Hello From Kathleen

Wow it’s Wednesday! I’m thrilled to be the middle-of- the- week blogger and I’m also thrilled to be with kindred spirits – my three fellow Whiskey Creek Press authors.

We are all morning writers (Larks). Though what is morning for me is afternoon for Margaret Blake in England. We just call her Super Lark. Like Debbie, I also live in Florida – near Tampa. And like Sarita I write both short stories and novels.

I’m still amazed – even after ten years – to be a mystery novelist. I studied and got an M.F.A in creative writing at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop a while back (quite a while) and fully intended to write literary novels.

Until my twenties it never occurred to me that a mystery novel could be literature. I remembered the stack of whodunits my aunt kept by her bed when I was a kid. The lurid covers always contained a well-dressed dead young woman lying in a poll of burgundy-colored blood. I assumed all mysteries were scary and second rate.

As fate would have it, my first boss was a mystery addict who introduced me to his favorite writers – Sharon McCrumb, Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes.

These women were graceful, elegant writers and mystery writers. I found Anne Perry on my own and was wowed. Like Dickens, her writing gives you a vivid sense of Victorian England—the sooty skyline, the pervasive poverty and the wealth and power of the upper class.

She made me want to write a police procedural. And so I did and then I wrote another. Now I’m hard at work on a third. I’ve never regretted the path I took because it was what I was meant to do.
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