SPECIAL EDITION!
SURPRISE!
To celebrate the release of Kate's newest book, I'm doing a SPECIAL EDITION of Adam Interviews!
Let's dive right in!
Living in gorgeous Coastal Devon, Kate synergises her lifelong love of reading Cozy Sleuths with years of writing experience and her extensive knowledge of foreign climes to write Travel Cozies.
Her first Cozies were the 1970s-set Màiri Maguire Cozy Mysteries - fun, frothy, fast-paced mysteries, with just enough clues and twists to keep you guessing until the end.
Now Kate’s Quick Reads Cozy series is released: Huntingdon Hart Investigates, Casefiles of an Occasional Detective
Kate hopes that her readers will get as much pleasure from reading Màiri’s adventures as she gets from Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Ellery Queen, Raffles, and Jana DeLeon's Miss Fortune series.
Find her at:
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/author/kate-darroch Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22133773.Kate_Darroch twitter: https://twitter.com/BooksBonanza
Star Trek or Star Wars?
I enjoy them both! In different ways for different reasons. Although my Fave in-space shows are the original Lost in Space (I loved Zachary Smith) Galaxy Quest and Spaceballs.
A book that pleasantly surprised you?
Louisiana Longshot, Jana DeLeon’s first Miss Fortune book. It’s very funny, and it was a book I didn’t expect to be humorous.
Where do you get your information or ideas for your books?
My ideas come from the Muse, but the information comes from a lifetime of hoovering up knowledge. I love learning. When I get an idea, it’s usually about something I already know well. On the rare occasions when it’s not, my research is extensive.
For example, I have lived in every city featured in my Travel Cozies series, Màiri Maguire Cozy Mysteries. But I intend to write a Màiri story set in Vienna, where I have never lived. So I have arranged to rent a flat in the heart of Vienna for 3 months and I shall write the book whilst living there. First, though, I need to exhaustively research Vienna during the period (1972).
What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?
I self publish, so whether I’m writing that day or not, my work begins when I open my eyes and it doesn’t stop until I go to bed. Sometime I wake up in the middle of the night and grab my laptop. Always I’m thinking about work. I stop reluctantly to wash and dress, to grab a quick bite to eat at odd intervals, to go for a walk. I stop happily to talk with my family and to worship. The rest of the time, I’m working - or too ill to move. As James Barrie so perfectly put it “You think that was hardship? It was sublime.” (in What Every Woman Knows). Always working is sublime, I mean.
Do you have any suggestions to help someone become a better writer? If so, what are they?
The Bard said it for me. “This above all, to thine own self be true.” Of course you would be insane to write a book that no-one will want to read, but I do not believe that any well-written book exists which someone doesn’t want to read. And we have the wornderful luxury today of being able to self publish. So your audience will find you. You don’t need to worry about pleasing a particular market segment, or writing “commercially”. You can be true to yourself and write what you want to write.
But do not make the mistake of thinking that you can slam up a book that hasn’t been properly formatted, with a home-made cover and an interior which shows no respect for the editing process or the publishing industry, and make no effort to market that book – and yet still find readers.
Read Dorothea Brande’s wonderful book Becoming A Writer, and do everything she says.
Never stop learning. Learn from the Greats – Sol Stein, Lajos Egri, Michael J Stravinsky, Thornton Wilder. And from those at the coalface today – Save The Cat, all James Scott Bell’s books for writers, Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book
Learn from the behind-the-scenes professionals. Here is a link to a marvellous online exposition of great writing principles. https://summit.yourwritingprocess.com/talks/tbd-2/ If it’s no longer available, try the presenter’s website AbigailKPerry.com
Depending on your age, you may find it easier to get a publisher than to self publish, notoriously difficult although it is to get a publisher. With a few well-known exceptions like J K Rowling and Mark Dawson, few writers earn enough to live on the income from their calling, whether self published or traditionally published.
I shall not easily forget my shock on learning that Howard Waldrop, a writer whose work I respect enormously (and which was always in high demand), earned less in a lifetime of writing than a barely competent middle-skilled middle manager earns in a year.
Accept, before you try to make a living by writing, that Lady Luck – not the degree of your native ability – will determine whether you earn enough from your writing product to let you eat. Most writers have day jobs. Some of us have pensions. But only a tiny percentage of us can make a living by writing what we want to write. So have a backup plan.
Always remember Churchill’s words: Never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up.
What’s the greatest living example of that? IMO, Connie Willis. I adore her work. And it very, very nearly, never saw the light of day. This woman was the first writer ever to win both the Hugo and the Nebula. She has been honoured over and over and over. And yet if not for the slightest thing, postage stamps already affixed to an envelope, she would have given up. She tells that moving story in her preface to A Letter From The Clearys. So don’t give up.
Do you hear from your readers much? What kinds of things do they say?
I am blessed to hear from my readers all the time, a couple of hundred emails a week usually, although when my son was very ill over a thousand readers wrote to me on the same day. They say lovely things like they hope my health improves; and they send me Hugs or say they are praying for me; and that I mustn’t wear myself out working too hard – and then in the same email they say how much they are longing for my next book. That was why I decided to write Hunt. Novellas are easy for me to write and Quick Reads are a good way to give my readers some stories to enjoy while they wait for my next novel.
What is the first book that made you cry?
A marvellous novel I read when I was 14 years old, called A Dragon’s Life I am ashamed to say I don’t remember who wrote it. It was an incredibly evocative tale of a man in a travelling carnival, who was dressed in a dragon costume, and he got accidentally left behind on a roadstop. He had to try to reach the carnival trucks, and he couldn’t manage to catch up with them. All the time he was still wearing the costume, and it got dirty and torn, and he was too hot, and hungry. He couldn’t get a ride, and he had no money on him. And in the middle of the road, he got hurt in some small way by a passing car, (maybe it splashed dirty water on him, I don’t remember exactly what happened) and when that happened I cried a river. I wanted to reach into the book and pull him out of it and feed him. I was crying because I couldn’t do that. He was absolutely real to me. And at the same time I knew it was just a story, that the man I was weeping for didn’t really exist. A wonderful book.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you building a body of work with connections between each book?
When I sit down to write, I say to myself, perhaps, today I am going to work on Chilworth Street (a crime novel I’ve begun) and maybe I do, but maybe I work on one of my Cozy series instead. Or I say, today is the day I figure out how to rewrite Elda (a screenplay I’ve decided to self publish as a novel) and instead my eye is caught by something else and I write a new flash fiction piece. Or I say, Oh Hell! a deadline has snuck up on me, and I type like a maniac until I can submit. I do hit my deadlines, but sometimes it’s at 3 minutes before midnight. So I don’t exactly build a body of work, it’s more that some opus muscles its way to the front of the queue. And it’s a winding queue. There are over a hundred stories I want to write, who knows if I’ll live long enough?
How do you balance making demands on the reader with taking care of the reader?
Frankly, I don’t. I figure that if readers don’t enjoy my books then they’ll read someone else’s books. I think non-stop about how I can make my writing better, more entertaining, easier to escape into, more believable, funnier, frothier, more action-packed. More enjoyable. Clean, but not stuffy. Only once have I worried about reader reaction. I’d written a moment of extreme violence into a Cozy, which is a No-No. No-one has ever called me on that scene, though, and more than seventeen thousand people have read it, so I guess my readers can take care of themselves.
Do you write novels, novellas, short stories, episodic fiction, poems, screenplays, or something else? What is your preferred format?