Well, I’m back from Book Expo America, and, boy, are my dogs barking! Lots and lots of walking and excitement as always, and I’ll be posting all about it in the days to come, but today we have our featured debut author. A big welcome to Tamara Ward!
Name: Tamara Ward
Name of book: Jade O’Reilly and the Ice Queen (A Sweetwater Short)
Book genre: short story, mystery
Date published: March 2012
Publisher: Amazon
What is your day job? Stay-at-home mom with two young boys, freelance journalist
What is your book about? When a priceless vase disappears during the fanciest party of the year in the fictional town of Sweetwater, NC, it’s up to private investigator Jade O’Reilly to recover the family heirloom. As Jade tracks down the vase, she juggles pressures from her ex-fiancé, Dale Pickles, and hard-core co-worker Mack Blackmon. This Sweetwater Short story is about 40 pages in length and originally was published in the WG2E All-For-Indies Winter Wonderland Anthology.
Why did you want to write this book? Fortune and glory. Just kidding; I’m not Indiana Jones or his sidekick, though I wouldn’t mind wearing the hat.
Seriously, though, I enjoy writing fun, fast-paced mysteries, so when an opportunity to write a short story for an indie writers’ anthology arose, I jumped at the occasion. I was in the process of writing a novel with the same characters who appear in the short story. I’m surprised at how much I learned about those characters in the process of writing the short story.
So the story was published in the anthology. A few months later, my publisher, Peak City Publishing, ran a promotion for Storm Surge, my first novel. When it hit the Amazon bestsellers lists, I wanted to offer something more for readers. Since the Ice Queen had been professionally edited, and since it was ready to go, I decided to self-publish the short story. In the meantime, I’m finishing writing the novel with the same characters.
