I didn’t plan it this way, but this seems to be the week for interviews with authors who have both Italian Greyhounds and German Shepherds. (Yesterday I posted an interview with author Lauren Carr whose pet menagerie also includes these breeds.)
As you can tell from the above picture, the author du jour, Ms. Kathleen Delaney, also has two such dogs. Besides accompanying her to book signings, how else do her pooches help with her writing process? And does she model any characters after them?
My inquiring mind wanted to know that and more, and Ms. Delaney was kind enough to indulge me with the following answers.
Courtney Mroch: What kind of things do you write about? (Genre, subject matter, themes, what have you.)
Kathleen Delaney: I write a cozy/amateur sleuth series, set on California’s central coast. Ellen McKenzie is a divorced woman in her early 40’s, one college age daughter, who returns to her home town, brand new real estate license in hand, to start life over. She finds a possible new romance and a lot of dead bodies throughout the first three books.
CM: What kind of pets do you have? (Or have you had.)
KD: I have two dogs, a German Shepard and an Italian Greyhound. Bred Arabian and half Arabian horses for years, have had a large assortment of other dog and cats, and my kids were in 4H. Dairy, beef, pigs, horse and dog obedience. It was a full life.
CM: Do animals appear in your work? Do you ever use your pets as the basis for any animal characters? (Are they the focus of any of your stories or the main characters?)
KD: There is a cat, Jake, who is in all of them. He was a marmalade kitten one of my daughters brought home, who I said couldn’t stay, and he only hung out at our house for 14 years. He deserved to be immortalized. He is the only one that is modeled after a real animal.
As to focus, the second book, Give First Place To Murder, is set in the world of Arabian horse breeding and showing. I have written an article on my kids’ adventures (and their mother’s) in 4H for Family Fun and have a short story based on the birth of a foal in an anthology.
Use animals whenever I can sneak them in. In the newest book, And Murder For Dessert, Jake appears but also a white standard poodle, named Paris, who is the winery dog, and a thorn in Jake’s side.
CM: What are you working on now? Any new releases?
KD: Working on the next book in this series, working title, Murder Half Baked.
Of Note About Ms. Delaney’s Works
In addition to Give First Place to Murder and And Murder for Dessert, Ms. Delaney also scribed Dying for a Change. You can read the first chapters of each by visiting the Books page on her website.
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Photo credit: Photo from Seattle Mystery Bookshop’s blog site and used with permission from Ms. Delaney.