A Chat with Susan Kimmel Wright
Good Morning, Readers!
Can you believe we are just days away from the end of 2024? I don’t know about you, but I am ready for this year to be over with and cautiously excited for 2025.
Today, we have a new author to Back Porch Reads (which has actually been a chat at the dinning room table and not the back porch). Cozy Mystery author, Susan Kimmel Wright agreed to join us for a chat today to discuss her book, Mable and the Unholy Night.
Welcome to Back Porch Reads, Susan. Since you are new to us, please share a little bit about your writing journey and your book.
What inspired you to become a writer?
I always tell people I owe it all to my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Lloyd. In fact, I dedicated my first published book—a children’s mystery—to her. She was a wonderful influence on a weird little girl who loved words and kept getting lost in her daydreams. When I read my essay, “My Favorite Christmas Present,” to the class, my beloved teacher said, “Someday you’re going to write a book, and I want you to dedicate it “To Mrs. Lloyd, who inspired it all,” waving an airy hand. Wasn’t she surprised to find out, three decades later, that I’d gone and done it?
Good teachers can change a child’s whole life.
I began writing as a child and finished two complete children’s mysteries, each around seventy-five poorly typed pages, by the time I left junior high. Though I tried to find another career, and later started college in pre-nursing (and eventually became a lawyer for about twenty years), I did end up with a bachelor’s degree in writing. Throughout my years practicing law (and functioning as the writing coach for our young lawyers and interns), I still felt that deep pull to write and publish.
After spending years writing and submitting stories and articles in my spare time, and collecting nothing but rejection slips, I retired to raise our three children and spend more time starting many novels that all fizzled after a few chapters. In time, I began finishing and submitting novels, all of which also ended up contributing to my rejection slip collection. It took me until I was thirty-four to finally publish a short nonfiction article. I published my first children’s mystery novel at age forty-two, a journey of about thirty-three years.
While I’m an unusually bad example, I think my journey should give other aspiring writers an idea of the kind of persistence it may take to achieve traditional publication, particularly for novelists. I always tell people to just keep writing and working on their craft, and don’t give up. It’s a lot easier to quit, which is why those who refuse to do that are generally the ones who reach their goals.
And what a journey you have been on – would be teacher to lawyer to Author. That’s a trip.
The same way I handle all of life’s problems—with prayer. I’m also blessed to have a very supportive writers’ group, especially my two critique partners. They always help me gain a fresh perspective and help me brainstorm.
AMEN!
What kind of impact do you hope your writing will have on readers?
My only goal for what I write is to give readers an escape from the cares of life. I don’t care about money, awards, or recognition. When a reader tells me my books made her laugh when life was hard, and she really needed that laughter, nothing makes me happier. It warms my heart when someone tells me my books got her through chemotherapy, or sitting at the bedside of a dying loved one. And even if I never write a bestseller, there’s nothing better than the readers who tell me they’ve read my entire series several times over, because they feel at home in Medicine Spring.
Here, here!
In Mabel Gets the Ax, the first book in my series, I first introduced Miss Birdie and Ms. Kathryn Ann, girlhood friends of Mabel’s grandma, as quite minor characters. I was very surprised when I wrote the prequel novella, Mabel & the Cat’s Meow, and found these two spunky old ladies taking over. My readers loved them—and so did I. They always have their ears to the ground, and give Mabel a lot of her best leads, besides being a really funny twosome. In Mabel & the Unholy Night, they surprised me again, when a moving and unexpected part of Miss Birdie’s back story comes to light after many years.
I don’t know about the readers, but I love it when there are secondary characters who just keep showing up. It’s like they don’et want to be forgotten.
Thank you, again, Susan, for joining us today. It was such a blessing to have you with us and sharing with us. I hope this tour is a blessing to you and your book.
Readers, please continue to read about Mable and the Unholy Night and Susan Kimmel Wright’s thoughts on the book. Then be sure to enter the giveaway at the end.
Have a happy New Year,
Melissa
About the Book
Book: Mabel and the Unholy Night (Mysteries of Medicine Spring Book Four)
Author: Susan Kimmel Wright
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Release date: November 5, 2024
Faithful dog Barnacle has run off into a snowstorm, disrupting Mabel’s fun outing at the Christmas tree farm. Things don’t improve much when he reappears…with a human skull.
Since Mabel moved into her late grandma’s house, the sleepy village of Medicine Spring has provided clean air, a close-knit community, and charming small-town shops. To her surprise, it’s also offered up several murders—and romance with a handsome private investigator. Now, Barnacle’s discovery plunges Mabel into the mystery surrounding a decades-old unsolved murder and the disappearance of her friend Nita’s great uncle.
Before Mabel, boyfriend John, and her friends can find answers and bring justice for Nita and her family, more complications develop. Incredibly, a sixty-year-old Christmas card arrives, bearing Mabel’s name and address and containing a plea for help. Are the mysteries related?
While Mabel tries to get to the bottom of these strange events, a second suspicious death casts suspicion on Nita. Can Mabel find the real killer in time? Or will her Christmas season end on an unholy night?
Click here to get your copy!
About the Author
Susan Kimmel Wright began her life of mystery in childhood, with reading. That led to writing kids’ mysteries and eventually to Medicine Spring with Mabel. A longtime member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, Susan’s also a prolific writer of personal experience stories, many for Chicken Soup for the Soul. She shares an 1875 farmhouse in southwestern PA with her husband, several dogs and cats, and an allegedly excessive stockpile of coffee and tea mugs.
More from Susan
Does Christmas make you nostalgic? In Mabel & the Unholy Night, fifty-year-old Mabel is observing her first Christmas in her late grandma’s house. As she sets out each fragile, vintage ornament, she feels that same familiar lump in her throat.
What we treasure may have to do with when we grew up. I love mid-century glass tree ornaments from Woolworth’s, ceramic elves stamped “Made in Japan,” and Gurley candles shaped like carolers, some still bearing 29¢ stickers on the base.
Ever since childhood, I’ve loved the tiny cardboard village under our tree. Houses and churches sparkled with glitter in their landscape of cotton-batting snow and bushes of dried moss. A sheet of glass atop light-blue construction paper made a perfect pond for tiny skaters. As someone once pointed out, accuracy of scale is of no concern in the cardboard village. Reindeer may loom over the houses like the mutant product of scientific experimentation gone wrong in a “B” horror movie.
Cardboard villages, properly called “putz houses,” originated with Moravian immigrants. Once handmade, houses were later imported from Germany and Japan. While nowadays we’re more likely to buy a ceramic village we can light up, I’ll take the primitive charm of a putz village any day.
Maybe best of all, we can build our own putz villages to suit ourselves. A new tradition for child and parent or grandparent might be building a new house each year, to add to the tiny community. While kits are available, you can also find plans online, such as this free resource: https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/make-traditional-glitter-houses-2365171
Perhaps our yearning for the things of the past is rooted in a longing for a more carefree time, when beloved faces, now gone, were still around us as we enjoyed the season together. When our slower-paced celebration centered on Christ’s birth, and family closeness. Building a putz house or church with loved ones might let us recapture just a bit of that old-fashioned Christmas spirit.
Blog Stops
Book Reviews From an Avid Reader, December 20
Babbling Becky L’s Book Impressions, December 21
A Reader’s Brain, December 22 (Author Interview)
Holly’s Book Corner, December 22
Locks, Hooks and Books, December 23
Fiction Book Lover, December 24 (Author Interview)
Guild Master, December 25 (Author Interview)
Debbie’s Dusty Deliberations, December 26
Texas Book-aholic, December 27
Back Porch Reads, December 28 (Author Interview)
Happily Managing a Household of Boys, December 28
Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy, December 29
A Modern Day Fairy Tale, December 30 (Author Interview)
Blogging With Carol, December 31
Lily’s Corner, January 1
Vicky Sluiter, January 2 (Author Interview)
Giveaway
To celebrate her tour, Susan is giving away the grand prize of a $50 Amazon gift card and a signed copy of the book!!
Be sure to comment on the blog stops for extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.
Love getting to know more of Susan Kimmel Wright’s path to being an author! She’s a go-to author whenever someone asks for books to make them laugh uncontrollably!
This looks like a great read. Thanks for sharing.
Sounds great
Sounds like a lovely book. Congratulations!
Lovely cover
I enjoyed the interview and learning about Susan’s writing journey. This book has been added to my TBR list.