1. What is your working title of your book?
The working title of our seventh novel is Agenda for Murder. The
author is Margarite St. John, a pen name adopted by us, Margaret Yoder and
Johnine Brown, when we began collaborating on novels about five years ago.
2. What genre does your book fall under?
Murder mystery with elements of many sub-genres.
Our novels aren’t cozy
mysteries, but cozy scenes are interspersed with darker scenes of crime. We don’t want to depress our readers and
life, after all, is a mixed bag. Cozy
scenes give us hope. We always include a romance that is central to the story. The romantic partners have their ups and downs, not through the clichés of silly misunderstandings and contrived circumstances but because they have different views of life that need to be reconciled. The course of true love is never smooth but promises happiness, so the romance in our stories is the lighter side of suspense.
Speaking of suspense, our chapters end with a hook, creating (we hope) a driving need to know what happens next. In this new book, there are several candidates for the title of Baddest Bad Guy but, as in a traditional mystery, the Baddest Bad Guy’s identity is withheld until the end, so the emotional driver for the reader is suspense.
We don’t write police procedurals, but we include both amateur and professional sleuths pursuing the same ends through different paths. In this novel the sleuths are the mother of a murdered girl, the ex-CIA investigator she hires, and a police detective who has appeared in some of our prior Fort Wayne novels.
Our novels are set in contemporary times and thus are not historical mysteries. Even so, in this new novel we include an historical element, the Y2K delusion about all the dire consequences of reaching the year 2000. The Y2K delusion is emblematic of the flawed thinking of the Agenda 21 fanatics who generate fear to elevate their careers, waste the taxpayer’s money on ephemera, popularize foolish or evil ideas as wise or virtuous, and stampede the populace into unwise action.
In summary, our newest novel is a cozy, romantic, suspenseful murder mystery with a nod to sleuthing and history.
3. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your
book?
When the Fort Wayne mother of a girl murdered in Chicago
infiltrates the dangerous world of sex clubs and Agenda 21 politics, she barely
escapes death herself before identifying her daughter’s killer, a “respectable”
man with a secret history of evil deeds.Another one-sentence description:
The men who bring the United Nations’ Agenda 21 to Fort Wayne believe that the ends justify the means and that they are above the moral law, including laws against rape, theft, sexual deviance, extortion, embezzlement, and murder.
4. What else about your book might pique the
reader’s interest?
Sex and humor. Our humor hovers on the dry, understated side -- ironic, sly, sardonic, satiric, unexpected, take your pick. Some readers claim they laugh out loud. We hope that’s true.
Our novels do not include explicit or raunchy sex, but sexual
attraction and repulsion always play their part because we’re dealing with
human beings, after all. In our newest
novel, sex is front and center because a fictional Fort Wayne sex club figures
prominently in the mystery. Late last
year, two local sources almost simultaneously alerted us to the surprising fact
(surprising to us, at least) that Fort Wayne actually has such a place,
allegedly frequented by prominent figures who like to swing but don’t want
anybody to know about it. The lascivious
secret life of society’s self-appointed ruling elite contrasts delightfully
with their public face of higher virtue, revealing not only the depth of the
elite’s depravity but the ironic dissonance between their high-sounding words
and their corrupt actions.
5. What other books would you compare this story
to within your genre?We don’t know of another murder mystery with this theme. If anyone knows of such a murder mystery, let us know.
Glenn Beck’s recent best-seller with Harriet Parke, Agenda 21, has the same theme in a genre called apocalyptic fiction. Beck’s suspense mystery, The Overton Window, is, like our forthcoming novel, constructed on a political framework.
6. Where did the idea come from for the book?
When we learned that the United Nations adopted Agenda 21 and
that Fort Wayne is one of many American cities to join the International
Coalition for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), we knew we had an
important story line. Agenda 21 is a
stealth bomb for limiting human freedom by making people slaves to the
environment. It is a transformative
agenda in the worst sense, turning the world upside down and inside out.ICLEI cities promote Agenda 21 through their land use policies, though we suspect very few city fathers understand the consequences. In our own informal survey of friends and merchants, nobody had any idea that Fort Wayne is an ICLEI city.
The UN’s and the ICLEI’s goals are contrary to Judeo-Christian
values. Jews and Christians believe God
is sovereign and created the universe, the earth, and all its inhabitants. He created man in his own image and gave him
dominion over the plants, animals, land, and natural resources. God set man in a garden, not a
wilderness. He told man to increase
throughout the earth. He demonstrated
his hatred of one-world government by destroying the Tower of Babel,
confounding the languages, and dispersing the people.
By contrast, Agenda 21 supporters believe that Judeo-Christian
values are destructive to the environment.
Man was not created in God’s image but is a virus destroying the
earth. The number of humans must be
limited. Our guess is that Agenda 21
supporters don’t believe their numbers should be limited. Wilderness is superior to farms and
gardens. Animals have the same rights as
humans. Centralized government to
control land use and population growth, together with the redistribution of
wealth, is the solution.Among the intermediate goals of Agenda 21 are the transfer of individual property rights to the government in the name of the environment and reductions in human population by unspecified means. Humans, as they keep reminding us, are a virus, a pest, a scourge. Natural resources are not to be used for the comfort of humans. The ultimate goal is to do away with national sovereignty altogether in favor of one-world global government. Those goals violate our constitutional and God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But we aren’t in the business of writing scholarly books or political screeds. We’re in the business of entertaining people. Our chosen method is the murder mystery, and Agenda 21 readily lends itself to that. Agenda 21 fanatics think of themselves as more virtuous than God, yet they’re unwise and ungodly, lacking in humility. So what will they do to get what they want? Rape, theft of property, murder of the innocent, and worse -- worship of false gods.
7. Will your book be self-published or
represented by an agency?
All of the above. Welcome
to the new world of publishing.
Our publisher is Bauer
Communications, with the guidance of Patrick Boylen at ReviveWorldMedia. Boylen
acts in lieu of an agent. We will use Kindle Direct Publishing for digital
publication and CreateSpace for
on-demand trade paperbacks, both with the Bauer imprint. Sara Norwood, a local artist and web
designer, is our editorial assistant.
8. Which actors would you choose to play your
characters in a movie rendition?We’ve always thought the actor John Slattery would be perfect as the leading bad guy in several of our books, especially Face Off, our first novel set in Florida. We liken Lexie Royce in our Fort Wayne novels to Katherine Heigl.
But as the bastion of progressive ideas and political correctness, Hollywood is unlikely to be terribly interested in our newest novel. The producers of the Atlas Shrugged series, however, should be interested in our story line. So the actors we’d choose are the lesser known but very talented actors in that series.
9. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
At this writing, we’re a little more than two-thirds through the “first” draft. We put “first” in quotes because as we write, we edit over and over, so a first draft is a fiftieth for us. By the time we’re ready for the final edits, the writing of a 90,000-word novel will have taken approximately three months, which is about average for our recent novels. Our first couple of novels took longer but we’ve learned how to make the process more efficient. It usually takes an additional four to six weeks for more editing, final proofreading, preparation of the cover text, design of the cover, preparation of copy for Amazon, and conversion to other software platforms.
10. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Flamboyantly hypocritical and overwrought characters in politics
and popular culture and the growing threat of evil schemes from around the
world. Our novels are character-driven,
so we start there, but we also devise intricate storylines. Because each chapter is written from a
different character’s perspective, weaving the threads together for a
surprising but intelligible and credible ending takes some work. We’re very interested in history, religion, and politics and follow current events closely. Mass delusions are common in history and are always fascinating in retrospect. But what is it like to live through one?
Well, we’re living through one right now. The current mass delusion and apostasy are fostered by (among others) the “greens,” the one-worlders, and the socialists.
Despite evidence to the contrary, the greens believe we are destroying the earth. The greens substitute worship of the creation they call Mother Nature for worship of our sovereign Creator. Logical errors abound in the views of environmental fanatics. They both despise humans as a virus destroying the earth and, paradoxically, pretend humans are the equal of gods in their ability to regulate climate change and population growth. Some of the greens’ acts of contrition -- recycling, composting, conserving water, outlawing plastic grocery bags -- are mostly annoying. Others, like deliberately making energy expensive for the average person, are vicious and unnecessary.
The one-worlders hate democratic republics like the United States. They seek to concentrate government in an inaccessible and unaccountable global body of faceless experts and bureaucrats. One-worlders want to make all decisions for the collective good instead of individual happiness -- which produces the opposite consequence, misery for everyone. Name any centralized government you want -- Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Mao Zedong’s Communist China, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia -- to appreciate the truth of that. The faceless experts and bureaucrats then become a privileged oligarchy who never experience the dire consequences that their victims suffer, as in the old Soviet Union. In effect, the one-worlders seek to rebuild the Tower of Babel through the United Nations. We know how the Tower of Babel ended.
Socialists believe they can make earth a paradise without God by engineering equal outcomes regardless of merit and limiting individual freedom. Forcing people to do “good” as the secularists define it always leads to crime on a monumental scale, including extermination of whole populations. Think of the desire of the reformers who wanted to force Americans to stop drinking alcohol. We got Prohibition and organized crime. Think of the greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration fanatics. They brought us the Chicago Climate Exchange, which transferred massive amounts of wealth with no reduction in greenhouse gases before closing down in 2010.
And then there are the exterminations. Think of the Chinese officials who wanted to force people into communism and slow population growth. They killed millions through forced labor and more millions through abortions, in the process creating a gender imbalance that threatens the social order of the whole world. Think of the Nazis who wanted to rid the world of “inferior” races. They brought us the Holocaust and a very bloody war.
In short, current events threatening the freedoms we take for granted and the corrupt character of so-called reformers inspired us to tell the story through a murder mystery.
Here are two questions we’ve added to PeggySue Wells’ list.
11.
Is writing the soul-grinding, butt-numbing
work many writers claim it is?Not this kind of writing. The sister who thinks up the stories finds it fun to imagine fictional worlds where dark deeds are done but the evil-doers meet their just ends. The sister who does the writing and research treats it as a real job requiring daily attention but with perks because she can take all the coffee breaks and dog walks she wants without getting yelled at.
12.
What’s the remedy for writer’s block?
What’s that?Seriously, there is no reason for fiction writers to fear a blank computer screen if they have firmly in their head a good plot, several subplots echoing the theme, a setting they know and like, and interesting characters. In other words, a writer can limit the perspiration by getting the inspiration right from day one.
Here are some other authors to check out:
RichMcIntyre.com