Who’s the New “Kid”?
Terry Odell

When I opened the email inviting me to become a contributing member of The Kill Zone Blog, I was honored. I’ve been reading the blog for years, making comments, but move to the other side of the page? Scary. The other contributors have set a high bar. But I accepted the invitation, so here I am.

Who am I?

I’m someone who did not start out with aspirations of becoming a writer. I did not write my first story in crayon. The one time I thought about putting a story idea onto “paper” (we were well into the word processor age by then), the tedium of getting dialogue punctuated correctly put a halt to that project.

You could say I became a writer by mistake, through a chance introduction to the Highlander television series. You can read that whole misadventure here. I’ll wait.

Back? I’ll continue.

Eventually, punctuating dialogue became automatic, I joined a local writing group (The Pregnant Pigs, and that’s another story), and I looked forward to sitting down to play with my characters. Honestly, I was having fun, and had more of an If someone knocks on the door and asks if I have a manuscript, I’ll say yes mentality. But my fellow Piggies pushed. I found an agent, which meant my rejections came faster and were worded more politely.

My road to publication started with e-publishers back in the day when people were reading on their computers or PDAs. I had some romance short stories published by The Wild Rose Press (I was their first contracted author), and some romantic suspense novels published by the now defunct Cerridwen Press. I had a trio of books published in hard cover by Five Star, which targeted the library market. When my first Five Star book was remaindered and I got the rights back, the Kindle had just come into being, and with it, indie-publishing. I figured I had nothing to lose, and ventured down that road.

And, that’s where I am now. A purely indie-author, and happy to be one. I have 22 novels, 3 novellas, 2 short story collections, plus some bundled works out there. (I had to check.)

What do I write?

This blog is focused on mysteries, and I have a mystery series (Mapleton Mysteries) with 5 novels (the 5^th, Deadly Fun, drops on February 24^th) as well as three novellas. My collection of mystery short stories, Seeing Red, happened to win the Silver Falchion Award in 2015. (There’s a story there, too, but that’s for another time.)

However, despite thinking I was writing a mystery, my first manuscript, according to my daughters, was a romance. Given I’d never read a romance, that came as quite a shock. I realized that when I read mysteries, I was just as interested in what went on in the “off duty” lives of the characters as I was in solving the crime. Thus, I call all my books “Mysteries With Relationships” even though three of my four series would be classified as romantic suspense, or mystery romance.

My series: the Mapleton Mysteries, Pine Hills Police, Blackthorne, Inc., and the Triple-D Ranch series. Most of them are also available as audiobooks.

That’s the writing side of me.

The personal side: I grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA, taught junior high, moved to Florida, raised a family, and now I live in the Colorado Rockies with my husband and rescue dog, FBI SAC Odell, but we call her Feebie.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.” Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.