I’m taking a one-week break from a fresh posting here. It’s launch week for my book and I am delightfully busy. I’ve also been guest blogging, so you can check out my ramblings at several sites right now:
Crazy-for-Books: http://www.crazy-for-books.com/
Lesa’s Book Critiques: http://lesasbookcritiques.blogspot.com/2010/06/murder-in-abstract-by-susan-c-shea.html
also blog regularly at The LadyKillers: http://www.theladykillers.typepad.com/
Thanks for visiting.
“For Tim, forever.”
So, after several writing and revising years, the formation of a wonderful writing group, the extraordinary generosity and encouragement of some very classy authors, the miracle of finding a fabulous agent, and her success in finding a publisher in a tough market, my debut murder mystery is about to come out.
In the acknowledgements, I thank people by name. But, today I want to thank the one person I can’t walk up to and hug, the one whose copy of the book I can’t sign with all my love, the one whose face won’t be there, smiling proudly, when I start to read at a bookstore.
Tim Rose was my life partner for 18 years and a friend for almost as long before that. He was a gifted artist (www.mobilesculpture.com), a loyal friend, a loving dad, and an unswerving supporter of all my dreams. He believed in me to an extent that’s hard to explain and was even harder to escape. When I told him how difficult it was to get a book published, he said, “You just write it and it’ll happen.” To prove his point, he promptly wrote a book (okay, it was a short book), found a creative young friend to pitch it to Chronicle Books and, voila, there it was, Exploring the Fine Art of Mobiles.
I gave him some p.r. advice about getting attention for his beautiful artwork and he sailed into the project with no hesitation. The results: newspaper articles, television segments, a web site well before that was standard, good commissions. An education video company approached him and I now treasure his gentle voice explaining the process of creating a mobile. “Start from the bottom….”
A week before he died, sitting in our living room, surrounded by the friends who were with us every day, he said, “I want you to get an agent before I die.” I said that it was a hard task and lots of people worked years at it. My defensiveness probably frustrated him. He had no patience for self-doubt, rarely letting himself sink into that state. His consistent advice to other artists was “Go for it!” and he took his own advice.
When I found an agent, several months after he died, it felt miraculous, like a fairy godmother had waved a wand over me. Except I have a strong hunch my magical helper wore jeans and Balinese vests, and what he was waving was a pair of needle-nosed pliers.
So, here’s to you, Tim, with my thanks for your optimism and your faith in the people you cared about, and with my love, forever.
Launch events begin June 23rd.
Sophie Littlefield is a burst-onto-the-scene success who actually has been working at her craft for many years. She’s active in Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and Romance Writers of America, unfailingly collegial with other crime writers, and possessed of a self-deprecatory sense of humor. I hope you’ll enjoy a quick introduction to Sophie and her unconventional series protagonist in this short interview.
Your first book, A BAD DAY FOR SORRY (2009), garnered considerable positive attention and a number of award nominations. And, now, it’s out in paperback, sure to bring you more fans. How did you settle on a 50-year old victim of spousal abuse as your lead series character?
Stella Hardesty is a plain, plump, rural housewife who shocks her entire community by taking out her abusive husband after 30 years of marriage – and then she surprises herself by discovering that she’s good at delivering justice for other abused women. She’s really a hodge-podge of many of my own interests. Middle age became a lot more interesting to me when I arrived there myself, and there is a dearth of interesting middle-aged heroines that a reader can truly root for, so I set out to create one. Issues of image – particularly the disconnect between real women and society’s messages about self-worth being attached to how hot one is – are on my mind because I am raising a daughter. And as for making Stella the owner of a sewing shop, some readers might be surprised to know that I am a very skilled seamstress and quilter, though I don’t have time for much sewing these days!
Stella made me a little nervous at first – she seemed comfortable inflicting pain when it wasn’t in self-defense. Did you have any doubts about casting her as a hero?
I’m a bit of a contrarian – make that an irritable contrarian. I had noticed that we accept a great deal of violence in film and on TV from men, while women are rarely able to be violent without getting punished for it, even when the violence is justified. So while I am not a violent person or even an advocate for vigilantism, I was intrigued and irritated by the unfairness of it all, and Stella’s badassery grew out of that.
If you can have action films in which the hero blows away dozens of human beings and audiences barely blink an eye, why can’t we have a heroine who dishes out comeuppance to those who truly deserve it – the worst of the worst? (And it will probably come as no surprise to readers that I think people who prey on those who are weaker than themselves are true scumbags.)
You’ve mentioned having written nine, I think, other novels before A BAD DAY FOR SORRY sold? Were they mysteries? Was Stella in any of them? Will we see any of them in print?
Before writing SORRY, I wrote, in order: five romance novels (one of which was, um, “extra spicy”); two women’s fiction novels, one of which topped 170,000 words; and one police procedural. Also around two dozen true confessions and an equal number of literary and crime short stories.
I’ve always read very broadly, but I went through periods of focusing on different things and I generally wrote what I was reading. I spent my early adulthood reading mostly literary fiction and short story collections. Then I read women’s fiction and romance for a long time. Then I got more interested in crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers.
I am fond of my police procedural, which featured a young Pakistani-American detective and was set in suburban San Francisco, where I currently live. I could definitely see revisiting that cast of characters, probably with a different story.
There are one or two short stories which I occasionally wonder about, whether they could carry a whole novel. That’s how Stella got her start, actually. In the original short story, she was actually able to talk to the dead, in addition to owning a vengeance business. Also, it was set in the Nevada desert, rather than Missouri. I love that story! My brother read it and said “hey, you have a book here!”
The sequel, A BAD DAY FOR PRETTY (2010), is just out to great reviews. Congratulations! Are there more Stella books in the works?
Yes, thanks for asking, Susan! The third and fourth books will be out in spring of ’11 and ’12. I’m still working on the fourth, but the third has a fun plot that may or may not feature some gentlemen escorts. Also, Stella’s daughter Noelle makes an important discovery about herself that causes everyone a little consternation.
I hear you’ve just signed a contract for something entirely different.
Oh yes, I adore my new series! I am thrilled to be writing three books in a series for Harlequin’s Luna line. These are post-apocalyptic thrillers and they feature a heroine I’ve come to love, a damaged young mother who has to find reserves of strength she never knew she had in order to not only survive but thrive in a very different world. The first is titled AFTERTIME and will be out in March, 2011.
Sophie’s web site: http://www.sophielittlefield.com/
Book details:
A BAD DAY FOR PRETTY, St. Martin’s Minotaur, June 2010.
As a writer, I am not interested in telling the story of the physical act of murder – the knife point spearing tender flesh, the protective shield of the skull cracking open, the hungry lungs filling with alien fluid. In fact, it makes me sad to envision the human body overwhelmed and that miraculous machinery brought to a screeching halt through malevolence. What interests me greatly is what drives one person to be willing to inflict such violence on another. I am intensely curious about the mental processes of people who are about to do such horrible things or are required to live with having done them. Especially so-called “ordinary” people (although I do not believe anyone who kills is, at that moment, entirely sane).
When I think about which writers influence my own writing, they are not necessarily in the crime genre: Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment), Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Henry James (The Golden Bowl), Trollope (Barchester Towers), or Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), and others who probe the human psyche with brilliant insight. Almost none of the books I named include a murder, but they all have protagonists under pressure of one kind or another before the author ratchets up the tension through an action. The actions may be innocent, or casually taken, or peripheral to what seems like the protagonists’ lives. But they serve as catalysts for the writers to explore the ways in which we poor mortals try to cope with our personal worlds when they spin out of balance and beyond our control.
If that all sounds very academic, let me say that I write fairly light stories. After all, a lot of people go to pieces in funny ways and, when they lose the ability to think logically, are pretty comical. But I also think a great deal about why the butler did it in the kitchen with a pistol, or the maid in the parlor with a rope. For me, that’s the fun part.
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