Today we’d like to introduce you to Nancy Cole Silverman
Hi Nancy Cole, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I’m a novelist. I write mysteries. This means I live in my head a lot and, for the first time in my life, after twenty-five years in news and talk radio — spoiler alert — I can make it up!
Los Angeles is a terrific city for mystery and mystery writers. Think, James Ellroy’s “L.A. Confidential” or Nina Revoyr’s “Southland,” Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sheep,” with that unforgettable detective, Phillip Marlowe. As a mystery writer, I enjoy reading, writing, and listening to writers talk about their craft. I’m president of a group of mystery writers called Sisters in Crime Los Angeles, and together with the Southern California chapter Mystery Writers of America, we recently launched Inventing the Page, a new speaker series for writers on writing with some of California’s Grand Masters: Michael Connelly, Walter Mosley, and Laurie R. King with Nicholas Meyer, as moderator at the Skirball Cultural Center. If you missed it, stay tuned; we plan to do more. In the meantime, if you’re a writer or a reader who loves mystery, check www.Sistersincrimela.com We meet at the Radford Studio Lot in Studio City on Sunday’s once a month.
Okay, enough of my sales pitch. Let me tell you a little bit about myself and my writing career. My first mystery series,
The Carol Child Mysteries are based on a middle-aged female reporter whose boss refers to her as the world’s oldest cub reporter. Sexism and ageism be damned! On the page, anything’s possible, and it’s a fun way to write away some of those demons that plagued middle-aged women as they came up in the business. My second series was a trilogy, the Misty Dawn Mysteries, focused on an aging Hollywood psychic to the stars who has decided to rehang her shingle after moving into a client’s former home only to find the house is still occupied by her client’s recently deceased brother, whose spirit has yet to move on. It was a fun caper to write, and I was able to use a lot of L.A.’s back alleys and Hollywood haunts to flush out the story. My newest series, The Kat Lawson Mysteries, is one of international intrigue, featuring a disgraced journalist who accepts a job working undercover for the FBI as a travel writer. After living in Europe during my more formative years, it’s been a chance to reconnect with some of my early travels and historical routes.
All my writing hasn’t led to any overnight successes, but it has made for an exciting journey. Nora Ephron said it best. “Take notes. Everything is copy.” So I take lots of copious notes, and I write every day.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Life will toss you challenges. But as any optimist will tell you, the trick is to make lemonade from lemons. In 2001, I retired from talk radio, and I was looking around for something new to do. I had always liked horses, although I wasn’t necessarily a good rider. After visiting the LA Equestrian Center one afternoon, I saw an opportunity for a newspaper. A real old-fashioned print publication with news and pictures of southern California’s active equestrian lifestyle. I jumped on the idea and, for several years, printed 30,000 newspapers every other month and distributed them to hay and feed and equestrian barns from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Today, you can find The Equestrian News on Facebook. It’s a well-done publication, a tribute to my then-editor and now publisher, Paula Parisi, who took the paper over after I suffered a riding accident and decided to hang up my stirrups.
I spent the following year recovering, and during that time, I needed a lot of hand therapy, part of which was typing. One can only type the ‘quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ so many times. It was then I decided that as long as I had to sit and type, I’d try writing fiction. I suppose it might be said that my beginnings as a mystery author are a direct result of being bucked out of my previous life as the founder and publisher of The Equestrian News. I know that if I hadn’t had that accident, I would still be at the barn currying my horse and mucking stalls. There wasn’t anything about it I didn’t love.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
As I wrote above, I’m a mystery author. I write both long and short form, and I’m president of Sisters-in-Crime Los Angeles.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Writers writer. Write every day. Find a time and location and sit down and write.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nancycolesilverman.com
Image Credits
Photo by Craig X Sotres
