A Visit with Pat Browning

A veteran traveler, Pat Browning's.globetrotting of the 1970s led to her work as a travel agent and correspondent for TravelAge West, a trade journal published in San Francisco. During the 1990s, she served as a newspaper reporter and columnist. Her mystery novel, Full Circle, first of her Penny McKenzie mystery series, was later republished as Absinthe of Malice. She's currently hard at work on the second novel in the series.

Pat, when did you realize you were a writer? And when did you publish your first work?

I can’t remember when I didn’t write. Scribble would be more accurate, but from an early age I exhibited something every writer needs—unabashed confidence that people want to read what I write.

In the 5th or 6th grade, I wrote one-page, illustrated haunted house stories (in pencil, on notebook paper) and passed them around the classroom. That summer, I wrote a "book" (written in pencil in a lined school notebook), a blatant knock-off of the Bobbsey Twins, and passed it around the neighborhood. When I was about 12, I sat under a pear tree in our front yard and wrote a story about fairies living in a tree stump. I mailed it to The Kansas City Star; they printed it, and sent me a check for something like 50 cents.

I was always a writer. If you don’t count my 50 cents from The Kansas City Star, I really knew I was on to something when The Fresno Bee hired me as a stringer and began publishing my feature articles back in the ‘60s. They hired me to do routine society news, weddings and such, but I started doing features like they were going out of style and never looked back.

Tell us about the writing awards you've won.

"Got Those Ol' Call Me Fat, Diet Time Blues," a feature I wrote for the Bee in 1964, won third place in California Press Women's annual Writers Contest. I gave that up for the travel business and wrote for TravelAge West, a trade journal published in San Francisco. No awards, just some fantastic travel assignments.

I the 1990s, I signed on full time as a newspaper reporter and columnist, at the Selma (Calif.) Enterprise and the Hanford Sentinel. While at the Enterprise, my lifestyle coverage placed first two years in a row in the California Newspaper Publishers Association Better Newspapers Contest. As co-writer of a feature on AIDS, I was a finalist for the 1993 George F. Gruner Award for Meritorious Public Service in Journalism. At the Sentinel, my feature story about a Hanford man who was one of the Japanese-American "Yankee Samurais" of World War II, placed second in the CNPA contest.

In 2000, the first chapter of Full Circle won Futures Magazine’s second annual Karen Besecker Memorial Award. The award was named for the late Karen Besecker of Fresno, California, who founded the San Joaquin Chapter of Sisters in Crime.

When did you decide to write your first novel, Full Circle, later reissued as Absinthe of Malice, and how did the story evolve?

While I was working for the Hanford Sentinel, the editor decided the lifestyle pages needed a book review column. I went to the library and pulled books off the shelves. They turned out to be mysteries, and I thought, how hard can it be to write one? Ten years later I can say, it’s not as easy as it looks.

It became Absinthe of Malice almost overnight when an online friend decided to start his own publishing company, read Full Circle, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Three months later the new book was revised and reissued. It was a mad, mad, mad, mad merry-go-round and I loved every sweaty minute of it.

How did your various jobs influenced your writing?

Everything I’ve done has turned up in my writing in one form or another, especially the newspaper columns and features. My Penny Mackenzie mystery series reflects the small newspaper offices and law office where I worked, as well as the small California town where I lived for almost 50 years.

How do you feel about the current publishing downturn and do you think it will force major publishers to streamline their methods of marketing? Do you have any suggestions for them?

Major publishers seem to be turning into foreign-owned conglomerates interested in the bottom line, and it's difficult to know who's publishing what any more.

Pearson (UK) owns Penguin Putnam Inc. and its imprints. Bloomsbury (UK) owns Walker and its imprints. Holtzbrink (Germany) owns Macmillan and its imprints, and also St. Martin’s. Hachette Livre (France) owns Warner Books/Little, Brown and their Imprints. One fairly large US publisher who I think is still independent is Kensington/Zebra.

The smart ones are getting on the e-book bandwagon. HarperCollins, with numerous imprints, has a Browse Inside section on its web site (www.harpercollins.com).The blurb reads “HarperCollins Browse Inside lets you start reading books before they go on sale with Sneak Peak and offers Full Access on selected titles, where you can read the entire book for free online.”

I clicked on the cover of The Gradner Shift by Ulrich Boser, which went on sale Feb. 24 in hardcover and e-book formats. The true story of the world’s largest unsolved art theft, several chapters of the book are there to read. It certainly piqued my interest.

What's the most difficult aspect of writing for you and what do you enjoy most about the creative process?

The most difficult aspect is sitting down to do it. Once I’m into it, I lose all track of time. The creative process is like breathing to me. Couldn’t live without it.

Has blogging at Morning's at Noon helped sell your books, or do you feel that blogging only gets a writer's name before the public?

I don’t usually blog about my book(s). My blog is just a personal thing, not a marketing tool. As for other blogs I show up on, who knows? It does keep your name before the public but I can’t even guess how it relates to sales.

I understand you have a memoir, “White Petunias,” in the Red Dirt Festival Anthology. It's an intriguing title. Briefly tell us briefly about it.


Briefly? That piece is almost as old as I am. It’s basically about a summer night when a boy walked me home from church, but in a larger sense about a small rural community in Oklahoma that was changed forever by World War II. I first wrote the church scene in the 1960s, planning to turn it into a novel. Didn’t happen.

But it was near and dear to my heart, so I filed it away and got it out again about every 20 years, wondering what to do with it, rewrote it, and filed it away. A couple of years ago I rewrote it again, and it won second place in the Memoir category of the 2007 Writers Competition, Frontiers in Writing, sponsored by Panhandle Professional Writers, Amarillo, Texas. A year ago I rewrote it once more, and it was accepted for inclusion in the Red Dirt Book Festival Anthology. The anthology and festival are sponsored by the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the Pioneer Library System.

Advice for fledgling writers?

We’d need another blog for that!

Thanks, Pat.

Pat's blog site is: Morning’s At Noon: http://pbrowning.blogspot.com

She's also on Facebook and Twitter,"but mainly to keep up with friends and relatives. A lot of Central Valley people I know and/or used to work with are there and it is fun to hear what they are doing. I'm on Twitter but never go near it and will cancel it as soon as I get time.

For writing and promotion networking I prefer listservs such as DorothyL, Senior Sleuths and Sisters in Crime-Internet Chapter. I just rejoined SouthWest Writers in Albuquerque. They have a great newsletter, among other things, and I'm getting ready to rejoin Panhandle Professional Writers in Amarillo. They also have great online programs for writers."