Murder on Match Day - A Guest Post by Diane Weiner

This month, Fabulous Florida Writers is pleased to welcome guest blogger Diane Weiner.  Weiner is a former teacher turned mystery writer who is the author of ten Susan Wiles Schoolhouse Mysteries and three Sugarberry Falls Mysteries. She was our featured author on March 2, 2018.

Murder is Medical, the tenth book in my Susan Wiles Schoolhouse Mysteries, begins with retired teacher turned sleuth Susan Wiles attending her son’s Match Day ceremony in St. Louis. Yes, this is based on real life experience. My husband and I flew to St. Louis last spring to attend our son’s ceremony at Washington University Medical School. It’s an exciting day for fourth year medical students and their families—in my opinion, even more so than graduation.

Let me explain Match Day. When you finish medical school you’re a doctor, but you’re not really a doctor. You have to do more training to become the specific type of doctor you want to be. This training is called residency. Senior year of medical school is spent applying and hopefully interviewing at hospitals where you wish to do your residency. Medical students rank their choices, and the residency programs rank their applicants.

If two students are a couple, and are graduating and heading to residency at the same time, they can ask for a “couples match” to end up in the same hospital or city. My son and his girlfriend did this and are doing their residencies together in St. Louis. She is specializing in emergency medicine, and my son is specializing in radiology. In Murder is Medical, Cara and Evan are based on my son and his hopefully one day, fiancée. Susan wants the engagement to happen as much as I do!

Medical schools download a top-secret, computer generated list matching the students to programs and print out a letter for each student. Each letter goes into a sealed envelope which cannot be opened until noon on Match Day. Students all over the U.S. open their envelopes at the same time, at noon, on a Friday in the middle of March. Some schools make this a public event (i.e.: Wash U), while others have students open their letters privately.

This event sparked an idea. In my book, a professor has a reception at his home following Match Day. When he dies right as he’s making a toast, Susan can’t help getting involved. Her detective daughter is there also, and before flying home, introduces Susan to Detective Jazmin Lowe, and her mother, Valerie.

Valerie and Susan are quite the dynamic duo and work together to “help” the police. A medical crisis involving Susan’s husband, Mike, keeps them in town longer than expected, and Susan is up for a distraction. My publisher and I liked the character of Valerie so much that she may be visiting Westbrook, New York to team up with Susan again in a future book.

Susan Wiles is a strong, smart, character who sometimes is too fearless for her own good. Her brave front disintegrates whenever her family is threatened, not just by the ‘bad guys,’ but by things that can happen to us all as we progress along life’s course. She battles Type 2 diabetes, and constantly struggles with her weight. In Murder is Medical, her husband has a major, life-threatening health crisis which brings forward Susan’s paralyzing fear of losing him as well as her financial concerns. If Mike can’t work, how will they pay the bills?

While this is book 10 in the series, this mystery happens away from the home setting of Westbrook, New York (a small town 90 miles or so north of NYC), so the reader won’t feel lost if it is read out of sequence. Throughout the series, Susan butts heads with her detective daughter, Lynette as she gets involved in school related crimes. After all, Susan was a teacher and offers unique insights as well as inside connections. Hopefully, once you meet Susan Wiles, you’ll want to spend more time with her!

 For more information, visit the author's website at www.dianeweinerauthor.com.

Kathryn Bain - Suspense that Inspires

 It was a challenge from her daughter that set Kathryn J. Bain on the road to writing. This Jacksonville author admits to being an avid TV watcher who enjoyed critiquing shows. “One day, I was watching television with my daughter, and I said, ‘This could make it much better,’” she recalls. “My daughter told me, ‘You always say that – now do it!’” So Bain did. The result is a body of work she describes as “clean fiction with an edge.”

This Idaho native came to Florida in 1983. “I got sand in my toes and didn’t want to leave,” she says. “I love the Florida winters, the heat and the wonderful people. And it’s great to be able to go from one coast to the other in a day. There’s so much to do.”  One of the things Kathryn decided to do was write what she enjoyed reading the most – a mystery/suspense novel. She took some courses and joined a critique group, and in 2012, she published Breathless, the first in what was to become the Lincolnville Mysteries. Set in the fictional town of Lincolnville, Georgia, Breathless is the story of a woman being stalked and the man who protects and eventually falls in love with her. The novel won a prestigious Royal Palm Literary Award for Inspirational Fiction

For Bain’s next offering, she tried her hand at a novella –  Game of Hearts,  a humorous romance. It was followed by two more novels: Catch Your Breath, (Lincolnville Mysteries #2) and Knight and Day, a stand-alone mystery. Beautiful Imperfection, published in 2013, was a novel with a special meaning. The story of a breast cancer survivor who witnesses a mass murder, Bain wrote it as a tribute to breast cancer survivors. “I wanted women who go through breast cancer to realize just how brave and beautiful they really are,” she says. 

Readers return to Lincolnville for Bain’s next novel, One Last Breath, a story that tackles the subject of child trafficking.  The following three works  – The Visitor, Small Town Terror, and Reunion – are a trio of mystery novellas linked together by a common protagonist - KT Morgan, a mysterious woman who travels alone. Each story exposes a little more about this enigmatic character.

Bain’s next release, Take Her Breath Away, (Book #4 in the Lincolnville series) centers around Rayleene and Ty Davenport, a couple whose relationship has been rocked by infidelity.  When Ty’s life is endangered by a mysterious killer, Rayleene must learn if she can trust him again. “Rayleene and Ty had separated in an earlier book, and I wanted to bring them back together,” Bain explains. The inspiration for Ty Davenport is country singer Lee Brice. “Every hero in the Lincolnville series is based on a country singer,” Bain says. “For Breathless,’ it was Toby Keith; for Catch Your Breath, Chris Young; and George Strait for One Last Breath. The female characters are made up.”

Bain’s next work was a real departure. The Chain We Forge was a contemporary version of Bain’s favorite Christmas story, “A Christmas Carol.”  In 2018, she published 30 in 30, a short book filled with ideas on blessing others. She has recently finished another suspense book scheduled for release in 2019. Titled Fade to the Edge, it tells of a mother's search for her missing seven-year-old son. When her soon-to-be ex-husband ends up dead, she has no choice but to take the law into her own hands and find her child herself. Bain is currently working on a middle-grade ghost story, Seven Sisters Road,  about some teens who get stuck on Seven Sisters Road in Nebraska City – a road said to be haunted.

While Bain’s works are characterized as Christian fiction, she believes that there are elements that set her stories apart. “I think my books are more realistic than most Christian fiction,” she says. “And even though I write clean psychological suspense, I try to make it edge-of-your-seat suspense too.” She wants readers to come away from her books feeling entertained and inspired. “My books deal with forgiveness. I want people to realize we all make mistakes, and that’s fine. I want them to be able to forgive themselves."

She also hopes her books will keep readers up all night.

For more information, visit the author’s website at www.kathrynjbain.com

             

                

Keeping Pain in the Past - A Guest Post by Dr. Christopher Cortman

This month, Fabulous Florida Writers is pleased to welcome guest blogger, Dr. Christopher Cortman. Dr, Cortman, a licensed psychologist and a much-sought-after speaker, has facilitated more than 60,000 hours of psychotherapy, and has provided psychological consultation at five hospitals in the Sarasota/Venice area.He is the co-creator of a youth prevention and wellness program called "The Social Black Belt" and the co-author of Your Mind - An Owner's Manual for a Better Life and Take Control of Your Anxiety. Dr. Cortman was one of our featured writers on January 17, 2012.

 

What if you thought you had stumbled upon something that professionals in your field didn’t understand, appreciate or implement? What if you had been applying your discovery in quiet obscurity for decades, while people in your profession fumbled with lesser strategies and techniques, with disappointing results? What if you honestly and humbly believed that your insights could substantially reduce suffering in the world? And when you studied your own results, you knew you were not being grandiose or ridiculous, and that your strategies seemed to work consistently. What would you do?

I decided that writing a book would be the best strategy. My book, Keep Pain in the Past, is not for my fellow psychologists, but for the layperson, especially people still suffering from the ravages of the Vietnam War fifty years ago, grandpa’s drunken groping, or the car accident that left someone dead in the middle of the road.

 

I have treated these cases and many more like them. In fact, I have treated hundreds of such cases over more than three decades, totaling over 70,000 hours of psychotherapy. And I can tell you from experience that people are capable of recovering from significant trauma and loss by following a simple (to understand) formula, when combined with the courage to face and say goodbye to the trauma. This is so without the need to apply some of today’s more popular treatment strategies, including eye-movement desensitization, tapping, or repeated and prolonged exposure to the trauma. Traumas and horrors that have endured decades are often put to rest in only one session of treatment.

 

There are two reasons that people stay stuck in their traumas. First, society tell us that that “time heals all wounds.” Even misinformed mental health professionals perpetuate this inaccurate and destructive adage. As a result, people expect to "get better over time," and sometimes do, but never completely heal. Second, people avoid the pain of their experiences. As a hospitalized Vietnam veteran recently told me when asked about his military service, "I was in Nam and we don’t talk about that." Unfortunately, this self-protective avoidance keeps the trauma-sufferer hopelessly mired in the quicksand of life’s very worst moments. And isn’t his avoidance understandable? Why would anyone meditate on their own personal horror show, if they could avoid it? Do we really need to relive the anguish again and again?

The purpose of my book, Keep Pain in the Past, is to change all of this, forever. Psychology is getting closer. Experts understand that healing requires exposure to the traumatic material, but something is still missing: The trauma / grief sufferer must not only face the ugly experience head-on but also must actively release or say goodbye to the trauma, as if they no longer need it. Without experiencing the emotions that accompany the trauma, and the willingness to accept the reality of the incident (including the changes that have been brought about as a result of the trauma) there will be no healing. If they have the willingness to remember (face) the horror, feel the accompanying emotions, express and release the pain and accept the reality, they can reframe and say goodbye to it.

 

Allow me one example: Sarah was about to fall into slumber in her apartment one night when she was awakened by a knife-wielding, masked man. The intruder cut Sarah 14 times and left her for dead. She miraculously survived and learned weeks later that the masked man was someone she dated. Her reactions featured the typical symptoms of PTSD, including revisiting specific aspects of the scene in her thoughts and nightmares, avoiding reminders of the event, not sleeping alone, not sleeping in the dark, not trusting men (especially romantically), and believing that life could ever be normal again.  
Sarah invested in weekly therapy in an effort to process all aspects of the trauma. But the most powerful contribution to her healing was a guided imagery session I conducted with her one day, where she could watch the entire attack (as if on a movie screen) and enter the episode at the end to provide comfort and rescue to herself. We promptly took the DVD of that horror movie and broke it into pieces, assuring her that she was finished with this episode and never needed to see it again. This allowed her to finish her trauma so as to no longer feel it’s intrusions into her life.

Today, Sarah is now happily married and speaks of the incident in schools to empower girls in regard to recovery, self-protection, and resilience.

 

Sarah’s nightmare is likely worse than anything most of us will ever go through. The bottom line is this: There was hope and healing for Sarah. And there is hope and healing for you.

 

Imagine you stumbled upon that.


For more information, visit Dr. Cortman's website at www.SRQshrink.com

Gwenn Mayo and Sarah Glenn - Sisters in Crime

“Synergy” is defined as the creation of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Sarah Glenn and Gwen Mayo, two Safety Harbor writers, have managed to accomplish this in Murder on the Mullet Express, a mystery that takes readers back to the early days of Homosassa, Florida.

The two Kentucky natives have long shared an interest in writing. Graduates of the University of Kentucky, Glenn earned a degree in journalism and Mayo attended college on a poetry fellowship. After careers that included working the reports desk for the police department in Lexington, Kentucky (Glenn) and a stint as a railroad engineer, one of the last to be certified on steam locomotives (Mayo), the women tried their hands at writing. Mayo wrote a story that was accepted for a mystery anthology. The main character was so well-received that Mayo decided to feature her in a novel, and in 2010, Circle of Dishonor became the first in her Nessa Donnelly mystery series. It was followed by Concealed in Ash a sequel which introduced Professor Percival Pettijohn, a character who would re-emerge in Murder on the Mullet Express.

 Glenn’s initial work was quite different. All This and Family Too (2011) is the comedic tale of a vampire who escapes from North Carolina to a gated community in California and discovers that the Home Owner’s Association is worse than any vampire hunter could ever be.  

The decision to co-write a novel came about after the two women moved to Florida. They decided to visit Homosassa to see the manatees and became fascinated with its colorful history.  “When the land was being sold, there were so many people coming down that the railroad made an embargo and people had to take the train to Jacksonville and be driven to Homosassa,” Glenn says “I wondered what would happen if someone fell out of a car dead. It would be the ultimate locked room mystery.” It also served as the basis for Murder on the Mullet Express. 

One of the elements that sets the book apart is its quirky characters. “We wanted to put together all the characters you’d find in a land deal with the swindlers, schemes and skullduggery,” Glenn explains. The two female protagonists, Cornelia Pettijohn and Teddy Lawless, were inspired by one of Glenn’s ancestors. “She was a nurse who’d been gassed in WWI,” Glenn says. “She had a very strong personality and was stubborn and staunchly moral.” The two writers knew from the beginning that Professor Pettijohn would be part of the cast. “I became totally enchanted with the professor when I was editing Concealed in Ash,” Glenn recalls. “The characters fell in together perfectly and created a whole new thing,” Mayo adds.

While some writers find it difficult to collaborate, Mayo and Glenn relished the process. “Our biggest challenge was our very different writing styles,” Glenn explains. “Gwen starts at the beginning and writes in order straight to the end. I start with the strongest scenes in my head and then establish a timeline and tie everything together, so chronology can sometimes be a problem.” But they found that co-writing gave them one distinct advantage. “Most of the dialogue came from playing off each other,” Glenn says. “That made writing it a lot easier.”

Glenn is currently busy selecting stories for Strangely Funny VI, an annual anthology that brings supernatural and humor together, and Mayo is working on a third Nessa Donnelly novel. But Mayo and Glenn enjoyed co-writing so much that they’ve decided to do it again in a sequel set closer to home. Scheduled for release in 2019, Murder at the Million Dollar Pier centers around the building of the pier in St. Petersburg in 1926. It opens at the Vinoy and involves Tampa gangsters and the Chicago mob. “You will see a few gangsters, but the story focuses more on how secrets from the past can change lives,” Glenn says. She and Mayo concur that by writing together, they create something unique. “It blends Sarah’s humor with my love of history, and the voice isn’t mine or Sarah’s – it’s like the two combined,” Mayo says. “I love that aspect.”  According to Glenn, “Other writers say ‘You wrote a book together and didn’t kill each other?’ The answer is yes.”

For more information, visit the authors’ websites at www.gwenmayo.com and www.sarahglenn.com.