A Conversation with Nic's Main Character

This week, the Rockville 8 and I rock the house as we celebrate my debut, The Kill List: A Jamie Sinclair Novel! To kick-off the ebook’s launch, I imagined sitting down for an interview with my main character, Jamie Sinclair. Over a cup of piping-hot coffee and a sticky, sweet treat at an M Street patisserie in Georgetown, our conversation might go like this:

Nichole Christoff: Jamie, like a long line of Mystery, Thriller, and Romantic Suspense protagonists before you, you’re a private eye. But your business card also says you’re a “security specialist.” What comes along with that job description?

Jamie Sinclair: I’m glad you asked, Nic. I serve high-risk, high-profile clients who call me when their safety is on the line—and calling the police isn’t an option.

NC: Wow. You mean like that big city mayor who ran for president a few years ago? Or that sports star who’s in all those underwear ads?

JC: I can’t really comment on the identities of individual clients. But you've got the right idea.

NC: Well, in The Kill List, you tangle with a TV news anchor’s stalker before your ex-husband claims he needs a security specialist when his little girl is kidnapped. To help him, you return to the army post where you were raised by your tough-as-nails father. Why on earth did you decide to take this case?

JC: I’d have been happy if I never saw my ex again. But this child's in danger and it’s not her fault her father is a jack—I mean, a crumb. Besides, her disappearance hits a little too close to home—and the secret reason my marriage fell apart.

NC: In the course of your investigation, you meet the fictional military police commander at the post, Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett. The two of you make quite a pair. He certainly makes it clear he thinks the world of you!

JS: No comment, Nic.

NC: Okay, okay. To keep this interview rolling along, I’m going to steal—ahem!—borrow a question my pals Evie Owens and MacKenzie Lucas came up with. Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Downey Jr, or Benedict Cumberbatch?

JS: Cumberbatch. Definitely.

NC: Hmmm... Back to Adam Barrett… Will you be seeing more of him in the future?

JS: You tell me. You’re the author.

NC: I’ll rephrase the question. Do you want to see more of Adam Barrett in the future?

JS: *blushing* I, uh…well…hey, isn’t my sequel coming soon from Random House?

NC: That’s true! Jamie and another familiar character return in The Kill Shot on March 17, 2015.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen! Thanks for celebrating my debut with me. Read on for a bit more about The Kill List: A Jamie SinclairNovel available now everywhere ebooks are sold.

In this taut debut thriller, Nichole Christoff introduces a savvy private investigator with nerves of steel—and a shattered heart.

As a top private eye turned security specialist, Jamie Sinclair has worked hard to put her broken marriage behind her. But when her lying, cheating ex-husband, army colonel Tim Thorp, calls with the news that his three-year-old daughter has been kidnapped, he begs Jamie to come find her. For the sake of the child, Jamie knows she can’t refuse. Now, despite the past, she’ll do everything in her power to bring little Brooke Thorp home alive.

Soon Jamie is back at Fort Leeds—the army base in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens where she grew up, the only child of a two-star general—chasing down leads and forging an uneasy alliance with the stern military police commander and the exacting FBI agent working Brooke’s case. But because Jamie’s father is now a U.S. senator, her recent run-in with a disturbed stalker is all over the news, and when she starts receiving gruesome threats echoing the stalker’s last words, she can’t shake the feeling that her investigation may be about more than a missing girl—and that someone very powerful is hiding something very significant . . . and very sinister. 

Choose Your Own Romance Ending: Sidewalk Flower Hero Edition

This week the Rockville 8 welcomes the beautiful and talented Carlene Love Flores! She's here to talk about her debut book, Sidewalk Flower, which has one of the yummiest heroes ever to hit the page. I'm still reading Sidewalk Flower, so I can't say for sure that Carlene actually chose the right ending, but I can tell you that she chose the right hero! Lucky captured my attention from the moment he walked up to Trista's Jeep . . . and he can capture yours, too, because Carlene is giving away a copy of Sidewalk Flower to one lucky commenter!

Welcome to the Rockville 8, Carlene!

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Okay, I know I’m supposed to be cool and sophisticated now that I have a book out there…well that’s not happening!  I am having the biggest Holy Moly moment because this is the very first time I have been asked to guest blog!  Uh-huh, oh yeah!  Okay, now I will revert back to the non-silly guest that the esteemed and lovely Rockville 8 ladies intended to present to you today ;)   Need I say that I am honored to have been asked?  Thank you!

Remember the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books?  Man, I loved those.  My favorite was “Jungle Safari” by Edward Packard.  I loved it so much that at the tender age of ten, I wrote my very own and completely unique (snickers and grins) CYOA called…The Jungle.
I guess it’s not a huge surprise that my debut novel, Sidewalk Flower, at one point was on track to becoming a “Choose Your Own Romance Ending” book!  I can smile fondly now at the discarded “When it was this guy or when it was that guy” files on my laptop, but at the time I was beginning to feel like the anti-cupid.
You see, it took a while to find Trista, the story’s heroine, just the right guy.  The Sheryl Crow lyrics “Are you strong enough to be my man” sum up our hero search and the answer was all too often NO.  I’m not kidding when I say it took years.
There were moments when desperation set in and I asked Trista to consider her best friend, Jaxon, as her hero material.  After all, “friends-to-lovers” is one of my favorites to write.  Yeah, no.  “Ew.  That isn’t happening, Carlene,” she said to me.
Then there was the time I tried to push Sin Pointe’s (the band Trista works for, led by her besty, Jaxon) webmaster on her.  All I can say is poor, poor Benny.  Not only did he have to pull me aside and let me in on the fact he’s pretty deep into a secret crush on another woman but next to Trista, he’s the most overworked, underappreciated, low-man-on-the-totem pole in the Sin Pointe world.  “No time for love for the Benny,” he said to me.
Finally, I had resorted to writing Trista these silly love poems in attempts to cheer her heart and assure her I wasn’t giving up on her happily ever after when KABLAM!
He.  Showed.  Up.
Potential Romance Hero #3 was holding his own in their scenes!
It took a few months to work things out, (theirs is a roller coaster of a romance ride) but Trista and Lucky made the best ending ever.  I hope you’ll agree and enjoy reading Sidewalk Flower!
It was my absolute pleasure to be here with you today at Rockville 8!
So tell me, if you could take your favorite romance novel and choose your own ending, how would it go?
Happy 2013!

The Idea Fairy

Dear readers, the Rockville 8 are honored to introduce debut author Jane Sevier. Jane's first book, the award-winning novel, Fortune's Fool is available now and she's here to tell us about The Idea Fairy.

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“Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a perpetual question writers are asked, and they smile over it. The Idea Fairy brings them, of course.

If you really think about it, though, that’s not such an outlandish question. It relates to the nature of creativity and how the mind works, which fascinate me. If I ever go back to school, I’d like to study creativity scientifically.

But back to ideas. Sure, people have them all the time. Lots of them are crazy or boring or too hard to carry off. But every now and then, you get a good one. But how do you turn it into a story that people want to read and will connect to?

Take this blog, for example. When the lovely Rockville 8 invited me to join them today, I was thrilled. Then it occurred to me that I needed an idea to blog about that was more than just nattering on about my book, and the terror set in. Fortunately, I had an idea about where to get ideas.

Have you ever tried a logline generator? Loglines are those 25-word-or-less descriptions screenwriters use to pitch their movies. Novelists call them elevator pitches. Here’s mine for Fortune’s Fool: When her husband dies and leaves her penniless, a 1930s Memphis socialite becomes a fortuneteller, only to discover she has the true sight.

Let’s say you decide to write a novel, but you really and truly don’t think you have any ideas. Total. Idea. Block. Never fear! You simply Google “logline generator,” and come up with a site called—what else?—Random Logline Generator! I’ll give it a whirl. On my first try, I get, “A mechanical noodlemaker doesn't get along with the ex-husband of a thief.” I don’t know about y’all, but I find that one a little hard to work with.

I hit the “Generate Random Logline” button again and end up with, “An adolescent interior decorator, a drug addict, and a dyslexic outlaw cook dinner in a whorehouse.” The adolescent interior decorator and the dyslexic outlaw cook are promising, but I don’t want to write about drug addicts.

I’ll give it one more spin. “A car salesman and a team of yodeling criminals find a lost gorilla.” Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Who can resist a good car salesman story? And I can think of all kinds of scenarios with yodeling criminals and gorillas. What if the gorilla could also yodel?

The point is not that a logline generator will give you a story you actually want to tell, although it might. But it will make you think about possibilities, and that’s where good ideas come from. If I’m having a slow writing morning, I sometimes go to the Random Logline Generator! to get my brain cooking. The hard part is stopping after 2 or 3 or 70—the silly thing is highly entertaining.

So, where did the idea for Fortune’s Fool come from? I was in the Westlake Barnes and Noble in Austin, Texas, where three mystery writers were doing a reading. Louisiana author Deborah LeBlanc was a few paragraphs into a scene at a voodoo ceremony—alas, I can’t remember which book—when I thought, “What would it be like to discover that you have the true sight?” I dug out the little notebook I carry for writing down ideas and scribbled, “Woman who finds herself down and out and decides to become a psychic, only to discover that she has ‘the sight.’ Uses her grandmother’s tarot deck. Or the mojo sack that brought her parents together. Grandmother met grandfather playing piano in Mineral Wells.”

You see where I really got my logline. Except the piano playing in Mineral Wells, all of these elements ended up in the book. Members of my extended family will recognize the bit about the mojo sack. Perhaps because I am so Southern and know hundreds of my cousins of all degrees, most of whom are natural storytellers, lots of family lore figures in what I write.

Then, of course, I had to decide where to set Fortune’s Fool. I wanted to tell a Southern story and didn’t want to make it modern-day. Because it has always had a fascinating cultural history, I have lots of family there, and I like to eat ribs at the Rendezvous, I chose Memphis. I love the ’30s and ’40s with those wonderful movies and style. A little research told me that in the 1930s, Memphis was the murder capital of the United States, and, voilà. I had my setting.

So you see, Virginia, there really is an Idea Fairy. You just have to trust her to find you.

To find out more about Nell Marchand and the cast of characters who will populate the Psychic Socialite series, visit me at www.janesevier.com.