Paty Jager is an award-winning author of 50 + novels, novellas, and short stories of murder mystery, western romance, and action adventure. All her work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters. Paty and her husband raise alfalfa hay in rural eastern Oregon. Riding horses and battling rattlesnakes, she not only writes the western lifestyle, she lives it.
Like most writers, I don’t like the marketing and promotion side of writing. These days we don’t just sit down and write a book, send it off, and hope a publisher likes it. Especially not if you are an Indie author.
Back when I first started writing novels 30 plus years ago that was the process. Write, edit, send a synopsis and first three chapters to agents and editors and then write the next book while you waited sometimes over a year to hear back. If you did get the nod from an editor or agent then it was revisions and after 18 months to 2 years your book was published.
I was lucky to get picked up by a new small publisher who not only helped with editing but taught me a lot about publishing my book. When I had that down, and with a nudge from other author friends, I took the plunge into being an Indie author. And while being with the small press I had to do all my own marketing and promotion, I didn’t do near enough.
Now, fast forward, I have 55 books, half that are western romance and half that are murder mystery. My heart has always been in writing murder mystery and I feel as if the romance books were what I used as my stepping stones to getting to the genre I love to read and write.
With my murder mystery series, I have been promoting the heck out of them and learning new things as I add more print books and now audiobooks into the mix.
Just when I think I’ve figured out Amazon ads or Facebook ads, or using other promotional third parties, I find out that I messed up with this or with that. I had a promotion scheduled and I thought I’d changed the price of the audio box set. Well, I didn’t so there went the money I paid for the promotion down the drain and the graphics I made to promote the sale will have to be used later when the price finally is changed on all audiobook channels. With this headache, I can see why so many indie authors with audiobooks are selling them direct. It is something that keeps swirling around in my head and I’m thinking strongly about doing it so I can send people to my direct store to purchase audiobooks that I want to put on sale and to get audiobooks for a fairer price all the time.
I have my print books on a direct store and it would only take adding a link to the audiobooks to make it happen. Well, after I upload them to Bookfunnel. That would be another 2-3 hours a day for a week to get them all uploaded. That will cut into my writing time. I have scheduled to write three more books this year. If I don’t get to putting words in the document instead of uploading audiobooks to different vendors and now Bookfunnel, I’d have this book half way written instead of just starting. But once I get them all uploaded I will only have to upload each new book.
“Sigh” Just as I need more energy to do more promoting and marketing, I’m, finding my creative and productive energy doesn’t last as long as it used to.
I have also decided today, after realizing how many more audiobooks I need to upload to Kobo and Bookfunnel that I will from here forward, sit down at the computer with only my book document open and get my word count written before I do promotion or upload audiobooks. It will be the only way I’ll get my book goal accomplished this year.
But it is all worth it when I hear from readers how much they enjoy my books and I receive word that a book is a finalist in a contest. After contemplation I thought I’d put Damning Firefly in the wrong category, I guess not!
Some books almost write themselves. The plot sails along, the characters all interact as they should. Even the backdrop feels like it’s an impressionist painting that only needs a few brushstrokes to make it shine.
Book 3 of the Ghost Shop series wasn’t that book.
I had trouble finding a title, even though the theme was a haunted vineyard that wasn’t producing anything except anger and bad vibes. Compounding the problem, I wanted all books in the series to have titles starting with the letter T. After mentioning my dilemma to several people, two came up with the same suggestion: Tainted Legacy.
Still not completely sold, I used it as a working title I liked more as the plot struggled along, characters tripping over themselves and refusing to fall in line when I tried to take them in a certain direction, creating strange sidebars that, when I researched them, were grounded in reality.
I’d had a similar problem with book 2 of my Miami-based Swift/Roberts series. A group of friends became suspects of one kind or another in a cold case murder and kept squabbling like an unruly flock of geese, twittering songbirds or more likely, buzzards. I had a great deal of trouble reining them in. After opening one chapter in particular, I’d stare at it, then close it again without changing a word. Finally, with 4 drafts completed, the squabbling stopped and everything fell into place.
Tainted Legacy felt like a rerun with different players. Since I don’t outline my books, surprises are lifeblood for me. They fuel my imagination and reveal things about my characters I could never envision with the rational side of my brain. But when one of those characters presented me with a pivotal scene during what should have been the final 4th draft, I balked. That draft is supposed to be a read-through. An opportunity to catch those last few errors that typically occur, regardless how many times a manuscript is polished. I remained stuck, unable to work on the file for 2 weeks. My version of writer’s block. Something I had never experienced before.
Finally, I wrote The End, but was it? I hadn’t made any significant changes to that scene. It flowed too well. Now, I had to go back and read through the entire manuscript for a 5th time. If I changed my mind about that chapter, the entire storyline would have to be revised. The manuscript wouldn’t be ready for publication in time for a shipment of books to arrive before the Portland Holiday Market, the biggest show of the year for NIWA (Northwest Independent Writers Association,) and my unofficial book launch for Tainted Legacy.
I took a few deep breaths, got back in my office, and swiftly completed that 5th draft/read through. The plot worked. The character who had thrown that pivotal scene at me stood back and smirked. It had to be there. It complicates the relationships between the main protagonists when they should have cleared a major hurdle. It forebodes trouble of a possibly monumental degree in the books that follow.
This year, I’m planning to work on the 4th books in both my series. I have titles and rudimentary plots, big steps toward meeting that goal. Without encountering angry wine or squabbling teenagers, Maine Issues and Trick or Truth will both be available before the end of 2024.
Tainted Legacy
A barren vineyard in Dallas, Oregon. Two deaths. An unexpected heir who wants a quick sale. Is it a bargain, or an invitation to become entangled with the misfortunes of the Taricani family?
Sinister winery owner Vincente Valderos calls in psychic Sunny Weston and her partner, retired detective Ash Haines, to solve the mystery and save their souls…until the next time he summons them.
Heather Ames writes two mystery/suspense series, one with a paranormal twist, standalone suspense, romantic suspense, and short contemporary romances. When she’s not writing, she’s either thinking up new plots, traveling the world, or dreaming up new adventures.
Late night–no, was already morning. I read through an email when my gaze snagged on a name. I stared at it, incredulous. After forty years, I had found Zenia.
Zenia is not her real name. I’ve changed it to protect her privacy. When I was fifteen, I met her on her first day at school. A year older than me, she was a tall, statuesque teen with a well-developed figure and, as I discovered, a wild imagination. She was a “boarder”—a residential student; I was a day-student whose mother was also a teacher.
From almost the first minute, we became close friends. She was lovely, with long wavy hair. Plump and vivacious, she had travelled, and boy, could she talk. Her tales of dangerous train journeys enthralled me. Then, gradually details emerged. Some were shared in long, private conversations—I usually stayed after school to chat, and often rushed home an hour or two late.
As a teen, Zenia was full of imaginative stories. She dreamed. And she narrated those dreams in long, vivid tales of descriptions that would today be called ‘drone shots’. In turn I made up ghost stories to entertain her. We had our in-jokes too; we once disagreed about how to pronounce the word ‘obviously.’ She skipped the B entirely, while I stressed it! So, when one of us made a pronouncement, the other replied, “OVIOUSLY!” whereupon we dissolved into giggles.
She said her father had worked at Tata’s (a huge, respectable conglomerate) but that he had been unfairly accused of embezzlement. My father also worked in a subsidiary of the Tata Corporation. He said that Zenia’s father had been fired from his position. There was a protracted lawsuit, the outcome of which I never did learn.
Sighing, he also said that Zenia’s mother had committed suicide.
Separately Zenia revealed that she walked in on her parents one day while their legal issues were at their height. She must have been eight or nine years old. She said, “A bottle of pills was on the table between them. They were holding hands. They looked at me when I came in, and my mother said, ‘That’s why you have to stay.’” That phrase haunted Zenia. She repeated it over and over.
On our school’s parents’ day, I met Zenia’s father, a handsome, charming man with a boisterous manner. And I met Connie, an old, trusted friend who loved Zenia dearly. Connie had been close to Zenia’s parents for decades. A year later, she married Zenia’s father.
Then, in tenth grade (a crucial exam year in India), we broke up. I’d brought home a poor grade, and my mother was astonished. It hadn’t happened before. That night, she came to my room, sat by me on my bed, and asked me to stop spending so much time with Zenia.
I did; my grades skyrocketed. When Zenia asked why I didn’t stay late anymore, I begged off with excuses of homework. She got the message. I was sorry, but no harsh words were spoken and we both dived into exam prep.
Years after I’d migrated to the States, my mother mentioned that Zenia’s father had passed away. She must have had some common friend or acquaintance to know this.
Decades later I looked for Zenia on Facebook and Instagram. She would have enjoyed these forums, full of color and variety. But I couldn’t find her. I checked LinkedIn; no sign of her there either. I assumed she had changed her name after marriage.
Now I know why she wasn’t on social media. That email said she had stage-2 respiratory failure. And Rheumatoid Arthritis, morbid obesity and a slew of other conditions. It was a community appeal to help with Zenia’s medical bills. She’d never married. Her stepmother Connie was caring for her.
That notice brought back a waterfall of memories. I wept for the girl with the big imagination, the gorgeous singing voice, who’d played a funny, eccentric Petruccio to my Katherina in our wacky adaptation of Taming of the Shrew. That girl had such big dreams, wanted an erudite, playful husband, and had plans to work in theatre. In the decade after school, I completed a master’s degree in economics, travelled to the States on a scholarship, married and had children. After my corporate career, I began to write novels about the wide spaces and colorful people of India, crime stories based on immigrants, and history.
Forty years ago, we were both at the starting point of our journeys. Then Zenia fell sick. Meanwhile, I was flying without the terrible weight she carried, the tragedies that had already shaped her at seventeen.
She was longwinded because she had no one else to talk with. She was loud, argumentative, because she imagined that other students were whispering behind her back. Now I wonder whether she was lonely because of a self-imposed exile from the other boarders.
And I wonder if they were cruel to her because she was so unlike them. Most boarders came from orthodox families in small villages and had rarely traveled beyond their own towns. Zenia had been abroad, read widely, loved Shakespeare and Mills and Boon novels. We shared so many interests, not least a penchant for short stories and poetry. What a writer she would have made!
These splinters of memory come alive as I write my novels. Faces from long ago return, embedding themselves into my chapters. Perhaps I’m trying to hold on to them, understand them, preserve the essence of who they were. In Murder in Old Bombay I built the Framji family based on people I’d known, and lost. Each book that follows contains fragments of me too.
Now regret escapes my eyelids, dropping wetly on my keyboard. Regret that I did not reconnect with Zenia when we were younger. Why didn’t I try to find her phone number? It didn’t occur to me. Youth can be stunningly self-absorbed. In the quiet past midnight, I mourn the friend I left behind.
The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret
In The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret, award-winning author Nev March explores the vivid nineteenth-century world of the transatlantic voyage, one passenger’s secret at a time.
Captain Jim Agnihotri and his wife Lady Diana Framji are embarking to England in the summer of 1894. Jim is hopeful the cruise will help Diana open up to him. Something is troubling her, and Jim is concerned.
On their first evening, Jim meets an intriguing Spaniard, a fellow soldier with whom he finds an instant kinship. But within twenty-four hours, Don Juan Nepomuceno is murdered, his body discovered shortly after he asks rather urgently to see Jim.
When the captain discovers that Jim is an investigator, he pleads with Jim to find the killer before they dock in Liverpool in six days, or there could be international consequences. Aboard the beleaguered luxury liner are a thousand suspects, but no witnesses to the locked-cabin crime. Jim would prefer to keep Diana safely out of his investigation, but he’s doubled over, seasick. Plus, Jim knows Diana can navigate the high society world of the ship’s first-class passengers in ways he cannot.
Together, using the tricks gleaned from their favorite fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, Jim and Diana must learn why one man’s life came to a murderous end.
The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret she explores revenge for a real-world unresolved crime in the years before the Spanish American war over Cuba. Nev is presently working on book 4 of her Captain Jim and Lady Diana series. Her books deal with issues of identity, race and moral boundaries.
I don’t know how many of you get giddy when you can visit or see the settings from books you’ve read. But as a reader, I have always enjoyed being taken to settings or worlds I haven’t been and may never be able to see. Books have always been my window into other worlds.
A few weeks ago, my hubby and I made a trip from SE Oregon to Killeen, TX to see his sister and her husband and deliver boxes of belongings to our oldest granddaughter now living in Arkansas. On the way over we drove through the four corners and the towns of Flagstaff, Tuba City, Windowrock, and Gallup. The settings of author Tony Hillerman’s novels.
My husband just shook his head as I said the names of places that I’d read about in those novels. I could envision Leaphorn, Chee, and Bernie Manuelito driving around on the dirt roads I saw from the freeway. Seeing First Mesa on Hopi land and the hogans on the Navajo land… It stalled my breath to see places and things I’d envisioned as I read or listened to Mr. Hillerman’s books but had used my imagination at what it would look like.
In case you haven’t figured it out already, I have been a huge fan of Tony Hillerman’s books since reading the first one. While he has more Native American life, traditions, and legends in his stories than I have in mine, he was my inspiration to have a Native American character as the main protagonist in my three mystery series.
He lived on or near the four corners area where the Hopi, Navajo, and Pueblo tribes live. He had many contacts among these tribes to help him show more of the culture than I’ve been able to cultivate living a distance from the reservations and tribes I write about in my Gabriel Hawke novels, Shandra Higheagle Mysteries, and Spotted Pony Casino Mysteries.
I aspire to write as intriguing and thrilling reads even though they aren’t as steeped in the culture and lives of the people.
The next Gabriel Hawke book, I’m having Hawke and Dani, his significant other, attend Tamkaliks. A powwow held every July in Wallowa, Oregon. I attended it this past year for the third time and am now feeling confident I can give my two Nez Perce characters the experience they would undergo having been away from their culture for decades due to their careers and trying to fit into a culture other than their own.
However, with the return of Hawke’s sister to his life, she is showing him how good their culture is for their wellbeing. That will be a subplot in the book to his investigation into a decades-old body he discovers while patrolling the Snake River in the Hells Canyon.
I‘m hoping my contact within the Nez Perce community and the Fish and Wildlife Trooper helping me with the patrol of the river will give my story more realism.
Speaking of realism, I took a trip to the Oregon Coast last Spring to research for my newest release, The Pinch, book 5 in the Spotted Pony Casino Mystery series. In this book Dela Alvaro, head of security for the Spotted Pony Casino is at a tribal-run casino on the Oregon Coast helping them beef up their security. While there a child is kidnapped and she runs into an old friend.
The Pinch
Dela Alvaro, head of security for the Spotted Pony Casino, is asked to do a security check of a casino on the Oregon Coast. She no sooner starts her rounds at the casino and a child of a dubious couple is kidnapped. Special Agent Quinn Pierce of the FBI has been out to get the father for some time.
One of Dela’s best friends from the Army is also at the casino and they catch up. The next morning, Dela finds her friend strangled. As Dela struggles with the violent death of yet another best friend, Tribal Officer Heath Seaver arrives and the two begin untangling the lies, kidnapping, and murder.
As Heath carries the kidnapped child to safety, Dela must face a cunning killer alone.
I hope you enjoy this latest book and follow my books to learn more about the Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Cayuse tribes as my characters, Hawke and Dela begin to, in Hawke’s case become reacquainted with his roots and Dela is just beginning to learn she may have a Umatilla heritage.
I purchased this seed holder pot from a Pueblo woman in front of a market on the reservation. She told me she was Acoma (Ah-kuh-muh) Pueblo with the Bear Clan. She showed me her name and a bear paw on the bottom of the pot. She then told me the solid black on the pot represents mountains and land, the orange sun, and the thin lines rain. I enjoyed my visit with her.
That is the thing I love most about reading, writing, and traveling. I learn new things and broaden my horizons.
What comes to mind when you hear the word “occult”? Evil cults that worship the devil? Weird rituals where animals are sacrificed? Wizards with nefarious aims wielding power behind the scenes? If so, you probably got those impressions from Hollywood or from fear-based religious groups. Let’s pull back the dark curtain that shrouds the occult arts to discover how supernatural elements can contribute to a mystery novel’s plot.
What Does “Occult” Mean?
First of all, the word “occult” simply means hidden, as in hidden knowledge. For centuries, people who practiced the occult arts had to hide what they knew and practiced in order to avoid imprisonment, torture, and murder at the hands of misguided authorities. They formed secret societies sometimes known as Mystery Schools, passed down wisdom through symbols and oral tradition, and wrote in secret code.
Yet occult ideas and practices––witchcraft, divination, spellcasting, incantations, and magic potions––continue to fascinate us to this day. Perhaps the most famous scene in literature comes from Shakespeare’s MacBeth where three witches stir a mysterious brew while they prophesy “toil and trouble” for the Scottish king. The Bard’s plays MacBeth and Hamlet also feature ghosts, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream involves faery spells and shapeshifting. More recently, J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter stories have captured the imaginations of millions of young people worldwide and introduced them to some of the tenets of magic work––and its possibilities.
Using the Occult in Plotting a Story
Occult practices involve working with forces beyond the mundane, tapping into reservoirs of hidden power, and sometimes interacting with supernatural beings. Therefore, they let writers and readers step outside the ordinary limitations of a storyline. Ghosts and spirits can also expand readers’ knowledge into realms beyond the physical. In Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, for example, a murdered girl shares a perspective of the crime from her vantage point on the other side.
Oracles such as the tarot, astrology, or runes can give veiled glimpses into the future. Is someone destined to die when the Death card turns up in a tarot reading? In my mystery novels What the Walls Know and The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors, a tarot card reader sees trouble lurking ahead for the protagonist Lizzie Crane, which adds to the stories’ suspense.
Authors can incorporate metaphysical ideas into their novels in various ways. For example:
Is a character a seasoned witch or wizard, or a novice dabbling with forces she doesn’t understand, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice?
Does a character pursue a metaphysical path that leads him to a discovery or danger? How does he grow from this experience?
If this is a historical novel, what local customs, religious beliefs, and laws affected occultists at that time? Are historical events, such as the Salem Witch Trials of the early 1690s, worthwhile additions to the book?
Do nonphysical entities influence a character’s decisions, aid her in solving a problem, or guide her into a realm beyond the physical one?
Does a character conjure a spell that works––or goes wrong––and takes the story in an intriguing direction?
Oh, and by the way, writing is a powerful form of magic. When casting a spell, you envision an outcome you want to create. Then you infuse it with color, action, emotion, intention, and passion. You experience it as if you’re living it right now. In your mind’s eye, you see the result as if it already exists––and you’re the Creator who makes it happen. Sounds like writing a novel, doesn’t it?
The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors
Salem, Massachusetts, Christmas 1925: When the heir to a shipping fortune hires New York jazz singer Lizzie Crane and her band to perform during the Christmas holidays, she has high hopes that the prestigious event will bring them riches and recognition. But the evening the musicians arrive, police discover a body near a tavern owned by Lizzie’s cousin––a cousin she didn’t even know she had. Soon Lizzie becomes a pawn in a deadly game between her cousin and her employer over a mysterious lady with a dangerous past.
Skye Alexander’s historical mystery novels What the Walls Know and The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors, the second and third books in her Lizzie Crane mystery series, use tarot cards and other occult ideas to provide clues. Skye is also a recognized authority in the field of metaphysics and the author of fifteen bestselling nonfiction books on the occult arts including The Modern Guide to Witchcraft, The Modern Witchcraft Book of Tarot, and Magickal Astrology.
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