Ily visiting my Toastmasters Club during Service Dog Training
Q. What inspired the story behind one of your books?
A. I’ve written four books so far: three business books and one children’s book. The children’s book I did not intend to write; it just kind of came out of left field.
We have a German Shepherd who was a medical dropout from a guide dog organization. My husband and I were volunteer puppy raisers for them several years ago down in Connecticut, and we ended up adopting her because the organization wants their dogs to be able to work for at least 10 years, and sadly she was going to have (and has) early hip dysplasia.
The inspiration (if you can call it that, because it had been more of a running joke for the last few years) behind the children’s book is that she is, like many GSDs, a drama queen, but she is exceptionally so when going to the vet. Our vet, who is a good friend, and the vet techs quite literally say, “Here comes Ily the Drama Queen!” when she walks in the door.
The book was really written for our granddaughter, who Ily adores. We had shown it to several friends and relatives, who suggested putting it online. Because of the service dog connection, 50% of the proceeds from the book are donated to Service Dogs NH.
Q. Are any parts of your books drawn from your own life experiences?
A. With my business books, Finding a Location for Your Business and Finding a Location for Your Restaurant, they are based on many years of talking to both personal business clients and SCORE clients about things they need to look into, research, and do a deep dive into before settling on a location for their business. They cover topics that I tend to discuss with clients over and over again, so they were more brain dumps than anything else.
When they say “location, location, location” is everything for a business, that’s very true. While businesses can work in locations that are not optimal for them, it really cuts down on the likelihood of a successful business long-term, and it means that the marketing for that business has to be exceptional and requires more work. I wish I could say this was opinion but it’s a pretty established fact.
With the restaurant marketing book, many of the marketing initiatives I included are either tried-and-true methods or ones that I have seen and documented working for other restaurants. With the price of food and everything else being higher than ever, as well as the other challenges that the restaurant industry faces, I thought it would be a good idea to put out some free and low-cost marketing tactics, including some operational details that might be helpful to restaurant owners.
Q. What kind of research do you typically do while writing?
A. That’s a really tough question. For the first three books, they were drawn from information and knowledge that I either had personally or been adjacent to through my consulting business and working with SCORE clients for many years.
With the children’s book, I didn’t need to do any research because, well, it’s a children’s story, and it’s all based on real life. The research I did have to do was learning how to format a picture book correctly, which is very different from formatting a traditional print volume.
One of the books that I am working on right now, though, is a fiction book. Hopefully, I finish it within the next decade or so (fingers crossed). For that book, I’ve actually been doing a very deep dive into what’s practical and factual.
The setting of the fiction book (zombie apocalypse(ish) is in a Costco-like big-box store, and I have been researching information such as how high the shelves are in an average big-box store, how wide the aisles are, and how many hours a generator would potentially run before it ran out of gas or propane. And how far can the average person throw a 16 oz. jar of pickles.
To me, there’s nothing worse than reading a book or watching a movie or TV show where it’s clear the creator has not researched the topic. It makes me lose interest, enthusiasm, and respect for the work if details are included simply because they sound good, rather than because they are realistic. Like a book set in a town I happen to know well, where the author has clearly never been, as evinced by the locations it supposedly refers to or by its description of the town’s personality or atmosphere.
One of my personal pet peeves that, ironically enough, I’m also building into the book is the fact that in most zombie movies, zombie TV shows, and quite a few zombie apocalypse books, nobody ever seems to stop to use the loo or brush their teeth. Ugh 🙁
Merry (one of the main characters in Undead in Aisle Nine)
Q. What are you currently working on?
A. I’m currently working on two books. One is another business book, specifically for nonprofits, focused on guerrilla marketing and operations. The other is the fiction book referenced earlier.
It’s not quite horror; trying for more horror-comedy. Think Shaun of the Dead meets The Truman Show. The name of it is Undead in Aisle Nine, and I’m about halfway through writing it. I’ve gotten a bit distracted and have been sketching character cards for many of the characters. Merry (the hero of the story) and Greta (my faux Avon lady) are examples.
The feedback I’ve gotten from some beta readers so far is that it’s quite funny, although I think they might be a bit biased. I hope it’s amusing, and I have been having a lot of fun writing it. Writing just for the love of it has been an absolute joy.
Some of the characters in the book are actually drawn from real life. One example is a character who only briefly appears in the beginning named Greta (below), who was my nemesis when I was a small child. She was an Avon lady who used to stop in once a week to visit my mom and I was absolutely terrified of her.
Greta (a minor character in Undead in Aisle Nine)
They do say some of the best writing and stories are based on real life. Some of the other characters and plot points in the book are also based on history. I’m including a few stories that I’ve experienced from years in professional kitchens, as well as some other personal experiences mostly because I found them amusing, so I hope they are to others.
The story came about because I love the supernatural, but I really don’t love blood and I’m more of let’s visit the kitchen for a snack if it get too scary kind of gal. I don’t love, but am absolutely fascinated by, the “idea” of zombies because there are so many different varieties: fast zombies, slow zombies, smart zombies, not-so-smart zombies, running zombies, etc. etc.
In fiction and the supernatural in general, you don’t get that same variety. Vampires are pretty much vampires with a few variations, and werewolves are werewolves with a few variations, but zombies I think seem to capture people’s imaginations because of that variety.
Plus I tend to be a practical and skeptical person in a lot of ways. So when friends have subjected me occasionally to watching The Walking Dead, I’m the one yelling at the screen, going, “What is WRONG with you people? Have you never heard of defending yourself occasionally?”
I have this line in the book from the main character (and it very much mirrors my own snarkiness): “I kept noticing this one thing that kept happening in almost every episode I got tortured with: characters walking single file down empty back roads like they were TRYING to get picked off by an apex predator with a taste for poorly organized humans.”
Friends of mine and I have always had off the wall discussions about, if there were a zombie apocalypse, which big-box store would you want to get stuck in? That’s really where the idea for this fiction book came from in the first place. It’s been roaming and lurching (pun intended) around in my brain for a while.
Q. If you could give your younger self one piece of writing advice, what would it be?
A. I think the best piece of advice would have been: don’t stop writing.
When I was in high school I used to write a lot of poetry and I had started writing a fantasy novel. I had all the character outlines and plot outlines and I made the mistake of sharing what I had written with my 10th-grade English teacher who basically scared me away from writing, or at least creative writing, until recently. Being neurodivergent and not knowing that at the time didn’t help.
I’ve been blogging for business for about a decade, but that’s business-related and focused more on factual information. If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self to ignore that person and keep going.
Q. If your book were turned into a movie, who would play the main character?
A. Obviously, the three business books don’t have main characters, and the children’s book is already based on a real-life dog. I would hope that Ily would play her own character if a movie were ever made about her, although it’s a short children’s book, so maybe a short stop-motion film would be fun. I can picture Ily as a claymation character a la Wallace & Gromit.
With the horror-comedy fiction book that I’m writing, I think the main character (Lou) would be played by an actor who is not overly imposing, mostly because he’s not the hero of the story, but is a good character actor. The main character, who is also the narrator, is very average (he describes himself in the book as: “Stats? Sure. Five-foot-eight on a good day. 140 pounds. Early fifties. Mousy brown hair doing its best impression of a retreating glacier. Light blue eyes the exact color of disappointment diluted in a puddle reflecting a cloudy sky. Glasses that make me look like I’ve either read a lot of classic literature or Googled ‘how to hide from responsibility.’ Intelligence: enough to set up a Wi-Fi router, not enough to avoid buying gas station sushi twice. So. Average. Exceedingly so. Painfully so. Like if central casting needed someone to play ‘Guy #7 in Line at the DMV.'”)
He doesn’t really do anything extraordinary besides having observation skills that are maybe a little above the norm and being Robin to Merry’s Batman.
The actors who come to mind that I would love to see play Lou, are Rupert Grint, Eddie Redmayne, a young Gary Sinise, Dane DeHaan, or a young slimmer Brian Dennehy, mostly everyman-type people with the strength of being very good actors, in my opinion, regardless of the roles they play.
Q. What has been the most challenging part of writing or researching?
A. Overcoming imposter syndrome.
With the business books, I know what I am talking about is helpful, useful, and accurate. When I wrote the children’s book, though, I had massive imposter syndrome because I kept thinking, “What am I doing writing a children’s book? That’s not in my wheelhouse?” With the fiction novel I am writing, I know I will have that thought too, but I’ll wait to stress about that one until I actually finish it.
I am still trying to get used to the idea of having to promote and advertise books, which I honestly am not comfortable doing quite yet. This is one of the reasons I started this website; many of my friends are authors and feel similarly. I have no problem advertising a business, but advertising a book? Yikes!!!
Visit Heather’s page at https://nhauthors.com/heather-turner/