Please tell us a little about yourself and Blood Will Tell.



Loving to read often leads to loving to write and I love murder mysteries. Shortly after retiring from the Wilmington, North Carolina, StarNews as the publisher’s assistant, I took a writing class where an assignment to write a scene with two or more characters in conflict became the genesis for my debut novel, Blood Will Tell. I set it in the early 70s as that was the decade I experienced after college graduation. The Vietnam war, the Equal Rights Amendment, desegregation of public schools—these were the burning issues of that day. My book became a love letter to newspapers, my main character a recent graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism. This is my first novel and it took a mere eight years to write.

What was your editing process like?



It seemed as if it would go on forever, to the point I gave up numbering my drafts. My late brother, for an engineer, was a decent writer himself, and became my first reader. It was important to have an honest first reader before I hired a professional editor. Michael stressed the importance of fine details to make a reader care about my characters. I then hired my writing class teacher, Vicki Lane, to do a line-by-line edit. She pointed out that my overuse of exclamation marks was “like wearing underpants on your head.” When I hired Palmetto Publishing, I paid for a copy edit as well as a line-by-line edit and they were crucial to making it a better book.

How did you develop your characters?



I knew who my main character would be and that there needed to be a newsroom love interest. From there I populated the Coastal Herald with an amalgam of characters from the real StarNews; gruff editors, sports and investigative reporters, all led by a publisher who cared deeply about the role newspapers have in a community. I had a lot of fun creating a hippie mother for one of my characters. From my brother’s great advice, I went back and developed back stories for important characters so that their behavior was believable and compelling.

How did you create/acquire the cover art?



I knew I needed an eye-catching cover. Since “blood” is in the title, that was a start. The dark family secret that is revealed involves a child’s uncertain heritage. I told my publisher that I envisioned a swaddled baby in a pool of blood, which, in hindsight, sounds extreme. The winning cover thrilled me—the book looks like it’s dripping in blood and the title forms a niche for the swaddled child. One reader politely told me she found it “disturbing.” I was secretly pleased.

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.