Heather Cox Richardson is my favorite historian. I listened to her being interviewed in Ohio and she, as she often does, made a point that I found interesting because it applied to my writing. She said we are the first generations who have twenty to thirty years after our children are grown and we have retired from our day jobs to spend any way we want. I chose writing for my later years adventure.

I never intended to write anything after my beloved AP English teacher humiliated me. I had skipped a grade in elementary school so I was young trying to keep up socially with classmates who had a year’s worth of sophistication and experience on me and I was six feet tall at twelve, in other words, backward, shy, and fifteen…you remember those teenage years…and primed to be easily embarrassed even if there was no need to be.

I loved Mrs. McNabb. And I trusted her, which as it turned out was not a good idea, although I’m sure she liked me and had no idea what she was about to do to me. Perhaps as a high school teacher she should have, though. She said as an exercise she wanted us to write about something personal for her eyes only. She promised she would not let anyone else see what we had written, but it was a way for us to learn how to express emotion in our writing.

My paternal grandparents lived an all-day drive away from us in a tiny town in northern California where there was only one main street still faced with a wooden boardwalk from when it had been a stagecoach stop. I loved our visits. I’d get to walk down the street holding Grandpa’s hand, my imagination thinking I could hear the neighing of horses as they pulled buckboards and coaches into town, to buy malted milk balls in the general store.

One of the best parts of my grandparent’s home was Grandpa’s garden. He had three acres of land, a mini farm, where he grew a myriad of vegetables for the table and for sale. His peas rivaled the malted milk balls in sweetness when we picked them and popped them in our mouths directly from their vines. It was he and those visits which fostered my nascent love of gardening.

He had died a few years before Mrs. McNabb’s assignment and I still missed him terribly. On our last visit to see my grandparents we had dug up a bed of pansies which I found charming and put them in big flat boxes for the ride home. He knew, if I did not, that it would be our last visit and he gave them to me to remember him and our gardening adventures.

When I got home with my treasures, I had carefully planted them in the back yard and nurtured them as best as I could, but they failed to thrive and I was heartbroken to watch them wither. When we came home from his funeral, the pansies were in full, colorful bloom. No one could convince my inner child that he hadn’t stopped by before he left for an afterlife and tended them. That was the intimate story I chose to write about for Mrs. McNabb.

A few days after our assignment, she returned all my fellow students’ papers to them in class. But she didn’t return mine. Instead, she stood at the front of the class and proclaimed one story was so well written and had touched her so much that she had to share it with the class. I shriveled amid my classmates’ giggles as they figured out the story was mine.

I never wrote another thing until I was fifty-nine and decided to write my first book as a game to see if I could connect what I thought was a good opening with a strong ending. I guess the point of this post is to encourage any readers out there who want to write that it is never too late to start. I was still working full time at the beginning of my writing career, although my children were grown and launched, but I wrote when I could. I’ve never regretted my later-in-life decision.

I’ve forgiven Mrs. McNabb for her thoughtless betrayal, but I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t embarrass easily now and don’t care if people giggle at my words. I write because I love to do it and hope some of you enjoy my stories. If you don’t, I’m not an awkward teenager any longer looking to fit in; I can take any response that comes my way.

My newest book. “A Faire to Remember” is out now and available in print and for e-books on Amazon. I’ll be touring online with it beginning on November 11^th. Look for posts on my Facebook page ( Nancy Lynn Jarvis) if you want the inside scoop on it or go to my website:  nancylynnjarvis.com to read the first chapter for free.

When I first started writing mysteries decades ago, I didn’t even know what a cozy was. And when I found out, I never thought I was writing them. Still don’t. A lot of my subjects are fairly dark. In Book 4 of the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, DEAD … If Only, the story deals with a rape and child pornography. I don’t beat it into the ground, but these two facts motivate many of the characters’ actions. So, as I say, I never thought of myself as a cozy writer, despite resolutions that end with everyone becoming a B&BP (bigger and better person). However, when my publicist flung me into the cozy mystery category and gave me new covers indicating that’s what I wrote, my sales picked up. Inside, my stories hadn’t changed. Not a single word.  But here I was in the cozy mystery category. That was a real eye-opener for me.

There are levels of darkness in my books that, apparently, the reader can absorb or ignore. Or just deal with as a part of life. Readers are, by and large, a sophisticated lot and often take it as it comes. They accept that I write funny while dealing with serious subjects. In fact, they are often grateful for it. Life can be pretty dark and disturbing. If you have a laugh here and there, so much the better. As far as I can tell, I write the humorous mystery pretending to be a cozy. All right then. I cope and write on.

One day a reader sent me an email saying how glad she was I didn’t use any colorful language in my novels. I thought about it. Well, given the setting, yes I do. Or have. But probably not in the one or two novels she’d read. In one scene from Death Runs in the Family, Lee is helping her ex-husband with a serious problem. His gratitude runs along the lines of using every vulgar word he can think of because he’s that kinda guy. Fed up, Lee tells him nicely to stop talking like that or she’ll stop him and not so nicely. I couldn’t have him say words like gosh-darn it and phooey. It simply wouldn’t work in that setting. I had to use the real stuff to get my point across. But other than that scene, I don’t pepper my dialog with curse words for no other reason than I simply don’t. Now and then, if it’s necessary, I let ‘er rip with a damn or hell. But I try to keep it to a minimum. In my opinion, a plethora of explicatives can take away from the story. That might be all the reader remembers.

This is not just in books, either. A friend of mine returned from the theater the other day and was aghast the musical she’d seen seemed to use the F-word in almost every other sentence. At least, that’s what she took away; not the songs, acting, or choreography. Which is a pity. Unless the book and libretto were lacking and the writers thought they were covering that fact up with shock value. Young comics often hide their inexperience with the world. “Fu-fu-fu-fu-fu” seems to be all I hear. If they think they’re being shocking, they’re not. They are being boring and unimaginative. Give me Seinfeld or Rita Rudner any time.

Recently, I asked myself a question. Could I write a novel without using one single explicative? More to the point, could I substitute a clever word for what society has deemed a curse word and still have it come off as sounding plausible? In my last novel, Cleopatra Almost Slept Here, I found I did it once or twice without realizing it. Here’s a paragraph: Startled, I must have jumped three feet into the air from a sitting position, surpassing any previous record set at the Olympics. This is the problem with relaxing for a moment after a hard afternoon. People tend to sneak up and scare the Rumpelstiltskin out of you. 

Brilliant? No. Entertaining? Hopefully. When I write, I write for me, first and foremost. But I do try to have a mystery sprinkled with the emotions of life wrapped up in a few laughs. And lately, I’ve been trying to keep my explicatives to a minimum because, frankly, I don’t want to be remembered just for them.