P.J. Parrish (Kristy Montee) writes:
I used to be a newspaper reporter but kept getting promoted until one day I looked up and the only thing I was writing was personnel evaluations. Journalists don't make big bucks, so I decided I could get rich churning out romance novels. (Hey, that's what the article in Money magazine promised). My first attempt, The Dancer, was plucked out the slush pile at Ballantine and published in 1984. I thought I was on my way and quit my job. Next came a meteoric rise up the romance midlist. (You can buy my "Kristy Daniels" books for 1 cent on Amazon.) When my editor got fired, so did I. I moped around in malls for a year before my husband said, "start writing again or get a job." I got a new agent who told me to lay off the sex and start killing people. I wrote 300 pages of a really, really bad mystery before I joined up with my sister Kelly to create the Louis Kincaid series. Our first was published in 1999 (after being rewritten ten times and rejected by nearly every publisher in New York). Seven books later in the series we're still hanging around -- like our hero Louis, bruised but ever hopeful.
P.J. Parrish (Kelly Montee) writes:
My first literary effort was to kill off all the Beatles in an adventure/thriller that took place in about four pages and ended with arrest of their manager as the villain. Since I was ten, the only editor and reader was my father, who dutifully wrote "Good Job!" on the cover page. That was enough to keep me going, and by junior high, I was writing stories in spiral notebooks (well, actually the same story with the same characters who had endless high school exploits, complete with gang fights, knife slashes and an occasional dead body.) My feedback during this phase was "How can you write this stuff?..Ewww!"
My life turn took a real life turn of its own when I married and spent the next twenty years raising children and learning the casino business from the blackjack table to Employee Relations. But the urge to create a very different and far more exciting fictional world never really let go. By the time the kids were in all in school, I was back to the spiral notebooks, and eventually progressed to a $99 typewriter, where I literally pounded out a two-finger southern romance and inundated my mother with ideas, characters and aspirations until the wee hours of the Arizona mornings. Feedback here was close to "Dear Author, your manuscript does not fit our needs at this time."
When I found myself single, and living in a town rich with a criminal history of its own, and all my children out of the house, I tried again, giving birth to our current character (and our bread and butter) Louis Kincaid. This period coincided with Kristy's husband telling her to either write again or go get a real job. Faced with that, we teamed up and finished our first novel together, titled Dark of the Moon. I don't have to tell you what the feedback here was, since we are currently at work on Louis Kincaid #7. It has been an interesting journey, ending up right back I started: writing endless adventures with the same character and showing it first to a member of the family.
P.J. Parrish's Louis Kincaid books have been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Shamus awards and have appeared on the bestseller lists for the New York Times and USAToday.
