T D O N L
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Cozy m yst ery a ut hor b u i l d s h e r c ata l o g
Story and photos by Dalondo Moultrie
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or as long as she can remember, words have been Tracy Donley’s thing. It feels like writing is something she has done in some form since her earliest days of even knowing how to string words together to form sentences. “I think I wrote my first booklength manuscript around age 13,” Donley said. “I’ve always written. I think I was about 5 years old when I asked for a typewriter for my birthday.” Back in those early years, she knew her goal in life was to become an author, which she told people as a child. It took some years and lots of hustle, but Donley achieved her goal. The Seguin High School and Texas Lutheran University graduate is a published author several times over under an assumed name, Thea Cambert. And now, her publisher has agreed to release the next cozy mystery series penned by Donley under her real name. “As Thea, I’ve written about 21 books,” she said. “As Tracy, I’m starting the fourth in a series.” “Murder in the Meadow” released earlier this year is the first of a four-book Rosemary Gray cozy mysteries series. Two others of the series are written and ready for release and she’s currently sculpting the fourth of the books. Her publisher came up with the nom 26 SEGUIN ~ GUADALUPE COUNTY LIVING
de plume Thea Cambert when Donley penned her first cozy novel last year. Even though she knew writing was her thing, she didn’t start publishing her work until around the time of last year’s lockdowns related to COVID-19, Donley said. “It’s because of the pandemic this all came about,” she said. “My job before that was as a children’s minister at St. Andrews Episcopal Church. We couldn’t meet in person because of the pandemic. I couldn’t do the stuff with the kids. I was still trying to do something for them but most of what was taking up my time I could no longer do.” She just had more free time in which to practice her passion professionally. Donley also had an inside track since she had previously done freelance work editing books. That work allowed her a glimpse inside the publishing world and access to a publisher. She reached out to one and let the company know she was interested in penning a novel. Things worked out from there, Donley said. “They had me come up with an idea for a series of four books and asked me to go ahead and write the first one,” she said. “If they liked it, they would have me write another three. By the time I finished the fourth, they asked me to write four more and then they asked me to write four more.”
As the offers kept coming, she kept churning out novels. The turnaround times for the novels is brief so authoring more and more books keeps her busy, Donley said. She started out completing a new book about every other week. That scheduled has relaxed a bit as more work is piled on her plate, she said. “I’m writing three books right now,” Donley said. “One as Thea, one as Tracy and a third book I’m actually co-authoring with my son Nate.” Cozy mysteries are lighthearted tales that often begin with a character discovering a murder and then being swept up in getting to the bottom of the criminal act, Donley said. There’s no extraordinary violence, no blood and nothing too graphic It is somewhat of a formulaic genre, which helps feed new material to readers insatiable appetite for more content, she said. Books she’s authored run somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 words. The novels may not be ground shaking, classical literary works but she writes them for readers who get out of them just what they need, Donley said. “It’s not that I’m trying to write ‘important’ literature with these books, but I’ve gotten some fan letters during the pandemic that people have said,
