Diane Gilbert Madsen - Q and A - Part 2

Editor's Note: Welcome back to Diane Gilbert Madsen for Part 2 of our Q&A!

Diane Gilbert Madsen Q&A - Part 2

CMM: Do you have a favorite place to write: office, library, under the stars? Under the stairs?

DGM: I usually write in my office which is in my home. I live on a five-acre parcel in rural southwest Florida called Twin Ponds. My office desk is positioned in front of a window overlooking Sunrise Pond, making it sometimes hard to concentrate, like the time I spotted a Florida Panther at 8:30 AM walking slowly around the pond toward my house. I suspect he’d just had breakfast because he was very lethargic and sat down on the apron of my garage with his rump against the garage door. It’s quiet and the desk is big – my husband put it together for me so I can spread out ideas and workbooks and research papers. I like to have classical music playing in the background. I have two little Japanese Chins, Sugar and Spice, and they always go into the office first thing in the morning – so you know I’m a creature of habit.

CMM: You do talks and booksignings… have you had any interesting experiences during that?

DGM: I love booksignings. You get to meet the most interesting and friendly people and you often get to hear from other people who’d like to write. I love to meet fans of my work who’ve read my book and want to get it inscribed. At a recent booksigning, I had Gary Reinstrom, the piper, come for a few hours. He and my video were the hits of the evening. It was around Christmas and he played Christmas songs on the pipes. It was wonderful.

CMM: Reviews are a mixed blessing for most authors; we love the good ones, hate the bad ones, and know they are just one person’s opinion. How do you deal with negative reviews? Do you even read reviews?

DGM: I just read an article on bad reviews and how a writer should NEVER comment on them. That being said, I regard reviews as a marketing tool. Good reviews help sell books and bad ones don’t. Obviously I desire to have good reviews, which “A Cadger’s Curse” has luckily garnered. But tastes vary – thank goodness – and not everyone is going to love you or your book.

CMM: Did you always want to be a writer growing up, or did you have other aspirations?

DGN: Growing up, I loved to read and went to the library faithfully every Saturday. I would read anything, but I was especially attracted to mysteries. When I was in grammar school, my cousin Sharon and I (in the same grade) liked to write “little mysteries.” We would do alternate chapters and amaze ourselves at how the plot turned out. I also loved the business world, and went on to become the Director of the Economic Development Department of the State of Illinois where I was in charge of the Tourism and Film and Economic Development offices. Then I owned my own business for over 20 years, including my own grantwriting business here in Florida - talk about the urge to write and the urge to murder. The more I learned about the business world, the more I wanted to write mysteries!

CMM: What do you read? Any favorite authors?

DGM: My favorite authors are Doyle, Sayers, Christie, Tey and John Dickson Carr. I like to read Michael Connelly and Stuart Kaminsky (especially the Lew Fonesca series set in Sarasota), anything by Dick Francis, Nicholas Blake, Amanda Cross, Patricia Wentworth, Sara Woods, Barbara D’Amato, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, and John Dunning. There are so many good mystery writers out there right now, I can’t name them all. It’s like a feast - the second golden age of great mystery writers. I also like history and biography. Right now I’m in the middle of reading “The Gardner Heist” by Ulrich Roser; “Forty Odd Years in the Literary Shop,” by James L. Ford; “Scotland is not for the Squeamish” by Bill Watkins; “To the Tower Born,” by Robin Maxwell; “The Egyptologist” by Arthur Phillips; and “The Book of Air and Shadows” by Michael Gruber.

My website is: www.dianegilbertmadsen.com

Thank you so much to Diane Gilbert Madsen for joining us here at Cozy Murder Mysteries!

Diane Gilbert Madsen - Q and A with the Author! - Part 1

*From the Editor: Welcome to Diane Gilbert Madsen. Here is a brief 'About the Author' to whet your appetite! 'Chicagoan Diane Gilbert Madsen has an M.A. in 17^th century English, was the State of Illinois Economic Development Director, and later ran her own consulting firm. She’s listed in Who’s Who in Finance & Industry and the World Who’s Who of Women. Fascinated by crime, history and business, her interest in writing murder mysteries was sparked when she met someone convicted of murder who was later exonerated. The encounter caused her to rethink how people form their first impressions of murder suspects. “A Cadger’s Curse,” is the first in the DD McGil Literati Mystery series, published by Midnight Ink. Diane and her husband Tom now live in Florida at Twin Ponds, a five-acre wildlife sanctuary.' Thank you to Diane for taking the time to do this.

*Note... today, coincidentally, is Robbie Burns Day (The Cadger's Curse involves Robbie Burns!) The Scot would be 251 today. Raise a glass of whatever you tipple!

Q&A with Diane Gilbert Madsen

CMM: First, tell us a little about your writing history… did you write before the DD McGil series?

DGM: I’m an English major and our curse as well as our blessing is that we all write -- or try to. I did write an early murder mystery called “Wild Life” centering around art forgery, but it never got picked up. Then I was interested in writing True Crime but got diverted when I started the DD McGil Literati Mystery series.

CMM: Now tell us about your DD McGil Literati Mystery Series; where did the idea for the series come from? What made you decide on a literature theme for your mysteries?

DGM: The Literati Mystery Series is a melding of my two interests, history and mystery. I like to read about famous authors. They all have some hidden mysteries in their own adventuresome lives. I like to take these incidents in authors lives and speculate on how the story might have continued after the final page. So I decided to combine my speculations about incidents in authors lives with my other passion – mysteries - and create the Literati Mystery Series. In the first book in the series, “A Cadger's Curse – The Robert Burns Affair,” the mystery revolves around an incident in Robert Burns’ life. The mystery took shape when I read that Burns had taken a diamond tip pen and boldly scratched a treasonous verse on the window of the Lion’s Head Inn in Stirling. It was a wild and crazy thing to do and could very well have cost him his life.

CMM: You have a book video for A Cadger’s Curse… how did that come about? Did you do the video yourself or did someone else do it for you?

DGM: I love all the book trailer videos. I had one done through COS productions. They worked closely with me and were excellent. I had a friend, Gary Reinstrom, who is a Jacobite piper from Sarasota Florida who teaches the bagpipes, and he did a special arrangement of Auld Lang Syne which we used as the music for the video. It turned out fantastic. I use the book trailer video at speaking engagements and book signings, and it’s been very enthusiastically received. I definitely plan on doing another one for my next DD McGil Literati Mystery, Hunting for Hemingway.

CMM: How do you create characters that can/will sustain a series of books? Do you know everything about them going in, or does that come bit by bit as you write the books?

DGM: Characters need to grow and develop and take on a life of their own during a book and from book to book in a series. In my case, I believe if I simply plot out a character, that character would turn out very wooden. Sometimes a character surprises you and takes over and you find yourself writing things in a rush, not really knowing where it’s all coming from. In A Cadger’s Curse, that happened with Aunt Elizabeth, or the Scottish Dragon, as she’s referred called.

CMM: Cozy mysteries generally take place in a small town, but you’ve set your DD McGil series in Chicago. Was that a conscious choice? Tell us about your decision making process?

DGM: Location, location, location! Maybe all cozy mysteries don’t have to take place in small towns. I would classify my mystery, A Cadger’s Curse, as “a slice of life” – a

“not-quite-cozy” rather than a “cozy.” I believe my story worked out very well in a large city where my heroine, DD McGil, can rely on a number of contacts offered in a large city. The larger venue also allows interactions which come out of “left-field” and keeps the mise en scene changing and unexpected. I don’t think I’m the only writer who’s done a “not-quite-cozy” in a big city. I wrote about Chicago because it’s my hometown, and I know it well and love it. I lived and worked there until I moved to Southwest Florida. I visit often and have many friends and family there and my visits keep me up to date on the city I love. Like politics, I think all stories are local, and if you have a feel for a city or town, I believe you can make the venue work - even in a cozy or a “not-quite-cozy.”

Check back here Wednesday for Part 2 of Diane Gilbert Madsen's Question and Answer with Cozy Murder Mysteries!

Why I Write Mysteries - Diane Gilbert Madsen

Editor's Note: Welcome to Diane Gilbert Madsen, who writes the DD McGil Literati Mystery series, published by Midnight Ink. From Diane's Website: "The DD McGil Literati Mystery Series features DD McGil, Insurance Investigator, probing the true mysteries and secrets that famous authors have in their past. The series gives readers an intriguing blend of mystery and history. If you think you know all there is to know about Robert Burns or Ernest Hemingway, you’ll discover some interesting – and deadly – mysteries afoot – all set in today’s world of academic and corporate treachery."

Why I Write Mysteries

Diane Gilbert Madsen

Since the November 1, 2009 publication of “A Cadger’s Curse,” the first in the DD McGil Literati Mystery Series, this is a question I’ve been asked frequently, (why I write mysteries) and I find myself not giving any one answer.

One of the obvious answers is that I like to write, and I like to read mysteries, so I’m writing what I’d like to read. My goal is to write an entertaining, amusing story with a good plot, engaging characters, and clues that are fair but still manage to misdirect the reader. I’m not striving to be socially relevant, and I don’t espouse causes. I leave that to others. I’m striving for goode olde entertainment. (Don’t you just hate it when people add all those extra “e’s?)

Another reason (and you probably won’t hear this from a lot of writers, but I’m being perfectly honest) is that over the years I’ve run across a number of people I don’t like, and writing mysteries give me a chance to kill off these folks. What a thrill to achieve the great satisfaction of getting rid of my foes and not have to suffer any real consequences! “A Cadger’s Curse” has five murders -- five being better than one. My husband Tom tells me I’ll never have to see a psychiatrist because I purge all my angst through the murders in the books. Tom also tells me he’s sure I’ll never run out of villains. (Does this mean he thinks I’ve made a lot of enemies?)

One unintended consequence of writing mysteries is that I have found people love to talk to a mystery author. It is great fun to talk with mystery fans, whom I find are invariably knowledgeable and friendly with wide ranging interests. Many fans want to write their own mystery novel, and they like to get reinforcement to convince them that it can be done.

Writing mysteries gives me an opportunity to combine a good mystery plot with interesting bits of history. I’ve always been interested in both mystery and history, and combining them both in my DD McGil Literati Mystery Series has been a fun challenge. I enjoy doing the research. For “A Cadger’s Curse,” I researched a true incident in the life of the great Scottish Bard, Robert Burns. In the second of the Literati Mystery Series, “Hunting for Hemingway,” coming out in September 2010, I take the consequences of a pivotal event in Hemingway’s life into modern day Chicago. The third in the Literati Mystery Series focuses on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1894 trip to Chicago.

When I attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, I loved to write. Many of my fellow students who had trouble with their English Lit papers would beg me for help. The papers I wrote for them all got “A’s” for my efforts, but my professor would not give me an “A,” try as I might. Soon this was the joke of the campus and stayed so through the years. That’s why “A Cadger’s Curse” is dedicated to my college roommate, Alta Sumner, with these words, “Thanks for helping me remember and helping me forget the infamous Dr. Bailey.”

A Cadger’s Curse – Midnight Ink – November 2009

Hunting for Hemingway – Midnight Ink – September 2010

http://www.dianegilbertmadsen.com

A Corpse for Yew review

I thought I would share with you a great review of our friends Jim and Joyce Lavene's new Peggy Lee Gardening mystery.

Have a look! Click on the book cover to go to the review!


Sounds great, and I can't wait to check it out!

Click on the linked graphic above to get to Sharon's Garden of Book Reviews
and enter to win during cozy Mystery Week!

Cozying up to... Jim and Joyce Lavene - Part 3

We continue our Cozying Up to Jim and Joyce Lavene series with some more questions and some contact information!

Donna - There has been some concern that ‘cozy’ as a designation is a slight to the sub-genre (I don’t think it is, but some authors apparently feel so.) How do you feel about the designation ‘cozy’ for your murder mysteries?

J&J - We think most readers don’t know what that means. Cozy mystery like any other subgenre is a writer’s term. We have to know what it means so we can send our stuff to the right editors and market it. But readers just know what they like to read. They might enjoy a cozy today and read a police procedural tomorrow. Most people happily read across the spectrum without ever knowing the difference.

Donna – You wrote ‘The Everything Guide to Writing a Novel’ and teach classes and workshops on writing. Are there any skills to do with writing that you think can’t be taught?

J&J - Voice. No one can teach you HOW to tell a story. We can teach people how a story goes together; verbs, nouns, sentences, plot, character, but if they can’t put it together in a way that a reader finds interesting, it doesn’t mean anything. Voice is what makes two writers, telling the same basic story, completely different.

Donna - Why murder mysteries? What is it about the genre that led you to writing them?

J&J - We started out writing romances but the genre was so limited. Our editor kept saying we had too much plot. This isn’t meant as any slight on romance. If you can write it, you’re lucky! But we couldn’t stay in the pocket with the basic formula. We started experimenting with other genres and have published fantasy, science fiction, romantic suspense and others. Mystery seems to fit us best right now. Not sure why really. We like to have whole characters that have whole lives with jobs and friends and family and problems that don’t just revolve around them. Maybe we like to kill people too. Who knows?

Donna - Do you both read murder mysteries? If so, what are your favorite authors?

J&J - We both read a little of everything. Jim’s favorite authors right now are Charlaine Harris and E.E. Doc Smith. Joyce’s are Loretta Chase, A.E. Maxwell and Simon Greene.

Thank you so much, Joyce and Jim, for being my first guests here at CMM. I want to encourage everyone to check out Joyce and Jim’s wonderful array of murder mystery series. Here is some information that will help you find out all about them!

Website: www.joyceandjimlavene.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Joyce-and-Jim-Lavene/54780722723?ref=ts

Twitter: @author54

Blog Spot: http://carolinaconspiracyblog.blogspot.com/

Carolina Conspiracy: www.carolinaconspiracy.com

Cozying Up To... Jim and Joyce Lavene - Part 2

Today we continue our three part interview with Jim and Joyce Lavene.

Donna - You live and work in North Carolina; how does where you live affect your writing? Did it influence writing a stock car series, for example? Do you set all your books close to home?

J&J - North Carolina is a weird state. We mean that in a good way! It has rivers that flow backwards, fairy crosses, strange phenomena like the Brown Mountain lights and a love of history. It’s a good place to live and work. It probably didn’t influence NASCAR because that sport has grown to almost every corner of the earth. We do set many of our books at least close to home (Wilmington, Myrtle Beach, Duck are places we like to go) probably because you can find a little of everything here. We’re two hours from the mountains and two hours from the coast. Like California without all the mansions!

Donna – I’m intrigued by your note on the Midnight Ink site that your pets ‘help’ you write. How?

J&J - Quincy won’t let us write unless he’s in the office too. He howls if we don’t let him in and hogs up all the space when we do! We had to have a bigger desk to accommodate him since he has to lay in front of the monitor. He has this uncanny ability to sneak up and lay his paw on the zzz key. We’ve come to acknowledge that it means we’re writing boring stuff and look to see what we can do different.

Donna – You are very prolific as a team; what is your schedule like: writing, family, down time, etc?

J&J - We write six days a week, half chapter per day. We usually do at least one set of revisions (for another book) during the rough draft part of each book. The rest of our writing time is taken up with promotional things; website, blogging, setting up promotional events for ourselves and the Carolina Conspiracy, our group of mystery authors that we promote with.

We are fortunate to have our whole family living close by and see them almost every day. Sometimes that takes up even more time when our son, the pizzeria owner, needs a spare pizza delivery guy or our daughter, the bookstore owner, needs some help with something. But we love being part of their lives.

As far as downtime, we like to drive around the back roads looking for anything unusual. We love taking pictures too! Jim likes to putter with his (and other people’s computers) and Joyce likes to do some watercolor painting. We even manage to sneak in some TV occasionally and enjoy movies and reading.

~::~

That’s all for now… but come back Friday for the final installment - as well as contact information and lots more - of Cozying Up To… Jim and Joyce Lavene.

Cozying up to... Jim and Joyce Lavene - Part 1

Today I'm launching my new Question and Answer feature "Cozying Up To..." First up, I will be Cozying Up To... Jim and Joyce Lavene, authors of several murder mystery series.

Good Morning, Jim and Joyce. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this Q&A. You’re my very first blog guests! I understand you have several murder mystery series. Could you tell me a little about each?

J&J – Here is a brief explanation of each of our series.

Peggy Lee Garden Mysteries – Peggy Lee owns a garden shop in Charlotte, NC and teaches botany at Queen’s University. She uses her special knowledge of plants, especially poisonous plants, to help the Charlotte Police solve murder mysteries.

Renaissance Faire Mysteries – This series is set in a Renaissance Faire in Myrtle Beach, SC. Our protagonist is Jessie Morton who is working on her dissertation that involves being apprenticed to different craft people in each book. We’ve tried to capture the crazy, fun atmosphere of going to a Renaissance Faire in these books.

Pet Psychic Mystery – Our pet psychic is Mary Catherine, a Wilmington, NC radio talk show host, who can communicate with animals of all sorts. They frequently cause more trouble than they are worth! Mary Catherine hears the cry of a turtle whose owner has been killed in The Telltale Turtle and she helps catch the killer.

Stockcar Mysteries – Glad and Ruby have been called the Nora and Nick of the racing circuit. Glad is a retired Chicago cop and Ruby is a small town southern hairdresser. They travel from race to race in the NASCAR circuit solving mysteries.

Sharyn Howard Mysteries – This is our first mystery series. It is set in the Uwharrie Mountains in North Carolina. We wrote it about the first woman ever elected as a sheriff here. Our protagonist, Sharyn Howard, becomes the sheriff when her father is killed. She finds she likes the job and is very good at it. There are 12 books in this series. Each book has a historical mystery, some from as far back as the Civil War, that links to a present day mystery Sharyn solves.

We have a new series beginning May 2010. It’s called the Missing Pieces Mysteries. It’s set in Duck, NC on the Outer Banks. It’s about Dae O’Donnell, mayor of Duck, and a finder of lost things. In the first book, Death Watch, Dae finds a wristwatch on the arm of a dead woman and helps solve the crime.

Donna - You are a husband and wife team who work very closely in a multitude of ways. How do you split up the writing work?

J&J - We don’t split up writing the books. We sit down and take an idea that we think will work, collected through the year. Then we write a long synopsis that details what we think the story will be like. Our final stage is sitting down together at our large desk with back to back computer monitors. We talk out the story as we type it in. Then when the story is all in the computer, we begin revisions. That is our process.

Donna - How do you resolve disputes about the books you write?

J&J - We have one rule in working together; we have to agree or it doesn’t make it into the book. If we don’t agree about something, we get up and go out for a drive or a walk and talk it out until we come up with something else. Or until Joyce convinces Jim that she’s right!

Donna (laughing) - I like that Joyce convinces Jim she's right! How did you decide on the central idea of each series; for example, how did the idea for a pet psychic murder mystery series come about?

J&J - We came up with the idea for Sharyn Howard because we loved the Uwharrie Mountains and wanted to write about what it would be like for the first elected woman sheriff. The history part came in because we love history.

Our next mystery was the Peggy Lee series. We are both Master Gardeners and Berkley was looking for a garden mystery series. We wrote it in Charlotte because people in that town love their gardens and we thought urban gardening would be fun.

We did the NASCAR books for our racing crazy relatives who wanted to see mysteries written about the real life of stock car fans who camp out and go wild during races.

The Pet Psychic was an offshoot of a Peggy Lee book. Mary Catherine was actually in Fruit of the Poisoned Tree, the second Peggy Lee book. She helped Peggy with her Great Dane. We wanted to write a whole book about the character. We met a pet psychic that the book is based on.

We love Renaissance Faires and Festivals! We thought it would be a great place to kill people (in a book, of course) and wanted everyone to be able to experience the fun. We put it in Myrtle Beach because we thought that area could sustain an all-year faire. We put it in the old Air Force base there and we have had a great time writing it! Our newest book is the second in the series, GHASTLY GLASS, out September 1 from Berkley Prime Crime.

We visited the Outer Banks last year and loved the spooky, foggy area. We thought it would be fun to write something there with all the folklore, pirates and ghosts that haunt the area. Our protagonist is able to find things by touching the people who own them. Missing Pieces is the name of her thrift store in Duck where she sells some of the things she finds.

Donna - Thank you so much, Jim and Joyce, for the fascinating answers... but you've answered a whole lot more, and Part 2 and Part 3 of this wonderful interview is coming up on Wednesday and Friday!

*Note to my readers... I am sooo not a technical person, so I'm having a little trouble with the funky things blogger is trying to do with the font. I can't get it to stay all in one font! Until I get it sorted out... have fun reading everything from Courier to Arial with a little stop at Verdana somewhere in the middle!

Jim & Joyce Lavene

I am thrilled to introduce my first Cozy Murder Mysteries interviewee(s), Jim and Joyce Lavene, authors of several murder mystery series - including a series centered on stock car racing, gardening and a pet psychic, among other things - for Murder Ink and Berkley Prime Crime.

Jim and Joyce, a long-time married couple who not only write together but seem to enjoy doing everything together, have this to say in their bio on their website:

(Jim and Joyce) ...currently write four mystery series and work for a small newspaper in Stanly County, North Carolina. When they aren't promoting their books, coming up with new ideas for books, or taking photos of sweet potatoes that look like guinea pigs and congressmen who look like sweet potatoes, they spend time with their family (3 children, 5 grandchildren) and their cat, Quincy who ‘helps’ them write.

They have been gracious enough to answer all my questions, and beginning Monday, I will host a three-part series on them and their books.

For now, visit them at: http://www.joyceandjimlavene.com/