SQUEEE, as they say

I can finally announce this. OK, I could have announced it earlier, but I’m superstitious about not telling people about things until they’re all set up. On Monday I received the counter-signed contract from Kensington for a new three-book series!!! I’m VERY excited about this.

It will kind of replace the Fat Cat series that got dropped by Berkley Prime Crime when they mostly got out of the cozy mystery business last year. I had worked on this proposal off and on, but put it away when I got the Fat Cat series. That lasted for three books and gained me national best-seller status and a whole bunch of cozy/cat fans. I’m hoping for carry over to the new series.

My agent, Kim Lionetti at BookEnds, liked my idea of setting it in Fredericksburg TX. It’s a cute German tourist town in the Hill Country. It has lots of wineries in the countryside around there, very cute shops that draw shoppers, diners, and just plain tourists. There’s also an intriguing natural formation outside town, Enchanted Rock, which I intend to make use of.

Here’s a little personal story about the town. One Thanksgiving, it happened that all of our kids were due to spend the holiday at the inlaws’ places. Hubby and I were on our own! We decided to make a break for it and head out to do something we had been thinking of—a wine tour. We booked a B&B, drove from Dallas (where we lived at the time) stopping at wineries along the way. We had Thanksgiving dinner at a wonderful German restaurant and I did a bunch of Christmas shopping. I fell in love with the place and am so happy to be writing about it.

I had proposed a cupcake/candy shop set there, but Kim and Jessica Faust felt there were enough cupcake cozies either out or coming out, so they suggest Vintage Candy. Meanwhile, we moved to Austin and I dropped in on an actual vintage candy shop to acquaint myself with the stuff. It was wonderful—Clark Bars, Zero candy bars, all kinds of things I hadn’t had in years.

So I morphed the project into a vintage sweets themed series, rewrote the proposal, and Kim sent it out.

The upshot is that REVENGE IS SWEET will be the first book. I’m about 1/3 done with it, so I have a lot of work left to do.

One more thing—I’m going to give my main character, Tally Holt, a Maine coon. I hope all the cozy/cat lovers will like the new series. I’m having great fun writing it!

Maine coon photo from morguefile by katmystiry

A Special Anniversary

(First a little boost for a review I received yesterday: http://www.examiner.com/article/kaye-george-orchestrates-a-great-mystery-eine-kleine-murder)

Now, onto my topic~~

Last week was the anniversary of a day when my efforts of ten-plus years paid off. On Monday, the 14th of May, 2012, I talked to Kim Lionetti on the phone for nearly two hours. At the end of the conversation, I had agreed for her to be my agent!

In the year since then, a lot has happened. She set me to work on a project that she and her partner, Jessica Faust, had come up with. I hadn’t even finished it, though, when a chance for a work for hire cozy came to her from Berkley Prime Crime. It was a mystery set in Minneapolis, featuring an overweight cat name Quincy, and his mistress, Chase Oliver, the co-owner of a dessert bar shop. (A work for hire is written to the publisher’s idea, and the publisher will own the copyrights--but I’ll get paid normal royalties, etc.)

This was right up my alley for a couple of reasons. (1) I am a long-time cat owner and my most recent cat, Agamemnon, was a clever rascal, also slightly overweight. I would model the cat after him, although I’d change his coloring. I thought an orange tabby would look better on the cover than a black shorthair with extra long fangs. My cat had been a rescued feral and I swear he was reverting to saber-tooth tiger. You could see his fangs when his mouth was closed! He could be very sweet, but was exasperatingly smart. On several occasions, I saw him climb onto something next to a closed door and attempt to turn the knob. If he’d had a thumb, he could have done it.

(2) I once lived in the Minneapolis area for a little over 3 years. I’ll admit, it is my favorite place I’ve ever lived, and I’ve lived in a lot of places. My puzzlement was--how to set a cozy in the place where the darkest noir crime novels take place. Should I put it in Minnetonka, where we used to live? Hopkins, the next-door suburb, a bit closer to the Twin Cities themselves? My husband came up with a place he remembered from our stay there: Dinktytown. The name was perfect, but would it do?

I googled it extensively, a cute little area of just a few square blocks on the edge of the U of M campus, nestled between the campus and the Mississippi River. It’s on the east side of the river, where St. Paul lies, but this portion is technically Minneapolis--I checked. I got in contact with the president of the Dinktytown Business Association and he was supportive and kind, even sent me an excellent map of the area done cartoon style, highlighting the local businesses.

The upshot of all this is that I got a workable outline put together, wrote the first three chapters, and sent them off. I was in shock after I landed my awesome agent, but even more shocked when my proposal was accepted!

I got to meet Kim at Malice Domestic this year and she’s just as awesome in person as by email and phone. I can’t believe what a whirlwind this last year has been. (Plus we moved twice--yikes!)

This news has all been announced previously, but, for this anniversary, I thought I’d give some details on the background. I’m now about 3/4 (or maybe a little more) finished with the first draft of the as-yet-untitled first in the three-book FAT CAT series. It’s going well and I love the characters, especially that rascal, Quincy! (Look for the book sometime around the fall of 2014.)

Photo from Dreamstime

Upsy Daisy Day

I was surprised and delighted to learn that June 8th is Upsy Daisy Day. I know this is only the 6th, but I blog on Wednesdays, so I'll have to celebrate it early.

According to this page, Upsy Daisy Day encourages you to face the day positively, and to get up ‘gloriously, gratefully and gleefully’ each morning. 

Daisies are my favorite flower. I carried them in my wedding and try to grow them every place I live. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. I had some good ones going before our drought last year. We're moving next week, so I won't plant any more this summer, but maybe next year.

When I first saw the words, Upsy Daisy Day, I thought it meant a day to turn things upside down. My life is doing that, since we're moving!

My writing career is also turning upside down, or inside out, or something. I'll reprint part of the blog I did for All Things Writing on Monday, since I want to say the same thing here. It's a long tale, but there's a good payoff at the end.

  

Over the years, I've queried hundreds (yes, hundreds) of agents. Here are my Querytracker.com stats. 212 for one project--15 interested agents, 2 positive responses, but no offers. 55 for another project, 3 interested agents, no ultimate positive responses. 63 queries, 3 showed interest, but in the end no positive responses. That's a partial list because I was querying for a few years before I started keeping track on Query Tracker. I made a decision not to keep querying agents not long ago.

I had much better luck with small press. One of the first two I queried took CHOKE last year. However, we parted company in May and I am self-publishing the rest of that series.

Even though I say I had quit querying agents, there has always been one agency I'm interested in. That one is BookEnds. I've sent them proposals several times because of their excellent track records with cozies. I also know some authors who employ them and are happy there.

So, earlier this year, my good friend Peg Cochran/Meg London, who is writing two series for BookEnds and Berkley Prime Crime, alerted me to a new idea being put out by a Berkley editor, an idea for a series set in Texas, where I live. She encouraged me to turn in a proposal for it. I've done more than one proposal for BookEnds in the past, and they've liked some, but have never taken me on. A proposal is three chapters of a mystery, the synopsis for the rest, and sketches for two more books. These take me about a month.

I told Peg I just don't have an extra month right now. We're moving from the Austin area to the Waco area in the 13th of June, as I've mentioned, and I'm also finalizing my second Imogene Duckworthy novel, SMOKE, to publish right after our move. (And yes, I'm also going crazy.)

Peg suggested I submit my novel, CHOKE, instead of a proposal. This didn't seem right, since it's not the same type mystery, a cozy, but the worst that would happen would be another turn down from BookEnds. (Their turn downs are polite, so it's not so bad.)

I submitted the novel, went to Malice, met the editor with the Texas proposal idea, and came home. Soon after Malice, I got an email from Jessica Faust, the agent I had sent the file to. She liked it! But didn't need more clients, and besides the Texas idea had been taken by someone else. BUT, she would forward my file to her partner Kim Lionetti. Two days later (2 days!), on a Friday, Kim emailed with positive comments, asking if I was available for a phone call on Monday! I had to postpone my husband's cancer treatment and the baby's open heart surgery (just kidding!), but I was there for the phone call.

All of my hyper-ventilating over the weekend was for nothing! We talked and even laughed, even though Kim had a bad cold, we sent some emails back and forth and worked out details, and last Friday, Kim emailed a contract! I signed it and mailed it back Saturday morning. I think it's official. After I had virtually stopped looking for an agent, and had gone whole-hog into self-publishing, I got an agent. I'll keep on with the Duckworthy series, but Kim will agent my Neanderthal series and the new series I'll write for her.

This is my Upsy Daisy tale! I like it so far.