Serial Killers and Serial Victims...

In the discussion of titles of non-fiction books that I've read as the author of psychological thrillers/mysteries, my own understanding of the serial killer (and not all psych thrillers have one) and his mindset comes more from reading great fiction writers of this genre. When I need info on this phenomenon I use the internet for a quick search of current thinking and analysis. Criminal psychology has evolved over the decades, and keeping abreast of the terminology is paramount to writing nonfiction books on the topic for present-day readers. (I majored in psychology in my distant youth.)

But for a fiction writer I feel the more important knowledge must come from the inside. No, you don't have to be a serial killer, but it helped me to have studied the subject over a period of time--and to have been raised in a family with a serial abuser.

I have a character in my Quilted Mystery series who may well be a serial killer. but he is also a serial victim. I find it equally interesting to explore the connection between what may be two sides of the same coin, criminal and victim.

It's difficult for us to accept the idea that the capacity to become a serial killer may lie in all our breasts. Equally difficult is understanding that being a victim is also serial behavior. Obsessional behavior is commonplace among humans, perhaps some aberration of the normal learning process in animals. Every teacher knows that repetition is the key to learning.

So is the serial killer trying to learn something by repeating his acts? About his nature? About his parents' natures? About something broken in his mind?

Barbara Sullivan, Unraveling Ada, Ripping Abigail.

Read the new Quilted Mystery book!

Available now at amazon.com--the second installment of the Quilted Mystery series, Ripping Abigail. Featuring Rachel Lyons, PI and hand quilter as the lady who rashly rushes to the rescue, this story centers around Abigail P., who at the tender age of thirteen decides it's time to leave her home-school group and register herself at Pinto Springs high.

Unfortunately for Abigail, this is also the week six local boys on a weekend jaunt to Tijuana wreck their car on their return trip. Five of them die at the scene. For the next week, the school is torn with grief so overwhelming that no one sees the other, far more dangerous change happening right under their noses.

Read Ripping Abigail soon. Unraveling Ada is the first mystery in the Quilted Mystery series.

You'll also want to read Unraveling Ada at amazon.com

Are psychological thrillers with strong language too much for Indies readers?

My first book, Unraveling Ada, is the genesis for a series. In this book, readers are introduced to Rachel Lyons, new PI and retired librarian, who becomes involved in the solving of a crime through a hand quilting group she has recently met. In the process she is changed from a happy middle-aged grandmother to someone struggling with her basic assumptions about life.

This is no granny's quilting group. The women (one of whom is 13) who gather to top-stitch each others quilts are the subjects of each of the nine novels I intend to write (7 more to go) in this series. This first book, Unraveling Ada is about Ada Stowall, the woman whom Rachel Lyons replaces after her brutal murder. On one level, it is a psychological study of a dysfunctional family who harm each other in horrible ways.

Unraveling Ada is also a murder mystery, and Rachel is partnered with her husband Matthew in their private investigations business.

The second book in the series (just released) is Ripping Abigail and it is a psychological thriller about a teenager caught up in the violence of a gang gone bad.

I chose to self-publish because I was 68 when I published my first, and I felt I didn't have time to wait to be accepted by an agent, and then wait again for that agent to find a publisher. But now I'm worried that the nature of my writing is too strong for the POD audience. What do you all think?

Ripping Abigail joins the Quilted Mystery series

Available now at amazon.com--the second installment of the Quilted Mystery series, Ripping Abigail. Featuring Rachel Lyons, PI and hand quilter as the lady who rashly rushes to the rescue, this story centers around Abigail P., who at the tender age of thirteen decides it's time to leave her home-school group and register herself at Pinto Springs high.

Unfortunately for Abigail, this is also the week six local boys on a weekend jaunt to Tijuana wreck their car on their return trip. Five of them die at the scene. For the next week, the school is torn with grief so overwhelming that no one sees the other, far more dangerous change happening right under their noses.

Read Ripping Abigail soon. Unraveling Ada is the first mystery in the Quilted Mystery series.

Ripping Abigail.

If you are new to this blog, my name is Barbara Sullivan and I'm the writer of the Quilted Mystery series sold through amazon.com. My first novel is Unraveling Ada and it has been out for a year and a half. And now there is book two,Ripping Abigail.

I love writing novels and have been attempting to do so for my entire life, back as far as when I was in my first decade. My mother saved my first effort (4 pages) so that I'd know this. But life and its demands led me in another direction with my love of books, into the field of librarianship, which I enjoyed emensely for twenty-five years before retiring in 1999. A few years after that I returned to writing in earnest.

Finding a publisher at my age (69, 67 with the first book in the series) was something I felt I didn't have time for, so I self-published through amazon's CreateSpace and Kindle programs.

And now I'm beginning the process of marketing this second Quilted Mystery.
Here is the jacket copy for Ripping Abigail.

"Picking up the threads of the Quilted Mystery series that debuted with Unraveling Ada, Ripping Abigail delves into the seamy side of Southern California gang culture as bright, creative, 13-year-old Quilted Secrets member Abigail Pustovoytenko rebels against her homeschooling and enrolls herself in a high school where the local gangs are under pressure from mysterious forces and engaging in ever more violent acts. As Abigail draws unwanted attention by speaking up for the victims of the escalating gang activity, retired librarian-turned private investigator Rachel Lyons has her hands full trying to keep the rebellious, principled teenager safe while seeking to uncover the forces behind this eruption of gang violence that is overwhelming the high school and surrounding community."

I hope you'll give Ripping Abigail a read. I believe you'll find it entertaining and informative.
Enjoy!
Barbara Sullivan

Ripping Abigail is now published.

Benefit or Curse?

One of the benefits of being a military family is that you get to move to a new locale every couple of years. That’s an average amount, couple, at first it’s more like every six months to a year. But later, when it matters the most--when your children are in high school for instance--it might only be once ever three years.

At least this was how the Marine Corps handled its personnel back twenty-five years and more ago. Maybe things are more stable now, what with all the separations. But the result of all those moves was that on our final move, to Camp Pendleton in Southern California, I announced as we entered our new and now house—“You’ll have to buy a coffin to get me to move again.”

I was tired; tired in my bones, weary in my heart at leaving good friends, exhausted with trying to start a career over and over again. And I was losing children along the way.
By then we were down to one child, having dropped off the eldest at college in North Carolina.

We were still hauling a dog and a cat, however, and even grandma Miller. Wither we went, went grandma. As it should be. She didn’t live with us, but she needed to be near us. I needed her near us, too, if for no other reason than she was a familiar bring-your-own friend and volunteer baby-sitter for all the wonderful trips my wanderlust husband and I took. She kept away the lonelies that happened whenever my Marine deployed.

But I’m way ahead of myself. Why I’m writing this post is to begin sharing some of my experiences as a “camp-follower”. To begin with, I’ll just list our moves and their approximate dates to give you a flavor of why this activity so profoundly defines a military family’s life. The second most powerful element, separations for special duty assignments, also adds to this constant uprooting. My heart goes out to the military folks today. I have no idea how they cope with the amount of separation they are dealing with now.

Our first move was from our home towns, of course, to Pensacola, FL, in 1962. While there, my young and handsome Marine was sent to three different area bases for flight training, and of course we moved each time. We rented furnished in those days, so moving was a matter of packing up pots and pans and clothes for the most part.

Our fourth move was across the country, however, to Southern California, and an air base that doesn’t even exist anymore, Santa Ana, Marine Air Station, Tustin. Here Michael trained for war, the Vietnam War. Of course, all of his training was for war, but this training was more specific, and after two years and three more moves (mostly because we’d begun our family and we needed a second bedroom), Lt. Michael Victor Sullivan left for the most hated American war in history. It was February of 1966. He didn’t return until March of 1967.

To be continued.

The power of memory in fiction writing.

Fortunately we have the internet to supplement our memories now, but any writer of fiction knows that the foundation of their tales is their store of remembrances—good and bad.

The good memories are as important as the bad, in that they allow us to bring a celebration of human life into our stories-without which those stories might lack appeal. They lighten the darker episodes. They enrich our characters with likable traits. The good memories can soften our recounting of the bad memories so that our readers are willing to endure a dark tale and not feel abused by it.

But often it’s the bad memories that motivate our fiction writing efforts, just as it is the bad memories we most often remember when contemplating distant events. If you spend any time at all revisiting your childhood you know that the occurrences you are likely to remember are the bad ones; the ones that hurt, the ones that damaged.

The ordinary, everyday activities that you enjoyed with your parents, siblings and childhood friends are often forgotten, or overshadowed, by the “bad” memories.

Our minds are drawn to moments of fear and pain in our past in much the same way we are made to gawk at car accidents as we slowly drive by them. Perhaps some survival instinct hard-wired into our psyches forces our attention to images of danger and suffering as a teaching device—so that we will remember what not to experience. The urge to see how another human is suffering can be as strong as a narcotic.

Not all of us are attracted to scenes of violence and misery to the same degree, but so many of us are that we can’t just write this behavior off as some sick abnormality in the collective human personality. But if you are drawn to the darker side, you’ll probably love a good mystery, like the ones I write.

Editing is Arduous

Except my editor says she had fun, even found it educational, proofing my second book, Ripping Abigail. Not once, but twice!

So here's my humble praise for the sensitive, creative and exacting work Sue Sullivan has done editing Ripping Abigail. No one could have done it so well.

Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel, will be available through www.amazon.com by Memorial Day. I hope you enjoy it.

March is coming, don't be blown over by the roar.

What's really roaring around the world seems to be economic discontent. The fallout? Maybe gasoline prices around $5 a gallon. Maybe higher. Whatever, we need to be prepared.

For my husband Mike and I that has led to our decision to purchase a Prius.(Also leading to the decision is that my beloved Ford Taurus stationwagon sprung a couple of leaks after eleven years of hard driving.)

We are thrilled at the prospect of getting 48-51 mpg (highway, in town) and even though the push button technology is hard to get used to at first, and the digital dashboard is likewise a challenge, it only took us a couple of days and watching their beginner's video a couple of times to make the switch.

I still love Fords. I'll always wish my purchase could have been of an American made car. But the need was immediate. Maybe down the road we'll be able to return to our favorite car company.

Welcome to my blog on quilting and mysteries

I recently wrote about one of my grandfathers. I hope to add a piece to these posts about our family history each month. But the exciting news for me this winter is that book two of the Quilted Mystery series is almost ready to publish. Unraveling Ada is of course already in print at www.amazon.com for pb and e book through Kindle, and www.smashwords. com. But soon there will be a second book, Ripping Abigail.

My series has two underlying threads (well, there are more, but for this post I'll just concentrate on the two largest) the decades in a female life and the comparative times in American history. The first book references decade one in a girl's life and the Colonies of America. The mysteries in book one are lifted from these two threads, early childhood traumas on the one hand, and the trials of settling and surviving in very early America.

Similarly, book two aims at the mysteries encountered by a growing girl in her rebellious teens and the corresponding period of rebellion in Colonial America.

Visit facebook for more of my writing, under Barbara Sullivan, and twitter for snippets I frankly find frustrating, under QuiltedMystery.

January's Chores

I finally took the Christmas tree down. It's January 18th.

It seems to take longer and longer each year. I'm not sure if we're loving the winter lights more or just dreading the effort. But Mike and I enjoy the lights of Christmas for as long as we can.

In its place I'll put back my quilting display rack, an Amish-inspired wide ladder I purchased four years ago. On this quilt rack I’ll hang the retirement gift from my workmates at Oceanside Public Library—an album quilt. Machine made of red and green fabrics, it has white squares of fabric strategically placed that hold photographs of the years I worked there. I cherish this gift.

About the same size, that of a lap blanket, is the Irish quilt I made my husband Michael. Featuring the three colors of the Irish flag, it's a double sided quilt with two different renderings of the flag. The colors are green, white and orange in case you didn’t know.

And I'll display my Greek quilt, a king sized mosaic of a photo I found that depicts a typical Greek island community. We visited Poros Island once, and the white homes arrayed against the aqua blue sea caught my creative imagination. The quilt is constructed of hundreds of two inch squares, just like a mosaic.

I also still have the sunflower quilt I’ve made for my granddaughter. I call this one Sunny’s Sunflowers after her current dog. I'll give it to her when she's older, as she already has her childhood quilt from me.

To see these quilts and the others I've done just follow the Blink to Barbara’s Quilts.