With a joint in one hand and her lover in the other, Dana Barry struggles to rouse herself from bed–the rumpled sheets protecting her body from the first hints of morning air. The empty wine bottle on the nightstand is a stark reminder of her throbbing mental vulnerability. She’s an actress with unique ambitions: she aims to become the top hostess on a cable shopping channel.
No. We’re not kidding.
But who’s kidding whom? You quickly begin to notice the snark and twisted humor of Ellen Meister in her first mystery, Love Sold Separately. Meister writes women’s fiction–witty women’s fiction. So, for her, pouring romance, sex, humor, and murder into a modern genre blender, and finding an appreciative publisher willing to risk a taste of her concoction…well, let’s just say it wasn’t easy.
“It really is a mystery to me,” she says. And if you know her backstory–and this is where it really gets interesting–it should be a mystery to all of us. Afterall, Meister has 260,000 followers on Facebook. Yep, more than a quarter million. But not as a mystery author. Ahh. Mystery solved.
She’s the voice of Dorothy Parker on Facebook. Yes, that Dorothy Parker, the lead wit of Algonquin Roundtable fame. Meister’s written two critically acclaimed Dorothy Parker novels, along with several other well-regarded works of women’s fiction. So, when she decided to write a mystery, she created a female protagonist not unlike Parker and other female characters with the same pedigree in her novels. And like Parker, Meister is a bit of a wag. You can’t get through one of her novels without a smirk, a grin, or a sly laugh. You’d think a great backstory and large platform would be enough to make a publisher salivate.
Well…
Her story begins shortly after college where, “My primary talent was procrastination.”
Her writing career started with advertising copy and sales promotional materials. “I could tell people I was a writer, but it felt like a cheat because of what I was writing,” she says. Meister then entered motherhood and found she couldn’t multitask a writing career and a toddler. She put her writing aside until her early forties when she had a mortality moment. A dear friend received a cancer diagnosis, and she received a wakeup call.
Or call it a bucket list moment. Time was eyeing her, and she shuddered at the image in the mirror. “It was really easy to avoid that reality until it looked me right in the face.”
Meanwhile, she’d been relying on a cable shopping network as the white noise of her life and found herself gradually being sucked into the the high-def spectacle. As the picture-perfect hosts on pick-your-pocket television gently walked viewers through their next product, an idea rung in Meister’s register.
A shopping channel murder mystery.
A what?
“I thought what if they’re not really like that? What if they’re hiding a bunch of stuff. A murder at the shopping channel would make a good book. But I’m not a mystery novelist…it’s not the same thing as women’s fiction. I wasn’t going to do it, but it was the main character who spoke to me.”
She purchased a backstage tour of the QVC shopping network studios in Pennsylvania. She went incognito, telling no one she was a future murder mystery writer. Instead, she posed as a superfan on the exclusive tour with a middle-aged couple from Kansas.
“This was like their Disney World,” she says. “It wasn’t their first time. They had returned because they loved it so much,” says Meister. “One of the personalities came up to see them.” Meister had no clue who he was, but she fawned as any good super fan would. “I came out of it as a convert, because they convinced me of how dedicated they are to screening the products they sell. The people who do this stuff are really serious about. They take great pride in their low rate of returns.”
“When I first got the idea to write a shopping channel murder mystery, I tried to suppress it since I’m not a mystery writer. But the idea was funny and charming and wouldn’t leave me alone, especially since I was madly in love with the main character. So, I decided to take a crack at it. First, though, I had to teach myself how to write a mystery. That involved reading up on it and then reading more in the genre while trying to glean insights into the structure.”
Soon, Meister found herself crafting her female protagonist Dana Barry, who wakes up in the morning with hazy ambition until she can focus. “She notices things in her environment, which makes her a great amateur sleuth. These ladies could talk about a pair of earrings for two hours.”
In her first attempt at crime fiction, Meister found, “Every character has a secret. It makes it that much easier to plant red herrings. I really figured out how to put a red herring in front of a red herring and then put a red herring behind it.”
A star shopping network host, a diva who terrorizes her staff, is found dead in Love Sold Separately. Protagonist Barry knows the prime suspect is innocent but she’s too busy trying to jumpstart her own career to initially get involved. And of course, there’s romance–she falls for the local detective with her trademark quotient of humor (there’s that word again).
“I just let it rip. I had fun writing it.”
Meister had already made a name for herself with her two Dorothy Parker novels, Dorothy Parker Drank Here (2015) and Farewell, Dorothy Parker (2013). “I decided I would write it under a pseudonym. After all, it was very off-brand for me. I even invented a persona to write the book. I know that sounds weird, but it was kind of freeing.”
“I didn’t show it to my literary agent until I was done, and she absolutely loved it. I think we both expected a fast sale, because it seemed pretty commercial.”
Soon, though, she learned mystery publishers didn’t know what to do with it. It had an amateur sleuth, but it wasn’t a cozy. It was too cosmopolitan and sexy for that genre.
“One editor said, ‘I’m gutted that I have to reject this book.’ She loved it.” Several others wanted to ride along too but couldn’t persuade their marketing departments to board.
Finally, Mira Books, a general fiction Harlequin imprint (Harper Collins), came forward. Her working titled was Kitty, Kitty, Bang, Bang because Kitty Todd is shot dead in the story. “They wanted to market it as a rom com with a mystery element, rather than the other way around. So, they re-titled it Love Sold Separately.”
“It was a little problematic” Meister admits. “Romance readers are some of the most sophisticated around. They know what the tropes are. It didn’t follow the structure of a rom com…They complained it wasn’t one and they weren’t wrong.”
“I have to trust the pros that they know what’s best for these things. Do I think it would have gotten better reviews? Dedicated rom com readers were disappointed. They even gave the cover that look, so you didn’t have to say it’s a rom com.” But they knew.
The trades gave it good reviews even if her genre readers didn’t.
She’s written four novels since then and says she has no plans to resurrect another Dana Barry mystery. “But I never say never,” Meister says.
If she were alive today, Dorothy Parker might channel elements of Dana Barry’s naked ambition, but not likely before sunrise with that empty wine bottle to remind her of the night before. Parker loved martinis and men, and not necessarily in that order. While apartment hunting she once cracked, “All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.”
Meister has captured that Parker ethos and in so doing, appears to have learned her success is no longer a mystery, even if Love Sold Separately is.
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Love Sold Separately
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Start to Finish: About a year
I wanted to be a writer: The light came on when I was 17.
Experience: I started out writing advertising copy, which was surprisingly rewarding. I still enjoy it, given the chance.
Agents Contacted: About 50
Agent Responses: I don’t remember. Suffice it to say that back then, agents actually responded to queries.
Agent Search: 10 months
Time to Sell Novel: 3 months.
Novel Agent: Annelise Robey and Andrea Cirillo at the Jane Rotrosen Agency
Novel Editor: Kathy Sagan
Novel Publisher: Mira Books
Inspiration: Those pristine shopping channel hosts. They seemed so perfect I couldn’t help wondering what might happen if the truth was precisely the opposite.
Advice to Writers: Write the book you most want to read. Also–for the love of all that is holy–do not try to hide exposition in dialogue.
Website: ellenmeister.com
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