Q&A with M.C. Grant

This week, we sat down with M.C. Grant (also known as Grant McKenzie), author of Beauty with a Bomb.

Midnight Ink: How long have you been writing?

M.C. Grant: I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t writing—and even before I knew how to string the words together, I loved to create adventures with my toys. And when I didn’t have toys, I would sit on the sidewalk and create stories using bottle caps and discarded cigarette butts, or twigs, seaweed, stones, cardboard boxes, anything really. I was one of those kids who could play by himself for hours and, actually preferred it. Of course, if you don’t play with others, you’re labeled odd, but I never minded being odd. It came as a shock to me when I first started school and the teacher told my mum that I would need to transfer to “special school” because I was writing some of my words backwards. This was before they understood or even had a word for dyslexia. Fortunately, my mum insisted that despite my quirks, I didn’t have a learning disability—and I soon taught myself how to put the letters in the “correct” order. My first recollection of showing my writing to others was when I wrote and performed a series of short plays in elementary school. I attempted my fist novel in junior high, and after several rewrites, including the purchase of my first typewriter, finished it by Grade 12.

MI: What influence have other authors had on your writing?

MCG: I’ve always been a voracious reader with a strong attraction to crime thrillers and mysteries. My first mysteries were Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, followed by S. E. Hinton’s amazing YA novels, which led into collecting the entire Mickey Spillane library, plus Gregory McDonald, Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. From there, it has been a smorgasbord of talented writers from Robert McCammon to John Sandford, Andrew Vachss, Stephen Hunter, James Rollins, James P. Hogan, Ben Bova, and Isaac Asimov to name a few.

MI: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?

MCG: It would have to be something creative: working behind the scenes in theatre, television or movies seems like a natural fit. In high school, I was the stage lighting designer for our theatre department and loved it. I also acted and wrote, plus I was the assistant editor of our school newspaper. I actually debated between studying journalism or theatre in university, but writing won out.

MI: If you have a job outside of writing, what is it?

MCG: I was a newspaper journalist for 30 years, but I am presently the Director of Communications for Our Place Society, a unique inner-city community center that provides over 1,200 meals per day for the poor and vulnerable citizens of Greater Victoria.

MI: What is/are your favorite thing/s to do when you’re not writing or working?

MCG: I love to read, dabble in art, and relax with my wife and daughter.

MI: What was your inspiration for this series?

MCG: Interestingly, I wrote the first draft of Angel With A Bullet, the first Dixie Flynn novel, many, many years before it was published. I wanted to write a noir-style mystery series that contained both explosive action and dark humour. Dixie also allowed me to give the series its heart.

MI: How does the Dixie Flynn series compare to your past works?

MCG: Dixie is quite a bit different from the stand-alone thrillers that I write as Grant McKenzie. For one, Dixie is written in first-person, present-tense, female perspective, while my thrillers are third-person, past-tense. I also try and have more fun with the Dixie books by including more humour and quirky, fun characters. With that said, however, the plots can be dark and dangerous, but only because I know Dixie can handle them.

MI: Tell us about Dixie Flynn. What inspired you to write a feisty newspaper reporter?

MCG: Dixie is such a fun character: she’s fierce, witty, sassy, and headstrong. And although she’s proven unlucky in love, she’s a loyal friend and protector to those she cares about. As a veteran journalist myself, I wanted to explore how that profession has changed, but also bring back some of the grimy glamour of the sliver age when the best reporters were the rebels and not necessarily the nicest people. In the 1960s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s, editorial meetings were more like cage matches of passion and intelligence, with everyone fighting to showcase the best story. Today, the decisions are made from the top down without any real input from editorial at all. Dixie is a bit of the antithesis to this, one of the last rebels working the crime beat of San Francisco.

MI: Who is your favorite mystery sleuth and why?

MCG: My favorite has to be Mike Hammer as I just love the way Spillane could tell a fists-clenched, uncompromising story. The pulp era heroes never apologized for taking the law into their own hands and getting a bit bloody.

MI: Do you have a favorite murder case from a book (either yours or another author’s)?

MCG: I really love the mystery in The Fear In Her Eyes. A distraught father receives a note from the person who killed his daughter in a drunk-driving accident one year earlier. The note includes a visitor’s pass to the prison where the driver is incarcerated, plus seven life-changing words: "I was paid to kill your daughter."

Grant at work with Flower and Boo

MI: Do you have a pet? Tell us about him/her.

MCG: I can’t imagine not having a cat. I have two at the moment and they love to curl up on my lap when I’m writing. Flower was found frozen in a barn in the middle of winter by a farmer who rushed to put her in a low-heat oven. Remarkably, she survived and has been with us for 16 years now. Boo is a pure black cat who spent a whole year in an animal shelter before we adopted him. It has taken some gentle coaxing to earn his trust, but now his purrs fill the room.

Flower

Boo

MI: What food could you live off of for the rest of your life?

MCG: I’m a big fan of soup. All different kinds of soup. I could probably have a bowl of soup and a chunk of San Francisco sourdough bread every day for lunch.

MI: Do you have a favorite recipe?

MCG: I do, but I’m one of those cooks who doesn’t follow recipes. I love to eat something new and then make a guess at how I would re-create it at home. So I rarely make the same dish in the same way twice as I’m always changing a bit here and there, or adding something new. I would love to try Turducken one of these days though—it sounds delicious.

MI: What’s your favorite part about being an Inker?

 It’s an absolute thrill to be published alongside such a great bunch of talented writers. And the editorial team is such a wonderful support—they really want the books to succeed.

Beauty with a Bomb, the third Dixie Flynn Mystery, is available online and in bookstores now!

September 2014 Books Available Now!

   

Don't miss Midnight Ink's latest releases!

"A stylish noir voice."

—Kirkus Reviews on Adobe Flats

"Readers will cheer for this avenging less-than-angel as she goes after some very bad people.

—Publishers Weekly on Beauty with a Bomb

"Lively and entertaining . . . [a] well wrought whodunit." 

—Publishers Weekly on Of Merlot and Murder

"[A] thrilling tale."

—RT Book Reviews on Unraveled Visions

Now available from Midnight Ink, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and your local bookseller!

Sales conference - Fall 2013

I think I might thrive under pressure.  I say that because this week, here at Llewellyn headquarters, we will be doing our Fall 2013 sales conference and I have been slow to get prepared.  For those of you unfamiliar with sales conference, it is a huge meeting where the acquiring editors showcase the fall titles for the sales, marketing, and publicity departments.  For each title, we create a document that gives those departments all the information it needs, such as:

• release date
• cover image
• synopsis
• author bio
• physical book description (page count, sub-genre, ISBN)
• who the audience is
• a one to two sentence sound bite
• three comparable titles with book description and life to date sales

We also create a powerpoint to go with the presentation.  During the presentation, I give a verbal summary of the book and often go deeper into why I chose the applicable comp titles.  I also talk a bit about the author, especially if I have personally met the author.

 

After each title presentation, I ask if there are any questions or other information to add.

 

Is it stressful?  Heck yeah.  The most stressful part for me is the question time, because I have no idea what might come up!

 

But in general, I find sales conference to be fun and exciting.  I acquire books that I love and often refer to them as my children.  And at sales conference, I get to whip all my baby pics!  I tell stories of hanging out with authors and getting to know them.  I might go on and on about how much I loved a manuscript.  I can talk about a series - where it has been and where it is going.  I also work in my vision of Midnight Ink.  Where we have been and where I see us going.

 

But alas, I procrastinate.  Which means I should be filling in my powerpoint rather than typing up a blog post.  By noon today, I will start feeling anxious and stressed out.  Tuesday I will probably be a wreck and finish up my powerpoint.  Wednesday starts the sales conference with nonfiction lines.  Thursday we do fiction.  I can't wait...  now to just finish this powerpoint!

 

 

 

 

I give a big shout out to Kelly Van Sant who did the heavy lifting on my onesheets.  And to Brian Farrey-Latz who put the bones of my powerpoint together.  :)

 



Grunt Goes to Canada

A guest post by m.c. grant

It was likely the strong, undiluted accent, but it could have been shyness or the overwhelming heaviness of being suddenly different.

Whatever it was, to their Canadian ears, my name sounded like Grunt.

You can imagine the laughter--and the sound effects.

There I was, as Scottish as can be: orange hair so bright it practically glowed, freckles (masses of them since it was a hot summer) and the pale white skin that comes after painful lessons learned on the sandy beaches of Troon.

Most people believe there shouldn't be any language barriers when one emigrates between English-speaking countries, but they're wrong.

This was 1976. I was thirteen years old. And I didn't speak English, I spoke Glaswegian with an East Kilbridian burr.

My working-class brogue had erased the "th" sound from my vocabulary, so words like "think" and "thought" became "fink" and "fought." I also used such foreign phrasing as "Aye" for "Yes" and "Ta" in place of "thanks." There were even times when you would have thought I was speaking Gaelic rather than just trying to ask a teacher for permission to go to the washroom. "I'm burstin', miss. Canna no use the loo?"

This language barrier became even more impenetrable when I attended French class at A. E. Cross Junior High. As an official bilingual country, Canada tries to place an emphasis on its second national language. Fortunately, I had a year of French at Claremont High School before leaving Scotland, and so I believed I was in with a shot. I was a good student and knew how to ask for the time, close the door and hang up my hat, all in French.

The teacher, however, thought I had been sent by Candid Camera. She was from Quebec (a province that speaks a different variety of French from France, just to confuse matters) and to her, I sounded like a tractor ripping her language up by the roots and shredding it to tatters before her ears.

My ability to master the written portion of the exams seemed to only frustrate her further as I believe she thought I was actually speaking some form of Scandinavian.

Scotland has changed dramatically since I left, but in 1976, we only had three television channels (although BBC2 barely counted) and the only American shows I can remember were a few cartoons, an occasional John Wayne movie and The Wizard of Oz every Christmas.

Canada didn't look or sound like any of them, even though my family landed in Calgary, the cowboy capital of the country. This wasn't Cowboys and Indians (although there were plenty of both), this was oil country with belt buckles the size of your face and ¾-ton, extended-cab pickup trucks larger than a council flat. The city was clean and noticeably graffiti free with large blue skies and powerful Chinook winds that could pick up a small dog and carry it off to Saskatchewan.

It was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. The city sprawled, stretching itself across hills and valleys, spacing everything out so that people didn't walk--they drove. And they drove a lot. In Canada, but especially in the prairie provinces, people think nothing of driving hundreds of kilometers to find a nice spot for lunch.

But although Calgary was newer and shinier than the city I left, it still had problems that wouldn't arrive in Scotland for several more years.

I discovered this on my first week of school when my English teacher gave the class an essay assignment to write about a "pot party." The other students thought this was hilarious, but I was completely befuddled. The only pot party I could imagine was one where a group of people brought over their fat-blackened chip pots and made a huge load of steaming, hot chips.

Now, although that sounded like a fun time to me as I loved a good poke of vinegar-soaked chips, the teacher went on to say that our story should end with the police arriving at the door and the consequences that would entail.

I had to raise my hand.

What the heck could the criminal charges be? Too much hot fat bubbling on top of a stove at the same time?

I was clueless. Drugs just hadn't entered the mainstream of Scottish education at that time. We had alcohol and violence--I knew all about that. You would be hard pressed to find any schoolboy or girl who hadn't been a victim and/or witness to some horrific thuggery, but drugs weren't part of that--not yet.

In Canada, however, every teenager was well versed about cannabis and all its various and colorful aliases.

It sounds horribly naive, but I didn't even know what you did with it.

The teacher seemed dumbfounded when she had to explain to the foreign kid--who, with the exception of his bright ginger hair, looked just like everyone else in class--that pot was an illegal plant that grew all over Canada (but especially in British Columbia) that people dried and smoked to get high.

As you can imagine, the other students loved this and my status quickly dropped from unusual but kinda cute foreign kid to weird loser who no one could understand.

I further cemented my weird reputation when the school announced that the first theme day of the year was Greaser Day. Naturally, I once again had no clue what a greaser was, but I was determined to find out.

No one sticks out further on theme day than the kid without a costume--or so I thought.

In my research of greaserdom, I discovered it was a term used to describe a 1950s-style rocker. No problem. My dad, a joiner from Burnbank, and my mum, a Glasgow seamstress, had met at the big city dancehalls that were all the rage in the '50s and '60s. My dad was so cool back then that he spent his carpentry paycheques on handmade suits from an Italian tailor and had even won a contest to meet Bill Haley and His Comets on their first visit to the UK.

I told my parents that I wanted to look like a '50s rocker, and they did their best. Unfortunately, the '50s in Glasgow was an entirely different beast from the '50s in Canada. Canada basically stole its '50s memories from America, or more specifically from American TV shows and movies that glamorized that era.

So while every other kid looked like The Fonz from Happy Days in black leather jacket, white T-shirt, blue jeans and greased hair, I arrived looking dapper in a collared shirt and skinny tie, suit jacket borrowed from my mum, and my unruly hair blow-dried into a giant, orange pompadour.

After that disaster, even the really weird kids started ostracizing me.

Fortunately, I switched schools at the end of that year and was given a chance to start again. This time my accent was not quite as broad (although I still cling to it even to this day); I knew what the traditional teenage delicacies of Slurpees, Hoagies and Big Macs were; I could use cool words like "keen" and "keen-o"; I had a cowboy hat for the summer and a toque for the winter; I became an avid downhill skier and I even learned how to roller-skate.

I never stopped being proud of my heritage, but I also became equally proud of growing to be more than I was, a citizen of two countries with memories in each that make me the person I am today: the weird adult with the ginger hair and a stubborn perseverance that refuses to give in even when the odds seem stacked against me.

Without that indefatigability, I would have used all those numerous rejection slips of my early work as an excuse to stop writing. Instead, they became stepping stones to become a better writer and signposts that to my stubborn, Celtic blue eyes read: Never Give Up.

m.c. grant is the author of the upcoming Midnight Ink mystery, Angel with a Bullet. You can visit the author's website here.

Sorry I have been away a for a little bit folks.  Been busy.  Today for example, we had our Fall 2012 sales conference.  A lot of work for me, but it is also incredibly exciting and fun to announce the new titles.  Wanna see the covers??



Total awesomeness, don't you agree?  This is where I give a big standing ovation to the art department.  Lynne, Lisa, Ellen, Kevin and Adrienne are the best designers and Jeanette keeps it all together.  Thank to these folks, we put out some very fun and interesting covers.