What Am I Up To Now, You Ask?

Thanks to Holly McClure for tagging me in this blog hop (you can read her answers to these questions at her website). Holly says of herself, "I've been many things in my life and if I'm lucky I hope to become many more things before I leave the world. Today, I'm a priest, an author, a literary agent, and mentor among other things." Holly has several books out – you can read about them here – including The Vessel of Scion, which is getting amazing reviews. 

Plus, you can learn about three more awesome writers at the end of this post.

1. What are you working on now?

The fifth book in the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver series, a contemporary traditional mystery series set in Atlanta. It features amateur sleuth Tai, owner of a Confederate-themed gun shop, and Trey, a former SWAT corporate security agent. And a Great White Shark named Mary Lee.

2. How does my work differ from other authors in the genre?

For one, I have co-protagonists. Tai is my narrator, but Trey is her partner in both romance and crime solving. Their issues with trust and commitment and what it means to care about someone provide lots of practice in the kind of skills that make them excellent detectives. Tai is emotional, intuitive, quick off the starting line. Trey is rational, analytical, more inclined to take things slow. Their respective strengths and weaknesses complement as often as they conflict.

Another unique aspect of my series is that I write a character in recovery from a Traumatic Brain Injury (a TBI in the medical parlance). Trey suffered damage to his frontal lobes – the seat of executive judgment, decision making, language processing, and emotional intelligence – and his challenges to recover his sense of purpose and identity help me think about larger thematic issues.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I enjoy exploring identity, the ways we create our personas to keep our real selves safe and protected. My characters allow me to do that in multiple ways – through Trey, whose sense of self was literally scrambled, and Tai, who has spent a lifetime rebelling against other people’s constructions of who she is. And I get to do it through one of the brain’s most natural function – story-telling.

4. How does my writing process work?

It’s taken me years to figure this out. I am a pantser all the way (one of those people who just starts writing and seeing where the story goes). It’s messy and inefficient, and when I wrote my second book, I swore I’d do it differently. It was a nightmare! Outlines do not feed my creative engine. I have to jump in and get messy. I’ve discovered it may not be the easiest or fastest way, but it’s my way, and now that I’ve accepted that, I’m becoming better at streamlining the process. Scrivener – a word processing program for writers – helps a lot because it allows me to write and organize simultaneously, saving me tons of rewrites.

Also get to know:

Susanna Ives

Tammy Kaehler

Bernadette Pajer