Interview with Yolanda Renee | Sound Authors Radio

November 30, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest is the author of a book called Murder, Madness and Love. Her name is Yolanda Renee. Welcome to the show.

Yolanda Renee: Thank you, it’s good to be here.

Dr. Kent: I understand you also have a talk radio show.

Yolanda Renee: Yes, blog talk radio, Thursday nights, 9:00 starting in August.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your book.

Yolanda Renee: Well it’s a murder suspense novel and its set in Anchorage, Alaska and Seattle, Washington and it involves a detective who is part Indian and part Irish; Tlingit Indian to be exact. And he falls in love with one of his people he’s supposed to be protecting, which is probably a no-no in the business. But he thinks she’s also guilty so that causes some tension.

Dr. Kent: How did you get into writing?

Yolanda Renee: I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I think I wrote my first play when I was in sixth grade and even got to produce it for Christmas so its something that I’ve always done but never really pursued until I decided to get serious about it a couple of years ago.

Dr. Kent: You live in Alaska.

Yolanda Renee: I lived in Alaska, yes. I actually worked on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline.

Dr. Kent: My goodness. Tell me a little about that. I know very little about the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. I do know that people can walk along it because it’s such a beautiful thing. What was that like?

Yolanda Renee: Well it was one of the most interesting times of my life. I went to Alaska on vacation in 1975 and I had a weeks’ vacation. I called two days after arriving and told my boss I would not be back at my job I was staying in Alaska. I had fallen in love with it that quickly. I found a new job and I did stay there. After a year of living in Fairbanks I went to work on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. It was formerly not open to women to work up there and things started changing because of women’s lib and equal rights and that sort of things.

I got a job and I was actually one of the first women up on the line as an employee. I worked for Bachtel, the inspection group, and I got to go out on the line to see the work being done and the inspection part of it. I produced the reports and filed things away and my title was Assistant Field Engineer. It was an eye opening experience.

Dr. Kent: How does that bring you to being a novelist now?

Yolanda Renee: Well I’ve always written stories of things I have done and places I have been and I’ve traveled across the United States several times. And I would write letters back to family and just tell them my experiences. My first hiking experience in the Alaskan mountains; it was a four day hiking trip in the wilderness and I would get responses back to my letters that it was just like being there. I had described everything so well and that’s how I like to write, very descriptive and it’s the way I like to read too. I like to be put into the place by the words on the page. It’s just something that I’ve always done and I decided I wanted to write a novel and mysteries are something I’ve always loved.

Dr. Kent: Obviously you enjoy other authors. You host a radio show like I do, which features authors as well. I’ve got to say I love speaking with different authors. What’s your inspiration?

Yolanda Renee: I’m finding that its very educational to speak with other authors and one of the reasons I started doing this is trying to find the marketing niche for myself I realized how hard it was to get an interview on a radio show if you’d written fiction. I mean if you write non-fiction you can almost get an interview anywhere with anyone, but fiction; people don’t seem to want to take the time to know why you wrote that particular book or what inspired you and so on and so forth. The non-fiction authors have a better niche because they can be the expert in their field. When you write fiction, it’s very difficult to be an expert in murder if you know what I mean.

Dr. Kent: It’s true and do you have, have you thought of writing a non-fiction tale of being the first women to work on the Pipeline?

Yolanda Renee: Yes in fact that is one of my goals, to write a non-fiction book about my experience up there because like I said they were very eye opening. I was in my early 20s and I learned quite a bit. I grew up so to speak by moving there and living there by myself and it was just an experience that I would like to share. I just have not had the courage to sit down and write in first person yet.

Dr. Kent: And you have on your website you talk about two upcoming novels that I guess people enjoy writing in trilogies. I had an author earlier in the show that wrote a trilogy and you have two more in your novel trilogy coming out soon, right? Or in the next couple years?

Yolanda Renee: I’m hoping to get Murder, Madness and Memories out by the end of the year and Murder, Madness and Obsession by next year yes. I’ve already got them both written, I’m just in the editing format right now.

Dr. Kent: Are you going to stick with three or are you going to keep going like Agatha Christie?

Yolanda Renee: Well, you know that’s the funny thing about it is I already have the idea for the fourth novel growing in my head. I mean I’m trying to ignore it while I get these other two out there but its pushing itself forward. So there may be a fourth and a fifth, I haven’t decided yet.

Dr. Kent: It’s too much fun, right?

Yolanda Renee: It is. When your characters speak to you and continue to speak to you, you kind of have to go with that. But it’s also dependent on the fans and what they want so you kind of pay attention to that too.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little more about the book itself? We spoke very little about it. The book is called Murder, Madness and Love, and it started out well you tell me about it.

Yolanda Renee: Well it’s about a young woman who loses her husband in a tragic car crash and it’s a very unusual car wreck in that she bought him a Porsche on his birthday and they think the brakes failed. Which is kind of an unusual thing to happen in a brand new car but they can’t prove that there was foul play. She is under suspicion of course for murdering her husband for his money because he was very rich. During that time she goes into hiding and then when she comes out she decides to take over the chairmanship of her husbands company.

She moves back to Anchorage and becomes haunted and stalked by a killer who murders look-alikes on the 14th of the month, starting in November. He sends her evidence of his crimes and of course then the detective gets involved and he thinks he’s going to solve both cases, which would be catch her for killing her husband and of course catch the person who’s stalking her. I tried to weave a tale where it left you in doubt as to who could be guilty. Whether she was involved in some way or whether it was her friends who were the ones stalking her? I tried to weave a tale that left you asking questions and I think I’ve done that.

Dr. Kent: It sounds like it and of course it’s important that you’re writing about Alaska. I think its funny, for me it’s the great beyond that I haven’t visited. I lived in Washington State and I’ve been all around the country and I think many people really stigmatize Alaska as this wild expansive wonderful place and remote and all of that. So there’s a real mystique attached to that and there’s very few books set in Alaska.

Yolanda Renee: That’s one of the reasons I chose it. That’s another reason I chose Indian as the background for the main detective in the story. The Tlingit Indians, Tlingit means human being and I wanted it to be set into more of the Tlingit background in my other books that I’m coming out with. I think Alaska is an exciting place. I look forward to going back there and visiting. I probably will not settle down there because it’s just a little bit too cold and too dark sometimes, but not the whole state.

You can find a variety of weather patterns and a variety of light and darkness because Alaska is such a huge place. You can find just about anything that you can find in the lower 48 in Alaska but its an exciting setting and I think when I went up there to work on the line, I had a lot of people who believed it was more of an iceberg than an actual place.

Dr. Kent: This is an Alaska question – this time of year apparently it’s fairly warm and pleasant, right?

Yolanda Renee: Oh it’s beautiful. Right now it’s beautiful up there. In anchorage it’s probably in the 60s and 70s. In Fairbanks it can be in the 70s and 80s and of course you have to acclimate to that. It probably would feel like 20 degrees different if you’re coming from the south. If you’re coming from the northern part of the United States then it would probably be pretty normal for you. But the darkness starts closing in around September, that’s when winter starts closing in and you have more of a winter up there than you do down here. You don’t have the four seasons like you do and so things do kind of close in on you a little bit but during the summertime, the light and the brightness of the midnight sun is just aesthetic and energizing, it’s wonderful.

Dr. Kent: Thinking about it, it’s a great setting for a mystery novel too because of the fact that we always hear oh, people go a little wild in the wintertime and it must seem a little more normal. I’ve heard there’s a few more domestic disturbances and things like that because of the high pressure of the wintertime up there.

Yolanda Renee: Right because you feel closed in and they call it cabin fever and there are ways to deal with that and you have to be prepared for that as far as getting yourself out and doing things. Because it does close in on you, the darkness, the ice fog. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that, it’s almost a crystallized fog surrounding you. its like little lights all over the place and it does close in on some of the places up there, especially Fairbanks gets hit with it pretty good. Anchorage not so much because they have a breeze off of the inlet there, the ocean. But in Fairbanks its kind of a valley setting so they can get closed in by the fog a pretty good bit. And that will drive you a little bonkers at times. I know the weather up there is usually 50 below during winter and that’s quite a temperature change.

Dr. Kent: I grew up in rural Minnesota and it got that cold sometimes and when it did, we bundled up pretty well but it’s cold.

Yolanda Renee: But it’s an exciting place and its got wildlife galore and experiences I don’t think you’ll get anywhere else in the world. I was lucky to have been able to do that when I was in my early 20s. It was a very lucky time in my life.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a wonderful chance to speak with you about Murder, Madness and Love. Yolanda Renee has a website online, www.yolandarenee.com. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Yolanda Renee: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Kent: Her books are available all over the web and you can visit her on her website. There’s a nice ordering page there to buy some books. My next guest on the show is musician. You’re going to want to listen to this song coming up and then we’ll chat with him. His name is Andrew Calhoun so we’re going to listen to a song called Jaybird and Sparrow. Come on back.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST