This month I interview Kentucky author Laurel Heidtman. Laurel writes cozy mystery and romance novels from her home in the Daniel Boone National Forest.
15)
Believe it or not, purely by coincidence, you’re the second consecutive female
ex police officer I’ve made my Author of the Month (the last was Christine
Lyden, aka CA Asbrey, who was a UK cop). Between your law enforcement
experience, stint as a bartender, nursing training and two English degrees, you’re
very admirably and enviably weighted for a crime writing career. How much does
your experience as a cop inform your fiction?
Quite
a bit. Since most of my books are mysteries in which some of the characters are
police officers, it helps to have knowledge of how the police work and think,
as well as what’s believable in the description of the crime. I often yell “you
gotta be kidding!” at some of the things I see on TV crime shows. My third Eden
mystery, A Convenient Death, is even loosely based on an unsolved double
murder that occurred in a convenience store in the city where I was a police
officer. Of course, my fictitious cops solved it. Hah!
14)
I’d like to first talk to you about your Eden series. First off, it’s not a
series in the traditional sense. Each of the three Eden books features an
interesting new protagonist (except for insurance investigator Cal Becker) and
only the locale is retained, almost as if it’s a character in its own right. In
a way, it resembles the Mundy’s Landing series by bestselling novelist Wendy Corsi Staub. What made you choose to write your series like that?
Actually
most of the characters are retained throughout the series, but different ones
step forward to share center stage. Cal Becker is introduced in the first one,
takes center stage in the second, and has a supporting role in the third. Eden
police detective Jo Valentine is a major character in all three, and Eden
University police officer (and later chief) Lou Pelfrey has a supporting role
in all three. Edna and Ann Hill are in all three, and Ann has a bigger role in
the third. Many of the other characters have minor roles in all three.
As
far as why I did it that way? Honestly, I’m not sure I thought it out. It just
seemed right because it’s the way it would be in real life. The police officers
in a given town remain more or less the same for years, but the crimes happen
to and are committed by different people. But many of those people live in the
town for years.
13)
So, looking at your thriller canon, strictly speaking, all four of your books
are standalones. Any plans to bring back any of your MCs to make them series
characters?
I
think I might have answered some of this in the previous question. I do plan on
continuing the Eden series, but I’ll do it the same way I’ve been doing it—continuing
with most of the same characters but bringing a different one forward to share
center stage with Jo Valentine.
As
for Whiteout, it will always remain a true standalone. However, I am toying
with the idea of doing other thrillers set against the backdrop of a natural
threat. I can honestly say I’ve never been truly afraid of another person—wary
of them, certainly, but not afraid. I always figure I’ve got a chance of either
reasoning with them or beating them. But Mother Nature? She can throw some
serious shit at you, and there’s no reasoning with or beating her. Earthquakes,
fire, flood, blizzards, tornados—I’d rather face a serial killer any day! :-)
12)
Is the fictional town of Eden based on any place you know of either within or
outside your home in the Daniel Boone National Forest?
I
live a little less than an hour away from Morehead, Kentucky, which is a small
college town. But it being a small town with a university and close to Daniel
Boone are the only things that resemble Eden. There are no gorgeous bed and
breakfasts like Holly House, no steel mill, and no river. And I didn’t base any
of my characters on people who live there. I don’t even know any of the police
officers and only one or two people who live there.
11)
Have any real life anecdotes from your stints as a cop, bartender or a nurse
made their way into your fiction?
As
I mentioned, the idea for the double murder in A Convenient Death can be
attributed to the unsolved crime that occurred while I was on the police
department. But nothing matches that crime other than it occurring in a
convenience store at night with both the clerk and a customer the victims. It’s
more that I try to use my experience in various professional environments to
add a realistic feel to the stories and the characters.
10)
It’s been said that writers are not made they’re born, while others say the
exact opposite. You seem to be the former. On your website, you relay an
anecdote handed down from your mother who said you wrote stories based on the
pictures in books when you were too young to read. Has the stimulation of your
visual sense continued to inspire your fiction?
Gee,
I dunno. Probably. And I didn’t “write” the stories based on the pictures when
I was a kid. I was too young to read and too young to write, so I made up
stories and told them to her. Kept up the oral tradition, I guess, like my
distant ancestors would have done around the campfire. In truth, I think most
people are probably born storytellers. Most young children are, but somewhere
along the way, their imagination gets crushed.
9)
You also write romantic suspense as Lolli Powell. Who are your favorite authors
in that subgenre?
I
really enjoy J.D. Robb’s books featuring Eve Dallas. Those are a wonderful mix
of romance and crime set in a future world.
8)
As you may know, all my Authors of the Month are indie novelists. Are you happy
being an indie or do you yearn for a Big Five publishing contract obtained
through a literary agent?
I’m
happy being indie. If I were younger, I might be knocking at the doors of
agents/publishers, but at my age, I’d probably be on my deathbed by the time I
landed a contract. Back in the early nineties when I was working twelve-hour
nursing shifts, I submitted a couple of romantic suspense books to Silhouette.
They were rejected, but I got long, personalized letters telling me what they
liked and didn’t like rather than form rejections. From what I read at the
time, that was encouraging. There was no option of self-publishing at the time,
of course. Then I took a technical writing job and stopped writing fiction.
After spending all day writing online help and manuals, I couldn’t face sitting
at the computer any longer.
A
couple of years ago I attended the Killer Nashville mystery writers conference.
They have roundtables with a couple of agents and eight or ten writers. Each
participant prints ten pages of a novel. They are read out loud, then the
agents make comments and fill out a short form they give to the writer. If they
like it, they tell the writer they’d like to see more and how many pages more.
I decided to participate in one just to see how I would do. I took the first
ten pages of A Convenient Death, and both agents said they wanted to see
more. I didn’t pursue it with them and never intended to, but I think I needed
that positive feedback that told me I was doing okay.
Besides,
indies can do quite well. I recently purchased a K-Lytics report on cozy
mysteries. Out of the top ten bestselling cozy mystery authors, six were indies—as
were numbers eleven and twelve. I edit for a couple of indie authors who now
make a very good living at it. I’m nowhere close to that yet, but I turn a small
profit every month.
I’m
also a bit of a control freak when it comes to my own life. I like being in
charge of what I write, when I write, the cover, the advertising—all of it. And
even if the money isn’t much, I only have to share a little with Amazon.
7)
Describe your typical writing day. Do you use a spiral loose leaf notebook for
drafts, strictly a laptop or both? How many hours a day do you devote to
writing? And despite the breadth of your experience, do you still need to do
intensive research into your mysteries?
I’m
strictly computer—laptop or desktop. As for how many hours a day I devote to
writing—not enough. It would be more accurate to say I average 2,000 words a
day on a writing day. Some days those 2,000 take several hours; other days I get
them done quickly. I know I’m not producing books as fast as I’d like, and I
want to work on that.
As
far as research, I wouldn’t say I do intensive research, but I usually
do some. For example, even though I was a police officer, I was one from 1977 to
1988. A lot has changed since then, especially in terms of how the police use
technology. And police departments in a small town are different from
departments in mid-size cities and they’re both different from big city
departments. Federal law enforcement is different from city, county, or state.
New weapons and new problems have appeared on the scene. So it is necessary for
me to do some research.
6)
Plotter or pantser?
Pantser
for the most part. I know the start of a story and I generally know the end,
but the part in between comes to me as I write. I always compare it to driving
from New York to California. You know where you’re starting and where you want
to end up, but there are a lot of ways to get there.
Sometimes
I think I know what I’m going to write, but it changes as I go along. I often
say I feel like I’m channeling the characters. They tell me what to write, and
they do things I’m not expecting. It’s a little creepy. A lot of writers I talk
to have the same experience.
5)
You and your husband have a sizable menagerie consisting of three dogs and two
cats. Have any of them made their way into your fiction or at least have given
you ideas?
The
Top Shelf mysteries are the only books I’ve written that have an animal in them
(Jasper, Ricki’s cat). I do plan on doing another cozy mystery series that will
have more animal characters. I love animals of all kinds—and like them a lot
more than I like most people.
Living
in the woods like we do, we also have a lot of wild visitors. Our latest and most
surprising was about a month ago. A black bear decided the can of bird seed and
corn on our front porch was just too tempting to pass up. We heard the noise
about eleven one night, opened the front door expecting to see a raccoon—boy,
were we surprised! It’s not something we see every day in our part of Kentucky,
but it’s getting more common. Who knows? Maybe a bear will show up in one of my
books one day.
4)
Assuming you’re still an omnivorous reader (you once told me you have over 300
titles on your Kindle), what are the trends you welcome in indie fiction and
which ones don’t you welcome?
I
don’t know if you’d call it a trend, but I really hate that so many indie
authors put out work that has not been copyedited. Often the story is really
good and the author does a great job of telling it and creates characters that
are believable, but the sheer number of grammar and punctuation errors, missing
words, etc. distract a reader from what would be a good book. Because the eye
sees what it expects to see, anyone can have one or two mistakes—I find them
even in books that come from the big publishers—but too many indie books are
filled with them. That hurts all of us. I know many writers can’t afford to pay
an editor, but I think most people know someone who aced their English classes.
If nothing else, ask them to look it over. They might not catch everything, but
they’ll catch a lot.
A
trend I like is the growing popularity and acceptance of indie books. When I
see things like the K-Lytic report that shows six of the ten top-selling
authors in cozy mysteries are indie, it’s encouraging. What one considers a
good book is subjective. Readers, not the gatekeepers of traditional
publishing, should be allowed to decide what they want to read.
3)
WHITEOUT is the only thriller you’ve written and published that isn’t part of
the Eden series. I have to admit, I’m irresistibly drawn to domestic thrillers
that devolve on a cabin during a blizzard. What inspired you to write WHITEOUT?
In
March of 1993 I was in my last year of nursing school in Ohio. We’d already
bought the Kentucky house, but we only came on weekends and vacations since my
husband was still working and I was still in school. During spring break, we
headed down for a week in our house in the woods, and a freak snowstorm struck
while we were here.
Some
areas of Kentucky got thirty inches of snow. We got twenty-two where we are,
and the blizzard-force winds resulted in hip-high drifts—very rare for our
area. Our house is a third of a mile back a gravel lane that leads to a paved
forest service road. That, in turn, goes for ten miles in one direction until
it intersects with a county road and two miles in the other direction to the
end of the peninsula we’re on. We lost power, and that was before we had a Generac.
We couldn’t get out our lane, but even if we had been able to, we couldn’t have
driven on the road. The county snow plows would probably have gotten to the
road eventually, but as you can imagine, three inhabited houses (that’s all
there were at the time) were not high on their list of priorities. About three
days into it, one of our neighbors got his backhoe out and plowed us out
himself. Whiteout grew out of that experience, but at least we didn’t
have any escaped killers show up at our door.
2)
When you retired and began writing fiction full time, who were and are your
biggest influences?
I
don’t think anyone influenced me in the beginning, but now the global community
of other indie authors are a big support. As an undergraduate English major with
a creative writing emphasis, I’d known other students who aspired to be
writers, but I’d lost touch with them by the time I started writing Catch A Falling Star. My husband mentioned that I was writing to a man at a
restaurant where he often goes for coffee, and that man said his nephew had
also written a book. The man went on to tell the local librarian about both of
us, and she set up a book event with us and two more local authors. One of the
people who came to see us turned out to have written a book that she hadn’t
even told her mother about. She’s now outpaced me in the number of books she’s
written, and she’s one of my editing clients.
Besides
the local community of indie authors that I didn’t know existed, there’s the
global community. I regularly edit for a British author who now lives in Spain
and a Kosovo author who writes in English and sets her stories in the U.S. I
occasionally edit for a writer who lives in Washington state. I “talk” with
others around the world on Facebook and Goodreads and sometimes in emails.
There are a lot of us out there, and for the most part, we’re all supportive of
one another.
1)
What’s next for Laurel Heidtman?
I’m
working on the third Top Shelf mystery now. It’s been slow going this summer
(that seems to hit me every summer), but now that fall is here, I hope to
devote more time to it. My cozy mysteries seem to be the most popular of my
books, so for a while, I plan on focusing on them.
Most
of all, I want to become more disciplined as far as treating my writing more
like a “real” job, i.e., putting in regular hours on a specified number of
days. Eight full-length books and one novella in five years isn’t bad, but that’s
still slightly less than an average of two a year. I can and should do much
better than that.
This is where you can find Laurel's Facebook page and this is where you can find her Lolli Powell website.
