Under Tuscan Blooms.

 

So personal experience is a huge factor in the stories I write. If you don’t believe me, just ask my dog Trixie, who is now the star of her own Kindle Vella series, The Adventures of Trixie.

 

Murder Under Tuscan Blooms

A Holly and Ivy Cozy Mystery, Book 4

 

The Manelli family vineyard in Tuscany seems the perfect spot for Holly and Nick’s honeymoon, until the suspicious death of a long-lost cousin who’s come to stake a claim on the vineyard. Plans for a marriage celebration are thrown into disarray as Holly, Nick and their extended family are drawn into the investigation. Was it an accident or was it murder? Will they solve the mystery, or is the honeymoon over?

 

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WHERE DO AUTHORS GET THEIR IDEAS?

By Lois Winston

Ask any fiction author, no matter the genre, the most frequently asked question readers ask her, and she’ll answer, “Where do you get your ideas?” Ask any fiction author, no matter the genre, what advice she’s heard most often, and she’ll answer it’s to write what you know.

Some may wonder how the two can be compatible. What about authors who write about zombies or stories which take place on distant planets or back in ancient times? Zombies aren’t real, and no writer has ever traveled to a distant planet or hitched a ride in a DeLorean to go back in time.

“Write what you know” doesn’t mean write only what you’ve personally experienced. Once you research a topic, you know about it. And research can take many different forms, including reading books by other authors who write the kind of books you want to write. Once an author immerses herself in the world of zombies or interstellar travel or life in medieval England, she can put her own unique spin on the genre.

Since I’m often asked where I get the ideas for my stories, I thought I’d write a series of posts in the coming months on how the ideas for each of my books came about. I've also invited some of my fellow authors who write in a variety of genres to join me. Today I begin the series. Look for more posts on the topic in the weeks and months to come.

I get most of my ideas for both my characters and my plots from the world around me. I’m a die-hard news junkie who has always believed that truth is stranger than fiction. That belief is reaffirmed every time I pick up a newspaper or turn on the evening news. I’ll hear a news story or read an article, then give the event a “what if” spin. The voices in my head take over from there, and the next thing I know, I’ve got a plot, a subplot, a scene, a protagonist, or a secondary character.

When the writing bug first bit me, I started penning a sweet romance, a story that came to me one night in a dream. Prior to that, I hadn’t written any fiction since Freshman Comp in college. I called my romance Spilled Coffee because of the way the heroine and hero meet at the beginning of the book.

At the time I was living in a Philadelphia suburb. While I was writing this romance, a shocking murder occurred in a nearby town. Each day the news was filled with more and more gruesome details of this horrific crime. To my surprise, the murder began influencing my writing.

Eventually my sweet romance morphed into a story about secrets and revenge and the lengths some people will go in order to bury the former and achieve the latter. The plot is ripe with scandal. Drugs, violence, blackmail political machinations, and attempted murder. My heroine is a wealthy young widow whose abusive, cocaine-snorting, deceased husband was about as low as a low-life can get.

A decade after I first sat down to write a romance, Spilled Coffee became the award-winning romantic suspense Love, Lies and a Double Shot of Deception, the second book I sold. The novel is by no means a fictionalized retelling of the murder and attempted cover-up perpetrated by Main Line Murderer, Craig Rabinowitz, but elements of the crime played a huge role in how the story developed.

Love, Lies and a Double Shot of Deception

Life has delivered one sucker punch after another to Emma Wadsworth. As a matter of fact, you could say the poor little rich girl is the ultimate poster child for Money Can’t Buy Happiness — even if she is no longer a child.

Billionaire real estate stud Logan Crawford is as famous for his less-than-platinum reputation as he is his business empire. In thirty-eight years he’s never fallen in love, and that’s just fine with him — until he meets Emma.

But Emma’s not buying into Logan’s seductive ways. Well, maybe just a little, but she’s definitely going into the affair with her eyes wide open. She’s no fool. At least not any more. Her deceased husband saw to that. Besides, she knows Logan will catch the first jet out of Philadelphia once he learns her secrets.

Except things don’t go exactly as Emma has predicted, and when Philadelphia’s most beloved citizen becomes the city’s most notorious criminal, she needs to do a lot more than clear her name if she wants to save her budding romance with the billionaire hunk someone is willing to kill for.

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BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR LYNN CAHOON

Lynn Cahoon is a contemporary romance author with a love of hot, sexy men, real and imagined. Her heroines all have one thing in common, their strong need for independence. Or at least that’s what they think they want. Learn more about Lynn and her books at her website. -- AP 

Temporary Roommates is a novella set in the Central West End of St. Louis, next to Forest Park, where the 1905 World’s Fair was held, and, down the street from the hospital where I spent the majority of 2007.

The writer handbooks all tell you to write about something you know, so when I stared out the window after being told I had breast cancer, instead of focusing on the fear of what might be, I spun a story about a nurse who needed a place to live.

As the treatments continued, I had a lot of time to think about this story.  As the months passed through spring and into summer, I, like my heroine yearned to be outside.  Maybe not running like Annie enjoys, but at least walking, hearing the birds and feeling the sun on my face.

I’ve been cancer free now for five years and although I still haven’t taken up running, I’m a lot like my spunky nurse heroine, always trying to find my way in the world without help. But I’ve found that taking care of each other is a calling.  So I wanted to share my top five gifts for any friend undergoing cancer treatments.

1-Offer to help. No, scratch that, don’t just offer, show up to clean their house, or drive them to chemo, or even sit and talk on the porch. 

2- Ease the boredom.  I tell everyone I know the best part of cancer was time to read.  If your friend isn’t a reader, crosswords are great, too.  Just something to pass the time while waiting for the next appointment.

3- Food. As time passed, the chemo made food less appetizing. So I ate a lot of mashed potatoes and ice cream.  Find out what your friend loves, then stock their fridge.

4- Be an exercise buddy. Studies have shown some advantages for people who exercise through the months of treatment.  Added strength, energy, and maybe even just a healthy dose of the feel good stuff that floods your brain after working out.  (Be sure to clear plans with your friend’s medical professionals.)

5-Offer to take your friend to their appointments.  I found myself wondering about the future way too often when I was alone. Having someone there kept me in the moment and focused on getting better.

Annie Baxter, my heroine in Temporary Roommates is given doggie duty, escorting a puppy through the halls to meet patients. I tend to agree with my character, there’s nothing quite so healing as a big wet puppy kiss.

Blurb: Annie Baxter has her dream job.  Now, all she needs is a cheap apartment close to the hospital.  Troy Saunders knows his life as an intern is all about the long hours. He doesn’t have time to play doctor to some Nurse Barbie.  So when his sister finds a great apartment walking distance to work and next to the best running paths in the city, he’s sold. Two leasing agents, two prospective renters, one apartment.  Can they co-exist without fireworks?

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