Today, The Back Deck Blog is featuring Holli Castillo, author of the Crescent City mystery series published by Oak Tree Press. She is also the unofficial poster girl for perseverance and "No excuses!" Let's get to know Holli a little better:
I have been a Louisiana
appellate public defender since March of 2000. I quit my job as a
prosecutor at the New Orleans D.A.’s Office in December of 1999 so
I could stay home with my daughter, who was a few months old at the
time. The appellate job was offered to me a few months later and was
perfect because it allowed me to work from home. It was then that I
finally decided to start seriously working on my writing career.
The first in the Crescent
City Mystery Series, Gumbo Justice,
was published in 2009 by Oak Tree Press. The series revolves around
Ryan Murphy, a tough, spunky female prosecutor in New Orleans. She is
highly competitive, a necessity to keep up with the unofficial boy’s
club. She also has a big mouth, which sometimes puts her in tough
spots, as well as draws the disapproval of her father, who is a
police captain in one of the eight New Orleans police districts. Her
brothers and her boyfriend are also NOPD. While Ryan is a pit bull
of a prosecutor, she is also a magnet for trouble, particularly when
she insinuates herself in situations that shouldn’t concern her.
There’s always bound to be drama around Ryan, most of it
self-imposed.
My road to publication was
somewhat rocky. When I believed the novel was finished, which was
the beginning of 2004, I researched and found agents I felt might
publish my novel. I queried and received between 30 and 40
rejections. I was lucky, though, because a good deal of the
rejections had notes on them for me about the reason for the
rejection. Some were the standard, “So sorry, your work is not
right for our agency.”
Some of the rejections,
however, included notes as to why my work wasn’t right for their
agency. For instance, one agent circled the word serial
killer on my query and wrote, “Not for us,”
next to it. Another said they didn’t handle such dark material. A
third said my dialog was unbelievable.
This led me to conclude
first, that I hadn’t researched agents as carefully as I had
thought, and second, maybe my work wasn’t quite as ready for
publication as I had thought.
At that point, I took a
Writer’s Digest online novel workshop. It was designed for writers
who had finished writing the novel and wanted feedback to get
published. G. Micki Hayden was the teacher, and her advice proved to
be extremely valuable. One of the biggest pieces of advice she
offered was about my ending, which she pointed out was not going to
be satisfying to the readers and thus would limit my ability to lure
an agent. At the end of the course, I re-wrote the ending, changed a
few things that weren’t working, and decided to start the querying
process again. This was near the end of 2004.
My first step was to spend
more time researching agents and publishers. This time, I chose to
query mainly publishers. Honestly, the reason was because I felt I
had tapped out the agent market to some extent and didn’t want to
re-query agents I had already queried. This time, I bought books
published by the publishers I was interested in. I realized at this
step that some publishers that seemed right for me in the Writer’s
Market weren’t actually right for my work in real life. Just
because a publisher publishes mysteries written by new authors
doesn’t mean my novel fit into what they published. The idea of
specialized genres had never entered my equation before.
I was finally ready to
send out the queries and did so, sending out to fewer, but more
targeted, publishers, with a few agents thrown in for good measure.
I received a relatively quick response from an agent requesting the
manuscript. I mailed it off to her and waited.
Not too longer after that,
September of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit. Everything in New Orleans
was a mess. We were fortunate in that we didn’t lose everything,
but had some structural damage. No flooding at my house, but repairs
had to be made and household items had to be replaced. Plus we had
no phone, no internet, and no mail for quite some time. For months,
we were the only family back in our neighborhood, only the men in the
neighborhood returning to work. Needless to say, thoughts of writing
and getting published went on the back burner for quite a while. Not
to mention that having no contact with the rest of the world thing.
Finally, things got back
on track. By then, I had heard back from the agent, who was no
longer taking new writers due to health reasons. I had also received
a request for my manuscript from Billie Johnson at Oak Tree Press, my
current publisher based upon an email query. I sent her my manuscript
and then waited for a response. She got back to me and said she
wanted to publish it and we began to start talking timing. The book
was on the calendar for summer of 2008. We discussed the cover, the
blurb, and all those other good things publishers discuss with the
writer.
And then, in June of 2008,
three days after my oldest daughter’s ninth birthday, my two
daughters and I were in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. We
were scheduled to go to Alabama the next day to adopt a puppy from a
rescue shelter not too far from where we had purchased an evacuation
house. My first puppy, just four months old, was in the car with us
as well.
The wreck delayed the
publication of the novel for a year (as well as delayed getting the
second puppy for several more years.) I was in the hospital for two
weeks, getting titanium rods and plates put in my left thigh, left
arm, and right ankle. I had over 80 staples throughout my body,
burns, bruises, sprains, broken bones, including missing two inches
of my femur and fracturing a lower vertebrae. I was in a wheelchair
for seven months, and it was a year before I could walk, albeit with
a limp. My girls were also injured, my oldest with a seatbelt
laceration to her abdomen, my youngest, who was six at the time, with
a broken wrist, a cut that required staples under her eye, and nerve
damage to her legs that took nearly two years before she could walk
and run normally again.
My doctor said I was lucky
because I should have been eating out of a straw after that kind of a
wreck. Two years earlier, my Jeep had been stolen and wrecked by
teenage thieves, deploying the airbag. When the dealership repaired
the car, apparently they neglected to fix the airbag. This turned out
to be a Godsend during my collision because the airbag actually flew
off with the steering wheel and landed in the seat next to me. If the
airbag had deployed, my doctor believed I would have likely suffered
facial injuries, internal injuries, or possibly death. I don’t
consider myself lucky, although I do say I am the luckiest unlucky
person in the world.
The only positive thing
was that while I was laid up unable to do anything else, I spent a
lot of time on the computer, doing promotion, engaging in social
media and learning the online ropes. Almost exactly a year to the
date of the car wreck, Gumbo Justice
was published.
Fortunately, Jambalaya
Justice was born without so much drama,
although it did take almost two years to write. Currently, I am
working on Chocolate City Justice,
the third in the Crescent City Mystery Series, which should be out
this year.
The best advice I can give
to other writers is to not give up just because getting published
seems tough, but also to pay attention to why you might be getting
rejected. Don’t assume that all advice is bad or doesn’t apply
to you. Writers have to be confident or they would never want anyone
to read what they’ve written, but they should temper that with the
humility to recognize when something in the writing isn’t working.
Completing the work makes
you a writer. Getting it on the pages to sell makes you a published
writer. If you want to move from the first category into the second
category and you’re not getting anywhere, you might need to take a
step back from the work to figure out why.
The second best advice I
can give is if you are going to self-publish, hire a good editor.
Even with a publisher and a number of people looking over my
manuscripts before they get published, typos or errors get through. I
can only imagine how many more would be present if I didn’t have
other people doing some of that work for me.
Since I finished writing
Gumbo Justice, I’ve
had another daughter, adopted two deaf cats and two more dogs, got a
guinea pig, and finally bought another car a mere six years after the
wreck (you could say I was kind of shell shocked about getting
another vehicle.) I still live in New Orleans with my husband et al
and anticipate writing about Ryan and her mysteries until my
publisher gets sick of me.
WEBSITE-
www.hollicastillo.com
FACEBOOK-
www.facebook.com/holli.castillo
Thanks for joining us on The Back Deck today, Holli, and sharing your story! I hope many readers will pick up the Crescent City mysteries and get to know you better through your stories!
