Tag: #MMIW

One of My Favorite Things About Writing

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

My favorite part about writing is learning. When I wrote historical western romance, I enjoyed visiting museums and libraries in the areas where the books were set to learn local history and to find maps of the towns. I read newspapers on microfiche to get a feel for the setting and the people. The small-town newspapers back in the 1800’s were as much gossip columns as they were filled with political news.

Writing historicals, I had to learn a lot, and I loved every minute of it. I was a nerd in school. I’d take my history, geography, and social science textbooks home even if my work was finished so I could read ahead and learn more.

Writing contemporary books, I always come across occupations or places I don’t know anything about and spend hours learning. Even if all that learning may only end up as one paragraph in the whole book.

When I write mysteries, I have to research causes of death, how law enforcement works, occupations, and settings. My horizons are always expanded when I start a new book. I’m currently researching for the next Spotted Pony Casino book, Crap Shoot. I know it will deal with MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) I have three articles that I’ve set aside until now to help me determine how I want to handle the subject and whether the character will be just missing or murdered. Whether it will be domestic or a stranger. So many possibilities and the research I’m doing will help me to see the direction of the story.

I’m also attending an event called- Winter Fishtrap: What is the West? Fishtrap is a gathering of writers from the West. The organization puts on several events throughout the year in the county where I grew up and where my Hawke books are set. This Winter Fishtrap has some great topics and many of the speakers are Indigenous. I’m hoping to get a better sense of that it means for them to be in Wallowa County and telling their stories from this event. To hopefully help me better articulate my character Gabriel Hawke and my character Heath Seaver from the Spotted Pony Casino Mysteries.

I first attended a Fishtrap event back in the 1980’s and quickly discovered it was more about literary writing than genre writing. that was the only multi-day event I attended. I have been in the county visiting family when they had readings and attended those with a family member, This will be the first multiday event since the 80s. I’m hoping it will be as good as it sounds.

Speaking of my Gabriel Hawke series… Wolverine Instincts is now available.

In the heart of the wilderness, the hunter becomes the hunted.

Gunshots shatter the quiet of Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness, drawing Oregon State Trooper Gabriel Hawke into action. Following the sound, he stumbles upon a shredded cage, the sharp musk of a wolverine, and a dead hiker.

Tracking footprints through the rugged terrain, Hawke uncovers a second victim. It’s clear—he’s hunting a killer who’s hunting humans.

With Dog by his side, Hawke’s search leads to two brothers, one gravely injured. Enlisting the help of pilot Dani Singer, he gets the injured man to safety before returning to the wilderness.

Teaming up with a reclusive, disabled veteran who knows the Eagle Cap as well as he does, Hawke pieces together the killer’s twisted game. They suspect a poacher—one as ruthless and elusive as the wolverine he’s still chasing.

In a deadly wilderness where survival is the only rule, Hawke must outsmart a predator who knows no bounds.

Universal buy link: https://books2read.com/u/m2yARG

OR Purchase direct from the author in ebook and print from these links:

ebook link – https://www.patyjager.net/product/wolverine-instincts-ebook/  

print link- https://www.patyjager.net/product/wolverine-instincts/

Guest Blogger ~ Pamela Fagan Hutchins

~ patyjag

Vigilante with a Badge in the Modern West: Delaney Pace

My Delaney Pace Series is set in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, present-day—the real-life Modern West. It’s a setting I know well. I live there, right on the eastern face of the Bighorns near Sheridan. For the book, I created the fictional town of Kearny. Its name was inspired by Fort Phil Kearny near Story. My husband and I used to live across the street from its ruins and the museum that now stands in its place. That setting has fueled many of the books I’ve written.

But any good series is driven by its lead character more than anything, so it is with that in mind that I present to you my vigilante with a badge, Deputy Investigator Delaney Pace. My friend Daisy is the inspo for Delaney, and you couldn’t get more Modern West than Daisy—or more kick ass.

A few years ago, my husband Eric posted that we were giving away rusty, fire-damaged barbed wire. One of the takers was Daisy, who showed up with her family to claim some to use for a project.

We soon learned that she’d given up oil field trucking in North Dakota—and a side gig as a reality star— for taking over the family homestead, raising her second daughter twenty years after her first, and being a service to others through philanthropy and her physical labor. She was a key player in organizing one of the largest agricultural relief efforts in the history of the United States through a huge convoy of truckers, donors, and volunteers after historic fires devastated America’s Midwest. She and her family raise (and butcher) a large flock of turkeys every year to feed 300+ people at a free community Thanksgiving dinner.

Daisy’s the one you want as your second in a knife fight, who could have been a model or actress instead of a rodeo star and extreme trucker, and she’s the friend you can knock back a cold one with or take to meet your pastor (after you’ve done your best to prepare them for the encounter). If by some small miracle you find her in a church, you won’t see her sitting in the pews… she’s the one standing in the back.

She was forged in the kind of volcanic upheaval that can result in smoking rubble or beautiful rocky mountain ranges. Daisy, through character and force of will, is the latter. If you enjoy Delaney as much as I do, it is because of my friend Daisy. {Daisy, thank you for agreeing to let me reshape you in fiction.}

Whether it is her love for her niece, her desperate need to find her father’s killer and unravel the mystery of her mother’s disappearance, or her passion for hunting down killers (and for the handsome deputy she works alongside), Delaney goes all in. Her spirit embodies the Modern West. Rugged, self-reliant but selfless, with one foot in 1950 and one in 2024.

I think she and I have a long road to travel together, and I’m thrilled to ride shotgun on her fictional journey.

Hop in with us—we’d love to have you, too!

Pamela Fagan Hutchins

Catch Delaney Pace in her latest adventure: HER FORGOTTEN SHADOW https://amzn.to/3Nh54xYA violent storm erupts over the small town of Kearny, bringing a devastating mudslide. Amongst the debris, the worn threads of a child’s blanket, hides the body of a young girl, her long dark hair matted with the fallen earth that killed her.

When the rescue team find rope marks around the ankles of the teenage girl, they call in Detective Delaney Pace. Fourteen-year-old Marilyn Littlewolf went missing five years ago after moving to Kearny from a local reservation. Fearing she was dead, nobody expected Marilyn to ever come home. So where has she been? And why is her body covered in bruises?

Delaney thinks Marilyn was held captive in the mountains that tower above the town, but with acres of remote wilderness to search, the investigation seems impossible. Diving into Marilyn’s case, one name stands out that makes her blood turn cold as ice: her friend and longstanding babysitter to her two adopted daughters, Skeeter Rawlins.

Racing to his home, she finds it in disarray, it’s clear he left in a hurry. In disbelief, Delaney takes in the empty whisky bottles and wonders if she was wrong to trust her reliable old friend with her darling girls?

As evidence piles up against Skeeter, Delaney’s heart shatters when another girl is reported missing. Tracing her to a remote cabin deep in the woods, she fears she’s about to finally uncover the truth about her once-trusted friend. But when she bursts into the disheveled shack nothing could have prepared her for what she finds. Was she wrong to suspect Skeeter as the twisted mind behind the missing girls? And is she already too late to save another innocent life?

Pamela Fagan Hutchins is a USA Today bestselling and Amazon All Star mystery/thriller/suspense author with books in ten languages, who believes in soulmates, loves to laugh, travels too much, and lives out the adventures in her books at a rustic lake camp at Maine’s Mooselook Lake and in an off-the-grid lodge on the face of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains with her husband, sled dogs, and draft horses. She’s currently along for her husband’s year-long assignment on the Mediterranean coast of France, writing her fifth Delaney Pace crime thriller in a tiny village where no one speaks English or has ever seen Alaskan malamutes before… and loving it.

Website: http://pamelafaganhutchins.com

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Reaching out by Paty Jager

~ patyjag ~ 6 Comments

Whenever I start a project with a topic I know only enough about to want to write about it, I reach out to others who have experience.

That’s what I did for my latest Gabriel Hawke book, Stolen Butterfly. For years, I’ve heard of the injustice towards the Native American people. The women and children who were murdered and missing. While the cause, MMIW, now also titled MMIP, because it isn’t just women but children and even some men who are murdered or missing, has been growing slowly, the last few years it has started rolling with fury.

While the Indigenous population is only 2% of the all the people in the U.S., they are the group with the largest percent of missing and murdered people. The reason is law enforcement up until lately hasn’t cared. It has taken the MMIW movement to bring this to light.

Because I had decided back when writing book 1, Murder of Ravens to have Gabriel Hawke tackle this injustice, I reached out to social workers in and around the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation to find help in telling my current release, Stolen Butterfly, accurately. The social worker I contacted, put me in contact with a woman who has lost four family members and is an advocate of the MMIW/MMIP cause. When she told me the stories of the people she’d lost and photos she took to commemorate them, I was choked up. That’s when I knew this was the book I was born to write.

Not only was the woman, Kola Shippentower-Thompson, an advocate for MMIP, she also is the co-founder of Enough Iz Enough a non-profit that teaches women and children how to defend themselves and be aware of danger. She was the prefect fit for the research I needed. She also had worked in security at the Wildhorse Casino on the reservation and her husband works with the Tribal Police in the Fish and Wildlife division. She could answer all of my questions and give me the emotional side I needed as well.

One of the secondary characters in the book is my new main character in my upcoming Spotted Pony Casino Mysteries. Kola has graciously said she would answer any questions along the way as I write that series which will be set on the Umatilla Reservation.

By reaching out and asking for help to make sure my book captures the way the people come together when a person is missing and showing their emotions, as well as the treatment they receive from entities that should be helping, I hope my book will build a little more compassion toward the Indigenous People. This is a book that I hope will make more people aware of the fear that is faced every day by a people who have lived through diseases that nearly wiped them out, being banished to reservations, and then treated as if they weren’t human. They are strong and resilient and deserve to be heard when their people are being taken from them.

Here is the review Kola gave my book after reading it: “The story was captivating, I couldn’t put it down. So many memories were brought to surface, so many emotions, like this has been lived before, because it has, this is a glimpse into our reality in the Reservation. Thank you for seeing us & helping tell part of the story.” 

The proceeds from the sale of this book will go to the non-profit Enough Iz Enough. This is a community outreach organization that advocates for MMIW on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation.  

Stolen Butterfly

Gabriel Hawke Novel #7

Missing or Murdered

When the local authorities tell State Trooper Gabriel Hawke’s mother to wait 72 hours before reporting a missing Umatilla woman, she calls her son and rallies members of the community to search.

Hawke arrives at the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation and learns the single mother of a boy his mom watches would never leave her son. Angered over how the local officials respond to his investigating, Hawke teams up with a security guard at the Indian casino and an FBI agent. Following the leads, they discover the woman was targeted by a human trafficking ring at the Spotted Pony Casino.

Hawke, Dela Alvaro, and FBI Special Agent Quinn Pierce join forces to bring the woman home and close down the trafficking operation before someone else goes missing.

Universal buy link: https://books2read.com/u/baZEPq