Sugar and Spice And Not So Nice: An interview with paranormal mystery author Janet McNulty

Today I'm talking with Janet McNulty about her paranormal mystery, Sugar And Spice And Not So Nice.
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1) Please tell us about your book.

Sugar And Spice And Not So Nice centers on the character of Mellow Summers. She moves to Vermont with her friend Jackie and together they get an apartment that has very cheap rent. After moving in, Mellow discovers that her apartment is haunted by a ghost. The ghost’s name is Rachel and she was murdered a year earlier. Unfortunately she does not remember who killed her. So, she enlists Mellow’s help in solving her murder.

Mellow reluctantly helps Rachel. Partly because she’ll never get any peace if she doesn’t. As the story progresses, Mellow gets into tense situations, mostly due to Rachel’s interference. However, she manages to escape with Rachel’s help as well. Together, they discover the identity of Rachel’s killer and then have to set out and prove that he committed the crime.

The book is a short mystery with a paranormal twist.

2) What was the inspiration for this book?


When I moved into my first apartment, I could swear that it was haunted. Strange things happened that I couldn’t explain. When I told a friend about it they said, "Oh, you have a ghost.” I wasn’t thrilled at the time and I was never able to prove it. But, life moved on and I changed my residence.

Much later I came up with the title for a book but couldn’t figure out what to make it about. One day, my friend reminded me about my first apartment and that’s when it hit me. Right then was when I decided to turn this into a mystery about a ghost.

3) Tell us about how you developed your protagonist, Mellow.

A lot of mysteries center on teenagers or middle-aged characters, so I decided to make Mellow more college age, but put her in her mid-twenties. I decided to make her a very simple person who loves her jeans and t-shirts. I took elements of people I knew and put them into Mellow’s personality to make her a well-rounded person that people can relate to.

4) Why did you choose to set the story in Vermont?

Pure chance really. I needed a setting, so I took out a map of the United States, closed my eyes, and pointed. Vermont was where my finger landed, so that was where I set the story.

5) Your book rests on a murder mystery, but the protagonist has an unusual advantage: the ghost of the victim. Can you tell us a little about how this led to challenges with maintaining the mystery and how you dealt with them?

A big challenge to maintaining a mystery is when you have the ghost of the murder victim. To keep it interesting, I decided to make Rachel have amnesia and she slowly gets her memory back as the story progresses. This way, I could have my reader guessing a bit as Mellow tries tp put the pieces together by exploring Rachel’s old haunts. (No pun intended).

6) What do you feel is the most important aspect of a mystery?

The most important aspect is when Rachel gets her memory back completely. Then, Mellow and her friends are stuck trying to prove that the murderer killed Rachel. And her murder happened a year earlier, so whatever evidence there was is gone. This is when the story turns from being a who done it to a catch the bad guy.

7) Can you tell us about some of your other work?

I have a novel that I published in August 2011 under the pen name of Nova Rose. The book is called Legends Lost Amborese. This book is a fantasy adventure novel that I started in high school and finished after graduating from college. It was one of those things I wrote and rediscovered years later in a drawer.

The story of Amborese focuses on a girl of about 20 years of age named Amborese. She is the lost heir to a throne that has sat empty for centuries. Naturally, she discovers this fact when her parents are murdered, but is reluctant to accept it at first because of what it means if she does. In an effort to discover who she really is, she embarks on an adventure to travel to the far side of the kingdom with her friend Zolo and a talking cat that is very forthcoming with her opinions.

Along the way, Amborese encounters many dangers and even makes a few friends as she develops the skills necessary to claim the throne. She also learns that the kingdom is in disarray as several factions have formed fight among themselves. It is her job to unite them. Amborese is also relentlessly pursued by a man named Clymorus who wishes to claim the throne for himself and seeks to kill her before she takes up her birth right.

Legends Lost Amborese is the first book in a proposed trilogy. I am currently finishing up the second book titled Legends Lost Tesnayr and should be released before the end of summer 2012.

I am also writing a sequel to Sugar And Spice And Not So Nice. This I hope to have published before the end of 2012. It is called Frogs, Snails And A Lot Of Wails. Mellow and her friends will be back with a new ghost to solve another mystery.

I have even published a nonfiction book, Illogical Nonsense. This is more of a political commentary book.

All are available on Amazon.

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Thanks, Janet.

Sugar and Spice And Not So Nice can be purchased at Amazon.

Dancing, Ghosts, and Jane Austen: An interview with author David Wilkin

Today I'm talking with David Wilkin, an author who normally specializes in Regency period novels. For this latest work, he satirically takes on the Jane Austen/monster mash-up trend in JANE AUSTEN AND GHOSTS.

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1) Tell us about your book.


JANE AUSTEN AND GHOSTS is a story about the making of the classic works of Jane into a movie with the twist that has recently come these last few years of including everything Jane with some type of monster. The novel is set in the here and now at a movie studio. Jane, being deceased, now falls into a category that we could include with zombies and vampires, werewolves and other monsters that Hollywood has done to death, so to speak. Jane now would be a ghost.

And were Jane a ghost, from the other side, she in my interpretation would not like at all what so many have done to her stories. Thus a haunting by Jane who most assuredly has been rolling over in her grave seems in order.

2) What inspired this book?

I actually have a cousin at the studios whose job is much like my protagonist, Ellis Abbot. Elizabeth, I mean Ellis Abbot is a finder for the studio. He looks for works that would make a great movie, and when he sees PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND Z*****s it was only natural for him to think that this would make a great camp movie. I played with that idea in my mind and what my cousin does, but I thought Jane would hate to see these movies made. She would probably hate to see these books having been written. (Though I never read one until I had finished the first draft of JANE AUSTEN AND GHOSTS, I was then very much surprised that the first seemed a graft onto Jane's writing.)

Playing with the idea that Jane had rolled over in that grave in Winchester Cathedral (I visited her grave in 2007 and also looked for the God Begot House then as well which my cousin Arnold once ran a store out of just a few feet away) I thought what other Ghosts might accompany Jane to set things to right. What could come of that, and then how to link my knowledge of Hollywood (I worked at Dick Clark Productions when younger and taped every single American Bandstand there ever was) to that of Jane Austen.

3) For over two hundred years, people have been reworking Jane Austen. Besides simply mild setting time shifts, we've had modern updates, such as EMMA being reworked as CLUELESS and more extreme cultural transformations such as the Aishwarya Rai-lead Bollywood take on Austen, BRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Why do the works of an English woman who wrote so long ago about a fairly narrow socio-economic range of characters still appeal to so many people all over the world today?

I think that we have a love story in this and it is a little complicated. Thank you, Wickham, Lydia and Georgiana. That love story is a key to why we return to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE as perhaps the favorite of the tales. (I have to admit to liking PERSUASION at this time of life more.) The characters and the stereotypes we find in the work are all well detailed and where some parts of Jane's writing would be far from considered a great novel today, her ability to spin a good stroy endures.

I look at the Regency Romances I delve into, including COLONEL FITZWILLIAM'S CORRESPONDENCE, my Jane sequel, as a dance with the beginning our seeing the Hero and Heroine. Then one or the other takes a fancy to the other, but that can not be returned. Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl, and of course Boy loses Girl. The next part is critical, Boy endeavors to get Girl back. Wentworth shows up in Bath and crosses paths with Anne, or Darcy after Elizabeth is found at Pemberly goes to London to make things right between Lydia and Wickham. Our Heroes must then do something heroic to show their love. In Jane Austen and Ghosts, Ellis has to do something to show his affection has something behind it as well.

4) Despite the various direct updates and the re-imaginings, it's only in recent years that it's become popular to try and fuse Jane Austen's work directly with rather discordant elements such as zombies or sea monsters. Do you feel this nothing but a gimmick, or does it imply something deeper about our interface with Austen's work?


I have to think that the mashups of the Austen stories with Monsters are gimmicks. Not a deep exploration of the theme of Love and love in a society where arranged marriages were normal. I can not speak to having read the first of the monster mash-ups beyond the Assembly Ball scene. With that book showing so much in the way of using Jane’s own writing and not original from the author, I think that highlights that it is riding on Jane’s work. Kudos to the author for a creative idea, but perhaps more kudos if the story had been completely written by the author and not grafted onto Jane’s writing.

For JANE AUSTEN AND GHOSTS, I hope those who read it find that I have been very creative in telling a light hearted romp that plays up Hollywood, Jane, B-Movie actors, and Hollywood legends, and the books that are in this recent trend. I think that the tale will bring a smile to the face of Janeites and others who read it.

5) What is the most common thing you feel people misunderstand about Jane Austen's work?

I think that Jane is not the be all and end all of what the Regency period was about. Jane’s work gives us a great glimpse of country life for the edges of the Ton, where she was firmly ensconced. But so many Regencies talk of Dukes and Earls and with Jane we do not see that lifestyle at all. We have to look elsewhere to glimpse it and even when we look at someone like Darcy, or the Elliots, we do not see the members of the first stare.

6) You became interested in the Regency by studying period dance and teaching it. My own dance knowledge is fairly limited compared to yours, but I've noticed more than a few times, for instance, a film tossing the waltz in before it'd been introduced to England. Do you feel film and television adaptations of Regency, Georgian England, and Austen works tend to get the dance right, completely wrong, or something in-between?

They get dance wrong. Mr. Beveridge's Maggot is one of our favorite dances, and the one done in the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle P&P where they dance together. Choreographers of the period had to redo the steps that were on film because so many had done what they had done on screen and it was wrong. (The real version is better IMO) There is a lovely piece choreographed in Paltrow’s Emma, again beautiful on the screen but wrong. Or in the Olivier/Garson P&P, the Assembly Ball is filled with dances that come after the period.

There are plenty of great dances for the period, but the movies are just not correct. And waltzing is just out. Jane Austen died in 1817 and waltzing, as I wrote in an article at http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/ in an article on waltz in the period, would have been about 3 years done. It would seem a stretch for Jane to have learned it, decided to have her characters master it, and then be able to dance it in such a short period of time.

7) Which do you prefer: contradancing or the waltz?


I like them both. I had been known a few decades ago, to dance 4 nights a week, several of that contradancing. (Great exercise, lost lots of pounds) But for wooing and it is Valentine's Day, nothing beats the waltz, and after a couple years of waltzing, I was able to be proud of my waltzing. A sought after partner here in Southern California at the local balls we have.

8) You've written several works set directly in the Regency. Can you briefly describe those for us?

I have 3 Regencies currently available. COLONEL FITZWILLIAM'S CORRESPONDENCE, THE SHATTERED MIRROR and THE END OF THE WORLD. I consider all three a little different. The first of course is a continuation of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. We look at the war through the Colonel’s eyes, and we look at society through Kitty’s. As the Colonel is away in Portugal and Spain, letters are sent back and forth and we catch up what is happening with our favorite characters as life moves on. That this lasted sometime, we have developments in all the lives of the characters continuing even as our heroes in this story become united, and parted, in their own ways. And of course we can not forget Lady Catherine. She is present as well (Though my interpretation is more that of Edna May Oliver)

In THE SHATTERED MIRROR, I deal with the effects of the war on our hero, and how a man wounded in the war, as so many were, might think that there can never be love again for him. As a Regency, we know that somewhere along the way there will be love, so our Heroine is young and vivacious and wanting to find love with a real hero of the war. Not realizing that our wounded hero might very well be that man.

Last I have THE END OF THE WORLD, where our heroine does not expect to find love being in the shadow of her sister. Here my hero also is not looking to fall in love as he runs from his own demons only to find the girl and her family beset by neighbors and those who once were friends.

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Thanks, David.

If you want to see more from David or are interested in his other titles, you can find him at http://thethingsthatcatchmyeye.wordpress.com/.

JANE AUSTEN AND GHOSTS is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

If you could speak to the dead, anyone at all, who would it be? An interview with YA paranormal suspense author Craig Hansen

Today I'm interviewing Craig Hansen about his paranormal suspense novella, SHADA

1) Tell us about your book.

SHADA is a roughly 28,500 word novella that marks the first installment in the Ember Cole series of paranormal suspense books. It's the least obviously paranormal because Ember hasn't really come into her powers at the point in which this story takes place and because SHADA isn't about Ember's powers. It's a story about her and her closest friends, in their last big outing together before life drives them their own separate ways.

It's a fun read that has received early praise from some prominent independent authors, and I'm hoping the good word-of-mouth will continue to spread as more and more readers buy it, try it, and find it enjoyable for a story of this length.

While it's less obviously a paranormal book than future installments, there are some paranormal thrills going on in SHADA. The girls decide they want to go on a camping trip sleepover together so they can hold a séance and speak to the dead. Ember has a very personal reason for wanting to do this.

And while these are girls who are between the ages of thirteen and fifteen at the time of this story, and know very little about how to hold a proper séance, they give it a good effort. The novel opens with an enticing question: If you could speak to a dead person, anyone at all, who would it be?

All four girls have their own answers for that question, but once they get out in the middle of the woods, things start to get spooky, and while I won't spoil what happens, let's just say… sometimes the dead have their own agenda.

2) What inspired you to write this book? 

When I was roughly the same age as the girls in this novel, maybe a bit younger, I actually tried a séance myself, and while the results were nothing that would interest Ghost Hunters, I did get more than I bargained for. I have a blog entry on my own blog that goes into great detail about what happened.

That's for the main theme, but there are some underlying themes for this novel. One of them is a motivating subplot for Ember that focuses on her grandmother's battle with Alzheimer's disease and dementia. It can be scary for a kid Ember's age to deal with and to understand, and it's the sort of thing that fills a person with questions. Being young, they might not always seek their answers from the right or best sources.

3) As a current resident of the fine state of Wisconsin, I'm intrigued by your choice of setting. Why did you choose Wisconsin? 

I chose it is because I lived in northwestern Wisconsin for about five years myself, as a community journalist and sports reporter.

I lived in an area where the woods and vacationland took over from the pure farmland further south. When I was living there, I liked to say that I got to live where most people save up all year to go on vacation.

That being the case, I soaked up a lot of that atmosphere, so when I needed to create a place where my novels could take place, it was a natural choice. My fictional town of Hope is a bit bigger than any of the towns near where I was; it's probably comparable to Eau Claire, which was east and south of my old neck of the Wisconsin woods. I just took the idea of a town the size of Eau Claire and set it in a slightly different geography.

I just love the sheer breadth of the woods up there, though. I often thought, as us oddball writers often do, that a person could commit a murder up there, leave the body in the middle of the deep, dense woods, and it could be years before anyone came across it and discovered it.

And of course, that sort of thinking is what leads to novel ideas, even those that's not what Shada is about.

4) Halloween is coming. A casual review of literature shows that ghosts have been a staple in fiction ever since humanity first started telling stories. Shows about guys running around with night vision goggles looking for ghosts in old houses are somewhat popular. Why do you think the ghost continues to fascinate people even in this modern technological age? 

I believe it does, and I think the popularity of Ghost Hunters and similar "paranormal reality" shows attest to that. My wife and I are looking forward ot the Ghost Hunters Live event on SyFy, which we watch every year.

Another clue is this: as I write this, my wife and I spent our date night going to see Paranormal Activity 3. We've seen all three installments together, and the movie series is just a whole bunch of spooky, ghostly fun. In fact, I understand it made over $28 million on Friday alone and could be drawing between $50-$65 million this weekend. Biggest opening ever for a horror movie and not a fang in site.

So, yeah, vampires get all the glitz and fame, but a good, haunting ghost story one that's spooky without all the over-the-top gore and such, like the Paranormal Activity series is usually pretty timeless.

How we tell ghost stories has changed, in some ways. The popularity of paranormal ghost-hunt shows make it harder to get away with full-bodied apparitions because viewers and readers are more sophisticated now and want something closer to the weird stuff they've seen on shows like that. It's more appealing when you don't go quite so over the top.

But the essence of all ghost stories is: someone's not staying dead. And that can be fun.

5) What are you two favorite characters in the book?

I'll answer this as though you asked, "Aside from Ember…" Because naturally, Ember is the most appealing character to me, or I wouldn't be building a series around her, or writing a story like SHADA to introduce readers to her before her life gets really complicated.

Within the confines of SHADA, I'd have to say one of the most fun characters to write was Willow. She's the youngest of the four girls but definitely the brainiest. A bit of an outcast, too, because she's not willing to play the social game and hide her intelligence.

After Willow, I'd have to cite Shada Emery herself. She's the narrator for our tale, and it's through her eyes that we get our first impressions of everyone in Ember's world. We get to know a little bit about her in Shada. We'll learn more in the future, a few books down the line.

6) I'll ask your own question: If you could speak to the dead, anyone at all, who would it be?

Like Ember, for me, the answer would end up being pretty personal. I'd love to speak to my Mom again. She passed from pancreatic cancer back in 2008, and I used to call her two or three times a week, sometimes more, just to talk about life and how things are going and what I'm thinking, and listen to her do some of the same.

I know I can never recapture those days, and I realize I probably made as good a use of that time in my life as anyone could have. But when someone we love, like a parent, passes away…especially when they were such a confidant and fixture in our routine…their absence leaves a hole there that's not always easy to fill. And no matter how much you took time to talk to them and appreciate them, you always have regrets and wish you could have done more, spent more time, gone on more face-to-face visits.

My mom's ghost doesn't haunt me, not in that way. But I am haunted by the good memories and the regrets in almost equal measure.

7) This is book one of the Ember Cole series. How many books do you plan for this series?

To be completely honest, it's wide open as a series. If sales go well, and people keep embracing the character, there are a lot of stories I could tell with Ember Cole. I conceived of her originally as a comic book/graphic novel character, so I have a lot of ideas on different places to that her as a character.

So, this is one series that I think readers can embrace, where they won't go, "What do you mean, it's only a trilogy? Why only seven books?" Even though I have other ideas--standalone novels and other series I'd like to get to, the Ember Cole series is one that can continue a long time, for as long as readers are still interested and I'm still alive and writing.

That's not to say at some point I'll write a storyline and realize, hey, the character is used up. The story is demanding a final curtain to fall. That could happen. It probably will at some point. But I don't see it happening soon.

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Thanks, Craig.

If you want to see more from Craig, you can visit him at http://wwww.craig-hansen.com/.

SHADA can be purchased at Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes and Noble.

When that brilliant idea doesn't seem so brilliant half-way through the writing process

Although it is only recently that I’ve managed to produce something readable for the general public, I’ve written many stories over the years. Today, though, I was reflecting on the novels that I’ve written and then abandoned. In general, once I’ve generated an idea and actually start writing on it, I finish. I don’t think this is the result of dogged determination or discipline as much as a reflection of the fact that I try to only write the kind of thing I want to read. It makes the actual writing process very fun for me. Editing . . . not so much fun. That's perhaps why I've only managed to produce two decent works and only rather recently. I've slowly (with the aid of critique partners and beta readers) acquired the necessary editing discipline. 

In considering the two major projects I abandoned, they were both helped me realize a lot about the kind of things I enjoy in books and, consequently, the kind of things I enjoy writing.

The first abandoned project was a somewhat dark YA paranormal. The story concerned a college freshman that learns she is a faerie. Unfortunately, she learns this because a group of faerie-hunting humans called the Iron Sword attempt to capture and kill her. She only manages to escape with the aid the human agent (who was posing as her roommate) of a faerie-affiliated group. After she thinks her roommate is killed, she ends up being saved by another faerie who also, conveniently enough, is also a hot guy. The twist is that he’s actually the bad guy. He’s been seducing her as part of an attempt to resurrect the spirit of Baba Yaga (who in this book was going to be depicted as a sort of dark faerie-witch hybrid). It had lots of angst, magic, ruthless guys with iron swords, random references to Wisconsin and Illinois (I live in Madison, WI) and what not. I wrote a good 2/3rds of the novel before abandoning it. After all that planning, developing, and work, why did I abandon it? One simple reason: protagonist agency.

One day, after I spent a good hour editing, I realized the protagonist basically had no agency. She spent the entire book being pushed from one person to another person. Everything happens to her, but she initiates nothing. Now, I don’t think that all protagonists have to be action heroes or whatever, but something really bugged me about a protagonist who is nothing more than a leaf on the plot wind and spends the entire book being just timid, sad,scared, and manipulated, even it was a totally realistic reaction to the situation she was in. Part of the problem with this was that it made everyone around her seem more interesting. Her roommate/guardian, her boyfriend/evil dude, et cetera. I toyed around with some rewrites and realized I was so dissatisfied with the result that I abandoned it.   It did, however, rise again in a sense. I took many of the elements of the plot with some slight tweaks and incorporated them in as the plot of an adult urban fantasy novel I wrote that focused on a different protagonist who was involved in the search for a faerie girl who had gone missing.

The second novel I abandoned for a totally different reason. I had started working on a YA paranormal about a girl who can see ghosts but since no one else can, she’s been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. The book concerned her meeting up with a ghost hunting other, far more evil ghosts, but the main idea was to make it ambiguous (i.e., as no one else can see the ghosts, maybe it really was all in her head). When I got about half-way through this, I felt  uncomfortable. On a certain level, I wondered if what I was writing was somehow insulting to schizophrenics. Now, who is to say? One thing that strikes me about people raising sensitivity complaints is that horrifically serious things like murder are treated very casually in certain genres that are often considered light, fun escapist reads (e.g., cozy mystery). I've seen no one make the argument, for example, that cozy mysteries shouldn't be around because there are a lot of suffering people who've left friends and family to murder. Anyway, despite my intellectual defense of the idea, I found I still felt very uncomfortable with the project. My spouse told me I was thinking it through too hard, but, ultimately, I abandoned the project.

I was inspired to write this post today, though, because when I was flipping through my blogs, I saw a new YA book coming out with a very similar premise (unfortunately, I can’t remember the title or the blog I saw it on). Basically, a girl gets committed because she can see ghosts no one else can. Now, reading through the blurb and what not, it didn’t really strike me as exploitive or outrageous, yet in my own case overthought my way to abandoning the project. If I can find the blog (or the book) again, I’ll probably buy it. My reader interface with the idea was quite different than my writer interface.

I’m curious. If you’re a writer, why have you abandoned projects in the past? If you’re a reader, what sort of things make you want to abandon a book or make you uncomfortable?