What Can Happen When a Writer Retires , by Kathy Lynn Emerson

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I was delighted to catch up with Kathy Lynn Emerson at this June's Maine Crime Wave. As we were chatting (and I was trying to not look like I was eating all the tiny spinach quiches, which I was) she dropped a bombshell on me. 

She was retiring! 

I'm afraid I gaped in a very inelegant way (and probably with green between my teeth.) Kathy Lynn (and Kaitlyn Dunnett and Kate Emerson) has been part of the national and New England mystery scene forever. I read Face Down in the Marrow Bone Pie as part of my home-made crime fiction education back in the late nineties, and of course her Liss MacCrimmon series, set in the wonderfully named Moosetookalook, Maine are required reading in my neck of the woods. 

Of course, as she explained to me, she had some very good reasons. And as you'll see here, it's not quite like she's resting on her laurels...

 

 A question I hear a lot these days is: Why did you decide to retire? There isn't just one answer. I'm well over the traditional retirement age of sixty-five. I have arthritis, making long hours in front of a computer painful. The publisher of the two cozy mystery series I wrote as Kaitlyn Dunnett dropped both of them during the Covid lockdown and wasn't interested in the only other suggestion I had for a new series. No other publisher was exactly beating down my door, begging for a new book by Kathy Lynn Emerson or Kaitlyn Dunnett or Kate Emerson. After having had sixty-four books traditionally published between 1984 and 2021, I wasn't interested in writing something I wasn't enthusiastic about just to make a sale, especially if acceptance would mean committing to spending more time promoting a new book than it took to write it. I exaggerate, but not by much!

 

But the real reason I decided to call it quits was that, in spite of all the extra writing time available to me during Covid, I couldn't come up with a single new story idea. I still can't. Apparently, I've already used all the ones that appeal to me, some more than once. If I were to try to write another novel, I'd end up reusing plot devices, or settings, or character types, and possibly all three. I've always believed in recycling bits and pieces of discarded writing, but not to that extent!

 

That said, my career as a writer didn't exactly end. Even before Covid, I had started work on several self-publishing projects—all material I'd already written but which had never found a commercial home, in particular my grandfather's memoirs and a collection of over 2300 mini-biographies of women who lived in England from 1485 to 1603. I'd posted the text of both The Life of a Plodder and A Who's Who of Tudor Women online for free for years, but let's face it, those files really do disappear after a while. For—well, let's call it my legacy—I wanted a more permanent format. The Who's Who has too many pages for a print edition to be feasible, but works well as an e-book. For other projects, I was able to produce both e-books and print-on-demand trade paperbacks.

 

Oh, yes. There were more. My earliest published books were written for young readers. I wrote more of those than I sold and still had the unsold manuscripts. Plus I issued new editions of the ones that were traditionally published back in the 1980s. Then I put together a collection of essays (originally posts at Maine Crime Writers) titled I KillPeople for a Living, and a collection of short stories featuring pet photographer Valentine Veilleux, the character I'd once hoped would be the sleuth in a new cozy series.

 

 

At that point, I was still calling myself semi-retired, but people were traveling again. Conferences were back on. Invitations to speak at libraries in person started to reappear. And I realized that I didn't want to do any of that anymore. It's not that I don't like people. I do. But even Zoom programs are exhausting. Worse, prep time, travel time, and the usual pre-and post-performance second-guessing myself would take time away from working on my "projects." That's when I started saying "Sorry. I'm retired."

 

By then I'd branched out into creating e-book omnibus editions of my backlist historical mystery series—three volumes of novels and stories from my Elizabethan-era Face Down series and a one-volume collection of the Diana Spaulding mysteries set in the U.S. in 1888. Next up I planned to create an e-book omnibus edition of the three historical romantic suspense novels I wrote for the Harper Monogram line of paperback originals back in the early 1990s. And that's when things took an odd turn.

 

While I made a few changes to the other books before issuing those omnibus editions (mostly getting rid of excessive use of 'tis and 'twas), they held up well. I expected the first of my romantic suspense novels, Winter Tapestry, to be the same. It didn't quite work out that way. The more I read, the more I itched to make changes. To make it better. To take it back to the mystery  novel it had started out to be all those years ago. I ended up rewriting the whole thing, including reducing the number of point-of-view characters from many to one. I might not have had any fresh ideas for new books in years, but suddenly I had plenty of ideas for making an old story better.

 

I ended up with a new novel. Sort of. It isn't considered a new book by traditional publishers, or so my agent informs me. Since they would feel bound to reveal that it had been previously published, they would lose the opportunity to have it reviewed as a new title. Therefore, no one was interested in buying it. If I hadn't already been into Indie publishing, I might have been discouraged. As it is, Death of an Intelligence Gatherer (formerly Winter Tapestry) is available now for pre-order and the release date as an e-book and trade paperback is August 9.

 

Did I mention I've also created print-on-demand editions of two of my backlist nonfiction titles? How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries is already out and The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England 1485-1649 releases on July 19.

 

I may be retired, but I'm busier than ever . . . and loving every minute of it.

 

Kathy Lynn Emerson has had sixty-four books traditionally published under several names and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for "excellence and achievement" as a Maine writer from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating e-book omnibus editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com