INSPIRATION
(and stuff like that)
I sold my very first book, One Bright Morning, in January of 1994.
That was a Big Thrill. Unfortunately, even though I’ve had more than fifty
books published since then, everything’s gone downhill from there.
Well… maybe not everything. There have been a
few bright spots along the way. The first one came shortly after the
publication of that first book, One
Bright Morning, when a bookstore owner in Nebraska (whose name I’ve managed
to forget) wrote to tell me she’d named her newborn palomino colt (or do you
call newborn horses foals? Well, never mind) Maggie Bright, after the heroine
of the book. Therefore, somewhere in Nebraska there’s now a twenty-year-old
palomino horsey named Maggie Bright, and my
character was the inspiration for her name. I tell you, that note made me cry.
Actually, thinking about it made me teary-eyed for years.
Plod forward twenty years, and there have
been some ups along the writing road, but not a whole slew of them. This may
partly be because I’m the George C. Scott of writing contests and don’t believe
you can truly judge the worth of one book over another unless you’re talking
grammar and punctuation, word usage and imagery, and stuff like that. Besides, I
write funny stuff. It’s usually dark stuff that wins awards.
Very well. Confession time here. The main
reason I never enter contests is ’cause I’m poor as a church mouse and have a
whole bunch of dogs to feed. One tiny bright spot in an otherwise colorless
career was winning the Arizona/New Mexico Book of the Year Award (for
mystery/suspense) in 2012 for Mercy Allcutt’s rousing adventure, Fallen Angels. The glow fades slightly
when I admit I entered the contest because the mere thought of New Mexico as a
literary state makes me chortle inside. And sometimes even outside. That, and
the fact I had a few extra bucks lying around that the dogs didn’t consume in
one way or another.
However, in recent months, something really
quite nice happened as a direct result of my books. A woman named Julie
Turjoman e-mailed me a while back to ask if I’d mind if she used a character
from one of my cozy historical mystery series as a model for a hat in the book
she was then writing, A
Head for Trouble: What to Knit While Catching Crooks, Chasing Clues, and
Solving Murders. Her book would feature knitted creations appropriate for
the Roaring Twenties, when the books are set. Would I mind? Was she kidding me? Naturally, I gave her my wholehearted
permission.
And you know what? She actually
did it!
A Head for Trouble: What to Knit While Catching Crooks, Chasing Clues,
and Solving Murders is now in print, and she used Mercedes “Mercy” Louise
Allcutt (from my “Angels” books, including the aforementioned
Fallen Angels) as a model for the
following stunning creations:
Julie was kind enough to send me a
copy of her book, and it’s truly wonderful. I recommend everyone who knits (or
even those who, like me, don’t) go out and buy one or two (or three or four,
because, after all, we all have relatives and friends) copies. Here’s a link:
http://www.julieturjoman.com/a-head-for-trouble-2/
Of course, you can find my books on-line, too, if you’re
interested. They’re all on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle and/or Smashwords
(if you have a Nook, Kobi, or whatever). In fact, here’s the cover art for my
next Mercy book, Thanksgiving Angels,
which will be published in April of 2015.
I’ll be giving away advanced
reading copies (ARCs) of
Thanksgiving
Angels at the end of November. If you’d like to enter, just send me your
name and home address at:
alice@aliceduncan.net I’ll drop your name into my winner-picking
wiener dog’s special contest doggie dish, and Bam-Bam (my winner-picking wiener
dog) will select winners at month’s end.
Thank you!
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