HALLOWEEN – IT’S NOT JUST FOR KIDS by Catherine Bruns

Jenn McKinlay: Small surprise that I love Halloween. Scary stories, apple cider donuts, costumes, CANDY...what's not to love. And, yes, I'm counting it's only 41 days until my most favorite holiday! So to get us in the mood, here is Catherine Bruns, talking about her love of all things Halloween, which is the foundation of her latest book Dessert is the Bomb. 

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Catherine Bruns: Autumn officially arrives this Wednesday, but the leaves in Upstate New York where I live have already been changing for several weeks. Along with my favorite season comes my favorite holiday, Halloween. I’m a firm believer in fate and that my birthday’s in October for a reason. It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,aired for the first time on the day I was born. If that isn’t enough proof, I don’t know what is!

Dessert is the Bomb releases next week on September 28. It’s Book 11 in my Cookies & Chance series and centers around…you guessed it, Halloween! I have been dying (yes, pun intended) to write a Halloween cozy mystery for years, but the stars and my series’ timeline have never aligned until now.

Main character Sally Muccio owns a novelty cookie shop in Western New York, and everything is coming up chocolate chips and roses until a competing bakery, It’s The Bomb, moves in across the street. Along with worries that the new bakery will steal her customers, Sal also has to cater a Halloween bash at—of all places—a funeral home.

Sal’s father is a mortician and a loveable guy, but he’s also a bit of a wackadoodle. In his strange mindset, there’s no better place to celebrate the holiday, and the rest of the town agrees. But the party comes to an abrupt halt when the owner of the new bakery is blown away (another pun) while driving off in the Muccio hearse. Of course, Sal and her friend/baker Josie are at the top of the suspect list and soon land behind bars with a murder to solve. 

I only went trick or treating twice as a child, but I still remember those horrible masks that smelled of plastic and made breathing and seeing almost impossible. Ironically, I dressed up more often as an adult for home and at-work parties. Still, it wasn’t until after I had children of my own that the holiday took on a whole different meaning. Costume shopping, decorating the house and baking treats for school events made the day even more special because I got to experience the excitement through my children’s eyes. It was the one night a year that they could be any creature or person they wanted to. Batman and Robin? Holy Jackpot! Scooby Doo and Sully? Jinkies! 

Halloween activities with my kids (now grown) always included a visit to my in-laws house. My father-in-law was a big kid at heart and nothing pleased him more than to watch dozens of children traipsing their way to his front door. He made a point to talk to each child and had a unique way of making everyone feel welcome and special. 

One Halloween shortly after my husband and I were married, we attended a horror film screening with my father-in-law at the town hall. It may have been the only year my mother-in-law was allowed to hand out candy. After the movie, we came outside and found that every car in the parking lot had been soaped, with the exception of my father-in-law’s. I’ll never forget how his big blue eyes shone with unspoken laughter and merriment that night. 

Do you have a favorite memory or costume from Halloween? Leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of Dessert is the Bomb!

About Dessert is the Bomb:

Baker turned sometimes-sleuth Sally Muccio has always loved Halloween, but this year she has more on her mind than ghosts and goblins. In addition to catering a party at her wacky father’s funeral home, a competing bakery has just moved in across the street from Sally’s Samples. The new owner, Celeste Delgado, seems intent on burying Sal’s novelty cookie shop into the ground with her sensational smash cake bombs. Suddenly, the homemade fortune cookies that Sal and her best friend Josie create with loving care are predicting an ominous future for their business.

Before Sal can discover what’s behind Celeste’s grudge, the woman is killed by an explosion. To take the cake, Josie was heard threatening Celeste shortly before her death. A night in the slammer, another deadly explosion, and dangerous family secrets all add to Sal’s growing list of concerns. Like an oven timer, precious minutes of her life are ticking away. Can she find Celeste’s killer before everything blows up in her face? *Recipes Included!*

BIO

USA Todaybestselling author Catherine Bruns lives in New York with her very patient husband, three sons, and several spoiled pets. She writes the Cookies & Chance, Italian Chef, and Cindy York mysteries. Her new series, the Maple Syrup Farm Mysteries, debuts in 2022. Catherine’s book, For Sale by Killer, won the 2019 Daphne du Maurier award for Mainstream Mystery/Suspense. When she’s not writing, she loves to bake, read and attend live theater performances. 

Sign up for Catherine’s monthly newsletter and get a free ebook at https://www.catherinebruns.net/contact

Join Catherine’s Cozy Readers Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/241834706420330

National Novel Writing Month by Catherine Bruns

JENN McKINLAY: I was recently at Bouchercon (so fun!), hanging with the Red when a familiar face stopped by the table where we were signing. It was the fabulous Catherine Bruns. Of course, I immediately invited her to come visit us and here she is! And that, my friends, is the beauty of conferences. There's always a new friend to be made!

CATHERINE BRUNS: Thank you so much, Jenn, and to the rest of the Jungle Red Writers for having me here today! 

In the writing community, November is synonymous with National Novel Writing Month, or Nano for short. The main objective is to try and complete a novel within thirty days, or at least 50,000 words. 

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The first and only time I ever did Nano was back in 2016. I had an idea for a novel that I’d been carrying around in my head for over a year and really wanted to put down on paper. I’d just published my first two cozy mysteries in 2015 with a boutique publisher and though happy with them, I wanted more. I yearned to see my books in bookstores and on library shelves, like many writers do. It was a goal that I’d had since I was eight years old and wrote my first story, a highly plagiaristic version of Cinderella. Fortunately, Disney never sued.

Now all I had to do was write the book, find an agent, and send the manuscript off on query to publishers. Piece of cake, right?

Not exactly.

Since I had already committed to two more books and was also working full-time, it was difficult to find the hours to write the new manuscript. So, I decided to set aside the month of November to complete it. 

Cozy mysteries are very formulaic, and sometimes I tend to push the boundaries a bit, so to speak. I worried that my plot might be too dark for the genre, so I decided I’d try my hand at a suspense novel instead. The main character, Tessa, would be a talented chef and recent widow whose husband had just died in a horrific car accident. But Tessa would soon discover that it wasn’t an accident. She is determined to find the person responsible and decides her talent as a chef will lead her to the guilty party. She goes “undercover” as a cook in a dumpy pizza parlor called Slice where her husband was last seen. Tessa then learns that her husband wasn’t as well liked as she’d originally surmised—in fact, every one of the employees at Slice had a different reason for wanting him dead. When Tessa starts to uncover the secrets her husband was keeping, she winds up in some scalding hot water. 

I made my goal with Nano and finished the book. Writers can track their progress on Nano’s website, locate a writing buddy there, and receive badges. They send emails to inspire your writing and want to help you achieve your goal. This is the one time that word count matters more than the actual content. Because of this, my first draft was complete but nowhere near ready for an agent to look at. 

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I spent the next eight months editing and polishing. I asked beta readers for honest feedback. In the fall of 2017, I started to send the manuscript out and was fortunate to find an agent who liked my voice and was willing to help me complete the additional work needed. She suggested that I query the book as a cozy, not suspense, which meant even more changes to the manuscript. We went back and forth with edits for another four months until it was finally ready to query in February 2018. Sourcebooks offered me a contract and Penne Dreadful was released in July 2019.  

Let me just say that Nano isn’t for every writer. Would I do it again? Absolutely. Back in 2016, I made it my goal to get the story down on paper first, and Nano served its purpose. Goals motivate me and help me to stay focused. I’m not the most organized person (far from it, actually) so I need this in my everyday life. 

Readers and writers, what type of goals do you set for yourself?   

USA Today bestselling author Catherine Bruns lives in Upstate New York with her very patient husband, three sons, and several spoiled pets. Catherine has a B.A. in English and is a former newspaper reporter and press release writer.  She currently writes four series: the Italian Chef, Cindy York, Cookies & Chance and Aloha Lagoon Mysteries. Her book, For Sale by Killer, won the 2019 Daphne du Maurier award for Mainstream Mystery/Suspense. Please visit her website at catherinebruns.net.