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| Celebrating collaboration |
Thank you so much for having
us as a guest blogger!
I’m Traci, half of the
writing duo Traci Wilton. Patrice Wilton is the other half—you can see that we
decided not to get too crazy with our pen name J. We wanted our romance readers to be able to find us.
Between us, Patrice and I
have well over seventy novels—Patrice is a New York Times bestselling romance
author and I especially love her Paradise Cove series. My backlist meandered a
bit more to include medieval romance, paranormal romance, and young adult, and
there are sixteen novels in my contemporary romance By the Sea series. In the
Dog House, a sweet contemporary romance, was released in February.
After so many years of
writing romance, we decided to stretch our writing wings and tackle a cozy
mystery. In romance there are different levels of heat, as you may know, and
Patrice and I are similar in varying the level of sexy depending on the story.
Let’s face it, sometimes we aren’t in the mood, lol. With mystery, we didn’t
have to be—though in Mrs. Morris and the Ghost, we have two love interests for our
widow. We stuck with the traditional format of the handsome detective, because
our ghost makes for a very unique third party.
In the first book, Charlene,
a native of Chicago, buys a mansion sight unseen in Salem, Mass. to escape the
memories of her life with her husband, who was killed in a car accident. The house, as it turns out, is haunted by Dr.
Jack Strathmore. According to her sources, it is believed that he died of
natural causes, but he’d actually been murdered and Charlene is the only one
who can see him.
We’ve written three of the
stories so far and they are so much fun—we’ve completely fallen in love with
Jack ourselves.
We get asked quite a bit how
it is to write with a partner and it helps that we’ve been critique partners
since 2003, before we were published, so we trust each other with our words and
our writing styles. We follow a plot, which is key to keeping us both going in
the same direction, and alternate chapters to write, and then when we do our
next pass, we switch those. If one of us feels strongly about writing a certain
scene, we try to be supportive of that because at the end of the process, this
is about the story, and not ego. When we disagree, we leave a note in the
comment section, and come back to it later. We made a pact that we are friends
first and always!
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| Authors in Salem, Mass doing research |
We hope to write many more
Mrs. Morris cozy mysteries—I think they are being called the Salem B & B
cozy mysteries? As writers, our characters are family, so we just think of them
as Charlene and Jack.
Thank you again for letting
us visit with you all at Romancing the Genres!
Traci
Learn more about Traci Wilton on their websites:
You can find Mrs. Morris and the Ghost at these e-retailers.
