Book Banter
Susie Black’s Newsletter
Edition 4
Hello! I’m Susie Black. I write humorous cozy mysteries. Thanks for taking a peek at my monthly newsletter. I discuss my writing, books, and anything else that piques my interest.
In this edition:
A Bit About Me
What I’ve Been Reading
What I’ve Been Writing
A Bit About Me: How I Develop My Characters
By nature, I am a people person, so I begin by developing characters when planning a story. Once the characters are created, the plot is built around them, not the reverse. So, how do I develop my characters? All my characters are based on people I have encountered in my career as a ladies’ swimwear sales exec. I start with the characteristics, quirks, traits, and personalities of real people as the foundation. Then I build upon them to create the cast members I want in the tale. Basing my characters on people I know has given my cast a ring of authenticity. That believability has translated into characters readers root for or boo at, but either way, invest in.
To illustrate my character development technique, I’ll detail how I created Holly Schlivnik, the protagonist of the Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series. Holly Schlivnik is based on me. She is the me I always wanted to be and more. She is fearless, loyal to a fault, and smart.
Holly is infused with me in every respect- from her physical description to her personality to her life experiences, career, family, friends, car she drives, and where she lives.
Physical Description:
Holly is as slim as I am and is my height- 4 feet 8 inches to be exact. I have made the consequences of her height, lack of it, a key component of the messes she gets herself into and the adjustments she’s had to make in her everyday life to accommodate her height. These situations add to her personality and translate into some of the funniest schticks of the series. She has brown eyes and short brown hair like mine.
Personality:
Like me, she is funny, sarcastic, stubborn, wise-cracking, and irreverent.
Idiosyncrasies and inherited traits:
I inherited a fear of death from my maternal grandmother that we both overcompensated with the nervous habit of laughing, often inappropriately. I incorporated this idiosyncrasy into Holly’s personality and made it one of the main characteristics that identify her. I also inherited my grandmother’s rapier wit and a love of perfume and jewelry. I blended these into Holly’s personality as well.
Family: My dad was a ladies’ apparel manufacturer’s representative, and I started my career working for him, as did Holly’s dad. I got into the rag biz by accident, and so did Holly. Holly also started her apparel career working for her father. My parents were complete opposites who had a very successful marriage, and so are Holly’s. Holly’s parents, her bigger-than-life maternal grandmother, and siblings were all based on my family.
Religion: Like me, Holly is Jewish, and the traditions and history are woven throughout the series, adding to the richness and authenticity of each story.
Love Life: While I lived in the South, I did have two men in my life, one of whom I introduced as a continuing character and love interest for Holly. Unlike Holly, I have never had a personal relationship with a police detective.
Pets: Sigmund Freud, Holly’s wildly popular standard poodle/psychiatrist and amateur sleuth, is based on the personalities of my own two springer spaniels. While he can’t talk, like my two hounds, Siggie gets his point across. He shakes his head yes and no, rolls his eyes, barks if he disagrees with Holly, and has been known to pull her in the opposite direction if he doesn’t think Holly is going the right way.
Health and habits: To keep my girlish figure, I am a dedicated walker. I walk four miles every day- and have made Holly’s daily walks with Sigmund to the Washington Street Pier an important part of her routine. “Pop,” the senior citizen fisherman she has befriended and shares morning coffee with on the pier, has helped her solve several murders.
Hobbies: I have been an avid stamp collector since my pre-teen years. In book number six, which was recently released, it is revealed that Holly is a stamp collector. She encounters someone tangentially involved in a murder while at her stamp dealer’s store.
Car: I have owned convertible cars throughout my driving career. I incorporated my love of convertibles into my stories by having Holly drive a bubblegum pink classic convertible passed down to her by her mother.
Home: I lived on a houseboat in Marina del Rey for ten years. I loved living on the water in a houseboat. I amalgamated that into the series by having Holly live on a houseboat in Marina del Rey, California. I have used Holly’s houseboat and marina locale as an integral part of Holly’s personality, as well as the site of her adventures and misadventures as an amateur sleuth.
Age: Holly is on the shady side of her twenties when she is promoted from a sales rep to a management position. This is the same age when I made the leap from sales rep to executive management.
Friends and colleagues: Like me, Holly is in a traditionally male-dominated industry and is one of the very few females in a management position. I surrounded her with a group of female professional colleagues and friends who supported and mentored her like the ones I was fortunate enough to have had do the same for me. The Yentas are based on that group of wonderful women.
Career:
Holly is the same successful ladies’ swimwear sales exec based in the Los Angeles apparel center as I am.
Employment: Ditzy Swimwear and Mermaid Swimwear are based on two swimwear companies I worked for.
I have created a fictionalized me that has been fun to bring to life. Fortunately, unlike Holly Schlivnik, I have never discovered a murdered person or hunted down a killer…at least, not yet!
What I’ve Been Reading:
If I had to choose one genre I most like to read, I’d pick the same one I write in: Cozy Mysteries. Not only do I enjoy reading them, but as a cozy mystery author, I am also always interested in seeing how other authors in my genre construct their plots…and of course, I am trying to figure out whodunit! Right now, I am reading Birds, Puppies, and Murder, book four in the fabulous Chocolate Martini Sisters Mystery Series, written by the talented team of Joyce Proell and Brenda Whiteside. This is one of my all-time favorite series.
Here’s a blurb to whet your appetite:
Lost puppies, endangered birds…
The sisters are bird dogs on a murder most fowl.
The sisters are thriving like mountain sage in an Arizona autumn. Nicole’s yoga business is gaining a foothold in Wyatt. Emma’s first mystery novel is scheduled for release. But a proposed, expansive building project in the pristine area of the bird sanctuary has the small town community in an uproar. It’s Environmentalists versus Big Business, and the sisters are caught in the crossfire. When one of Nic’s yoga students is found dead near the planned resort, the amateur sleuths are back on the trail of a killer. Who has the most to gain from her death—the morally challenged developer, the money-grubbing boyfriend, her jealous brother, a nasty neighbor, or a co-worker with dark secrets? And where has Skittles, the dog, gone? While the Chocolate Martini Sisters sort through the litany of villains, they’re leaving no mystery unsolved. The stakes are escalating, sending the sisters down divergent paths that converge at a dangerous intersection. As they unsnarl the tangled mysteries, will they expose the murderer before the killer finds a way to silence them?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239470579-birds-puppies-and-murder?ac=1&fro
What I’m Writing:
After multiple readers’ continuous nagging…er, requesting, I finally locked myself in the writing cave and started the first draft of The Case of the Dead Drug Dealer, book two in the Hannah White Mystery Series. Fingers crossed, look for this one to be released before the end of this year.
Here’s a blurb to whet your appetite:
Terry Newman’s dad, a Chemistry teacher at affluent Encino High School, enlists his daughter’s friend, Encino High School Newspaper Investigative Reporter Hannah White’s help to promote an anti-drugs campaign by way of an exposé in the school paper on drug use at the school after Mr. Newman’s son gets hooked on drugs. He enters rehab, but goes right back to taking drugs when he is released. Hannah agrees to do a series on drugs at the high school, and her investigation leads the intrepid journalist into the dark world of drugs and danger.
Here’s an Excerpt: The next morning, I drove Nana’s huge white four-door sedan into the half-empty student parking lot next to the football field at Encino High School. I slid the car into the space two down from tall, gangly Julie Jacobs as she pulled her spindly, long legs out of her bright blue Vee-Dub bug.
Julie lived down the street from my house and was a year ahead of me in school. She wore her black, stick-straight hair in a shoulder-length blunt cut, so it framed her oval-shaped face. Her pale skin is a translucent white highlighted by wide-set dark chocolate eyes, giving her a perpetually surprised expression, as if life were one big secret and hers alone to tell.
She waited for me to extract myself from the cavernous cab of Nana’s car. “Are you sure you don’t want to trade cars?” Beanpole-thin Julie is at least six inches taller than me, and I had to bend back to look up at her. Here’s another one of life’s twisted ironies. “I’d gladly swap you out in a minute, but I highly doubt that my grandmother will appreciate my trading her car.” I pointed to Julie’s blue bug. “She’d never get all the groceries into your dinky trunk.”
We walked on the path from the parking lot leading into the main campus. Julie took a camera out of her messenger bag and stopped when we got to the football practice field. She aimed the camera at the Varsity squad’s early scrimmage and shot a half dozen pictures.
I said, “Jules, did you recently become a football fan, or are you dating one of the players and want to be supportive?”
She wrinkled her nose and snorted a laugh. “Hardly.” She held up the camera. “I’m taking photography this semester. This is for an assignment to tell stories about subjects we’re unfamiliar with through photographs.”
“Are you taking the class to fill an elective requirement or are you a shutterbug?”
“I took it to fill an elective requirement, but now that I’m in it, I love it.”
“What do you love about it?”
“Capturing a moment in time for all time. And it’s fun to catch people off-guard.” She aimed the camera at me, and I stuck my tongue out. She said, “You’d be surprised what stories a photograph can tell.”
“Do you have a portfolio?”
“Yeah, why?’
“Mr. Kaufman, the journalism faculty advisor, has been talking about adding a photographer to the Clarion staff. Would you be interested? I could set up a meeting between you, Mr. Kaufman, and Jodine McPherson, our editor-in-chief.”
Julie pointed to the practice field. “I dunno, Hannah. I don’t see myself taking pictures of a bunch of sweaty boys tackling one another, fighting over a ball.”
“It wouldn’t be just for athletic events.”
She scoffed. “Shooting photos of the homecoming King and Queen isn’t the moment I want to capture for all time.”
I said, “Not all the stories we cover are fluff pieces. I’m working on a story right now that might end up being the most important one I’ll ever report on. And for this piece, a picture would be worth a thousand words.”
“What’s the story about?”
“Drug use at Encino High.”
An insane idea popped into my head. Julie Jacobs has this effect on me. Last semester, I was investigating Coach Bixby’s murder and suspected Billy Beaumont, the Auto Shop teacher, as the killer. Julie was one of several girls taking Auto Shop. She somehow managed to get a key to the Auto Shop Complex. Julie and I snuck into the building before dawn to search for clues. We had to jump into the trunk of the shop car to hide when the night watchman opened the complex door while we were looking for evidence.
Julie asked, “And how do photos come into play?” She giggled. “You planning on photographing drug deals going down?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah.” I pointed to her camera. “And I don’t know anyone crazier than me, but you to jump at the chance.” I grinned. “You game for another Hannah White adventure?”
Julie wiggled her brows. “I’m in.”
Until next month, happy reading.
I can’t wait for the next Hannah White mystery.
Great newsletter!