PREPARING TO LAUNCH by Donis Casey
My tenth Alafair Tucker Mystery, Forty Dead Men, has finally been
released into the world. I’ve been gearing up for the personal appearances
that go with a launch. This entails a new outfit and a new hair color. I always
plan on it entailing a 20 pound weight loss as well, but as yet that goal has
never been accomplished.
I am particularly proud of this book, which deals with the
psychological effects of warfare on a veteran of the First World War. They
called it shell shock back then. Now we call it PTSD. George Washington
Tucker–a young veteran of the fighting in France during World War I, returns
home to the family farm in Oklahoma. Overjoyed, his family gives him space to
ponder what to do with his life. Only his tiger mother, Alafair, senses that
all is not well with her elder son. One morning when she tidies up his
quarters, she finds two cartridge boxes under his pillow, boxes that once
contained twenty “dead men” each. All the bullets are missing, save one. When
Gee Dub becomes the number one suspect in a murder, his mother Alafair, who
recognizes that not all war wounds are physical, marshals every resource to
keep him out of prison.
The early reviews of Forty Dead Men have been stellar. Publishers’
Weekly starred review of Forty Dead Men says “Casey expertly nails the extended
Tucker family—some 20 people—and combines these convincing characters, a superb
sense of time and place, and a solid plot in this marvelously atmospheric
historical.”
Launching a new book is an adventure for me every time. Forty Dead
Men is my tenth book in almost thirteen years, and just in that short time
things have changed so quickly that I have to re-learn how to do it with each
release.
When I first began writing the Alafair Tucker Mystery series in
2003, I had a story arc in mind that was going to carry through ten books. This
is a wonderful idea, but as anyone who has ever written a long series knows,
after a couple of books all your plans for a story arc have been knocked into a
cocked hat. The reason this happened, at least to me, is that I seem to be
writing about real people who have their own ideas about how things should be
gone about, and once I put them into a situation, they react to it in ways I
had never anticipated. Besides, I really want readers to be able to pick up any
book in the series and have a satisfying experience without having to know
anything about what went before.
My original arc idea went like this: I would to feature a
different one of Alafair's ten children as the character of interest in each
book. The featured child would somehow be involved in the events surrounding a
murder, and as their mother, Alafair would intrude herself into the kid's life,
whether s/he wanted her or his parent's help or not, and in the end, Alafair and
maybe the child would contribute to the solution of the mystery. As an aside,
the featured offspring might end up with a life-partner.
The million dollar question for the author of a long series is
this: How do you keep it fresh? How do you make every story stand alone, yet in
its place as well? I have found over the course of ten books in the same series
that I have even departed from the usual mystery novel format. The later books
are constructed more like thrillers than puzzles, they may or may not revolve
around one of the children, and Alafair may or may not be able to solve the
mystery.
I stuck with the formula through book one. As it turns out, I like
to mix it up a bit. Because if you aren't excited by your own writing, how can
you expect your readers to be?
Forty Dead Men, An Alafair Tucker Mystery, is available in
hardcover, paper, and ebook, wherever books are sold. Read the first chapter of
each Alafair Tucker Mystery at Donis’ website, www.doniscasey.com
Bio:
Donis Casey, author of ten Alafair Tucker Mysteries from Poisoned
Pen Press. Her award-winning historical mystery series, featuring the sleuthing
mother of ten children who will do anything, legal or not, for her kids, is set
in Oklahoma during the booming 1910s. While researching her own genealogy,
Donis discovered so many ripping tales of murder, dastardly deeds, and general
mayhem that she said to herself, “Donis, you should write a series.” Donis is a
former teacher, academic librarian, and entrepreneur who lives in Tempe, AZ.
For more information about her and her books, visit her web site, and follow
her on Facebook and Goodreads.
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