Interview with women's fiction author J.M. Kelley

J.M. Kelley is here to tell us a bit about her newest novel, Daddy’s Girl.

She's also going to be giving away a gift basket of some of her favorite things, including a $25 Amazon gift card and a signed copy of the Foreign Affairs anthology from Turquoise Morning Press, to a lucky commentor.

So leave a comment below for a chance to win. And if you'd like to increase your chances, visit other tour stops and comment there too.

Bio:

Three years ago, native Pennsylvanian J.M. Kelley packed her bags and moved south. Now, the wannabe Carolina Girl can’t speak a single sentence without adding the word y’all at the end of it, and regards a blast of snow flurries as a doomsday-level event.  When the day job allows, and when she can pull herself away from George Takei’s Facebook fanpage, she likes to go on writing jaunts to her favorite lake, or a local coffee shop with delicious shakes and questionable Wi-Fi connections.

J.M. Kelley is a proud recipient of a Carrie McCray Memorial Literary award, and is a member of The South Carolina Writers Workshop and Romance Writers of America (PAN).

Welcome, J.M. Please tell us about your current release.

Daddy’s Girl is a work of women’s fiction, published by Turquoise Morning Press.

Sometimes, returning home isn’t about confronting your past; it’s about discovering your future.

Janie McGee, the black sheep of her family, is free-spirited, uninhibited, and never one to stay in the same place for too long. Despite a lifetime of never seeing eye to eye, when Janie learns her father, Joe, is gravely ill, she surprises even herself by returning home to rural Pennsylvania to care for him.

David Harris sports a pocket protector, collects coins, and is addicted to Antiques Roadshow. Everything about the man rubs Janie the wrong way, from his nerdy wardrobe to his enviable friendship with Joe. And to make matters worse, Janie’s father thinks they’re perfect for each other, proof positive of how little Joe knows his own daughter ... or so Janie thinks.

A shared devotion to the elder McGee begins to close the gulf between Janie and David, but a burgeoning romance opens the door to unexpected consequences neither could foresee. Joe, however, remains steadfast in his resolve to show Janie that Daddy knows what’s best for his little girl after all. Can Janie finally open her heart to David while watching the first man she ever truly loved fade away?

What inspired you to write this book?

This book was a way to work out the pain of losing my father, who died of lung cancer in 2007. Joe McGee is a fictional character, but he feels, in some ways, like the ghost of my own Daddy. Janie McGee isn’t really like me, but if we ever sat down to share a couple of beers, we would find a lot of common ground to bond over.

This is the book, I think, that I will always consider a doorway to my heart.

Excerpt:

Before he even opened the door, David knew something was off. Late night visitors, in his experience, rarely brought good news. When the visitor turned out to be Janie, his heart leapt into his throat. “Janie,” he said when he threw open the door. “What’s wrong? Is Joe okay?”

“Yeah. He’s fine.” Relief hit him so hard he took a step back and leaned against the doorjamb.

“You scared me.”

“I didn’t mean to.” Janie rubbed her hands up and down her arms and looked over her shoulder. “It’s cold out here. Mind if I come in?”

“Oh. Right.” David gestured for Janie to enter. “Come inside.” He followed when she slid past him and walked into the living room.

“It’s late.” As if she needed to tell him. The atomic clock on the wall, a Christmas gift from his mother, showed the time at almost two in the morning. Janie stood in the middle of the room and focused her gaze on the bookcase in the corner. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“I was reading. A little too wired to sleep, I guess.” David moved up behind her and raised a tentative hand to her shoulder. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

The sound of his voice jolted her out of her thoughts and she jerked her head toward him. Her movements were stunted. Wooden. “Ever have one of those moments when you’re convinced you may float away, and no matter what you do, you can’t keep yourself grounded? And you need to hang on tight to something until the sensation passes?”

Whatever was going on, he thought, she was not in a good place. David gently spun Janie toward him and gazed at her. “Tell me what you need from me.”

Janie closed her eyes and lowered her forehead to David’s shoulder. “Ground me, David,” she whispered and laid her hand on his chest.

What exciting story are you working on next?

My next story will be available in June of 2013. Almost Magic is a paranormal romance from Turquoise Morning Press, and I have a contemporary romance, She Let Herself Go, to be released in May of 2014, also from TMP.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

When I really, truly got that feeling that I was a real, honest-to-god writer was when my first novel, Drew in Blue, was nominated for Best Contemporary of 2010 by The Romance Reviews. I knew I didn’t have a chance of winning, considering the competition, but the mere fact that my story was remembered and included in the list of nominees was so thrilling. It truly was fantastic just getting that nomination (and losing, rightfully so, to the lovely Nora Roberts).

Do you write full-time? If so, what's your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?

I have a day job. The schedule changes from week to week, day to day, hour to hour. I never know what I’m going to get, and boy, it makes writing hard. But, I have to keep a roof over my head, so I make it work. Usually. A lot of times, I am hurtling towards a deadline with my brain frozen, my body tired, and my fingers unwilling to put together a coherent sentence. In the end, it all works out, though. Let’s hope it continues that way!

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

Well, I might be the sloppiest writer out there. I will start at the beginning, then pick up at the end, write backwards for a bit, come up with five chapters of mostly dialogue, then decide I need a new ending…is that quirky, or is that just flat-out insane?

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I have a long list of oddball careers I wanted to join when I grew up. There was about a month-long period in which I decided I had to be a Ghostbuster. I just had to. Sadly, I found out that there’s no such thing as a Ghostbuster, and I would never, ever get my hands on a proton pack.

Links:

E-mail: readers@jmkelleywrites.com

Website: http://www.jmkelleywrites.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/JM-Kelley/108021242585994

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AuthorJMKelley

Daddy’s Girl purchase links:

Turquoise Morning Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Smashwords | AllRomance | Omnilit 

Interview with mystery author Judy Alter

Please give a friendly welcome to mystery author Judy Alter. She's here to talk about her newest book, Skeleton in a Dead Space, and all the other fun parts of her life.

Judy, please tell us a bit about yourself.
I have been a reader and a story teller since childhood and wrote my first stories at about the age of ten. I majored in English in college because I liked to read and I was going to get married and some man would take care of me—no career plans for this child of the 1950s. But that didn’t quite work out as I planned, and in my early twenties I began writing nonfiction medical articles for laymen. After earning a Ph.D., I was startled to realize I could write a novel. My first, After Pa Was Shot, pegged me as a juvenile author, a pigeonhole that it’s hard to break out of. But I had a good career writing fiction and nonfiction, for adults and y/a readers, mostly about women of the American West.

Tastes changed, and I didn’t publish for almost ten years. As I neared retirement, I began to write cozy mysteries—I’d read them all my life. Although I’d published in New York and had agents, the mystery world and the changing publishing industry were all new to me. I’ve learned a lot from Sisters in Crime and their subgroups, such as Guppies. I have a couple of abandoned mysteries in my stack, but my first published one, Skeleton in a Dead Space, launched August 29 from Turquoise Morning Press, and I hope to continue the series. The protagonist, Kelly O’Connell reflects some of my own experience as a single parent—but I surely never was involved in investigating a murder. I just read about them.

For almost thirty years, my daytime job was director of a small academic press—a very different publishing hat, but work I loved—my two careers supported each other nicely. I am the single parent of four grown children and the grandparent of seven. I live in Fort Worth, Texas, with my Australian shepherd, Scooby, and my aging domestic longhair cat, Wywy, and a new three-month-puppy, a Bordoodle (cross of a border collie and a poodle) named Sophie. I spend a lot of time puppy training these days, but I’m hard at work on the third volume of the Kelly O’Connell series. The second is already turned in to the publisher.

Please tell us about your current release.
Skeleton in a Dead Space features Kelly O’Connell, a single parent of two young daughters and owner of a real estate business that specializes in refurbishment traditional houses in an older neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas. Kelly never thought real estate was a dangerous profession. But while updating an early-twentieth-century Craftsman house, she stumbles over a skeleton and begins unraveling an old murder. The police call it a cold case, but Kelly knows she must solve the murder if she is to finish the house and sell it. She and her two young daughters quickly become the target of threats and vandalism, and someone is telling her ex-husband in California what’s going on. Tim Spencer arrives to protect his daughters by taking them to California with him but is soon found shot to death. Then a new client barges into Kelly’s life, and she finds herself facing a gun, a deadly killer, and the solution to the mystery of the skeleton and Tim’s death.

What inspired you to write this book?
Determination to write a published mystery. I thought about creating a heroine who was a little different—not the owner of a craft store or a bakery—and decided on a real estate agent. I added the Craftsman house touch because I love old houses. Also I have a dead space in my kitchen, which we’ve wondered about for years, and one day I passed a house under reconstruction that clearly said to me, “This is the house of your mystery.”

What exciting story are you working on next?
A sequel to Skeleton involving a serial killer who targets little old ladies in the neighborhood is already turned in to the publisher, and I’m working on the third book in which Kelly is stalked and her new husband police officer Michael, injured in an automobile accident, is unable to protect her. That’s about all I know about it so far. I’m a pantser, not an outliner.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
At the age of ten, when I began writing short stories on lined paper. My mom saved them, and I have them somewhere in the attic.

Do you write full-time? If so, what's your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Since I retired writing is pretty much my full time occupations, but I am easily distracted by household chores, cooking, lunch invitations, etc. Grandchildren can always entice me away from writing. I do try to work in the mornings—but that includes catching up on emails and blogs and FB and, if I’m inspired, Twitter. Twitter is still hard for me. Early afternoons are often good times for writing but then I quit for a nap—one of the privileges of retirement—and somewhere I try to work in either 40 minutes of yoga or four miles on my stationery bike. Late at night, I read for pleasure.

When I’m not writing, I spend a lot of time reading recipes, planning meals for guests, and cooking. My secret ambition: to be a chef (I’ll never do it—my aging feet couldn’t stand it!).

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I think, unfortunately, that my quirk is that I’m haphazard about it. I don’t force myself to spend a certain amount of time at the keyboard, although I am pretty compulsive about checking my word count. I don’t check my Kindle and Smashwords sales daily, I tune out technical discussions about computer programs on various listservs. I’m all for the non-marketing approach to marketing. I want writing to be fun for me and for that fun to reflect in what I write.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A writer

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I spent a week in Scotland in the spring and came away inspired with new story ideas. I’d love to stay on Skype for two weeks and just write!

Launch parties: a local grill, mentioned several times in Skeleton in a Dead Space, will host launch parties at 7 a.m. on Saturday Sept. 24—they get lots of early Sat. morning customers who bring their books and read while they eat breakfast—and again at 5:30 on Monday, Sept. 26 to catch the dinner crowd. Seems an ideal set-up for a signing to me—caters to the local neighborhood, setting of the novel, and I don’t have to buy wine, nibbles, whatever. It’s all there for purchase. I’m really looking forward to it.

Thanks for being here today, Judy. You sound like you have a lot of fun with your writing.