Guest Post: Susan Van Kirk on The Powerful Gift of Words

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Visiting us today is bestselling author Susan Van Kirk. Susan and I were first introduced to one another by Lourdes Venard of Comma Sense Editing. This would have been in 2013, maybe 2014. Both Susan and I had written first manuscripts and we were filled with dreams of eventual publication for our cozy masterpieces. The dream came true for both of us, though we’ve both had a few bumps along the way (getting “orphaned” when our publishers closed shop being one of them). Knowing there was someone there to understand what we were going through, from those early edits on, knowing we could vent (and it would stay between us)…that’s powerful stuff.

But here’s the thing. Susan is also a former educator and she’s just released Mr. Vonnegut and Me (And Other Incredible Tales from a Teaching Life).  Take it away, Susan:

The Powerful Gift of Words

Sometimes gifts are returned to you in unique ways, often using words as their vehicle of choice. The universe has a way of doing this when you least expect it.

Since my first book came out sixteen years ago, I’ve written ten mysteries. However, my first book was a memoir about my forty-four years in classrooms. I recently revised it and launched it into the reading world again. Called Mr. Vonnegut and Me (And Other Incredible Tales from a Teaching Life), it consists of fifteen true stories written as creative nonfiction.

Before becoming an author, I was a single parent of three and a public school teacher. When my last child was a summer away from starting college, I went back to school for a master’s degree at the University of Illinois. I moved there for three summers, sublet an apartment, and finished my degree at age fifty. It was the first thing I’d done for myself since I’d married almost thirty years earlier and eventually divorced.

I took a course called Reflective Teaching, a course meant to help educators consider deeply the answer to this question: How did their beliefs and values influence their teaching? On one of my papers, my professor wrote a note saying, “Your writing has a wonderful voice, and your stories are incredible. Have you ever thought about writing a book?”

Well, no, Professor, I hadn’t, but her words stuck in my brain, and several years later I wrote my memoir. Her remark had given me a gift, one I’ve enjoyed over these sixteen years.

After the memoir came out, I received a letter from a former student who’d read it. In part, it said this:

“You know, I grew up in a family that loved me but had few expectations for me. My mother’s only requirement was that I graduate from high school. The fact that I brought home As and Bs was a bonus for them. My seven older siblings sure hadn’t. Anyway, since they were happy, I never learned to push myself…Now here I sit, working my way through a PhD program, planning to become a college professor.

“For years, I have held on to a memory of being in your English class. You assigned us to groups and had us ‘teach’ the class. None of my group members wanted to be the one who actually spoke. So, I stepped up and did the teaching. I clearly remember you writing the words, ‘you should be a teacher’ on my paper when you graded it. At the time, I didn’t think I would truly be good at teaching others. In reality, you apparently saw the flicker of a passion within me that I did not self-identify at the time. Now, I can’t imagine doing anything but teaching. I thank you for this gift.”

I tell this story not to brag, but to illustrate that the universe sometimes does work in unique ways, and words are the powerful tools it uses.

About the book

When Susan Van Kirk drove into little Monmouth, Illinois, in 1968—straight out of college, with her teaching degree in hand—she thought she was ready to teach English and speech to high school students. She didn’t realize she would both teach and be taught by a town, a school, and the students who entered her life. A veteran of forty-four years of public high school and college teaching, Van Kirk will take you on a passionate and unforgettable journey through one teaching life. Meet her students and experience the events that molded a rookie teacher into a veteran. This montage of stories covers the years 1968 to 2008; they describe her early fears about classroom discipline, plots to overthrow “the rookie,” handling drug overdoses, the devastating first student death, and a challenge to a major Kurt Vonnegut book in her classroom.
Mr. Vonnegut and Me (And Other Incredible Tales from a Teaching Life) is a second edition, and Van Kirk has added a new introduction plus updated material about where the students from the stories are now. These fifteen stories are incredible, inspiring, and filled with what makes us human. Find the book.

Susan Van Kirk

About Susan Van Kirk

Susan Van Kirk is the author of six Endurance Mysteries beginning with Three May Keep a Secret. Her standalone mystery, A Death at Tippitt Pond, was followed by the Art Center Mysteries: Death in a Pale Hue, Death in a Bygone Hue, and Death in a Ghostly Hue from Level Best Books. The third book of the trilogy was nominated for the Anthony Award for Best Paranormal Mystery of 2025. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and is past president of the Guppy Chapter of SinC. Find her at susanvankirk.com.

 

Guest Author – Eva Shaw, Ph.D.

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Where do original ideas come from?

Eva Shaw, Ph.D, author of Jane Won’t Quit

 

In addition to being a mystery writer, I’m a writing instructor, teaching remotely through Gale Courses/Education to Go, I thrive on mentoring emerging writers.  It’s fun and serious business.

As we all know, words have power and can encourage.  And scar.  Hence, I take great care with this responsibility with these budding authors and with the words I use.

Recently, a student asked, “Where do ideas come from?”

I hesitated and then blinked a dozen or 15 times.  Since this is remote learning, they didn’t hear my scream: “Holey guacamole, what do I say?”

This was the first time, in the years I’ve been teaching adult learners, that I’d been asked this question.

Truth be told, I never thought about it.  They just happened to enter my brain as tiny seeds and when tended, watered, weeded and grow to harvest.  (Can you tell I’m an avid gardener???)

But from where do they come?

I had to take Coco Rose for a long walk before I could wrap my head around this.  Here are my thoughts.

Original ideas are clobbered together from our experiences.  They’re what we read, see, talk about, smell, eat, turn our backs on, and hash out with friends.  We pull the tiny “seedling” ideas from reading, conversations, arguments, teachers, education, career, lovers, kids, pesky coworkers, friends.  From out in the crazy world and these confusing times.

They come barging into our lives dragging baggage, pain, joy, sorrow.  Memories.  The good and bad of it are thrown in the blender of life in 2026.

Not too long ago I visited a friend.  Opening the door, he was on the phone, so I waved and waited.  Then he said with shock edging his voice and to whomever he was talking: “Wait.  Don’t ever let her know you have that information.”  I knew at once that was an idea I’d have to use.  It may just be the first line in my next mystery.

Sometimes our ideas come from what we know for sure.  However, what if we don’t know much or anything about a possible idea?

Best-selling author Sebastian Junger explains away a hurdle many emerging and published writers face.  He writes in the afterword of the The Perfect Storm: “Writers often don’t know much about the world they’re trying to describe, but they don’t necessarily need to. They just need to ask a lot of questions. And then they need to step back and let the story speak for itself.”

He’s telling us, while we might not understand everything, we can trust the creative process.  I believe he’s also saying that if a weird idea pops up, give it a chance.  It could work.  Why don’t we do this often enough?  Fear throws us under the bus.  Yet, the more often we take these writing “detours,” the more interesting and entertaining our writing becomes.

When writing original ideas, we pretty much know where we want it to go, most of the time, and what we want to happen.  Then we start.  Ideas evolve, plots change, characters tell us the direction the story should head and to take Mr. Junger’s advice, we step back and let the story speak for itself.

I hope this quote from one of my favorite authors encourages you to do what you do: Write.

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” ~ Carl Sagan

© Eva Shaw, 2026

Jane Won’t Quit

Pastor Jane Angieski never quits—especially when vulnerable children are at risk. When a scandal inside a powerful Las Vegas megachurch exposes a sinister trafficking ring, Jane’s search for justice collides with Captain Frank Morales, a protector who knows she’s in danger. Attraction sparks, trust doesn’t. As powerful enemies close in, Jane and Frank must uncover the truth before the city’s darkest secrets bury them both.

Buy it now: https://amzn.to/4uR14J2

 

***

Eva Shaw, P.h.D with her dogEva Shaw is the author of the romantic suspense Jane Won’t Quit (Varus Publishing, 2026) and the ghostwriter of dozens of published books.  She teaches creative writing through Gale Courses/Education to Go and lives, with rambunctious Coco Rose, in Carlsbad CA.  Reach Eva at www.evashsaw.com and follow her @evashawwriter

Guest Noir Mystery Author M.E. Proctor

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Noir Mystery Collaboration

By M.E. Proctor

A few days ago, a friend posted a picture of New York in the 1940s, all neon and jazz clubs with big names on the marquees, accompanied by this caption: I want a time machine! Ah, to be able to go back in time to see legendary performers on stage … Don’t we all have these kinds of fanciful thoughts? Like traveling to 1889 to see the Eiffel Tower go up and hear people complain that it ruins the view. Or a day trip to catch a chariot race in Rome. Was it really like in Ben-Hur, and did they have snack vendors?

Alas, the technology isn’t there yet …

But I would argue that we have the next best thing in easy reach.

I’m not talking about the corny AI renditions of ‘life in the days of yore’ that proliferate worse than kudzu on every social media platform. Have you noticed that everybody looks suspiciously neat and clean and the cars are all shiny?

That’s also one of my movie pet peeves, by the way. The jalopies without a speck of mud … (I guess the car collectors wouldn’t let Hollywood borrow them without a guarantee of white-gloved treatment.)

I’m interested in a different kind of virtual time machine. Every time I open a book, I embark on a trip to a different place or a different time. Fiction or nonfiction, my mind provides the soundtrack and the image reel. I might even catch a whiff of a scent or a hint of a taste.

For example, as I write this, I vividly remember the beginning of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. She took me to Putney in the year 1500. Her writing gave me a front row seat. Imagine how Hilary felt when she was writing the book, totally immersed in the times. I’m convinced she breathed the same air as Thomas Cromwell. She definitely traveled in time, without a flux capacitor.

Russell Thayer and I experience the same extraordinary feeling when we jump back seventy-five years to create trouble for our two favorite characters—Vivian Davis, aka Gunselle, a professional assassin (Russell’s creation), and Tom Keegan, my San Francisco PD homicide detective.

Our first writing collaboration, Bop City Swing, was published last year. That story revolved around a political assassination in 1951. The book was barely in the hands of the publisher when we decided to have another go at it. Tom and Vivian were playing well together; they deserved another walk in the spotlights.

Russell and I play well together, too. We’re comfortable with the way we build a narrative, through a mix of late night brainstorming sessions and improvisation on the page, supported by reams of documentation. We know all the good gin joints and dance clubs. We have maps, stacks of photographs, favorite cars. We know the price of a cup of coffee and what music plays on the radio. Most of all, we are comfortable with the two main protagonists and their complicated relationship.

If a Train Leaves San Francisco at Noon on Friday, May 2, 1952 …

For our second collaboration, Kansas City Breakdown, Russell chose the setting. He’d spent some time in KC and wanted to relocate Tom and Viv to Missouri. An interesting challenge. The stack of background documents grew. New maps, new photographs. New rabbit holes. Train schedules, in particular. How do you get from San Francisco to Kansas City in 1952 and how long does it take?

Flying is too expensive, driving takes too long, and there’s no direct train connection. San Francisco to Sacramento. Then Reno. Salt Lake. Change trains in Cheyenne. Head to Denver, arrive in Kansas City Union Station. Two days on wheels. A lot can happen. We had so many ideas and ended shelving them all. NeitherTom nor Vivian took that train. She was on another one and he found a clever way to beat her to the destination. Plots have a tendency to do that. They’re good at throwing curve balls.

I suspect a jaunt in a real time machine would meet with the same kind of unpredictability. You might not land exactly in the right spot or at the right time, like in one of my favorite books, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book: Kivrin, a historian, travels to the 15th century. She’s prepared (or thinks she is). She wears the right clothes, she’s learned the language (but surprises are in store), and she knows the geography. The problem is that she misses the date mark and arrives as the Black Death marches across the land. Ouch.

Virtual time travel is a lot safer. I’ll let my fictional characters deal with the turbulences. Tom and Vivian look pretty relaxed on the book cover of Kansas City Breakdown. Don’t let it fool you. These two are a pair of very cool customers.

Kansas City Breakdown

May 1952

Mobsters, molls, and muscle are meeting in Kansas City to carve out territory, make deals, assert influence. They come from Chicago, Dallas, New Orleans, Detroit … By plane, by car, and, in the case of mid-level heavy Mike Abati, by train from San Francisco. The FBI sees an opportunity. A chance to get close to the man, gather information, and have eyes and ears on the conference. A honey trap.

Tom Keegan, San Francisco PD homicide detective, knows the right woman for the job. She’s smart and cool. Seductive. Fearless. A rare and fiery combination of brass and sass. Would she agree to put her life on the line? If her cover is blown, she’s dead. Besides, Vivian Davis, aka professional assassin Gunselle, doesn’t do favors for cops. But Tom is doing the asking and it makes Vivian’s heart beat a little faster.

The job isn’t all it appears to be. It comes with a side of betrayal. Because, after all, a girl has to look out for herself.

Buy Link

~~~

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. She’s the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries (Love You Till Tuesday and Catch Me on a Blue Day), two short story collections (Family and Other Ailments and A Book to Live By), and two co-authored retro-noirs with Russell Thayer (Bop City Swing and Kansas City Breakdown). Her fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. She’s a Shamus Award and Derringer Award short story nominee. She can also be found on Substack.

Russell Thayer’s work has appeared in Tough, Roi Fainéant Press, Mystery Tribune, Bristol Noir, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and Literary Garage among others. His novels include Bop City Swingand Kansas City Breakdown, co-written with M.E. Proctor. Russell received his BA in English from the University of Washington, worked for decades at large printing companies, and currently lives in Missoula, Montana. You can find him lurking on “X” @RussellThayer10.

Donnell Ann Bell

What I Learned When My House Burned Down

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I had a post all ready for this month’s blog. Then I opened my friend’s newsletter. After I read something that I consider much more poignant and timely, I asked if I could share. Please welcome Barbara Nickless to The Stiletto Gang. ~ Donnell

Author Barbara Nickless

Friends have called to ask if I’ve been triggered by the fires in Los Angeles. In short, yes. It’s an unsettling fact that more people than ever live in fire-prone areas known as wildland urban interfaces. With L.A. on everyone’s mind, I want to share what I learned when my home of twenty-two years burned down in a wildfire.

When I lost my home in Colorado’s Waldo Canyon Fire of 2012, I went—in the space of hours—from being a middle-class, tax-paying suburbanite to one of the shell-shocked homeless. Overnight, I found myself needy, helpless and so bone-deep tired I suspected a solid year of sleep wouldn’t fix it. Like anyone grieving or in pain or simply raw from the public weight of it all, what I wanted was the one impossible thing: to go home.

I passed through the classic stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Some stages, like anger, were brief. Others lingered for years, depression and bargaining looping back in unwelcome refrains. Denial reappeared, too, a kid poking her tongue in the place where there used to be a tooth, surprised by the emptiness.

But tragedy’s sharp-edged gift is that it brings unexpected growth. Pain reshapes us, expanding our capacity for understanding and wisdom. Here are a few things I’ve learned—and am still learning—about loss.

  1. Losing your home isn’t about karma or offending God or not packing well or living in the wrong place. It’s just life, and life is capricious.
  2. Do your best to eat regularly. Exercise. Go to bed at a reasonable time. As soon as you can, resume your regular pleasures—TV shows, books, coffee with friends, NPR on the radio. If you don’t yet have a TV or books or a radio, go to a friend’s house.
  3. When you start to run down that mental list of everything you lost, stop.
  4. Take comfort in knowing you may go the rest of your life without having to purge your closets. In a land where public storage is a multi-billion-dollar business, this is no small thing.
  5. When a friend complains about his junk drawer, smile and ask, “What’s a junk drawer?”
  6. Aunt Matilda’s bean pot. You hated it. Now it’s gone. And you don’t even have to lie about it.
  7. You have more friends than you realize. The ones who show up at the door of your hotel/rental/friend’s house/car (God bless you) with hiking boots or plates or a set of towels might not be the ones you expected. Tell them you love them.
  8. In fact, tell all your friends you love them. Life is capricious (see above). Don’t wait.
  9. You cared more about those stupid love letters and track ribbons and dorky high school pictures of yourself in big hair and platform shoes than you realized. That says wonderful things about your capacity for humor and self-love.
  10. Your mother will forgive you for losing her mother’s pearls. Your father will forgive you for losing his WWII pilot’s jacket.
  11. A home—not a house—is about emotional resiliency. Put your energy there. Have dinner with your family as often as you can. Kiss your loved ones morning and night. Listen to your kids when they want to talk. And if you are lucky enough to still have a mother, return her phone calls.
  12. It’s okay that you’re not okay. One day you’ll catch yourself laughing, and you’ll realize you’ve made it through the worst.

My heart goes out to everyone who lost their homes in L.A. If you want to take action, here’s how you can help:

  • Give to World Central Kitchen, which is providing meals to communities in Southern California.
  • From the Red Cross: “Help people affected by wildfires in California in 2025 by visiting redcross.org, calling 1-800-RED CROSS (800-733-2767) or texting the word CAWILDFIRES to 90999 to make a donation.”

About Barbara’s latest release: 

The Drowning Game has been named Best Book of 2024 by WRBH Reading Radio. “Although a difficult decision with so many good books, the winner of the 2024 WRBH Writers’ Forum Book of the Year Award is Barbara Nickless for The Drowning Game.” A huge thank you to the Writers’ Forum on WRBH!

“Ms. Nickless continues to be one of our best action/mystery writers. Her deep dives into her subject matter and smooth narratives always guarantee a great experience. Following Nadia down the twists and turns of international industrial espionage and spy craft is a thrilling ride, made more enjoyable by the interior monologues and richly drawn characters. More, please.”

–Amazon Reviewer

Photo of author Catriona McPherson

Special Guest – Catriona McPherson, The Bride Saw Red

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by Sparkle Abbey

Today we welcome a very special guest back to the blog and she’s chatting about the latest in her A Last Ditch mystery series – Scotzilla.

Catriona take it away!

 

SCOTZILLA opens at a wedding and we find Lexy Campbell, protagonist of six previous novels about the Last Ditch Motel, whom readers know to be a pretty laidback sort of a person, in full bridezilla mode, breathing fire and turning the air blue because her daisy-style flower fairylights don’t have five petals, which would have been acceptable, or even four petals which would have been an outrage, but three. Three! Like that last-minute, I-don’t-really-care, sales-point gift-flower the orchid. Or like irises. Pond flowers. As if Lexy is supposed to get married under a web of stinking fish lights!

Chapter one was a lot of fun to write. Even more fun was going back to six months earlier at the start of chapter two and slowly charting the gestation of the monster and the rise of her friends’ dismay at what they’re witnessing, alongside the seeds of the murder plot.

I don’t even think I’ve made her over-the-top. Anyone who reads Carolyn Hax has seen brides this uncorked and I heard of a real life example where my niece offered to pass on her wedding reception fairylights to a friend, in a spirit of generosity and in recognition of how expensive weddings are. The friend burst into tears at the news that someone else was having fairylights at their wedding before she did. Ummmmmm.

Not every bride, mind you. Another niece of mine got married this summer and arrived at the venue only to discover she’d forgotten her veil. Enh, she got married without a veil. And yet another niece (I’ve got a fair few) proudly wore white shoes that cost a tenner because, and I quote, “They’re going to get wrecked and I’ll never wear them again.” That’s my girl.

I never wanted a wedding of my own, and I don’t regret not having one, but that’s not to say I don’t sometimes enjoy them. At a good wedding, I love the ceremony, the speeches, the catch-up with family, sitting out “All the Single Ladies” and getting up for “Solid as a Rock”, the cup of tea that’s served after a couple of hours of dancing, along with savoury and sweet pastries, the tiny wee baby boys in kilts, the post-mortem on the way home . . . (Who was it who said that in a happy marriage you never tear each other down; you tear other people down together? Not me.)

What don’t I love about weddings? Or – to put in another way – what makes for a bad wedding? Well, when you think one of the couple is making a mistake. That’ll do it. (I’d love to be at a wedding where someone objects, soap-opera style. Does it ever happen in real life?)  A terrible DJ who wants to look cool and won’t fill the floor is a bit of a drag (see above: Beyonce/Ashford and Simpson). If there are enough Scots to warrant ceilidh dances but not enough to form a critical mass of people who know what they’re doing; that’s frustrating. Getting stuck with really hard-work people who make no effort to have fun but won’t stop hanging around you. (Same reason I’d never go on a cruise. I would be in the next cabin to and the same table as a crashing bore with no boundaries. And they’d live in the next town when we all got home again.)

What don’t I love about weddings that I probably shouldn’t admit to? Home-made vows. Love the speeches for the toasts, but oh my God the throbbing emotion of a home-made vow makes my toes curl so much I could snap my dancing slippers. (Although, I immediately start to remember exceptions to this rule. A wedding last summer had the sweetest and funniest vows anyone ever spoke – things like “I will always drive you anywhere you want to go because you hate to drive”.) But, usually, home-made vows. Also – the photographer. The time it takes, the hanging about for everyone, the knowledge that no one is ever going to look at 99% of these pictures. Ever. And if there’s a videographer too? Guess.

So my nightmare wedding would be an ill-suited couple of Instagram influencers, who wrote rhyming vows, blew most of their budget on the photographer and videographer and are determined to get their money’s worth, saved a few pennies by letting a relative – huge fan of modern jazz – be the DJ, banned all children, didn’t allow speeches, and one last thing. Where is this hellacious event taking place? Where else? At a “destination”.

Unless anyone wants to convince me that destination weddings are a great idea. No? Tell you what then: let’s really get going on this calamitous event I’ve started designing. What else does it need?  I haven’t touched on the menu . . .

 

Here’s a little bit about SCOTZILLA

Lexy Campbell is getting married! But in the six months of planning it took to arrive at the big day, she has become . . . a challenge. Friendships are strained to breaking point, Lexy’s parents are tiptoeing around her, and even Taylor, her intended, must be having second thoughts.

Turns out it’s moot. Before the happy couple can exchange vows, Sister Sunshine, the wedding celebrant, is discovered dead behind the cake, strangled with the fairy lights.

Lexy’s dream wedding is now not just a nightmare: it’s a crime scene. She vows not to get drawn into the case, but the rest of the Last Ditch crew are investigating a bizarre series of goings-on in Cuento’s cemetery and every clue about the graveyard pranks seems to link them back to Lexy’s wedding day. Will the Ditchers solve the case? Will Sister Sunshine’s killer be found? Will Lexy ever get her happy-ever-after? Not even Bridezilla deserves this.

Thanks so much, Catriona, for stopping by. We love stories set in Scotland and we love Catriona! So needless to say, we already have our copy of Scotzilla!

Photo of author Catriona McPherson

Serial awards-botherer, Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. She writes: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories about a medical social worker; and contemporary psychological standalones. These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comedies about a Scot out of water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California. SCOTZILLA is book number seven of what was supposed to be a trilogy. She is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.  www.catrionamcpherson.com

 

Book cover of Murder at Glenloch Hill

Special Guest – Historical Mystery Author, Clara McKenna

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by Sparkle Abbey

Today we welcome a very special guest to the blog –  our friend and fellow Iowa author Clara Mckenna who is has a fantastic release coming out later this month, Murder at Glenloch Hill.  More about that later.

First, we had some questions for Clara about her writing journey, her process, and more.  

Author Photo Clara McKennaBefore we get started with our questions, tell our readers a little about yourself. Maybe start with where you live, where you’re from, what you do beside writing, etc. Whatever you’d like to share.

I live in a Victorian farmhouse on the outskirts of Ames, Iowa, though I grew up in Upstate New York. I’m passionate about travel, which I do both for fun and to research my books (Why else would I set one of my series in the UK?). I love to hike, whether in a local park or in the Highlands of Scotland. Since there aren’t any tearooms nearby, I also enjoy hosting afternoon tea at home, using my ever-growing collection of vintage teacups, which I use daily and are not just for display.

And now to the questions.

What started you on your writing journey?

I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. I like to say I started with handmade greeting cards when I was four. I would always include original prose or a verse inside. I eventually graduated to poems, short stories, even a historical play when I was 12. I continued to write poetry throughout high school and college, having a few published in my college literary magazine. But it wasn’t until I’d changed careers twice as an adult, did I finally write a novel. And that, A Lack of Temperance, was my first published book.

What do you write? And why did you choose that genre or sub-genre?

I write what I like to call historical cozy mysteries. I have two series, the Hattie Davish Mysteries that follows a late 19th century American secretary who solves crime in every historic town she visits and the Stella & Lyndy Mystery series about an unlikely duo who mix love, murder, and horseracing in Edwardian England.

I chose the historical mystery sub-genre because I wanted to combine my love of mysteries with my passion for history. If I’m going to spend my whole day writing something, I want to love it as much as I hope my readers do.

What’s your favorite part of writing?

My favorite part of writing comes when I’m completely immersed in the story. Often, I’ll be so engrossed in the writing that I lose complete track of time, space, everything. I’m in the world I’ve created and when the words are flowing, there’s nothing like it. And since my mysteries are set in the early days of the 20th century, for me, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to a time machine.

And what’s your least favorite part of writing?

My least favorite part is the time required for me to write a book start to finish. It takes me a month to plot my books, two months to write a very rough draft, six months to edit my rough draft and two months to polish everything up. I’d love to write two books a year but until I figure out a way to edit faster (I’m looking at you, synonyms), I’ll only be able to publish one book a year.

How much do you plan before you start a book?

Since I write historical novels, and because my publishing editor requires that I submit an outline for his approval, I have quite a bit to do before I can start. My planning process has two aspects – an outline and historical research.

I start by creating a detailed scene-by-scene outline, which includes all the necessary plot elements like clues and red herrings. I then research the historical context – the topic, setting, and anything else that comes up from my outline. This ensures my plot is historically accurate and appropriate. Based on my research, I then adjust my outline as needed.

That being said, in the world of plotter versus pantser, I’m a “plantser.” I plot extensively upfront but remain flexible as I continue to research and write.

Where do your very best ideas come from?

My best ideas always come from when I visit the location of the book. When I do a site visit, I not only take in the sights, sounds and smells of a place, I do extensive research in local libraries, museum, and archives. Every time I come away with an array of plot elements, characters, and detail that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Who knew the New Forest had its own resident “snake catcher?”

What part of writing is the most difficult for you to write? Characters? Conflict? Emotion? Something else?

This may sound funny, but I struggle with writing humor. If I try to intentionally include humor, it always backfires and falls flat. Instead, I just write and hope it emerges organically in the right places at the right time.

And also smell – I never think to include it. Might have something to do with my poor sense of smell? I don’t know, but I always have to intentionally add it at the end.

What’s next? Tell us about your next book and when it will be published.

Book cover of Murder at Glenloch HillThanks for asking! My next book is MURDER AT GLENLOCH HILL, the 6th in the Stella & Lyndy Mystery series. It releases on November 26, 2024. Stella and Lyndy take a weekend trip to Scotland to visit her distant kin’s country estate and, as the blurb on the back of the book says, “learn how sinister bad sportsmanship can be when a prestigious golf tournament becomes a deadly game of murder…” Sounds pretty good, don’t you think?

We think so!  Thanks for stopping by, Clara. We’ve already pre-ordered our copies and can’t wait to read more of Stella & Lyndy’s story. 

For a complete list of Clara’s books, visit her website at: www.claramckenna.com

And to connect with her, you can find you on Facebook, Instagram, and BookBub with the following links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/claramckennawriter

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/claramckennaauthor/

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/clara-mckenna

Photo of author Catriona McPherson

Special Guest – Catriona McPherson

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by Sparkle Abbey

Today we welcome a very special guest back to the blog and she’s chatting about the latest in her Dandy Gilver series – The Witching Hour. Plus let’s talk about in-laws…

Catriona take it away!

“Two houses both alike in dignity” says Shakespeare of the Montagues and the Capulets at the start of Romeo and Juliet. (Off topic, but “Juliet Capulet” has always bugged me; I’d have swapped their names in the edit.)

And I suppose two houses can easily be alike in dignity but not in much else. When you’re wee, you think your family is normal and quite possibly all families are similar to it. But when you grow up and especially when you join families in a marriage . . . Well, I can’t be the only one who reads Carolyn Hax in the Washington Post. Second only to destination weddings – a pox on all of them, right? – her column is full of in-laws as far as the eye can see.

As THE WITCHING HOUR (Dandy Gilver No.16)  opens, Dandy and Hugh are gearing up to meet a prospective daughter-in-law. They’ve weathered one dynastic alliance (and survived the awkwardness of a corpse at the engagement-do) but now in the spring of 1939 their younger son is bringing a girl home and his track record is  . . . not unblemished.

Cover of book - The Witiching Hour

I love this jacket!

‘Cartaright?’ Hugh said. ‘Not Cartwright?’

‘Nor Carter-Wright,’ I assured him. ‘Teddy wrote it down for me to address the envelope.’

‘What address?’

‘London,’ I told him. ‘A 3F, I’m afraid. A flat. But north of the river. It’s so hard to tell these days. She could be anyone.’

‘Dolly Cartaright,’ said Hugh. ‘She sounds like a barmaid.’

‘I don’t care if she is a barmaid,’ I said. ‘Or a chorus girl, or even a . . .’ My imagination ran out.

‘An artist’s model,’ said Hugh. ‘Like What’s-her-name.’

‘I think she was a muse,’ I reminded him. ‘Although that might be the same thing, now I consider it at a distance. She was very . . . limber.’

Hugh rewarded me with a snort of laugher.

‘And I mean it. I don’t care. If she marries our son-’

‘If marriage isn’t too old-fashioned for her,’ Hugh chipped in.

‘And the call goes up for single men first-’

‘It won’t or only very briefly.’

‘-then she could pull pints of beer in the Atholl Arms for all our friends and I’d drive down to pick her up at closing time and offer a lift home.’

‘What friends of yours drink pints of beer in the Atholl Arms?’ Hugh asked me.

I rewarded him with a little snort of my own.

I remember meeting my in-laws. I was dressed all in black with a crew-cut and an attitude. They can’t have been thrilled, but Neil and I were only nineteen so they no doubt thought I’d soon be gone. Ha! How’d that work out?

Young Catriona and Neil

We were infants!

I do remember a formal meeting of in-laws in advance of one of my sisters’ weddings. My mum prepared an elegant meal then my dad came home with a punctured tyre, brought his bike into the kitchen and turned it upside down in the middle of the floor. A lively debate ensued.

I also remember sitting awkwardly in the living room at home with a set of in-laws-to-be in advance of a different wedding when a knocking noise came out of nowhere and all four of us girls stood up and left the room. There used to be a door there, see, and the wall is hollow so, when dinner was ready, my dad would knock on the hollow bit instead of shouting through the house. Seemed perfectly normal to us; looked like The Village of the Damned to strangers.

Then there was the fact that my dad didn’t drink either coffee (normal for Brits born in the 1930s) or tea (outlandish for Brits born anytime) so when visitors, including prospective in-laws, came and orders for hot drinks were taken, he was missed out and passed over. It wasn’t until someone said “Your mum looks so innocent but she rules with a rod of iron, doesn’t she?” that any of us realised the impression being given of a downtrodden and thirsty husband.

Library Offering

This was offered to me at a library once.

But that’s nothing, when it comes to food and drink and new alliances. I’ve got an American pal, Jewish, from Boston (these details are because I have no idea where her norms come from!), who married a Turkish bloke and, upon meeting her prospective family-in-law, politely cleaned her plate making yummy noises. Her mother-in-law-to-be replenished her plate. She cleared it. It was replenished. It was cleared. It was replenished. It was cleared. Only when the bloke started paying attention, which was thankfully before his mother had to send out for more food or his fiancée burst, did he say, “Oh yeah, babe? She’s gonna keep filling your plate till you leave something on it. And, anne, she’s trying to show she likes the food by eating it up.” Relief all round.

My sister’s mother-in-law is no longer with us so I can tell tales of her legendary and misguided culinary confidence without causing upset. You’ve heard the expression “a plain cook”? Well, this lady took it to soaring heights. She once opened a storage jar in my sister’s kitchen, saw muesli, pondered a while, recognised the rolled oats in the mix and made porridge with it. (I realise that this story is very British. The US equivalent would be making grits with granola.) Another time, she looked in my sister’s crisper drawer and found a head of broccoli. She thought Well that can’t be right and put it straight in the bin.

Photo of broccoli

It wasn’t even Romanescu!

All the weird and even annoying clashes of family norms become funny stories in the end, eh? I’d love to hear yours, Stiletto Gang. Can you remember meeting your in-laws? When did you realise you were in-laws? What’s the equivalent for single people? I know there’ll be one.

Here’s a little bit about The Witching Hour

It’s the spring of 1939 and Dandy Gilver, the mother of two grown-up sons, can’t think of anything except the deteriorating state of Europe and the threat of war. Detective work is the furthest thing from her mind. It takes a desperate cri de coeur from an old friend to persuade her to take on a case.

Daisy Esslemont’s husband Silas has vanished. It’s not the first time, but he has never embarrassed her with his absences before. It doesn’t take Dandy and her side-kick, Alec Osborne, long to find the wandering Silas, but when they track him down to the quaint East Lothian village of Dirleton, he is dead, lying on the village green with his head bashed in, in full view of a row of alms houses, two pubs, a manse, a school and even the watchtowers of Dirleton Castle. And yet not a single one of the villagers admits to seeing a thing.

As Dandy and Alec begin to chip away at the determined silence of the Dirletonites, they cannot imagine what unites such a motley crew: schoolmistress, minister, landlord, postmaster, park-keeper, farmworkers, schoolchildren . . . Only one person – Mither Golane, the oldest resident of the village – is loose-lipped enough to let something slip, but her quiet aside must surely be the rambling of a woman in her second childhood. Dandy and Alec know that Silas was no angel but “He’s the devil” is too outlandish a claim to help them find his killer. The detecting pair despair of ever finding answers, but are they asking the right questions?

Thanks so much, Catriona, for stopping by. We love stories set in Scotland and we love Catriona! So needless to say, we already have our copy of The Witching Hour. How about the rest of you?

Photo of author Catriona McPherson

Serial awards-botherer, Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. She writes: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories, including September 2024’s THE WITCHING HOUR; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories about a medical social worker; and contemporary psychological standalones. These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comedies about a Scot out of water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California. She is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.  www.catrionamcpherson.com

 

 

photo of umbrella and sun

Nancy J. Parra and the Dog Days of Summer

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with Sparkle Abbey

Today we’re thrilled to welcome longtime friend and fellow author Nancy J. Parra aka Nancy Coco aka Nell Hampton to the blog.  She’s a USA Today Bestselling Author and has over thrity-five published novels including five mystery series. And she’s also party to many of our conference adventures.  Nancy take it away…

Photo of Bichon FriseHi, ya’ll, thank you for letting me visit. I can’t believe how quickly summer has flown by this year. We’re in the dog days of summer now, which are technically July 3rd until August 11th, although that date has changed with the changing of the calendars. It’s still the hottest time of the year for the northern hemisphere. Are you feeling it? It’s hot and muggy here and it’s so easy to get heat stroke if you’re not careful.

I’ve been wondering for a long time why we call the hottest days the dog days. I mean, doggies are cute and sweet and silly. Then why name the hottest days after them? So, I looked it up.

It’s a very old idea whose history tells the tale of cultural minds. The whole thing began when we looked up in the sky and observed the dog star rising. People associated it with drought, storms, heat, human ailments, and mood changes. One culture said the dog days “made women wanton and the men feeble.”

But for us, it’s simply the hottest time of our year.

Still, it would make for an interesting twist in a mystery, wouldn’t it? Book cover for Three Fudges and a Baby

Allie McMurphy from Three Fudges and a Baby doesn’t think so. She has enough twists on her hands. Especially with handling her best friend, Jenn Christensen’s erratic moods. In her last few weeks of pregnancy where all she wants to do is get the baby out, Jenn’s doula is arrested for the murder of her fiancé.  Jenn has a meltdown. She’s tired of waddling, being unable to see her own feet and struggling to get up out of chairs. But she won’t have the baby without her doula and demands Allie as her best friend and the baby’s godmother to find the real killer. Perhaps the “dog days” could explain Jenn’s moods but nobody would dare tell her that. Besides it’s early May.

It’s a good thing Allie has her own cute pup who helps sniff out a killer before they all end up in the doghouse.

Tell me, how do you feel about the hottest days of the year? Are you someone who lives for them? Or are you ready to collect Halloween décor or start Christmas shopping?

Let me know your thoughts below and one lucky commenter will win a signed copy of Three Fudges and a Baby!

Nancy J Parra Photo

 

USA Today Bestselling Author, Nancy Coco AKA Nell Hampton AKA Nancy Parra is the author of over 35 published novels which include five mystery series: The Oregon Honey-comb Mystery Series (Kensington), The Candy-Coated Mysteries (Kensington), The Kensington Palace Mystery Series (Crooked Lane), The Wine Country Tours Mystery Series (Crooked Lane) The Gluten-free Baker’s Treat Mysteries (Berkley Prime Crime), and The Perfect Proposal Mysteries (Berkley Prime Crime).  Her writing has been called witty and her protagonists plucky by reviewers around the world.  Nancy is a member of Sisters in Crime and loves to hear from readers.

You can find her at:

Website

Facebook

Bookbub

 

Thanks for hanging out with The Stiletto Gang today, Nancy! We’ll be interested in everyone’s thoughts on the hottest days of the year. We’d have to say that we’ve had some challenging weather here lately and we’re definitely ready for some cooler days.

Wishing you and the rest of the gang a great rest of the summer!

Sparkle Abbey 

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