Interview with mystery author Rhonda Lane

I am proud to have my friend, mystery author Rhonda Lane, on the blog today to chat about her debut mystery novel with a dash of psychological suspense, Fatal Image: An Avery Sloane Mystery.

Bio:
Rhonda Lane has been a stringer news photographer, a reporter with a split beat covering “cops & courts” as well as feature stories, and a TV broadcast technician for live and recorded news and sports programming.

For twelve years, she ran the horses-in-culture blog known as The Horsey Set Net. She is the author of the short story “On Like Donkey Kong,” which appeared in Fish Out of Water: A Guppy Anthology.

Her poem “At the Rail” is in Track Life: Images and Words by Juliet Harrison. Fatal Image is her first novel.

She lives with her husband and their cats in an oak grove in central Connecticut.

Welcome, Rhonda! Please tell us about your debut novel, Fatal Image.
Too many close calls prompt globe-trotting, award-winning photojournalist Avery Sloane to ditch covering world news to join a school friend at a small rural newspaper. Little does Avery know, she may have survived a war zone, but nosing around small-town secrets could get her killed.

What inspired you to write this book?
About twenty years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune situation. During treatment, I had several insights, including a realization the Washington thriller I’d been writing for years was a bunch of characters in search of a plot. I also wanted horses back in my life, however I could pull it off. I decided to write a mystery with a unique equestrian setting.

When I was a child in Kentucky, we had close family friends who owned a horse farm. They showed me a special world of horses aside from horse racing, rodeo, and the equestrian sports you see at the Olympics. So, in a haze of steroids and immune suppressors, I started writing this book based on their equestrian world.

Excerpt from Fatal Image:
The grouchy man strode past me again. “Somebody up and killed the horse show judge. Happy now?”

If he expected me to wilt, he faced the wrong woman. “So I hear. How do you know? Do you know who it was?” Not an official confirmation but leverage or a diversion if the cops confronted me later.

He headed toward me. “You reporters always talk a good game then do a tree-hugging hatchet job on us and our horses.” He stepped into my personal space, close enough for scattered saliva specks to land on my cheek. “Is that your plan, too?”

I studied the deep crow’s feet etched around his eyes and tan, leathery skin—a farmer’s face. Lines around his mouth suggested a long-time smoker. The silence around me, even from the horses, told me everyone waited for my reply.

“All I care about tonight is the murder. I think the Trib ran an announcement about some guy from Nashville judging the show. Is that who’s dead?”

Josie emerged from a stall and said, “Oh, mercy, Uncle Dwayne,” to the grouchy man half threatening me.

She brushed past him. A fresh tissue fluttered from the fingers of her right hand. “Please accept my apologies, Avery, is it? Daddy told me he’d hired a go-getter from New York. Y’all get to the point in a straight line.”

The man who’d loaded the horse into the trailer, who Josie had called “Uncle Dwayne,” huffed and slouched into another stall, leaving me with his niece.

“The judge we’d hired couldn’t come up,” she said. “He’s in the ER with a kidney stone. No one on the grounds wanted to step aside and judge instead of showing their horses tonight. After all, this horse show is the main fundraiser for the VFW to donate to our local military families. We called an old family friend.”

What exciting project are you working on next?
The second book in the series where, not only do chickens come home to roost, but new challenges demand Avery’s attention. I also have some shorter stories set in the same world in various stages of progress.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
When I was in sixth grade, I wrote and illustrated stories with my own pencil and crayon drawings based on my favorite TV show “The Man from UNCLE.” That was also the year when a certain female rite-of-passage hit me with a painful vengeance. So, once a month, I felt terrible and needed to stay inside and sit during recess while everyone else scrambled outside to play. That’s when I spent time with the classroom encyclopedias to research “exotic locales” for my stories.

My teacher, fresh out of college, asked why I didn’t go out for recess with the other kids. I told her. She commiserated with me, “woman to woman” – which I greatly appreciated even though I would rather be outside on the swing set—before she told me, “You could grow up to be a professional writer.”

After that, I started paying attention to UNCLE’s writing credits and kept track of the writers I recognized. I never dreamed of writing for TV because I’d have to move to Los Angeles, which might as well be Mars when you live in rural Kentucky. That’s when I realized I could write novels anywhere.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I’m free to write full-time, but I’m also self-published, plus my brush with autoimmune challenges twenty years ago didn’t leave me unscathed. As a self-published author, I wear almost all the business structure hats, except for tax preparation. Gentle Reader and Aspiring Author, I love wearing the creative hats, but most of those business hats chafe. Well, they chafe me. One of my other author friends thrives on that stuff.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I write on a desktop computer monitor set up to Portrait. The monitor shows me almost a full page of manuscript. Now I have no excuse for repeating myself on the page. Plus, writing on a laptop now feels like writing through a porthole.

If you want to try this at home, know that you’ll still need an additional monitor set to conventional Landscape. Some websites and apps do not display in Portrait. So, just know now: you need the Landscape monitor, too.  

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A cowgirl. Then, a lawyer because my mother worked for the county attorney’s private practice and I noticed he didn’t have to worry about money like we did.  

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
No book is for everyone. If portrayals of what I call “southern discomfort” bother you, you may be happier reading something else. However, if you vibe with certain tropes, like fish out of water, small town secrets, a narrator with some scars, upstairs downstairs, as well as a very slow burn romance, you might enjoy it.

Also, the setting, Blanchard County, KY, and Bowmansville are totally fictional, as is the Bluegrass Ambling Horse. The breed is a composite of “gaited” horse breeds, which have a mutant spinal cord gene recently discovered by scientists at Cornell University. That gene can create a horse that’s smooth to ride. Real-life gaited horse breeds include the Tennessee Walking Horse, Icelandic Horse, and the Paso Fino.

I chose to create a fictional breed, along with a fictional Kentucky county, because I didn’t want to be limited by the history of a real breed. Also, seeing as how this is crime fiction, there are and will be more human shenanigans the real-life horse people may not appreciate.

Thank you for coming along for the ride!

Thanks so much for joining my blog!

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