Happy New Year! What We're Writing - Jenn McKinlay

 HAPPY NEW YEAR, READERS!!!

We wish you all good things in the coming year! 

JENN McKINLAY: I love starting a new year. It's a clean slate, a new beginning, a fresh calendar. I love, love, love it! Of course, January always seems to send me spinning on my ear as soon as it starts and nothing ever goes quite right and by the end of the month, I usually ask the Hub if we can bump it out and  celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year instead. Incidentally, it's on February 10th and it's the year of the dragon for those of you who, like me, will need a do over.

But this is what we're writing week at the Jungle Reds, so I have to tell you that I am madly finishing a book that is due tomorrow. It's a Library Lover's mystery (#15) called A MERRY LITTLE MURDER PLOT and will be released in October of 2024. Here is a snippet of the victim being found: 

     “And here I thought we were going to have a quiet holiday season,” Emma muttered. She unclipped the Maglite from her belt and illuminated the scene. It was much more powerful than Lindsey’s puny phone flashlight and the entire gazebo was bathed in light.

     Emma ran the light over Jackie’s body, pausing on her bare hands. She jumped back and grabbed Helen by the arm and shoved her toward the steps and then did the same thing to Lindsey. “Get out of the gazebo. Now!”

     “Why? What’s happening?” Helen asked.

     “Go!” Emma shooed them down the steps. The urgency in her voice did not invite dawdling.

     They dashed down the steps, only stopping when Emma did. They were thirty feet from the bandstand and Emma was pulling her phone out of her jacket pocket. 

     “What is it, Emma?” Lindsey asked. “What’s wrong?”
     “I’m not positive but I think our victim up there was electrocuted,” Emma said. “If the current is still live one of you could have been next.”

That is all I can share with you at the moment because I am a sleep deprived zombie and barely coherent. The 14th Library Lover's mystery FATAL FIRST EDITION is out on February 13th (next month!) and the trade paperback edition of THE PLOT AND THE PENDULUM (which came out in 2022) will be released tomorrow! 

To celebrate, I am giving away FIVE signed copies of the trade paperback but the giveaway is happening on our new private Facebook group Reds and Readers. You can join by clicking on the name and get yourself in the drawing. To kick off this new venture, we're having giveaways every day! So head on over there and check it out. With giveaways, live chats, and our community of awesome readers, it is sure to be a good time!

So, what will I be writing after I finish this book? I have two romcom proposals to write as my publisher is looking for my next book after May's upcoming LOVE AT FIRST BOOK and then I have a brand new venture that I can't talk about yet. Suffice to say, I am pivoting into the fantasy genre with the plan of adding it to my mystery and romcom books - SO EXCITING!!! - with more details to follow!

Needless to say, 2024 looks to be full of mystery, romance, and fantasy for me. 

How about you, Reds and Readers, what are you looking forward to in the coming year? 

What We're Writing: Proposals, proposals, and more proposals

JENN McKINLAY: I'm in the In-Between that restless spot between Out of Contract and I Have a New Idea. I think it's much like the Upside-Down from Stranger Things, which is described as an alternate dimension that's inhospitable to humans and should be avoided at all costs. Yes, very much like the In-Between for authors, at least for this author.

For me, proposal writing is the same as outlining. In fact, my proposals are usually what I use for my outline when the project gets the green light and it's a go. 

I recently turned in a proposal for a new genre (cozy fantasy with a mystery and a light romance tucked in) that I'm very excited about but because it's a brand new genre for me, the outline was twenty-five pages and the sample was forty-five. I wanted to be certain I was getting it right. If and when it sells, it should be easy peasy to write.

 [pause for laughter because it's never easy]

Aside from the cozy fantasy, I am working up proposals for two more romcoms, two more library lovers mysteries, and trying to decide if there is room in the schedule for more cupcake bakery mysteries. Given that most retailers are no longer carrying mass market paperbacks, which is the format for the cupcake bakery mysteries, I have a feeling that series is dusted and done but I will wait to hear before I declare it so. 

I had written up proposals for two more hat shop mysteries and my publisher said I could write them and they would publish them but where would they be sold if retailers no longer carry mass market? It's a conundrum. 

I do feel as if the publishing world is undergoing some dramatic changes. It used to be that they wanted books that were clearly definable by genre. If you wrote a romantic magical mystery, they were never clear on where to put it. Romance or fantasy or mystery? They couldn't decide so the book was rejected as unmarketable, which given the success of Gabaldon's Outlander seems short-sighted, but whatever. 

Now, it appears they no longer care and mashups are all the rage. Do you have a time traveling, sword wielding Amazon who likes to knit with vampires and runs a chocolate shop with her wily grandma while  they amateur sleuth the village murders? Let her rip! Yes, I'm exaggerating...but just a little.

So, how about it Reds and Readers? What are some genre mashups that you've read and enjoyed?

The Utility (or Futility) of Subgenres: a guest blog by Chris F. Holm

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Being a resident of the great state of Maine, it always gives me pleasure to discover a new author scribbling away up here in Vacationland (formerly the Pine Tree State, until the marketing people reclassified it.) Then I found out Chris Holm was an ex-pat from Syracuse, NY (like me!) who was pursuing a graduate degree in Virginia (I did that, too!) and who married a Mainer (yep) who lured him north. (At this point, I can only conclude that Chris Holm and I are the same person.)

I sent off an email to Chris' publisher, Angry Robot Books, and they kindly sent me a review copy of his debut, Dead Harvest. I was tickled by the cover, which appears for all the world to be a well-read golden-age pulp paperback complete with scratches, smudges and the marks of many fingerprints. I was even more impressed by what was inside.

Sam Thornton collects souls. The souls of the damned, to be precise. Once taken himself, he’s now doomed to ferry souls to hell for all eternity, in service of a debt he can never repay. But when he’s dispatched to retrieve the soul of a girl he believes is innocent of the horrific crime for which she’s been damned, Sam does something no Collector has ever done before: he refuses.

It was a hell of a read. The only problem was: what was it? Pulp fiction? Paranormal? Noir detective? Horror? Paradise Lost fanfiction? (Seriously, that would be awesome.) I couldn't tell. And clearly, I'm not the only one.


First off, thanks to Julia and the rest of the Jungle Reds for letting me tarnish their otherwise stellar blog. ’Tis truly an honor, particularly for a lowly debut novelist such as I.

One thing I’m discovering now that I’ve got a book out is that folks (be they fellow writers, reviewers, or random family members) seem more curious what sort of books I write than what my book is actually about. And given that DEAD HARVEST is the first in a series that recasts the battle between heaven and hell as Golden Era crime pulp, I don’t always know what to tell them. Do I say that I write urban fantasy? Fantastical noir? Gonzo crime-fic? Cross-genre horror-tinged fantasy-pulp? Science fiction, since despite the fact there’s not a hint of science in my book, that’s where it always winds up shelved?

Yeah, sometimes, I guess I do say that. It’s what they want to hear, after all. I know, because I see it echoed in reviews and interviews that reference my work. The only problem is, I don’t mean it.

As far as I’m concerned, I write mysteries. Mysteries are the sole through-line in my work, the thread that ties together everything I’ve ever written. Whether fantastical, horrific, science-fictional, or quiet and literary, my stories are all just mysteries at heart.

Fact is, when I first started writing toward publication, I hadn’t the faintest notion of the morass of subgenres into which I was ignorantly wading; I just wrote what I wrote. It was only when I started submitting my stories that I realized how fractured along genre lines the publishing industry truly was.

The first short I ever published – and quite possibly the best I’ve ever written – appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I was elated. My next few tales were perhaps a little darker, a little nastier, and wound up in grittier online magazines such as Demolition, Beat to a Pulp, and Thuglit. To me, the only difference between those markets was in flavor, not quality, so imagine my surprise when I discovered plenty of folks from the grittier camp held Ellery Queen in disdain. Why, I’ve no idea. Lord knows I don’t shy away from violence and F-bombs when called for (a fact to which I’m certain Julia could attest), but good writing is good writing, and bad writing can’t be saved by striking fashionable literary poses. Ellery Queen, to my mind, falls solidly in the former camp.

I was a kid when I first fell in love with mysteries, and back then, I didn’t delineate along subgenre lines. Whether it was the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, Christie or Poe or Doyle, or even THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER, they were all of a piece to me. And to this day, the writers I most admire didn’t chain themselves to reductive ideas about what one should and should not write. Donald Westlake wrote one of the bleakest series of all time in his Parker books, but he also wrote marvelous comic capers featuring career thief John Dortmunder. Lawrence Block writes the hard-bitten tales of unlicensed PI Matthew Scudder, but also light mysteries featuring bookstore-owner-cum-cat-burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Michael Crichton got his start writing pulp, and went on to dabble in historical-, techno-, medical-, and espionage-thrillers, to name a few.

It seems to me readers and writers both benefit by eschewing a myopic, reductive genre worldview – and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. On Julia’s site, you’ll find a section titled “Are my books cozies?” in which she expounds far more eloquently than I on the topic of the limited utility of subgenres. I was fortunate enough to catch Rosemary’s so-called cozy panel at Bouchercon, in which she described her own work as suburban noir, no doubt earning new readers in the process. And when my wife described Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef novels as cozy/thriller hybrids in a recent (glowing) review, it seemed far closer to the truth than either one of those labels on their own.

My point isn’t that authors should strive to straddle fences and break down boundaries; as advice goes, that’s every bit as silly as telling writers never to. All I’m saying is, it seems to me the best writers read widely and go where their muse takes them, and leave it to the booksellers to sort out where to shelve it. God knows I’d rather read ten great novels outside the narrow slice of real estate I’ve staked out in my own fiction, than ten lousy ones that fall within my wheelhouse.

Which reminds me, there’s this Julia Spencer-Fleming novel on my Kindle I’ve been dying to get to…

Well, dear reader, what do you think about genres, sub-genres, blended genres and bent genres? Are you a purist, or an anything-goes sort? Do you think genre-mixing is the wave of the future? Or not?

Chris F. Holm was born in Syracuse, New York, the grandson of a cop who passed along his passion for crime fiction. His work has appeared in such publications as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2011. He’s been an Anthony Award nominee, a Derringer Award finalist, and a Spinetingler Award winner. His first novel, DEAD HARVEST (Angry Robot Books, February 2012), is a supernatural thriller that recasts the battle between heaven and hell as Golden Era crime pulp. You can find out more at Chris’ website, friend him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.