Interview with cozy mystery author Annabelle Hunter

Today, I'm excited to feature an author whom I've only just discovered and read one of their books recently and boy did I enjoy that hilarious cozy mystery!

So naturally when I got a chance to interview them, I seized the chance. Allow me to introduce *drum roll* Annabelle Hunter, author of the Lark Davies Mystery Series and the Barrow Bay Mystery Series.

I recently read Leg Up, book 1 in the Lark Davies Mystery Series and enjoyed every bit of it! Gave it 5 stars on the spot!

From my Book Review:

"There was a severed leg on my porch."

That's how cozy mystery novel Leg Up by Annabelle Hunter opens. From the first lines, we notice that Larklyn "Lark" Davis is one of the most sarcastic characters ever. And a hilarious one too.

There are tons of quotable parts in the book. Even when dealing with problems, Lark's sarcasm makes way for humor and comic relief.

Read my full book review for Leg Up by Annabelle Hunter.

So back to Numbers Up, what's it about? Here's the synopsis:

Number's Up (Barrow Bay Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Independently Published
Publication date: 13 August 2019)
ASIN: B07TW8Y9HH

Jennifer Ward’s To Do List:
1) Turn in my business partner and his lying, cheating, law-breaking client to the SEC for insider trading.
2)Cooperate with the FBI. Do not kiss - scratch that. Do not yell at Special Agent Nicholas Kelly, the FBI agent leading said investigation.
3) Discover a dead body...

Jennifer Ward, MBA, CPA, and business consultant, likes a nice, orderly lifestyle. Schedules and To Do Lists are what gets her through the day. So when the by-the-numbers fashionista finds her business partner was breaking the law, she turned him in to the SEC. Which brought the FBI to her door, and her ordered world to an end.

But that was three weeks ago. Things couldn’t possibly get worse. Right?

Until Jen discovers her business partner dead in his hotel room. With Nic the handsome FBI agent dogging her every step, Jen must use her skills to discover the truth. Who killed Henry? And will she be next?

About the author:

Annabelle Hunter is a stay-at-home mom and an avid fan of classic mystery shows and dressage. She lives in Southern California with her husband, two children, and too many animals.

On to the exclusive INTERVIEW with Nadaness In Motion

Q: What got you into writing cozy mysteries? Can you name any authors and/or movies that inspired you?

Annabelle Hunter: I got into cozys as an exercise to improve the mystery element in my writing and found that I really loved them, more than the fantasy that I was trying to write. 

Q: If you were to experiment with genres away from cozies and mysteries, what would you try your hand at?

Annabelle Hunter: I have tried fantasy, urban fantasy and romance but so far nothing has been as much fun to write. 

Q: Your bio says you have "too many animals," can you tell us about that? And which of them have you included in your books (most likely with a different name)?

Annabelle Hunter: I have not included any of my animals, although I have other horses that I’ve known that have inspired some of the horses in my books. I have a horse, who is really a Disney Princess in horse clothing. She’s sweet as pie and a master of the passive aggressive, probably because she’s used her sweet, loving personality and good looks to get away with far too much. I also have a small, black ball of fluff in the shape of a dog. He really is just sweet and loving, and for some reason that defies logic, loves my youngest more than she deserves. 

 Q: So, you're a stay-at-home mom and author but Jennifer Ward, the main character in Numbers' Up, has an MBA, CPA, and is a business consultant. Can you tell us how you researched all that?

Annabelle Hunter: Well, before staying home with my kids, I had many jobs, a few of them working closely with all kinds of different people, including CPA’s and accountants. I also have several close friends who are CPA’s or work in the financial field. So Jen is kind of a combination of my own experiences and listening to others. 

Q: What was the toughest thing for you when you started writing?

Annabelle Hunter: Tenses. I love switching tenses when I shouldn’t. Past tense, present tense, I had (have) it all. I owe everything to my editors, Casey and Josh, because without them, my work would be a mess. 

Q: Humor is a bit hard to manage sometimes in a book, and yet your novella Leg Up was hilarious, are you always this funny or did you get help writing it? (The problem is that some people think they're funny but the truth is.. they're not, so how did you manage the humor in the book?)

Annabelle Hunter: I have no clue! Seriously, I am the last person that anyone would say is hilarious, but it’s different when I write. I’m a lot funnier when I control both sides of the conversation, I guess? 

Q: Your Barrow Bay Mysteries and your Lark Davis Mystery Series are both set in Barrow Bay, doesn't it get confusing for you when you're working on mystery books set in the same place and at the same time?

Annabelle Hunter: If I’m working backwards, yes. Sometimes I have to go back in my timeline to make sure I’m not referencing something that hasn’t occurred yet. But Number’s Up was written because I got near the end of Stir Up and Jen demanded that I finish her story, so, not as much as it might if they weren’t so interconnected. 

Q: You're independently published, can you tell us a bit about that? How are you going about with the cover design, publication schedule, e-books and hard-copies...etc?

Annabelle Hunter: It was a tough decision, but in the end, I wanted to get as many books out to the readers as possible. I have a wonderful graphic design artist, Melody Simmons, who babysat me through the cover design process and now seems to just read my mind. I also work a lot with my editors. Josh Stabiles, from Scrivere Editing, has spent hours trying to get me to understand what grammar rules are and Casey, from Heart Full of Ink, never lets me by without pushing my novels to the next level. I can’t tell you how lucky I am that I have found them. Seriously. If you are looking for an editor, they are amazing. 

Q: You've recently released two books, Number's Up and Leg Up, what are you currently working on and when can readers expect more of your work?

Annabelle Hunter: Well, I released the first two in Lark’s series, Leg Up and Stir Up, last month, and Numbers Up in August. We’re working on getting Load Up out to the readers in late September or early October depending on our schedule. Load Up will be another Lark book and I can’t wait to start telling people more about it. 

Q: Last but not least, what is your best writing advice for new and/unpublished authors?

Annabelle Hunter: Find an editor you trust. Someone who pushes you to the next level. Who returns a book saying, “it’s fine, but you can do better. Try…” Can you do it by yourself? Maybe, if you have much better grammar than I do (not hard!) but a good editor will do so much more for you. Every time I hand my editors the document, I think ‘this is the best thing I have ever written’. And every time they tear it apart and it gets even better than I thought it could be. 

Buy Annabelle Hunter's books via Amazon 

Connect with Annabelle Hunter on social media via Facebook, Twitter: @cozycrazyfun, Instagram, and her Website. 

Keep up with the rest of the blog tour including Book Reviews, more interviews and guest posts, including character interviews and guest posts, which means they're written from the perspective of the main character in Numbers Up.

August 28 – Hearts & Scribbles – SPOTLIGHT & Brooke Blogs – GUEST POST

August 29 – I'm All About Books & Babs Book Bistro SPOTLIGHT  

August 30 – Christa Reads and Writes & Reading Is My SuperPower BOOK REVIEW

August 31 – Celticlady's Reviews – SPOTLIGHT & A Wytch's Book Review Blog – REVIEW, CHARACTER INTERVIEW

September 1 – Laura's Interests – REVIEW

September 2 – The Pulp and Mystery Shelf – CHARACTER GUEST POST & Nadaness In Motion – AUTHOR INTERVIEW

September 3 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT & LibriAmoriMiei - REVIEW

September 4 – The Self-Rescue Princess – CHARACTER INTERVIEW

September 5 – Ascroft, eh? – GUEST POST

September 6 – Baroness' Book Trove – REVIEW & MJB Reviewers – SPOTLIGHT

September 7 – Literary Gold – REVIEW

September 8 – The Book Decoder – REVIEW

September 9 – Elizabeth McKenna - Author – SPOTLIGHT & eBook Addicts - REVIEW

September 10 – Cozy Up With Kathy – CHARACTER GUEST POST

Translation, Arwa Saleh, publishing & more - Interview with Samah Selim

This week I'm hosting author-and-literary translator Samah Selim.

Samah Selim is an Egyptian scholar and translator of Arabic literature into English. She studied English literature at Barnard College and earned her BA in 1986. She obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997.

Selim is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985, which was published in 2004.

She is currently working on translating Egyptian novelist Arwa Saleh's Al-Mobtasaroon (المُبتسرون) with the tentative title of The Stillborn.

Samah Selim is the first person to win both the Banipal Prize and the Arkansas Prize for Arabic literary translation.

Personal Preferences:

Q: How do you decide what to translate?

Samah Selim: First the text has to speak to me in a very deep way, usually in a combination of political and aesthetic languages that grab me and won’t let go. Second I have to feel that the text will serve a particular purpose, or set of purposes, in the target language. I want to be able to take the target language reader on a voyage of discovery, learning and pleasure similar to my own when I read the text in the source language. Finally, I have to be confident that I’m up to the task of translating that particular text; that its music, style and language are not entirely outside the reach of my own way of wanting to make sentences and cadences.

Q: What is/are your favourite genre(s) to translate?

SS: Fiction, but lately I have been doing more non-fiction because I feel there is a great need for it. There is so little Arabic non-fiction translated into English. There should be much more. Also, I’ve recently discovered the great pleasure of film subtitling. I’d like to do more of that in the future.

Q: What is/are your least favourite genre(s) to translate?

SS: Poetry, because I’m so bad at it!

Books and Writing

Q: Can you give readers a brief about your book The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985?

SS: The book was based on my doctoral dissertation. So much 20^th century Egyptian fiction is about the countryside and the village, and I wanted to figure out why. I was also very interested in the way the novel as a genre came into the modern Arab, and specifically Egyptian, literary tradition. Many of the earliest Egyptian novels were about a kind of nostalgia for the village and the peasant way of life, and this theme persisted well into the 20^th century.

The book is mostly about how and why Egyptian writers used this theme in their work, how they used it to create very different images of the nation and of modernity, both socially conservative and radical, over the course of the century.

Q: It's been over 10 years since you wrote your book, would you consider writing a new one? What would it be about?

SS: I’m almost finished writing a book on the translation of popular 19^th century European fiction into Arabic in Egypt at the very beginning of the 20^th century. The tentative title is The People’s Entertainments: Translation, Fiction, Culture in Colonial Egypt.

Translation and Techniques:

Q: Translating for 10 years, have your translation techniques or your views regarding the way you handle translation differed over time?

SS: Not really; it never gets easier.

Q: Literary translation is considered the hardest form of translation, why is that and what is the hardest part for you?/How does literary translation differ from any other form of translation (in your opinion)?

SS: You have much more freedom, and therefore more responsibility, with literary translation. Meaning is more fluid and therefore harder to pin down in literary translation than in a piece of criticism or a social science text for example.

Correspondences are more complicated; mood, tone and language register. The hardest part of literary translation for me is staying as close as possible to the voices and textures of the text. It’s easy to fall out of sync with these details and lapse into standardisation or impose a language on the text that isn’t there in the original if you don’t pay close attention.

The Translation Process and Publication:

Q: How many drafts to you usually end up with per book before you get to the final version?

SS: Lots.  Maybe four of five.

Q: How do you describe The Stillborn in terms of translation difficulty? Apart from the title, what other difficulties in translation have you so far encountered with this book?

SS: Arwa was not a stylist, and did not, like most Egyptian writers, then and now, have the benefit of an editor. Her sentences are long, convoluted and sometimes chaotic, but interestingly, this feature of her writing is part of its power and intensity. Parsing her sentences into an English that will make sense to the reader while preserving that rushing power and intensity is sometimes quite difficult.

Q: You said you will have to do a lengthy introduction for The Stillborn, does that mean you will write the intro first or translate the book itself first?

SS: The translation comes first. The after-energy of the translation process itself will be an important part of writing the introduction, and I intend to write about the process, and my relationship to the text as well.

Q: With novels, authors go to beta-readers and book reviewers, what about translators? Who do they go to before and after the final version is published?

SS: Friends, editors, and book lovers first and last. A good friend will read and comment. A good press will take proper care of distribution and reviewing. Word of mouth, social media, and blogs and bloggers are also very helpful.

Q: Copyrights, how are those handled when it comes to translation? (Can someone simply attempt a translation and publish their outcome online for instance?)

SS: This is a very interesting subject. The Berne convention stipulates that copyright goes into the public domain fifty years after the death of the author. Some countries have longer periods (70 years in the US for example). So technically, if the text in question does not fall into these time-frames, then no, a translator cannot simply translate and publish it online or in any other format. However, the rules of ‘fair use’ might give translators some leeway as to what and where they can publish.

In the normal course of things (living, or recently deceased authors), the press which contracts to publish the translation will acquire the translation rights to the text from the author, his/her heirs or the original publisher of the work.  The translator should request (and receive) copyright of his/her translation of the work, and this is legally established through a clause in the translation contract. What this means is that while the press has the right to market, sell and distribute the translation for the period stipulated in the contract, they do not own it and cannot resell it to another entity without the translator’s consent.

Q: Who do literary translators need to go to in order to get their translation published?

SS: S/he needs to do some research about the presses out there that publish translated fiction, their areas of specialisation, what their list looks like, their distribution record, etc. Then s/he contacts individual presses to gauge interest in the project in question. Interested presses will usually ask for a synopsis of the work, a description of why it is important, and at least one sample chapter. Grants and award competitions for translations are also an option. The US National Endowment for the Humanities for example has a generous grant for (published translators), as does PEN. The University of Arkansas gives an annual award for unpublished Arabic to English literary translations which are then published by Syracuse University Press. I’ve noticed that more and more of these types of grants and awards have been popping up lately.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

SS: Yes, about a ‘goal’ and a pet project that I’d like to attempt one day. First I’d like to start learning how to translate in reverse; that is, from English to Arabic. Second, I’d like to write a novel in both English and Arabic that would be ‘translated’ simultaneously to the writing process and be produced as a collective or co-authored work in both languages.

More about Selim:

Translations and Awards

- Neighborhood and Boulevard: Reading through the Modern Arab City by Lebanese writer Khaled Ziadeh.

- Jurji Zaydan's novel Shajarat al-Durr

- Mohamed Makhazangi's Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian Between Moscow and Chernobyl.

- Yahya Taher Abdullah's The Collar and the Bracelet.

- Her most recent translation is Egyptian novelist Miral Al-Tahawy's Brooklyn Heights (end of 2011).

In 2011, Selim won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award for her translation of Jurji Zaydan's novel Shajarat al-Durr, based on the life of the Mamluk sultana. She also won the Banipal prize for Yahya Taher Abdullah's The Collar and the Bracelet.

Cozy interview with Stormy Smith

Having reviewed Stormy Smith's two books Bound by Duty and Bound by Spells, I figured it was time to have a chit-chat to get to know Stormy better, and to talk about some writing and bookish fun 

About Stormy:

Q: Tell us something special or different or weird about yourself

Stormy Smith: Something weird: I have double-jointed elbows and hyper-flexible shoulder joints. The elbows makes it really complicated to do certain exercises (like push-ups), and my shoulders make a variety of yoga poses much easier.

Q: What are your favourite classical books and modern ones?

 SS: Classic – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Modern – Left Drowning by Jessica Park (contemporary) and The Fever Series by Karen Marie Moning (Fantasy)

Q: Apart from YA, what is your favourite reading genre?

SS: I love all things fantasy/paranormal!

Q: Do you speak any other languages?

SS: I took French for six years and there was a time when I was fluent. Now, I can pick up on it but can’t really speak it anymore.

Q: What is your favourite food?

SS: Ever? That is hard…I really love food…I would have to say shrimp pasta!

Q: What countries would you like to visit/are on your to-travel-to list?

SS: I would really like to do the UK, Ireland and Scotland tour and after that, visit Australia.

Q: If you could experiment with a new genre, outside of your favourites, what would it be?

SS: I’m really curious about Steampunk. I think I would enjoy it, but I’ve never tried it out.

Moving on to writing and her books

Q: Before the Bound series, did you publish any other works?

SS: I published a poem in middle school and wrote for a variety of newspapers in college, but I had not published any other books.

Q: How many parts are you planning for the series?

SS: It’s funny you ask, because a lot of people have been lately. Originally, I always planned for the series to be three books, but I am not a heavy outliner; outlining just doesn’t work well for me. So, often my writing is a journey that I can’t anticipate and Bound by Prophecy (book three) is very much that way. I know where I’m heading with the story but we are getting there in a way I hadn’t directly anticipated. I see a strong possibility the series goes past three books. They may not all be full-length, but I have a lot of great secondary characters that could have their own side stories.

Q: Do you have anything works in progress? Or plans after Bound?

SS: I can only write one story at a time, given I have a full time job and I am in graduate school, so my focus in on the Bound series right now. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I finish it! I guess that will depend on how many more books there are waiting to be written. J

Q: What is the best writing advice you could give to new and upcoming writers?

SS: Don’t think about anything except writing the book until it's written. Don’t worry about going traditional or self-publishing, don’t worry about marketing or building your brand and don’t worry about what anyone will think. Write the story you want to read and don’t stop until it's done.

Q: How many drafts do you go through – give or take – before the final work is ready to go out into the world?

SS: That very much depends on the book. Bound by Duty took four drafts plus professional editing. Bound by Spells took two plus professional editing. I would guess Bound by Prophecy will be three.

Q: Beta readers, how many do you have before you think your book is ready? And are they for the final draft or do they come in a bit before that?

SS: I have a critique partner that reads the rough stuff and helps me mold and shape the story. My betas don’t come in until the second to last draft. I look for betas to help me tweak, to find missing words and small issues before I go to my professional editor. I only use four betas, any more than that becomes overwhelming.

Q: How do you incorporate writing into your everyday life? Do you have a part-time or full-time job? What's your day like?

SS: It depends on how you think about it. I don’t write my story every day, I don’t have time, but I think about it every day. I talk about it in my marketing efforts every day. I communicate with bloggers and fans, I develop my own graphics, organize blog tours, work with a street team, work with my writing group…all of that happens daily. But I really only have time to write on the weekends and I generally get 6000 – 8000 words each weekend. I do have a full time job and I’m in graduate school, so there are many demands on my time. I’m also married and try to have a tiny bit of a social life.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add for Nadaness In Motion? J

SS: Just a heartfelt thank you for everything you do. Bloggers are a self-published author’s lifeline and your passion for our stories finds its way to new readers, and many times, loyal fans. I can’t thank you enough for your assistance in helping me achieve my dreams.

Check my reviews of Stormy's novels: Bound by Duty and Bound by Spells.
Get in touch with Stormy Smith via Twitter and Facebook