It’s day one of what promises to be a busy, crazy, and joyful year for me. All The Broken Peoplewill be released on March 5. I’m excited and nervous and a whole bunch of other emotions that overwhelm authors as their book launches approach. For those of you in the Boulder area, I’ll be holding a big launch party at Lunada Eatery & Cantina. They hosted my last book launch and it was a wonderful evening. Great food and lots of celebrating!
 
I’ll be doing some traveling this year, both for business and for fun. Looking forward to my 3rdyear at Thrillerfest in July and my first year at Bouchercon. Over the summer, my sister and I are taking my mom and aunt to France for a two-week adventure! That rip will be bookended by a mini-book tour in New Mexico and a conference in New York City so if you see me looking a little discombobulated, you’ll know why. 
 
Over the holidays, my husband and I made a trip to Georgia to say a final farewell to my mother-in-law, who passed away on Thanksgiving. It was a bittersweet trip to say the least, but visiting Jasper and meeting family members for the first time filled my heart with love and hope. The kudzu is dormant but the landscape is plenty breathtaking to captivate the imagination of this desert-born girl.
 
So, as I work fervently toward putting my book out into the world, I am wishing you all a Happy New Year with lots of great reading! Please stay tuned for news about the book and related events.
 
Hello, 2019! Let’s do this thing.

I’ve loved to tell stories and write stories for as long as I can remember. As a little girl I read Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and other books with strong female protagonists. I fantasized about being a detective, and as I got older, I was able to do investigative work in a number of my careers. I worked as a social worker, a probation officer, and a federal investigator for a total of 9 years before I started teaching at the university level. By then, I was over the idea of being a detective anymore, but I found that I still liked writing mysteries. After teaching sociology and criminal justice for 11 years, I decided to work full time as a writer. Of course everyone thought I was having a midlife crisis because who abandons their career as a tenured professor to become a self-published writer? Um, that would be me! I’ve been writing full time since 2013 and have written six books with the seventh installment in the University Mystery Series to be released this spring.

My first book, Day of the Dead, was inspired by actual events. In 2004 I was teaching at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota when a fellow professor was found shot to death outside the building where we both taught. The resulting investigation left us on campus with more questions than answers. Years later, I used this premise as the inspiration for my book. After writing Day of the Dead, I realized that I had tons of background information from my previous occupations I could use and, thus developed a series.

The University Mystery Series can best be characterized as cozy mysteries with an edge. They take place in the small, quirky, fictional town of Elmwood, South Dakota. My protagonist, Marlee McCabe, is a professor of criminology, struggling to figure out the politics of university life. At the same time, she’s balancing her love life, struggling with overeating, and has a bit of a drinking problem. While she’s muddling through her professional and personal struggles, she finds herself pulled into mysteries in the area.

In an attempt to avoid “Cabot Cove Syndrome,” my latest book, Blood Feud, is set in Delhi, India. This came about organically when I went on a trip to India with one of my best friends. Once I arrived and experienced the richness of the culture I knew I had to make it a setting for an upcoming book. As a university professor, my protagonist was coming up for sabbatical; a release from work duties on campus to complete research. I decided to have Marlee travel to India while she was on her sabbatical. Once there, she falls into similar academic pitfalls that beleaguered her back in Elmwood, SD. She also experiences the murder of a new friend and tries to uncover the details of his death while navigating the Indian culture.

I’m currently working on the seventh book in the University Mystery Series. As of yet, it’s untitled, so I’ve been referring to it as #7. Don’t worry, I’ll come up with a better name. After completing this book I’m excited to start on a new series. It will also be set in South Dakota, but will be a bit darker than my other books. It will still fall in the Mystery genre and can be categorized as Prairie Noir.  

In my work as a probation officer and social worker, I developed a strong sense of empathy for victims of crime. Fortunately, I’ve never been a victim of a serious crime, but have worked with many people who were victimized. When I began writing Day of the Dead, I decided to begin each chapter with a sentence or two in the words of the victim. The victim’s words might be foreshadowing of events to come or a reaction to something a character said or did in the book. In Blood Feud, I began each chapter with a Hindu proverb. The book is set in India and the victim often speaks in proverb form, so it seemed fitting.

Motivation is more important than inspiration, in my opinion. If I waited for inspiration, nothing would get finished. Since 2009 I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) as a way of getting the majority of a first draft completed during the month of November. At least part of all of my books have been written during Nanowrimo. I need the challenge of meeting a daily word count and writing 50,000 words in a month. I publish a book about every ten months. This is slow compared to many authors I know who crank out four or more books a year. Could I write four books in one year? It’s doubtful, but if I did they wouldn’t be fit to read. Every writer is different and for me I need the better part of a year to work on my story plus all the revising, editing, marketing, etc. that goes along with being a self-published writer.

My best advice for aspiring or new writers is to write and keep writing. If you get stuck, give it some time. Switch to a new story or do something else creative for a short time. Don’t stop and don’t throw anything away. Also, limit the amount of time you spend reading what so-called experts have to say about writing.

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​When an unexpected teaching assignment whisks Marlee McCabe off to New Delhi, India, she lands right in the middle of an ongoing family dispute and an academic firestorm. Before long, Marlee is faced with the most difficult decisions of her life, causing her to choose between her life back home and a new life in India. Without the familiarity of the Midwest, she’s dependent upon the good graces of strangers. But are these new acquaintances really who they pretend to be? Sacrificing her career and her own safety, Marlee struggles to unravel the mystery of who murdered her only friend in India. Can she unmask the killer before she becomes the next victim?

​Sandy Ward Bell grew up in upstate NY. Radio was her first love. After college, she became an announcer and promotion director. She married, had a daughter, and the art of storytelling became her new passion. She spent many years living in Augusta, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. Today, she calls Nashville home. For more information, visit sandywardbell.com.
 

Becoming a writer started as a dream, an actual dream. I pulled this weird chair off a farmhouse porch, placed it smack dab into the middle of a gravel road, and sat, waiting for something exciting to happen. A male voice announced, “This is the beginning of your novel.” I woke up and started writing. Six years later that scene became the opening of my first novel, In Zoey’s Head.

Self-publishing through CreateSpace was becoming stylish in 2010, so I took that route after several rejections from traditional agents. I’m glad I did. I was in control, picking everything from cover design to font size, and my bank account wasn’t drained to empty.

Finding an honest bi-monthly, line-by-line critique group was my next blessing. Four men and three women of different ages helped me mold my second novel in half the time as the first. In honor of Jane Austen, I wrote a modern version of Mansfield Park. My Parked at the Mansfields’ has sold well in Europe thanks to faithful Janeites. 

​I write because I must. Characters are often buzzing in my head, demanding to have their voice’s heard through my fiction. I’ll see a fancy new nightlight and imagine that is how fairies enter our world or I’ll watch a documentary about life-like dolls and I’ll want to explain that raw emotion in words. Because novels are time consuming and concentrate on only a few characters, I decided to change it up by creating a series of short stories. Boldwas born,a collection of 14 short stories about strong women. 

Self-publishing remained the best option: my daughter modeled for the cover again, I controlled pricing and eBook giveaways. Yet, that was the last time I could use CreateSpace. For my next book, I’ll be going to Kindle Direct Publishing. I don’t believe there will be much difference because they are still under the Amazon umbrella.

With my writing journey said, here is what I recommend for all future authors. 1) Find a committed critique group. The best way to learn is through mistakes. 2) Surround yourself with creative people. They will inspire you. 3) You will find time to write if you tell the world you are a writer. 4) Writer’s block does not exist. Put some words on a page and keep going. It may be crap, but you are writing. 5) Read, read, and read some more.

“Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.” J.K. Rowling.

Growing up, every now and then I used to sit down and write a poem about something happening in my life. Poetry was one of the few things I liked about English classes in school, but I wasn’t a reader. What I had going for me was that I always had something to say, as far back as I can remember (Mom and Dad called me Motor-mouth when I was around 3 years old). And poetry is what got me started as a writer in my adult life.

It was 2002, and my wife and I were set to have twins. Unfortunately, following a short trip to the beach with my in-laws, we came back to bad news in my wife’s next checkup. The doctor broke tragic news to us that one of our twin boys had passed. This was a bittersweet time for our entire family; we had lost a child we so looked forward to seeing, but we still had a little boy who stood a chance. The rest of the pregnancy was high risk, and of course had strong emotional impact on both my wife and me. It had been a while, but I wrote a poem to cope with the loss on my part, and to try to give my wife some sort of closure. Thankfully, my son Jay was born to us a few months later in the summer of 2002.

Meanwhile, that poem sparked something to life in me. I began writing more poetry. I lost a collection of poetry some time ago that I shared with people here and there back then – a collection I called Daddy’s poems, showing the first couple of years of life as a father. It was during this time of sharing poetry with the guidance counselor and librarian at the school in which I worked, that it was suggested that I try to write a book. I began taking their advice… and I wrote the beginning of one story…and another… and another. But I just couldn’t seem to finish a story. It would take the words of Stephen King, something about you’ll never make it as an author until you actually sit down and write an entire story, to get me to come to my senses. It also took time, and a short run at two careers (PE Teacher/ coach, and Wellness Director/ Personal Trainer) before my job as a training officer in law enforcement, which I hold today.

Then one night, as I checked in with a security officer when I was a police officer on night shift at a hospital, that the perfect inspiration came to me for the first story. The security officer was cleaning out the knife inventory drawer near the metal detector, and he tossed a little plastic bag aside.

“Why is this in here? It’s not a weapon,” he stated as I picked up the small baggie.

I took out the contents and held it up. It was a small golden cross; a necklace charm, but bigger than most I’d seen. I studied the cross in my hand, and an idea occurred to me.

I spoke up to the security officer, Officer Pace I believe; “No – but it could be a calling card.”

I smiled at him and walked into our substation office near the metal detector. I sat down at the computer and took a plain white piece of paper from the printer. Using a pen, I scratched out an outline of main ideas; a chronological order of events surrounding a broken man who takes revenge against a religion he hates, leaving a gold cross at the scene of each assassination of important religious figures. The Jesus Assassin was born. A few months later, I sent out attachment after attachment of the original rough version of Misguided, to agents and publishers everywhere. I received several rejection letters and e-mails. Some of this upset me; some didn’t. But the fact was that I had done it; I’d written my very first novel!

And my father was one of the most supportive people in that early part of my writing career, bragging to all his friends and family that his oldest boy had written a book. After learning a little more about the publishing world and talking to a close friend, I decided to attempt self-publishing. I published on Amazon using CreateSpace, and on December 19th, 2014, I had my first book signing. My dad invited several people, and I had friends from several circles attend. I decided to make the venue a local bar where I bounced a few years prior; the folks at Chicora Alley in Greenville, SC were more than accommodating. And Dad made a toast at the end of the evening that helped me realize one of the proudest moments in my life.

So that’s how it all started for me. That was four years ago; I’ve written five more books since then. I am steadily working on number seven. I’ve started a fictional universe that keeps expanding with every exciting dynamic character I add to pages. I’ve learned so much more about self-publishing since then. I have not ruled out traditional publishing, but self-publishing is the main path for me because I am my own man, and to quote Frank Sinatra, I can always say
regarding most of my novels: “I did it myyyyyyyyyyy way!”

Why is the World Turned Upside Down?
In our nation, where once scholars roamed the halls of academia, we now have socialists, anarchists, and even avowed terrorists donning professor’s robes....Where people were once innocent until proven guilty, they are now found to be guilty, despite their innocence, by the prosecutorial mainstream media and in the court of public opinion....Where the anti-establishment of the 1960s and ‘70s have now become the establishment of the past three decades....Where once policemen and servicemen were revered and honored and criminals, thugs, and enemies were reviled and abhorred, now the reverse is true....Where we now have people who kneel during the playing of our national anthem, yet fewer and fewer people are kneeling in prayer in our houses of worship....Where once the Judeo-Christian principles on which our nation was founded were valued and protected, our principles are being demeaned and attacked. Is this not the world turned upside down?