J. Carson Black: Summer Book Club

Facebook Alert!  J. Carson Black will be doing a live Facebook chat on Saturday July 16 at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time at http://www.facebook.com/summerbookclub   Please join us with your questions for J. Carson.

How the Cult of Personality Inspired My Thriller THE SHOP

When I decided to write a new thriller, I had several ideas on the table.  None of them made the final cut.  The idea for THE SHOP came out of the blue, thanks to a cable TV news show.  

Come to think of it, most of my ideas come out of left field.  When one of these ideas strikes, it’s like being hit by lightning.  I get a tingle in my gut and then my mind starts working a hundred miles a minute. 

This time, my husband Glenn and I were watching cable news while eating dinner.  John Mark Karr’s plane was coming into Boulder, Colorado, where he would face charges for killing JonBenet Ramsey.  He’d been flown over from Europe, dining on shrimp cocktail and entertaining his captors—federal marshals, I believe—and generally having a great time of it.  Now the press was lined up along the airstrip in Boulder to cover his arrival.  Picture the private jet coming in for a landing, with all the pomp and circumstance of the Space Shuttle.  The reporters, the news vans, the cameras, the microphones, the breathless reporting on the ground and in the studio: an absolute frenzy!  

Glenn and I looked at each other.  This was a farce worthy of commentary.  This is the new American way: celebrity from nothing.  It turned out later that John Mark Karr was playing everybody.  He didn’t kill JonBenet Ramsey.  But he’d fulfilled his purpose—he’d fed the hungry maw of the media for a short time. 

Something could be done with this—the distraction of celebrity.  That was the seed for my story, THE SHOP. 

In the opening scene of THE SHOP, celebrity Brienne Cross is killed in her Aspen chalet, along with the four finalists of her reality show, SOUL MATE, and the producer of the show. 

 

I knew right away who killed them.  But why?  

Even the killer wants to know why.  And so he sets out to find the truth.

Getting a plot idea from the instant celebrity mode of television news.  Who knew? 

*****

J. Carson Black is the author of THE SHOP—available for purchase as a Kindle ebook for $0.99 (USD)—a Summer Book Club promotion for a limited time at amazon US and amazon UK.

Learn more about J. Carson at her website and blog at jcarsonblack.com

Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/jcarsonblack

Fan her Facebook page at facebook.com/pages/J-Carson-Black-Author-Page

J. Carson Black will be doing a live Facebook chat on Saturday July 16^th at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time at http://www.facebook.com/summerbookclub

Please join us with your questions for J. Carson.

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Killing Cupid: Summer Book Club

Killing Cupid - Mark Edwards and Louise Voss

Killing Cupid is the first book to be featured in the Summer Book Club. Mark Edwards, who co-wrote this darkly-funny stalker thriller with Louise Voss, will be on Facebook on Saturday evening to answer questions and chat.  He will even answer questions about the controversial Dan Brown/Stieg Larsson subtitle scandal if you are nice. Please drop by as his psychiatrist has warned him several times about talking to himself...  Go to www.facebook.com/summerbookclub for more information.

Can you sum up your book in no more than 25 words?

Killing Cupid is a stalker thriller in which a wannabe writer becomes obsessed with his tutor. But then she turns the tables, with devastating results.

How important is a book's central character?

Vital. Killing Cupid has two central characters. I wrote Alex, who starts off as a creepy stalker but, I hope, becomes more sympathetic as the novel goes on. Louise wrote Siobhan, a lonely writer who it turns out, has a lot of issues. The central idea of the novel is that there is someone out there for everyone - no matter how crazy you are.

What are the central themes of the book?

Love. Or rather, obsessive love.  Both of the central characters in Killing Cupid are lonely and frustrated; they feel that their lives would be complete with a significant 'other'. But neither of them know the best way to find that other person so they act in increasingly bizarre ways.  Of course, we all do stupid things when we're in love, but Alex and Siobhan take it to the extreme. If this makes Killing Cupid sound like a serious book, it isn't. It's a dark comedy with lots of twists and turns and a great joke about haemorrhoid cream.

What was your motivation for writing it?

Killing Cupid was co-written by Louise Voss and me. When we started, Louise was in the middle of a four-book contract with Transworld. I had recently been dumped by my agent. We got drunk one night and came up with the idea of writing something together as an experiment - and also because we thought the idea of a stalker novel in which the stalker becomes the stalkee (I think I just invented that word) was compelling.  Two months into writing it, a lucky meeting attracted the attention of a BBC producer who optioned it. It never got made in the end but it gave us the motivation to make sure we finished it.

What parts of the book are you most proud of?

Apart from the fact that we managed to pull off the tricky act of co-writing a novel without any tantrums, tears or throwing of teacups, my favourite parts of the novel are the scenes where Alex is creeping around Siobhan's house, inspecting her possessions, reading her diary, sitting on her toilet seat for a thrill.. And I love the second half of the book, in which everything turns around and starts moving really fast. And I love Louise's chapters because I just love reading everything she writes.  It was like simultaneously writing and reading a novel. Great fun.

What's your favourite part of the writing process?

I love the first draft because my favourite aspect of writing is plotting, although we never work out the full plot before sitting down to write. We enjoy working it out as we go along. The characters tend to take a life of their own and tell you what they would do next. With Killing Cupid I wrote a chapter which I sent to Louise with some notes about what might happen next. She edited my chapter then did the same. We had no idea how it would all turn out.

Can you tell us something about being an indie writer?

The best thing about the rather insane few months we've spent as indie writers - apart from hitting the No.1 spot on Amazon.co.uk with our second novel, Catch Your Death! - has been the opportunity to 'meet' lots of other writers who have been incredibly supportive.  That's where the idea of the Summer Book Club came from: the idea of creating a mutually-supportive group to celebrate the fact that we'd done it for ourselves, and to show readers out there how many great self-published books there are on Amazon.

Bio: Mark Edwards lives in south London with his girlfriend, their daughter and, arriving this August, a son.  He is the co-author, along with Louise Voss, of Killing Cupid and Catch Your Death, a conspiracy thriller that was the first novel by British indie authors to reach No. 1 on Amazon.  You can find him on Twitter @mredwards.

Killing Cupid is £0.49 on Amazon.co.uk: http://amzn.to/gXGez2

and $0.99 on Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/eGhcPx

Mark's blog: http://www.indieiq.com