Embracing My Senior Sleuth by Nora Page

JENN: My agent never asks me to endorse anyone because she knows I'm usually in one stage of deadline hell or another. So, when she mentioned she had a librarian sleuth that she thought I would enjoy, I was all in and I am so glad I was because I adored Better Off Read by our guest author today. And don't just listen to me, this is what Publisher's Weekly had to say: "Funny [and] fast-paced… A dynamo of a lead in Cleo, who drives with a lead foot and refuses to back down from anything or anyone, including bullies and murderers."


Nora Page Many thanks to Jungle Red Writers and Jenn McKinlay for inviting me to guest post! I’m a huge fan, so right after celebrating the invite, I got down to dithering. Namely, what to write about? Do I have Jungle Red–worthy advice? Doubtful.

Nora Page, aka Ann Myers

I’ve never overcome procrastination or found joy in decluttering. I have poor writing posture (I take the “lap” in laptop seriously), and I don’t have the secret to producing five-thousand words a day or even a few hundred. I kept on dithering.

Then I recalled some memorable writing feedback: You write old.

To backtrack a little, last year I returned to college. It wasn’t like those movies, where—let’s say, hypothetically—a mid-forties, white-haired, work-from-home wallflower discovers her inner party girl. No. It was terrifying, but also enlightening.

The class was a senior fiction seminar at the college where my husband teaches. Classes there run as blocks, three-and-a-half-week sessions taken one at a time. A friend—a professor and writer—invited me to sit in. It was kind and generous, and remember how I take laptops literally? I took the sitting-in part at word value too.

I imagined I’d be sitting back, soaking in the brilliance of the professor and another award-winning novelist. There was brilliance all right, but no relaxing. The students had signed up to write entire novels. Big, meaningful, edgy, fabulous, full-length works of fiction they’d crank out by the end of the semester. Senior fiction seminar was the starting block, the sprint to get down words and dissect them daily in class.

Yikes! I’m a shy sharer, let alone with bright college students half my age. Adding to my terror, I was between projects and floundering for ideas, any idea.  

Under the next-day deadline, I made up something fast. I had a homeless, college-age heroine. She was good with scalpels in a med-student way. I got about 10,000 words down but shelved the idea after the seminar, mainly to start a new project but also because of a seminar participant’s critique: You write old.

The student who said this was being kind and constructive. She thought my main character seemed more aged than her years. She was onto something. The problem wasn’t just a matter of age or slang. It wasn’t the character’s fault either. As characters go, she had fine elements: flaws and noble goals, conflicts and a traumatized backstory. It was me. The seminar student was right. I am drawn to more senior characters, and that’s who I was writing.  

Previously, I wrote a culinary cozy series (the Santa Fe Café Mysteries written as Ann Myers). My favorite character was the bold octogenarian sidekick. She reminded me of my grandmother. She had spunk and experience and said and did what she wanted. I missed her most when that series ended, and I was still hanging on to bits of her.  

Available: June 12, 2018!!!

The Bookmobile Mysteries got the green light from Crooked Lane Books the day the seminar ended. I was thrilled and ready to embrace a new heroine, a senior sleuth! Librarian Cleo Watkins has the starring role in the Bookmobile Mysteries. She’s seventy-five, adores her job, and resists retirement, so much so that she’s wary of crossing into nearby Florida. Together with her feline sidekick, Cleo hits the road in a school-bus bookmobile and rolls into trouble, including murder.  

I have a blast with Cleo. I connect with her, and that’s a key, isn’t it? It’s the broader message behind the student’s critique. Stitching together a handful of traits and troubles won’t cut it. As both readers and writers, we want to feel for the people on the page.

I spend a lot of time with Cleo in my head. She’s also someone I’d want to hang out with in real life. I imagine we’d read quietly on her porch or mix up some biscuits in her kitchen. Maybe we’d do a little sleuthing, although I’d probably stay back in the bookmobile. I’m not as brave as Cleo, not even in writing seminars.

I am glad I sat in, though. I learned a lot from the students, and I hope if they got to critique Cleo, they’d feel her senior spirit. What a compliment that would be. 

What about you, Reds and readers, do you find that you write characters in a certain age demographic better than others? Do you have a preferred age for the characters of the books you read?