I will need to submit a brief synopsis/proposal for a couple of books in hopes the publisher will want to contract for more. My agent is already bugging me for them (he’s a whip-cracker at times!) even though I just turned in the last book on March 1. I would like to submit proposals for three more books and I’m pondering what cryptids to focus on next. Most of my contracts have been for 2 or 3 books, though I’ve had some 1-book contracts, too.
This must drive the IRS crazy!!! Then again, maybe you only need to file for one persona!
Door County is one of my favorite places in the world. Do you live there? Oh, you don’t have to answer if you want to keep that private. Maybe one of Al Johnson’s goats will become a crazed monster. OR perhaps one of the mysterious beings lives in the caves at Cave Point County Park.
Greetings AKA!
I picked up a copy of Death in Door County when we were headed there for a vacation. (I always like to read a book set in the place where I am visiting.) You really captured the landscape and the friendly local people we met. The next two in the series were a lot fun as well and I am waiting for the fourth to arrive at my library. So maybe now I’ll look for Working Stiff, although your original title was catchier! I like humor. P.S. I have worn glasses since I was four and had many grade school pictures just like yours! Thanks for making me laugh.
My checks are all paid in my real name, thank goodness. I know of some authors who set up a d/b/a (doing business as) LLC for their pseudonyms.My payments run through my agent first and he pays me after taking his cut.
I wouldn’t dare mess with Al Johnson’s goats, though I like the idea of something hiding in Cave Point. I don’t live in Door County but our family owns a vacation condo up in Gills Rock so we are up there a lot. I live in Stoughton, about 20 miles SE of Madison.
Yeah, but were you the tallest kid in your class (sometimes in the entire school)? And did you have weirdly wide feet that required you to wear Stride Rite corrective shoes instead of the cool shoes all the other kids wore? Or did you have a lazy eye that made you look crosseyed half the time? I know it’s not a competition–LOL. Working Stiff and several of the other earlier Mattie Winston books are out of print now but you can sometimes find them used and they are also available as ebooks and audio books. Thanks for reading A Death in Door County and the others.
I was super pleased to find Working Stiff on Amazon for $2.99 recently (in ebook format).
Speaking of Mattie, I wasn’t familiar with the series until recently, and I just read the first book last week, so this may not be a very knowledgeable question. But one of the things that really stood out for me was the amount of humor you used when describing this character’s exploits. Morgan has a sense of humor, too, but it’s a darker, more cynical one. Is this how you designed the characters, or does this reflect how your writing has changed over the years?
BTW, I love Mattie, and I’ve already picked up Book 2, Scared Stiff.
Does it bother you to learn your books are out of print, or heavily discounted? Or do you just accept it’s part of the book biz and concentrate on what’s next?
You mention that you’ve had a number of book contracts. At which point were you approached about your first one? I imagine it had to have felt amazing!
Why did you decide to switch from your Mattie Winston series? Do you ever expect to return to her, or to any of your other protagonists (other than Morgan Carter, who you’re still featuring)?
What challenges do you feel writing the Monster Hunter series present that you haven’t encountered in your previous series?
Actually, I was the shortest girl in the school and had to wear kid-sized clothes when everyone else graduated to pre-teen. Haha. My library still has one copy of Scared Stiff, so I might start there.
Hi Annelise,
When given the opportunity, I always like to ask authors, what was the scariest part of writing your first novel? What made you to take the plunge?
Thanks,
Robyn V.
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The entire Mattie Winston series is centered around the dark and sometimes twisted, politcally incorrect humor that is prevalent among medical workers and first responders like EMTs, paramedica, and police. I wanted to write a series that portrayed that humor against the sometimes tragic and horrific things these people deal with. It’s why they have that level of humor. It’s a coping mechanism. I wanted to share it (even though I know some people might find it crass or cold) because I do believe that laughter is some of the best medicine.
The whole idea for the series came to me while I was watching an autopsy–my first–back in the early nineties, and I was worried about whether or not I’d get sick or pass out from the smells I might encounter. I’d seen people cut open before in the OR and knew what we smelled like on the inside when we’re alive. And I wasn’t worried about the visual. When the autopsy began and the body was cut open, my first thought was, “Phew! The inside of this dead body doesn’t smell all that different from the inside of a live one.” And the writer side of my brain instantly thought, “What a great first line for a book!”
It took me several years and a move to Wisconsin to make what would become the Mattie Winston mysteries work. I had my contracts with HC during that time, but in between books I worked on the Mattie Winston book, trying to set it in Virginia, which is where I lived at the time. Once I left HC (or got fired–tomato, popcorn) and moved to Wisconsin I tackled the book again with a change of setting and suddenly it all worked. That thought that triggered the whole thing is the first line in Working Stiff.
I’ve always had a dark sense of humor–it’s a family trait–and as a healthcare worker who spent the last 20 years in the ER, I grew to appreciate the role it played in keeping me and others in the field, sane. So because Mattie is a nurse/coroner her thoughts, and by association, the Mattie Winston books, are more humorous. Morgan is a much more serious person and in some ways she’s also naive because of her somewhat sheltered upbringing.
It does bother me a little, though I know it’s inevitable. And these days writers can often get the rights reverted back to them and then re-release their out-of-print books if they want to self-publish. I did that with my HarperCollins books, though I admit I haven’t pushed them very hard.
Holly, you and I probably would have been friends in our early years. One of my high school friends who was often next to me in everything because our last names started with the same letters and it was all alphabetical, happened to be six feet tall and I was only 5’11” so for once I wasn’t the tallest girl, though we both stood out–literally and figuratively. She used to say she was 5’12” because she thought it sounded shorter. I stole that for Mattie Winston, who is also six feet tall.
My first contract was in 1995 for Cold White Fury. I had multiple query letters out to agents for the book and when a woman called me at home on a Sunday afternoon (something I never thought an agent would do) I thought she was one of my friends playing a practical joke on me. I called her out on it and refused to believe her. Once I realized she was legit, I was mortified. Fortunately, she had a good sense of humor. When she agreed to work with me I was super excited because I’d already been rejected by 40 other agents (one of those rejections was the words “Don’t give up your day job!” hand written in the corner of my query letter that was then mailed back to me.) When she informed me she had an offer from HarperCollins I was over the moon! When Cold White Fury came out a year later and I saw it for the first time in a bookstore, I cried. Fortunately, I left the store before security had to escort me out.
Hi Robyn! The amount of time it takes to write a novel is a huge investment. But after nearly two decades of writing short fiction and never getting any of it published, I decided to take the plunge because a professor in a writing class I took as an elective when I went back to school for my BS degree said he thought I would do better writing long. I ended up hiring him after the class was done to be a critiquer and we met once a week at a coffee shop and he would hand be a chapter he had critiqued and we’d discuss it, and then I’d give him the next chapter to read. It did three big things for me–it forced me to write so I’d have a chapter to give him each week, it helped me to see the things I was doing right and the things I was doing wrong, and it ended up being a novel-length story (a romance) proving I could do something that long. When all was said and done, it was a horrible story and I chucked it. After three weddings and three divorces, I decided horror was more my field and settled in with an idea I had for a paranormal thriller. Once I had it written and had two finished novels under my belt (even though the first one was embarrassingly bad) I started querying agents. I also started another novel based on another idea I had. I knew it could be a long, tedious process and that I might never see any of my writing published, but I was determined. It was a goal I’d been pursuing for years and years and I don’t quit easily. But it also felt like my last chance. If I couldn’t sell my short fiction or my long fiction, where did that leave me?
I’m also an adrenaline junkie (its why I spent my last 20 years of nursing in the ER) so I love taking chances on things.
I didn’t decide to switch from Mattie Winston. Kensington made the decision for me. The introduction of e-books proved fatal to my work with HC, and COVID proved fatal to my association with Kensington, who trimmed their stable of authors during that time. I did 20 books with Kensington and loved my time with them but once they cut those ties, I had to move on. And unfortunately, publishers rarely take on an existing series midway unless it’s a huge, bestselling series. After spending the better part of a year writing the book my agent didn’t like, I had to come up with something new. And because mystery series were, and still are, a popular commodity, he pushed me toward coming up with another series. And together we came up with the cryptozoology idea.
Fortunately, Berkley loved the idea and I was able to secure a contract with them based on a synopsis and the first 50 pages of A Death in Door County. It was nice not having to write the entire book to get a contract, but I had 23 traditionally published books under my belt by then so I guess they figured I could do it.
I do miss Mattie Winston. She is my favorite of all my characters. I love her sarcasm, her sense of humor, her dark outlook on things, and her overall kindness and generosity of spirit. Mattie often says the things I’m thinking but would never or could never say. I love writing about some of the craziness and humor among medical workers and first responders. I would love to return to the series at some point, but I’ve been too busy with contracted books and life to get very far with it. It’s on my radar, though.