Today’s guest blogger, Betty Webb, is the author of DESERT CUT, DESERT WIVES, DESERT RUN, and other mysteries by
Poisoned Pen Press. Starting this month, she has a new series, beginning with THE ANTEATER OF DEATH.

Writing novels is tough. Writing novels is especially tough when you’re already writing full time at a different job.

For 20 years I wrote full time for newspapers, and for ten years before that, wrote full time for ad agencies. Why I wanted to write novels during my free time is a subject probably best left to my therapist, but I decided to do exactly that around ten years ago while I was still working in a busy newsroom. I wasn’t certain what particular kind of novel I wanted to write, only that after working in the newspaper business for so many years I really, really wanted to kill someone — mainly, my editor.

Since killing editors in real life is illegal, I realized it was safer to do my killing metaphorically on the printed page. Years spent interviewing killers on Arizona’s Death Row came in handy here. One of them, a guy nicknamed called “Banzai” Vickers — because he once yelled “Banzai!” when carving his initials into his cellmate’s dead flesh – even shared how it felt to kill someone. Emboldened by my first-hand knowledge of murderers’ psyches, I began my mystery-writing career with “Desert Noir,” a novel that explored the psychological destruction of a woman, and the physical destruction of the Sonoran Desert. The book introduced Lena Jones, a private investigator raised in a series of foster homes and who had, to put it mildly, issues.

When I first began writing mysteries, polygamy, which is practiced on several large compounds in rural Arizona, was never prosecuted, even when the polygamists’ multiple wives were as young as 13. Even though reports of polygamists’ human-rights abuses had floated around the state for years, a succession of state attorney generals maintained a hands-off philosophy. The feeling was that freedom of religion trumped child rape. Enraged by this, I wrote “Desert Wives: Polygamy Can Be Murder,” which included an Author’s Note detailing how many taxpayers’ dollars were spent on supporting the compounds. Confronted by these statistics, the Arizona Legislator quickly enacted the state’s first anti-polygamy law. Money trumped religion.

In following books, Lena Jones continued to dig up political and social dirt, a job made fairly easy for me because of my close association with killers and news editors. The only problem I faced was time. A reporter’s life is an exhausting one, with hours that frequently stretched from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., sometimes into the wee hours. My weekends weren’t my own, either. So in order to keep Lena Jones series going, I woke up at 4 a.m. wrote until 8 a.m., then got ready for work at the newsroom, where I cranked out stories about real-life crimes. This odd schedule was beneficial because it meant that I was never “too tired to write” (the usual excuse for us writers) and ensured that the day’s “journalism-speak” never crept into my work. In fact, this schedule became so beneficial that I maintained it even after I retired from the newspaper four years ago.

Two years ago, though, I ran into trouble. Midway through the gruesome research on “Desert Cut,” my fifth Lena Jones novel, I hit the wall. Although my own nature is fairly cheerful, the material I uncovered — crimes against little girls in Third World countries — threw me into a deep depression. To climb out of it, I began volunteering at the Phoenix Zoo, where I cured my depression by watching the antics of various animals, but especially, those of a giant anteater named Jezebel.

Soul refreshed, I began the hard work of actually writing “Desert Cut” in the early mornings, but almost without planning it, in the afternoons, I worked on a humorous short story titled, “The Anteater of Death.” To make a long story short (or a short story long) “Anteater” evolved into a novel. It featured a crime-sniffing zookeeper named Theodora “Teddy” Bentley, who had no psychological issues other than a leaky houseboat and two nutty, not totally law-abiding, parents. After Teddy and Jezebel, who I renamed “Lucy,” helped me through the writing of “Desert Cut,” I’d grown so fond of them that I decided to create a second, much more humorous series. Fortunately, my editor at Poisoned Pen Press – a much more humane soul than my editor at the newspaper – agreed, and “The Anteater of Death” hits the bookstores in early December.

So now I have a revised writing schedule. In the morning, I delve into social activism with Lena Jones, and in the afternoons, I giggle along with zookeeper Teddy. The schedule seems to suit my peculiar dark/funny nature, so I’ll stick with it for a while. At least until I get an idea for a third series. And then – well, I’m sure I’ll come up with a new schedule.

Visit the Lena Jones web site at www.bettywebb-mystery.com

Visit the Anteater’s web site at www.bettywebb-zoomystery.com