Episode 46. Wendy Sand Eckel: The Journey from Criminologist to Mystery Writer

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From an experience she had as a young adult that caused her to study criminology all the way to being inspired to write her first book by her dyslexic child, she became an award-winning author. And she has written one of the best mystery series that there is. Join me as I talk with author, Wendy Sand Echo, on this episode of True Crime.

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in authors. Welcome to true crime and authors podcast where we bring two passions together. The show that gives new meaning to the old adage. Truth is stranger than fiction. Here's your host David McClam. What's going on everybody? Welcome to the episode of true crime and authors. Of course, I'm your man, David McClam.

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If you guys haven't already, make sure you follow us on all of our social medias. One link to a link tree can be found in the show notes of this episode. If you are paying attention or looking at your calendars, you know that once again it is time for another author interview. And I have a good one for you today. Let me tell you who our guest is. She is the award-winning author of the Rosalie Hart Mystery series. Mystery at Winswept Farm is the third in the series.

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She studied criminology and earned a master's in social work, writes the advice column for the Maryland Writers Association newsletter, and enjoys mentoring aspiring authors. She lives on the eastern shore of Maryland, where she is happiest when cooking for a house full of family and friends. She is the author of the Rosalie Hart Mystery series, which includes Mystery at Windswept Farm. Please welcome Wendy Sand Echo. Hi, Wendy. Thank you for joining me today. Hi, David. Thanks for having me.

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It's an honor and a pleasure. So you studied criminology is kind of a big leap from criminology to writing. So how did we get there? Oh, it was a, it was a long path. That's for sure. But I had a, an experience when I was a senior in high school, um, not to date myself, but when I lived in Ohio, there was a time where if you were 18 years old, you could drink 3.2% beer. Um, and so I was 18 and I went out with a lot of my girlfriends who were not 18. All had fake IDs.

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We went to a bar in Canton, which was a big deal, and they stamped you 3.2% or 6% when you went in, and they accidentally stamped me 6%. So we all got a beer and sat down. Then the next thing we knew, we were surrounded by liquor control officers. They grabbed our beers, put us in a squad car, and took us down to the police station. And since I was the only adult, they booked me because I was drinking 6.5.

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percent beer as opposed to 3.2 percent beer. And my friends got to go wait in an office while they were waiting for their parents to pick them up. Meanwhile, they took a mug shot, fingerprints, took my jewelry and my scarf. And at one point, one of the cops said, I think we might be getting carried away here. So they finally let me post bail and I went home. But it was really pretty scary to think that I might have a criminal record when I was only 18. And I think of a story. I think of...

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before an incident and after, and what life is like before, and how different it is after. So I had a brief moment of thinking that I was going to have to walk through life with a criminal record, but of course, my dad got a lawyer and my record was expunged because it really was kind of silly. But it really intrigued me with criminology and the law. And so I was a social work major, but you could minor in other courses. And so I minored in.

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criminality and I got to be a juvenile probation officer and an internship for a year. And so since that experience, I've always been quite fascinated with this kind of thing, which is what eventually led me to write Mr. So being a social worker, I want to kind of touch on that a little bit because, you know, in this day and age, a lot of that's going around. I live in LA County, which they say we have the worst DCFS department of all time.

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What kind of things have you learned through your social work about children and other aspects of that that may be led into your writing? Oh, so much. I'm fascinated with relationships. I was a family therapist and had a private practice toward the end of my career. I think that relationships drive us. I think how we interact in the world says so much about us. And I like to writing characters. I really do focus on their story arcs and their relationships with the world and with one another.

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And I remember, I was listening to some of your podcasts and I, did you say in one of them that you, you have a child with a learning disability? Did you say that? Was that it? Yes, two of them. Okay. So my youngest has dyslexia. And so I was working as a therapist and was, she was diagnosed in second grade and it was on the Eastern shore. We can talk about my setting, the Eastern shore. I was living on the Eastern shore at the time because it's pretty fascinating. But anyway, it was very hard to get her what she needed.

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And so I fought with the school for a long time and she was in a small private school and they ended up kicking her out because they said I was too much trouble. And so we ended up having to move to Annapolis where I found the right school for her. But that whole experience, I thought I knew so much more about learning disabilities than I actually did as a social worker, I thought I would know. And so I was right about it. I wanted to write a nonfiction book about her experiences, my experiences.

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And I just couldn't do it. I kept getting stuck. You know, I didn't want to throw anybody under the bus. And so I thought, well, what if I write a novel about what happened with us? So I wrote a novel about a family with a child with dyslexia and it just came flying out of me. It was so much easier to write the nonfiction. And so that's really the first book that I wrote. So it is all tied together in many ways. So yeah, I will say this. Yeah. A lot of us that has children, that has disabilities, we're, we're the problem as parents because we stick up for our kids.

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So I totally do feel you on that one because I've been there many a times. Yeah. She loves telling people she got kicked out of school in second grade. So yeah, we're the troublemakers, but that's good. You got to do it. So take us a little bit inside the makings of the Rosalie Heart Cozy Mystery series. I guess I'll start with the question is, uh, how did you come to write mysteries? Well, part of it was.

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My mother taught geology at Kent State University. She was a brilliant woman, but she spent her entire summers reading mystery series. She'd drag us to the library once a week, get a stack of mystery series, bring it home and read it that week. And we were never to interrupt her when she was at the end. But I learned a lot about the love for mystery. Like I said, I'm also fascinated with criminology.

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And I tried writing in another genre and I really had a hard time finding a publisher. And so I thought, well, let me write in a genre that's a lot more marketable and one that I would enjoy. So that's what I started with the mystery. And Rosalie Hart just kind of walked up on my doorstep one day and there she was. And I'm like, we're going to be with each other for a long time. And I'm really, so I'm going to write her and I did, and we're still going. So.

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So if you listen to any of my other interviews, I think a couple of authors have asked this question, and I'm gonna ask you because you brought up Rosalie Hart. The character Rosalie to you as an author is a living, breathing person that lives within you, and that's how you write about her, correct? Yes. I asked that question because a lot of people I've written to, they say, oh, well, these authors make these people up. And then they say, well, it seems so real. And I'm like, it's because these people that they create.

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lives with them, they work with them, they sleep with them, they shower with them. I had one author that said that, you know, when she was writing her book, one of the characters wouldn't leave her alone until she got up and wrote chapters about him. So I just wanted to point out that it's a very real thing for you guys when you're writing. It's a very real thing. Well, I write in first person, so she's in my head all the time. She's in every scene. But what you said about characters kind of nudging their way to the

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is so true. In the first in the series, she lives on a farm and the man that leases her farm came walking down the driveway and they have an encounter and I thought, oh, okay, Tyler, here you are. You're going to be a big player in this book, which I never expected when I started to write him. So they do. They stand there and wave their arms around and it's like, give me a story arc. I have things to say. And when you find their voice, which hopefully is very different from Rosalie's voice, then they talk to you too.

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Yeah, I've heard that before too, that there's a number of others I talked to said the same thing. They had a character that maybe was going to be in the book, maybe not, and maybe have a small role. And then that character ends up being a very focal point of the book. How does that end up happening? Just because you're writing and it makes sense to do that? Or they just nudge their way in like that? For a character like that, they definitely nudge their way in. But you know, it's interesting. I do a lot of research and inspiration.

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Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a book called Big Magic. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's a wonderful book. She wrote Eat, Pray, Love and some other books, which were okay, but this big magic, I've got it on my shelf and I pick it up all the time. And she talks about the muse for any kind of creation, but how instead of thinking that the genius and the muse is within you, she says that the muse visits you. And when it visits you, if you're not open to it, the muse will go on to the next person. So you have to be open to that muse.

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And I feel that there are times when I'm writing where there's the muse and the stuff that comes out of me is just amazing, where other times I can't pull anything out. For instance, there's a funeral in the book that I'm writing right now, the fourth book in the series. And we're at the funeral and the victim's son, who's in his forties, is talking to my characters. And this person just showed up and she walks up to the guy, she's 16, she's got a bunch of tattoos and earrings. And she says,

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I'm your sister. I don't know where she came from, but it just gave me this amazing plotline. And I'm having so much fun with her. Yeah. That I think when the music visits you, you got to grab it. Now in your series being that, uh, Winsor Farms is the third entity of that. Are they connected to the point to where you want to make sure you read one through three or each book, a separate story that you could pick up on his own? You can pick them up on your own. They're standalone. It is a series. My characters do grow.

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They age, things happen to them, but I never ever give the mystery away. For instance, in Windswept Farm, I never give away how the mystery ends in the first book, Murder at Barclay Meadow, or the second, Death at the Daily Lily Cafe. So you can read them without learning things you don't wanna learn, but my characters do age and grow. I know a lot of series, the character always seems to be the same age. Everyone in the series has story arcs and they grow, but they definitely can be read independently.

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Now for me, I'll just give the listeners a tip of how I do this. Uh, I am very blessed and privileged. Wendy did send me my own personal autographed copy of mainstream whisper farms. It is the third book, but I'm starting back at book one. For me, I find out that if I do that, I get to know a little bit more about that main character as that character grows. And as I go along, even though, and you're not the only author, I have a couple of other authors of interviews, same thing. They wrote their books.

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Like Shannon Jump, she's written a lot of her books to be standalone, but if you go back and do yourself that favor of reading that first and second book that she already has out, you now grow with the character. And that's what I'm doing with your series because I know there's a lot of parts to Rosalie. I don't want to miss any of them. And I know even if you don't intend to sometimes there's tidbits of, oh yeah, well, I remember that happened back in book number one and two, so I could piece that together. So I do encourage people to go out and do that.

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Now you say that your genre of writing is cozy mystery. Can you explain to us exactly what that is? And cause a lot of people that I've talked to don't even know. They just say mysteries mystery. Can you break down cozy mystery for us? Absolutely. Um, my first book deal was with Minotaur books and I was working with an editor. She picked it up. She loved it. And she was, we were making edits and she said, well, there's some few things you have to take out of it.

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There were some swear words, a couple other things, and I said, well, why? And she said, well, this is a cozy. And I had no idea. But she said, this is, you're in the cozy mystery genre. So there are rules. For one, it's always an amateur sleuth. What else? Let's see. No sex on scene. That all has to happen off scene. You don't ever see the crime. That happens off scene. Let's see. Not a lot of swear words. Usually just one crime.

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Not a serial killer, that kind of thing. And I think that's about it. Oh, and there's usually a hook. Some of them are knitting. Some of them take place in the library. Um, I have a cooking theme with mine, which is a lot of fun for me. Yeah, this is true. Cause I think I told you, and I talked to you yesterday, this is the first book, the last thing that came with the menu.

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So there's definitely recipes in that book that you guys can go off and write. The bookmark you sent me actually has one of the recipes on the bookmark itself. And I'm like, this, I can eat and read. This is good. Absolutely. It's really fun. I get to indulge myself in all kinds of ways, writing about food. And I think food has its own narrative. And so it fits right in with the story. And I've really been researching that and really done a lot of research on certain foods and certain cuisines.

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And they all have their own narrative, and it's really fun to include that. I've been doing that a lot in the current book. And then, of course, in the third book, she gets to study with an Italian chef, which was so much fun for me. There's a five-day cooking school that's juxtaposed with the mystery, and there's all kinds of food, and it was so much fun to write. Oh, and everyone tells me it makes them hungry, but I also really like secret family recipes, and I...

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have a newsletter and I always have a secret family recipe in every edition of the newsletter. But I have a friend, Carla Palumbo, who's pure Italian, never had any kids, her brother never had any kids, but she's got this secret family red sauce that's never been written down. And so we were in Fort Lauderdale sitting on the beach and I kept pouring her champagne and as I was cajoling her with the champagne, I wanted her to give me this secret family Sunday red sauce.

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And finally she agreed. So she went home to Rochester and she was in her kitchen for 13 hours trying to write down this recipe because it had never been written down. And so she finally got it. She sent it to me. It's on my website and it's amazing. It takes all day to cook. It's they call it Sunday red sauce because the Italians make the sauce and it simmers all day and then you invite everybody, you know, over that night and everybody eats pasta. So I really have fun with it. Yeah. So your mother go.

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Eat pasta now after this one. Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process? Of course. I used to be a pure pantser, but that got me into trouble. So I do outline a little bit, not too much. I give myself some room to be creative, but now I do outline more. I never know who did it until toward the end of the book. That way I make all the suspects plausible.

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So I set everybody up to have done it. And then I usually invite a couple of my writer friends over to spend the night and we drink wine all night and we decide who did it. And that's really fun. Men sometimes I get attached to some of the suspects and I don't really want them to have done it, but sometimes you got to kill your darlings. So I do that. And like I said, I love it when the muse hits me. I would made myself laugh out loud the other night. My husband came in the room and he goes, what are you doing? And I said, oh my God, I just gave this guy the best line ever. I love it.

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And then they're dry spots, you know, it's the agony and the ecstasy. When you hit a dry spot, you just got to keep writing and let yourself write badly because you know, you can always go back and edit and get your inspirations again, but move it forward, move it forward. Have you ever killed off a character and then you reread the book and said, I wish I wouldn't have done that. Well, you know, that's interesting. The, the one thing that I've learned is the victim is usually someone that's not well liked.

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And in Murder at Barclay Meadow, when I didn't realize writing Nakozi, it was a person that Rosalie grows to understand and to care about a lot, the victim. And so I'm not sure if I would have done that again, although I love that mystery, and I love how she gets inspired to find out what happened to the girl she found floating in the marsh grasses. But now I've learned you probably should make the victim a little less likeable, if that makes sense.

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So your whole series does very well. Uh, you now send you writing the fourth book. Can you tell us a little bit of, you know, a little bit of the ecstasy and agony that you maybe go through of trying to make sure you produce the best book that you can? Oh, absolutely. I'm going through it right now. This book is actually set during the holidays, which I'm having a lot of fun with it. And so over Christmas time, I read Charles Dickens again. I'm blanking on what's it called? The Christmas story? Is that what it is? Yeah.

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Thank you. That happens all the time. One of the things is when he opens that book, you know right away you want to sign up for this ride. He pulls you in, you know in that first paragraph, this is going to be a story and I'm signing up. I want to read this story. When I first sat down to write this book, especially because it's set in the holidays, I wanted to just grab the reader in the first paragraph.

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So it probably took me two weeks to write the first page. I read every book I love. I picked up To Kill a Mockingbird. I picked up Charlotte's Web. I picked up all these books that I love, and I read the first page. And most of them have that ability. They draw you in, in that first two paragraphs. You're like, I wanna go on this ride with you, and you sign up. And so I agonized for weeks, and then I finally came up with it. And once I had that first page,

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then I knew where I was going. And I was like, okay, I want someone to open a book and I want them to think, let's do this. So I think I might've done that. I'm still tweaking, but yeah. Does imposter syndrome ever sink in on you? Oh my goodness, yeah, absolutely. It did before we got on air, of course. Well, it's interesting because I was doing a lifelong learning class that I've.

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taught a few of those, but it's more just we all sit around and talk. And this woman interviewed me the day before we were going to do this program. And we were talking, I had sent her my books and she had just been through some terrible situation. She was just recovered from cancer. She lost her husband to cancer. One of her best friends died in COVID. And she was just telling me that she'd had years and years of just trauma.

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And she said, so when she got my books, she went out and sat on her screen porch and she started to read and she said she hadn't read a book from cover to cover in years. She hadn't finished a book in years. And she said she read it and she finished it. And she was so grateful. We talked about why that may be, and this is sort of related to the cozy genre, but I think she felt safe that I wasn't going to take her somewhere.

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She didn't want to go. She felt safe to go on that ride with me. And I think one of the things I feel very strongly about is you've got to give your reader a satisfying ending. You can't trick them, you can't tease them. I want them to think hard about who did it, but they're going to have a satisfying ending. And so I think she had some safety when she was reading this book. And I think that's one of the benefits to writing in the cozy genre. Oh, I've had two other people tell me that, that they hadn't been able to finish a book since.

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One of them, her husband had died and the other, her mother had died. I bet they were able to finish it. I can definitely speak to that because of the fact that, well, being a true crime podcaster, as you can imagine, I have a lot of authors that contact me that are true crime authors or they have stories like that. So I read a lot of books that deals with crime and murder and things of that nature. And reading for me, like I'm sure it's for many other people is an escape, right? Reading takes us someplace else other than what our current problems are.

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And your books fit into that because of the fact that I know I'm not going to have to deal with murder. I'm not going to really have to deal with the sexual aspects of that. Even if that is part of the story, it's presented in a different way than the vivid ways I'm reading that. So for somebody that's lost my mom too in 2020, so just about three years ago almost now, my father-in-law died 11 months after that, I didn't want to do anything true crime. I didn't want to do a true crime episode because you're just in that funk of...

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I don't want to even deal with death, which maybe 98% of true crime is. So I understand where they're coming from and you have a good book. So it's one of those you don't want to put down. So that always helps. Absolutely. All right. So I do know that you are traditionally published. If you listen to my show, you know, a lot of authors I have is independently published. Can you tell me what your decision was between going independent and traditional?

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When I wrote the first book about my daughter, about the family with the daughter with dyslexia, it was called Educating Tigers, I was with an independent press. That was a while ago. That was when print-on-demand was just getting started and popular. And so I signed on with a publisher and it was print-on-demand and it was expensive. I had to buy the books. They weren't available unless I bought them. And I went to a lot of dyslexia conferences to sell them.

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and I would get a booth and people would come and talk to me and we and you know the people we would have these amazing discussions about having a child with dyslexia and I have one woman bought my book and she said you know I my daughter's in kindergarten and she just got diagnosed and so I've been reading all these books about dyslexia and one of them said 70 percent of the prison population are dyslexics and she said and I started crying said my baby's going to prison and you know people just get so scared when they think they can't help their kids. I was like no no no no.

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So she bought one of my books and she went upstairs and she came back down. She said, I read the first chapter and then my book literally fell apart in her hands. The binding wasn't glued and all the pages fell out and I was mortified. And I think when that happened, I thought maybe I need to find a different way to do this. Now, that was a while ago and I don't think that happens anymore. But it was, I mean, it was an unpleasant experience. And so I decided, I did find an agent.

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My agent found me my first book deal. And then I was orphaned after the second book, is what we call it in the publishing world, when your editor goes off to another publishing house and you don't have anybody to fight for you. So I found another agent and she eventually found me Level Best Books and they agreed to republish the first two in paperback, which they never were, and then gave me three more books. So it was a five book deal and it's been wonderful.

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It's been really wonderful. So I do know that you work with, you know, you have an agent, a publicist. So I've gotten to talk to Kendall's very nice. Where does that fit into the importance? I know that you're very busy with writing and probably doing speaking engagements. Where does agents and publicists for an active author fit in? It's interesting. I've actually had three agents over the years. I wrote a sequel to Educating Tigers and I pitched it to an agent at a conference and they gave me a contract.

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And it was a big New York publishing firm and she was trying to shop the book around. And then she emailed me and said, I can't work here. This is a terrible work environment for women. And I said, Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. And then I, they just dropped my book through the cracks. I had no one to fight for it again. So I was like, you know, you think you get an agent and you're like, I'm good. I got it. And then I found the second agent and he did get me my book deal. And then I went to, I wanted to meet another agent because

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Ken decided he didn't want to try and get me the third book. He had moved on. And so I went to a conference, I met Dawn, and we hit it off so well. And when I showed her my two books, she said, oh my gosh, I can't sell a series, mid-series. I just can't do it. No one will take it. And I said, OK, well, thanks. She goes, no, no, no, wait. I'm going to sign you up because I really like you. And then she tried to sell it and couldn't sell it. And so I said, OK, fine. And she said, well, wait, can't you write another series? And I was like, no, I'm not done with this one.

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She said, all right, but I really like working with you. And then three months later, she picked up the phone and called me and she said, I found you a home. And she found me a love of best books. And so she helped me so much. You know, you get the agent and you think I'm home free. But like I said, I've been through three. I think Don and I are gonna stick together for a while, but it's not like it looks. It can be pretty hard knocks.

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After going through all those woes with the different ways now of actually marketing and publishing a book, did you ever just think that you were going to go back and decide to do this independently at any time? I think that if Dawn hadn't found me level best books, I probably would have done something like that just because I love this series so much and I really just wasn't finished with it and I love the third book, so I certainly would have considered that. Absolutely. The number one complaint I do get from authors that are

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independently published is that they don't want to go traditional because they feel like their books would be hindered or they have a certain time frame in which they can't release a book. Maybe they release a book today and they won't release another one for another year. Do you feel that with the posts you have that they work with you on that or do you feel hindered at all? McMillan, yes. You had deadlines. I had a year to write the second book and it was going

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And they do make a lot of changes, lots and lots and lots of edits. Now with Level Best Books, they don't hardly make any edits at all if it doesn't need to be done and they want you to get it as clean as possible when you send it to them. And there was a backlog this time with Mr. Winslet Farm. My editor was overwhelmed and I'd already hired this publicist and she said, well, we have to have this pub date. And so I have a friend, we're in a critique group together and she's also a freelance editor.

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And I said, Susan, I mean, she knew my book very well from critique. I said, can you, can you go through my book one last time? And she said, absolutely. So she did that for me. And then Carla, my Italian friend, she vetted all the Italian in the book because you have to have, you know, if you're going to put a foreign language in your book, you got to get it right. Otherwise you're going to annoy your readers. So Carla vetted that book. She went on vacation in the Finger Lakes and she read it. And I'm like, I reached out and I said, Carla, it's been three days. And she said,

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Well, I'm just reading the book and having fun. And I was like, just go through the italicized words and make sure they're right. And so she did that. And so I delivered it to my editor and I said, it's been edited. It's Italian's been vetted. And she said, I'll read it once through and then we're going to format it. And we're going to go. So that was really nice that we had that flexibility that she was willing to trust another editor to save her some time. And then we hit the pub date. It was amazing. So there's a lot of flexibility there, but she was very, very appreciative too.

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And that's the other thing in this business. You know, you just have to be a nice person. I mean, it pays off like there's nobody's business. If you're easy to work with, if you meet your deadline, if you're a nice person, it really, really helps. So you bring up editing. Tell us what the importance and the value of editing is for you as an author to make sure you get that right. It's huge. It's such a big part of the process. And it's a part of the process that I know that a lot of beginning authors really struggle with to have another set of eyes.

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on their words. And a lot of people will just resist and say, well, I wrote this book and it's my book. But there's a lot of smart people out there. I'm in two different critique groups. I love now when someone gives me feedback because from the most part, they're right. And it's very helpful to me. I look for it. I seek it out. I welcome it. I mean, there are times when I say, nope, you know, that's not what this book is about. But I think it's a really important part of the process is to have another set of eyes.

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on what you've written. So I know we touched on this a little bit, but I know there's probably more to it. So tell us why you are obsessed with cooking. Now we do know we talked about that. There is a lot of recipes built into your third book, but you actually worked in a five day cooking class into this. So why do you love cooking so much? What does it do for you? Well, for me, like in my intro, I love it when I have a house full of people and I have a bunch of food out and everybody's just eating and laughing.

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And it just fills my soul. And I look at food as a way of nurturing other people. And I look at that when I write about food too, I feel as if I'm nurturing my readers. I wrote the Italian chef story because, well, I guess about eight or nine years ago, I went with a bunch of girlfriends over to Tuscany and we went to a week long cooking, they call it a cooking vacation, but we got to study with an Italian chef. We stayed in a villa and there were other people there too, but it was one of the...

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best vacations I've ever taken. And, um, so that's why I worked in the Italian chef. I really, really do love all things Italian. So, yeah, me too. That's probably why I have some extra pounds.

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You got that right. So you've mentioned that you are currently working on your fourth book. Can you tell us a little bit about that without giving away too much of it? Yes. Like I said, it takes place during the holidays. There was a guy who's riding his bike home from the country club and he gets hit by a car, you find out later that he's not a very likable guy, but he used to play Santa, he would be in the parade, that kind of thing. So everyone says you can't kill Santa. You can't kill the dog.

31:07
So, but I don't really kill Santa. He's just riding his bike. But anyway, that's the murder. And she's opened a cafe. So I get to write a lot about the cafe and her cook. They had a little expansion you'll see in the third book. So the cook, while they were closed down, went to a culinary school. And he's just an Eastern Shore guy, but he comes back from culinary school and he thinks he's the next Gordon Ramsay.

31:36
And so it's a small cafe in a small town, but he keeps trying to elevate the food. Like he puts kimchi on the great, the grilled cheese. And so I have another storyline with, with Custer because he's keep trying to elevate the food. And, um, it's a good story arc for Custer and Rosalie, but I'm having a lot of fun with it and I'm having a lot of fun with the food. Yeah. Sounds interesting. I can't wait for it, uh, for it to come out. So who inspired you? What are some authors that you are inspired by to write?

32:05
I am an eclectic reader. I do love mystery, but I love everything. What I love most about a book is one that makes me feel. Like I just read Where the Crawdads Sing, and that was one of those books that really made me feel. I really wanna feel, I wanna laugh, I wanna cry, but I wanna root for the protagonist. I really wanna care, even if they're flawed. I really wanna care about the protagonist. I just really like to dive in.

32:34
a book. I don't know if you ever read, this is dating me, but The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. He was one of those magical writers. The way he could make you feel, you know, you are just in that book, heart and soul. And I love that. I mean, that's what I look for when I'm reading. I just want to, I don't want to just love every minute of it. And my big thing, when I, when I, as a writer, what I've always...

33:00
dreamed of, I said, I know I've made it as a writer, if somebody dog ears a page in one of my books, if they turn down a page, because it spoke to them. And when I was doing the interview with Julie, the woman who had said, you know, she could finish my book, she quoted my book back to me and I'm like, there it is. She dog-eared a page. I made it.

33:25
Well, I do a lot of reading digitally on my Kindle if I can. One reason for that is because I can carry a bunch of books with me. The other reason is I like to preserve my books. So if you ever read digitally, the equivalent to darkening your page is basically when we underline passages and quotes. Um, so there's some books I actually buy that's brand new. And that's, this is the cool thing with digital books is if somebody else has read that book and they've underlined something, it'll give you notation.

33:51
that says 134 people has found this or has underlined this topic and they have little dots underneath it. So I have seen some of that throughout your book. So yes, people as dog-earing pages for you. Oh, that's great. Thank you. You made my day. What would you want or what is the biggest thing that you want readers to take away from your books? I think all of what I just said, I want them to have a good time. I want them to laugh. I want them to feel.

34:21
I want them to feel satisfied when it's over and I want them to keep reading. But that's huge for me. I feel that if someone is taking the time to read your book, that you have a responsibility to give them a good ride. And so if somebody feels that that happened for them, then I did my job. In closing, is there anything you would like to say to your readers and fans out there?

34:47
Well, thank you to anyone that's picked up the book and enjoyed it. Thank you for anybody that gave me a review. But, um, and if you tell your friends, that's great, but, um, thank you. Just thank you so much. And thank you. This is, you're great. I mean, I listened to you. We, my husband and I listened to a podcast and one of your podcasts in the car. And we're like, oh man, this is really interesting. And so I was like, let's find another one. And I listened to another one while I was walking. And so I was really having fun and you're very, very good at what you do. Just saying.

35:15
Oh, well, thank you, Wendy. I totally appreciate that. Thank you very much. And I do thank you for coming on the show today. It's been very enlightening. Let Kendall know I said hi. I'm thankful that she reached out. You're a great writer. I'm working my way through all your books right now. I don't think I would do you any justice just to jump into your third book. And I was starting at book one and it's been phenomenal. Thank you again for sending me my own personal copy that resides on my shelf. I cherish that to death. Anytime you want to come back on the show.

35:45
feel free to reach out, let me know. You always have a welcome, open invitation to come back. Oh, thank you, David. That means the world to me. Thank you so much. Thank you.

35:56
All right guys, that was the incredible Wendy San Echo. You can pick up the whole entire Rosalie Heart Mystery series on Amazon. Make sure you do that. Start at book one, go all the way through to book three. She has book four coming out soon, so make sure you go give her some love and some support. Everything that you would like to know about her, including how to get ahold of her, you can find in the description of this show.

36:24
Also, you can find it attached to her episode on the True Crime and Authors website. I thank you for tuning in for this one. I know you have many options in True Crime Podcasts. I'm glad that I am one of them. Be safe and always remember, always stay humble. An act of kindness can make someone's day. A little love and compassion can go a long way. And this is the podcast where two passions becomes one. I'll catch you guys on the next one.

36:53
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37:15
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