Nancy Bartholomew: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Dad is the closest thing to totally evolved. He's the epitome of unconditional love. You asked me how did Sierra come out the way she did. I remember when I was younger -- and I was a wild teenager -- I went to spend some time with my paternal grandfather, who was very conservative and insisted on things being done just the right way. So I went to the store and bought all new clothes, enough to last for the week [of the visit]. I came back, and my dad said, "The clothes look nice, but you don't dress like that."

"But I don't want your dad to think I'm a bad person. I want him to like me, and I think he wouldn't like me if I was who I was."

And my dad sighed. I didn't know at the time, but that was the experience my dad had with his dad. But my dad said, "Don't ever be ashamed to be who you are. You be exactly who you are and as rebellious as you are. You're a real pain in the ass, but we love you."

It was that kind of acceptance. When I would sing, underage, in bars, he would come -- wearing his collar -- to the biker bars. And all my girlfriends would sit with him and flirt with him, because he was cute. At the time I thought he was showing up to give me support. But now I think he was also kind of being a bodyguard, so they would know that's his daughter, don't do anything wrong. And no one ever did.

I think my boys are growing up in that same kind of atmosphere, where you can be a soccer mom and also have a brain and think outside the stereotypical soccer mom box. I think most moms get stereotyped as soccer moms, just because they drive kids around, but these ladies' minds go on, though they look like they're very conservative and not as "in the world" as we did in our twenties. If that makes any sense.

Crescent Blues: There's a lot going on in the minds of the soccer moms at this convention [Bouchercon 2001]: blackmail, arson, burglary, murder, mayhem…

Nancy Bartholomew: Yes. I look at all the women who are about my age. Everyday I pick Ben up from school like all the other mothers. We get out of the cars and walk up to get our kids, and we look so innocuous. But I know so much is going on in their heads.

I got so much support when I started writing. They all said, "Go get it. You're out there doing a thing that you really want to do." I think that's really, really cool.

Nancy Bartholomew

Crescent Blues: From the way you approached the Sleuthfest short story competition, it sounds like you've been part of the mystery fan community for a while.

Nancy Bartholomew: Probably since second grade when I got my first Nancy Drew. My mom was a huge fan. She introduced me to Nancy Drew, and from there she would throw the books she liked to read my way. By the time I was in sixth grade I was reading Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie and bunches of other people.

Crescent Blues: When did you start attending conventions?

Nancy Bartholomew: Sleuthfest was my first, and I think that was in 1994. I went every year for as long as I could -- at least five years. It was incredibly valuable. I made all the mistakes that people make. You know what they say in all the little books: "Know who's going to be there. Know their names. Know their pictures. Look in the program book." I got into an elevator at my first convention, and I'm in there with Albert Zuckerman, who wrote Writing the Blockbuster Novel. It's just him and me in the elevator, and he's asking me what I do.

That's when you're supposed to make your pitch. But I say, "I'm just hanging out. What are you doing?" I missed my shot, right there. You're supposed to have a one-minute commercial ready. Did I? Nooooooo.

Crescent Blues: Sometimes it's better if you don't give your pitch. Then they don't feel the need to run whenever they catch sight of you.

Nancy Bartholomew: Yeah -- they're not running away. I watch a lot, and I see. It's real easy to see if you put yourself in an editor or agent's place that they want to run away most of the time.

Crescent Blues: Getting back to your books. Your second heroine, Maggie Reid, appears in two books.

Nancy Bartholomew: Your Cheatin' Heart and Stand By Your Man.

Crescent Blues: Did you use any of your own experiences in creating Maggie?

Nancy Bartholomew: Absolutely everything I could find.

When I started Sierra, I thought: "Well, I'll write Sierra books, and I'll just do that."

My agent called me up, and she said, "Do not do that. That is a bad thing. You have to write another series, because you want to make a living from this, don't you? What if your first series stinks?" Miracle Strip [the first novel in the series] hadn't even come out yet, so this was a terrible blow to my confidence, but it was smart. I think I learned from it.

But I asked myself, "What the hell am I going to do now? Who else is in there?" I thought a long time about it. I thought about a character I'd been playing with, and I thought, "You know, I always wished that I had worked harder at singing, but it's too late now. I'll just give it to Maggie."

So Maggie went off and did her thing. But in order for her to have the whole world that she needed to live in, I went downtown to meet the Greensboro, N.C., police department. It was wide open, and they said, "Come on in." Because it's a small town -- relatively small, compared to Atlanta or Philly.

The police took me in, and they took me around. I rode with them and got to know them, and I thought, "Wow, this is useful. I can use a lot of this."

And the guys I used to play with in the band -- I thought it would be neat if I could fit them in. I hadn't seen them in twenty years, so I just described them from my memories. I added some things and took some things away, and plopped them all in there. Then, in the middle of writing Your Cheatin' Heart, I went to visit my brother in the town where we grew up and ran into the guy who was the model for Harmonic Jack. It was so wonderful. I had such a great time.

Crescent Blues: How's he doing?

Nancy Bartholomew: He has evolved. We had such a free, beautiful relationship when we were in college. Maggie doesn't have that with him. But it was so clean and so sweet -- and so painful when it ended. So I got to work through all of that, both by talking to him and writing for Maggie and giving her some of the ways to work out things. Like she and Jack are on the fence a lot of the time about what they're going to do. She has to work through that now in a way that I couldn't, because she's older, and he isn't.

In fact, he's grown into this great man, who's exactly like he was as a kid, only he's a wonderful dad, and he's got a job working with semiconductors and all this stuff that I don't understand. It's kind of cool to see how people grow up and change, and how their lives evolve.

Crescent Blues: He's obviously left the music business too.

Nancy Bartholomew: He teaches harmonica as a part-time job. He still goes to the Philadelphia Folk Festival. Some of the local musicians still call him, and he'll go sit in with them, because he's still up there with all of them, but neither one of us was in any danger of becoming famous.

Crescent Blues: Actually, now you are.

[Bartholomew laughs.]

Crescent Blues: One of the things that struck me about Stand By Your Man was the potential for developing numerous relationships, which lead me to wonder how you pace your series. Do you have a story arc in mind, or do you plot book by book?

Nancy Bartholomew: I should've read the article about that too -- how to think about a series before you start it. In a lot of ways, Maggie and Sierra get locked in. Like the end of Strip Poker -- I'm as flummoxed as everybody else. I have no idea what will happen next. And it was the same way with Stand By Your Man.

I just follow along after my characters. I've gotten better about plotting the mystery itself, because that's just a matter of who did it, and where all the clues should go. I know the rules about that. But the rules about relationships and what these characters are going to choose to do -- I'm not privy to it. They just say, "We're doing this."

Crescent Blues: So your characters are leading the charge.

Nancy Bartholomew: I'm like a psychopath. I'll look at what I'm writing and think, "You cannot put your unconscious on the page. If you have issues, you're going to have to resolve them yourself." Or I think: "These are issues that you've clearly resolved." Nuh uh.

Then one or the other of the characters will go: "You need to write it, forget about it and let it go. Or Sierra will jump right back out of the paper." So you write whatever they say.

Crescent Blues: Are you a full-time writer now?

Nancy Bartholomew: I have a half-time practice.

Crescent Blues: Do you write at the end of your workdays?

Nancy Bartholomew: No, because then I'm braindead. When I go into a room with someone to work with them, everything in my head gets cleared out. When I leave that room, everything gets cleared out too. I remember at the next session -- everything, no matter how many years it's been since I've seen the person. You have to learn to detach from that. But it takes up a lot of energy, and by the time I'm done… I see cases back to back from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. without a break. Then I go get Adam, and I go get Ben. Then soccer practice.

I try to write Mondays and Fridays when I'm not scheduled to be in the office. But I try very poorly, because I'm a procrastinator. I have to pull myself to the computer sometimes. It's not writer's block. I call it writer's A.D.D. (Attention Deficit Disorder). But when I do sit down, and I do get going, and I do get back into the zone -- it's like playing sports and being in the zone. It just goes and goes and goes. Then I can write any time of the day or night. I can write in the afternoon when the boys come home and they're playing. I just invite more kids over so there's a crowd and everybody's independent.

Crescent Blues: Have you found that the analysis required of a psychotherapist -- analyzing situations and deriving conclusions -- helpful in your writing?

Nancy Bartholomew: Not with plot. But characterization -- oh yeah. When a character comes to me, I can think about him or her. If they're side characters, I can flesh them out more.

I know what Sierra is dealing with. She's dealing with how do you commit to a relationship when you've been hurt so many times and all the issues that go with that. I can build that case history, and I can do that with everybody else.

Raydean is one of my favorites, because she is so nuts. What I like about that is that she is also the wisest character in the series. Bar none, she is the wisest. That's just my own, personal soap box about those who dismiss people who appear to be mentally deranged and say that these people could have nothing to offer. But they are so incredible. So I put Raydean in there for me.

Nancy Bartholomew

When it comes time to flesh out the characters, I will think, "What is your Myers-Briggs type? What were your parents like?" until I can get some feel about what's going on in their heads. Then I can write them.

Crescent Blues: I'm very intrigued to find out who Big Moose turns out to be.

Nancy Bartholomew: You and me both. I swear I don't know.

Crescent Blues: How do you keep the different voices of your main characters straight? How do you keep that Philadelphia, Florida, very East Coast speech pattern separate from Maggie Reid's North Carolina drawl?

Nancy Bartholomew: It's the setting. I think I change as soon as I walk through the door of either Sierra's trailer or Maggie's house. Living around in Greensboro, I am constantly bombarded by Maggie's voice, Marshal Weather's voice, and all the gossip about the real marshal and all the people at the police department. I can immerse myself in Maggie.

I remember when I was trying to write the first novel in the Maggie Reid series, Your Cheatin' Heart. I was into the book, but I wasn't into it enough to have a strong feel for it. I had been in the middle of writing Drag Strip, and I was so into Drag Strip. It was so intense. I missed Sierra like she was a part of me.

I walked into Barnes and Noble [bookstore]. All the Christmas cards were out on the table, and there was this black and white photograph of a little trailer with colored lights around it. I had to leave the store. I had to go back to buy the Christmas cards, but I had to go back into my car to cry. And I'm thinking this is ridiculous. This is somebody I made up!

Crescent Blues: Maybe she's out there. You just don't know! What kind of research do you do for the books? You mentioned going around with the Greensboro police, and you connected with Nova and checked out her club.

Nancy Bartholomew: Family vacations. One time I told the boys, let's go do research in Panama City, Fla. We need to stay in a seedy motel on the Strip. Orange shag carpeting, smoke billowing in under the doors from whoever was staying next door, loud sounds. Open the door, it's right out on Beach Strip Drive. The kids said, "There's green algae in the pool." They thought that was the coolest thing they'd ever done.

There's this supper club that was started right after World War II -- Green's Supper Club. It has this great ball, and it has this guy, who used to play in the 'Forties. It's frozen in time. Everyone's a hundred and fifty years old, but they have the scroll bandstand with the first letter of the band's name. They play dance music. All these older couples come, all dressed up, and they dance. They have the little tables, and the waitresses bring dinner. So I said, "Let's go. We have to do research."

We got there. Ben had a hand-held, voice-activated recorder, and I didn't know it. So he taped a 50-year-old birthday party with all the raucous things that were said -- which he did not understand, but I did.

The boys went into the men's room. They said, "We're going where you can't go, Momma." After they got back, they said, "All the potties…

Nancy Bartholomew - Continued