(NOTE: Our blog will be on hiatus for August. Please check back on September 3rd!)
by Kassandra Lamb
A couple weeks ago, I was a guest on Jami Gold’s wonderful blog for writers. I talked about my experiences writing the Kate Huntington mysteries with multiple perspectives, and what I had learned about how to write multiple POVs correctly. For writers, or for readers who’d like a peek behind the scenes regarding how we writers do things, here’s that post.
How To Write Multiple POVs Right
Once upon a time, writing in more than one point of view was a no-no,
unless you were writing romance, and then you were supposed to stick
with just the hero’s and heroine’s POVs. But it’s becoming more common
these days to see stories that include other perspectives, like the
villain’s and/or secondary characters.
There are reasons for doing this, but it can get complicated. So it’s important to figure out how to write multiple POVs right.
Having just completed a ten-book multiple POV series, the subject is
on my mind right now. I’ve been contemplating how I naively started with
multiple POVs without much pre-thought and now I am deftly (or at least
more deftly *grin*) using it for very specific purposes.
So here are some reasons for using multiple POVs and some Do’s and Don’ts for writing it right.
5 Good Reasons to Use Multiple POVs
#1: Character Importance
I’ve learned a lot about how to write multiple POVs, since the first edition of this book.
If you have two characters who are close to equally important to the story, it’s appropriate to show both POVs. This was my reason for this approach in the first book of my series, Multiple Motives. That story is about two platonic friends, and someone seems to have a murderous grudge against both of them. I wanted to show how the adversities they were dealing with strengthened their friendship, so it seemed appropriate to show parts of the story from each perspective.
#2: Plot Logistics
More than one POV also allows you to show what is happening at times and places when the protagonist isn’t present. This was critical in Multiple Motives, because at a point in the story, the two friends are separated; one is in danger and the other is trying to find/rescue him.
The only other way to do that would have
been to have one of the friends “tell” what happened on their side of
things, once the rescue happened—not nearly as powerful as showing what
each is going through in real time.
#3: Necessary Insights into Character Motivations
Multiple POVs also allow for showing the motivations of more than one character’s actions. I ran into this issue with one of my
important secondary characters. Not being inside her head when she came
to a particular decision would have made her actions seem totally out of
character. Again, I could have had her explain her motivation to the
others, but that would not have been nearly as powerful as having the
reader witness her internal struggle.
#4: Contrasting Perspective
A character’s nature (especially their flaws) can be revealed through another character’s perceptions. Nothing illuminates a character better
than the reader seeing them through another person’s eyes, especially
when that is compared to what the character believes about themselves.
In my new release and the last book in the series, Kate is doing something she feels is necessary to protect others, but those close to her have a different opinion about the wisdom of her actions. Their concerns are summarized in a secondary character’s internal dialogue.
“And Kate’s going to meet this guy by herself?” Judith asked, fighting the urge to shake her head. Kate was a brilliant psychologist, but she sure could be stupid sometimes.
#5: Manage Reader Emotions
Multiple POVs can be used to modulate emotional intensity. Most of the time, we want readers to feel
what the characters are feeling, and just as intensely. However,
sometimes this is not desirable.
There are times when we want to back the reader away from the intense emotions.
One is when the emotions may be too overwhelming
for our audience. I can show raw, dark emotions in my romantic suspense
stories, for example, but not in my cozy mysteries (thus the different
pen name). We don’t want our readers to stop reading because they can’t
handle the emotional intensity.
Another time is when intense emotions would slow down the story’s pace too much.
In both cases, showing the character’s
reactions through the eyes of another character can create just the
right amount of distance.
In Multiple Motives, Kate’s
first husband is the murder victim. I show some of her initial shock and
grief through the eyes of her friends and family, both to keep the
story from bogging down and to not overwhelm the reader.
While multiple POVs have these advantages, there are some pitfalls to avoid when using this approach.
For the 7 Do’s and Don’ts on how to write multiple POVs, READ MORE HERE…
We will be on hiatus now for August. Have a wonderful rest of the summer, everyone, and we’ll see you in September!
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
While writing my July 4th novella (which is releasing today, 19 days late, but, hey, it’s still July at least), I stumbled on an interesting and disturbing question. How well do we really know the people we know?
When we meet someone new—a new neighbor, co-worker, friend of a friend we meet at a party—we ask them about themselves. Where are they from, what do they do for a living, etc. And unless their eyeballs are bouncing around like jumping beans or they break out in a cold sweat, we take their answers on face value.
And after we’ve “known” them for a while, we assume we do truly know them, and all the things they’ve told us about themselves become solidified in our minds as fact.
But how do we really know the people we know are telling the truth?
A new employer or landlord will run a background check, or at least check one’s credit, but those we meet socially, we assume they are who and what they say they are.
In A Star-Spangled Mayfair, the mystery the protagonist Marcia (pronounced Mar-see-a, not Marsha) is trying to sort out revolves around her friend, Jess, who runs the local diner. When Jess becomes the prime suspect in her fiancé’s murder, Marcia discovers that the fiancé is not who he said he was.
Then Will Haines, Marcia’s significant other—who also happens to be a police detective—raises the issue of whether they truly know Jess:
“Look,” Will said, “when you think about it, what do we really know about Jess? All we know of her background is what she’s told us, and that’s precious little. She could be a Black-Widow type, on the run from other jurisdictions after knocking off multiple husbands and fiancés.”
I pulled away from him a little. “Will, she’s terrified of fireworks. No way would she have gotten anywhere near where they were actually setting them off, much less pick up one, light it and point it at her fiancé. It’s just ludicrous.”
He shook his head. “And how do you know she’s phobic of fireworks?”
“She–” My body slumped. “She told me so.”
from A Star-Spangled Mayfair, A Marcia Banks and Buddy Mystery, #8
By the end of that scene, Marcia is even questioning if she truly “knows” Will. After all, she’s yet to meet his family.
I don’t have an answer to the question do we really know the people we know. I just found it rather amazing that I’d never really thought about it before. Oh, it’s often a premise in fiction—the character who isn’t what they seem—but in real life, most of us blithely go along assuming everything that everybody has told us about themselves is true.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten you, and myself, all paranoid about our friends and neighbors, here are the details about the book. It wasn’t intended to raise profound questions … mostly it’s just a fun read.
A flamboyant fiancé, a “Mob Killer” Roman candle, a yappy rescue dog, and a bison bull named Tarzan.
A recipe for chaos and calamity for Marcia’s introverted friend, Jess Randall.
When not serving up her to-die-for eggs and biscuits at the Mayfair Diner, Jess just wants to live quietly on their farm. But her fiancé Dan has impulsively offered to host the Mayfair Independence Day Extravaganza.
The day of the big bash, Marcia and her dog Buddy witness a public fight between the couple, and just hours later, Dan is found with a Roman candle through his chest. Was it an accident, or was it murder? And is Jess a killer, as the sheriff’s department believes?
Between dog-training sessions, Marcia feels compelled to investigate, especially when there are signs that the real killer may not be finished… Could Jess be the next target?
Just $0.99 for a limited time! (Goes up to $2.99 later.)
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
One of the joys of being an indie author is that you set your own deadlines; one of the pitfalls is that you set your own deadlines. Or at least, it’s a pitfall for recovering overachievers like myself, who are struggling to ward off “overachiever angst” and maintain some semblance of balance in our lives.
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I fell into the pit this year. In early January, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could finish the Kate Huntington novel I was drafting, write another service-dog novel and then a novella I had planned for that series, and get all of those stories edited and published in order for the novella to be released around July 4th, since that story involves Independence Day.
Just reading back over that sentence is exhausting, much less actually doing all that. But I was determined to try.
So the deadlines were set…
The Kate book would come out some time in May, The Sound and The Furry would be released in mid-June, and A Star-Spangled Mayfair would come out on or before July 4th.
I made the first deadline;Police Protectioncame out on May 24th. The other two deadlines…not so much.
Which brings me to the point of this post.
Overachievers have trouble adjusting goals. Even goals that are self-inflicted (yes, I have chosen that word intentionally).
It was a downright painful decision to slide those other two deadlines. But it finally dawned on me that once the Independence Day novella is out, people will be reading it at all different times of the year in the future. It is an integral part of the series and the character’s ongoing stories. So its relevance is not limited to the time period around July 4th.
And as long as it came out during the summer “beach-reading” season, even this year’s readers probably wouldn’t mind that they are reading about July 4th on, say, July 24th.
Why did I do that to myself?
Why did I set myself up for overachiever angst by taking on more than I could possibly get done?
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I used to do this kind of thing more often. I would almost always over-estimate how much work I could get done in a given amount of time and/or under-estimate how much work a project would require. I’ve gotten somewhat better and don’t make these miscalculations quite so often anymore, so I’m looking at this as a moderate setback in my recovery as an overachiever.
I think I also set these kinds of goals sometimes to create a challenge for myself. Let’s see if I can do this? That challenge can be stimulating, but it can also be a set-up for disappointment, when I can’t meet the nearly impossible goal.
I’ve gotten better at forgiving myself though, when I have to adjust a goal.
What Drives Us Overachievers?
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In my younger years, I was trying to prove something to myself and the world. I had to be the “best” at everything I did. I got past that when it dawned on me that it was okay to not be the best at things I didn’t care all that much about.
It’s okay for me to be a mediocre cook and a less than stellar housekeeper, for example, since those are not high priorities for me. But I still tend to put a fair amount of pressure on myself to be the best I can be when something is important to me.
And that’s what convinced me to slide my self-imposed deadlines. My writing is very important to me. I did NOT want to produce inferior stories, just to get them out by a certain date. So I decided to push through my overachiever angst and make some adjustments.
The Sound and The Furry is releasing today. Yay!! And A Star-Spangled Mayfair is tentatively scheduled to come out on July 23rd. I hope to have it available for preorder soon. (Covers and blurbs below.)
How about you? Do you tend to be an overachiever, an underachiever, or (the sanest position) somewhere in between? What do you think is driving those tendencies for you?
Service dog trainer Marcia Banks had thought it was the perfect arrangement—stay on her client’s private Gulf-coast island and get the human phase of the training done more quickly, while enjoying a much-needed break from the chaos of house renovations back home.
This certainly wasn’t the tranquil getaway she’d envisioned, however. Two resident ghosts, a sour-puss housekeeper and bearing witness to her client’s shaky marriage are bad enough. But within days, she’s discovered even deeper and darker layers of dysfunction.
Via emails and static-filled phone calls, fiancé Will Haines convinces her to get herself and her dog Buddy out of there, but before Marcia can accomplish this, a late-season hurricane abruptly changes course and strands them on the island… with a murderer.
A flamboyant fiancé, a “Mob Killer” Roman candle, a yappy rescue dog, and a bison bull named Tarzan.
A recipe for chaos and calamity for Marcia’s introverted friend, Jess Randall.
When not serving up her to-die-for eggs and biscuits at the Mayfair Diner, Jess just wants to live quietly on their farm. But her fiancé Dan has impulsively offered to host the Mayfair Independence Day Extravaganza.
The day of the big bash, Marcia and her dog Buddy witness a public fight between the couple, and just hours later, Dan is found with a Roman candle through his chest.
Was it an accident, or was it murder? And is Jess a killer, as the sheriff’s department believes?
Between dog-training sessions, Marcia feels compelled to investigate, especially when there are signs that the real killer may not be finished… Could Jess be the next target?
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
This is an “off” week for our blog, but in honor of Memorial Day yesterday, I’m rerunning one of my favorite Memorial Day posts.
(Note: the following are the opinions of this author and do not necessarily reflect those of the other misterio press authors.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a pacifist by nature. I abhor violence. But unfortunately in the real world there are some evil people, and even more people who are willing to do evil things in order to achieve their goals. So violence is part of the human condition and probably will be for the foreseeable future.
One of the many things I learned from being a psychotherapist is that evil survives and thrives on fear and passivity. So I do believe that it has to be stopped. And the only force evil understands is just that, force.
So how am I any different from those I accuse of using evil to achieve their own goals? I guess I’m not completely different. My only defense is that I believe in the use of violence only in defense of self and others.
In the real world, this country needs a strong military. It does act as a deterrent against a good bit of that evil. And the rest of the time, unfortunately, those men and women in uniform have to fight back the evil.
I was a teen and college student during the Vietnam War–probably the least popular war ever fought by this country. I protested against that war. But I was appalled by the treatment of the returning GIs at the hands of some of my fellow pacifists. These men and women who had served out country at great sacrifice (many of them drafted), were not always welcomed home as the heroes they were. They were sometimes spat on and called baby killers.
Humans have short memories and we don’t always learn from the past. But I think our society learned that lesson. By all means, hate war! But honor the troops who have sacrificed so much to protect our peace.
(public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
Any particular soldiers, sailors or Marines whom you’ve been remembering this week?
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
Today, we are pleased to introduce you all to another crime writer whose work we thought you might like. Please help us welcome Elena Hartwell to the blog!
Elena spent more than twenty years in the theater, before shifting her storytelling over to fiction. She writes the Eddie Shoes Mystery Series. Her next novel, Resurrection Lake, will be out in early 2020 with Crooked Lane Books under the name Elena Taylor.
Kass Lamb (on behalf of the misterio gang): Let’s start with a “tell us about yourself” question. What two or three things do you feel people need to know in order to understand who you are?
Elena with one of her horses, Radar. (Photo Credit: Mark Perlstein)
Elena Hartwell: What a great question. I guess the first thing I would say is you can’t ever really understand me! Ha ha ha, but that sort of defeats the purpose. I would say it would help to understand that my animals are one of the most important aspects of my life. I currently have two horses, two cats, and a dog.
Second, that I am an outgoing introvert. This means I enjoy people and don’t mind public speaking or events, but afterwards I need to be alone with a cappuccino to recharge. Lastly, what you do means more to me than what you say.
Kass: Why a crime writer? What is the appeal of mysteries for you?
And her other horse, Jasper. Isn’t he handsome?
Elena: This is something I think about a lot. It’s interesting because I’m not a violent person, so why am I drawn to writing about murder?
I think first and foremost, it’s about the puzzle. I love reading (and writing) the puzzle of “whodunit.” I like to incorporate human behavior into the various pieces of the picture. Because I am most drawn to character and character relationships, I’m intrigued by how we behave under the worst of circumstances. My “bad guys” aren’t all bad and my “good guys” aren’t all good.
I’m fascinated by the grey areas of human experience and how we’re all capable of incredibly bad behavior under the right conditions. What would push a person to commit such a heinous act against another human being? What would make someone else cover it up?
Kass:What type, i.e. subgenre, of mysteries do you write? Why does that subgenre appeal to you as a crime writer?
Elena: My Eddie Shoes Mystery Series is a humorous series about a private eye, set in Bellingham, Washington. I think Eddie and her mother Chava are the only mother/daughter crime-fighting duo in the genre. Eddie, the daughter, is the professional. In the books, she teams up with her mother, a card-counting poker player who was kicked out of Vegas, to solve homicides.
My new book is about a sheriff living in a tiny town in the
Cascade Mountains of Washington State. The new book is much more serious, but it
also centers around a strong female protagonist. I like that both my
protagonists are professionals.
In my Eddie books, Chava is a fun secondary character,
because she can work outside the law and the ethics of a private investigator,
but my protagonists have to weigh their professional ethics with catching the
criminal. So they sometimes have to decide if they are going to do things by
the book or take some risks to save the day. They also have training and
experience, which gives them tools to go up against criminals and solve crimes,
but it doesn’t mean they can’t make mistakes or put themselves in risky
situations.
I love the research aspect of how law enforcement and homicide investigations take place in the real world. I enjoy putting as much of that as I can into my own work. As a reader, I read a wide variety of subgenres, including thrillers and domestic suspense, but I tend to write the private eye/law enforcement protagonists.
Kass: What was your favorite book/author as a child? Why was it your favorite?
Elena: It’s incredibly hard to pick just one, but I would probably go with The Hobbit. I loved the world J.R.R Tolkien created. The magic, the animals, the non-human beings. I loved the adventure and the quest and how the smallest of the group made the largest contribution. In some ways it is the perfect book. It grapples with good and evil, war and peace, individualism versus the greater community and culminates with a fight to the death with a dragon.
Elena’s cats, Cocoa and Coal Train, supervise as she writes.
Kass: Haha, and who doesn’t like dragons? Tell us a little more about your stories. Where are you in your writing career?
Elena: I worked professionally as a playwright for several years, including professional and amateur productions of my plays around the US and abroad. Then I moved over to writing fiction.
I wrote a couple manuscripts before the first Eddie Shoes book was published in 2016, One Dead, Two to Go. That was followed by Two Heads are Deader Than One and Three Strikes, You’re Dead.
My latest novel, Resurrection Lake, is coming out with Crooked Lane in 2020, under the name Elena Taylor. I’m working on another manuscript with my agent now. I hope that standalone finds a home as well. After that, I have a few other projects in the works.
Kass: What do you find to be the most fun and/or the most difficult part of the writing process, and why?
Elena: I love the whole process, but that doesn’t mean any of it is easy! The first draft is simultaneously the most challenging and the most fun. Challenging, because I’m just hoping I will have a complete story that’s strong enough for a full-length novel. Fun, because I’m discovering the plot and the characters at the same time and they do things that surprise me.
Kass: What’s the oddest and/or most difficult thing you ever had to research?
Elena: As a playwright, I did a lot of work around Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and service men and women. That was difficult because I did a lot of research, including interviews, and the stories are heartbreaking. I include some of that in my novels, but not to the extent that I did in my plays.
My heart goes out to all the men and women who have served and who struggle. Society owes them an eternal debt of gratitude, regardless of individual politics, and should do more to help them.
Kass: I agree. One of my series is about a young woman who trains service dogs for veterans with PTSD. Now tell us, in your latest story, what was your favorite scene?
Elena: In Three Strikes, You’re Dead, I have a scene where Eddie is in a forest fire. That was so much fun to write, but I also did a ton of research, including interviews with the Issaquah Fire Department.
Best research ever! I got to ride in a fire truck. I have tremendous respect for firefighters and what they do to keep us safe.
Kass: Thanks so much for joining us today, Elena, and please hang out for a bit in case our readers have questions for you.
And folks, you can get Three Strikes, You’re Dead and the other Eddie Shoes mysteries at the retailers below…
Private investigator Eddie Shoes heads to a resort outside Leavenworth, Washington, for a mother-daughter getaway weekend. Eddie’s mother Chava wants to celebrate her new job at a casino by footing the bill for the two of them, and who is Eddie to say no?
On the first morning, Eddie goes on an easy solo hike, and stumbles upon a makeshift campsite and a gravely injured man. A forest fire breaks out, and she struggles to save him before the flames overcome them both.
Before succumbing to his injuries, the man hands her a valuable rosary. He tells her his daughter is missing and begs for her help. Is Eddie now working for a dead man?
Barely escaping the fire, Eddie wakes in the hospital to find both her parents have arrived on the scene. Will Eddie’s card-counting mother and mob-connected father help or hinder the investigation? And how will Eddie find the missing girl with only her memory of the man’s face and a photo of his daughter to go on?
And coming soon! RESURRECTION LAKE introduces Bet Rivers, interim sheriff of a tiny mountain town in Washington’s Cascade range. With the election looming up ahead, she faces the opportunity to live up to her late father’s reputation, but then a body is discovered floating in the town lake. Bet has never investigated a homicide before, and this one threatens to take everything she’s worked for, including her life.
And Kirsten Weiss has a new release today as well! She’ll be taking over the blog next week with a great post on Tarot reading!
Steeped in Murder. A Tea and Tarot Mystery
Tea, tarot, and
trouble.
Abigail Beanblossom’s dream of owning a tea room in her
California beach town is about to come true. She’s got the lease, the start-up
funds, and the recipes. But Abigail’s out of a tearoom and into hot water when her
realtor turns out to be a conman… and then turns up dead.
But not even death puts an end to the conman’s mischief. He
rented the same space to a tarot reader, Hyperion Night. Convinced his tarot room
is in the cards, Night’s not letting go of the building without a fight.
But the two must work together,
steeping themselves in the murky waters of the sham realtor’s double dealings,
in order to unearth the truth – before murder boils over again.
Steeped in Murder
is the first book in the Tea and Tarot cozy mystery series. Buy the book to
start this hilarious caper today.
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
If you’re someone who has been dealing with an anxiety disorder for some time, you probably know as much or more about them than I do. But perhaps this post will offer some useful tidbits. If you’re newly diagnosed and/or finally focusing on how one or more of these disorders is controlling your life, this will provide an overview of what to do when anxiety takes over.
The Gold Standard of Treatment
Only two types of anxiety disorder are curable at this point in the history of the science of psychology. Specific phobias and some social phobias, such as fear of public speaking, are almost always learned reactions, although they are deeply ingrained in the cerebellum (as I mentioned in my last post on this subject) and do not respond well to conscious efforts to control them.
But they can usually be unlearned via a process of systematic desensitization. While practicing relaxation techniques, the person is gradually exposed to more and more of the stimuli that they are afraid of, whether it be heights or spiders or whatever.
For the other anxiety disorders, a combination of medication and talk therapy is the gold standard of care. Plus, there are a lot of other things one can do—lifestyle changes that can reduce the anxiety and make it more controllable.
Medications
Photo by Pina Messina on Unsplash
Better living through chemistry. There are over a 100 drugs on the market today that affect anxiety in one way or another. The trick is finding the right one for you, and getting used to it.
But, again with the exception of phobias (and some versions of social anxiety), there is no other way to truly control the anxiety. The body is producing it, so it must be treated biologically.
Now, if you have a fairly mild case of an anxiety disorder, there are coping techniques you can learn that may be sufficient. But for most folks suffering from these disorders… the brain chemistry is broken, and it takes adjusting that chemistry through medication to get somewhere close to normal.
1. Finding the right meds for you.
First of all, consult a psychiatrist. Don’t rely on your family doctor for this. The brain is incredibly complicated, and scientists are learning new things about it every day. And there are many different meds, each with its own pros and cons, its own way of operating on brain chemistry. There is no way that a general practitioner can keep up with all that. So find a good psychiatrist—they are the doctors who understand psychoactive drugs—and preferably find one who specializes in anxiety disorders.
Secondly, give the meds a chance to work. Most anti-anxiety meds take several weeks to start to make an impact. The best way to find the right med for you is through trial and error, which takes patience. Yes, I know it’s hard to be patient when you are anxious ALL THE TIME.
But if you eliminate a med too soon, before it has had a chance to show what it can do for you, well, that might have been the best one for you and you passed it by, out of impatience.
2. Getting used to the meds.
Folks with anxiety disorders tend to become hyper-alert to changes in their bodies and brains. Feel a little lightheaded or queasy and immediately your mind jumps to the conclusion that a panic attack is starting up.
But psychoactive drugs, by definition, are going to make you feel different. Yes, it’s really, really hard to do, but try to ride out those odd feelings until they don’t seem so odd anymore.
(For more on anxiety meds, check out this article.)
Talk Therapy
The most commonly used approach in psychotherapy for anxiety disorders is cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). That’s psychobabble for the therapist is going to help you retrain your thinking and your behavior to lessen your anxiety and learn how to manage what’s left.
By definition, psychotherapy is a bit abstract and therefore hard to test scientifically, but cognitive-behavioral therapy is the most studied form of therapy—it has a lot of fairly concrete techniques that can and have been scientifically analyzed. And it has been found to be a very effective approach to anxiety disorders.
There are a lot of these CBT techniques, but two very commonly used ones are:
Journalling is often used to pinpoint antecedents, behaviors and consequences. (Photo by Ana Tavares on Unsplash)
1. An A-B-C Assessment
A-B-C stands for Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence.
In other words, what proceeds the anxiety attack, how does the person respond to the anxiety behaviorally, and what is the consequence of that behavior. The antecedent can be an external trigger—anything from a loud noise to a weather or news report to a fight with your boss or spouse. Or it can be internal—a thought or feeling that gets things rolling.
Once the anxiety is running rampant, how does the person react? Do they become physically ill, do they hide from the world, lash out, have a drink (or several), try to pretend nothing is wrong (while anger and resentment builds up inside)?
Then the Consequence—how does the outcome then reinforce the behavior and/or the anxiety?
Ha, I bet you thought I was gonna say how does the behavior impact on the person. Well, often that is the problem. Hiding from the world (agoraphobia) definitely has a negative impact on the person’s life. But to break the pattern there’s a need to analyze how the avoidance behavior of not leaving the house is being REWARDED.
A person with panic disorder contemplates going out (antecedent), then they start to worry about having a panic attack while they are out among strangers, and how that will be so embarrassing and they won’t be able to get any help, etc. Then they decide not to go out after all (behavior), and the anxiety/worrying subsides a good bit (consequence). The avoidance behavior has just been rewarded by a reduction in anxiety.
The goal with an A-B-C assessment is to figure out where and how to break the cycle. (For more on ABC assessment, see this article.)
Which brings us to another CBT technique commonly used with anxiety disorders.
2. Changing Self-Talk
This is probably the simplest and yet most effective technique in a therapist’s toolbox. Have the person pay attention to what they are saying to themselves internally. And work with them to change those automatic internal ruminations.
Because almost always, self-talk is negative. “I’m going to screw up.” “This is going to be horrible.” yada-yada
People with anxiety disorders are NOT the only ones who tend to have negative self-talk. It’s very common in a lot of folks.
But those without anxiety disorders do not already have a constant sense of anxiety and impending doom coming from their faulty body chemistry. So they negotiate life’s twists and turns with mild to moderate insecurity, muddling through the things they’re sure are going to go badly and then breathing a big sigh of relief when it wasn’t all that bad after all.
And maybe they even gain a little confidence and are a little less negative next time.
But for folks with anxiety disorders, their self-talk often takes the form of “awfulizing.” Their already anxious minds immediately jump to the worst case scenario, and they quickly convince themselves that this is exactly what will happen, the most awful possible outcome imaginable.
photo by Sydney Rae on Unsplash
Once the exact nature of a person’s negative self-talk is identified, the therapist helps them come up with good counter-messages. Not just some bland “Everything’s going to be okay,” but something specific, like, “I’ve dealt with this _________ (fill in the situation) before and handled it. I can do this.”
And then the therapist will use role-playing to help the person practice that new self-talk again and again. Until it becomes fairly easy to catch the negatives and switch gears, when out in the real world.
Again, there are more CBT techniques than these two, but this should give you an idea of what to expect in therapy.
Other Things You Can Do
1. Learn and Use Relaxation Techniques Yoga, meditation, self-hypnosis, progressive relaxation, guided imagery, etc. Again, there are multiple options. Check them out until you find the one or ones that work for you. And then USE them. Every day, multiple times a day, and especially if you start to feel anxious.
2. Be Physically Active Nothing reduces daily stress (which contributes to anxiety) quite like physical activity! Find an activity that you like, or at least can tolerate, and then make it part of your routine. Twenty-five to thirty minutes every other day is sufficient. More often is better.
And if your anxiety disorder has led to other issues, such as fibromyalgia, find a gentle way to be active. Yoga or swimming are great options.
3. Take Care of Your Body Of course, all of us should be doing this, but if you have an anxiety disorder, this is CRITICAL. Develop a healthy eating plan, with nutritious foods that you LIKE. Make a point of going to bed at a consistent time each night, and develop a wind-down routine that helps you go to sleep more readily.
Again, experiment with different possibilities. Does reading work for you, or watching TV? Whatever you do, don’t do household chores or other stressful activities past a certain hour in the evening!
(She says as she is writing a blog post at eleven p.m…. Do as I say, not as I do. 😀 )
Resist the temptation to self-medicate with alcohol or recreational drugs. (photo by Sergio Alves-Santos on Unsplash)
4. Avoid Self-Medicating Alcohol and recreational drugs can backfire on you. They may help initially in small quantities, but their addictive tendencies and the development of tolerance can lead to more anxiety in the long run. And alcohol suppresses the production of melatonin, the hormone that promotes sleep. So it can contribute to insomnia big-time!
Also, nicotine is a sneaky drug. Smoking may make you feel more relaxed, but it is an illusion. Nicotine has a muscle-relaxant quality, which we feel almost immediately with each drag on a cigarette. But make no mistake, it is a stimulant. It increases your heart rate, your blood pressure, your muscle tension…i.e. your anxiety.
Caffeine can also be sneaky in its own way. I can’t begin to tell you how many people (my own husband included) have told me that “caffeine doesn’t affect me.”
Yeah, it does! But you’ve developed a tolerance for it so you no longer notice how it is affecting you. My husband eventually (not due to caffeine, due to aging) developed heart arrhythmia and had to cut back on his caffeine. He was amazed at how much calmer he felt and how much better he slept.
5. Break the Cycle Do not let anxiety make itself at home. When you start to feel anxious, break the cycle. This may be through self-talk, or you may need to literally get up and move. Take a walk, read a book, watch TV, pursue a hobby. Do something that distracts your mind before it starts to awfulize.
6. Make a Commitment to Your Routine Establish a routine of taking your meds regularly, paying attention to your self-talk, exercising, etc. And then when something knocks it out of whack, as life inevitably will—a holiday, a vacation, illness, etc.—make a point of getting back into your routine as quickly as possible afterwards.
7. Socialize and Seek Support Make an effort to spend time with friends and family. Socializing is a great stress reliever and also a wonderful distraction from your worries. And finding a support group of people who are dealing with similar struggles can make the process so much more bearable. Google “anxiety disorder support” and your city and/or check out the websites of organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) or the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA).
I hope you find all this helpful.
Feel free to ask questions in the comments. I’ll answer as best I can. Also, if you have discovered something in particular that works for you, please share.
And I have a new release in my Kate Huntington Mysteries, Police Protection. To celebrate, I’ve put Anxiety Attack, the book before this new one, on sale for just 99 cents (through 5/24/19).
Anxiety Attack, in part, explores the experience of someone with social anxiety.
Kate Huntington’s P.I. husband had doubts from the beginning about this case, a complicated one of top secret projects and industrial espionage. Now one of his best operatives is in the hospital fighting for his life, and Kate believes the alleged shooter the police arrested—one of her psychotherapy clients who suffers from social anxiety—is innocent.
Tensions build between the couple, until a suspicious suicide brings the case to a head. Is the spy/killer tying up loose ends?
Almost too late, Skip realizes he may be one of those loose ends, and someone seems to have no qualms about destroying his agency or getting to him through his family.
And Book #10, the last in the series, is here!! Just $2.99 during PREORDER and until after its release on 5/24 (goes up to $4.99 after that)
POLICE PROTECTION, A Kate Huntington Mystery
A story ripped from real-life headlines.
A police detective is found in an alley, standing over the body of an unarmed African-American boy. Groggy from a concussion, he has no memory of what happened, and he is literally holding the smoking gun.
To the Baltimore County Internal Affairs division, it’s a slam-dunk. But various forces push psychotherapist Kate Huntington and her P.I. husband to investigate behind the scenes, and what they find doesn’t add up. Why did the boy’s oldest brother disappear on the same day? And did the third brother, who’s on the autism spectrum and nonverbal, witness something relevant?
When seemingly unrelated events emerge as a pattern of intentional obstruction and diversion, it becomes apparent that what happened in that alley was more than just a bad shoot by a stressed-out cop. And for Kate, the case has become personal as she’s connected with the grieving mother, whose dead son was the same age as her Billy.
The answers may come from unexpected sources, but she and Skip better find them soon… before another life is lost.
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
A couple little goodies for you today—two posts aimed at writers, but they have a lot of good stuff in them for everyone. One is by me and the other is by a writing coach and teacher, Lisa Hall-Wilson.
The other post, by me, is about using writing to heal emotional wounds. One doesn’t have to be a fiction writer to do this. Blogging, journaling, writing bad poetry, etc. can be useful in facilitating the healing process.
Here’s the beginning of that post, and the link to read more if you like:
Writing To Heal
Writing to heal was what got me truly started as a fiction author.
Oh, I’ve always loved to write. I’d written quite a few stories through the years, plus some bad poetry, and I’d started more than one novel. But the inspiration for the first one that I actually finished, the one that would eventually become Book 1 in my first mystery series, occurred when a friendship ended abruptly.
The friend was a male lawyer with whom I’d shared a few cases—situations where one of my psychotherapy clients was dealing with some legal mess, such as a divorce. And over time, he and I had become friends.
And then we weren’t, and I realized I had seriously misjudged his level of mental health. After the friendship imploded, I thought, “Darn it! If I can’t have a healthy platonic friendship in real life, I’m going to create one.”
So I started writing the story, Multiple Motives, in which a female psychotherapist and a male lawyer are good friends, and someone has a murderous grudge against both of them. (That last part didn’t happen in real life. 🙂 ) Another thing that didn’t happen in real life, but does in the book, is that the bad things that occur in the characters’ lives make their friendship stronger, rather than destroying it.
Writing that novel helped me heal from the painful ending of that friendship. It fulfilled several of the purposes of writing to heal:
● Clarifying and venting feelings. ● Telling one’s story – being heard. ● Creating a different outcome. ● Finding meaning in the pain. ● Paying it forward – helping others struggling with similar issues and inspiring hope.
Clarifying and Venting Emotions—Why Is That Important?
In Multiple Motives, my character Kate realizes just how important her friend is to her, and then when he is in danger, she realizes what a black hole his loss would create in her life. As I was writing this story, as she was feeling those intense ups and downs, I was right there with her. It was quite cathartic.
But why is it that we feel better when we vent a negative feeling? READ MORE over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University.
And a slight adjustment in the blogging schedule. K.B. Owen will be posting next week as she releases her newest Concordia Wells historical cozy. I’ve read it and it is great!
And then I’ll be back on the 14th with Part II of my When Anxiety Is a Bad Thing series, talking about what can be done about anxiety disorders. (And I may have a new release to announce by then as well.)
So stay tuned, folks!
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
Last month, I posted about how a controllable amount of anxiety can be a good thing when performing. It can keep us on our toes and animate our performance. But what happens when it’s not controllable? Then, anxiety is a bad thing.
Basically, this happens when our survival mechanisms go awry. One of these survival mechanism is our fight or flight response.
When we perceive a threat in our environment, our brains and bodies take over. We automatically experience a long list of reactions intended to prepare us to run away from that threat or stand and fight it off—our hearts race to pump blood to our muscles faster, our breathing becomes more rapid to suck in more oxygen, our muscles tense, our pupils dilate to see better, etc.
But what if something biological, a malfunction in our bodies or brains, triggers our fight or flight response, rather than a true threat from the environment?
Biologically Triggered Panic
You’re going about your business, perfectly calm and safe, and suddenly your heart starts thundering in your chest and you’re breathing fast and furious.
You look around, your eyes wide with fright, desperately trying to find the threat. But there is none. Yet, your mind knows that if the fight or flight response has been triggered there must be some threat out there. Right?
This is what people with certain anxiety disorders suffer through on a regular basis, sometimes several times a day.
And they cannot control it!
During a panic attack, their bodies are freaking out on them, without their mental permission. And the sense of impending doom, that is associated with that physiological freaking out, can be quite overwhelming.
Which brings us to the other survival mechanism that can go awry.
Learned Associations
One of the other ways that our brains keep us alive is by making a myriad of associations between certain situations and our emotions. This thing made us feel good in the past (like eating tasty food), so do more of it. That thing was scary and/or hurt us in the past, so avoid it.
We smell food cooking and our stomachs automatically growl, because we’ve learned to associate that smell with something good to eat. We see a snake on the path in front of us in the woods, and we jump back and our hearts start racing. We were not born with the knowledge that cooking smells mean food or that a snake is potentially harmful, and yet these reactions are automatic.
That’s because these are conditioned associations, a different kind of learning than when we intellectually process something and commit it to memory. At some point in the past, we felt the emotion (fear) while in the presence of something (a snake, or an image of a snake on TV, doing something scary) and our minds linked the two together. So now the snake is a “conditioned stimulus” for the “conditioned response” of fear.
For most of us, the fear response can be controlled, once we have assessed the situation. From a safe distance, we take a harder look at the snake and realize it’s just a harmless black snake. So we get a stick, shoo it out of our path and go on about our business.
Cerebellum Images are generated by Life Science Databases (LSDB) ~ CC BY-SA 2.1 jp Wikimedia Commons
But sometimes, these conditioned associations reach phobic levels. As a child, you’re chased and bitten by a dog, and now you are terrified of all dogs.
So why can’t we control that phobic fear?
Because conditioned associations are stored in a different part of our brain (the cerebellum) from where our thinking occurs (the cerebral cortex).
(In the swirling image to the left, the cerebellum is highlighted in red, while the cerebral cortex is the tan part.)
So you see a dog, even a small harmless-looking one, and you are running away, even as your logical brain is saying, “This is stupid, That dog isn’t going to hurt me.”
When These Two Mechanisms Interact
People with biologically-based anxiety disorders (panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, etc.) often get a double whammy from these mechanisms. Their fear response is being triggered when nothing scary is happening, but the mind still associates the fear with whatever is going on at the moment.
So the person can develop a phobic-type response to a variety of stimuli. They have a panic attack while at the grocery store, so they can’t grocery shop anymore without freaking out. Then they have one while at the post office and they can’t go there anymore. Then while driving, so they can’t drive anymore. Then while getting their mail at the end of their driveway…
In its worst form, this can become agoraphobia, in which the person is afraid to leave their home.
And none of this is under their conscious control!
What Can Be Done?
For those who suffer from anxiety disorders, the answer to this question is a long one. I’m going to do a separate post on that on May 14th. So please stay tuned.
For those of us who care about someone with an anxiety disorder, we need to be patient and understanding. Chastising the person for letting anxiety control their lives is not helpful.
They are most likely already beating themselves up, on a daily basis.
My mother-in-law had generalized anxiety disorder. The best definition of this disorder is being a worry-wart on steroids. People with GAD worry about everything all the time, and they cannot control this! GAD is partly biologically based, and partly a learned pattern of coping that becomes ingrained early in life.
When my MIL was in her seventies, her eye doctor told her she had cataracts and she needed surgery or she would go blind.
She would not do it. After a while, she wouldn’t even talk about it anymore.
I got it, and tried to explain it to my husband and family members. Any surgery, but especially eye surgery, is scary for all of us. But most of us can manage the fear. Not, however, if you have severe GAD as she did.
When she considered such surgery, the anxiety was overwhelming. And the more the family tried to get her to “see reason,” the more anxious she became, until even thinking or talking about it became overwhelming.
Finally everyone gave up, and she lived out the rest of her years slowly going blind, but with her daily anxiety much more manageable.
I’m not saying that I thought her choice was correct, but I understood where she was coming from, in light of the disorder she had.
When we keep pushing someone with an anxiety disorder to do something they feel they can’t do because of the anxiety, we are only driving a wedge between ourselves and them, and pushing them farther into the unnecessary and unhelpful shame they are probably already feeling about their disorder.
Then, anxiety is a bad thing indeed!
It is more helpful to say something like, “I understand. The anxiety is too much. Let’s see if you and I can figure out a way around it.”
Stay tuned for next time, when we’ll talk some more about those work-arounds and other ways to reduce the anxiety and/or cope with it.
In the meantime, I’m happy to answer questions. Have you or a loved one had to struggle with an anxiety disorder?
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
When you adopt a puppy mill survivor, there are greater challenges than when taking on other rescue dogs (which can be challenging enough).
I hope to do an expanded post on the topic of adopting rescue dogs on my own website soon. But in the meantime, here’s an “off” week tidbit for you, a great post by Your Dog Advisor with some tips for dealing with a puppy-mill survivor adoptee.
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
We love introducing you all to up-and-coming crime writers! So we are very happy to welcome Nancy Wood to our blog today.
First, I’ll let her tell you a little about herself.
I grew up in various locations on the east coast and now call central California home. I’m recently retired, having spent 35 years as a technical writer, translating engineer-speak into words and sentences. Kind of like translating ancient Greek, when you’re not too familiar with the Greek part!
Since retirement, my husband and I are wandering across the globe, visiting various places in Europe, but also countries like Sri Lanka and India. You can check out our travel blog at hansandnancy.wordpress.com.
The first book in my Shelby McDougall trilogy, Due Date, was originally published in 2012. It just got a face-lift and was recently re-released by Paper Angel Press. The Stork, the second book in the series, will be re-released later this year. I’m working on the third and final story (with the working title of The Found Child).
Kass (on behalf of the misterio gang): Let’s start with a somewhat open-ended question. What two or three things do you feel people need to know in order to understand who you are?
Nancy: I LOVE to read; I’ve been a reader since I was teeny-tiny. So, it just seemed a logical progression to try to write fiction. It didn’t have to be life-changing, literary, heavy, or important! I just wanted to craft a book that would engage someone and would hold up as that person read it. I took creative writing classes, wrote stories, and wrote two terrible novels that, thankfully, never saw the light of day.
In 2006, I went to a commercial publishing workshop and was encouraged to try to write a mystery. At that point in my life, mysteries weren’t even on my radar. I started reading them, exclusively, and thought, ‘hmm…, maybe I’ll be able to do this!’
I retired two years ago, and since then, my husband and I have been traveling. A lot. We’ve traveled around the west (Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and California), and have also been to Spain, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, and India. Wow, all amazing countries, and so different.
My other passion is photography; in fact, I seem to spend as much time with the camera as writing these days! Here’s one of my photos. If anyone’s interested, my photography website is nancywoodphotos.wordpress.com
(c) Nancy Wood
Kass: Wow, that’s gorgeous. So tell me, why crime fiction? What is the appeal of mysteries for you?
Nancy: Before I decided to write a mystery, I had never read crime fiction. Now, it seems like crime fiction has expanded to include any subgenre of literature you can think of. Literary, social, cultural, historical, romantic, horror: it all can be incorporated in a mystery. There’s something very compelling about that. To be able to mold the genre to fit your story and your characters. I also love the idea of a series; getting to know a character over time and in multiple settings.
Kass: What type of mysteries do you write? Why does that type of story appeal to you as a writer? Do you also prefer it as a reader?
Nancy: My books fall into the category of suspense, psychological thrillers. I initially thought I was writing a mystery, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t insert a dead body into the story! I love to read suspense. I love getting scared, but getting scared in a controlled fashion. Reading allows that delightful pleasure.
But sometimes, it’s too much, and I have to read the book in small bites, so as not to get too terrified and lose sleep! Some of my favorite authors in this subgenre are Tami Hoag, Patricia Cornwell, Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, Lisa Scottoline, Tana French, and Lisa Jackson.
Kass: You mentioned loving to read since you were “teeny-tiny.” What was your favorite book/author as a child?
Nancy: The Nancy Drew mysteries were at the top of my list. I loved them because I could usually figure out ‘who done it’. The stories were predictable, yet kept me engaged. But the best part was that Nancy was a girl.
Kass: Nancy Drew has certainly inspired a lot of girls through the years, myself included! So where are you in your writing career? Tell us more about your stories.
Nancy: My Shelby McDougall series was picked up this past year by Paper Angel Press. They just re-released Due Date, and The Stork will be out sometime later in the year. I hope that the third book will be released not too long after that.
Shelby, the protagonist, stumbles her way into detecting. In Due Date, she’s signed on as a surrogate
mother, and when it’s almost too late, discovers that things are not what they
seem. In The Stork, Shelby has
switched career paths and is working on her PI license. But her life is turned
upside-down with a late night phone call. In the last book in the trilogy, the
one I’m currently working on, Shelby will be a licensed PI specializing in
locating missing children. Her mom does a DNA swab with a genealogy website and
turns up results Shelby would rather not know about.
I also have a story out featuring Shelby, called ‘Treasure Hunt.’ It was originally published in the 2018 anthology, Santa Cruz Weird, and is now available as a free download from Paper Angel Press. It’s about a ten-year-old boy whose granny encourages him to sign up for a Saturday afternoon treasure hunt sponsored by the city’s parks department. He’s not very happy about being out in the woods, looking for treasure, with a group of kids he doesn’t know. The only person he does recognize is a man he’d never wanted to see again.
Kass: When I first read Due Date in 2012, I really enjoyed it for two reasons. First, I loved the writing. It’s one of the best debut novels I’ve ever read. But I was also intrigued by the topic. What made you decide to write about a surrogate mother?
Nancy: Thank you for your kind words; I am so excited to see Due Date get a second go-round with its wonderful new cover.
Originally, this story was women’s fiction, about the relationship between a birth mother and the adoptive parents. However, it was clunky and slow and needed a lot of work. Around the time I was trying to figure out what to do with this uninspiring manuscript, I was in a brainstorming session at a conference and someone suggested I turn it into a mystery. After a lively discussion in that small group, I realized that if the protagonist were a surrogate mother, I could explore some of the same themes I was interested in–mainly the relationship between the birth mom and the adoptive parents–but also introduce even more complexity to the dynamic.
At the time, I had a lot
of friends who’d adopted children through both open and closed adoptions, but I
had never known anyone who was involved in a surrogate relationship. I did a
lot of reading on surrogacy and talked to a few surrogate moms. I read plenty
of discussion boards, forums, and blogs as well. I also researched fertility
clinics, trying to figure out how that end of the arrangement works. There are
so many legal and financial considerations. I’m still interested in the topic and
keep tuned for news stories, changes in the law, or blogs about surrogacy.
Kass: Well, all that research paid off. It’s a fascinating story. Thank you so much for joining us today, Nancy!
She’ll be sticking around for a bit, folks, to answer any questions you might want to pose in the comments.
Nancy: Thank you very much for hosting me! Misterio Press publishes high caliber books that are engaging, well-written, and really fun to read, so I am honored to be here.
Kass (blushing): Aww, thanks!! Check out Due Date below, folks. You will be glad you did! And I’m off to download Treasure Hunt.
And you can connect with Nancy Wood at her website or via email.
Surrogate mother Shelby McDougall just fell for the biggest con
of all—a scam that risks her life and the lives of her unborn twins.
Twenty-three year-old Shelby McDougall is facing a mountain of student debt and a memory she’d just as soon forget. A Rolling Stone ad for a surrogate mother offers her a way to erase the loans and right her karmic place in the cosmos. Within a month, she’s signed a contract, relocated to Santa Cruz, California, and started fertility treatments.
But intended parents Jackson and Diane Entwistle have their own agenda—one that has nothing to do with diapers and lullabies. With her due date looming, and the clues piling up, Shelby must save herself and her twins. As she uses her wits to survive, Shelby learns the real meaning of the word “family.”
Available at all major online book retailers for $4.99. Click HERE for buy links or to download a sample.
We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.
Please sign up via email (upper right sidebar) to follow us, so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )
