Wild Women Authors features author Susan McCormick as she celebrates the release of The Fog Ladies: Date With Death, book 4 in the San Francisco Murder Mystery series. With Susan is Enid Carmichael who will go first.
Welcome,
Enid. Thank you for joining us today. Let’s start with you telling us a bit
about The Fog Ladies: Date with Death. We Fog Ladies, five ladies of some years and young Sarah, the doctor-in-training
who is a fraction of my age, are back. I’ll just say, if you don’t know us
already, that we are called the Fog Ladies because we can count on each other
like you can count on early morning San Francisco fog burning off by midday. Our
latest caper you can easily read as a standalone if you don’t care about our
pasts. This time, Olivia Honeycut joined a senior dating service, met a man,
and promptly stumbled on a body one of her fellow romantics had pitched over a
cliff. I think the killer is her new honey. The man is too smooth. He’s lying
about his past, and I intend to find out why.
What
made you choose your current profession? If
this isn’t a loaded question, I don’t know what is. I don’t have a “profession”
or a “career.” I am eighty-one years old. I worked behind the cosmetics counter
in a high-end department store in San Francisco for about a year in my early days
until they fired me for being too heavy handed with the makeup. But that was not
a profession, a career. My calling, I guess, is being an old lady. I love it. I
love the way I can disappear, even though I’m over six feet tall in my heels. I
love the way I can say what I want, filtered or not. I love the way people
assume I can’t hear them, or that I wouldn’t understand if I could. Most of
all, I love my fellow Fog Ladies.
Knowing
what you know now, if you had it to do over again, would you stick with being an
old lady or do something different? Sorry,
bub, it’s inevitable. We all grow old. Best accept it.
What
is your biggest fear? Got none. When you
get to be my age, what’s left to fear?
Who
is your favorite fictional character and why? She’s not fictional, but I choose Julia Child. I don’t
cook, but I admire a tall, strong-willed, reddish-haired woman, being tall
myself, definitely strong-willed, and having red hair, though mine might be a
different color every month since mine comes from a bottle.
What
is the best piece of advice you ever received? My own. I just made it up today. Position yourself
near the cookies. You never know how long some of these conversations will go
on.
Thank
you for sharing your wisdom, Enid. Now we’d like to chat with Susan.
Which writer or
character[s], from either books or movies, have had a major impact on your
writing?
I love Alexander McCall Smith, with
his gentle No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. The mild-mannered mysteries,
the life lessons, the poignancy—though there are twenty-four books and counting,
there are not enough.
With regard to research,
where did you start for this novel? Did that lead you down different paths,
thereby changing the original concept? Because
I am a doctor, I try to stick to murder weapons I know and understand. So research
doesn’t lead me astray, but often the characters themselves will. I have an
outline, but characters have minds of their own. Enid Carmichael, for instance,
in the first book became addicted to Starbucks lattes. I planned that. Then she
started to steal her neighbors’ newspapers for the free latte coupons. She did that,
not me.
Tell us a bit about your
publisher. How did you hear about them; what influenced you to submit to them;
how is the submission process; what is the turn-around time from date of query
to date of release? I am on my fourth
book with The Wild Rose Press. I met my editor at the Pacific Northwest Writers
Association writer conference. I pitched to her, sent my manuscript, signed a
contract about three months later, and the book came out within a year.
What are you reading right
now? I love Liane Moriarty, Anthony
Horowitz, Richard Osman, and Alexander McCall Smith, and will read all their
latest. The current book I’m reading is City of the Lost Monkey God, a
complete departure from mysteries, but very suspenseful nonetheless.
What's next for you? I am always working on the next Fog Ladies book, the
new one to feature a Fog Ladies vacation. In addition, I am finishing revisions
on a suspense novel about an estranged alcoholic mother and her surgeon son who
must team up to save his career, his patients, and their lives.
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To purchase The Fog Ladies: Date With Death, go to:
https://www.amazon.com/Fog-Ladies-Francisco-Murder-Mystery/dp/1509249818
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fog-ladies-susan-mccormick/1143832976
https://bookshop.org/a/22704/9781509249817
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