Do you yearn for a story of suspense and intrigue that grabs you within the first few paragraphs and never lets go? If so, Marjorie DeLuca, under the pen name M. M. DeLuca, offers a myriad of novels that might be the answer to appease your unsated thirst. Here is an excerpt from the second page of her most recent novel, The Divorce Party.
In just a few short paragraphs, Ms. DeLuca seizes your attention and has you asking all kinds of questions. Who is the person for whom is she slipping out of her silk minidress? Why is he dead and who committed this gruesome murder? Why did they leave behind such a charming note?
The Zoom book chat event on June 11 began as always, with Susan Rocan, our experienced moderator, reciting the MWG Inclusion and Land Acknowledgement statements. Born and raised in Durham, England, Ms. DeLuca was introduced as a graduate of the University of London before becoming a teacher and moving to Winnipeg. In 2011, she studied Creative Writing under her mentor and friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields. In the years to follow, she published several novels spanning a variety of genres that she describes as “all over the map”.
Ms. DeLuca opened her presentation with a review of her writing journey, beginning in 2011 with a trilogy for young adults called The Forevers. She wrote this series while working as a teacher at a time when The Hunger Games series had been released. She realized the huge attraction it had for young adults, which inspired her to write The Forevers, The Parasites and The Feeders. She enjoyed the writing experience and used the trilogy in her classrooms, but was unable to find a publisher so she chose to self-publish it. Later, it was selected by Netflix, which was searching for submissions from which to create shows based on Canadian content at the time. She drafted a pilot script which was then short-listed, but ultimately it wasn’t picked up in spite of Ms. DeLuca being told it was a terrific story by a number of the network executives.
However, she had some reasonable success with the series, and in 2013 she plunged forward with her first full-length adult novel The Pitman’s Daughter, a historical saga. She submitted the story to a contest and was short-listed, but once again was unable to find a publisher so she self-published it as well.
She went on to write her next novel called The Savage Instinct, a historical suspense novel set against the backdrop of the arrest and subsequent trial of Mary Ann Cotton, a serial murderess who in 1873 was hung for the murder of several husbands, some of her children and stepchildren. It required considerable research to ensure the story perfectly correct, which was critical since Mary Ann Cotton was an infamous person whose story was well-known. After deciding that self-publishing required a significant amount of time and effort with the marketing and all the things that go with promoting a book, she chose to pursue traditional publishing, and in 2015 the book was published by Inkshares out of the US.
In the years that followed, she would write and publish several more books with larger independent publishers, including The Secret Sister (Canelo), The Perfect Family Man (Canelo), The Night Side (Severn House), and her most recent work The Divorce Party (Bloodhound Books). She noted that although all of her books were of varying genres, there was an underlying edge of darkness to all of them. So she decided to take a slightly different approach with The Divorce Party, and although it still contains her traditional servings of suspense and intrigue, it’s told from multiple points of view and has an undercurrent of dark humour. As one reviewer says, “It’s a deliciously twisty tale of betrayal, revenge and redemption.”
After reading excerpts from The Savage Instinct and The Divorce Party, Ms. DeLuca responded to numerous questions from book chat participants. When asked about the differences between writing screenplays and novels, she shared that she enjoys both equally. She explained that screenwriting is quite different from novel writing, as it relies far more on action and dialogue than narrative description. Still, whether she’s writing fiction or a script, she emphasized the importance of visualizing the story like a movie playing out in her mind.
One young writer asked her how she managed to get so much writing completed with all the conflicting demands of life in general, and she confessed that it was not until after her children were grown up that she was really able to commit the necessary time. Ms. DeLuca felt that she, like most writers, had to force herself to set aside the time to write on a daily basis. Having a writers’ group to work with for encouragement and critique was also a major part of her writing process at the outset of her career. Now she’s built up an informal virtual “writers’ network” and often swaps passages for mutual feedback with fellow writers in the UK, US, and Canada.
Her best advice to aspiring writers is to take plenty of time to discover new and fresh ideas before starting to draft your story since the publishing industry is so competitive these days. Agents and publishers are looking for “high concept” and original stories with characters and settings that will intrigue readers and draw them into the story.
For emerging writers, a good place to start is to dig deep into your own emotions to find a story that really resonates with you. She referred to the famous quotation often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
