Getting into the Game: a guest blog by Sara J. Henry

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  It won't come as a surprise to anyone who reads my writing to find out I;m always on the look-out for a good book set in the Adirondacks. Which is how I stumbled across Sara J. Henry. I had read some excellent reviews of her debut novel, Learning to Swim, and upon realizing it took place in the Adirondacks, I snatched it up. 

Reader, I loved it. I wasn't the only one, either; Learning to Swim was nominated for the Barry and Macavity awards and won the Anthony, Agatha and Mary Higgins Clark awards. Hoping to ride on her coattails, I asked if I could blurb the sequel, A Cold and Lonely Place. (When it, too, picks up a bunch of award nominations, I figure Sara will be good to stand me a few drinks.)

Sara's here today to answer the one question I didn't get a chance to ask her when we met at Bouchercon: how does a nice girl from Tennessee wind up writing about the North Country?

It took exactly twelve weeks to decide I wanted to make a living writing – the twelve weeks I spent working as a soil scientist in Gainesville, Florida. I was twenty, with a boss who told me every Friday, “Only thirty-five years to retirement.” Maybe that was his way of hinting that this was not the career for me (kids, the career that seems fun in college may not be anything close to fun when you’re doing it forty hours a week, in a hot Florida town where the clay layer doesn’t kick in until eighty inches, which is how deep you have to dig to map soils.)

Time for a new plan.

I got a column in the local paper, and started journalism graduate school. After a series of part-time newspaper jobs, I turned to the ads in the back of Editor & Publisher. One week I applied for jobs as farm editor, religion editor, and sports editor – all of which I was equally unqualified for.

One editor responded, from a tiny newspaper in a tiny town in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. I arrived for my interview in what seemed the dead of winter, stepping off the small plane at a tiny airport into a world that was white as far as the eye could see. It was cold in a way I’d never experienced.

They offered me the job as sports editor.

I took it.

Never mind that this was an area where sports were big – with three high schools, two community colleges, softball teams, three-day sled dog races, canoe races, Winter Carnival competitions, rugby tournaments. With the Olympic Center nearby, there was luge, bobsled, biathlon, ski jumping, horse show competition, boxing, triathlon. And more.

It was my job to cover them all.

Never mind that my sports experience was limited to competing in bicycle and running races, and writing a string of sports features. I’d been to exactly one college football game.

I worked the way you can work only when you’re in your twenties and have already flubbed one career and don’t want to flub another. I bought a book that detailed the rules of various sports. I went from event to event, shooting hockey from the penalty box, basketball from under the hoop, football from the sidelines. With this many sports to cover, understanding the nuances of game play was neither possible nor necessary. I took a lot of photos, got quotes from coaches, and spelled names right. I worked nearly around the clock, coming in at 3 am on Monday morning to write features and develop film and lay out my pages. Nearing deadline, the press room guys would stare at me through the window in the door while I hustled through my last page.

.

Winters were brutal. Bit by bit I assembled an essential wardrobe – wool-lined Sorel boots, long johns, insulated gloves, head warmer, wool hat, thick coat. I learned to carry cardboard to stand on at outside events for insulation. I kept a sleeping bag in the car in case I got stranded. I put a lot of miles on my car and shot a lot of film. I discovered coffee. I ate on the run. I was thinner than I’d ever been.

I loved it.

Toward the end of my second year someone sent one of my bobsled articles to a magazine that reprinted it and sent me a check that was more than I earned in a week. Light dawned. I couldn’t keep up this pace and didn’t want to cut corners, so not too much later I resigned to write freelance write. Then after a few years, I went off to other places, to work at magazines, at other papers, as a book editor.

But I never forgot this place I loved, and the people who made me feel I belonged for the first time in my life.

So when I sat down to write a novel, years later, this was where it had to be set.
 

Location, location, location. It's as important for a novel as it is for real estate. What are your stand-out settings in fiction, dear Readers? What sort of settings do you love to read about? And has a new place ever made itself home in your own life? One lucky commenter will win a copy of A Cold and Lonely Place!

Sara’s first novel, Learning to Swim, won the Anthony and Agatha awards for best first novel and the Mary Higgins Clark award. Its sequel is A Cold and Lonely Place (Crown, Feb. 5, 2013), which Howard Frank Mosher describes as “a character-driven thriller set in one of the coldest and loneliest places in the United States: the Adirondack Mountains in mid-winter.” (Publishers Weekly refers to “Henry's bone-deep sense of this terribly beautiful place,” and Booklist says the book “perfectly conjures the lure of living in a small and beautiful mountain town during a bitterly cold winter.” Which makes the author very happy.)

You can read excerpts of Sara's books at her website, friend her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter as @SaraJHenry. She blogs at Sara in Vermont.

My Most Amazing, Incredible, Wonderful Twelve Days: a guest blog by Sara J. Henry

 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Sara J. Henry, like me, is a Mason-Dixonite. She grew up in the south but now makes her home in the Green Mountain State. Her debut, Learning to Swim, initially caught my eye because it's set in New York State's Adirondack mountains. Learning to Swim caught a lot of eyes - it was an Emerging Author pick for retail giant Target, nominated for a Barry Award, and last month, it went on to win the prestigious Mary Higgins Clark award during Edgars Week, and then went on to win the Best First Agatha Award at Malice Domestic. However, Sara's not here to tell us why we should read Learning to Swim (although you really should!) She's here to give us a peek into what it's like to live the mystery writer's dream come true.

 My Most Amazing, Incredible, Wonderful Twelve Day

I live on a dirt road in southern Vermont—excitement is when a fox tunnels into my yard and I try to referee a chase between dog and fox as they lap the yard, me alternately trying to grab my 105-pound Newfie mix and direct the fox to a fox-sized opening in the fence.

A long time ago I wrote a novel. Parts were good and parts weren’t, and I put it in a drawer, where it stayed for a very long time. Eventually I pulled it out and revised it, over and over, until it was published. In the 14 months since I did two panels, and went to the few bookstores who asked me. And then my amazing twelve days began.

I head off to appear at the wonderful St. Louis County Library’s annual Suspense Night. (This, because at the previous fall’s Bouchercon, I’d shoved a copy of my novel into the library director’s hands, being abominably bad at talking about my work.) It goes well, and I’m delighted by the attendance of three long-ago Tennessee high school friends, now St. Louis transplants—one of whom arrives dressed as my novel’s main character, complete with fake ponytail.

Home one night, and then off to Booktopia in Manchester, Vermont. (This, because I’d forced my reticent self to meet the folks at Northshire Bookstore some time back, with my writer pal A.S. King’s words ringing in my ears, Sara, you HAVE to go to bookstores and meet people.) This is one of those events where you feel they accidentally invited the wrong person – there are seven other authors here, amazing authors, ones with books dancing around the New York Times bestseller list. I meet the delightful Richard Mason and Madeline Miller (the other debut author) at the opening party, and the next day appear with the wonderfully generous Howard Frank Mosher. The final event at Northshire is open to the public, and every chair is filled. I am scared almost spitless. I’m second to speak, and decide I’ll start with a funny childhood story. And people laugh, and I freeze only once, infinitesimally, and the result is now a podcast over at Books on the Nightstand.

Then to NYC where I appear on a panel with SJ Rozan at the MWA Symposium, and think from the audience’s blank faces that this must be the most boring panel ever, until I learn this is simply what people look like when listening. In a restroom I do a Superman-style fast change, to the shoes and black dress stashed in my daypack, and head into the MWA Agents and Editors party, where I’m up for the Mary Higgins Clark award. I’m happily standing there, with the analytic side of my brain assessing what I should say if I win, and then my name is called. And what I never once considered—the emotional impact of winning—hits me like a tidal wave, an enormous one. I cannot move, I cannot think, I almost cannot breathe. And I cry a little, but only a little, during my talk.

 

Next I’m at my cousin’s house in Virginia, where I play with my four adorable young cousins and do a book club group, and get up horribly early to drive to Malice Domestic in Bethesda. And there I have a lovely time at my first-ever Malice, until the awards ceremony where I am astoundingly up for a best first novel Agatha, and this time I refuse to let myself think that I could win, refuse to think of what I might say if I do, and sit in a sort of frozen stupor. (Yes, I am wearing the same immune-to-rolling-up black dress.) And then my name is called. So I stumble up there and stumble through a speech and stumble back to my table. And there, with my award teapot sitting in front of me, I dissolve into a puddle of tears, and my wonderful friend Jess Lourey takes charge of me for the rest of the evening. 

On the way home I stop at the home of A.S. and Mr. King and daughters, where I’m greeted with lovely child-drawn signs, and spend the day with people I love.

 

And so end my amazing, incredible, wonderful twelve days.

Now I am back on my dirt road in Vermont, marveling at the turns my life has taken—all because I wrote a novel that I decided to take out of the drawer, and didn’t give up on.

You can find out more about Sara, and read an excerpt of Learning to Swim, at her website. You can also follow her on Twitter as @SaraJHenry and like her on Facebook.