Book Tour Featuring *Dearly Beloved Departed* by Nancy Lynn Jarvis @dollycas #giveaway #authorguestpost

Dearly Beloved Departed: A PIP Inc. Mystery
by Nancy Lynn Jarvis

About Dearly Beloved Departed

Dearly Beloved Departed: A PIP Inc. Mystery
Cozy Mystery
4th in Series
Setting – California
Good Read Mysteries, an imprint of Good Read Publishers
Number of Pages: 241

Pat is hired by attorney Jason Forman to “get some dirt” on his daughter’s fiancé. Before she gets very far in her investigation, the young man is murdered. Did his past catch up with him or is what Pat fears, that there’s a serial shooter going after Christmas Eve grooms, the reason he was killed? Pat and her fiancé, Detective Sergeant Tim Lindsey, are planning a Christmas Eve wedding which means, if she’s right, he’s on the shooter’s hit list.

Guest Post By Nancy Lynn Jarvis

Pssst. In your head writers, may I talk to you?

I just celebrated a big birthday. I started writing in 2008 at fifty-nine so you can do the math and know I definitely qualify as a gezzerette. From the knees down I feel my age, but above them, I could be the same age as one of my female protagonists. Writing their adventures is a great way for me to stay young, or at least a lot younger than I am.

I didn’t spend my earlier years thinking about being a writer, although I did write one thing post-college and prior to 2008. Our local newspaper had a contest asking for a short screenplay that UCSC students would make into a production. I submitted a take on Westside Story with my gangs being students vs. townies vying for housing. My screenplay didn’t win. Other than that, I didn’t catch the writing bug until I was fifty-nine.

Many people tell me they want to write, but they have too much going on in their lives and don’t have time. Are you one of them? I’m generally a master at telling myself all my ducks need to be happily quacking in a row before I begin a new project, but with writing, I don’t accept that excuse. Okay, my nest was empty when I started writing, but since the first time I faced a blank screen on my computer I’ve worked full time as a real estate agent, saw my mother through her final years with all that entailed, supported my husband as he battled multiple myeloma with chemo and a stem cell transplant and held his hand as he died.

The CZU Fire in California destroyed much of my home and displaced me for eight-and-a-half months. When I returned home it was to live amidst a house full of contractors working on everything from replacing and painting sheetrock, putting in new carpet, replacing every window in the house, and refinishing damaged kitchen cupboards. There were constant calls of, “Nancy, we’ve got a problem. What do you want us to do about it?” I lived in the center of utter distraction with disruption in every room of my house which made concentrating on writing quite difficult.

Through all of it, I wrote books. I believe writing got me through a decade of serial disasters. And it makes sense that writing did, doesn’t it? We all know what it feels like to escape into a book, to become so engrossed with the characters’ adventures and trials that we forget our own. Imagine how much more escape is possible when writing a book than when reading one.

As I was beginning to write, a man who was working on his second book told me he liked to go sit in his car along Highway I near Santa Cruz, look at the ocean, and listen to what his characters told him about their lives. He seemed normal enough, but isn’t hearing voices a sign of schizophrenia? I thought he must secretly be crazy…until my characters started talking to me.

Before I write a new story, I do a background profile for each of my characters. I need to understand who they are and what they’ve experienced in their life. I have to do this. I can’t write about them if I don’t know who they are. Even so, as I’m writing, they tell me things about themselves. It’s their way of helping me write.

What they share with me can be something simple like police ombudsman Dave Everett from the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries series telling me he spoke German to something more surprising. The villain in The Corpse’s Secret Life told Pat Pirard, the protagonist in the PIP Inc. Mysteries series, that she genuinely liked her. That was news to me. The whole time I was writing the book, I assumed the villain was a master manipulator using Pat to get what she wanted.

In the newly released book Dearly Beloved Departed, Pat revealed that she was afraid Tim would tire of her. That concern was a huge surprise to me. In the three books leading up to Dearly Beloved Departed, Tim has been pursuing Pat faster than she was sometimes willing to go. According to my backstory of who Pat is, I thought Pat wanted to slow the relationship down because she was unsure of her feelings toward him. It turns out, I was very much mistaken. Even though she’s a bright, clever, and capable woman very much in charge of making potentially life-altering decisions on the fly, she was aware of a weakness I didn’t know she had. She was afraid Tim would discover she wasn’t as perfect as she thought she needed to be.

I encourage you who have a secret desire to try writing to go for it. If you want to, you’ll make time―even if it’s only for a few minutes a day―to put something down. Your characters will help you. As you get to know them, they’ll let you into their lives. It’s going to be worth the effort. You’ll enter a community of writers, some of the nicest, most supportive people you’ll ever meet. You’ll have unimagined new adventures, and you’ll eventually hear from someone who says they read your book and loved it. Few other days in your life will be better than that one.

About Nancy Lynn Jarvis

Nancy Lynn Jarvis left the real estate profession after she started having so much fun writing the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries series that she let her license lapse. She’s enjoyed writing about Regan and her husband, Tom, but decided it was time to do a new series.

PIP Inc. introduces protagonist downsized law librarian and not-quite-licensed Private Investigator Pat Pirard. “The Funeral Murder” is the second book in the series.

After earning a BA in behavioral science from San Jose State University, Nancy worked in the advertising department of the San Jose Mercury News. A move to Santa Cruz meant a new job as a librarian and later a stint as the business manager for Shakespeare/Santa Cruz at UCSC.

Currently, she’s enjoying being a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Santa Cruz Women of Mystery.