Ask the Author: Sharon L. Dean
Answered Questions (10)
Sharon L. Dean
I'd hang out in The House of the Seven Gables, curl up in the garden area with a good book, smell the sea air, and retreat to the hidden staircase if I wanted to jumpstart my imagination. After all, the novel does have a happy ending. It would help if Hawthorne were living down the street. "Jesus, he was a handsome man" (e.e.cummings). Biggest downside: no indoor plumbing!
Sharon L. Dean
I've just gathered enough short stories to make an anthology and will be seeking a publisher for them. Now I've started on a new novel tentatively called Homeward Bound. It will follow the protagonist, Connie, as she moves from Massachusetts to Florida to Oregon and develops a successful writing career. An underlying theme centers on home as a place people seek or are bound to. The underlying mystery centers on Connie's great-uncle Charlie who disappeared from the family and whose secret is never spoken about.
Sharon L. Dean
My book club will be reading The Good at Heart by Ursula Werner, so that's on my list. I try to read all of Joyce Carol Oates. Next up her A Book of American Martyrs. Victor Lodato's Edgar and Lucy is also beckoning.
Sharon L. Dean
I fear my life has been too tame to harbor mysteries. Maybe the mystery is how one manages to live an Ozzie and Harriet life--minus all those female hours in the kitchen. Seriously, I take details from things I see and remember, try to spin a good yarn, and consider myself fortunate.
Sharon L. Dean
I fear that I don't. She's taking a vacation, but maybe if I create a file and a bio she'll be able to reappear.
Sharon L. Dean
Remember, it's all about revising. It doesn't have to be perfect in the first draft.
Sharon L. Dean
I've just completed my third Susan Warner mystery, Cemetery Wine, which will be published by A-Argus/W & B Publishers in fall 2016. I am currently writing short stories, hoping to gather them into a collection of stories set in New England.
Sharon L. Dean
I seem to begin with a sense of place: the Natchez Trace in Mississippi for Tour de Trace, the Isles of Shoals for Death of the Keynote Speaker, and a New Hampshire farmhouse, much like the one I once owned, for my forthcoming Cemetery Wine.
Sharon L. Dean
Death of the Keynote Speaker grew from my years attending academic conferences and researching the nineteenth-century writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. Star Island, where I attended camp when I was in high school, seemed like the perfect setting for a mystery novel. As I began writing, I realized that I could integrate the rich history of The Isles of Shoals into an academic conference about a fictional nineteenth-century writer. The tone, not the content, of Woolson's letters became the headnotes that helped me to recreate the history and to integrate it into the present.
Sharon L. Dean
Working on my own time.
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