Carrie Stuart Parks

Transcribed by Otter.ai; Lightly edited by Linda. Please forgive typos or grammar errors J

Episode 119 - Carrie Stuart Parks

19:41

Linda 00:00

Welcome to Tart Words. I'm your host, Linda Hengerer. And I'm a writer, a reader and a baker. I talk to writers about their latest book and what inspires them, chat with fellow author Suzanne Fox about what writers can learn from reading their favorite authors, and share fast and easy recipes for anyone looking for a sweet treat. Join me as I share Tart Bites, Tart Thoughts, and Tart Words.

Today I'm talking with Carrie Stuart Parks, an award-winning, internationally known forensic artist. She travels across the US and Canada teaching courses in forensic art to law enforcement professionals including the FBI, Secret Service, and RCMP, and is the largest instructor of forensic art in the world.  Her best-selling novels in the mystery/suspense/thriller genre have garnered numerous awards including several Carols and Inspys; the Christy, Golden Scroll, Kudos, Maxwell, and Wright. Her books have finaled in the Daphne du Maurier, Selah, and Cascade competitions. As a professional fine artist, she has written and illustrated best-selling art books for North Light Publishers.  To find out more information about Carrie and her books, visit www.CarrieStuartParks.com.

Hi, Carrie, welcome to the podcast.

Carrie 01:32

Hi, Linda. I'm so excited to be here.

Linda 01:35

I'm really looking forward to talking to you today. I heard you first on I think it was actually a Sisters in Crime webinar. And I was really interested in what you do and what you write about.

Carrie 01:46

It was interesting because I had my airline tickets already to go to fly out to Virginia and do a full day presentation over there and COVID hit. And so everything went on the back burner until we could figure out exactly how to handle these different presentations. But we finally got it done. So that was good.

Linda 02:10

Tell me about your latest book.

Carrie 02:11

The latest book is called Relative Silence. Actually, the latest latest book is Women in Shadow, but it won't be out until July. So the one that's out now is Relative Silence. And like all of my books, it's a mystery Suspense Thriller that is involving forensic art and dogs, and Relative Silence actually takes place in the Charleston area of South Carolina, Mount Pleasant and so on, though that's quite far from where I live, which is Idaho, but we were forensically, my husband and I and we teach so Mount Pleasant police department is one of the locations where we teach and I thought well, wouldn't it be fun to place a story in South Carolina.

Linda 02:53

And I like the fact that you talk about a hurricane coming in because I live on the Atlantic coast of Florida. And I am quite familiar with Hurricane preps and what can happen during a hurricane. And a lot of it isn't good.

Carrie 03:08

I actually had to Rick has cousins in South Carolina. So when I was getting ready to write about the hurricane, since I've never experienced it, we don't have those in Idaho. I interviewed his cousins and said, Okay, what is it like to live through a hurricane and my husband is from Virginia. So he lived through and I don't remember which hurricane it was, but he told me about that. But he was inland, he was in Woodbridge. And I wanted to put what it would feel like to be in a hurricane when you're on an island when you can have a storm surge higher than your island. And I thought well, now that's pretty exciting. That would make a pretty good antagonist as a whole hurricane. So they told me what it like in the sounds and what they did and so on. And I was very appreciative of that.

Linda

Is this book part of a series or do you write standalones?

Carrie

The first four books I wrote were a series and I was 30-40,000 words into the next book in the series, and my publishing house came back and said, okay, no more in this series. And I was like, what, what? What? No, you can't do this to me. No, no, I love this character. So I had to start all over. And they wanted me to just write standalones for a while. So the last four books have been stand alones

Linda 04:25

That's interesting. Generally, with mysteries a series is the way to go because readers really liked the characters.

Carrie 04:32

Well, that's what I thought but they said no, they wanted standalones. So there is a link between three of the books and that the characters are all coming. This was the first one that characters are all coming up a group called Clan Firinn, which is Scottish for family of truth. What I did is I came up with an idea that there's a farm in eastern Washington, that would take First responders and law enforcement people who had ruin the reputation or had PTSD or had very, very severe emotional problems because of their work. And this place is like a recovery. And so the characters in the next three books, starting with Relative Silence are all from Clan Firinn, and are recovering from some event that had happened to them. So in Relative Silence, the male character is a forensic artist who destroyed his life and basically had to change everything in order to get back to life again. So he had gone through the treatment and was in South Carolina working on the Hunley which is the first submarine that sank a boat in a wartime situation. And it was the war was a Civil War. So it was a Civil War submarine. So he was out working on that when he runs against my protagonist.

Linda 05:59

Yeah, I would not have thought about submarines being around during the Civil War. So that's really interesting in and of itself.

Carrie 06:07

And I love to weave history, some kind of historical event through my story is to bring them not written from the time period, they're written in the present time. But in Relative Silence, I brought out the Hunley the book before that was Fragments of Fear, where I touched on that was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I touched on the Native American people as well as the land that's down there. And the one before that touched on World War Two and the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands. So I tried to get some historical context as well.

Linda 06:44

It's interesting. Is that because if your background as a forensic artist?

Carrie 06:49

Well, I try to put forensic art or something similar to it in all of the books. In Relative Silence the fellow is a forensic artist, forensic art defined as any art pertaining to law enforcement or legal proceedings, the book that will come out in July, it'll be a forensic linguist. And that's kind of relating to my work with signs of deception through language. So I thought, well, let's have a forensic linguist, which is different, but I usually weave that in there somehow, because that allows me to use my own background and training in that field.

Linda 07:26

Interesting. Tell me a little bit about Piper Boone. She's the female protagonist in Relative Silence.

Carrie 07:32

Her full name is Sandpiper Boone. I use templates of people. So she's a template, if you will, of the Kennedy family. Basically, she's the daughter of some very, very powerful and wealthy people that have a compound on what they call Curlew Island off the coast of South Carolina. Her older brother is a senator and their wealth and their political pole is very significant. Piper when she was first married, she had a daughter, a four year old daughter who it was that died in a boating accident, and she never really recovered from that. She ended up divorcing her husband, she moved away from home and tried to make a go of it in a publishing industry couldn't make a go of it couldn't really get on with her life. Her basically her life just stopped with the loss of her daughter. So she decided to just go back and hide from the world on the family compound in on Curlew Island, when the story opens, she is having lunch with a friend on an outdoor cafe when a gunman opens fire on her and she's saved by the fellow who is the forensic artist, male love interest, if you will, that saves her life. So through this story, she finds out that a fellow is able to age progress faces, and she asked him to age progress the face of her daughter so she could see what her daughter would look like today. And that's one of the many things that forensic artists do. I've done a number of those so he aged progresses, the photograph, and she becomes convinced she knows who this girl is that her daughter didn't die. Even though they found her body. They did DNA she's buried. I mean, there's no doubt that they found her body but she can handle it. She does not believe that she believes that her daughter is actually alive. So this story explores her feelings about that her struggles to come to grips with what has happened, the people in her life that would keep her in the situation she's in now her escapist actions covers a lot of that type of thing. It's sort of a family saga. In a way though it only covers her primarily.

Linda 09:51

I did read the book. So it did seem to me that there were some similarities between Piper and Tucker where they're both dealing with issues in their past and trying to move on with their lives. But certainly the shooting would not be a good way for someone with PTSD to move on with their life; to me that would bring them right back to a fraught time in their life.

Carrie 10:14

Right with Tucker, he was a drunk while he drank that was his escape. And in his drinking, he is in a car accident where he loses his wife and unborn child. So he's living with the guilt of that. And he's also living with the terror of water because that was part of his PTSD. And of course, he's invited to go out to the island which is surrounded by water. So that's a huge challenge that he has to overcome and face.

Linda 10:42

I really enjoyed the book. And I look forward to reading some of the other stories that are I guess, loosely related by the Clan Firinn?

Carrie 10:53

Yes, f i, r, i, n, n. It’s Gaelic.

Linda 10:57

I have Scottish ancestry myself, and I'm always interested in Celtic things and Gaelic things, and some of the legends and lore that goes along with that.

Carrie 11:07

Absolutely.

Linda 11:08

Do you have a writing routine or schedule?

Carrie 11:10

I do, it's been badly tossed. Because my laptop decided to give up the ghost, I've ordered a new one, my normal routine is to sit in the living room with my laptop, and just right from the time I get up until roughly noon ish, or one o'clock, we're somewhere right in there, I have a word count that I try for, I'm having to use my desktop. And that's changed a whole lot. Because I'm sitting differently, I'm looking different. My husband said, Oh, my gosh, he said, I feel like Rain Man, you know, you're not sitting over there, you're not sitting over there. So my routine is very disturbed that the new laptop will arrive in a week or so. So I'll get back to that. But I work I write unless I've got some event, I try to write every day for several hours.

Linda 11:58

Did your dying laptop trap your work in progress on it? Or were you able to access that and keep working?

Carrie 12:12

It took me half a day to find it, I think that the operating system is fine. But the screen is now sort of an interesting plaid. So there's a big black bar that goes through the middle. And then the whole lower part is little ripples. So if I can bring something up to the top right corner, I can see what it is I spent a big part of the day trying to find the latest edition of the story, I usually say like by the name, and then the month, so March, April, and so on, it turned out that I had been saving the current work by an earlier name. So I thought, Oh, no, I've lost a week's worth of writing, I've lost 1000s of words. Don't let it happen. But I found it. Now it's backed up all over the place. I mean, I had it backed up. But you don't think about backing up all the time you think about doing it every couple of days. But then when you realize, you know, if I lost, I've lost that. Plus the notes, I have extensive notes. I had they there as well. I was hoping I had the most current thoughts also on my notes, and I was able to find most everything. And when the new laptop comes in, I'll take it over and have everything transferred. So I'll be back to my routine.

Linda 13:28

That is a sick feeling to think that you have lost days-worth of work. And it is such a relief when you find it, whether it's under a different name, or you were able to access it a different way. But I have had a finger fumble and not days of work, but maybe an hour's worth of work and inadvertently got deleted and can't undo to get it back. It's like I'm not even sure like what combination of keys I hate to do that. But it's like, Alright, well what was I thinking? What did I write? How do I get it back? And it's never exactly the same.

Carrie 14:02

Exactly. And oftentimes, you spend time on one little pass that you wouldn't just want to get it right got to flow better and you work on and you work on you finally get it you know, oh, it's good. Okay, now it's working and you move on, and then it's gone. And it's like, no, it took me how long to fix that mess.

Linda 14:19

And do you outline?

Carrie 14:20

I do, I actually teach a class at different writers conferences called Visual Plotting. So I teach people who hate to plot how to do it using mind mapping or link analysis. These are different names for the same thing. But I use a mind mapping to figure out where my character is going to go, the big points in the story I use, what clues do I need to get, when do I introduce a new character, what big events and then from that I go to the internet and download images and I go from mind mapping to essentially storyboarding. So I storyboard it. So that I see it, and I'm an artist. So I'm very, very visual. So I storyboard it. Then I have another kind of running pages that I write notes like, what does the house look like they're in, I might download house plans, I might have to day by day, what are they doing on this day? What are they doing on this day, I might have to figure out when a lot of things I do is figure out when people were born, how old they are the relationships. And I use a program by James Scott Bell, who has written a number of books-he's an author himself. But he's also written a number of books, like Write Your Novel from the Middle, but he has a program called Knockout Novel. And it helps me to focus on the different characters, even though that may not appear in the book. I still know all about them. So I use a combination. So by the time I type things out, it is outlined I figured it out and but it's still open to a lot of surprises, like you're typing along, all of a sudden you go Oh, gosh, look there, look what they just did. So it leaves that open, which the pantsers really liked to have.

Linda 16:14

Yes, you're also a fine artist, aren't you as well as a forensic artist?

Carrie 16:19

I am my gallery closed down just before COVID. I was at my gallery, the gallery that represented me, but I wrote five books on drawing and watercolor for North Light Publishers, of which some of them are still in print, actually one of them still a best-seller. And then I taught art, but I was a watercolorist and sold paintings to corporate and private collections, large watercolor paintings to places like the Halekulani, Waikiki, the Kalia Hilton quarterly resort, a variety of different places like that,

Linda 16:54

Do you find that painting is an outlet for writing? Do you write in the morning and paint in the afternoon? Or are they separate things?

Carrie 17:03

They're both creative. So from that standpoint, either one will provide me with creativity currently, because I, as I know, you will know about this, I am working under a deadline. So the paintings taking a back step or a backseat right now, until I hit my deadline. But I do have some events coming up where I've got to produce some artwork. So I'll start working on that. And then I have a group of ladies that get together every year. They call it art camp. And so I'll need to come up with at least five or six projects for them. So I'll need to be doing five or six paintings, and working out the steps for them, as well. When I was actively painting I was producing between 150 and 250 watercolor paintings a year, considerably less prolific. Now

Linda 17:57

That sounds like it's what, three a week, three to five a week?

Carrie 18:01

Yeah, yeah, I was very prolific. And that leads that can get you a pretty good case of burnout. When you're producing you know, you have to have 30 new paintings because you have a show coming up or 30 or 40 new paintings because doing some kind of exhibit or gallery opening or whatever you're going to be doing.

Linda 18:22

When is your next book coming out?

Carrie 18:23

Woman in Shadow comes out July 12. It's currently with the public

Linda 18:28

Will a link to that be on your website?

Carrie

A link to all the places you can get the books are on my website now.

Linda 18:43

I'll have the links to your website and to Relative Silence in the show notes for the podcast episode. I look forward to reading your next book. Thanks for coming on the podcast today, Carrie, I've enjoyed talking with you.

Carrie 18:49

Thank you so much, Linda. You are just such a gracious person. I so appreciate this time.

Linda 18:55

Oh, You're quite welcome.

Thank you for joining me this week. To view the complete show notes and the links mentioned in today's episode, visit tartwords.com/tart119. Follow now in the app you're using to listen to this podcast, or sign up for email alerts through an easy signup form for bakers, readers and writers at tartwords.com/about. Thank you again for joining me, Linda Hengerer, for this episode of Tart Words.