Featuring Linda Trout—Romantic Suspense Author Extraordinaire

Today I’m welcoming Linda Trout who writes dynamite romantic suspense stories, to tell us a little about herself and her work. Let’s start with the routine question of how you got started writing.

Linda Trout

Linda: Hi, Jackie. First, thanks for having me at Murderous Musings. I’ve always loved a good mystery and I’m a romantic at heart. I suppose that’s why I combine the two disciplines and write romantic suspense.

Even at a young age, I was fascinated with the written word. However, I didn’t take my writing seriously until later in life. Now I can’t see me doing anything else. And no matter what I try to write, there’s always an element of mystery or suspense in it.

In my previous occupation I was an accountant. So cut and dried...rather boring, actually. Guess that’s why I turned to killing people off. Well, on paper at least. LOL When I’m not creating mayhem in my stories, I’m either off riding my Harley or working in the flower beds. I live in Northeastern Oklahoma, have a wonderfully supportive husband, and all of my children are furry with four legs (2 dogs and 3 cats). Needless to say the critters rule the roost.

Jackie: Tell us about your work and the books you have available for us to buy.

Linda: My first book, GRAVE SECRETS, was recently released by The Wild Rose Press. I’m so grateful I had an editor to point out all the places where my ‘perfect work of fiction’ needed to be fixed. I have a new appreciation for all they do for authors.

Sara Adams is desperately searching for her missing baby; Morgan Daniels is trying to prove she's a murderer. Will the remains of an infant in her husband's grave prove either of them right? Or will they find there's more than one explanation?

Fate has thrown them together, but will they survive the encounter?

~~~~~~



 

My latest novella, SHATTERED PROMISES in the anthology ROMANCE – THE SPICE OF LIFE, has just been released, by DIVA Press. All of the stories are romance, but each depicts a different sub-genre. My subgenre is suspense. As an extra bonus, each story includes a delicious tried and true recipe. One reason I especially love this book is that not all of the hero’s and heroine’s are in their 20’s or 30’s. Love can (and does) bloom at any stage of life.

Shattered Promises -Novella by Linda Trout

Miranda Johnson never expected to see Wade Malone again--not in this life. But after a deadly plane crash reunites them, these former lovers will need to stay two steps ahead of a kidnapper to rekindle their love and mend shattered promises.

I enjoy interacting with readers and you can find me on my website at: http://www.LindaTrout.com or reach me at LindaTrout@peoplepc.com

Both of my books are listed on Amazon and are available in either print or digital format.

Grave Secrets: http://tinyurl.com/bvpysqf

Romance – The Spice of Life:  http://tinyurl.com/at64tgf

I loved visiting with you today and appreciate the opportunity to connect with your readers.

Linda Trout

Speaking my mind

A friend of mine, over the past few years, has been writing his memoirs, which have now been published.  But when I say writing, he’s been doing it in a way that I don’t think I could.  He’s been dictating them into the computer using a voice activation programme (or whatever they’re called). Nevertheless, just to prove my point, I’m going to try dictating this to see what sort of product emerges.

The trouble with talking is that it moves too quickly.  You don’t have time to balance the sentence, structure the argument – or rather, even if you think very carefully before you speak, what you say is not part of a larger batch of words, but simply something separate, independent, expressed in the instant of saying it.  That’s OK when you’re doing workshops or working from notes because then you’re interacting with other people or things and that gives you a different sort of continuity. But when you’re sitting here as I am now with a blank mind and no idea where I want to go with this, all it produces is garbage. In fact, it actually brings home the immediacy of speech.  That seems a strange thing to say, but the act of speaking is such an instantaneous thing that, once you’ve spoken the sentence, you’re left with silence, just a blank, and nothing to link to what you’ve just said.  With writing, it’s different.  The words lie on the screen or page in front of you, part of something that’s unfinished and which you can juggle around, delete or add to.  It’s only finished and delivered when you’ve shaped the whole thing the way you want it to look and sound.  As I’m saying these words, they’re just vanishing and only tenuously linking with what’s gone before.

You wouldn’t believe how painfully slow this process is.  I could have written more than this far more quickly than I’m speaking it (and it would have made more sense).

I’ve had enough of this. I’ve switched off the mic and reverted (gratefully) to the keyboard. It was the repetitious nature of what I was saying that got me in the end. I had no idea whether it was leading anywhere or even if it was making any sense. I always read my stuff aloud when I’ve finished writing it and that always highlights stylistic as well as other flaws. But there’s a disjunction in dictating – it’s just regurgitating lumps of words which don’t necessarily relate to those around them.

I’d love to hear if any of you have tried dictating and, if so, how successful or satisfying you found it to be. It’s so utterly different that I’m still not sure how to define it. (The above attempt was woeful.) In a way it’s the difference between thinking in sentences and thinking in paragraphs. (I look forward to the day when I’ll start thinking in novels.)

(And also to the day that I don’t use quite so many brackets.)

Pet Wisdom

 By Mark W. Danielson

For humans, life can be stressful.  Most of us have too many things to do and never enough time or money to do them.  But to our dogs like Maxx, waking up is blissful.  This is one reason we love them so much.

For us, life has been trying ever since we listed our Colorado house last spring.  Selling it quickly was a blessing, but building our dream home has been a challenge.  The recession made our loan process extremely difficult, and there always seems to be some new problem in seeing our plans come to fruition.  Add to this our sometimes inability to communicate via cell phones or Internet due to service-related problems and our frustration increases.  My job takes me on the road for a week or more at a time, which frequently compounds our problems, but all our little dog cares about is curling up to us on the sofa.  Regardless of whatever pressing issues we may face, Maxx always wakes up smiling, wagging his tail, telling us everything’s alright.  Thank God we have him.  No doubt, pets like him are why dog is God spelled backwards.  (Cat lovers forgive me, but this is a dog article.  Your pets are equally important.)

Having the holidays behind us gives us more reason to learn about love from our beloved companions.  If we could see the world as they see it, our problems would seem smaller and our happiness would be greater.  With 2013 upon us we should realize that most of our stress is self-induced, so we should do all we can to minimize it.  Let’s only worry about things we can control and take pleasure in the meaning of Christmas by treating people as we wish to be treated.    

Clearly, none of these things come easy to humans, but they do to our pampered pets whose only mission in life is to love and spread joy.  I hope your pet’s hearts touch each of you as we all welcome the new year. 

I'm Blogging With A Little Help From My Friends

Happy Healthy 2013 from snowy Cape Cod. One of my New Year's resolutions is to remember to post twice a month on Murderous Musings. Well, I'll try! Chester Campbell recently invited me to participate in The Big Blog Hop -- a round robin blog tagging one or several authors, who are given the opportunity to promote their work. But therein lies the rub -- it's a blog. I don't have my own blog. At least, I don't think I do. Unless I have one and forgot. Nah, not possible. Anyway, I thought and thought about how I could participate in this without starting a brand new blog that nobody would find and read. I decided that what I needed was someone who'd host me as a guest blogger on their own page. Someone who already had some followers. And, believe it or not, I found someone. So this coming Wednesday I'll be blogging on the National Association of Baby Boomer Women. www.nabbw.com/blog.The organization has several thousand members, and I'm proud to be one of them. Hope some of them check out the blog site that day. Hope you will too!

The Jesuit Missions

by Leighton Gage

In the middle years of the 16th century, when this gentleman, Ignatius de Loyola, founded the Jesuit Order, the more venerable Augustinians (an order founded in the 5^th Century), Benedictines, (in the 6^th) and Franciscans (in the 13^th) already had a long-established lock on many of the activities of the Roman Catholic Church.

Opportunities in Europe being limited, the Jesuits sought to grow their power and influence by turning to the Evangelization of the Orient and the New World – and they quickly became known for their willingness to go anywhere, and suffer extreme privation, to propagate The Faith.

This is a painting of one of those intrepid Jesuits of the period. Not quite what you'd expect of a priest, is it?

By 1541, they were established in India.

By 1551 there were making inroads into Japan.

And in 1554, the Jesuit priests Manuel de Nóbrega (on the stamp above) and José de Anchieta (in the portrait below) were able to celebrate mass in their newly-constructed collegio.

This is how it looks today:

And it is now situated in the heart of this city, modern São Paulo:

Half a century later, in 1606, the first of South America’s remarkable Jesuit missions was constructed across the border in what is now Paraguay.

It was a remarkable success.

And similar establishments soon sprouted up throughout the region.

Referred to by the priests as “indian reductions” (reducciones de indios), because they reduced the amount of land occupied by the Guarani Indians and drew the tribesmen  into settlements where they could more easily be converted, taxed and governed, the missions grew and flourished.

Jungle utopias or theocratic regimes of terror?

That depended upon whom you were talking to.

The Guarani undoubtedly benefited to a certain extent, because the Jesuits protected them from colonists who were always trying to enslave them.

But, it’s questionable if they wouldn’t have been much better off if both the colonists and the Jesuits had never come at all.

The Guarani were natural craftsman, and soon became skilled in construction and artistic techniques. The photo above shows an actual interior from one of the few churches surviving from that time.

And here you have it, photographed from the outside.

Over the course of the next 180 years, the Guaranis and their Jesuit mentors generated a rich heritage of churches, religious sculptures and paintings.

But, in time, the royal governments back in Europe began to perceive the missions as an impediment to progress. They cared less about the propagation of the faith than they did about exploiting the land and its resources. And they wanted to exploit it for them, not for the greater glory of the Roman Catholic Church.

Ultimately, the Jesuits were forced to abandon the lands ruled by Spain and Portugual.

For more in-depth information about how it came about, go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_the_Society_of_Jesus

After the Jesuits left (1767) the missions slowly died out, becoming victims of slave raids or being absorbed into European society.

Some have continued to be inhabited as towns.

Most have been abandoned and remain only as ruins. 

The feature film The Mission, with Robert de Niro, gave Hollywood’s version of the story back in 1986.

And won a prize at Cannes.

If you’ve never seen it, you might enjoy watching the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj-AKSwYS-I

The waterfalls behind two of the scenes are at Iguaçu on the border between Argentina and Brazil and very near the border with Paraguay.

The region is referred to as the TBA (Tri-Border Area) and it plays a considerable role in the latest Mario Silva investigation, PERFECT HATRED.

The book launches in North America on the 18th of February.

The Personal Touch

by Jaden Terrell

I recently read a blog post by Jane Friedman. It's about ways to immediately improve your your book marketing efforts. If you're a published or aspiring writer and you're not familiar with Jane's blog, you should check her out. I don't think you'll be sorry you did--unless you spend the whole day reading the archives and forget to do the laundry or write that looming chapter of your next opus.

The premise of the article is that it's personal connections that help drive book sales. How many of us click on those ads that pop up on the Facebook sidebar? Not so many. But how many of us have bought books from authors we've met at conferences, on newslists, or on social media sites? More, I suspect. And how many have bought books from authors we've become friends with, either online or off? Does that number get higher still?

I'm not saying (and neither is Jane) that we should cultivate "friendships" for the sake of selling books. That's just...skeazy. I'm just saying that maybe the best thing we can do for our book sales is not shouting through bullhorns or slipping copies into the shopping carts (or pocketbooks) of strangers, but rather by being genuinely interested in people and cultivating real, meaningful relationships. Some of the people we get to know will be interested in what we write, and others won't, but if we've made a real friend or managed to help someone else, we come out winners anyway.

This blog sort of proves the point. Leighton and Mark take us vicariously on their travels. Ben keeps us up-to-date on weapons for our sleuths. Bill brightens our days with his humor. Jean shares her delightful interviews. Carola gives us a charming look at life in Cornwall and shares photos of her remarkable garden. And on, and on, and on. Thank you all for your generosity.

Reading Jane's article was a tremendous relief to me, because I'm a terrible sales person. I mean, terrible. When I was in college, I had two extremely short-lived sales jobs. One was selling Avon and the other was selling encyclopedias. They were great encyclopedias too, some of the most beautiful books I'd ever seen, with stunning color photographs and full-color transparencies. I would have bought a set myself if I could have afforded one. I get chills just thinking about them. Can you tell I really, really loved those encyclopedias?

Guess how many I sold. Not one. In both cases (Avon and encyclopedias), I had no trouble knocking on people's doors. I had some delightful conversations, some of which lasted for hours. Everyone admired the books. Everyone took a copy of the Avon catalog. I never sold so much as a single lipstick. So you can see why the marketing aspect of this writing business sometimes makes me break out in metaphorical hives.

But making connections with people I like and trying to promote fellow authors whose work I admire . . . that I can do.

For the Birds

Carola Dunn

The Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count started as an alternative to a holiday tradition: The day after Christmas men would go out with their guns and see who could bring back the largest number of dead birds and animals.

Around the turn of the 20th century, scientists and others were beginning to notice a decline in bird populations. Frank Chapman, an ornithologist and a member of the young Audubon Society, named after the painter and naturalist John James Audubon, proposed that fellow-members should instead count birds without killing them. The first year, he was joined by 25 others, from Toronto to Pacific Grove, who counted about 90 species between them.

Audubon's painting of Passenger Pigeons, now long extinct though once their flocks darkened the skies of North America.

These days, local groups choose a day between December 14 and January 5. Singly or in groups, people count the birds in their gardens and yards, when they walk the dog, in farms, parks local and national, streets, and parking lots (the last being the main habitat of the Brewer's Blackbird, as far as I can see). Then they report their sightings to a local leader, who reports in turn to the Audubon Society. The numbers give a continent-wide picture of the bird population.

I've been doing the Bird Count for several years. I have feeders in my back yard, but what always amazes me is how many species I see on The Day, just because I'm concentrating and making the effort to identify them. Almost every year I see a species new to me.

Townsend's Warbler

This year my count includes dark-eyed juncos, fox sparrows, pine siskins, bushtits, goldfinches, housefinches, Townsend's warblers, both black-capped and chestnut-backed chickadees, robins, starlings, house sparrows, white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, a spotted towhee, a varied thrush, a downy woodpecker, a Northern flicker, a scrub jay,  a yellow-rumped warbler, an osprey (heard, not seen) and a sharp-shinned hawk.

Varied Thrush

I saw all these while sitting at my computer and peering out of the window, standing up with the binoculars now and then. The hawk made me very nervous, first swooping on the little birds around the feeders, then sitting still in the birch, not a feather moving, waiting for the next opportunity. It was chased off, prey-less, by a pair of squirrels.

Sharp-shinned Hawk

If you're interested in having a go next year, this is the place to go: http://birds.audubon.org/get-involved-christmas-bird-count-find-count-near-you

The Great Backyard Bird Count is another chance to be involved, spending as much time or as little as you want:

http://birds.audubon.org/great-backyard-bird-count   

[I wish I could tell you that I took these wonderful pics, but I found them online, as free-use images.]