The Writing Process Blog Tour: Today it is my Turn
22 Sunday Jun 2014
Written by susanfinlay
Hello, Everyone! Author Jane Risdon (http://janerisdon.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/the-writing-process-blog-tour-today-it-is-my-turn/) has very kindly included me in the popular Writing Process Blog Tour. Thanks so much for thinking of me! She has asked me to answer some questions about my writing, and she would like me to pass the baton on to four other authors.
Here are the questions and my answers:
What are you currently working on?
I’ve just completed the first book in an exciting new series called Project Chameleon. The book, Liars’ Games, is a novel that, unlike my mystery novels, is set in the U.S.—at least for this first book. I’m working on the blurb that will appear on the back cover. Also, a graphic designer is working on the book cover design. I expect the book will be published in mid-July.
Here is my original description to give you an idea of what the book is about:
A genius college professor who hates lying is stuck in witness protection, along with her three-and-a-half-year-old son. Through a political maneuver, she ends up working as a principal at a high school full of gangs, drug dealers, and disgruntled employees. She’s in over her head and terrified, especially when she finds out a stranger is watching her and her son, but her handler can’t or won’t move her. She must figure out how to survive in a world where everyone seems out to get her. It’s a book that on the surface deals with school violence and fear, but at the heart of it is a woman’s struggle with lying and deception, trust, self-identity, and what at times feels like the moral decline of society.
How does your work differ from others of its genre?
Up until recently I was undecided what genre this book fit into, and that worried me. It has a romance in it, as well as a lot of suspense. But it doesn’t follow the genre rules for romance, suspense, or romantic suspense.
Many writing reference books tell authors to pick one genre and make their book conform to that genre’s rules. But I had something very specific that I wanted to write about, and that meant not following a formula. I was tempted to completely change my plans, and I did to some extent make some plot changes, but the overall story is still the story that I wanted to write. I wouldn’t budge on that. Only recently did I find a writing reference book that says genre-bending is a good thing. I guess Liars’ Games could be called a genre-bending novel, and I believe that it falls into a blend of literary-mainstream, suspense, and romantic suspense.
Liars’ Games is about a dangerous school that is out of control, and about a woman who wants to fix the school’s problems. The suspense comes from the dangers she faces within the school and as a result of being a witness in a big crime case. But on a deeper level, it’s about the woman’s internal struggles, about her guilt and her fears, about her conflicts, and her fractured self-identity. I believe it’s that emotional content that puts it into the literary-mainstream category.
Why do you write what you do?
That’s a good question, and I’m not sure I know the answer. I suppose that I am looking for ways to understand people. Why do they behave the way they do? Why do some people lie easily and others have difficulty lying? How do people form their self-identities? And so on . . . .
The first two books in my Outsiders mystery series are In the Shadows and Where Secrets Reside. Both books also deal with some of those same questions. They are already available on Amazon. I hope you’ll check them out.
http://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Outsiders-Book-1-ebook/dp/B00GB846MS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403475031&sr=8-1&keywords=in+the+shadows+an+outsiders+mystery
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Secrets-Reside-Outsiders-Book-ebook/dp/B00J9G5KXS/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1MCXNEFE97YABT6EBHQR
That is my writing process. Thanks again to Jane Risdon for asking me to share this with you. And thanks to Gev Sweeney and Sophie E. Tallis who also invited me to this blog tour. Now I want to ask everyone reading this to visit their blogs and find out about their work and also the blogs and work of the writers I’ve invited to follow on from me.
Please check out and support:
Jane Risdon, http://janerisdon.wordpress.com/
Sophie E. Tallis, http://sophieetallis.wordpress.com/
Katrina Jack, http://kateannejack.wordpress.com/
Gev Sweeney, http://gevsweeney.wordpress.com/
Jane Dougherty, http://janedougherty.wordpress.com/
Joanne Hall, http://hierath.wordpress.com/
I would like to invite Authors Marsha Norris Knudsen, Sara Stinson, April Kempler, Tami Carter, and Hadena James to participate in this blog tour.
9 Comments
June 23, 2014 at 7:12 am
Glad to hear you are still working on the Chameleon book.
June 23, 2014 at 11:58 am
Thanks, Jane! I actually submitted it to several publishers. Two of them wanted to publish it, and two more said they were on the fence. I decided to pass. I set the book aside while I finished up ‘Where Secrets Reside’. Then I made some good revisions to this book, adding about 10,000 words to it, gave it to my editor for polishing, and now I believe it’s finally ready to make its debut. It’s been a labor of love.
June 23, 2014 at 12:34 pm
If it’s so close to your heart it’s a good idea to choose your publisher very carefully. Good luck!
June 23, 2014 at 9:02 am
So pleased you accepted the tour Susan. I found reading your answers really interesting. It is always fun to see how other writers work and what makes them decide to write what they do.
Gangs is a difficult one and I admire you for including them in your story. Research must have been difficult. My only experience of gangs came in LA when working with a record label who had a lot of rap acts and we were held up by one of the bands (gang members) and had a SWAT team rescue us all….then we had a gang related drive-by shooting soon after – shot out the front of the record label and recording studio windows late at might when we were recording there!
Witness protection is something which has always fascinated me; how do you leave your whole world behind to create a new one where everyone has a history except you? Trying to recall your new ‘background and past,’ must be a nightmare and especially with kids – can they ever be trusted to keep to the script?
I wish you much success with all your books and for this in particular. Cannot wait. I will visit the other bloggers as well. Thanks for accepting the tour.
June 23, 2014 at 12:06 pm
Thanks, Jane! It was a fun post to write. It must have been terrifying getting attacked by those gangs in LA. Thanks for sharing that. I like doing research and learning new things for the books I write. When I lived in bigger cities (Denver, Minneapolis, and Oklahoma City), I heard lots of news reports about gang activity. I assumed that gangs were only in the big cities. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. That was a big surprise to me. Like you, I’ve been fascinated with witness protection, too. Maybe that’s because of my interest in psychology and sociology. It was interesting writing this story and trying to see how someone might cope with the anxiety of giving up everything to survive.
I loved reading your blog post, too. Good luck with your books.
June 23, 2014 at 1:33 pm
Susan I love your posts as you know and I try and pop in when I have a quiet moment to read them carefully. I have never studied psychology or Sociology – think I would have loved them – but when one bumps into the variety of people in one’s own lifetime one suddenly becomes aware (meeting different peoples and in different situations abroad for example) that basically we all want the same things from life; just some of us go about it differently and without any thought for others. WP must be the ultimate escape from yourself, your past and in a way the future…our future is based on our past and if you have to forget it and start afresh at, say 50, what a nightmare and how do you make a future when everything you would have made can’t be the same as it might have been because now you are someone else. Complicated and so interesting. We all think we’d like to reinvent ourselves now and again, but not like that I am sure. Thanks for the good wishes and for your comments. 🙂
June 23, 2014 at 10:07 am
Loved this, Susan – the notorious blog hop is eventually going to take in every writer in the world as it makes its pyramid progress through cyberspace! Good luck with Liars Games, a fine piece of work.
June 23, 2014 at 12:07 pm
Thanks, Frances! I hope you’ll like the book. This blog tour was a great idea.
June 27, 2014 at 8:26 pm
Oh wow!!! Thank you SOOOO much Susan, very kind of you sweetie! 😀 xx