From My Driveway to 29 Countries: Guest post by Emelie Schepp

Swedish author Emelie Schepp has worked for over a decade as a project manager in the advertising industry, leading the Coca-Cola account in Sweden. In 1998 she won first prize in the Östgöta Theatre's drama prize competition. Since then she has written two feature screenplays and published two crime novels, Marked for Life and White Tracks, and is at work on a third. Emelie lives in Sweden with her husband and two children.  

Marked for Life (MIRA Books; June 14, 2016), is a riveting crime novel from Sweden that introduces American readers to Emelie Schepp, the latest in an impressive corps of Scandinavian writers who have taken the crime fiction genre by storm. With its brooding characters and chilly landscapes providing the unexpected background for a dark tale of human trafficking, this impressive debut is the first in a shocking trilogy from a writer who is being compared with Jo Nesbø and Stieg Larsson. Thanks to Sue Trowbridge for translating this post from Emelie Schepp.

Emelie Schepp
From My Driveway to 29 Countries

Book publishers didn’t have time to look over my first book, Marked for Life. Then I decided to publish it myself. In three years, my books have gone from my driveway to 29 countries, and soon Marked for Life will be released in the United States, a book release that I really look forward to.

Many people dream of writing a book and getting it published. So did I when I worked as a project manager in the advertising industry. But writing a book takes time, and quitting my job to bet everything on writing wasn’t an option. The only free time I could find was in the evenings when the children had gone to sleep. I opted out of TV viewing and surfing the web on my smartphone, and instead sat in front of the computer. No one but my husband knew that I was writing a book. I wrote in secret because I did not want to get a lot of questions like: "How is it going? When will you be finished? And what is it about?" And it is actually a lot more fun to say “I have written a book,” instead of “I'm going to write a book.”

After half a year, Marked for Life was ready, and I sent the manuscript to several publishers. It is said that it will take three months to get a response from Swedish publishers, but it took longer than that. Eventually I got tired of simply waiting and decided to publish the book myself. I read everything I could find online about self-publishing and I decided to not only do a really good job, I decided to become the best at it.

But when the first printing of 5000 paperbacks was delivered to my driveway, I wondered what I had actually gotten myself into. It looked like an incredible number of books. But I rolled up my sleeves and started carrying them from the driveway down to the basement.

I booked a lot of meetings with dealers and worked hard to get them to carry my book. I did quite a bit of promotion on social media and complemented the digital meetings with in-person meetings. I know how important it is to meet readers face to face, and because of that, I set up my own signing tour and traveled around the whole of Sweden. Everything I did led to the 5000 books selling out in a month, and I could order a second printing. When I had sold a record number of books on my own, 40,000 copies in six months, the publishers contacted me and since 2013 I have been a full-time writer.

Today I am very happy and grateful that I can I write whenever I want to and not just in the evenings after the kids have gone to sleep. In Sweden, I have just released my third book in the series, and soon it will be time for readers in the U.S. to meet Jana Berzelius, an odd and complex woman, for the first time. On the one hand, she is a prosecutor working to enforce laws, but on the other hand, she does not hesitate to break them to hide her own dark background. Because of my interest in film, I wanted to create a heroine, a woman whose actions teeter on the edge of what is possible. Whose character will tickle the reader's senses. Who makes the reader astonished, fascinated, and downright angry. The only thing I was certain of was not to make her predictable. You may think that she is unrealistic. But which characters are not?

3 pieces of advice to anyone who wants to publish a book:

1. You need to set aside time to write the book. A quarter hour, a half an hour, one hour: it doesn’t matter, the main thing is that you do it.

2. You should definitely submit to publishers within the genre you are writing in. But if you want to publish the book yourself, learn all you can about self-publishing.

3. Enlist the help of experts such as proofreaders, graphic designers and editors. Your budget will, of course, be a consideration, but if you have spent a lot of time writing a book, you want it to be so good that it will be read.

***
About Marked for Life:
Jana Berzelius is an ambitious public prosecutor with an icy disposition. When she is assigned the high profile murder case involving Hans Juhlén, the man in charge of asylum issues for the Migration Board, she tackles the investigation with her usual detachment. It is not always smooth sailing for her, working with Detective Chief Inspector Henrik Levin and, most especially with Detective Inspector Mia Bolander, who is a hotheaded as Jana is cool, and as intuitive as Jana is methodical. There are few clues at first—only some threatening papers found hidden among the victim’s papers and the handprint of a child found on a window frame. CCTV footage reveals a young boy fleeing the scene of the crime, but do children commit murder? Later, the body of a boy who looks like the one in the footage is found murdered, too, a blood-stained Glock found beside his body. What’s the story behind this connection? And what do the marks found on the boy’s body tell about his connection to child trafficking?

Cartoon of the Day: Disturbing the Peace

The Haunted Country of Our Past: Guest post by Lynn C. Miller

Lynn C. Miller’s third novel, The Day After Death, came out in March from the University of New Mexico Press. Miller’s prior novels are The Fool’s Journey and Death of a Department Chair. She is the Editor of the literary journal Bosque.

Lynn C. Miller:
The Haunted Country of Our Past

A psychologist friend and I were talking one day about how trauma in families affects each member of the family differently, and she remarked that sometimes the family system makes it impossible for the most vulnerable member to survive. That led me to the central “haunting” in my new novel, The Day After Death: The protagonist, Amanda, has a fraternal twin, Duncan, who dies in an ice skating accident when they are twelve. With him that day was their older brother, Adrian, whom Amanda blames for her twin’s death.

When Amanda wakes up one day in her early forties with the memory of Adrian’s bullying her as a young girl, all her childhood fractures surface, including Duncan’s mysterious death. She must, at this mid-point in her life, come to terms with her past and try to understand the family dynamic, and secrets, that haunt her.

Amanda excavates the past through her work in the theater and through therapy. Both in college and later, she is involved with productions of Harold Pinter’s play, Betrayal, which tells the story of a love triangle in reverse chronology. Her participation in the play upends her life and leads to an involvement with the director, Sarah Moore, who becomes her lover. Later in the novel Sarah dies, and Adrian is present on the day she dies, and––once again––Amanda holds him responsible for the death.

You always hope that when you reference another work of art, in this case a play, that the work provides layering to your story and deepens its resonance. In my novel, Pinter’s probing of love and loyalty and the back and forth movement of time in the drama underscore Amanda’s journey to understand her memories of the past while beginning a new relationship in the present where she must learn to trust again. The theater, where art imitates life and life imitates art, is a laboratory for psychological action. Pinter’s play shows how secrets can transform and ultimately poison relationships. The play also shows the power of the triangle, as the three characters align and realign in various scenes, with the power of two pressuring the third. The secret that Adrian and their mother share about how Duncan died is one of the things that pit Amanda and Adrian against each other throughout their lives.

As I said earlier, Amanda also pursues the truth through therapy with Helen, a Jungian psychologist. Theater and therapy are related, I think, in that each examines closely human motivations and the reverberation of an action on other actions. Both involve risk. In a play, what each character says about another or does to another, causes a further action. Therapy is like that too: as you talk about a situation, one question breaks through a barrier to a larger question. In The Day After Death, as Amanda learns more about herself, she goes deeper; she develops a thicker skin and sees herself more clearly. In the theater, the audience becomes the mirror for the action; in therapy, the therapist is the mirror for the client.

I think our lives are full of hauntings; we all search for healing from difficult experiences during the course of our lives. Adrian is a difficult character but not an unsympathetic one. He, too, was damaged by family secrets. Amanda’s healing depends upon her being able to see past Adrian as the villain in her life and on her realizing that she––and no one else––is responsible for her joy and sorrow.

I wanted to explore the rippling effects of family secrets in this novel, as well as the ways in which we can find meaning and forgive others for their limitations even while we transcend our own. The human being is flawed but the human spirit is unstoppable. How do we live with the past? How do we shape our lives? Who are we responsible for? These are questions that I hope resonate for readers in these pages.