Update:
Just to let you know: The first book of my new traditional/literary/somewhat
cozy mystery, An
Uncollected Death, is up on Amazon and is free today and tomorrow (March
1-2) for its inaugural weekend. If mysteries are your cuppa tea, this is your
chance to try it out. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
From the official description:
Broke. Empty
nest. Career and friends gone.Charlotte’s only ray of hope is a new
job editing the notebooks of a mysterious author from the 1950's, Olivia
Bernadin, who was poised to rival the very best when she disappeared from public
view for reasons unknown.Finding Olivia battered and left for
dead was not exactly what Charlotte expected her first day on the job. The
editing project continues under the supervision of the author's sister, Helene,
but Olivia has hidden the notebooks amid her hoard of collectibles with only
cryptic clues as to their whereabouts.Enter the only son and heir, Donovan,
a nervous character who seems to have an agenda of his own. His machinations
bring Charlotte far too close to the town’s criminal undercurrent, who will stop
at nothing—not even murder—to get their hands on a rare book rumored to be
somewhere in Olivia's house.Charlotte finds herself a suspect in
Olivia's murder on one hand, and staving off financial disaster on the other. On
top of all this, she has difficulty learning to trust her new acquaintances, as
well as her growing feelings for Helene's friend Simon.Solving Olivia's murder requires
understanding what made her tick—and that means finding all the notebooks before
Donovan has the estate hauled off to auction. As Charlotte perseveres in her
search and studies the clues amid Olivia's collections, she uncovers a story
that reaches from the French Resistance to the Vietnam War—and it hints at a
shocking truth about a world-famous novel.AN UNCOLLECTED DEATH is a book about
a book about a book. It is also a story of life, death, and renewal in a small
Midwestern college town.
Minimalism, downsizing, simplifying, the meaning of our stuff, and a new
perspective on consumerism plays an important role in both the subplot and in
the heroine's success as a sleuth, a theme which I think you might enjoy and/or
relate to, and particularly as the sleuth is also a writer and dealing with
current economic realities. The next book in the series is scheduled for release
this fall.
Cheers,
Meg
How/why did you start to write?
My first stories were picture
ones, usually done on a chalkboard and involved a house or several houses on a
hill, a couple of kids, cats, dogs, and birds, and amid flowers and trees, all
of which talked. This was before I was school age. I never wrote them down, but
I still remember a couple of them. I think I considered myself more of an
artist back then.
I was a bit lonely and awkward as
a mainstreamed deaf child, and was inspired to start keeping “notebooks” at the
age of 11, after reading Harriet the Spy.
This was in 1966. Because I didn’t want to risk Harriet’s fate if my notebooks
of observations were discovered, I wrote them in the codes I learned from a
gadget in my beloved James Bond briefcase. (And, yes, I wanted to grow up to be
sleek and cool like Mrs. Peel in The Avengers).
Slow going at first, but it got faster after practice, and I would rotate three
different codes for extra security. The notebooks were full of observations,
some utterly scathing and likely unfair, about classmates, family, teachers,
and life in general, but writing them helped me to feel more real, more
validated. After writing these for nearly two years, some classmates did get
hold of them and threw them into the school incinerator. They didn’t decode
them, but they just knew those
notebooks were very important to me and likely unflattering about them. It
wasn’t all bad, though—the principal had an inkling of what I was up to and he
encouraged me to start the school’s first newspaper. I staffed it with fellow 6th,
7th, and 8th grade misfits and we had a blast.
After that came high school, where I mostly wrote poetry
until my senior year, when a new young teacher had us spend a semester writing
short stories. I fell in love with it and ended up majoring in English instead
of Math in college.
What was your first published piece?
A poem and a short story in the same issue of the campus
literary magazine in my freshman year, I think 1974.
After that I continued to write poetry and short stories,
and wrote and produced three plays. After getting my graduate degree, I
expanded into a few articles and wrote several drafts of a novel, which I never
did finish. After writing for ten years and getting very little published, I
stopped. It was like I couldn’t tell what good writing was anymore. My
confidence was also shattered due to some unfortunate personal circumstances
that I wasn’t equipped to deal with.
I later wrote a few trade journal articles, garden club
newsletter material, unpublished short stories, and participated in NaNoWriMo,
but did not write with any serious intent to publish again until 2010, when I
started my current blog.
What did you do before embarking on your current writing
career? Was it an asset to your writing? How?
The previously-mentioned personal circumstances included a
divorce and subsequent single motherhood, requiring me to come up with a living.
Since I also had an art degree and design skills, I combined that knowledge
with remodeling and garden experience, and started my own landscape design
company, relying on others to help with phone calls. It was one of the very few
such companies in the area at that time, and eventually had an excellent
clientele list.
Geographically, I went from rural isolation to small college
town to the exurbs and inner city. Workwise, I went from academia to small
business ownership, from a protected, privileged environment into being a
contractor and often in charge of a team of laborers. If one is supposed to
“write what you know,” my “know” grew exponentially. Later, after remarrying, I
retired from the physically-demanding landscape work and we opened an art
gallery and I also did well as an artist. Then came the recent economic
upheaval, which hit the local art world very hard. We moved to a less-expensive
area (back to the small college town, in fact, where my son and his wife lived),
but the only job I could find was as a cook in a coffee shop. This led to
starting my own commercial cookery when the coffee shop closed, and I supplied
other coffee shops and private clients with baked goods and soups, casseroles,
and quiches for a couple of years. It was harder than landscaping, though, and
I ended up flat on my back.
My son, who is an online entrepreneur, then encouraged me to
collect my recipes and write a cookbook, and publish it as an ebook. So I did.
I had started my blog a few months before this, as an outlet for getting a
handle on the financial and emotional challenges we were facing, and the
connections I made through that blog helped the ebook, and subsequent ebooks,
to do quite well.
Blogging was also enabling me to find my long-subdued
writing chops again, and with the strain of being at the mercy of print
publishers removed, my confidence returned. So I’m back on track, nearly
twenty-five years after I “stopped” writing. My first collection of flash
fiction, Spirits of Place, is the realization of a dream I’ve had for fifty
years, ever since I was a little kid making up stories in front of the
chalkboard.
What inspires you?
I don’t know that I actually get inspired. Instead, I’m a
constant extrapolator, a what-iffer. Like a lot of deaf people, I’m extremely
visual. My eyes will land on objects or compositions in the world around me,
and then memory or a chain of thoughts start, and sometimes snowball into an
essay or a character’s back story. Oftentimes my husband’s photography triggers
a mood or point of view about something, and I use those photos at the top of
my blog posts. A lot of times, though, I just plain set myself a writing
task—and do it.
Please share one of your successful author platform
building techniques
The best author platform I have so far is my blog, The
Minimalist Woman, which quickly acquired a lot of followers who were also in
search of simplicity, downsizing, and a way out of the buy-buy-buy culture.
It’s more writerly than the usual “10 ways to declutter” blogs, as I’m more
interested in the shift in mindset and the counter-culture perspective that
happens when one embraces minimalism. It didn’t start out as an author’s blog,
but rather one on a topic that concerned me. Since many of my readers tend to
be, well, readers, I’m able to
connect with people who are potential readers of my other writing, especially
the fiction. It certainly has helped me to connect with other writers.
Apart from that, though, I don’t yet have anything else that
works well as a platform, but I’m open to trying things out and seeing what
sticks. Twitter and Facebook take too much time, and Google+ so far lacks a
certain energy, but that might be because I’m not using it right. There are
also networks of readers and writers that I’ve recently become aware of, and
hope to find a few that are a good fit.
What are you working on now?
I’m currently writing my first cozy mystery novel, and
taking time to properly learn the craft—and learning to use Scrivener. I’m also
allowing 80,000 words written over the summer to simmer for a while before
whittling them down into more collections of flash fiction.
Parting words
Digital publishing has made all the difference in the world
for a lot of writers. It’s less mysterious and feels less at the mercy of some
faceless manuscript reader at a publishing house. It also isn’t as expensive—or
fraught with folly—as vanity presses used to be. Ebooks can also be updated. If
I want to rewrite something or format it better at a later date, it’s no big
deal, and the existing customer can redownload it without repurchasing. Writers
can now learn as they go, without feeling like one amateur mistake or bad
review will kill their careers before they’re barely off the ground. And a
print contract is still possible once you have a blog and a few ebooks out—it’s
happened to several writers I know, including my husband.
This also makes it possible to write the book you want to
write, in addition to writing for a particular market. I’m just getting
started, but I know that even if I don’t get picked up by a legacy publisher, I
can still have a market for my writing—and that’s a feeling I would have killed
for twenty-five years ago!
Who
taught you to knit?
I
taught myself with the help of a very skinny pair of needles, a ball of twine,
and an ancient book of knitting stitches and patterns that I found in a box in
the attic when I was a kid. Later, my great-aunt, the original owner of that
book of patterns, helped me to refine my technique.
What
knitting method do you use? Continental? English? Or...??
Primarily
English, but will use Continental with two-color knitting
What
is your favourite stitch pattern?
It
depends on the yarn. The best stitch is one that brings out the quality or
color or texture of the yarn, and vice-versa. That being said, I’m fascinated
by cables and Aran patterns.
What
is your favourite yarn?
Any
yarn that handles well and co-operates with me. My latest sweater was made with
Berocco Comfort DK, totally synthetic, and it is so soft, consistent, and
washes well. It was much less frustrating than the beautiful cotton/linen DK
yarn I used for a previous lightweight sweater. But I have had great projects
with wools and bulkier yarns, too.
Is
there a needle size that you prefer? Bamboo, plastic or steel needles?
Again,
that depends on the project and the yarn. Years ago I would have said size 11,
as I had no patience back then, and I actually had broom-handle needles, too.
Recently, though, I’ve used size 3 and enjoyed it. I’m fond of enamel-coated
steel needles for their smoothness and balance, which makes it easier to knit
without looking at the work or making a mistake.
What is
your favourite item to knit?
Very
simple no-pattern drop-sleeved sweaters, and free-form crazy quilts that
combine all sorts of yarns and fibers in various knit and crochet stitches.
Where
is your favourite place to knit?
On the
sofa in the living room while watching favorite programs on t.v. My knitting
basket is stored inside the ottoman, there’s a task light next to me, and a
small table for a cuppa tea—or spot of brandy on cold nights.
What
are you currently working on?
I’ve
just finished a tunic-length sweater and matching moebius scarf. Now I’ve got
some blue yarn to recycle from an old unraveled project, and am trying to
decide what to make with it.
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