Welcome Nancy Pickard!

ROBERTA: Jungle Red Writers is so very delighted to welcome mystery goddess Nancy Pickard! She is the author of sixteen novels plus short stories and Seven Steps on the Writers Path with Lynn Lott. The Virgin of Small Plains won the Agatha award for best novel, and was a finalist for the Edgar, the Dilys, and the Macavity awards.

Welcome Nancy! First of all, we are dying to know what's coming next and when will we see it?

NANCY: Thanks, Roberta. It will be THE SCENT OF RAIN AND LIGHTNING, another stand-alone set in a small town in Kansas, but it's not finished yet. It's the story of what happens when a small town sends the wrong young guy to prison for murdering one of their most beloved residents, and then what happens twenty-six years later when he is released. It's a family saga, small town politics, love story, and mystery, set against dramatic landscape.

ROBERTA: Can't wait for that--though I guess we'll have to. I remember hearing you interviewed at Malice Domestic several years ago, just after THE VIRGIN OF SMALL PLAINS had been published to much acclaim. You said that you'd pulled back from conferences and other activities over a period of time to concentrate on writing. Can you please talk about your writing process and how you keep your focus?

NANCY: There was another reason I pulled back, which was that I felt myself getting cynical about conferences, etc. I sternly told myself that if I couldn't enjoy them and be appreciative, I should stay home. It took me about 10 years to go back with any regularity, but when I did they were fun again.

As for my focus? I don't have much sometimes. I'm a binge writer--when it's flowing, I don't do anything but write. But when it's not, flowing, when the well goes dry after I've sucked so much out of it, then nothing happens at all for a while. When I started writing fiction, I brought my disciplined, journalism-trained self with me, but I lost her somewhere along the way. I began to go with the ebb and flow of my internal rhythm of creativity--as pompous as that sounds, alas--and it changed my process completely. I think I write better books as a result of that change, but I have a harder time meeting deadlines. And by "harder" I mean I don't meet deadlines, lol. Well, I guess I do still meet the ones for short stories, but novels? Hopeless. I do not recommend this course of non-action for new writers!

ROBERTA: You've had wonderful success with short stories along with your novels. Tell us about how writing shorts feels different. Can you work on two things at the same time?

NANCY: I can't work on two things at the same time, except in the sense that I can sometimes write a short story or plot a new book during those dry-well periods I described earlier.

Short stories feel different, because they feel. . .short, lol. It is such a joy to know I will be able to type THE END after only about three weeks. I don't mean that it takes me three weeks of doing nothing but working on a story, I just mean that's about the gestation, writing, and editing period of several days spread over several weeks.

ROBERTA: Of course, everyone is nervous in this publishing climate. Since you've been at this a while, any thoughts on where you think we're headed? Advice for the anxious writers?

NANCY: I've been in this fiction business almost 30 years, and I can tell you that I have never experienced a single year when publishing people sat around on Dec. 30 and said to one another, "Wow, what a great year in publishing!" It's always a bad year in publishing. That's one reason I stopped reading industry news a long time back. It's best, I think, to limit one's focus to the page in front of us, because our own writing is the only thing we can control, and I'm not even sure how much real control we have over that. My philosophy from the beginning was that somebody is going to be published, no matter how dire the times, and it may as well be me. I've heard other published authors express the same bedrock sentiment. I recommend it. As for where we're headed? Every year will seem like a bad year in publishing to a lot of people; for others, well, somebody has to get published.

ROBERTA: I love that mantra: "Someone is going to be published, it might as well be me...someone is going to be published, it might as well be me..."

Last question, we can't end an interview without mentioning your central role in founding Sisters in Crime. Have women writers made progress since the early days of the organization? What do you think we need to keep working on?

NANCY: Absolutely, we've made tremendous progress. If we could compare bookstore and library shelves today with those of, say, 1980, we'd see the astonishing difference in the authors and kinds of books. What do we need to do? We, individually, need to keep writing the best books we can. We have much, much more than a toehold on those shelves now; we have entire shelves to ourselves. To keep that place, we need be creative, adventurous in our writing, and confident in ourselves. As an organization, we need to continue to support our sisters (and fellows). Join Sisters, provide useful programs for writers, BUY BOOKS, create and maintain links to the industry, have fun.

ROBERTA: Thank you for visiting--now go back and finish that book so we can all buy it! And the floor is open....