Seventeen years! It’s shocking to see that in print.
Writing is a constantly evolving process – you’re always exploring, learning, growing, and refining. It also reflects the perspective and psychological state of the writer. When PJ’s health began to decline, I think our writing became a little darker and more introspective. When she passed and I carried on solo, my work became more emotional. You work through things when you write. It’s your internal therapist.
I’m always discovering new things about the Twin Cities. In recent years, I’ve been fascinated by the role of bootleggers and mobsters here during Prohibition. This was not just a place of illegal transit and commerce, it was a summer getaway for the most famous heavies. During my research, I found out that a friend’s mother worked as a nanny and maid for the gangster Leon Gleckman, known as the Al Capone of St. Paul. She was only fourteen at the time, and had no idea who he was, but when she found a gun beneath a pillow while making a bed, she quit a week later.
We also have deep Scandinavian roots and traditions here, and they’re very much alive in the community. Not to denigrate the rich cultural heritage of our dear and noble citizens of Scandinavian descent, but the lutefisk thing is fairly outlandish and I don’t believe I’ve ever written about it in depth. In all these years, I haven’t found anybody who actually likes it. When I’ve probed advocates of this ‘delicacy’ (commonly known as fish Jell-O – eew!), they confess they only eat it because it reminds them of Christmas with their grandparents. And I guess you can choke down anything if you douse it with enough melted butter.
Jane Eyre, which I’d never read before! I loved it. And it’s about as far from murder as you can get. I needed some balance in my life.
I think the scariest thing is that they exist. It’s really incomprehensible that there are human beings completely absent of emotion and morality. Some psychologists debate whether psychopaths and sociopaths should be differentiated at all. For those who do, psychopathy describes a hereditary anti-social disorder; sociopathy describes behaviors that are the result of environment. Nature versus nurture. However, not all psychopaths or sociopaths become serial killers; and not all serial killers are psychopaths or sociopaths. Just a little confusing.
It was exhilarating to write about an entirely different world populated by fresh characters. I felt like a painter with a palette of new colors. A lot of things happened with the characters that I didn’t expect because I was just getting to know them. There was a wonderful element of unpredictability during the process. And of course, PJ was enjoying it right along with me. She is and always will be with me when I write.
What are you working on now?
The second novel in the Deep into the Dark series. Almost finished!
The plotting aspect is like a hilarious ping-pong match, back and forth for weeks or sometimes months, and most of it we do when we’re together. This is an annoying phase for anyone around us because we never stop talking and find it hard to focus on anything else. Ideas come randomly and sometimes at inopportune times and must be immediately discussed. I’m sure our conversations have terrified innocent bystanders within earshot when we’re out together in public.
The actual writing is more solitary – we each decide what part of the book we’d like to tackle on any given day and hunker down in our home offices. The following morning, we meet to go over our individual work, discuss the next phase, polish and blend the pieces we’ve written separately, and repeat the process until the last page is written.
We have no work schedules. We are both equally and happily disorganized, slothful, and easily distracted. This was the only job we could get.
Most are romance novels! Yes, believe it or not, we started out loving before we moved on to killing. I think they’re all out of print, but I believe there are a couple internet used book sites that still carry stray copies from time to time. We wrote under Melinda Cross, Jessica McBain, and one novel under Mariah Kent.
We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on Iris, and we enjoyed writing about her. And the fun part about introducing new characters, and having an ensemble cast to begin with, is that you can always bring old favorites back, as we did with Sharon Mueller and Sheriff Halloran in DEAD RUN. As long as we don’t kill them off, there’s a good chance that they’ll make another appearance at some point.
We would love to see MONKEEWRENCH on the screen one day. In fact, when we write the books, we often envision them as movies. We’ve had some nice offers over the years, but we’re not quite ready to sell the children yet. But some exciting things are happening on that front at the moment, and you will be the first to hear any good news.
Yes, you will. In the new book, we spend much more time with the MONKEEWRENCH gang, and some secrets shall at last be revealed.
If they look like they were signed by the same person, they probably were, but they’re not forgeries – PJ and I often do events separately, in which case we have to sign ‘PJ Tracy’ in our own hand. However, when we’re at an event together, PJ signs her name, and I sign mine, hence the variation you might see in the signatures. For the most part, they’re probably all illegible, no matter who was doing the signing!
It’s true — we did add some material for the British version, about 18 manuscript pages. The Penguin U.K. publishing schedule afforded us a little more time to windbag, and this was an opportunity we just couldn’t pass up! But rest assured, the outcome of SNOW BLIND remains the same in both versions.
We send our deepest apologies to all of you who thought you were buying a new PJ Tracy book and didn’t get it. It certainly wasn’t an intentional ploy to sell more books. Title changes happen often when a book is published in a foreign market and it can indeed be confusing. Here’s the backstory: MONKEEWRENCH was published first in the U.S. under that title, but when Penguin U.K. bought the rights to publish, they felt their markets would be better served by a different approach, which included making changes in the presentation and title — much the same way Coca-Cola markets their products differently in the U.S. than they do in, say, Italy or China. But since then, we’ve all been working together to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Almost every one we’ve ever read.
Boy, a therapist could probably have a lot of fun with that one, but the fast, superficial answer is that each of us started writing as soon as someone taught us the alphabet. We are both ardent storytellers – it was the only way you could get away with telling a lie in our family, and we did love telling whoppers.
Everybody always wants to know what it’s like to write with your mother/daughter. We’ve agonized over this question, trying to think of a thoughtful answer, maybe even a profound one, but the truth is, there’s little profundity to be found in two women sitting around giggling over imaginary people. We have fun – always. We rarely disagree, we never argue, we laugh most of the time, and a lot of people hate us for this.
professionally?
It definitely requires passion, but the nuts-and-bolts of writing professionally are discipline, patience, and absolute dedication to the craft. Read everything you can get your hands on. Great books and horrible books all have a lesson in them. Above all, tell a story and let it flow naturally. If you give your characters a voice, they will guide you. Don’t just write to fill in the blanks of a plot you’ve come up with in advance.
Plots and stories are everywhere, we could find one looking at a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of somebody’s shoe. The story behind DEAD RUN is indicative of our creative proceses: we were driving through a seemingly deserted Wisconsin town on a beautiful September day, when everybody should have been outside soaking up the last of summer. We immediately imagined that something horrible had happened to the town’s occupants, but the sane third party in the car informed us the Green Bay Packers were playing and that everybody was inside watching the game.
But the incubation from general concept to finished novel is much more arduous and unpredictable. The old, hackneyed saying: ‘If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life’ is true only in that you don’t care that you’re obsessed with the current project and work 365 days a year, sometimes even in your sleep. You can’t ever take a vacation from your mind when it’s working on a book.
The plotting aspect is like a hilarious ping-pong match, back and forth for weeks or sometimes months, and most of it we do when we’re together. This is an annoying phase for anyone around us because we never stop talking and find it hard to focus on anything else. Ideas come randomly and sometimes at inopportune times and must be immediately discussed. I’m sure our conversations have terrified innocent bystanders within earshot when we’re out together in public.
The actual writing is more solitary – we each decide what part of the book we’d like to tackle on any given day and hunker down in our home offices. The following morning, we meet to go over our individual work, discuss the next phase, polish and blend the pieces we’ve written separately, and repeat the process until the last page is written.
I’m thrilled to announce the upcoming publication of Deep into the Dark, my inaugural venture into an entirely new fictional world. I will never desert the Monkeewrench gang – they are an enduring tether to my deeply missed writing partner and mother, PJ — but as life transforms after seismic shifts in circumstances, so do our hearts and minds and creative yearnings.
My decision to write about Los Angeles was easy: I lived there for a decade and had a capacious vault of experiences and observations just waiting to be opened. Exploring new characters and a new setting was exciting, energizing, and rewarding, and the book took shape in ways that even surprised me. The twists, turns, and general mayhem of the Monkeewrench series are all there in abundance, with the additional edge of Los Angeles’ urban zeitgeist.
My personal relationships with brave men and women of the armed forces inspired one of the main characters — Sam Easton — a wounded combat veteran suffering from PTSD. The battle after the battle is often the most difficult, the struggles tragic and complex; I wanted to explore the depth of Sam’s strength and courage as he manages this in the face of a devastating series of events in his personal life.
Murder brings two strong and complicated women into his life: Melody Traeger and LAPD detective Margaret Nolan, who both have demons of their own. Together, they navigate love, obsession, grief, and revenge in the City of Angels.
I hope you enjoy!
Here are the top three:
WRITE FASTER
We wish we could, but we’re tortoises. It’s in our DNA. And in all the lab experiments we’ve conducted thus far, we can’t seem to splice the hare gene into our genetic make-up.
WHEN ARE GRACE AND MAGOZZI FINALLY GOING TO GET TOGETHER OR MOVE ON?
It appears there are more romantics out there than we thought. But the truth is, if we go that route, it will be very anti-climactic. Of course, on the flip-side, the constant tension and lack of real movement in their relationship begs for some sort of progress. We’ve really kind of gotten ourselves into a pickle with this particular element of the MONKEEWRENCH series, which is a main reason we chose to give Grace some arc in both SHOOT TO THRILL and OFF THE GRID. We’re hoping that will unleash some potential for an interesting, unexpected twist in the future.
The third area of most concern for readers is Charlie the dog, and reader comments usually come in the form of a threat: IF YOU EVER KILL CHARLIE, I’LL NEVER BUY ANOTHER PJ TRACY NOVEL AS LONG AS I LIVE. Hey, trust us – we bow, we humbly defer! Charlie is officially immortal. He will outlive us all.
See what nice fans we have? They care about love and animals.
The entire creative process is constantly evolving; inspirations and the world around us are constantly changing, so we approach each novel with a unique perspective and strategy. A straighter answer is to tell you what hasn’t changed in our approach to writing a novel – it very simply begins with an amorphous blob of ideas and emotions that eventually gather and organize and spawn. If you’ve ever seen microscopic footage of a virus proliferating, that’s kind of what goes on in our heads. Except it takes us longer.
We love doing research for our novels and OFF THE GRID is no exception, but the heart of the plot was simply a matter of extrapolating a scenario from current events. We recognized the trend of more tech-savvy, opportunistic terrorism — lone wolves being inspired and directed via the Internet. Global, post-9/11 security has made the successful launch of another horrific, large-scale event unfeasible, but we believed that a coordinated, simultaneous attack on multiple soft targets nationwide could achieve a similar goal and was probably a more imminent danger. Our contacts confirmed our speculation – anything diabolical we could think of is probably already in the works.
Grace has been haunting us for a while – she is one of the major players of the series, and the relentless nature of her fears was starting to turn us both into neurotic messes. We love Grace, and we wanted to free her, allow her an arc. Most people make gradual changes throughout the course of their life, but the traumatized often remain static until they finally reach a tipping point, then the changes happen quickly and they can be pretty dramatic. We decided now was the time to finally unlock her dungeon and open up new opportunities for her future.
Gino and Magozzi are like dessert for us. They are constantly straddling a moral and ethical gray line and there is nothing like relentless existential conflict to bring out the dark humor in people.
We loved creating and writing Claude and the Chief, who are both mosaics of people we know. They served a very specific purpose for this particular book, but if there were ever characters we’d love to bring back at some point, they’re right up there on the list.
Some questions appeared in Mystery and Suspense.
