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 Interview with Agatha Award nominee Toni Kelner, author of Death of a Damn Yankee (Kensington, August 1999) the latest book in the Laura Fleming mystery series, nominated for a 1999 Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award for Best Amateur Sleuth Novel - Feature by PJ Nunn.PJ NUNN - Toni, tell us about your latest book. TONI KELNER - My last book is DEATH OF A DAMN YANKEE released in August 1999. Here's the blurb from my bibliography: A Romantic Times Magazine Top Pick and nominee for the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award for Best Amateur Sleuth Novel of 1999. Carpetbaggers have come to Byerly. Yankees Marshall and Grace Saunders want to buy Walters Mill. But Burt Walters doesn’t trust them, and sets Laura to work finding out if they’re on the up and up. The sleuth and her Shakespeare-quoting spouse find more than they bargained for: a con man and an arsonist are at work in Byerly. It’s bad enough when Marshall Saunders is murdered, but when the family home place gets firebombed, it gets personal. How did you get started writing? Are we ignoring the re-writing of Thumbelina in second grade? I started trying to write down my daydreamed adventures in junior high school. Somehow the research paper I'd written on science fiction in ninth grade convinced me I should give it a shot. So I'd carefully scribble down these fairly ridiculous adventures, most of which starred an idealization of myself. This eventually led to my reading books about writing, and starting to put together the elements of plot and character and so forth to make a real story. It was an evolutionary process. I submitted my first story to a professional magazine and received my first rejection slip when I was in eleventh grade. I've still got it, come to think of it. It was what writers call a good rejection. He rejected the story, but not me as a writer. So I never gave up. What's the first thing you had published? I published an interview with a teacher on the kids' page of the Gulf Breeze Sentinel when I was in sixth grade. When I was in college, I published an interview with James Doohan (Scotty of STAR TREK), an interview with a local play-by-mail games entrepreneur, and several Dungeons and Dragons limericks. On the mystery side, Down Home Murder, the first Laura Fleming book, was published in 1993. Has your writing changed since that time? Since Down Home Murder I hope so. With each book, I try to bring changes both to my characters and to the plots. Down Home was mostly a character book. The next Dead Ringer was heavier on plot. In the third Trouble Looking for a Place To Happen, I tried to keep both character and plot and added a bit of a twist. My protagonist Laura Fleming and her husband Richard are having a battle of words throughout the book. He'll use a Shakespeare quote, and she'll try to top it with a Southern quote. In Country Comes to Town, I tried to write about someplace other than the South so I set the book in Boston, though still with Laura. I don't know how successful I was - that book hasn't sold as well as the others. I try to do something a little different with each book, while still keeping to the spirit of the series. Real changes in my writing style are more evident in the non-Laura short stories I've published. Has your writing won any awards? Unless you count the Summerwriters Award I won from the Charlotte News in high school, I haven't won any awards. But my short story The Death of Erik the Redneck was nominated for an Agatha Award, and DEATH OF A DAMN YANKEE has been nominated for the Romantic Timnes Reviewers' Choice Award for Best Amateur Sleuth Novel of 1999. It won't be awarded until November 9/2000, so I can keep hoping until then. Who are you when you're not writing? What kind of work do you do? What are your hobbies? When I'm not writing, I'm a fulltime Mom. I have two girls: four-and-a-half-year-old Maggie and twenty-one-month-old Valerie. Having them around pretty much kills off hobbies. Before I became a mother, I was a technical writer for ten years and wrote software documentation for the most part, which is great training for writing mysteries. Who or what has most influenced your writing? Probably everybody and everything I've ever read, either as a good example, a bad example, or just soaked into my pores. My first love was science fiction, and I really wanted to write like Andre Norton. My SF and fantasy is pretty abysmal, because I was too busy trying to write like Norton to find my own voice. Only by switching genres to mysteries was I really able to let loose. In the mystery field, I'm not sure who influences me. I am constantly inspired by Dorothy Sayers who is just wonderful; Elizabeth Peters who makes me dream of adventure; Barbara Paul who never writes the same thing twice; and Charlaine Harris who is always brave enough to take chances. As a writer, where do you see yourself in 10 years? Though I love the Laura Fleming series, in ten years from now I would like to have books from at least one more series on the shelves, and maybe two. At one book a year, I'm hoping to have ten more books written by then, and some short stories too. I'm optimistic. What do you enjoy most about writing? The actual writing is a joy for me. I lose myself in the emotions of my characters, and vicariously living out their adventures. My books have been light on the adventure side perhaps, but I'd like that to change if I can become more confident with action scenes. What do you find most difficult? Action scenes - fights and chases and such. And probably coming up with convincing villains. I think I do come up with them, but it's a struggle for me. Best advice for new writers? If you're not having fun writing, stop. The money is lousy, the hours are horrible, and fame is hard to find. If it's not fun, then what's the point? Don't immediately give up if you hit a hard spot. Instead, step back and remember when the work is fun and try to recreate that. Or find a new way of marking your progress that makes it fun again. I mark my progress with word counting. It's endless fun to figure out how many words I've written, if that puts me ahead of schedule and when I'll finish a book if I keep going. It's silly, but it helps make writing more fun for me. Where can we find your website? I share a website at: http://members.aol.com/femmesweb Email: tonilpkelner@mindspring.com |
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