with Cathy Spencer
We are delighted to welcome mystery author Cathy Spencer to Omnimystery News today.
Cathy visited with us earlier this month with an excerpt from her second Anna Nolan mystery, Town Haunts (Comely Press; February 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats). We recently had the chance to catch up with her to talk a little more about her new book.
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Omnimystery News: On your last visit we introduced Town Haunts as a cozy mystery with romantic elements. Is that an accurate description?
Photo provided courtesy of
Cathy Spencer
Cathy Spencer: I would categorize my Anna Nolan mystery series as a cozy mystery, although I also label it as a romantic suspense on the e-retailer sites I use. My books are cross-over mysteries with romantic story lines, and I'm glad to be able to tap into the romance audience as well. The advantage to having a cross-over is that mystery and romance are currently the best-sellers of genre fiction. The disadvantage is that because the mystery and romance markets are so huge, it becomes harder for an author to be discovered. A nice little sub-genre in which you are one of a much smaller pool of authors ‒ mysteries thrillers where the police detective is a reincarnated Egyptian pharaoh, for example ‒ might ultimately result in more recognition and book sales. The problem for me is that I'm drawn to writing cozies with an amateur female sleuth who owns a dog, so, for this series at least, I'm a very small fish in a very big pond.
The other problem with being categorized by a genre is that you must play fair with the expectations of the readers. For example, in the second book of the series, Town Haunts, I was toying with two of the major characters having an important conversation during a sex scene. However, I polled readers on the Amazon and Goodreads sites and discovered that cozy mystery readers don't want sex scenes in their stories. Had I included that scene, I wouldn't in good conscience have been able to call that book a cozy, and since I didn't want to change genres mid-series, the dialogue was held over breakfast the next morning instead. So genres do impose restrictions on the author.
OMN: Describe your writing process for us.
CS: I begin with an idea as to how the story will begin and end; I'm more of a "seat-of-the-pants" kind of writer than a plotter. I get very excited when I come up with the idea, lying in bed at night long after the lights have turned out writing the first chapter in my mind. For me, the scary part is writing the middle, because I don't have more than a vague idea of what's going to happen next until I sit down at the computer and write. Often the characters will take me in a new direction that I didn't anticipate, but they haven't failed me yet.
I also have a general idea about the characters, but flesh them out more as I go. Situations arise that force me to decide how the character will react and why. I wrote biographies for my characters mid-way through the story with my last project. I also decided to condense two police constables into one with my first book, Framed for Murder, because it made for a stronger character rather than two weaker ones. When you're writing a series with a number of recurring characters, you don't want to have so many that it confuses the readers, plus I like to take turns featuring them. The downside of this is it seems as if poor Steve Walker is the only police constable in town, running around doing most of the leg work for different superior investigative officers, depending on the story. Anna even commented on this in the first book.
OMN: How did you come up with the title of the book? And were you involved with the cover design?.
CS: As a self-publishing author, I am responsible for the covers as well as for the writing. The first book in my series was originally titled Road Kill because I thought it was a clever play on words, and because the heroine/amateur sleuth discovered the dead body of her husband beside a country road. Listening to the advice of other authors and publishers, and having no idea at the time about the elements that go into a genre cover, I contracted someone to produce the cover for me at a cost of $125. Unfortunately, I was never happy with the result, and between the title (which I think reminded people of a dead skunk on the side of the road) and the cover, the book didn't have many sales at first. However, one of my regency romances was doing quite nicely, and I attributed that to a good title, The Affairs of Harriet Walters, Spinster. I changed the title of Road Kill to Framed for Murder, and came up with the idea of using pictures taken in cemeteries for the series covers. My husband, who is a former professional photographer, shot the covers for me, although I'm proud of the carving I did for the pumpkins for Town Haunts. Since the third book in the series, Tidings of Murder and Woe will have a Christmas 2014 release, I have to go to the cemetery again soon while there's still snow on the ground to scout out the shot for the third cover. A photographer friend of my husband taught me how to use Photoshop, so I produce the covers for the mystery series, although someone did design the cover for the contemporary romantic comedy I'm working on. I wanted a graphic for that cover, and I certainly couldn't do that myself.
OMN: Have any specific authors influenced how and what you write today?
CS: My relaxation book of choice is a mystery, and I've read lots of different authors over the years. The three grand dames of classic British mystery, Agatha Christie (whose books I bought as a kid when I was on vacation at the beach), Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham, probably influenced my decision to write cozy mysteries, and taught me the importance of plot construction and humour. I could never figure out who did it with Agatha Christie, and so I began to suspect anyone and everyone, which stretched my imagination as to character and plot development. Literally anyone can do anything in a story as long as the author can come up with a viable explanation as to how the impossible became possible. I'm also a fan of Elizabeth Peters' Vicky Bliss series and Robert B. Parker's trio of detectives; I love the romantic elements and humour of both writers, plus the compact writing style of Parker. I, too, tend to have a spare writing style and, if anything, have to go back and embellish a bit after the first draft. Finally, I would cite Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, as having influenced my love of setting my stories in a small town. She's such an excellent story teller, and I enjoy revisiting the same larger-than-life characters in her other books.
OMN: What's next for you?
CS: The project I'm currently working on is a one-off, contemporary romantic comedy entitled The Dating Do Over. This will be a new genre for me, since I've only written romantic suspense or regency romances to date. This novel will have a summer 2014 release date; after that, I will be working on the third novel in the Anna Nolan series, Tidings of Murder and Woe. The first book in the series featured Anna in both her work environment, a fictional university in Calgary, and her home environment, a fictional small town in the Alberta Foothills. The second book is set exclusively in the small town. The third book will be set exclusively in Calgary for the first half, but then I'm looking forward to Anna's boss hiding out with Anna in her home town and having to interact with that group of characters. I'm new at writing full-time, as I've always had a full-time job outside the house with a salary and benefits up until this past summer, when my husband and I moved from Calgary to Hamilton, Ontario. I'm nervous about producing three books in one year, but I'm up for it!
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The curious thing about Cathy Spencer was that she didn't write any fiction before the age of forty-nine. Up until then, she had held a variety of administrative assistant positions with an insurance company and some post-secondary educational institutions, but she was never happy in her work. She tried to find something better, attending teachers college for three weeks and a theatre program for one term, but nothing seemed like a good fit.
Years later, with a husband and two children, she abandoned her quest for career fulfillment and settled for a decent pay cheque and a good benefits package. But the family was suddenly uprooted to a new province, and she found herself in yet another administrative assistant position, this time with a small town office in which she was particularly miserable. What to do?
Cathy decided to write a novel — a regency romance, of all things. Nine months later, that novel was completed. Although she was in a better job by then, a job she stuck with over the next five years, she finished two more novels, a second regency and the first novel in a mystery series, when her family was uprooted once more. This time Cathy decided to gamble on a full-time writing career because she had found something she loved to do at last — writing novels. She started her own publishing company, Comely Press, and will write and publish her stories until she is physically incapable of continuing.
For more information about the author and her work, please visit her website — Cathy Spencer, Author — or find her on Facebook.
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Town Haunts
Cathy Spencer
An Anna Nolan Mystery
Cemetery caretaker Sherman Mason is horrified to hear his dead wife calling to him from her grave. He asks newcomer Tiernay Rae, a gorgeous witch and proprietor of the Healing Hands store, to hold a séance to find out what's troubling his wife's ghost. Tiernay needs a coven to focus her powers, however, so her roguish brother, Greg, suggests that Anna Nolan and her two friends help — "the maiden, the mother, and the crone" as he calls them.
But with Halloween fast approaching and the séance unleashing a malicious evil in the small town of Crane, can Tiernay stop it before someone gets hurt, or even killed?
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