VISITING DIGNITARY CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

WELCOME CAROLE!!!

Folks, I want you to give a warm welcome to our guest today.  She's a good friend (and is going to be my roommate at RT this spring.  She's a veteran writer with a looooooooooong backlist and a great sense of humor.  I give you CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS!  (INSERT CHEERS HERE)



All right Carole, the blog is acting up a bit and your pictures keep wandering all over the place.  I have no idea how this is going to look.  But we are all going to be good sports, ignore my technical difficulties, and move on with the interview.  LOL.

It's good to hear from you.  It's been a while.  What have you been doing to keep yourself busy?

I've been busy promoting my fifth Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, novel, Virtual Virgin, which has gotten great reviews from Publishers Weekly and RT Book Reviews. It's set in Delilah's very original and dark "Las Vegas from Hell," but the climax occurs in the desert outside Juarez, where Delilah and her partner, Ric take down a demon drug lord and his zombies on speed.

Then I've been ramping up my own imprint, Wishlist Publishing, to get out my first indie-produced e-book, an original short novel, A Wall Street Christmas Carol, now on Kindle and Nook.

I plan to e-book publish many novellas and short stories my readers probably don't know about, which are related to my three major series, the Midnight Louie feline PI mysteries, the Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, paranormal urban fantasies and the Irene Adler Victorian Sherlockian suspense series.

So I'm also getting out an earlier Scrooge take-off, Scrogged: A Cyber Christmas Carol, set around the Enron corporate scandal of a decade ago. And an Irene Adler tale, The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes. With the new Sherlock Holmes movie coming out this month, that would be a good tie-in.

 I'm really excited about A Wall Street Christmas Carol. That subject is so topical now. The book has the feel of the Frank Capra movies where "the people" triumphed over heartless big business and Congress--Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and that other Christmas classic, It's a Wonderful Life.

Obviously, the Occupy Wall Street movement touched a nerve, no matter how it turns out. A Wall Street Christmas Carol tells how Caleb Gould, Wall Street billionaire, is confronted with a trio of unusual ghosts to help him find his soul . . . and help other people. Unlike in Charles Dickens' Christmas classic, this "Scrooge" is

a monster of greed, not a miser. It's wicked fun to watch him get his comeuppance, and to discover where that avarice came from.

 What releases do you have coming out in 2012?

Coming up is the usual Midnight Louie mystery double-header. His 2011 hardcover, Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta, goes to paper in 2012, and his 2012 hardcover, with smashing cover art, arrives in early August. It's called Cat in a White Tie and Tails.

The Midnight Louie series is alphabetically titled, so it's heading closer to the "Z" book. Readers are anxious to learn the romantic fates of the four leading human characters, PR freelance Temple Barr and her former and current boyfriends, magician Max Kinsella and the ex-priest now a media rising star, Matt Devine. There's also the fate of Las Vegas homicide lieutenant Carmen Molina to worry about, as well as Louie and his many four-legged "legmen" and cohorts.

Readers are also anxious about Midnight Louie disappearing with the Z book. I doubt a twenty-pound black alley cat-detective is leaving his famed, and often dangerous, life as a literary lion just because the alphabet ends with a Z. I do expect some closure for the human characters, though.

 

You have a fairly significant backlist? How many books have you written? Can you give us the titles?

When I was guest of honor at Malice Domestic 23 mystery convention last spring, they asked for my bibliography. I answered, you want just the mystery-suspense novels, of course.

No, they said, short fiction too. Okay, I answered, just the mystery novels and short stories.

No, everything, they replied. Everything? I had to update my listing, which was a good thing to have on hand anyway.

When I sent it in, the reply was: "When do you sleep?"

I've written almost sixty novels and forty pieces of shorter fiction. Most of my current readers don't know about my out-of-print earlier work. I wrote five books for the Loveswept contemporary romance line, including the Midnight Louie Quartet that introduced him as a mystery star. There are three unusual historical romances, a mainstream Gothic, Amberleigh, Fair Wind, Fiery Star (a female swashbuckler) and Lady Rogue.

The five-book Irissa/Kendric series and two Taliswoman novels are both high fantasy series. High fantasy is set in totally imagined worlds. I also have four mainstream women's fiction novels.

And . . . there are eight novels in the Irene Adler series, which is now on its second hiatus: Good Night, Mr. Holmes was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won American Mystery and Romantic Times awards. In sequence after that come The Adventuress, A Soul of Steel , Another Scandal in Bohemia, Chapel Noir, Castle Rouge, Femme Fatale and Spider Dance.

If you had to be “stuck in an elevator” with one of your characters for several hours, who would it be and what would you talk about?

That's a really good question. That's pretty much is what writing is, except the elevator is in your head. I think I'd most enjoy being sequestered with Sherlock Holmes and interrogating him to find out what Doyle really was thinking when he gave him the characteristics he did, including his distaste for women . . . except for Irene Adler, of course.

If you could change one of your characters, which one would it be and why?

Once you "build" your characters and set them in motion, they are pretty much their own persons and do surprise you. That's why I wouldn't change a one of them! I can't. It's amazing how you can drop a series for some time, yet always immediately get in the milieu if you write a short story about those characters and that time and place.

 

Do you listen to music as you write? If so, which artists? What is your playlist?

Everybody has a playlist these days, but I started writing in a busy news room, with typewriters clamoring away and my near neighbors interviewing people on the phone, and photographers and reporters swarming in and out. I learned to drown out ambient noise, so music would be wasted on me.

Also, my favorite songwriters are also poets, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, so you

have to concentrate on what they're saying/singing. I love Celtic music and songs, some Swing, and Jimmy Buffet and the Beach Boys for driving music.

I understand you do a lot of crafting to unwind. Any favorites?

Actually, Cie, no, but I'd like to. I don't have time to craft anything, and not much for unwinding. I collected vintage clothes and accessories for fifteen years before I quit my reporting job to write full time, so I picked up many gorgeous fragments of vintage velvet and beadwork I intended to repair. I started on a few items, but the writing and publishing processes soaked up all the spare minutes.

The business of writing is changing rapidly. Do you find the change scary? Invigorating? How (if at all) have you changed your career plans/path as a result?

The radical replacement of print media with digital forms has been a scary process. As an ex-reporter, I couldn't believe it when many newspapers 100 years old or more faded from physical existence, or existence at all.

Midnight Louie's newsletter is called the Scratching-Post Intelligencer, after the Seattle Post- Intelligencer. It's gone, but Louie's little newsletter is still here. Shocking!

Many people I worked with not only lost jobs, they lost another place to go, a profession that was hiring. I've heard heartbreaking stories. People with training who've learned ethics and wisdom from wielding the power of the word in any form have lost jobs and influence.

The same thing with fiction writing. It's all out there, much of it not coming through traditional editing channels. That's a great freedom, but it also results in a lack of quality and responsibility.

That said, with the breakdown of print media has come a greater freedom for professionals who felt hampered by institutions and systems. Now people can publish themselves, and perhaps find a fan base.

So I think the end result is positive, even though the culture seems more chaotic.

What is one key bit of advice you would give to a prospective writer?

You must read a lot, oddly enough, to find your own voice. What you love, and hate, when you read can provide the drive you need to begin to write, and, more importantly, to keep at it.

 

 

 

THANKS SO MUCH FOR COMING BY!  Guys, to encourage comments I'm going to offer up a prize, random drawing of the names of all commentors for an ARC of The Isis Collar.

 

Again, big thanks to Carole for her time.