The Dead Ground - Claire McGowan - Author Guest Post - Blog Tour

Today I'm delighted to share a guest post with you from author Claire McGowan. Claire's third novel is The Dead Ground, and is published by Headline on April 10th 2014. 

It's the second in a series featuring Paula Maguire. You can read my review of the first in the series, The Lost, here, and my review of Claire's first book, The Fall, here.

My writing process by Claire McGowan

There are a couple of questions that always come up when I’m being interviewed, and which I really should have worked out better answers to. One is: are you disciplined with your writing? And the other is: how much research do you do?

At the moment I write at least one book a year, and I always have other work to do as well, like most writers nowadays. So I don’t sit down at my desk all day every day and write – for one thing, it’s hard to crank out words eight hours a day. For another, life’s little jobs always get in the way, whether it’s proof-reading a different book, or promoting the one you have out, or going to the dentist or dry-cleaners. Part of this is procrastination, of course. When you don’t want to write a particular scene or you don’t know what happens next in your book, it’s amazing how much time you can fill up cleaning the taps, emailing, and watching YouTube videos of cats running into walls.

My process of writing a book spans around a year. This is probably because I have a year. If I had more or less time, I’m sure the work would expand or contract. First I’ll get the idea. I get ideas all the time, but not all of these will be workable as novels. It helps that I’m writing a series, so I know roughly what has to happen to the cast of characters in that one. Then I start scribbling down bits of the book, gathering ideas as I go. At this stage I don’t know much about the plot but rather than panic I just try to enjoy the adventure of finding out what’s going on. I use a notebook for this part, which is a sort of fetish – I can kid myself it’s like sketching, just playing about, and it also stops me being distracted by the aforementioned cat videos. Then, I will usually get to thirty thousand words and stop, stumped as to what happens next. I might stop for quite a while, procrastinating and telling myself I’m thinking it over. At some point I drag myself between thirty and sixty thousand words – the hardest part. Then I will stop again to think about what is really going on? What’s the book about? You might think I would know at this point, but….

Then, the research question. I wish I had a good answer for this, like ‘I embedded myself with the police for a year’ or ‘I got myself arrested so I could experience prison’, but it’s nowhere near as exciting as that. I will usually read around the subject I want to write on when I’m in the early musing stages, then try to get the story down, and then check the facts after. I’ll do this either by reading, going online, or talking to people about specific questions. Again, I’m a firm believer that too much research can weigh a book down, and that story is much more important than being totally accurate at all times. I want to write stories, not be an expert in the police force or forensic pathology or something. It’s surprising how often you get things right anyway. The mind is very powerful.

Hopefully this rather haphazard approach will show any aspiring writers that you don’t have to have all the answers when you start a book. However, you absolutely do have to keep going. I’m a big believer in doing 1,000 words a day in the writing stage– this very quickly adds up to a book and is why I wrote my first in three months. If you do this, and keep going without reading back over it, even when you’re convinced it’s no good, at least you have something to work with and fix. The only perfect books are the ones that stay in your head, unwritten. Give it a try!

About the novel...

BOOK TWO IN THE NEW CRIME SERIES FEATURING FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST PAULA MAGUIRE WORKING IN THE MISSING PERSONS UNIT IN NORTHERN IRELAND, IN A NAIL BITING STORY THAT WILL KEEP YOU UP ALL NIGHT

A stolen baby. A murdered woman. A decades-old atrocity. Something connects them all...

A month before Christmas, and Ballyterrin on the Irish border lies under a thick pall of snow. When a newborn baby goes missing from hospital, it's all too close to home for forensic psychologist Paula Maguire, who's wrestling with the hardest decision of her life.

Then a woman is found in a stone circle with her stomach cut open and it's clear a brutal killer is on the loose.

As another child is taken and a pregnant woman goes missing, Paula is caught up in the hunt for a killer no one can trace, who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

The Dead Ground will leave you gasping for breath as Paula discovers every decision she makes really is a matter of life and death...

About the author... 

Claire McGowan grew up in a small village in Northern Ireland. After a degree in English and French from Oxford University, and time spent living in China and France, she moved to London and works in the charity sector and also teaches creative writing. THE DEAD GROUND is her third novel and the second in the Paula Maguire series.

Author links: twitter @inkstainsclaire | website

The City of Strangers - Michael Russell - Author Guest Post

I am delighted to feature a guest post by author Michael Russell! 

Michael's new novel, The City of Strangers, is the second to feature Irish detective Stefan Gillespie, and is published by Avon on November 7th 2013.

Author guest post by Michael Russell

THE CITY OF STRANGERS

‘The Yankee Clipper was approaching New York. Stefan saw something, the top of a building… then the city, looking down to Manhattan from the East River. It was exactly as he had imagined it, yet breathtakingly like nothing he could ever have imagined.’

Chandler’s Los Angeles and Hammett’s (and others’) New York are two cities that dominate 20^th century crime fiction. But if Los Angeles has the greatest writer, New York has something else. More than any city it defines the 20^th century. For most of that century it was the most exciting city on earth, especially in the 30s and 40s. No city even looked like it. Someone said there was one other city as exciting in 3000 years of western history, 4^th century BC Athens, but without skyscrapers, movies, jazz, air conditioning, or detective fiction (the only literary genre the Greeks didn’t invent?) – it’s no contest!

My first story about Irish detective Stefan Gillespie, set in Ireland and Danzig in 1935, was about the kind of killings that come out of the darkness that takes hold of ordinary people, but it took Gillespie close to darker events too, the rise of Nazism. I wanted to write a series using the same kind of tale to spin good yarns and to explore Ireland and its compromised ‘neutrality’ in the years before World War II, and during the war itself. I also wanted to ‘visit’ cities playing a role in the war, including neutral ones like New York (initially) and Lisbon. So New York was next when I wrote The City of Strangers.

Everybody falls in love with New York. As Milos Forman said, ‘I get out of a New York taxi and it’s the only city where reality looks better than the postcards’. But the first time I visited New York I was surprised not by how much ‘now’ was around me, but how much of the whole 20^th century. Walking the city - Manhattan isn’t so big you can’t just do that and be absorbed by its mixture of grime, chaos, wonder - you don’t need a gallery to see the art of the 20^th century, just look up. Writing a novel partly set in New York in 1939 was irresistible. So many things came together. Most importantly the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows; a sprawling, majestic vision of the World of Tomorrow, of democracy, plenty, life-enhancing technology, and hope for humanity. Almost every country on earth was there, though many were still colonial territories, but the great absentee was Germany. Within a year the only existence some countries had was a pavilion at the Fair; Czechoslovakia and Poland were gone. There was another vision. It wasn’t a fairground. It was about to plunge Europe and much of the world into the dark.

And that darkness was already in New York, despite its energy, despite the World’s Fair. When Garda Sergeant Gillespie arrives to bring a suspected murderer back to Dublin, he finds what he left behind has followed him. In Times Square American fascists fight anti-fascists in the street. Arguments about American neutrality and isolationism seem arguments about which side you’re going to be ‘neutral’ on. But it comes closer to home for Stefan. Some Irish-Americans, like some in Ireland, see war as an opportunity to rid Ireland of Britain for good. IRA plans for cooperation with the Nazis are hatched in New York as in Dublin. If Stefan thinks he’s a long way from what’s going on at home, the dead body of an old friend soon tells him otherwise. And when he offers to help an Irish woman who is in trouble as a result, he finds himself mired in unlooked for danger.

The story takes Stefan home before that danger is faced. On the way it follows him through Manhattan and Long Island, upstate to Lake Ontario and Canada. New York in 1939 is worth visiting. The City of Strangers is one way to get there. Don’t forget Duke Ellington is playing Small’s Paradise in Harlem, and watch for falling bodies if you’re heading to 7^th Avenue on West 59^th. When I started writing about New York in 1939 I had three things in my head: Duke Ellington playing Caravan; a newsreel of the NYPD marching in the St Patrick’s Day Parade; the island of Manhattan seen from a Yankee Clipper that had flown from Ireland. That’s often how stories start. Not always character and plot, but a place, an image, a memory. Small things you can’t get out of your head.

The next Stefan Gillespie novel will be set in 1940. It starts with Stefan investigating a seemingly motiveless murder in the Wicklow Mountains that leads him to discover that the accidental death of his wife Maeve eight years ago was murder too. It’s something that is going to turn his life upside down. The search for the killer will take him to the edge of the war in Europe, to the neutral city of Lisbon, packed with refugees escaping the carnage to come; to Franco’s Spain where a dying Irish International Brigade officer is still imprisoned; and to bitter retribution in England, as the Battle of Britain begins.

~~~~~

Many thanks to Michael Russell for this wonderful guest post.

Find Michael on twitter @ForgottenCities and visit his website here.

The first novel featuring Stefan Gillespie is called The City of Shadows, published by Avon

Find The City of Strangers on amazon here

Book Tour Spotlight post - Have No Shame - Melissa Foster

Today on the blog I am featuring an author spotlight post by Melissa Foster for her new novel, Have No Shame.

The book EVERYONE is reading!!

HAVE NO SHAME
When civil rights and forbidden love collide

The most important book of 2013

“An American classic, not yet discovered.”

“[Have No Shame] should be up there with To Kill A Mockingbird.”

"This book will resonate with readers who enjoyed Kathryn Stockett's, THE HELP, Julie Kibler's, CALLING ME HOME, John Grisham's, A TIME TO KILL, Sue Monk Kidd's, THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, and Kathleen Grissom's, THE KITCHEN HOUSE."

Buy it now on AMAZON: http://amzn.to/16TaOSZ

Buy it Now on B & N: http://bit.ly/YATqAd

"Within moments of starting to read, you will be transported back to the Arkansas of 1967 - hot, dusty, utterly rural and edgy. Poor white farmers dependent upon cheap black labor who, due to their superior numbers, are constantly suppressed, living on the wrong side of town, ghettoised and terrified. You will remember scenes from `In the Heat of the Night' and `Easy Rider'; you will remember that, less than fifty years ago, if you were black, you could be beaten for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if you died at the hands of a white youth, justice would almost certainly be denied you." Author Roderick Craig Low

Summary

Alison Tillman has called Forrest Town, Arkansas home for the past eighteen years. Her mother's Blue Bonnet meetings, her father toiling night and day on the family farm, and the division of life between the whites and the blacks are all Alison knows. The winter of 1967, just a few months before marrying her high school sweetheart, Alison finds the body of a black man floating in the river, and she begins to view her existence with new perspective. The oppression and hate of the south, the ugliness she once was able to avert her eyes from, now demands her attention.

When a secretive friendship with a young black man takes an unexpected romantic turn, Alison is forced to choose between her predetermined future, and the dangerous path that her heart yearns for.

"A gripping and poignant novel dealing with a subject once taboo in American society." Hagerstown Magazine

"Have No Shame is a powerful testimony to love and the progressive, logical evolution of social consciousness, with an outcome that readers will find engrossing, unexpected, and ultimately eye-opening." Midwest Book Review

Buy HAVE NO SHAME on Amazon: http://amzn.to/16TaOSZ
Buy HAVE NO SHAME on B&N: http://bit.ly/12WGCYD

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR

Melissa Foster

Melissa Foster is an award-winning, international bestselling author. Her books have been recommended by USA Today's book blog, Hagerstown Magazine, The Patriot, and several other print venues. She is the founder of the Women’s Nest, a social and support community for women, the World Literary Café. When she's not writing, Melissa helps authors navigate the publishing industry through her author training programs on Fostering Success. Melissa is also a community builder for the Alliance for Independent Authors. She has been published in Calgary’s Child Magazine, the Huffington Post, and Women Business Owners magazine. 

Melissa hosts an annual Aspiring Authors contest for children and has painted and donated several murals to The Hospital for Sick Children in Washington, DC. Melissa lives in Maryland with her family.

Visit Melissa on The Women's Nest, Fostering Success, or World Lit Cafe, or attend her annual reader luncheon with the YaYa Writer Girls. Melissa enjoys discussing her books with book clubs and reader groups, and welcomes an invitation to your event.

Get in touch with Melissa here:

Website | Facebook | Twitter | YaYa Writer Girls | The Women’s Nest | World Literary Café | Fostering Success | Facebook Fan Page | Goodreads

Buy HAVE NO SHAME on Amazon: http://amzn.to/16TaOSZ

Buy HAVE NO SHAME on B&N: http://bit.ly/12WGCYD

Book Clubs

Melissa is now scheduling her late summer and fall events!

Book your author visit today!

Thinkhappygirl (at) yahoo (dot) com 

Giveaway

The giveaway is running across all the stops on this blog tour and the prize is a paperback copy of Have no Shame. Please use the rafflecopter form below to enter.

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