Guest post: Make Them Laugh by Lois Winston
Hello friends! It’s been a minute since the last time we checked in with one of my favorite funny ladies, Lois Winston, crime fighting author of the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries! She’s been featured several times on my blog: as a book club recommendation, an author interview, and today she’s sharing her take on writing and reading humor as an escape. Welcome, Lois!
Make Them Laugh
By Lois Winston
We live in interesting times. I hear that phrase quite often these days, and how apropos it is! Put bluntly, there’s a lot going on in the world that really, really sucks. Many people just want to make like an ostrich and bury their heads in the sand, and who could blame them? (Although, I wonder if ostriches really do bury their heads in the sand. Are there ostriches in deserts? I don’t think so, but I’m not an ostrich expert. I’ve only seen them in zoos and never saw one with its head buried.)
When I first began writing back in the mid-90s, I mostly wrote angsty romance and romantic suspense. The one exception was my foray into the world of chick lit. Talk Gertie to Me was a humorous novel about a young woman who cuts the apron strings and the mother bent on saving her from the evils of Manhattan, going so far as to try to drag her back to rural Iowa to marry the boy next door.
In real life, I’m the person who can never remember the punchline to any joke and who always comes up with the perfect rejoinder hours, or even days, after the moment passes. So it came as a huge surprise to me that I can write funny.
Lois Winston
Talk Gertie to Me became the first book I sold. In real life, I’m the person who can never remember the punchline to any joke and who always comes up with the perfect rejoinder hours, or even days, after the moment passes. So it came as a huge surprise to me that I can write funny. For that reason, along with my day job as a designer in the consumer crafts industry, when my agent learned an editor was looking for a humorous crafting-related cozy mystery series, she asked me to write one.
As a kid, I never read Nancy Drew. Instead, I read Cherry Ames because a neighbor gave me the series when she outgrew the books. The library didn’t carry Nancy Drew or any of the other children’s series that were popular at the time, and my parents weren’t about to buy them for me. To this day, I’ve never read a Nancy Drew book. Unlike many other cozy mystery authors, I didn’t grow up wanting to write mysteries because of Nancy. I wasn’t even sure I could write a mystery series, but I gave it a try.
Thus, was born my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries about magazine crafts editor and reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack. Crafts and murder don’t normally go hand-in-hand. However, normal deserted Anastasia’s world the day her husband permanently cashed in his chips in Las Vegas. Anastasia knew nothing of his affair with Lady Luck. She thought he was at a sales meeting in Harrisburg, PA.
Suddenly, she not only finds herself dealing with debt greater than the GNP of Uzbekistan, but she’s permanently stuck with her semi-invalid Communist mother-in-law, a woman who doesn’t exactly get along with Anastasia’s much-married mother, a self-proclaimed descendant of Russian nobility. Rounding out the Pollack household are Anastasia’s two sons, Alex and Nick (not named for Russian czars); an enormous white Persian cat named Catherine the Great; a French bulldog named Manifesto (Who names a dog after a political treatise?); a Shakespeare-quoting parrot named Ralph; and a photojournalist who may or may not be a spy.
I did say I write a humorous cozy mystery series, didn’t I?
Originally, I thought Talk Gertie to Me was a fluke, that I’d used up all my funny genes on that one book and would go back to writing angsty romance and romantic suspense. But as I wrote Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun, the first book in the series, I began to realize I’d discovered my true writing voice. Since the series debut in 2011, it’s grown to thirteen novels and three novellas, including the recently released Sorry, Knot Sorry. I’ve also written two books in my Empty Nest Mystery series; Elementary, My Dear Gertie, a mystery novella sequel to Talk Gertie to Me; and Moms in Black, a Mom Squad caper. All humorous mysteries.
At this point, I think my humorous voice is here to stay. I have no plans to go back to writing angsty romance or romantic suspense. The world is too full of angst. We need to laugh more to release those endorphins to get through these interesting and difficult times. I’d like to think in some part, my books are helping people do that.
One of my favorite movies is Singing in the Rain with Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor. One of the funniest scenes in the movie is when Donald O’Connor sings Make ‘em Laugh. If you could use a good laugh, watch it here. Then I hope you’ll decide to laugh your way through murder and mayhem with Anastasia.
USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Learn more about Lois and her books at her website www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.
Kelly Brakenhoff is an author of eleven books and an ASL interpreter. She divides her writing energy between two series: cozy mysteries set on a college campus and children’s books featuring Duke the Deaf Dog. The mother of four young adults and a hunting dog, and grandma to a growing brood of perfectly behaved grandkids, Kelly and her husband call Nebraska home.