Mandy interviews Carolyn Haines

LANGUAGE AND LAUGHTER

Carolyn Haines is the USA Today bestselling author of over eighty books. She is the 2010 Harper Lee Award winning fiction writer and was inducted into the Alabama Writers' Hall of Fame in 2020. She was honored by a Lifetime Achievement Award with the Mississippi Writers Guild. Carolyn writes in a number of genres including crime, mystery, southern gothic fiction, psychological thriller, short fiction, and horror.

Let's start with how Carolyn got started in her writing career.

“My parents were journalists, and I got my bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Southern Mississippi. I worked as a journalist for a decade for papers like the George County Times, Mobile-Press-Register, Mississippi Press, Huntsville Times and Hattiesburg American. Mama kept a bearcat scanner on the ironing board and she’d send me off with my camera and notebook when something came up. We kept up with everything so anything that came over the scanner and sounded like a story we were on the scene, whether I wanted to go or not,” Carolyn laughs.

They made quite a team. One time Carolyn’s mama sent her out to check on a call about a buzzard flying into treetops. It was August and hot and Carolyn took off with forty pounds of camera equipment at her mama’s insistence. “I didn’t want to go, but Mama knew something wasn’t right. When I got to the scene I quickly realized the bird wasn’t a buzzard, but a bald eagle, and it was in distress. The men there were ready to shoot it and didn’t care what it was. I told them if they shot it, I’d see them all in Federal prison.”

“Did you call the Game Warden?” I asked before I realized that this was before cell phones, but it wouldn’t have mattered – one of the men was the game warden.

Luckily for Carolyn, a man that lived nearby stopped to see what was going on who was on her side. He agreed that it was a bald eagle and offered to wing it to bring it down so Carolyn could get it to a vet. It was a gamble but like he told Carolyn, “You can’t stay out here forever. Eventually you’ll have to go pee and when you do, these men will kill it.”

Carolyn said bring him down. Bonny had been a sharpshooter in the army and he was able to shoot the eagle, who was flying blindly into the trees, in a spot in his wing no bigger than the size of a quarter. The bird fell into a pond and Bonny swam out to get him. Carolyn convinced Bonny to hold him while she drove to the vet’s office where it was discovered the bird had an infection in his eyes due to parasites. The vet wrapped his wing, put antibiotics in his eyes, and Carolyn was in charge of finding fish and other food to feed him, and clean his cage.

Carolyn laughs, “I would get him out of the cage to clean it and chase him around with a broom for exercise. He was huge, but he never once tried to hurt me. Once he was ready we took him to a hawk trainer for rehab and then finally when he was ready to be set free, we had a big celebration with an agent from the Department of Interior on the bank of the Pascagoula River.

Who knew a call about a buzzard would turn into such a good story. Carolyn has a million of them – and she was just as adamant about making sure people were treated as fairly as the animals. She’s fierce when it comes to taking up for the underdog and as a journalist she used her camera, pen, and sharp wit as weapons when needed—just as her parents did. It’s no wonder that Carolyn would decide to become an author.

“I decided to write full time and started writing short fiction. I’d stopped writing for the papers and starved to death quickly,” Carolyn laughs. “That's when I saw that some Harlequin editors were in Mobile having a luncheon. Aspiring writers could attend, so I got dressed up and I went. They had just started the Intrigue line and explained what the books were and what they were hoping to find in new books. I really could not write a straight romance—I just couldn't keep the focus—but when they let me kill off some people I was really happy.

“I published my first romantic mystery, titled A Deadly Breed, with Harlequin Intrigue when I was thirty-four. That was the beginning and I really do have to say that I learned so much about writing by working with the Harlequin editors. They were terrific and Harlequin treats their authors well.”

“How many books did you write with them?”

“About thirty-seven and seventeen of them were about Familiar, the Black Cat Detective. Familiar is the forerunner to the most recent cat books that we did as an author collective about Trouble, the Black Cat Detective, who is the son of Familiar.”

“Wow, thirty-seven romantic mysteries with Harlequin—that is impressive. What was your first book outside of that?”

Carolyn, “In 1994 I published Summer of the Redeemers with Dutton (an imprint of Penguin Random House). It’s a Southern Gothic fiction coming of age story about a young girl in Mississippi who is horse crazy. Bekka Rich lives on a red dirt road called Kali Oka Road, which is actually here in Mobile County, but I just picked it up and moved it across the state line for my literary purposes.”

“Oh, I love that book! It was such a subtle creepy good read that sneaks up on you and stays with you for a while.”

Carolyn laughs, “I love the legend of Cry Baby Creek, which is in The Summer of the Redeemers. There is a true—well, a legend—about Kali Oka Road where they say that late at night, if you're driving across the bridge you can hear a baby cry down in the creek. There are several different versions of the story of the crying baby. One is that it was not wanted, an illegitimate child that was drowned there. The other version is that during the Civil War, when some Union troops were coming through, a young mother had fled to the creek to hide from the troops, and when she was there the baby started crying. She was trying to quiet her baby and accidentally suffocated it. There are several different stories. A fun one that involves me happened about five years ago. My niece, Jennifer, and I decided to go to Kali Oka Road to Cry Baby Creek and see if we could hear the baby cry. We discovered that they had built a new bridge and it was a really steep drop down to the creek,” Carolyn said and laughed. “Oh, but we were not going to be deterred. We were gonna take our phones and photograph spirits!

“We finally get down there scooting and sliding and look to see if we can find anything. When we decide to go back to our car, I can't get up the steep climb. I'm too old!” Another great Carolyn Haines laugh.

“So Jennifer gets under my butt, and she's pushing and lifting me until finally we get close enough to the top that I can get a hold. She pushes me up to the side of the road just as a car is coming on. I’m sure I scared them half to death – they swerved, probably thinking the ghost of the creek had come up for him. Jennifer and I always have a good time.”

Carolyn had a two book contract with Dutton, so after The Summer of the Redeemers, she wrote Touched. Later came Judas Burning, part three in the Jexville Chronicles. Each book can be read as a stand alone novel but they all include members of the McVay family over roughly nine decades. Carolyn also published the Pluto’s Snitch Mystery series, several books in the horror genre (Carolyn’s dark side), some short fiction, and has collaborated with different authors in several anthologies.

“I really like to scare people, and I've always loved scary shows and movies. My whole family did. Going to see The Exorcist was a family outing,” more great laughter, “that's really sad.”

Oh, and let’s not forget her Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery series. She just finished the first draft of the twenty-seventh book in the series and Carolyn gets messages from readers just about every day who want to know when they can expect the next one.

I asked Carolyn what she liked most about writing. Her answer, “When I get so deep in the story that real life dissolves, and I’m living the story with the characters. That's what I really enjoy. It doesn't happen all the time, it’s one of those special kinds of things when you're writing, when the way that you plotted the story out and imagined it all comes together.”

“Do you have a group of special beta readers?”

Carolyn, “I do. They’re volunteers, and they're very, very helpful. I have different ones for different books, because some people don't like the scary books, and some people don't like the more humorous books, so I try to give them what they really like, so they can tell me if it works or not. They're not editors, but they're good judges of what works and what doesn't work, and then I’ll send it to the editor.

I frequently have timeline issues, which is when I’m writing. It takes a year to write a book and there are stops and starts when life intervenes, as my friend Eugene would say. You're going hot and strong, and then, you know, there's a sick animal or something that needs to be done, and you get knocked off that forward moving path of the novel. You have to pick it back up, and sometimes I don't pick it up as cleanly as I should, but I like to have things as clean as possible. My theory on publishing is that it’s a business and I try to turn in the most professional manuscript I can. I have been so lucky with the editors I’ve had. They are true professionals. Once it's in their hands, I've cleaned it up as much as I can and hopefully they can, you know, do their magic on it.”

Carolyn goes on to say, “You're only as good as your last book, and that's just as true of almost any other job. You're only as good as the last thing that you did, and I find that to be a little scary, and also a good instruction for doing the best you can with each book. My job is to make my editor's life as easy as I can because they have a lot of authors.

Having been a journalist there’s a level of you don't get to be a Prissy Pot. You know, you're a working journalist. You have an editor. They work every day; they clean up your stuff. You don't complain - you make it better the next time.”

“That's really good advice to a lot of new authors. Let's talk about agents because I know a lot of new authors have questions about why or if they should query agents.”

“Well, I've had the same agent for thirty years. Her name is Marianne Young. She is a terrific agent and a very ethical professional. She reads the contracts, she understands the language of the contracts, and she keeps me out of trouble because you know, things sound great to me, because I don't know. But then she's like, let me see if I can get a better deal on that. She negotiates with the publishers to get me the best deal. It's not just her reading the contracts and saying, sign them or don't sign them, she puts in a whole lot of work and effort trying to get things like foreign rights, audio rights, or whatever we can that benefits both of us.

I can't imagine signing a contract without an agent going over it. She also sells the books because she has the contacts in the publishing world where she can call up an editor at Dutton, or Random House, or St. Martins, and say, I have this manuscript I think you might be really interested in. I think it fits here. The publishing houses are huge - some of them have many, many imprints.”

“How many different publishers have you been published with?”

Carolyn, “Let's see. Well, first of all, Harlequin, which is a major publisher, St. Martin's, Random House, Leisure, River City, Pegasus, F&W Media, Tyrus Books. So I've published with some medium and smaller presses which I've loved working with. I've also self-published books for me, just books that I want to write, and I’ve also gotten the rights back of some of my earlier work that I’ve reissued through Good Fortune Farm Refuge but I do get them edited professionally and I pay someone to create the covers because I have no talent at all with graphics or images.”

Carolyn is originally from Lucedale, Mississippi but she’s been in Alabama for over thirty years. “I live on Good Fortune Farm Refuge. We have cats, dogs, horses, and the few assorted wild critters that show up from time to time. I’ve always been passionate about the fair treatment of animals and GFFR is one way I’ve been able to combine my passion for writing and taking care of animals in need.”

When you purchase Carolyn’s books you are supporting the animals on her farm and making it possible for Carolyn to help others’ pets when she can. Here’s a link for more information about Good Fortune Farm Refuge.

Carolyn taught graduate and undergraduate creative writing classes at the University of South Alabama and had several students go on to publish with big houses.

“I bet your students loved you.”

Carolyn, “Well they thought I was fun, and I think they did care. I'm in touch with most of them still, because I care about them and I want them to have a wonderful career. You know some of them have had to drop out of writing to hold down a job or raise a family. But we still talk about writing, and they'll get back to it and do something really great.”

“Do you get a lot of fan mail for Sarah Booth Delaney?”

Carolyn, “I get a bit and I try to answer each one, you know, and I do get some unfan mail from time to time.”

“Seriously? Like what?”

“Well, one lady said that Sarah Booth was a slut.” Carolyn and I laughed so hard we had to take a minute.

Carolyn, “My first reaction was well, you know, don't read about her. But then maybe her husband had cheated on her with somebody that looked like Sarah Booth in her mind. Who knows? People are strange, which is good.”

Speaking of Sarah Booth, Carolyn just finished the first draft of the next book in the series.

“It’s called Jaws Bones. You know it’s a true fact that a bull shark can live in the Mississippi River, so it's about a bull shark that has gotten up to Greenville. I think it's going to be a fun book. I'm also working on the synopsis for the next Sarah Booth book, which is going to be set at the Elvis Impersonators competition in Tupelo, Mississippi. It's called Tender Bones.”

I asked Carolyn if she came up with the titles first, or if she chooses them after she’d written the stories.

“I like to have the title first. It helps me focus the book and it’s a lot of fun to come up with the titles for the Sarah Booth Delaney mysteries.

“I'm also working on a collaborative thriller with a dear friend of mine named Mandy Haynes (that’s me!) it's a kind of a different book, set in 1970, and it is a psychological thriller set in a small southern town. I don't want to give it away, and I don't want to talk too much about it, but I’m really hoping that it is as much fun for readers as it has been for us working on it. We’ve had a good time.”

I agree. We’ve had so much fun, we’ve already come up with ideas for others to work on once this one is finished.

“Some people might think we’re crazy, but you know it's fun. This was not anything we planned, it just happened, and you know, instead of talking it to death or not doing it, we sat down and started doing it. And so we'll see what happens with it.”

“It’s really exciting for me because I’ve never written a thriller and wouldn’t know where to start but we’ve got a great story and you are a wonderful teacher. I’m so lucky.”

Carolyn, “Well, you're a fine writer and it's just a matter of learning different pacing, a stretched plot. The plot and the structure are the hardest thing for any writer. And I’ve never written a story where two people write different characters and combine them, so we're both learning and I'm having a good time. Whatever happens we've had a lot of laughs so it’s already a win.”

I had so many more questions for Carolyn, but my dogs—the terrors…I mean terriers—were getting restless and I still don’t trust them with the cats.

We’re all here at Good Fortune Farm Refuge writing, working, trying to keep all the animals happy, and laughing until our faces hurt. Life is good in Alabama.

Do yourself a favor and join Carolyn’s newsletter for all kinds of fun, monthly giveaways, and more surprises. www.carolynhaines.com/subscribe

Catch the full interview on WELL READ Magazine's BETWEEN THE PAGES youtube.com/@wellreadmagazine