PROFESSIONAL PURPOSE

by Leigh Lundin

New Mexico must have per capita the greatest number of writers, some which we’ve mentioned such as Susan Slater and Tony Hillerman. Today I’ll introduce you to another, Marie Cash, a friend and colleague of my friend Steve, and creator of series character Jemimah Hodge.

Marie is an unusual mystery writer in a number of ways. For one thing, she spends her days carving and painting, and her nights writing. For another, she won a Javits Fellowship and graduated college at age 55. Finally, she didn’t fall in love with the genre for the first half century of her life. When she began writing, she persisted as she’d done most things. She rolled with those bloodying gut-punch critiques and improved her novel, landing a publishing contract.

I’m pleased to doff my Stetson as I introduce you to …

Marie Romero Cash

The Trail to Mystery Publishing

by Marie Cash

I wish I could say I’ve always been a writer, but I can’t. The truth is that all my words have been in storage for years before I started withdrawing them one line at a time.

I love reading stories about how just one story catapulted Stephen King into unbelievable fame and about JK Rowling’s struggle to just make it through each day before she too became a household word. It took 35 years for me to dabble in an art form which eventually became a career and fifty-five before I started writing.

I was born in 1942 into a Spanish-American family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Women from my generation were not intended or expected to be anything more than housewives and mothers. It took a while for me to break that mold.

After many years of attempting to live within cultural barriers in place at the time of my birth, I was on my own. Art came much easier than writing. My word skills didn’t develop until I enrolled in college at the age of fifty and graduated five years later.

The Art of New Mexico

Most of my published writing has been about Northern New Mexico, traditional art, churches, saints, and the like. In my day job, I created art and spent evenings and weekends writing. A memoir about growing up in Santa Fe, Tortilla Chronicles, and a book of short stories rounded out my experience.

There’s nothing like a contest to challenge a writer’s creative process. Two years ago, I attended the New Mexico Book Awards, as my short story book had been nominated. Anne Hillerman was the guest speaker. She announced that to honor her deceased father, the upcoming Tony Hillerman Award was being increased to $10,000. The story had to be set in the Four Corners area (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah) and had to focus on the solution of the crime rather than the crime itself.

I discussed the competition with my son and said I didn’t think I could write a mystery. He said, “You’re a good writer, Mom, go for it.”

Inspired, I figured how hard could it be? It wasn’t long before I discovered that switching from research-based writing to fiction and mystery was going to be far more difficult than I could have imagined.

So how does one write about something they know nothing about? I hadn’t read many (actually any) mysteries.

My Seduction

I mentioned this in passing to my brother-in-law, an avowed mystery fan, who shuffled me into his library and sent me home with over a dozen books by the leading mystery writers: Patterson, Sanford, Evanovich, and a few by Michael McGarrity and Mary Higgins Clark. When I finished reading them, he had another stack waiting for me, and Borders had another thousand or so I perused.

I wanted to learn how these writers plotted their stories. What was it that kept a reader turning the pages until long after midnight, begging to sleep but held captive by words which moved at a rapid clip and piqued their imagination. There was no disguising the fact that I was hooked.

Crime in the Family

For many years my brother-in-law had been a Sheriff’s deputy in Orofino, Idaho. He told me about investigating murders. He described finding bodies and using Mentholatum on his nostrils to be able to tolerate the stench of decomposition. He also told me how to construct a booby trap from a chair, a sawed-off shotgun, and a piece of string. Thus when someone opened the door, their knees would be blown off.

I took notes on every word he said and then went home and started writing what I thought would be a believable plot. Several hundred pages into it, I realized I needed help. I liked my story line but I wasn’t sure anyone else would. It needed a punch and I didn’t know a whit about dialogue.

Show and Tell

I read somewhere about show me– don’t tell me in writing. I recognized right away I was telling the story.

Looking for an editor, I turned to a few online mystery blogs and found Leigh Lundin on Crimespace, who recommended I contact Roger Paulding in Houston. He was willing to take on a novice’s first attempt, and I imagine it turned out to be much more than he bargained for. In Paulding’s first email, his comment was that my first chapter read like a travelogue, and the second chapter read like a weather report.

For the next two months and hundreds of emails later, his many suggestions finally took hold and writing became less of a task and more of a pleasure. Months after submitting my manuscript, I learned the Hillerman Award had not been given that year. Out of a hundred manuscripts, not one met the criterion established by Minotaur Press.

Booking an Agent

Ah well, at least I had a completed book, even though it would spend another year in a drawer before I gutted and fine-tuned it. Inspired by completing that task, I plotted a sequel.

The next daunting task was to find a publisher. I am a firm believer that it’s not who you are, but who you know, and I didn’t know anybody in the publishing business. Yes, I knew all the regional university presses and small publishers who produced my previous works, but I didn’t consider them ‘real’ publishers. Don’t misunderstand that statement: I appreciated the fact they considered my work publish-worthy. But like most fledgling writers, I was looking for the brass ring, and maybe the New York Times Bestseller List dream.

Casting Couch

A few months ago, my friend Michael Pettit concluded a video interview at my studio. While the crew was gathering equipment, we sat on the couch and small-talked about writing. I mentioned I completed two mysteries and had one in the oven, but no potential publisher. He said he would send a query out on his writer’s blog later that evening.

Through this series of events, enter Catherine Treadgold from Camel Press, an offshoot of Seattle based Coffeetown Press. Carl Yung would call it synchronicity when the universe places us in the right place at the right time. Within days after I submitted my first mystery to her, a contract followed, and there you have it. Shadows Among the Ruins was released in December. It doesn’t get any more serendipitous than that.