Award-Winning Mystery, Suspense, and Thriller Novelist

Written by JENNIFER DZIEDZIC

Having grown up in Fairburn, Kim Carter moved to Newnan with her husband Julius seven years ago. Her writing room is adorned with signed photographs and movie memorabilia from Angela Lansbury and actor Ari Lehman, the original young Jason from “Friday the 13th,” among the multitude of macabre decor. A lifesize Michael Myers mannequin leers at Carter from one corner of the room while One-Eyed Willie, the skeleton from the Goonies, sits on an opposite wall, keeping an eye on her writing.

“This is something that my husband had done before he passed away, and I know it’s probably rather creepy to the average person but there’s a lot of really cool stuff in here. I don’t write horror – I’m not a Stephen King or a Dean Koontz,” she explains. “I just love to collect all the cool things. I have a sound machine and I’ll cut the lights off and it’s really inspiring.”

“I think writers are very eclectic, we’re weird people,” she adds. “We write because it’s who we are. It’s what leads us to start fifteen projects at once, even though they may not ever get completed, or even see the light of day.”

Carter says it cracks her up when people ask what she does. “I tell them I’m a writer,” she says. “They always react the same – highly impressed, assuming I am among the less than one percent of vastly successful, wealthy, and well-known writers.”

Carter started writing in 1999. “It was when an illness left me homebound, that I turned to writing as a form of therapy,” she says. What started with a sentence, a paragraph, and then a couple of pages turned into a book.

“It was my story; it was the beginning of finding myself and retrieving my health,” says Carter.

Friends and neighbors read her first manuscript, that came to them rolled up and held together with rubber bands, and became fully invested in the story and characters. This encouraged her to keep writing. “We all have a story in us. We’re actually living one every day,” she explains.

For her second book, Carter says, “My faithful group came through again and read the book in small sections, rolled up with rubber bands. I had garnered more support by then, especially from my husband, Julius, who was convinced they needed to be published. I’d love to flippantly say, ‘That’s when we were off to the races. But nothing goes as planned. That is one thing of which I’m certain.”

Four books and two publishers later, Carter says her writing career stagnated. “The people who read them seemed to like them, but I wasn’t within reach of a broad audience.”

Losing confidence, writing for deadlines and not for fun, Carter also began experiencing more health problems. “I left several projects incomplete, turned the computer off, and closed my office door. It was no longer therapeutic but too challenging. I was done with writing.” Slipping into depression, Carter says she received a wakeup call from her best friend, Kelly Keylon.

Says Carter, “He said, “‘You’re too good, you’re not going to quit – if I have to get these books out there myself, I’ll do it.’ And he did!”

They revisited her older novels and updated them. Re-inspired, Carter says her hands were soon tapdancing across the keys once again. “My publicist, Catherine Townsend- Lyons, worked day and night for meager wages and we secured the talented Keith Saunders as a cover designer,” she says.

Her seventh and latest release is called “Dark Secrets of the Bayou.” Carter says her eighth book is slated for release in late January, the first in a ‘Clara and Iris’ trilogy.

“Every month Cat (Townsend-Lyons) calls to tell me where my books have been sold, now reaching places I’ve never even visited, the U.K., Canada, Australia, even Japan and Spain,” says Carter, who always loved murder mysteries, going back to her high school days, watching “Murder She Wrote” with her family. Reading various mystery authors helped her develop her own writing style.

Previous educator and close friend Juli Simpson has also been instrumental in helping Carter with her writing and ideas. “So many times I will paint myself into a corner and then I’m like, how am I feasibly going to get out of this where it’s believable?”

Carter never knows what will inspire her with an idea for a book.

“It may be a place that’s both beautiful and creepy, or it may be just something that a person says that triggers me,” she says. “I’ve been to the morgue, the medical examiner’s office, cemeteries in the middle of the night, just all kinds of places that really inspire me. Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, and I became great penpals when he was in a supermax (prison) in Florence, Colorado.” She also reaches out to people at the GBI, Atlanta police department, and various homicide departments.

Carter’s advice to other writers is simple: “I think the key is having your own place to write, surrounded by things that inspire you. Having your own space where you can close it off is really instrumental.” NCM

AUTHOR JOE MCNABB