{"id":2000,"date":"2023-02-18T15:48:38","date_gmt":"2023-02-18T22:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/?p=2000"},"modified":"2023-02-18T15:48:38","modified_gmt":"2023-02-18T22:48:38","slug":"tell-me-your-story-tammy-kaehler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/?p=2000","title":{"rendered":"Tell Me Your Story : Tammy Kaehler"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I love this month’s Tell Me Your Story entry from fellow Poisoned Pen author Tammy Kaehler<\/a>. Every author I know will understand what she is talking about. Tammy is a writer, editor, project manager, and mystery author\u2014as well as a racing fan and an appropriately enthusiastic cat lady. Mystery readers and racing insiders alike have praised the five books in her award-winning Kate Reilly Racing Mystery Series, which follows a young woman driver as she competes in races, advances in her career, and solves crimes in the racing world. One of Tammy\u2019s recent creative endeavors is a series of micro stories: creative and fun backstories for a local rescue\u2019s adoptable cats and kittens. She\u2019s also working on turning those stories and her experience fostering kittens into a new cozy mystery series. Tammy and her husband live in Southern California and share their lives with Pepper and Daisy, two feline siblings adopted through the rescue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Mid-Life Renaissance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

by Tammy Kaehler<\/p>\n\n\n

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Tammy and friend<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I loved writing my first mystery novel. I was thrilled at this new endeavor I\u2019d undertaken, as well as with my own audacity. After all, I was writing a mystery about Kate Reilly, a woman racecar driver, when I hardly knew anything about writing fiction or auto racing. I felt like Judy and Mickey in the barn deciding to put on a show to save the farm. You know, a \u201cGee whiz, I can do anything!\u201d vibe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that point, the sum-total of my fiction-writing experience was a single, terrible, non-mystery manuscript. I was not a scribbler in grade or high school. I did not dream of writing the great (or even not-so-great) American novel. But I loved mysteries with every fiber of my being, and I had recently come across a fascinating world I wanted to tell people about. On a more mystical note, I felt at 35 that I had finally filled up my internal well enough with great fiction (mysteries and not) that I could make my own attempt. So I leapt into the adventure and had fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As any writer will tell you, the first book, in a series or pre-publication, is always different. There\u2019s not a single ounce of pressure except for what you put on yourself. It\u2019s a voyage of discovery. And like at the start of a car race, everyone was still a potential superstar and winner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was lucky. I got an agent indecently quickly after sending out queries. To balance that out, then there was a long, long wait to find a publisher. Which I did! And I loved them. And life was great, unless I was thinking about the second book. As my friend and fellow mystery writer Tina Whittle once said, \u201cWriting the second book is like crawling over broken glass.\u201d And she was right. But the problem was, I was still crawling over jagged shards for books three, four, and five. The bigger problem? I didn\u2019t realize it was that awful at the time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s because I was caught in a do-loop. Head down, do the things I\u2019m supposed to, meet the deadlines, repeat. I had so much fun with researching\u2014seeing friends and attending races\u2014and took so much pride in being published, that I told myself I still wanted to write the mysteries. Even in the face of a very modest impact on the world (and on my wallet). No matter, I said to myself and questioners, it\u2019s not about the money, it\u2019s about wanting to do it. I told people all the time, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to enjoy the process, because almost no one gets rich and famous doing this.\u201d I just wasn\u2019t listening to myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, there was a lot that was great. I wrote five mystery novels in a series. I have ISBNs! I went to racing school. I worked in the pits at the Indianapolis 500 for ESPN three times. Mario Andretti drove me around a track. I became part of the wonderful mystery community. And I made some lifelong, soulmate friends. But after book five, when my husband and I decided to change a bunch of fundamentals in our lives, I just \u2026 stopped. Life handed me the moment to step back and evaluate how I felt. The answer? Writing hadn\u2019t been fun in a long time. So I stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, I blamed it on our life-upheaval. We did a lot of home improvement and painting and selling and buying real estate. We moved. Twice. We dealt with some serious health issues. We gained, medicated, and then lost our first cat. Then the pandemic happened. I felt a lot of grief in those years. The obvious causes were our health crises and our cat. The less obvious ones were relationships that collapsed under the weight of culture wars and no longer feeling like I had the right to call myself a mystery author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But perhaps the biggest\u2014and most deeply buried\u2014reason for a large portion of grief was that I\u2019d lost the joy of writing. And as hard as that was to admit, I felt free after I did so. Because I\u2019d finally listened to what I\u2019d been telling other people: \u201cIf you\u2019re not enjoying the journey, there\u2019s no point.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I joked to friends that this was my mid-life crisis, my former editor corrected me: \u201cIt\u2019s your mid-life renaissance.\u201d And so I tried to live that philosophy. To go with the flow, not pressure myself to do any of the \u201cshoulds,\u201d and not even ask myself if I wanted to write again. I allowed myself to see where my passions took me.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First they took me to meditation, a wellness coach, and a lot of soul searching. To a better approach to my health (it comes to all of us at some point). To adopting kittens and volunteering for the cat rescue we got them from. And finally, years later, back to writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It didn\u2019t happen overnight. I started by writing fun, fictional biographies for the rescue\u2019s adoptable cats, inventing backstories of feline astronauts, rock stars and supermeowdels, a feline psychic to the stars, and more. As I got more involved, I wrote web content, volunteered at adoption and promotion events, and even fostered my first litters of kittens. Finally, I thought, \u201cI could write about this world.\u201d Actually, it was more than that. I realized I was moved to write about it. But this time, I was going to do it differently\u2014and that\u2019s where my real renaissance happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d always been a pantser\u2014writing by the seat of my pants. Sitting down each day with no idea what would happen next. Aka, sitting down in a panic every day until I got to the two-thirds point of the manuscript and had a complete freakout over how to finish it. Aka, misery. This time, I decided, I would experiment with other alternatives. So I took at least a month to write character profiles, to plan suspects and clues and motivations, and to make a rough outline of the novel. I\u2019m still not sure the process was fun<\/em>, exactly, but I was proud of it and it wasn\u2019t awful. That was good enough to keep going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started writing. Then I stopped because we moved (again, and we\u2019re done now). Six months later, I picked it back up and finished it in a NaNoWriMo blitz plus a couple extra weeks. I\u2019m still editing and battling the panic-demons that arrive each time I sit down to work on it. But I\u2019ve learned a few things.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First of all, I don\u2019t hate writing fiction, but I have to be passionate about the topic\u2014and it\u2019s all right if my passions change over the years. I don\u2019t have to write in spite of hating the process, because I can change the process anytime I damn well want to. I need to let go of the \u201cshoulds,\u201d as well as anything else that doesn\u2019t serve me. And I like starting a writing session with three minutes of meditation about how I\u2019m going to feel when I\u2019m done with that day\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still don\u2019t have all the answers. Will this book be good? Will I be able to sell it? Will anyone want to read it? (OK, it\u2019s about cats, so I figure that answer is yes.) Will I write another one? I don\u2019t know. But what I do know is that I\u2019ve found my joy again through writing this manuscript and the cat bios. And that\u2019s worth the struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

__________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Find out more at www.tammykaehler.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love this month’s Tell Me Your Story entry from fellow Poisoned Pen author Tammy Kaehler. Every author I know will understand what she is talking about. Tammy is a writer, editor, project manager, and mystery author\u2014as well as a racing fan and an appropriately enthusiastic cat lady. Mystery readers and racing insiders alike have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[269,268],"class_list":["post-2000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kiss-the-bricks","tag-tammy-kaehler"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2H58s-wg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2000"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2007,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions\/2007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}