You've the Right to Six Words: Week 7
Welcome back to the six-word memoirs from crime fiction's greats! We have another impressive group of writers sharing their six-word summations with us today. For those who might be stumbling across this series for the first time today, this was a project that kind of emerged from SMITH's Not Quite What I Expecting: Six-Word Memoirs of Writers Famous and Obscure. I read their book and found it quite amusing but the writers in it weren't really the folks I was interested in hearing from. So, I started asking the authors I interviewed here on the blog. And when readers enjoyed that question in all the interviews, I decided to ask more authors and make a series of just six-word memoirs. It took off and now I'm just trying to hang on.
Leading off for us today is another winner of the St. Martin's Press/PWA Best First Private Eye Novel contest. (For the record, we've now had memoirs from five of those winners - and who knows, maybe there will be more.) Michael Wiley's novel THE LAST STRIPTEASE won him that Best First Private Eye Novel award as well as a 2008 Shamus nomination. Earlier this year he released his second novel featuring Chicago Detective Joe Kozmarski, THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE. And he's working on a third. Even though Michael grew up in Chicago and his series is set in Chicago, he calls Florida home these days, where he teaches literature at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. When he's not teaching or writing, you can catch him at the 7 Criminal
Minds blog. I also hear tell he's pretty handy at building things. Well, he did a good job of building his memoir (with a little help from his wife):
Leading off for us today is another winner of the St. Martin's Press/PWA Best First Private Eye Novel contest. (For the record, we've now had memoirs from five of those winners - and who knows, maybe there will be more.) Michael Wiley's novel THE LAST STRIPTEASE won him that Best First Private Eye Novel award as well as a 2008 Shamus nomination. Earlier this year he released his second novel featuring Chicago Detective Joe Kozmarski, THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE. And he's working on a third. Even though Michael grew up in Chicago and his series is set in Chicago, he calls Florida home these days, where he teaches literature at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. When he's not teaching or writing, you can catch him at the 7 Criminal
Minds blog. I also hear tell he's pretty handy at building things. Well, he did a good job of building his memoir (with a little help from his wife):Four eyes. Three kids. Two jobs.
Next up for Week 7 is an award-winning woman of mystery. Carolyn Hart has to have a very long mantel or a large display case for all her awards. She started her writing career on her grade school newspaper. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma, she worked as a journalist for The Oklahoma Daily and The Norman Transcript. In 1964 she began writing young adult mysteries. It wasn't until 1987 that she began writing her first adult mystery series, Death on Demand. April brought the 20th novel in this series, LAUGHED 'TIL HE DIED. Carolyn also publishes the Henrie O series and the Bailey Ruth Raeburn series. And if all that wasn't enough, she has 20 publications that don't fit into any of those series. That's a heck of a lot of writin'! One of those stand alone novels, LETTER FROM HOME, earned Carolyn a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination, coming from the
Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University - Tulsa. So how does this prolific woman wheedle it down to six words?She sure did! Many thanks, Carolyn!I came, I saw, I wrote.
And finally we have Tim Maleeny joining us today. Tim came to writing in a little more of a round-about way than our other two memoirists. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Computer Science and then went to Columbia Business School. This combination somehow added up to a career in advertising. When the confines of the business office started stifling Tim, he began to entertain daydreams of murder and mayhem. (I think I can understand that, Tim!) Instead of turning those daydreams into actions, Tim turned them into critically acclaimed books. Tim pens the Cape Weathers Investigations series, but his most
recent novel is a standalone entitled JUMP. Tim called San Francisco home for many years but has recently made his way back to the East Coast and is calling New York home these days. Whether he's using them in advertising or in murder, Tim isMany thanks to all of our authors this week for their creative worth smithing. It's always such a joy to share these fun slices of creativity with you all. And this is going to wrap up June for us. Someone slow down the summer. I had to wait too long for it!Never at a loss for words.
Happy Reading!
Technorati Tags: You've the Right to Six Words, Tim Maleeny, Michael Wiley, Carolyn Hart
2 comments:
These were some fun ones.
I have to send this to some writer friends of mine who still don't know or believe that, as my dad said, "brevity is the soul of wit."
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