Hello! By Nancy Eady

If you don’t recognize my name as someone you’ve seen here before, there’s an excellent reason—I’m new. I have a confession to make. My name is Nancy, and I am a write-o-holic.

Sometimes the compulsion is more easily mastered than at other times, but once I give in to it, I am completely immersed. When I’m writing, family members can speak to me for five minutes before I realize anything is being said. My daughter (age 16) has been known to take advantage of this phenomenon by announcing, when questioned about an activity or outing, that she told me and I didn’t say no. This clever ploy led to a new rule—it doesn’t count as permission unless I, a) verbally acknowledge that I heard the question and b) specifically say yes.

My daughter and husband last month

 Proof of my compulsion dates back to the first essay I wrote in grade school. I think I was in second grade. The essay was about spring and living in the balmy weather of Southern California. I thought I should tell the teacher that there were places where it might snow during spring. The teacher thought that was very creative and wrote a note on the essay that my mother stored in the “Nancy’s School Years” book she kept for me when I was little. She handed it on once I got married, and I kept it. (Yes, I know, there’s probably a diagnosis for that.) 

I kept almost all of my creative writing from high school, most of it forgettable. Besides reams of poetry from the “I walk alone” stage at ages 16 and 17, I have the book I started in junior high, a Star Wars type coming-of-age story, and the very weird novella about bears named Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail I wrote the summer before my senior year. While the final work product left something to be desired, those six weeks were some of the happiest weeks I spent any summer. I sat at a typewriter and wrote for at least 8 hours a day, and it was heaven.

The Two Parents, Just Last Month (My Husband and Me)

Now that I am over 50, you would think somewhere in those decades of writing I would have found a publisher, but not yet—although I am getting closer. I started a blog in 2011 (www.workingmomadventures.com) which sprang from the antics of a household that included two parents, one eight-year-old girl, and three dogs. As of today, it has over 170,000 views. And I finally managed to finish—beginning is easy; finishing is not—my first novel, a murder mystery about lawyers in a small Southern town. Not coincidentally, I have been a lawyer in a small Southern town since 1998.

One of the Original Three Blog Dogs

Mystery writing is freeing. As a mystery writer, I choose my victims, my villains, and my victories. I can ensure that the right people get punished for the right crimes. I can kill people who deserve killing, and if I’m having a bad day, I can give the people in my novel an even worse day. (Although I relent upon editing unless the bad day in my novel serves an important plot purpose.)  I can endow my protagonists with qualities I wish I had or give them character quirks I find endearing. I inhabit multiple universes when I choose, with the advantage of leaving the problems in those universes behind when I’ve had enough.

When I was invited to join Writers Who Kill to blog once a month, I was overwhelmed. I admire the WWK writers and their work. Just to be listed on the same page is an honor. I checked to be sure they meant to send me the invitation, and not some other Nancy Eady, but they assured me they meant me.

So here I am, looking forward to sharing with you in the months to come my experiences as I search for an agent and a publisher, and finish the next two books in my series. I’ll probably deviate off message often, since my writing compulsion extends to just about any topic I find interesting. No matter what I write, I’ll be learning, and I hope I can share those lessons with you.

To help me with that, I’d appreciate it if you could answer the following question:  if you had met your favorite author before his or her first publication, what would you ask? 

I look forward to hearing from and to sharing with you in the months to come.