Inspiration Comes From the Strangest Places by Kim Smith, Author of Buried Angel

Our friend Kim Smith returns today to talk about the latest book in her Shannon Wallace cosy mystery series, Buried Angel.

Shannon Wallace is finding trouble in the most bizarre places these days, but not as bizarre as the ones her sidekick Dwayne Brown is finding. When his friend, Bubba, is found stuffed in a cooler in his flower shop, the hunt is on to find his killer.

Could it be Bubba’s sister who is now his heir, or maybe one of the flower shop guys who worked with Bubba? You can be sure the dreadful duo of Shannon and Dwayne won’t rest until they have helped South Lake’s police department, and the Hispanic hottie investigator, Sal Ramirez, find his man. Or was that woman?


"Inspiration Comes From the Strangest Places" by Kim Smith

It’s interesting to note that when I wrote Buried Angel, I had no idea that some of it would be situated in a cemetery, the least popular place on earth for this author. Cemeteries in the south are pretty cool places, however, and worth noting that they are sometimes set up as historical landmarks due to the famous persons buried in them.

South Lake, Mississippi is a fictional place. I made it up from knowledge of a couple of places near where I live. Likewise, Scott’s Funeral Home and Cemetery is a fictional place from several similar places nearby.

I have used the small cemetery on the corner of two really busy streets, the funeral home in the middle of a small town, the cemetery where my parents are buried, and the funeral home where my mother-in-law was memorialized.

The catalyst that sent me off to write this book was when I was on the way to a doctor’s appointment and ended up behind a hearse. The thing that came to my mind was, why on earth do they put curtains in a hearse? They doll them all up and make them look pretty. For what purpose? It isn’t like the passengers care!

This led to Shannon Wallace and how she would ask that very question and how she would react if she had to work in a cemetery. Followed closely by how Dwayne would react to the exact same thing. As we all know, Dwayne Brown would rather die than be near the dead!

The problem with this scenario was, I had a lot of experience being the bereaved and none being the behind-the-scenes person in such a situation.

So what do you do?

Invent!

This is the neat thing about being a writer. You do not have to have a specific place to write about. Use what you already know. What your memories are about a place or places and embellish on them.

Scott’s cemetery is a very busy place in the book. A lot happens there and my poor characters are subjected to a lot of things there that I pray have never happened in any cemetery or funeral home.

In fact, as research for the book, I made sure that enough of the info was accurate so that the invented parts would seem real.

Believe me, no humans, dead or alive, were injured in the making of this book!

Kim Smith is the hostess for the popular radio show, Introducing WRITERS! radio show on Blog Talk Radio. She is also the author of the zany, Shannon Wallace cozy mystery series available now from Red Rose Publishing. You can visit Kim’s website at www.mkimsmith.com.

You can follow Kim's virtual book tour during the month of January by checking in every weekday at http://virtualbooktours.wordpress.com/

In Pursuit of an Idea by Kim Smith, Author of A Will to Love

We welcome Kim Smith back to The Book Connection today. Her new book is a romance novel titled, A Will to Love.



Benton Jessup wants his bed and breakfast to be successful. He will go to no lengths to insure that it does. But when Kitty Beebe, a famous romance author, arrives at The Inn, his desire for success becomes a struggle of wills with love.






In the Pursuit of an Idea by Kim Smith

Recently, I was out of town on a business trip. No great thing but for the fact that I had horrible trouble with the airlines that was supposed to move me from point A to point B. The long wait times (two different days!) gave me plenty of opportunities to think about situations and writing and what worked and what didn’t.


For most beginning writers, the pursuit of an idea wide enough to carry an entire book is a big deal because many agents and publishers say “make the story universal, make it something that is timeless”. Most beginners (some who are not as well) take this advice seriously. They want to do everything right straight out of the gate.

I know many established, multi-published authors who take the idea that flashes through their mind and keep building on it “off the paper” for extended periods of time. Some have even developed their characters, their settings, or their plot for years in their pre-planning. But, for some of us, this simply won’t work. I happen to be one of these other writers, the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants sorts. This post is not for the writer who can create for extended periods before writing their first word, but rather the ones who cannot.

As I sat in the airport contemplating writing something (anything!) because my heart felt that I had put it off too long trying to make it into something useful not wasted, I remembered William Faulkner.

He is quoted as saying, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him"

So I am here to tout the news that it is okay to write out the idea on paper, not carry it around in our heads, go forward, dive right into the story by writing a few thousand words. It is okay to turn those few thousand into a few thousand more in an attempt to see if it will go anywhere, only to discover that you do not have a story. Yes, I am an advocate of broken beginnings, saggy middles, and books with no hope.

Why, you ask, would I do such a thing? Why would I encourage writers to write anything less than their best, and most well-thought out work? Waste paper, muddle a mind?

Because writers write. That’s what we do, that’s who we are!

Beginning writers (especially) need to keep poking the muse to see what she has to offer up. When we censor our writing mind, and toss out ideas before they have a chance to be developed (because someone says “that won’t work” or “that’s been done before”), we get into a mind-set that hobbles our creativity.

Let that weak idea flow! You may have a short story, not a novel. You may have a character sketch, or a mood piece, not necessarily a short story, but that is perfectly fine. You still have something to write. Something that moves your writing life forward a little bit more than yesterday. Along the way, you will know when it is right, when it is something that can be stretched, or developed, when it will go into a bigger piece of the puzzle, and who better to know such as that? It is your story to tell, your character to develop, your plot to pursue.

After returning from my business trip, I walked the grounds of Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. I smiled when I felt the urge to write hit me. I didn’t tarry either. Maybe ole Will was standing somewhere under one of those huge, old trees in the avenue, waving at me—(laughing, probably) telling me to go, go, go at my fierce determination to wrestle something out in the name of writing. Telling me to be free in my methods, my failures. I had a small amount of success, churning out one small story. Thanks, Will.

Kim Smith is the hostess for the popular radio show, Introducing WRITERS! radio show on Blog Talk Radio. She is also the author of the zany, Shannon Wallace mystery series available now from Red Rose Publishing and also the new romance novel, A Will to Love. You can visit Kim’s website at www.mkimsmith.com.

Mystery Author Kim Smith and Avenging Angel

Today's guest blogger is Kim Smith author of Avenging Angel: A Shannon Wallace Mystery: Book 1

Kim Smith was born in Memphis Tennessee, the youngest of four children. After a short stint in a Northwest Mississippi junior college, during the era of John Grisham’s rise as a lawyer, she gave up educational pursuits to marry and begin family life.

After the birth of her two children, she gave up working outside the home for the more important domestic duties of wife and mother. During those years, she began thinking of stories to entertain herself and pass the time. Before long she started telling her husband about her stories and he assured her she could write a book if she really wanted to. She put the idea away once she landed a job as a network administrator for a small corporation, and together the Smith’s started their own video production company.

Writing was a dream, hidden but not forgotten, and soon Kim began to talk again of trying her hand at it. She played with words, and wrote several poems, one of which was picked up for an anthology.

When she decided to try out her hand at mystery writing, she discovered her true love and niche in the writing journey. She has since had four short stories, and her first mystery novel accepted for publication.

Kim is a member of Sisters in Crime, and EPIC. She still lives in the Mid South region of the United States and is currently working on her second book in the mystery series.

You can visit her website at www.mkimsmith.com.

About the book:

Shannon Wallace is having a bad hair week.

She’s been ditched by her job, dumped by her boyfriend, and implicated in his murder.

When she finds out her very private video collection is missing from the crime scene, it is all out war to find the disks before the cops do. The problem is, the killer has them. And he’s watched them.

Now Shannon’s at the top of his most wanted list.

In this post, one of the potential suspects is interrogating Shannon Wallace to try and get into her head and see what makes her tick:

In the interrogation room waiting area, I watched as they brought in a sexy brunette wearing cut-off shorts and a Purple Wave tee shirt. She looked around at all of us and the questions were evident in her eyes.

“What’s with you?” I asked her. I was pretty sure she was a mistake. The guy had been stabbed. Not a murder of choice for a woman. “You don’t look like you’d kill a flea.”

She made a face. “Gee thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Another fellow, a muscular African American man, nodded at me. “Yeah, they reaching now, ain’t they? I mean she obviously ain’t guilty of murder.”

“You the man’s woman or what?” I asked, conversationally.

She rearranged her butt on the hard plastic chair. “Or what.”

I kept looking at her, waiting for her to answer why she was brought in. She dropped her gaze to the dirty concrete floor.

“I get it. You got caught hanging out around the apartment, and the cops decided to go hard on you.” She was probably the dead dude’s neighbor.

This brought her head up and her eyes flashed like twin blue sapphires. “Oh, you’re good, yes indeed. You think you know everything, but you don’t know squat.”

I couldn’t imagine what had triggered this reaction but determined to find out. “You must be the nosy neighbor caught in the act of checking out the traffic going in and out and the cops got ticked at you.”

She shrugged. “Think what you like.”

Oh yeah. I had finally found the story. “What? You’re a reporter? You stick a mike in the wrong mug?”

She laughed derisively. “Whatever.”

She looked like she might unload some details. I pushed a little harder. “It’s okay, lady. We’re not telling anyone your secrets. For all you know we’re the killers here. Are you a little scared?”

“Not even a little,” she said. I could tell by the way she avoided looking me in the eye that she was lying. Not that the man and me looked very deadly. Not that she would know that.

“So? What got you in here?” I lifted my cuffed hands and waved at the room.

Resolving to admit to the guilty part, she said, “I sort of let myself into the apartment and ran smack into a cop. Apparently, they don’t take to strange people storming onto their crime scenes. “

My pal and I hooted with laughter, maybe a little too long because she frowned. The door to the inner room where police interrogators waited opened and the grumpy Hispanic detective glared out at us. “Wallace, get your ass in here.”

She took a deep breath and hauled up out of the chair. “If either of y’all is the killer, I don’t want to know. But trust me, I have a photographic memory and I will check out the wanted posters before I leave here to see if you are there. See ya in the funny papers,” she said.


WIN PRIZES!!!

The AVENGING ANGEL VIRTUAL BLOG TOUR '09 will officially begin on February 2 and end on February 27. You can visit Kim's blog stops at www.virtualbooktours.wordpress.com in February to find out more about this talented author!

As a special promotion for all our authors, Pump Up Your Book Promotion is giving away a FREE virtual book tour to a published author or a $50 Amazon gift certificate to those not published who comments on our authors' blog stops.