Saturday, November 03, 2012

Authors on Tour: A Conversation with Morgan C. Talbot

Omnimystery News: Author Interview
with Morgan C. Talbot

We are delighted to welcome crime novelist Morgan C. Talbot to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of Red Adept Publishing, which is sponsoring her book tour. We encourage you to visit all the participating sites on her tour; you can find a schedule of stops here.

Morgan's new mystery is First to Find (Red Adept Publishing, October 2012 trade paperback and ebook formats), the first in the "Caching Out" series.

We recently had a chance to talk to Morgan about her new book.

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Omnimystery News: First to Find is the first in a new series. Why did you choose to create a series rather than a stand-alone?

Morgan C. Talbot
Photo provided courtesy of
Morgan C. Talbot

Morgan C. Talbot: Readers experience growth and change in their personal lives; I think they identify more with characters who do the same. I know I do. I also enjoy that sensation of layers and history that you get when you're reading book six and you get an inside reference to the plot twist in book two, or an inside joke that the characters invented in book four. When characters have a history amongst themselves, no matter how rocky or dark or thrilling, they become larger than life. They become your friends, and you look forward to seeing them again in the next book.

OMN: There seem to be so many subgenres of crime fiction these days. How would you categorize your book?

MCT: My books fall into the cozy subgenre, in that my sleuths are amateur and female, and the plots center around their shared hobby. There is a distinct tech element to the series, however, because the vehicle for the plot is the hobby of geocaching. Being a bit of an impatient futurist, I worked both existing and theoretical technology into my first book. I especially enjoyed giving one of my characters a green tech bent, since there's a whole cross-section of geocachers who embrace recycling, collecting trash from around geocaches, protecting the environment, and otherwise generally saving the planet. So my book is the love child of a cozy mystery and a technothriller. She's got her daddy's eyes, but otherwise she's a dead ringer for her momma.

OMN: Are you like any of the characters in the book?

MCT: There's a chunk of my personal experience in the book, but nothing of me. I don't like to borrow from people I know for my characters, especially myself. I assure you, I'm terribly boring. But I have held a job similar to Margarita's at the hospital, and I have been one of several instructors in a jujitsu dojo. I've also messed about with altering clothing to suit my own eclectic tastes, which Bindi does in the book. And of course, I've spent several years having fun geocaching.

OMN: Geocaching is a new term for us. How much research was involved in creating the story around this topic?

MCT: Having lived in and cached in the general area in which my stories take place gave me a broad background to start with, but there were metric tons of information I still needed to learn when I began planning my first mystery novel. I did a lot of Internet research to start with, not least because one of my characters is originally from Australia. Then I filled in the blanks with personal and online interviews and research trips (alas, not to Australia … yet!). I enlisted the help of an online friend in Victoria, Australia, to help me make my Aussie character believable.

The entire background for Bindi, my Australian geocacher, took about as much time to research as everything else I studied. I needed to familiarize myself with where she had lived at various times in her life, where she had attended uni, what she studied and why, how she spoke, what she said and didn't say (it's not shrimp, it's prawns), and how she'd handle the challenge of her supersmeller nose and its resultant beerophobia in a country that has more names for beer than the Inuit do for snow (I'm rounding up). "All things Aussie" was indeed the most challenging part of my research, but as a result, it was also the most exciting.

OMN: Where is First to Find set? Is this an area you're familiar with?

MCT: I was raised in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, and it's become my default geographical setting, to which I compare all other towns, temperatures, humidities, and biomes. I love the smell it has: rich, earthy, green, never quite dry. Everything grows in an environment like that, including ideas. I wanted to base my stories in the Willamette Valley because, even though I don't live there anymore, it's my favorite home on the planet. And it's full of wonderful people and great geocachers and fun hiding spots. You can't go wrong with a good Willamette Valley hollow stump.

OMN: Have you always been a fan of mysteries?

MCT: I read entire library shelves of mysteries as a child. Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, the Bobbsey Twins, Encyclopedia Brown, etc. They taught me to look at the world as a series of mysteries to be explored, of adventures to be experienced. There may be dangerous moments along the way, and chapter nineteen will always see Nancy kidnapped by the villains, but in the end, the destination is always worth the journey. And difficult journeys are where the best stories come from.

OMN: Is geocaching a hobby of yours?

MCT: I enjoy making geocaching puzzles, which are puzzles whose answers reveal a set of coordinates that will lead geocachers to the spot on the surface of the planet where a geocache is hidden, waiting for them to discover it. It's just one more layer of awesome in this versatile hobby. Margarita, one of my main characters, is a puzzle maker as well, and each book in my series will show her working on her latest puzzle.

OMN: What kinds of books — or maybe authors — do you rush out to buy for yourself?

MCT: I will read Terry Pratchett's shopping list if he lets me. I recently nabbed his latest book, Dodger, and enjoyed it immensely. I'm big on Brandon Sanderson, as well, and Jim Butcher for his Codex Alera series, which is complete now, alas, leaving me without my Tavi fix. I worked up a conceptual sequel series for that world and everything! (I also write fantasy novels under another name — I'm a worldbuilding geek.) I'll generally read most any genre, but sci fi, historical fiction, mystery, and fantasy are my Big Four. Mix any two of those together, and I will read every book in the series as quickly as humanly possible. Brother Cadfael's medieval murder mysteries by Edith Pargeter writing as Ellis Peters, were a complete braingasm for me. Visiting Shrewsbury in Shropshire, England, is now an item on my bucket list.

OMN: Give us a Top 5 list on any topic.

MCT: The Top Five Caching Experience Stories Veteran Cachers Have:

1. You've been bushwhacking for an hour through stickers, swamps, and something that you just know will give you a rash in the morning. You arrive at the geocache location dripping with sweat and surrounded by an army of tiny, madness-inducing insects, only to spy a nice clean trail that leads around to your parking spot with an easy ten-minute stroll.

2. Your GPS unit's batteries die on the way to a rural cache, and if you brought backups, they're also dead. Using vague memories of the zoomed-in Google map from the online geocache page, you ball-park the cache location and make the find without your GPS unit. For the rest of the day, you feel slightly psychic.

Alternate version: Your friends take you to a cache site where they've searched for a small hidden container on multiple occasions, with a man-hour total that rivals their full-time job. You feel a twitch in your brain, reach out, and pull the cache container from its terribly clever hiding spot on the first try. Your caching buddies spend the next few minutes claiming to have searched that spot multiple times and accusing you of producing the container from your pocket somehow.

3. You search for over an hour for a cache with a low difficulty rating, but you never find it. Upon returning home to log your DNF in shame, you discover that the cache was archived by its owner and physically removed between the time you spotted its online cache page and the time you arrived on site to find it.

4. You get lost while geocaching in the woods because you forgot to waymark the car.

5. You find yourself surrounded by serious-looking law enforcement officers who see your crouching, crawling, poking, and generally surreptitious behavior as a threat to national security rather than the innocent hobby it is. Again. Seriously, can we get some laminated Official Geocacher cards here? Guys? I want my one phone call!

OMN: What's next for you?

MCT: I'm working on the third installment in the Caching Out series, which hasn't told me its working title yet, and also on the fourth, which is titled Grandfathered Out. In addition, I'm planning a middle grade mystery series called Emmaleigh Teagarden, Girly Girl Detective. I begemmed a pink magnifying glass with stick-on jewels this week for inspiration. Ooh la la! My eight year old daughter is pretty excited, and so am I.

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Morgan is an outdoorsy girl with a deep and abiding love for the natural sciences. Her degrees involve English and jujitsu. She enjoys hiking, camping, and wandering in the woods looking for the trail to the car, but there isn't enough chocolate on the planet to bribe her into rock climbing.

When she's not writing, she can be found making puzzles, getting lost on the way to geocaches, reading stories to her children, or taking far too many pictures of the same tree or rock.

She lives in Eastern Washington with her family.

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First to Find by Morgan C. Talbot

First to Find
Morgan C. Talbot
A Caching Out Mystery

Death is the hardest puzzle to solve. Margarita Williams escaped death at a young age, but its shadow has followed her all her life. Now, amidst the chaos of a new Australian roommate and mysterious, menacing neighbors, Death has set the puzzlemaker a puzzle of her own: someone is killing her fellow geocachers, one by one. And if she doesn't stop the murderer before he strikes again, Death will finally collect the soul that got away.

Amazon.com Print and/or Kindle Edition  Barnes&Noble Print Edition and/or Nook Book  Kobo eBooks

2 comments:

  1. Great book to learn more about geocaching!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you so much for interviewing me! I really enjoyed answering your thoughtful questions. It was a pleasure working with you on this installment of the FIRST TO FIND blog tour.

    ReplyDelete

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