Amy M. Reade, Guest Author

My guest this week is author Amy Reade. Of course I had to read the post before I put it up, and let me tell you, you’re about to be entertained. (I also realized I’ll probably never travel with Amy. Yes, I’m laughing.) Her latest book, Trudy’s Diary: A Libraries of the World Mystery, will be available on April 16, 2019. Read on and I hope this blog brightens your day like it did mine. Welcome, Amy!

 

            Like all of you, I love reading Marja’s blog posts every Monday. I don’t expect to be able to match her for breadth and depth of topics and pure knowledge, but I hope I can at least entertain you while I’m here as her guest, which is both an honor and a privilege.

            (Thank you for the kind words! Marja)

            If you’ve read my books, you know that I love to set stories in places I’ve visited and found fascinating. I wrote a book set on the Big Island of Hawaii and three in the United Kingdom. I’ve also set stories in northern New York (where I grew up—write what you know!); Charleston, South Carolina; Colorado; and Washington, DC. I haven’t necessarily traveled to all these places recently, but some of them made such an impression on me that I put them in books long years after I visited.

            When I hear someone say “I love to travel,” I’m always a little bit envious. I picture people strolling down cobbled streets in Europe, sipping coffee and nibbling croissants at al fresco cafés in Paris, lounging poolside at a tropical resort under a huge cabana complete with cool towels and a frosty drink; or hiking against the backdrop of purple mountains’ majesty.

            I love to travel, too, but when I tell people that, what I should really say is “I love to travel despite everything that goes wrong.”

            Let me explain.

            This is what traveling looks like for the Reade family: after the initial complaints about where we’re going (these come from the children and it doesn’t matter where we’re going), they resign themselves to leaving at the appointed date and time. When that date and time arrive, one could be forgiven for thinking the date snuck up on us like a thief in the night. We run around like so many squirrels in a cage, packing, unpacking, repacking, making sure the kitchen is clean and the beds are made (in case, God forbid, we meet with an accident and someone has to come into the house to wrap up our affairs)…you get the picture.

            When we’re flying somewhere far away, I spend the first six hours of any trip crying about how much I miss the dog. Wine sometimes helps, and sometimes makes it worse.

            Upon our arrival at our destination, one of the children throws up. It’s almost always the same child.

            At some point during the trip, there is typically an injury or illness requiring medical attention, or at the very least, photographic evidence so people will believe us later. Once we went to Hawaii and all of us got pinkeye. Once on a trip to Washington, DC, one of my children stuck his/her head through the bars on the hotel window to yell “Hi, Dad!” (Dad was unpacking the car) and got stuck that way. It took three people to get the child’s head back into the hotel room. Once on a trip to Northern Ireland, one of the children went wading in a stream that was on the property of our VRBO and got a nasty rash that had remarkable staying power.

            Okay, you may say, so you’ve had a few lousy experiences.

            But what you don’t realize is that this happens on every single trip. There was the time I was driving a rental car and I hit the curb and the tire fell completely off, almost making us miss our flight and making the car rental guy yell at me, which made me cry. Thank God for the man who drove by and pitied me. He just happened to work for a tire store and he was a crackerjack tire-fixer. He got as big a tip as I’ve ever given anyone.

            There was the time one of our daughters (13 at the time) got stuck on London’s Tube without a phone, while the rest of us stared in horror as the train doors closed behind her. Luckily we were able to scream loud enough that one of the train supervisors took pity on us and stopped the train.

            There was the time we rented an apartment in a seedy neighborhood where parolees could wave at us across a tiny courtyard. There was the time we rented an apartment in another neighborhood where an actual rumble took place right below our windows when Venezuela lost a game in the World Cup that night.

            And here’s something fascinating: apparently this is genetic. One of my children studied in England last year. On a late-semester trip to Amsterdam with seven friends, she spent most of the weekend running from a crazed vacation rental owner who had tried renting the kids a room in a house that already had seventeen occupants and one bathroom. The kids spent the night on the floor of the Amsterdam airport once they were able to escape the clutches of the rental owner. Thank goodness I didn’t know about this until it was all over.

            But despite all these stories (and so, so many more), I still love to travel. I love to experience different places, cultures, foods, and customs. I can remember a place fondly even if we had a dreadful experience there (I believe there is a psychological term for this, something like “blocking”). I suppose the negative experiences I have imprint themselves on my brain, helping me to remember a place and the happy part of visiting.

            And home is always waiting, along with the dog. 

 

Author Bio:

Amy M. Reade is a cook, chauffeur, household CEO, doctor, laundress, maid, psychiatrist, warden, seer, teacher, and pet whisperer. In other words, a wife, mother, community volunteer, and recovering attorney.

She’s also a writer. She is the author of Trudy’s Diary, A Libraries of the World Mystery (Book One: Library of Congress), The Worst Noel (Book One in the Juniper Junction Holiday Mystery series), The Malice Series (The House on Candlewick Lane, Highland Peril, and Murder in Thistlecross), and three standalone books, Secrets of Hallstead House, The Ghosts of Peppernell Manor, and House of the Hanging Jade. She lives in southern New Jersey, but loves to travel. Her favorite places to visit are Scotland and Hawaii and when she can’t travel she loves to read books set in far-flung locations.

Her days are split between writing and marketing her books, but uppermost in her mind is the adage that the best way to market a book is to write another great book.

                                                         Social Media Links

Amy M. Reade

Website: www.amymreade.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/amreadeauthor

Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/AmyMReadesGothicFictionFans

Twitter: www.twitter.com/readeandwrite

Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/amreade

Instagram: www.instagram.com/amymreade

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Amy-M.-Reade/e/B00LX6ASF2/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Goodreads Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8189243.Amy_M_Reade

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/amy-m-reade

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COMING SOON: People Lookin' Half Dead - A Bogey Man Mystery