9.24.11

I'm celebrating this afternoon's launch party a bit early, after receiving this insightful and lovely review from one of my favorite booksellers, Fran Fuller, from the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. This was sent out to their mailing list yesterday - and I couldn't appreciate it more! 

I wanted to share because it addresses exactly the same issues I was worried about with this book. She's alleviated my fears. From Fran:

I have got to start trusting my authors. I really do, even when they step outside my usual expectations for them.

The new J.T. Ellison, Where All The Dead Lie (Mira, $14.95) takes Taylor Jackson away from Nashville and drops her in the middle of a gothic story. I love J.T. Ellison’s writing, I love Taylor Jackson, and I admittedly love gothics, so you’d think this would have been something I would have looked forward to, but darn it, I’m used to Taylor being a Nashville police officer! I was skeptical, I admit it.

I was also wrong.

If you’ve been following this series, you know that with The Immortals (Mira, $7.99), Taylor’s had some bad things happen, and has made some dangerous choices. It makes perfect sense for Taylor to get away from Nashville to try to figure out what’s going on in her head, which is what is going on in Where All The Dead Lie. And J T. Ellison has blended together her police elements into a gothic atmosphere that really works brilliantly.  

The other concern I had (and didn’t realize I had until it was alleviated) was that I was afraid I wouldn’t enjoy a book without all of Taylor’s support characters, especially Baldwin and Sam. Fortunately, Ellison has woven them into the story so I am content.

If you haven’t read the Taylor Jackson series, let me recommend that you begin with All The Pretty Girls (Mira, $7.99). If you have read the series, I promise you’re really going to enjoy Where All The Dead Lie. And J.T. has hinted that she might make it out to the shop next year, which would be a total blast!

Seattle Mystery Bookshop
 117 Cherry St., Seattle, WA  98104
206-587-5737  staff@seattlemystery.com www.seattlemystery.com
21 Years of Mayhem: 1990 - 2011

Thank you, Fran, for both "getting" my intentions, and for being such an amazing support over the past four years. 

9.23.11

I hope you will forgive my lateness and brevity today. After settling in to work this morning and managing to revise and edit a solid 100 pages of the May '12 book, I played a bit of hooky this afternoon to accompany Mr. Ellison in his final quest to purchase a new automobile. It went rather well, and we drove off the lot with a new baby.

But the purchasing took several hours, the car needed detailing, and we of course needed to take her out for a spin.... It is a gorgeous day here, sunny and only slightly warm. It started off rainy, which really helped the editing process, truth be told, but cleared off in time for the afternoon's machinations.

Revision at this point in a book is only pro forma, but it's this pass that I find to be the most important - the last chance I have to make real changes to the story before copyedit. I won't be able to get back to it until Monday, sadly, but I'll be able to plow through next week.

Tomorrow is the official launch signing for WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE, at Mysteries & More here in Nashville. I've been so caught up in post-Bouchercon, book launch, car buying ecstasy that I haven't had a moment to get nervous, which is a very Good Thing. If you're in Nashville, I'd love to see you tomorrow, from 2-4 pm. And then, it's off to my favorite event of the year, Wine on the River. We are meeting some good friends, plan to taste way too much wine, have a fabulous dinner and allow a car service to take us home.

It's going to be a really fun day. I hope I get a chance to see some of you out and about tomorrow.

And let me take just a moment to say thank you. I'm feeling very blessed today. This whole week, actually. My seventh novel is out in the world, you guys have shown such love and support, send beautiful notes and cards and emails, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of you. You mean the world to me, and I couldn't do it without you.

'Til Monday, then. Don't forget to enter the Haunted Contest or join in for the giveaway.

Xoxo, JT

9.22.11

I am unsettled.

So here I sit, sneaking a Hershey's Kiss I liberated from someone's candy bowl in St. Louis, pondering.

It's September, which means change is afoot. Facebook rolled out a bunch of craziness last night, the iPhone 4s or 5 will be here shortly, Where All the Dead Lie is out in the world, my to do list has grown a third head, and it's getting cooler out. I don't normally do well with change. I'm a Taurus. We like to have things a certain way, and don't want people messing with our stuff.

All right. To be honest, the day after a release is always a bit of a downer. You've spent all your time and energy pushing your new baby out, and now the nurses have taken him away to that faraway display bassinet, and you're left with your overfull breasts and sore body and an overhwlming desire to sleep which is countermanded by your biological need to reconnect with your child immediately.

Sigh.

Change. It does suck.

I'm done traveling for the foreseeable future, which means I get to unpack. We are going to redo the kitchen - and as I brewed my tea this morning, I will admit to standing, mouth agape, I'm sure, staring at the old refrigerator (white, dented, broken icemaker, basically a chilled stand for a set of overfull cabinets, paper plates, bread and potatoes) wondering what it's going to look like when we do built in shelves and replace it with stainless. And wondering if you can remove granite countertops in one piece without demolishing them? I'd like to give mine to Habitat for Humanity, but don't know if they'll come off well.

Then I wandered into the dining room, which we're also going to redo, and realized that once we take off the previous owners' grass mat, which resides below the chair rail, and repaint the room, (it's red now, and I'm sick of it) and sell the furniture, it's going to look MUCH bigger.

And we are buying a new car - and let me tell you, this is not an endeavor we undertake lightly. When I sold my beloved 4-Runner two years ago, it had just turned 18. And Randy's car just turned 11. We keep our stuff around for a long time, becoming quite attached. I cried so hard when I sold my truck. I hated to see him go.Last night we were literally fingers on the keys ready to drive off, but something stopped us, and we decided to sleep on it. Good thing we did - a deeper check into the car showed a bad accident that wasn't on the Carfax. So it's back to square 3 tonight (there's another in the running.)

We are not accumulators. We don't buy stuff just to buy stuff. We are doing our damndest to live a more minimalist lifestyle, with events instead of material goods. We gave away half our household last year, and damn if it doesn't seem like we need to do it again. Because of all the travel this year, things feels terribly cluttered.

Settling back into a work routine is messy as well. I was up until 1 AM two nights ago trying to sort through what has to happen now, what can wait until next week, and what waits until next month. My priority is the final edit on the May '12 book, due October 3, but I also had to do a line edit for a short story appearing next year, (Done and crossed off list - yay!) edit and bring pages of the sandwich book to group last night, plus do all the attendant release writing, publishing, tweeting and facebooking, plus juggle two other major projects I'm working on.

OK. I admit it. I am overwhelmed. And when I get overwhelmed, I shut down.

Hence the comforting bit of chocolate, and pondering. Which led me to the following, apropos of nothing, outside of the fact Facebook now wants me to categorize people, and I don't know which category name to use. And I know there are more like me who wonder. So. Help a sister out and take the poll.

And for you readers, when you take the poll, how do you refer to us? If you were going to say it aloud, which would it be - So and So is my favorite _________.

Share, chickadees. Give me something to distract myself.

9.20.11

Yay, Launch Day!

It's sort of surreal, really, because you spend weeks, months even, preparing for a book's release, and then the day hits, and you honestly feel like screaming if you ever hear your own name again. Gotta love PR.

It was a rather low-key day, actually. Finished ironing out the last few bits on the new Fan Page, worked on the top sekrit project, spent way too much time floating around Facebook and Twitter, did a couple of conference calls about another few projects, got my flu shot, put together the dinner menu - nothing terribly exciting. Tomorrow though, I'll go visit the book in the wild. And I have critique group, which means I'll get my head out of the clouds and back to work. They'll get chapters 2-3 of the sandwich book, and I hope they'll love it.

I have realized I have an inability to say no. Which isn't a good thing.

But today belongs to WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE.

Rachel asked where I got the impetus to have a spooky sort of tale. She mentioned one of my favorite short stories, THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, by Charlotte Gilman. It is a creepy tale of a woman going mad, and surely played into my thought process on Taylor's descent to the bottom.

When I realized I was writing a Gothic, I went back to the classics. THE YELLOW WALLPAPER was just the beginning. I reread THE MONKEY'S PAW by W.W. Jacobs, plus a host of other stories and movies - Hitchcock's fabulous movie VERTIGO, Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA, both film and book, Diane Setterfield's THE THIRTEENTH TALE, Sarah Waters's THE LITTLE STRANGER, Wilkie Collins THE WOMAN IN WHITE, and Horace Walpole's THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO.  

I wanted to be sure I had the right feel - the right texture to the story. Gothics aren't just ghost stories, there are important elements that need to be included. All of these stories are classic Gothic tales - combining elements of both horror and romance with a specific setting to create a sort of melodramatic terror-inducing state. Think of the story of how Frankenstein was written - Mary Shelley was partying with her literary buds, got herself spooked, had a terrible nightmare, and wrote it all down. FRANKENSTEIN is of course one of the finest in modern literature, but the way it came about lends itself to the Gothic tradition.

Add to all of that literary goodness was the tale of the Grey Lady of Glamis Castle, which I found during my research for the book. Glamis itself has an entire inventory of ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night - and as such, was certainly the model for Dulsie Castle.

And then we went to Scotland ourselves, and bumped into our own ghost.

We went to Tulloch because it was the ancestral home of Clan Bayne - (MacBean) - the fine plaid-covered loins of which spawned my husband. We went to have tea. This was the view as we drive up - stunning, because, austere. We went inside and every single hair on my body stood on end.

Tulloch Castle, near Inverness, Scotland

Tulloch Castle Ghosts Look Out Windows

See the vaporous shapes in the windows? Trust me, those windows were clear as a bell to the naked eye. Didn't see that until we loaded the pictures later that night. But the minute I got inside, all I wanted to do was leave. Run. Get the hell out of dodge. That place is so full of malevolent spirits .... what was so weird though, was the silence - silence so pervasive it felt like a scream.

So that went into the book as well - that horrible feeling of being watched when you can't see anything.

Where All The Dead Lie isn't designed to frighten. I don't particularly care for being frightened myself. But it came out that way - a spooky, eerie, Gothic tale that just might give you a chill down your spine.

9.19.11

So here we are - one day before launch. Though truth be told, many of you have received your books already because Amazon started shipping last Friday. I hope you enjoy them, the story, the style, and all that jazz.

I've also just returned from Bouchercon. I will tell you, St. Louis has some seriously kick ass food. We ate at Herbie's (fresh greens with goat cheese, strawberries and blueberry poppyseed dressing followed by steak frites in a red wine mushroom sauce), Charlie Gitto's On The Hill (toasted ravioli, calamari, Caesar salad and a lemon shrimp pasta that was actually quite spicy, plus tiramisu and an incredible bottle or two of 2007 Paitin "Ca Veja Nebbiolo D'Alba"), Anthony's two nights in a row (Tony's salad, a delicate appetizer of lobster and nectarine, angel hair pasta with lobster and shrimp accompanied by a great wine called La Massa.) Yes, I waddled home. But I'm full of lobster, so that's always a good thing. Mucho protein, don'tcha know.

The beautiful thing about Bouchercon, and all conferences, really, is the chance to see friends, and make new ones. I got to spend time with all my peeps, and it was amazing. My panels were great, resulting in what I know will be long and happy friendships with some fascinating people, the con itself was smooth and well-organized, and the bar - well, it didn't disappoint. If you ever want to see writers in their natural state, set a group of 300 loose in a hotel bar for a few hours. Some watch, some preen, some get drunk and fall down. And some swan about, trying desperately to catch up with everyone they know, and failing miserably. That last would be me.

I also had a lovely time at the Middendorf-Kredell Branch Library in O'Fallon. Met one of my online buddies, Debbie Haupt, who moderated Hank Phillipi Ryan, Julie Compton and myself in front of a packed room. It was a lot of fun, so big thanks to Sara and Deb and everyone from Main Street Books - it was great to be with you all.

Came home to a happy, lonely, and apparently chilly cat who won't stay out of my lap, a final quick revision of the May '12 book, a bunch of ideas for the sandwich book, a brand new Facebook Fan Page to launch, a newsletter to mail, some fun mail from NYC, and about a billion emails, including a line edit for my short story in Thriller 3. Fabulous husband is going to the store so I can keep working tonight. What a doll! (FH just came home with pretzel bread. He shoots, and he scores!)

And of course, we are all having issues with the new Firefox 6.0.2 update. I'm so glad to find out it isn't just me, and apologize for any discrepancies in the newsletter, of which I have already seen two. I stopped looking. You wonder why I have an editor.

Ooh - UPS is here - hang on a sec....

YAY! Books and a dress for the launch party. Hot Dog!

Sorry - back to it - here are some good links:

To the contest

To the Exclusive Extras on the Fan Page

To a fabulous review from Fresh Fiction - "...a mind-bending, frightening story."

To another goodie from Words I Write Crazy - "loved...loved....loved..."

To Harriet Klausner's review - "Where All the Dead Lie is a super entry in one of the best police procedural series on the market today."

Alas and alack, there was also a disappointing but fair review that came in, but it feels much too enlightened to link to it as well. Suffice it to say I mention this because if you believe the good, you must believe the bad.

So. Tomorrow's the big day. I have a few things planned - one is to finally answer Rachel's question about the impetus for the style of the book - but mostly, I'll be parked here at the house, working on the revision. So goes the glamorous life of the author.

I am tickled to pieces with the entries we've received so far for the haunted ghost story contest. I'm trying to stay out of the comments so I don't confuse things, so let me say - I am reading, and loving, your entries!

Til tomorrow, then!