Author: jlsimpsonauthor

Everyone’s a Killer

~ jlsimpsonauthor ~ 4 Comments

By JL Simpson

IMG_1610A bit of a dramatic title. Of course it’s not true but you’d never guess it if you were currently living at my house. Nervous Ninnies have taken over the building.

As if life isn’t complicated enough we decided to flog our house and move to Cairns in the tropical part of Australia, 5 days drive away. (I’m excited, my mop of hair not so much)

Anyway, before you move such a huge distance it’s important to downsize as much as possible to minimize the cost of the removal. This would be simple for most people but I live with a hoarder. Mr S loves to keep stuff, ‘that might be useful one day’. So, having convinced him to part with some of his treasure trove, we advertised the items online.

Aussies have a website called Gumtree where you can buy and sell stuff and it is full of interesting people. You advertise something for $100 and someone will offer you $20 and want it delivered. The percentage of lowballers and oddballs is very high so you do need to be careful and keep your wits about you or you get ripped off. However, it could be worse than selling something for half of what it’s worth. Some people online are not what they appear to be. (Shocking revelation, I know!) After a week of emails, texts and calls from lots of people who appear to have no social skills at all Mr S got really spooked. It didn’t help that our neighbor told him a horror story about someone spraying graffiti on their house after they refused to sell something. Now he won’t give out our address. Instead he meets people in public places or in other streets.

He is worried about them coming back and doing bad things to us if they are not happy with their purchases. However, in his quest to protect us all he is in danger of making himself look very guilty.The whole thing reminds me of an adventure I had years ago where I sold a car and the man who bought it could only meet me at 2 Am in the main street of a small town. I drove up and parked. Mr S parked next to me. I got out and the purchaser gave me a wad of dollar bills, I handed over the keys. I sped off with Mr S in his car. The purchaser drove the car he’d bought off me in the opposite direction, closely followed by the friend who had driven him to the hand over point. Talk about things looking dodgy, even more so when you know the town had a reputation for drug deals.

Anyway, so what is with the title? I do wonder if being a mystery author, or being married to a mystery author, makes you see crimes and potential crimes where none exist.

Tell me, do mystery readers have the same problem?

www.jlsimpson.com

 

Do you have voices in your head?

~ jlsimpsonauthor ~ 3 Comments

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By JL Simpson

When I wrote the first book in my Daisy Dunlop Mystery series their was some sliver of interest in making it into a TV show. The interest fizzled and I got on with writing the rest of the series. However, it got me to wondering how the book would work on the screen. I don’t have the money to fund such a venture but I did have an opportunity to do the next best thing, turn it into an audio book.

I put the book out for auditions and waited. A few people tried out. Some were better than others, but none of them could quite do the British accents, or get the timing right for the comedic edge to the plot. After over a year of trying to find the right person for the job I was ready to give up. Days before I was going to pull the book off the internet I got a new audition.

The lovely Mary Phillips from Riveting Narrations sent me her reading of chapter one and I was blown away. I listened to it over and over and decided to sign her up. So, the book is now in production. I have never released an audio book, and Mary has only narrated one other book, so we are both learning as we go.

Mary is more than half way through recording the book and I get updates of each chapter as they are complete. Every single chapter I hear convinces me that not only does Mary have a great future as a narrator but that she was the only person who could do Daisy justice.

If you’ve ever been to the UK you’ll know that there are dozens of different accents, and I think I used every last one. Mary has managed them all. Not only does she switch from accent to accent, but also male to female voice, and every character has their own unique identity. It is an amazing thing to hear the characters you created being brought to life. As I sit and listen I can almost believe that the people that were brought into being by my imagination are alive and well living as the voices in Mary’s head.

The book is due out later this month and I can’t wait to find out how my readers feel about the transformation of Daisy from book to audio. So, if you have voices in your heads, a skill for doing accents, love to read out loud, then maybe you’re a budding narrator.

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What Fresh Hell is This?

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IMG_1610You might think that the life of an author is all glamour and thrills, but you’d be wrong. I am looking down the barrel of a deadline and I am just not ready. My editor has already put the date back a month for me but I am still struggling. Book 3 in my series was going great guns. Things were happening, balls were in the air, juggling was going on. Nothing was going to stop me, until I got to the middle of the book. The nice shiny new was gone. The end seemed to be way too far to go. The plot was beyond my comprehension and I wanted to join my heroine in a large glass of wine.

So what do you do when you don’t want to do what you are supposed to be doing? You find something more interesting. My more interesting involved all sorts of things. Starting a diet, cooking (and if any of you knew me you’d know just how much I wanted to avoid writing if I was hanging out in the kitchen with a cook book), I started jogging again, and I decided to learn book marketing.

Can you guess which one had me running back to my half written manuscript?  Yep, marketing.  I’ve been buried in books on marketing, online videos, I have been wrestling with Amazon to add keywords to my books so that people can find them.

I am now in the midst of a course on how to advertise on Facebook. That is an exercise in frustration if ever there was one. I spent one evening wrestling with the Power Editor on Facebook creating an advert and nothing worked. The things I created kept disappearing. My stress levels were at maximum and the next morning I had an appointment with my doctor to get my blood pressure checked. I was shocked that it was normal because I felt like my head was going to explode.

Anyway, despite my best efforts, I am yet to crack marketing but it’s all good. For some unknown reason, whilst I was banging about screwing up everything I touched trying to give my first book away to a US audience, it took off in the UK and peaked at number two on the best sellers list in its genre. How or why that happened is still a mystery. Did someone somewhere talk it up online? Did Amazon decide to wind me up by emailing hundreds of people suggesting that they download it?

I wish I knew so that I could try and do it again. Meanwhile I have a photo of my computer screen showing how well it did and I will continue battling away trying to get a grip on book marketing. So, if you haven’t read my book…and there are millions of you…feel free to take tiptoe over to Amazon and download a copy. I need all the help I can get with this book selling lark.

You can download it at Amazon.

Lost Cause 400

Who Said You Could Wear a Dress?

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By JL Simpson

I made it this month. Due to the hectic pace of life, family crisis and dumb stupidity I missed posting in September. I hope you didn’t miss me, actually you probably never even noticed. However, whilst I have forgotten to post on here I have been busy writing.

Even though people buy and read my books I do feel like a fraud some days. In my head a writer bangs away on a typewriter with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of their mouth, a glass of whiskey close at hand. Even worse, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, (clue ha ha, no pun intended).

Some writers plot. They have weird charts, spreadsheets, cards and all manner of paraphernalia. I just have a blank screen. I’ve tried to plot. I’ve tried to work out how many words the book is going to be, how many chapters, what the gist of each chapter is, whose point of view it’s in, what the hook is at the end. It’s a great idea, but it doesn’t work for me.

For me writing a book is a lot like childbirth. Yes, lots of screaming, sweating, swearing at my husband (just kidding). Every word is hard earned. No matter how much you practice your breathing, and think  you know what is coming, labor is like nothing you could imagine. Everything you thought you knew goes out the window. Writing is like that for me.  Even when I have a plan or a plot my characters just do what they choose. I start a chapter thinking one thing is going to happen and then Solomon or Daisy will do or say something that takes the story off on a tangent. Today I was thinking I knew all there was to know about my grumpy Irish PI hero and then another character mentions that he once went undercover as a woman. Now Daisy is plotting how to put this knowledge about the Irish git to good use.

Not only is writing unexpected but it’s also surprising. If you’re going to slug it out for hours and hours then it’s nice to have something exciting at the end. When I had my kids I never knew if I was having a boy or a girl, and when I’m writing a book I never know what is going to happen. The only thing I know for sure is that someone it going to die, Daisy and Solomon are going to give each other hell, Daisy is going to flirt outrageously and somehow someway she is going to solve the case. Who dies, who kills them and why are not things that concern me when I start the story. Thankfully every book so far has been delivered healthy, and once dressed in a pretty cover lots of people have taken a look and decided that they love my crazy creation almost as much as I do.

 

www.jlsimpson.com

A Time to Kill

~ jlsimpsonauthor ~ 6 Comments

IMG_1610The problem with being a writer is having an over active imagination. Maybe you need the imagination to write, like the chicken and the egg thing. However, once you start to write your over active imagination starts to creep into every day life.

I had a very strange conversation with my son on the drive to work the other morning. We were trying to work out how many bodies you could fit in the boots of the cars as they drove past. If you were looking to dump a few murder victims it would be important to know these things.

Even before I wrote about murder I had a very nervous disposition. I think living with my husband made it worse. He scares the beejesus out of me, not on purpose. He is a clutz. It took four coats of paint to cover the red wine stain on the lounge wall when we redecorated, and we  bought a dark gray carpet for a reason. Every spill, crash, breakage makes me jump out of my skin. I pre-empt him dropping things and he says it makes him nervous and more likely to have a mishap.

Now my over active imagination has me jumping at shadows. I park my car in a multi story carpark. Taking the lift has me thinking it will breakdown and I’ll be stranded. Entering the stairwell sets my heart pounding. The other night I sprinted up four flights of stairs because the door at the bottom banged shut when I was half way up the stairs. I immediately ran for my life sure that it was some crazy man set on doing me in.

Maybe I should write a new genre? My over active imagination would have a new focus and life could be less tense.  If I wrote romance my husband could sweep me off my feet and take me away from all this. How about a book about financial crime? It might give me some ideas about how to make a fortune and give up the day job.

Then again, I kinda like killing people. There is nothing better to do after a hard day at the coal face than coming home and murdering someone. I often joke with my work colleagues that if they make me grumpy I will invent a character with their name and kill them slowly.