MEET THE AUTHOR: LINDA HALL

I’m happy to introduce you to a fellow mystery writer today, Linda Hall.

 

 

 

Linda spent the early years of her writing career as a journalist and freelance writer. She also worked in the field of adult literacy and wrote curriculum materials for adults reading at basic reading levels.

Then, in 1990 she decided to do something she’d always dreamed of doing, she began working on her first novel. The book she wrote, The Josiah Files was published in 1992.

Since that time she’s written eighteen more mystery and suspense novels.

Most of her novels have something to do with the sea. She grew up in New Jersey and her love of the ocean was born there. When she was a little girl Linda remembers sitting on the shore and watching the waves and contemplating what was beyond. She could do that for hours.

Linda has roots in two countries. In 1971, she married a Canadian who loves the water just as much as she does. They moved to Canada and have lived here ever since. One of the things they enjoy is sailing. In the summer they basically move aboard their 34′ sailboat aptly named Mystery.

Linda and her husband, Rik, have achieved the rank of Senior Navigator, the highest rank possible in CPS, the Canadian Power Squadron. Her Senior Navigator diploma hangs proudly on her office wall.

Social Media sites:

Website:

writerhall.com

Facebook:

Facebook.com/writerhall

Twitter:

@writerhall

Pinterest:

http://www.pinterest.com/lcrhall

Linkedin:

linkedin.com/in/writerhall

Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/goodreadscomwriterhall

Newsletter sign up: 

writerhall.com/newsletter

I asked Linda some nosy  curious questions about her writing process. This is what she said:

What do you write?

Currently I am writing mysteries and thrillers. The dark stuff has always appealed to me, and has always been my favorite reading material. In the past I have written for the Christian inspirational suspense market (how’s that for a mouthful?), and the romantic suspense market. Currently I’m writing mystery and I guess you could call it “mystery with romantic elements.”

My newest series character is a recently widowed young female boat delivery captain named Em (short for Emmeline) Ridge. What she typically does is take rich people’s yachts from Point A to Point. And of course, in her case, mystery and mayhem always follow. I have long wanted to write her stories. I have long wanted to get her stories down on paper, and I am so pleased to present Night Watch, the first in the #emridgemysteries.

Also, this week, Night Watch is on sale for a whopping .99 on all platforms. You can barely buy a cup of coffee for that price let alone a whole brand new novel. After Feb. 10, the price goes back up to $4.99, which is still pretty cheap, considering.

Are you published?

Yes. I have published 18 mysteries and romantic suspense with traditional publishers such as Random House and Harlequin. Now, however, I am on my own as an Indie author and loving the control and autonomy it brings.

When did you realise you wanted to be a writer?

I think I always knew I would someday be a writer. When I was a little girl I had a long walk home from school each day. (Those were the days when parents didn’t get arrested for letting their kids walk home from school!) If I didn’t have friends with me, I would walk and walk and make up stories in my head. They usually involved me being the hero and saving my school from some imminent disaster! When I got home I would go to my room and start writing the story down. But as we writers know, coming up with a story and actually writing it down are two very different animals. It’s easy to think up story plots. The hard work is turning said story plot into a novel. So, by the time I got to “Chapter 2” in my notebook, I would lose interest.

I was a journalist in my younger years. I also wrote curriculum for adult literacy programs and did PR work. I always had jobs where writing was the focus. It was just natural for me to end up writing novels.

Do your characters talk to you?

Sometimes they do and sometimes I talk to them. Sometimes I am known to walk around the house and say, “Okay Em, how are you going to get out of this one? Sometimes she even gives me answers, which of course, end up in the book.

How do you approach starting a new book?

With great fear and trembling! No really. I’m basically a ‘pantzer’ which means I have no clear idea where I am or where the story is going at any given moment. Every time I set about to write a new book, It’s like I’ve never done it before! I have to tell myself to calm down, one step at a time, it’s like eating an elephant. (or whatever that analogy is.) That said, I have recently begun using Scrivener and love it. Formerly I had loose scraps of paper all over my desk with ideas and plot points jotted down, plus a document set up in Word which I was continually scrolling backwards and forwards to see where I was.

Scrivener allows me to set up outline of scenes. I love it. Right now I’m working through Book #2 in the Em Ridge mysteries. I wrote the rough draft during NanoWriMo this past November. I’m hoping, fingers crossed, and planets aligned, to have it out for sale in June.

What are the best writing books or blogs you’ve ever read?

Right now I’m reading a lot of blogs specifically for self-publishing and marketing since this is all new to me. Some of the blogs I read on a sort of regular basis are the blogs of Hugh Howey, Dean Wesley Smith, Joanna Pen and Jane Friedman.

One of the best writing books I’ve ever read – and one I recommend at every writer’s conference I speak at is Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Brown and Dave King. A wonderful, wonderful book on the craft of writing. Read it.

What are your non-writing hobbies, or what do you do to relax?

I enjoy reading. I always have. Most authors do, I imagine, since reading is one of the prerequisites of writing! Another hobby of mine is music and singing. I sing in two city choirs and once a week or so, I take my guitar and off I go to sing in a nursing home.

If you could have a superpower what would it be? Why?

The super powers I would like to have might be considered odd by most standards of super powers. For a long time I thought it would be neat to own a pair of glasses which magnified absolutely everything in the world. I would think about this a lot. What would I see? When would I put these glasses on and when would I take them off?

Finally, and because I’m an author, I ended up writing a short novella about this very thing. It’s called “A Small Season of Magic” and it is currently in my collection of short mystery stories called Strange Faces which is up for sale on Amazon.

There are a couple of other super powers I would like to have. These, too, will probably end up in short stories when I get the chance to actually sit down and write them.

1. I would like to have the ability to change signs.

I know that might sound quite odd, but sometimes I get these strange thoughts as I’m driving along. Like, what if you changed the Stop signs to say Sing instead of Stop. Or what if you could change the word Convenience Store to Inconvenience Store. You get the idea.

2. I would also like the ability to stop the world for a moment or two, and then wander around and do things while everything was stopped and all the people were standing around like statues. I think that would be great fun, don’t you?

Amazon link for STRANGE FACES:

 

 

Fancy restaurant or picnic?

Either – depending on my mood or if I feel like getting dressed up or not.

Beer or wine?

Beer in the summer and wine in the winter.

 

 

 

 

Night Watch  – excerpt:

I was in the middle of a Jesse dream when Kricket disappeared. It was the best Jesse dream I’d had in a long time, and I wanted to stay in that place forever.

We were sailing. We always sail, the two of us, in Jesse dreams. We were out in the middle of the bay on my old wooden cat boat, the one I had before I knew Jesse, before he was such a part of my life. I’d sold that boat years ago to someone who trailered it to Lake Ontario. But dreams are like that, full of curiosities and strange chronologies, yet somehow making full sense at the time.

The wind was a steady ten knots, the sun warm on our necks. We moved effortlessly across the top of the waves as if through silk. I leaned back, held the tiller with both hands and pressed my sandaled feet down onto the leeward side. The creaking of the pintles, the whoosh of the water beneath us, and the wind filling the sail were the only sounds. We didn’t talk. We don’t talk in Jesse dreams.

Down, almost at water level, Jesse was winching the sail in tighter, tighter, one foot outstretched and braced against the bulkhead. I looked with longing at the curve of that bare ankle in the beat up boat shoes. I wanted to reach out, to trace my fingers along its bone, cradle it against my cheek. It had been so long. Too long. Almost two years gone, yet, in some ways it will always be yesterday.

I wanted to call out to my husband. I have learned not to in Jesse dreams. If he turned to look at me, would I see the face with the sun-ruddied grin? The mussed hair which always seemed in need of a cut? Or would he stare at me with cold, unseeing eyes, face streaked with blood? Would it even be a stranger’s face which turned to gaze up at me?

Jesse dreams always hold that sharp edge of terror which leave me breathless and gasping when I finally claw my way up toward waking. Yet, despite this, I crave them, hunger for them. I will take the horror—all of it—for one moment more with Jesse.

Em?

He was calling to me? No. He never speaks to me in Jesse dreams. I held my breath, watching the muscles in his forearms as he held the lines tightly, barely moving as the boat made its way out toward ever deeper water. He moved his foot and I saw it, on the bottom of the boat, wrinkled, wet, lying there—a simple postcard of a farm house. An old oil painting. I looked away, but fear rose in my throat like bile.

Em? He was tapping at my foot, touching it. Over and over. Tap. Tap. Louder.

I tried to speak, could not. Again, I looked at the bottom of the boat. The card was gone.

“EM!”

I blinked, opened my eyes wide and in an instant came fully awake in the half-light. I scrambled out of my berth and knocked my glasses to the sole as I did so.

“Wha—What?” I bent down, grabbed for them. No, I wasn’t on a cat boat with my dead husband. I was the delivery captain of Blue Peace, a 52 foot luxury sailboat and we were somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean en route to Bermuda. It was night and I was being shaken awake by a crew member. And when anyone awakens a sleeping captain, it’s important, it’s imperative. No one wakes up a captain unless it’s a Mayday-Right-Now-Batten-Down-The-Hatches-All-Hands-On-Deck-9-1-1-Emergency.

I put on my glasses, tried to focus. Rob Stikles, one of my three crew members was standing in front of me opening and closing his mouth and swallowing, his Adam’s apple bobbing. The boat moved unnaturally in the sea swells and I grasped for a handhold.

“You turned the engine on,” I said.

“Yeah—um.”

“The winds die? If you’re on watch, Rob, you don’t need to wake me up every time you have to turn on the engine. I presume you know how to pull in the sails and turn the engine on—”

“It’s—it’s—not that…”

“What then?” At eye level we were the same height.

“It’s about Kricket.”

I sighed, glared at him. He woke me for Kricket? “What? She forget to take her seasick pills again? Is she puking over the side at—” I glanced at the brass clock affixed to the teak bulkhead, “Two-thirty in the morning?”

I pulled a gray sweatshirt, one of Jesse’s, over the T-shirt and sweats I always wear when I sleep on boats. “Let me go and talk to her,” I said moving determinedly into the main salon. Kricket would be there, I was sure, lying on a settee in a fetal position, clutching at her stomach and demanding that we turn this boat around right now, right now, and take her home.

Behind the nav station, Joan, my chief navigator, was sleeping soundly, only the tiniest scruff of gray hair peeking out from under her thick woolen Hudson Bay blanket. I switched on one of the overhead lights, and the salon glowed eerie red. To maintain our night vision, we only use red LEDs down below after sunset. The light made Rob’s face look ghostly and I thought briefly of tenting trips with my two younger sisters and holding the flashlight under my chin at night and growling at them, and them screaming and holding onto each other until our parents demanded that I not scare them any more.

“Where is she, then?” I made my way toward the stern and to Kricket’s aft stateroom.

Rob followed me. “She’s not sea sick. She’s not—she’s gone.” He wailed this out, face flushy and red. His hands down at his side would not be still. His fingers kept crawling up the sides of his squall jacket like crabs. Joan stirred slightly.

Gone? What did he mean, gone? Gone, as in dead? But, no one dies of being seasick. I pressed my palm into my forehead to wake myself up and get rid of the last remnants of Jesse thoughts. “Rob,” I said quietly now and trying to muster a certain amount of command to my voice. “Where is she? Where is Kricket Patterson?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. Well, not for sure. She’s—” He paused. “She’s not on the boat.” He stopped.

I gaped at him. I’m sure my mouth hung open. What did he mean, she’s not on the boat? I asked him this.

He took a breath and words tumbled out. “It happened like this. I was outside. It was my turn to drive the boat. Kricket comes outside.” He paused, took a breath. He was working hard, I could tell, to get his thoughts under control. “She was feeling sick. She told me sometimes it’s better outside. She was right with me. Sort of leaning against the stern rail. We were talking. Like we do—”

The boat made a sideways lunge as we plunged through a sea swell. I grabbed an overhead handhold. I looked up through the companionway. Was the weather worsening?

He went on. “So, I go to make this little adjustment to the sail and then I look back and she’s not there. She’s just not there. And so then I get to thinking, well maybe she went down below. But I keep thinking, how could she have gotten past without me seeing? But maybe she did. It was so dark. Foggy like. Really weird. Sort of scary. So, just to be on the safe side I hit the little button on the GPS like you showed us—”

“The Crew Overboard Alert.” I nodded. When pressed it would mark the latitude and longitude and an astute sailor could sail back to that spot with ease. I asked, “Did you stop the boat? Are we on our way back to that lat/long?”

He shook his head. “I got sort of mixed up. I got so confused. I’m not used to that kind of GPS, I guess. So I came down here. I can’t find her. I looked everywhere, but, she’s not in her cabin. She’s nowhere. So I go back outside and I walk all over the top of the boat, like maybe she went up there or something, you know how she likes to do that. Sit up there, I mean. But, I can’t find her anywhere, so I came down to get you—”

“Joan! Peter!” I yelled, his words finally sinking in. “Crew Overboard! We need you! We need everyone. Rob! Go up there right now. You can do that, can’t you? Get us going back for the MOB waypoint! If you can’t you’ve no business standing watch. Get the boat pointed in the direction of the MOB. Now!”

He turned and went back up. Too much time had passed with no one at the helm. Even on autopilot a careful eye needed to be kept for stray containers from ships and other floating debris.

I didn’t know Rob well. My other two crew members, Joan Bush, and Peter Mauer, are almost family to me. Joan has always been like my wiser, older aunt, or big sister. She and her husband Art were closer to me than my own family after Jesse died. Peter, cook extraordinaire, is like my hunky little brother. We hadn’t needed a fourth crew member, yet Peter asked to have Rob come along. His friend was trying to build up his sailing résumé and needed more blue water experience.

Yet, less than a week on the water and there had been times I seriously doubted whether Rob had ever been on any kind of boat before. He didn’t even know the terms. Drive the boat? The correct term was taking the helm, and “the little button on the GPS”? Give me a break. Something as simple as tying a bowline or a simple clove hitch had him fumbling all his fingers. There was something else, too, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on no matter how much I thought about it. It was as if I had seen him before. He seemed very familiar, yet not familiar at all.

On top of that he and Peter had barely spoken one civil word between them. Would I please help a friend with his sailing résumé? What was that all about? We’d only been out four days, and it was clear that there was no love lost between those two.

I’d known Peter forever. I first met him when I was back in high school and taught sailing as a summer job. He was the brightest and smartest little kid in my class of ten year olds. I connected with him again when he was a cook on Windjammer cruises where I crewed for two summers. He’d gone to chef school for a year, but then dropped out to work on boats. We’d been close buddies ever since.

Then there was Kricket. She was the owner’s daughter and had come aboard her father’s yacht with great reluctance. I’d been told that her father ruled his family like he ruled his corporations and felt his wild daughter needed a bit of an “outward bound” experience.

“And put her to work,” Roy Patterson had told me on the phone. “I’m going to be asking you if she pulled her weight.”

That little part of the equation had proved difficult, if not impossible.

“What’s going on?” Joan ran her fingers through her hair. A few strands of it were sticking up at the back. None of us looked our best this time in the morning.

“Kricket’s missing,” I said quickly. “We think she went overboard.”

“What! How?” Joan’s sat up straight, eyes wide. “Was she wearing her PFD?” She got up and quickly pulled a long sleeved shirt over her slim frame. I frowned when I thought of anyone being overboard in this black and cold and vast ocean. We had not yet reached the Gulf Stream where the water suddenly warmed. If Kricket had gone into the frigid Gulf of Maine water, it would be unlikely she would survive, Personal Flotation Device notwithstanding.

Great excerpt, I love your cover! It was great getting to know you Linda. Your answer to the superpower question was inspiring, 🙂 How about you, have you ever wanted a super power? What kind? Share your thoughts, or ask Linda any questions you’d like.