Paranormal Mystery Author

It’s time to meet author, Ligia de Wit and find out about her writing journey and her book Seven Hundred Beachfront.

Helen: It certainly sounds deadly! And suits your series. What made you write this particular book?

Saffron: Though the book could’ve gone in various directions, a major and perhaps unexpected theme is faking paranormal activity. Which wasn’t something I planned specifically for this book, but a few years ago, the local reader/writer group I’m part of asked me to write a murder mystery evening for our Christmas party. 
Me being me, I couldn’t resist putting ghosts in it – but I didn’t want it to relate to my books, so I created a fake seance (and slightly unnerved some of my fellow players because I didn’t write a script, just handed out character sheets and instructions to have fun improvising, and maaaaaybe accidentally-on-purpose didn’t tell everyone about the “ghosts” thing. Sorry, guys!) 
However, I loved the idea of dropping a real psychic medium (like my character, Lucas Rathbone) into a totally fake séance with lots of “paranormal” activity, and seeing what happened, so I found a place for it in Dripping Poison.

Helen: I always feel so sorry for Lucas. You are always dropping him into difficult situations! When did you first realise you had a passion for writing?

Saffron: Oh, gosh, I didn’t really. I sort of fell into it by accident. I basically thought of a story I wanted to read and wrote it, then wrote nothing for a couple of years until I thought of another story I wanted to read. Now I just keep on doing that, though I’m slightly more proactive about finding the stories nowadays!

Helen: Nice, that’s a very relaxed process. No pressure is good! Which element of the writing process do you find most challenging and why?

Saffron: Usually I’d say editing, but currently, I have an outline that’s refusing to be finished. I know what happens at the end of the book. I know whodunit, whydunnit, howdunnit, and all the red herrings and twists we’ll come across on the way to solving the murders. But the exact order of things is refusing to be pinned down. 

Helen: Timelines can be the most challenging. The order in which things happen is really important and frustrating to get right! Talking about timelines, who first inspired you to write?

Um… whoever wrote the three or four really awful mysteries I read back-to-back before I decided enough was enough and I should write my own book?!
Partially because I didn’t think it was altogether fair to criticise people’s efforts in something I’d never done, but mostly because I figured I couldn’t do any worse!
I wouldn’t name and shame them, though, even if I could remember the books.

Helen: What a great reason to start writing. I’m so glad you did! Tell us about the genre write and why you chose it.

Saffron: I write historical murder mysteries with a paranormal twist. Or, paranormal mysteries set in the past, if you prefer. It’s been several years, and a dozen published books, and I still don’t know how best to describe them!

I grew up watching TV programs like Poirot, Midsomer Murders, and Jonathan Creek, so I guess murder mysteries are something I’m familiar with and felt like a natural fit. I’m also a bit of a history nerd, so again, it just felt natural to set my books in the past! Plus, the 1920s are a classic era for the kind of books I wanted to write.

As for having a psychic sleuth, I’ve been interested in the paranormal since I was a kid, and having a detective who could speak to the murder victims seemed interesting to me!

Helen: What is the best thing that has happened to you since you began writing?

Saffron: Finding a community of writers, especially on Instagram. Right from the start, they’ve been so welcoming, so generous, so supportive, and so all-round lovely. I’ve made real friendships, found help when I’ve needed it (and given help in return, which is truly an honour), and people who truly get how wonderful, frustrating, joyous, heart-wrenching, and magnificently challenging writing and publishing is. 

Helen: The support of the writing community is so important to new writers, and the contined support is inspiring. What is one of the most useful resources you use when writing?

Saffron: I draft in an online writing program called 4 The Words, which has gamified writing sprints into an RPG where you battle monsters by writing a certain amount of words in a set time. Very useful for keeping scatterbrained people like me focused! 

Helen: That sounds like so much fun and a great way to get words down on paper!! What a great resource to help people focus. How do you get the ideas for a new book?

Saffron: Generally, by stumbling across something interesting and idly wondering how it could be used to kill someone! I then figure out who would use something like that, who they would kill, why they’d kill that person in particular, and why the ghost wouldn’t just tell Lucas who killed them.

Helen: You always make it so difficult for Lucas. Lol! What are you doing to him next? Tell us about your current WIP.

Saffron: Hanged By Silk is the fourth book in the Beyond The Veil Detectives series, and much like the last one, is being written because I thought it was a good title for a book!  (In case you’re wondering, apparently the English aristocracy could, if sentenced to hang, request a rope made from silk. This has no bearing on the story, though!)

It’s taking place in London just before Christmas 1929, and my team of four private investigators have split up to investigate two very different cases: one, the trade in fake antiquities, and the other, the murder of a young woman at a ritzy teetotal club. 

Lucas, as the psychic medium on the team, thinks he ought to drop the antiquities case that’s boring him to tears and switch to the murder – but his wife and their friend Tommy want to prove their sleuthing prowess without supernatural help. So, Lucas is stuck on the deadly dull case with Tommy’s husband, Noah, and fretting about the woman he loves confronting dangerous killers, when…

When he steps into a junk shop and is overwhelmed with a feeling of dread, like something evil lurks in the shadows, watching him with curiosity, wondering what he is and how it can use him. He’s felt this once before, right at the start of the book, when a witch helping him understand his hated “Gift” hands him a necromancer’s notebook, and it makes his skin crawl. 

Unwilling to let things that feel like… that stay out in the world where anyone could find them, Lucas and Noah start trying to find these objects. But when their investigation leads them back to the murder their spouses are untangling, perhaps it’s better the two groups join forces after all…

Helen: I know Lucas is your protagonist. Why did you write her/him?

Saffron: Lucas Rathbone arrived, unbidden and unnamed, in my head somewhere around the end of 2018, then spent six months nagging me to write his story. I do it mostly to shut him up, to be honest. No, I jest. Well, not entirely – the nagging really happened – however, I really just loved the idea of a psychic sleuth, particularly one who didn’t embrace their “Gift” but used it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do.

Helen: If Lucas could answer, why would he say we should read your book?

Saffron: “For the love of God, please don’t read it. I hate the attention, and Saffron only ever writes about the worst, most difficult parts of my life. She’s not as funny as she thinks she is, either.”

I’m so grateful for his help…

Helen: You guys have this love-hate relationship. It’s so funny to watch. Moving on to the business of writing. What is the most useful piece of writing advice you’ve received, and by whom?

Saffron: My friend, DP Haka, told me to make a cup of coffee and imagine sitting down with my character and talking to them as if they were someone I was meeting for the first time.

I fear this may have led Lucas to think he ought to be treated as an equal partner in this whole writing malarkey. However, as a comment I frequently get about Lucas is that he feels like an old friend, perhaps that’s a deal I can live with.

Helen: Every writer experiences self-doubt. How do you overcome the fear and the little doubting voice in your head to keep writing?

Saffron: So. The long answer is:

I’ve always been “arty”, and through school, college, and university, took whatever creative courses seemed fun. And anyone who says the creative arts are a “soft option” has clearly never been on one of these courses (at least, not with the lecturers I got), because every damn week you pour your heart and soul into something, only for someone to critique the living daylights out of it – sometimes in front of your peers – then tell you to go away and do it again for next week.

At which point, they’ll tear that apart, too. But if you want to pass your course – and I’m too stubborn to give in when I probably should – you must do it.  If this sounds rough, it is. It destroys any confidence you ever had, but you have two options: either stay destroyed, or pick up your shattered ego and reform it into something new, preferably retrieving whatever gold may have been buried in the “constructive” criticism you’ve just endured.

It might take a lot of time and effort, it’ll never return to how it was before, and it’ll crack again with every harsh word you get about your work, but if you don’t pick yourself up again, that little creative spark, the thing that drove you to make something in the first place, will die forever. And whoever said you weren’t good enough will be right. 

So, for me, that little voice in my head got bricked up behind the pieces of my broken heart a long, long time ago, and I can barely hear it any more. If I do, I tell it it’s wrong, because I win. They don’t.

The short answer is spite.

Helen: As a writer you have to accept that not everyone will like your work. It’s those that love it that you need to listen to. My reader’s support is what keeps me writing more. Let’s chat about your writing proocess. How do you fit your writing into your everyday life?

Saffron: I’m very lucky that I generally have a chunk of time every day to write in, so fitting it in isn’t much of a problem (having no kids, no social life, and no TV helps a lot!). But when I am too busy to get to the laptop and write for a decent amount of time, I have a Bluetooth keyboard that links to my phone. I can get set up to write in seconds, can put everything away again almost instantly, and write wherever I am.

Helen: Do you listen to music when you write, if so, what do you listen to and why?

Saffron: I listen to the soundtrack from the Monster Hunter World game, because it’s mostly epic orchestral music without lyrics. I’m also very familiar with it all, so it helps me block out the world/keeps my brain busy without being distractingly new!

Helen: As you write a period novel, how much research do you do for each book?

Saffron: As much as needs doing! Sometimes, if I’m pretty familiar with everything involved, it’s barely any – just a few things here and there to check I’ve remembered correctly. But other times, when I’ve had an idea and don’t reeeeally know how to implement it, research can take three times as long as writing. Usually, it’s somewhere in between.

Helen: Are you a pantser or a planner? Do you write free form, or do you have a framework you stick to?

Saffron: Kinda both. I do a lot of brainstorming for my books, and then once I think I know what’s going to happen, I’ll pants the outline. In fact, I usually pants it several times, getting in a horrible tangle along the way. However, I figure that, going back to the Terry Pratchett quote earlier, this is a quicker way of telling myself the story than trying to get the entire thing out of my head in something resembling a book. It’s also much quicker to add something to an outline than it is to a full draft. I’ve done that before, and these things have a habit of having knock-on effects throughout the book.

Once I’m happy with an outline, I’ll tidy it up into bullet points for each scene, which I stick pretty closely to.

Helen: Do you ever encounter writer’s block? If you do, what do you do to overcome it?

Saffron: Take a break. For me, it generally means something in a scene isn’t working, and I need to step back and do something else for a while. The problem usually works itself out whilst I’m not thinking about it, or I come back with a fresh set of eyes that can see where the issue is.

Helen: I agree, sometimes it’s better to just let the back brain noodle on it for a while, and then when you go to sleep, the answer comes to you. Or it does for me. Who is your favourite character from your book?

Saffron: Ooh, tough question! I love them all, but Tommy has the most interesting backstory, and honestly, he throws the most curveballs, as you’ll see later. Keeps things interesting… even if I sometimes wish he’d just finish a scene the way I planned it!

Helen: I think Tommy grew on everyone. If you didn’t write mystery then which genre would you like to try and write in next?

Saffron: Funny story, I nearly didn’t write mystery at all!

Before I started writing Lucas and co, I kicked around a couple of other ideas. One was a kid’s mystery series, another was a near-future sci-fi, but the one I actually started writing was a time travel alt-history set in WW2 Germany.

But there was too much research I didn’t want to do. Sci-fi isn’t a genre I’m super familiar with, certainly not the time travel subgenre, but I know the fanbase love their details to be precise. Similarly, WW2 German isn’t a period of history I know much about (I hate military history of any kind, but particularly the World Wars) but I can’t fudge details because there are plenty of people out there who love all that stuff and know every single tiny thing about the war.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t work without time-travelling Nazis, so I ditched that and invented a cute village in 1920s England instead, so no one could tell me I’d got something wrong about a real place.

Then my characters ended up in London, but we won’t talk about that.

Helen: I’m so glad you ended up in the twenties! It would have been a great shame to have never met Lucas and the crew. Most authors read a lot. Do you have a favourite book? Tell us why you like it so much?

Saffron: Oh, this is a tough one. Currently, it’s probably – and please don’t take this as a recommendation to read it, because it isn’t – Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.

I actually picked it up as research and without knowing much about it, other than it was a (probably) semi-biographical book set in 1920s England with a bisexual male main character who has a same-sex relationship.

My character Tommy is a bisexual man living in 1920s England who is in a same-sex relationship, so I thought – brilliant. This is literally perfect for retroactively researching something I never planned for, because Tommy kinda neglected to mention he likes boys when he crash-landed in my first book, then took one look at Noah in book 6 and went “that one”, despite me having invented a nice girl for him to marry instead. This is what I meant earlier about curveballs, and this isn’t even the curviest one he’s thrown me.

Incidentally, I expected the same-sex romance in Brideshead Revisited to be more “read between the lines,” but nope. It was obvious Charles and Sebastian were a couple. What’s even more interesting is other characters clearly knew about their relationship too, but often seemed accepting of it. Totally unexpected, especially as the book was first published in 1945, a couple of decades before homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK. Anyway, I went into it expecting something fluffy and light-hearted about the upper classes. Kinda like Jeeves and Wooster, but a romance instead of a comedy. And for a good chunk of the book, it was charming, heart-warming romance, albeit with a dark undercurrent.

However, the reason I DON’T recommend Brideshead Revisited to just anyone is because it lures you in with this darling romance between two sweet young men, and – spoiler alert – then utterly destroys their lives. It’s beautifully written, completely compelling, bold, brave, unexpected, and absolutely something that SHOULD be read, but it’s still bleaker than a Bronte novel read in a leaky bus stop on a grey day in November when you’ve stepped in a puddle with leaky shoes.

Not something to be read if you’re feeling down, basically. And I think it’s important to point this out, because it completely floored me, and it’s fantastically written. But how I wish I’d known what I was getting myself into… Oh, heavy Catholic themes too, so if that’s a trigger for anyone, give this a wide berth. Anyway. My favourite book was heavier than I expected, and I loved it.

Helen: What are some of the books you read recently that you would recommend to others?

Saffron: I’ve just finished Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, and had forgotten just how good it was. 

I seem to be into re-reading at the moment, actually, as I’ve just re-read The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie, which again, very good. I’m a huge fan of the Jeeves and Wooster books, so always recommend those. 

Not such recent reads, but Love Habit by TL Clark was one of my favourites from last year, and Raven Song by Jennifer Brasington-Crowley is excellent, and When We Were Out Of The Ordinary by Elen Chase is gorgeous. Having always said I hate romances, it’s quite surprising to find myself recommending three of them!

Helen: It’s been a pleasure chatting with you, Saffron. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. Just to close us out, what advice would you give new writers?

Saffron: Just do it. Don’t think too hard about it, don’t second-guess yourself, and don’t, whatever you do, edit as you go. Get everything out of your head, then come back to fix it later.

You’ll think it’s absolutely awful and want to consign it to the bin immediately – but remember every book you love has been edited a dozen times or more, and didn’t go to print the second the author wrote “the end.”

Your favourite author also looked at something resembling word salad, probably cried a bit, and then rolled up their sleeves to form the clay they’d just created into a beautiful object they were proud of. 

There’s a quote from Terry Pratchett that says “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story,” and it really is. Once you know the story, you can refine it into something actually readable, but you can never get to that point unless you get that first draft out of your head.

About the Author – Saffron Amatti

Saffron Amatti is the author of the Lucas Rathbone Mysteries, a series of historical cozy mysteries with a ghostly twist set in 1920s England. She lives in a rather pretty village in Derbyshire, UK, where she spends an unhealthy amount of time thinking about how to kill people and (almost) get away with it. This is almost entirely in relation to her writing, but she keeps her family on their toes by throwing a little doubt in occasionally.

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If you enjoy epic fantasy then check out my award winning Sentinal series, which is now complete. If you like fantasy books with a touch of romance then you will love my SoulMist series, start with SoulBreather. Prefer Dystopian Science Fantasy? Then try Harmony. Start the adventure and stay for the journey.

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