A Cozy Conversation with Author Joanne McLaughlin
… The path to her latest book is a story in its own right
Welcome to the latest issue of Moonrise Prospectus. For this week, I caught up with Philadelphia-area author Joanne McLaughlin to chat about her most recent novel, her WIP, and all those sexy vampire stories.
Chasing Ashes was released last fall. It’s your first foray into crime/mystery/thriller. How did this book develop?
That's a story that spreads over a few decades—sort of like Chasing Ashes itself. I wrote a mystery novel in my late twenties, when I was living in Ohio. I had an agent, but the manuscript wasn't selling. And life intervened: She had a second child, I moved back to Philadelphia and got pregnant almost immediately, and we parted ways. Some Ohio friends brought my manuscript to me about a year later on a trip East.
Slow forward (ha-ha-ha) about a half-dozen years. I took the manuscript out of the box, read it, and decided I hated the plot but liked some of the characters. I wrote four chapters of that new iteration before I realized that my problem was I was thinking like a journalist, too dispassionate and just-the-facts, not like a novelist, not getting inside my characters' heads enough. So, I went to many Rittenhouse Writers' Group workshops in Philadelphia to learn the art of fiction writing. I spent the next few years writing short stories (with no luck at getting them published in those pre-Internet literary journal days), got divorced, raised my son, and got married a second time. My husband became ill and died in 2011, after which I wrote the vampire novels over the next five years. It wasn't until early 2018, after I left my job as a Business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, that I hauled the first two stories involving Laura Cunningham, Nick Fabrizzio and Kate McDonald out of the box again and started writing the book that became Chasing Ashes. Whew.
That’s a story in itself! It seems something at the core of that book continued to call to you. What was it about the characters that wouldn’t leave you alone?
Even after the manuscript sat in a box under my desk for more than 20 years, the characters were still interesting to me: an impulsive young woman, her friend who wonders WTF is going on, and the cop who's had a relationship with both of them. I liked that dynamic. And I thought, what if I make Kate the victim and everything spins around that? It unrolled from there.
You’ve also written three vampire novels (The Vampires of the Court of Cruelty trilogy). What prompted you to make the switch from sexy vampires to mystery?
I guess you could say I switched from mystery to vampires and back again. But the vampire books--Never Before Noon, Never Until Now, and Never More Human--each have elements of murder and/or suspense to them. I jumped into writing the vampire books after my husband died because they were a great release from my tumultuous real life, a dysfunctional family of legendary prog rockers with an overindulged grown daughter--and then Mom and Dad just decide one day to tell her they're vampires.
I found my voice while writing those vampire books. Reweaving the thread of my earlier efforts into Chasing Ashes wasn't easy, but I felt more comfortable with character and plotting than I had way back when.
What prompted you to write about vampires in the first place? Was there an author or film that inspired/influenced you?
I really liked Anne Rice’s first three vampire books (Interview with a Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned). They were smart and not the usual vampire story. As a journalist, I thought, having a reporter do the interview, well, that was brilliant. I read a lot of other vampire books I didn’t like. I wanted to write a vampire novel that also would appeal to people who didn't typically read vampire novels.
My husband ran a blues musicians management business called Never Before Noon. After he died (in 2011), I noticed one of his magnets on the fridge and realized: I have a book title! When I finished writing it, the draft was like 230,000 words. An editor friend helped me figure out how to divide the manuscript in two, and those became the first two books in the trilogy. The first two books spend a lot of time on the daughter’s relationship with her father; the last book focuses on her relationship with her mother.
Do you see yourself returning to that genre? Or have you explored it enough?
No, I have done my vampire duty! I did start a fourth book and got maybe 2,500 words in and said, where am I going to go with it that I haven’t already gone?
What’s been the reaction among your fans to your new book? Has anything surprised you?
So far, so good. Readers have had very nice things to say about Chasing Ashes. Several readers have told me they stayed up late at night because the plot had them in its grip. That was my plan, of course.
What has surprised me is how many people comment on the fact that Laura Cunningham, the main character, navigates the story's twists and turns while also raising two kids, working again with her ex-husband, and treading very uncertain terrain with her current husband. I wanted very much to make her a real-life woman with real-life issues.
I loved that aspect about your book, too. Tell us about your next book. Is it also a mystery? When is it due out?
My next book is in what I hope will be my final edits before shopping it to agents or publishers. Which is to say there will be several more rounds of edits, probably over a year or more, before it's launched into the reading universe. It's a cozy-adjacent mystery whose working title is I Am Not THAT Mary Irene Jones. Cozy-adjacent, because I haven't followed the cozy mystery playbook to the letter. I think it's a fun read, and I like the characters a lot--my amateur sleuth is a poet/English lit professor/pet sitter. I've gotten to stretch my poetry-writing muscles for the first time since college.
Because I've been all over the publishing map--traditionally published, indie published, hybrid published--my goal is to get Mary Irene out there however I can.
Sounds like fun! I love that term, “cozy-adjacent.” There are a number of “cozy” subgenres now, including cozy-horror, which I find amusing. What draws you to the mystery genre? Do you have favorite authors in that genre that you turn to?
I’ve been reading mysteries, starting as a kid with Nancy Drew, and crime thrillers all my life. Series by Louise Penny, Michael Connelly, others. In the 2000s, I read much of the series by Sarah Graves on home renovation mysteries [Home Repair Is Homicide], which are cozies. During the Covid lockdown, I watched a lot of Hallmark TV, which also includes cozies. And I started thinking about this book. I had the title: Mary Irene Jones is my grandmother’s maiden name, a grandmother I never met. To study the genre, I read as many free cozies online as I could, and I bought a book on how to write a cozy mystery to learn the tropes--How to Craft a Killer Cozy Mystery, by Andrea J. Johnson.
What’s your writing life like? Do you write every day? Do you have a daily word count goal?
I write in bursts. Sometimes, I start with only a very vague storyline--like "dysfunctional vampire family"--then I edit and refine and edit some more, usually working just a chapter or two at a time and thinking only a couple more chapters ahead. I don't write every day or have a daily word count goal. Because I'm a pantser rather than a plotter, I need to get the first words on paper, print them out, and then ruminate on them and where the next words will take me. I write at my dining room table, so there's a lot of walking around involved, and standing over the kitchen island with the printouts, red pen in hand, and making lots of notes in the margins about whether something is succeeding.
I wrote the first draft of my work-in-progress, about 60,000 words, in four months. Then I walked away from it for about five months while my editors and publishers at Celestial Echo Press helped me whip Chasing Ashes into shape. Since I returned to my WIP in November, I've added about 8,500 more words. Time to see what the beta readers think of my changes.
I’d like to follow-up on your publishing “map.” Can you talk about your experiences with getting published? Which channel do you prefer and why?
I was under contract with a small press early on [for Never Before Noon]. There are a lot of pressures in the publishing business. Small presses must put out books that sell well enough that they can publish still more books. My publisher was struggling financially, and they had an option on the second vampire book, but it was pretty clear the company wasn't going to survive. So, I asked for an amicable divorce, and they agreed. I self-published vampire books two and three, then the small press did go under. The first book would have gone out of print, so I republished it independently, so all three vampire books would be on the market.
I queried agents and publishers for about a year for Chasing Ashes, and when no one picked it up, I decided I didn’t want to self-publish again. There are so many balls up in the air when you self-publish just to get the book out, and then you have to do all your own promotion. I wanted a partner of some sort, someone who would keep me on track. The editors at Gemini Wordsmiths also run Celestial Echo Press. Gemini had done a developmental edit for me on another manuscript, and when Celestial Echo opened for submissions, I queried and they took me and Chasing Ashes on.
You had a long career as a print and broadcast editor before you began writing fiction. Was the transition difficult? Or do you still work as a journalist? Do you draw on any journalistic skills when writing fiction?
I haven't worked as a journalist for almost two years now, though I've done a bit of unofficial consulting. Because I wrote all my novels but the current work-in-progress while working fulltime in one newsroom or another, the only real transition is that I no longer have any excuse to procrastinate. There are no more COVID vaccine stories to edit, or radio pieces on PFAS contamination of local waterways to move to the news hosts on deadline. But I draw on all my journalistic skills as I write fiction, all the time. And vice-versa.
What writing fiction taught me many years ago is that crafting interesting stories involves a straightforward strategy, whether that story is about a fire or a flower show or a philandering husband: All of them need to draw the reader in with a sharp beginning, layering in details that fascinate, and then ending satisfactorily, acknowledging when necessary that sometimes all questions cannot be answered or all conflicts resolved, but not just checking out and leaving readers to ask themselves why they just bothered to spend their time on something.
As an editor, I often told my news reporters to consider not just the story they needed to deliver, but also the story they wanted their readers or listeners to take away. As writers (or reporters), we put stuff in, we take stuff out, we organize, we reorganize, we use dialogue, we offer description. It's just how we stitch a work of fiction from nothing, or lend vibrance and coherence to a narrative non-fiction piece, or make a memoir everyone's story that makes it different from journalism.
With journalism, there's a great responsibility to be fair and truthful and accurate. Novelists owe it to their readers to be fair to them and deliver worlds that are true to the universes in which their characters dwell.
Thanks for reading -
Dianna