How/why did you
start to write?
I
love to read and I’ve always written, ever since I can remember. I majored in
English and History, because of that love of reading and because I’m fascinated
by history. Those early influences are showing up in everything I write now. I
also love to paint—though it too often takes a back seat to my writing—and that
has definitely influenced the way I see the world and what I choose to
write.
How did you
become an author?
I
had an idea for an historical mystery, featuring the fourth son of an English
Baron, who goes to the Klondike to strike it rich, and winds up in Vancouver
hungry and broke. While I was researching, I came across the silk trains, and
was intrigued. I had never heard about the sleek steam liners that carried a
fortune in silk from the Orient to Vancouver at the turn of the last century.
The costly silk, insured by the day, was rushed to New York in specially
designed trains, which became the target of every crook across the continent. My
main character gets a job guarding the silk trains, and I was
off.
John
Lansdowne Granville proved to be an engaging character to write, and I loved
researching the history of the Klondike Gold Rush, silk trains and Vancouver in
1899. That book became The Silk Train
Murder.
What was your
first published piece?
I
pitched The Silk Train Murder to an editor from New
York at the Surrey Writer’s Conference. He liked the manuscript, and it was
published by Carroll and Graf in 2007. The Silk Train
Murder received starred reviews from Booklist
and Quill & Quire was nominated for an
Arthur Ellis award for Best First Novel.
The
second book in that series—The Lost Mine Murders
(because I was intrigued by a legendary lost mine outside
Vancouver)—came out in 2011 and the third book—The Missing Heir
Murders (because I was intrigued by the black sheep sons of the English
nobility, who came to the Canadian frontier as Remittance Men)—will be published
in 2014.
I’ve
also published four books in a contemporary mystery series—the Barbara O’Grady
books—which are also set in Vancouver. Barbara too is a fun character to write.
She’s a P.I. with a love of art and history, and her cases draw her back into
the past and into the nastier corners of the art world. The fourth book in that
series—A Shadowed Death—was published in December. (The other Barbara
books are Death of a Secret, Death of a Threat and Death of a
Lover.)
What did you do
before embarking on your writing career? Was it an asset to your writing?
How?
I
spent most of my non-writing career in offices of one kind or another, working
in everything from the mailroom to budget planning to human resources. The
variety of jobs I’ve held was and is an asset to my writing, because all of it
was about people and people’s interactions with each other. I learned a bit
about business along the way, and that pops up in my writing, too.
What inspires
you?
I
love story-telling, and it’s the lure of a good story that gets me every time.
People, “what if?” and “but why?” questions inspire me, as do quirky ideas, and
forgotten bits of history and research. The challenge of bringing the past to
life—in edgy historicals and contemporary mysteries with roots deep in the
past—is one of the things that keeps me writing.
Please share one
of your successful marketing techniques
I’m something of
a reluctant marketer, though I do keep my website up-to-date. Beyond that, I think writing books I’m passionate about—with
characters who come alive for me, and I hope will for my readers—is really
critical, because it gives me something I feel good about
sharing.
Once the book is
done, though, writing a series and having more than one book available in that
series seems to have been my most successful marketing strategy so
far.
Parting
words
Writing is a
solitary pursuit, and you have to love it for its own sake, but it’s sharing the
writing world with readers and with other writers that makes it
real.
Author
Links
website:
www.sharonrowse.com
