It’s A First!

My debut novel, For Better, For Murder, will be published in September 2009 by Midnight Ink. As a result, the Inkspot members graciously invited me to blog with them. I accepted then realized I would have to write my first blog entry—ever.

I’m taking the easy road this time and telling you a little about my new book and how it came to be. I’ll try to work my way up to something a little more edgy in the future.

Over two years ago now, I wrote For Better, For Murder because, as a stay-at-home mom, I found only so many hours could be filled with laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, dog walking, okay maybe a little mall shopping and lunching, volunteer work, children’s activities, and, oh yes, the ladies of The View. I craved purpose, earning potential, and some brain exercise. Then, when these characters started talking to me, I couldn’t stop writing until I’d completed three books in the Broken Vow Mystery series. Currently I’m taking a rest from writing, but, as my friend likes to say, ideas keep “percolating” in my head. Book four will pour out of me one day soon, I’m sure.

I intended to write a cozy, but my agent called this book a “cozy with an edge”. The acquiring editor at Midnight Ink called it “whatever this thing is that you wrote”. I took that as a compliment. I wanted this book to be different. Fresh. Entertaining. If you laugh out loud a couple times, come close to tears once, and remember something unique to the story months after you’ve finished reading it then I’ll have accomplished my goal.

The protagonist of For Better, For Murder owns a sportscar boutique in New York’s Finger Lakes region. I wanted to write about a protagonist with an interesting hobby or profession. When I took inventory of my own, I realized another author had already written about them. So I stole my husband’s hobby—cars. He’s been talking to me about them for seventeen years. Three quarters of the time—okay, half the time, but let’s keep that a secret between us—I was actually listening. Then I picked the Finger Lakes region as the setting for my fictional town, because I spent a lot of time there in childhood and now as an adult with my own children. I’m just hoping I didn’t make it sound so inviting that everyone flocks there and I can’t get a table at my favorite restaurants anymore.

Now for the plot: in For Better, For Murder sportscar boutique owner Jolene Asdale craves business success and a quiet life in her upscale Finger Lakes tourist town. But a corpse in her showroom Ferrari and the arrival of her almost-ex-husband, the deputy sheriff assigned to the investigation, creates a tense situation that only heightens as the evidence keeps pointing to Jolene as the murderer.

I’ll tell you a story about Jolene in my next post.