#bookrelease: MURDER IN PLANE SIGHT by Julie Holmes

Ciao, amici! I have a treat for you today. Long-time commenter and first-time guest Julie Holmes is releasing her debut novel: Murder in Plane Sight. I’m super excited to read this one, but even more excited to introduce her here today. Please join me in giving Julie a warm welcome.

Julie, I’m so glad to have you here today. Now, take it away!

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Staci, thank you so much for hosting me for my debut book release!

So what does one write in book release posts? How I came up with the story idea? Maybe why I wrote the story. Naw, already did that in other posts.

What about my writing process? Naw.

Oh, how about my origin story. I mean, all superheroes—er, writers have one.

Like most kids, I played my share of make-believe, from War (I have 3 brothers) to adventures with dinosaurs. My imaginary pet triceratops and I did a lot of great treasure hunting.

The catalyst that released the writing monster came during fifth grade. We had a writer visit our school for a week. He spent an hour with us every day, coaching us to channel our creative energy into various forms of writing, from limericks and haikus to flash fiction. 

The flash fiction was the most fun in my memory. He gave us a prompt, and two days to complete our assignment. The subject? Rutabaga. A page and a half about rutabaga. He encouraged humorous or fantastic stories. Even then I liked rutabaga. We use to eat it raw at family occasions; it’s like a peppery carrot.

My story rutabaga was a dinosaur egg. I think. Or dog poo. Hmm. In any case, though I was an avid reader since preschool, this was the first time I had really thought about writing for fun. I never gave up my imaginary stories, but after that week with a writer, I wrote my first book.

It is gathering dust now in a dark corner of a drawer, my first trunk novel, a fantasy that involved a unicorn (of course), a centaur, a dragon, and a heroine. A hero’s journey.

After practicing bits and pieces of bigger stories, I wrote my second book through high school into college, another fantasy, this one set in Ireland and based on Irish myth. After that, short stories were my projects of choice, and I managed to get two stories published in small presses before I set serious writing aside to be a new mother.

It wasn’t until my own mother was diagnosed with breast cancer that I started thinking more seriously about my writing. The clincher was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about local writers participating in NaNoWriMo. That, I thought, was the way for me to write an entire novel in a reasonable amount of time. It was the way to jumpstart my serious attempt at writing books.

After over a decade of NaNoWriMos, I have over ten novels drafted, and of those three are revised, fine-tuned, and one is now published.

What a ride!

Frozen body in an airplane? Check. Stalker ex-boyfriend? Check. Can an aircraft mechanic prove her innocence and uncover a deadly aviation conspiracy before she becomes the next casualty?

Find at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and wherever books are sold.

BONUS: The audiobook version of Murder in Plane Sight releases today!

Blurb:

Sierra Bauer is nobody’s fool—a skilled and confident aircraft mechanic, a woman operating in a man’s world. But her world is about to be turned upside down, and her confidence challenged.

After her stalker was sent to prison, and she was cleared of wrongdoing by the FAA in her brother’s fatal plane crash, Sierra had finally reclaimed her life. But in the dead of winter at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, she makes a gruesome discovery—a woman’s frozen body hidden inside the maintenance bay of a Range Airlines plane Sierra was inspecting. Her life is pitched into a tailspin.

 Enter Detective Quinn Moore of the Airport Police Department, who finds himself attracted to Sierra despite mounting evidence forcing him to consider her the prime suspect.

Sierra’s stalker may be back, and someone is trying to frame her for the murder. The woman Sierra blames for her brother’s death may hold the key to uncovering a conspiracy that threatens the entire aviation industry. She and Quinn must expose the truth before Sierra becomes the next casualty.

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I love “how I came to be a writer” stories, and Julie’s parallels mine in many ways, so I was really happy to read hers. I’m really happy about her new release, too. I hope you join me in wishing her a lot of luck.