A Conversation with Pepper Smith

Artist, writer, singer, musician, photographer, Pepper Smith writes a suspense series featuring horsewoman Patty O'Donnell.

How did your Patty O’Donnell suspense series come about?

Patty O’Donnell is a character I’ve been writing off and on since I was in grade school. Somewhere in my mid-thirties, when it occurred to me that I might actually have a shot at getting published, it just seemed natural to pick that character up and start a series with her.

Tell us about your protagonist.

Patty is a horsewoman, who grew up on a ranch in Arizona and later married an Irish jockey. She now lives near a small fishing village in County Kerry, Ireland, and works for her father-in-law, who trains racehorses. When we first meet her in Blood Money, she and her family discover that the widow of a family friend is being abused by her second husband. Their efforts to rescue her put Patty in danger not only from the abusive husband, but from scavengers who try to beat her family to a sunken treasure. Her skills as a racehorse trainer bring her trouble when a distant cousin decides she’d be perfect to help him in a racing scam in Rio Star. Her intelligence and adaptability make her a valuable asset in the eyes of her cousin’s partner-in-crime, making the two men the bane of her life and a source of future trouble.

Did you grow up on a ranch with horses?
I wish! I grew up in a college town, horse-crazy and horseless. My love of horses goes back at least to the fourth grade, when the teacher read us Misty of Chincoteague, by Margaret Henry. I began writing stories with a schoolmate the following year, and it seemed that the logical place to set our stories if we wanted our characters to have easy access to horses was on a ranch.

My husband and I had a couple of horses for a while, until the expense of keeping them outweighed the pleasure of having them. It was a wonderful experience while it lasted, though.

Your artwork is beautiful. Do you specialize in racing horses and do you raise them?

Thank you! I started drawing horses around the fourth grade—they were natural subjects since that was about the same time I fell in love with them.
Probably my fascination with racehorses comes from reading Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series as a girl. There are few domesticated animals as beautiful and awe-inspiring as a horse in motion, and the illustrations in my first copy of The Black Stallion, of a big, powerful horse with fire in his eyes was a tremendous influence on me.


I understand that you’re also a singer, musician and photographer as well as an artist. How do you manage to do all that and write too?

I did a lot more of all those things before coming down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome a number of years ago. I’m a lapsed guitar player, was a bassoonist in Junior High and High School, and taught myself the violin around ten years ago. I’ve done a lot of landscape photography, though none of it’s been offered for sale, and some wedding photography, which can be very exhausting. I’ve sold a few pieces of artwork, including a pastel portrait of Genuine Risk, who won the Kentucky Derby back in the 1980s.

My real driving passion has always been writing, with singing a close second. I was singing with an amateur group locally until recently, but the group lost members due to marriages, members moving away, the impending birth of children, and the fact that the weekly grind of rehearsals became awkward due to the economy. I miss it a lot.

Tell us about your job as an instructor at the Muse Online Writers Conference, held yearly in October.

The Muse Online Writers Conference is the brainchild of Lea Schizas and Carolyn Howard-Johnson, two ladies who very much believe in “paying it forward” by helping to give the next generation of writers the tools to help them succeed. The conference is entirely online, and held over a week’s time, allowing attendees to participate at times convenient to them, since they come from all around the world. There are workshops on a variety of subjects, ranging from basics like bringing characters to life, to marketing techniques for the published and soon-to-be-published.

I teach a workshop on adding suspense, along with fellow instructor J.D. Webb. This year, participants will be using story prompts to begin a suspense story, which will be critiqued with a view toward focusing on the point where the suspense actually begins. Handouts explaining what suspense in a story is and giving techniques for including it are provided to participants.

The conference itself is affiliated with several Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites For Writers, and was awarded Best Writer’s Workshop in 2008 by the Preditors and Editors Readers Poll. The conference is free of charge, though donations to help cover the website costs are accepted, and the instructors, visiting publishers, and guest agents are all volunteers, donating their expertise during the week of the conference because we also believe in paying it forward.

What are you working on now?

I’ve got two stories in the works, one a Patty O’Donnell novel, and the other a non-series book set in Hawaii. No notion of when either of them will be ready for publication, though.

Are you a seat of the pants writer or do you carefully outline your novels?

I’m very much a seat-of-the-pants writer. I’ll plot key scenes out in my head, and then work out how to get from one to the next as I go. It’s a very organic process, and often the ending I thought I was going to write gets jettisoned for one that makes more sense with where the story takes me, but the new ending is usually much better than the one I’d originally envisioned anyway. If I write everything down as an outline, I almost never end up actually writing the story. I guess maybe the thrill of discovery, the joy of seeing where the story takes me, is gone once the outline is on paper.

Advice to budding suspense writers.

Read a lot. Find the authors that do suspense well and read with an eye to how they do what they’re doing. Write a lot. Nothing will replace hands-on practice. Get feedback, and be prepared to hear things you might not want to hear. Look at what’s being said with an open mind and see if there are ways you can improve. It takes practice to get it right. Writing comes with a sort of unspoken apprenticeship. You’re the one who controls how quickly and how well you get through it, but refusing to work on your craft and convincing yourself that no one ‘gets your work’ is a sure way to stop yourself from making progress.

Anything you’d like to add?

For those who would like a chance to get to know Patty O’Donnell, the short mystery “The Uncle Hunt” is available as a free download on my website, in pdf.

Thank you, Pepper, for taking part in the series.

Pepper's web and blog sites:

Website: http://www.peppersmithbooks.com
Blog: http://painting-with-words.blogspot.com
The website for the Muse Online Writers Conference is http://themuseonlinewritersconference.com
Registration for this year’s conference is open, but closes end of August.