Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest mystery author, Daisy Bateman. Daisy is the author of MURDER GOES TO MARKET.

Daisy is a mystery lover, cheese enthusiast, and world-renowned expert in Why You Should Buy That. Her educational background is in molecular biology from Caltech and UC Berkeley, and in what passes for normal life, she works in biotech. She lives in Alameda, California, with her husband and a cat, only one of whom wears a tuxedo on a regular basis.

Norm: Good day Daisy and thanks for participating in our interview.

Please tell our readers a little bit about your personal and professional background. 

Daisy: Hi, thanks for having me! I’m a lifelong mystery reader and cat person, currently raising my first puppy. In my non-writing, non-treat-dispensing life, I work in biotech research.

Norm: What do you think is the future of reading/writing? 

Daisy: I think the future will look a lot like the past, though sometimes it won’t seem that way. Our attention is stretched more than ever, but no matter how many other forms of entertainment become available, nothing will ever really replace the immersive experience of reading, where you can create whole worlds in your own mind.

Norm: How did you get started in writing? What keeps you going?  

Daisy: What got me started was a love of the stories and characters I created, and the desire to see them live for other people. What keeps me going, as far as I can tell, is sheer bloody-mindedness.

Norm: Are you a plot or character writer?  

Daisy: A little bit of both, I think? In a mystery, the plot has to be central, so that’s generally where I start. But within that structure, I try to let the characters drive the action.

Norm: What helps you focus when you write?  

Daisy: Setting a timer for half an hour and forcing myself to stick with it until the alarm goes off. The internet is full of temptations, and it’s much too easy to decide that you’re stuck on something when really it’s just hard and you’d rather go read Twitter.

Norm: What has been the best part about being published?  

Daisy: Having people read my book! And I made an excursion out to my local independent bookstore to see it on the shelf, which was a thrill of its own.

Norm: If you could relive a moment in your life, which moment would you choose and why?

Daisy: Ooh, that’s a tough one. Maybe when I got the call from my agent that we had an offer on the book--because of the time difference, I was still in bed, and I didn’t get the excitement of it right away. For the do-over, I would be prepped with champagne.

Norm: Does the line between truth and fiction sometimes become blurred for you?

Daisy: Doesn’t it for everyone? Not in terms of mistaking imaginary characters for real people, but more for the idea that events in real life should follow some kind of narrative arc, with conflict and resolution, and the million-to-one chance that works every time. Terry Pratchett wrote about this, and I think about it a lot.

Norm: Please tell us something about MURDER GOES TO MARKET?

Daisy: It’s a book! More specifically, it’s a cozy murder mystery about a woman who opens a marketplace for artisan producers, and is forced to turn detective when one of her tenants is murdered.

Norm: Did you write the novel more by logic or intuition, or some combination of the two? Please summarize your writing process. 

Daisy: A combination of the two. There needs to be logic--the plot has to make sense, actions have consequences, and I need to get from the beginning of the book to the end in a reasonably orderly fashion. And intuition comes in for the individual scenes; how would this character respond to this situation? What does their response look like to the other characters? And so on. The two need to work together, so that you don’t have a book that’s either paint-by-numbers bland or an unwieldy mess.

Norm: What process did you go through to get your book published?  

Daisy: A long one! Murder Goes To Market is actually the fifth book I’ve written, and the second to find a publisher (the previous one had its imprint close before the book reached publication). I am nothing if not a poster child for the importance of persistence. 

Norm: How much of the novel is realistic?  

Daisy: The setting is fairly realistic (though the actual town on the Sonoma coast on which it’s based is smaller than the San Elmo Bay of the book), and I did my best to make the food as real as possible. The part where a small business owner solves a murder on her own? Not so much.

Norm: What did you enjoy most about writing this book?  

Daisy: I really loved creating the characters and seeing them come to life as they developed throughout the story.

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and  MURDER GOES TO MARKET?

Daisy: Infrequently-updated WEBSITE

Mostly-news Facebook page

More-about-the-inner-workings-of-my-brain-than-you-needed  Twitter  

 Largely-puppy-pictures Instagram

Norm: What projects are you working on at the present? 

Daisy: Marketplace book 2! It’s going to be a lot of fun, with even wilder adventures for Claudia and her growing group of friends.

Norm:  As this interview comes to an end, what advice can you give aspiring writers that you wished you had received, or that you wished you would have listened to?  

Daisy: That it’s only failure if you let it be. Everything else is just a setback.

Norm: Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors

Norm Goldman -- bookpleasures.com
is listed at
ExpertClick.com