Join us on October 31 at 2:00 p.m. ET on Zoom for the big bash Halloween launch of A Grave Diagnosis, 35 stories of murder and malaise!
Meet the authors and hear about their inspirations and journeys. Email me at carrickpublishing @ rogers . com for your personal Zoom invitation!
How We Spent the 2020 Lockdown: featuring 35 fantastic authors:
Join author Rosemary McCracken and moderator Madeleine Harris-Callway for the October 3 Zoom launch party of Uncharted Waters, the 4th Pat Tierney mystery by Rosemary McCracken.
In this Episode:
* Donna interviews #DeadlyFriend author Steven M. Moore (The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy, Carrick Publishing 2018)
* Tips for authors courtesy of Steve and Donna
* #ReadersOnTheRun short story feature: “The Case of the Carriageless Horse”, by Steven M. Moore, World Enough and Crime (Carrick Publishing, 2016)
Are you a published author? Would you like to be featured on our podcast? Email Donna at carrickpublishing@rogers.com – subject line: Schedule an Interview on Dead to Writes.
All music featured on Dead to Writes is brought to you courtesy of songwriter, composer and performer Ted Carrick. Keep up with all of his new music at his YouTube Channel
Find us on Facebook: Dead to Writes, or on Twitter: @DeadToWritesPod . You can also visit our site: www.deadtowrites.ca or look for donnacarrick.com or carrickpublishing.com .
There’s nothing like the glow of a cold winter moon to rev up the imagination of a writer.
It resurrects the memory of Au Claire de la Lune.
(At least this is the way we children learned the folk song of unknown origin, though Wikipedia offers a more adult version of the lyric.)
“Good Pierre, I beg you,
In the moonlight bright,
Your quill pen to lend me,
For I long to write.“Burnt out is my candle,
And my fire’s out too.
Good Pierre, I beg you,
Let me in, pray do.”
Since I was a child, these words and their haunting melody have claimed a room in my soul.
I’ve been inhabited by the image of the haggard writer — no candle, no fire, seeking warmth and light by which to continue his mission.
I suppose this accounts for my life-long fascination with lunar rhythms.
She is my silver muse, my inkwell, my inspiration.
It’s been too long since this writer snuffed out candle to bask in the dream-weaving radiance of a lunar swell.
I wonder what strange characters and nefarious deeds might be conjured up ‘neath her sublime countenance.
In June, I had the very great honour of being named one of five finalists for the prestigious Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story.
The title that received this nomination was Watermelon Weekend, from our Crime anthology THIRTEEN, by the Mesdames of Mayhem.
I’m proud of this story. It was written with an understanding of how families work, and how their fragile dynamics may or may not be destroyed by encounters of the criminal kind.
But then, the truth is that I feel this way about all of my stories.
Maybe it’s my genre, which allows me to go beyond the nuts and bolts of “whodunit” and delve into the humanity of crime, or maybe it’s the stories themselves, concerned as they are with suffering and survival.
For whatever reason, my novels and short stories have touched readers, and for this I am eternally grateful.
There can be no greater joy for an author.
Don’t miss your chance to download this Kindle Novel — Free today only!
It isn’t easy to engage in a real dialogue about ‘depression’.
First, there’s the stigma that attaches itself to mental illness.
Assumptions are often made about those who suffer chronic depression. Sometimes those assumptions are founded in reality. Often they are not.
Long ago, in the checkered landscape of my own past, I learned that problems tend to grow in the darkness of ignorance.
Open discussion, honesty and dialogue… these are the tools available to us in learning to live well with mental illness.
In my books, The Noon God and The First Excellence, I explore the harshest effects of long-term depression, most notably suicide. In The Noon God, my protagonist Desdemona Fortune experiences ‘survivor’s guilt’ after not one, but two, close family members end their own lives.
In The First Excellence, the story opens with Min-xi, the soon-to-be mother of a second born daughter, who finds herself under tremendous pressure to kill her daughters in hopes of later conceiving a son. Unable to hurt her daughters, she instead abandons them in a popular tourist area, knowing they will be found and hoping they will make their way to a better life. After leaving them on a park bench, she takes her own life.
I have an intimate understanding of the kind of depression that can lead to such a tragic outcome.
Like Desdemona, I am a survivor of ‘sibling suicide’. A long time ago — a lifetime ago, it often seems — I lost my older sister, Debbie. As a teen suffering from an intense and long-term state of depression, one dark night she chose to throw herself through the window of a 12-storey apartment.
I’d like to pretend that I don’t understand. Sadly, I do.
I am also a survivor of chronic depression, and like many such survivors, I remain alert to the triggers that can bring about a spiral into darkness.
There is one thing that seems to help stave off the ravages of depression, in my experience. That ‘one thing’ is honesty.
When I pretend everything is ‘OK’, that’s when I’m in danger.
On the other hand, when I accept that this illness is part of who I am, and when I am honest with myself and others, then I can find a way to not only survive, but to live well, to enjoy this gift I’ve been given.
Depression hurts.
If my words can help even one other person to cope, and more, to live well beyond the scope of that pain, then I will feel this dialogue has been worth the effort.
So come on, world, let’s get together on January 28 and remove the stigma!
Join me in Tweeting and Texting to support @Bell_LetsTalk.
Keep the journey alive! Tweet with me, or feel free to copy and paste the following Tweet:
#EndTheStigma with @Bell_LetsTalk on Jan.28/14 http://tinyurl.com/kj8ws5s TweetOrText #BellLetsTalk about #Depression & #MentalIllness
I was a teenage runaway.
There, I’ve said it.
I left my parental home at the age of fifteen. I don’t recall the exact date, but it was still early spring, so it would have been right around my 15th birthday.
At the time, I wasn’t aware of being young. I’d never really felt like a child, anyway. I suppose you might say I was born an ‘old soul’.
I have no photos of myself from that time period. The closest is this Metropass picture, taken after I found my feet again. As I recall, I was painfully thin; full of bravado, but truthfully more than a little fragile.
A year later, just two weeks short of my sixteenth birthday, I married my first husband. I won’t mention his name. I doubt anyone I know would know him, but hey, why take a chance?
Suffice it to say, the marriage didn’t sing.
Gritty is the word that comes to mind when I remember those years. A writerly word, don’t you think? Captures the mood of a teen living on the edge, desperately trying to clutch hold of society’s fringes and hang on for dear life.
I seldom talk about specifics. Why bother? Things happened. I survived. That was then. This is now.
But I remember.
Maybe that’s the reason I so often find myself writing about young people — the abused, the neglected and forgotten… the teens we secretly wish would just ‘go away’.
My news for 2014: I have a new novel underway.
It’s in the early planning stages, so I can’t say much about it, except that it will draw on those teen-experiences of mine.
The best of art comes directly from the soul. First you live it — then you express it.
Wish me luck!
Donna Carrick – January 8, 2014
It usually begins with an image.
The tilt of a head, or the turn of a hand.
He is standing in the doorway of a darkened room, daylight streaming around his silhouette, obscuring his true nature from the mind’s eye.
Or she is sitting alone on a curb. She is looking away from me, at nothing, I believe, as a tornado of urban noise swirls around us. I cannot catch her eye; she will not deign to acknowledge me. Her story eludes me in the beginning. She will not speak, but needs to be coaxed. Slowly, she rises to her feet, and the great journey of discovery begins.
For me, this describes the art of writing.
There is an image of a person, male or female, a mere shadow hovering on the edge of my consciousness. Yet, in my deepest soul, I know a story is waiting to be told.
So it was in the case of my first published novella, The Noon God. In my mind I saw Desdemona as clearly as you would see the person next to you on the bus. I saw the rush of long golden curls, the ice-blue eyes, the determined forehead. And I saw the father she had once adored: J. Caesar Fortune, broad-browed, full of pride, seemingly indestructible.
And yet, like all who claim mortality on this earth, capable of being felled. Capable of death.
Slowly, his legacy revealed itself to me: the many books, the lectures, the mass appeal of a life’s work.
I sensed the sunlight that shone always on this great man…no, not on him, really, more like from him. As if he radiated an inner light, casting the darkest of shadows on all who loved him.
So there was Desdemona, the disillusioned daughter of a renowned author. And there was Caesar, a man of singular passion, driven to greatness.
And then, in the varying recesses of that stage, there were ‘the others’, Lucy, Gail, Uncle Willard and Angelina, those lesser loves, whose lives were caught up in the vortex of that passion, and each, in its own way, damaged at the core.
The Noon God was inspired by and is dedicated to my late sister, Deborah, who died at nineteen years of age by her own hand. Like any survivor of family suicide, I’ve long been compelled to try to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of such a final act.
I think it’s fair to say my novels are all primarily ‘character driven’. From my earliest as yet unpublished works to my latest, The First Excellence, I have been led around the globe by an obsessive need to peel back the layers, to discover the truth behind those silhouettes.
And as with most art, great and small, the true quest remains: the discovery of self. The telling of a story more real than imagined, by imaginary players on the stage of our minds.
JOIN US AT THE SLEUTH OF BAKER STREET on October 27 from 2 to 4pm for wine and nibbles!
