LUCY BURDETTE: I always hold my breath a bit when correspondence from a fan hits my inbox. Will they want the world (including me) to know they hated the book from start to finish, the set-up was preposterous and the character plain stupid, or that an author should never insert her own opinions about ____, just write the damn book? Really, this kind of thing does happen, but luckily not too often. It certainly prevents a writer from suffering of too much head-swelling.
Note from Aunt Flo
When I had my first books published in the early 2000’s, email was only just taking hold. So if someone wanted to write an author, it was longhand, sent through the post office. I still have a few of those I treasure, including this one from an older woman who worried about how much my first character Cassie drank, and how this might affect her golf career aspirations.
Last summer, one of my readers pointed out how distressing it was to read this sentence in The Key Lime Crime: “But on the other hand, I felt a heavy weight lifting, as though someone had been holding a boot to my neck and I could breathe again.”
She’d been so upset that she’d had to put the book aside for a while. Of course I’d written that well before George Floyd died and I was as horrified as she to see those words on paper. It was too late to change for the hardcover—already printed. But I was able to remove it for the paperback edition that will be out in July, and I’m grateful to her for pointing it out.
On an entirely different topic, Sue P sent me a note a few years back that absolutely changed the direction I thought I was going with Hayley Snow’s love life:
I recently found this series and love it. I do have a complaint though. I was just getting interested to see how the romance would work out between Hayley and her detective. And you bring back his ex and she gets dumped! I was not a happy camper at this development. I still would like to see where this would go, more so than with her boss, which is where you seem to be leading. I think she needs a challenge and this is not her boss. Bring him back!! Just my opinion. Thanks.
Oh, and sometimes a note is pure joy. I can’t resist posting this old favorite that had me smiling for weeks:
We are a class of 12 girls in our freshman year at Gymnasium Sylt, a high school which is located in the far north of Germany on the island of Sylt which is surrounded by the North Sea.
We read your book "An Appetite for Murder" in our English lessons (cf. the photo attached) with our English teacher, Mrs Detlefsen. To us it was a really enjoyable book because it is full of romance, action and crime. We particularly liked the Scene with Meredith pushing Hayley off the road and threatening her with a gun. Moreover, we love the different quotations you use, some are so true and fit perfectly.
Though we talked a lot about the characters, the setting and the plot, there are still some questions left we would be grateful for if you could answer them for us. For example, we would really like to know why Hayley just spills the beans about everything (e.g. with the Police) and why she fell in love with that arrogant Person of Chad.
Don't you love that, "arrogant Person of Chad?"
Writers, what’s the best letter you ever received from a reader? Readers, do you ever send fan or other kind of mail to authors?
