My first reader: a guest blog by Clea Simon

This week marks the launch of my new mystery, Shades of Grey, first in a new series, and I should be celebrating. I’ve set up some readings and am guestblogging at various sites all month. But the champagne is still on the rack, its glorious pop postponed. Because my first reader is fading away.

It is sadly ironic that Shades of Grey deals with death and with those half shades of existence that come before, and possibly after. Unlike my previous books, Shades of Grey is a ghost story, a paranormal mystery, as they’re now called. In it, a young, vulnerable grad student is studying the Gothic novels of the late 18th century. But then her own life turns Gothic as the ghost of her beloved cat shows up – and various other psychic phenomenon start intruding into her orderly, academic life. In Shades of Grey, I deal with these topics gently – this is essentially a cozy mystery. A light read, but the topics are there.

When people ask me where I get my ideas, I don’t know what to tell them. I’ve always written, because I’ve always read. In fact, I still have a copy of the first story I ever wrote. In labored, oversize lettering, it tells of a prince who was changed into a frog – but who then decided to make the most of his amphibian existence. I have it because my mother, when she was moving, decided she no longer had any use for many of the keepsakes she’d saved over the years. Although I was hurt by this at the time, I now see that she was shedding her former life. Various forms of dementia – normal pressure hydrocephaly and other complications – were taking their toll. She was moving from her condo to assisted living, and she was holding on only to what was vital. To what she thought she could keep.

My mother was my first reader and has been, over the years, one of my biggest supporters. It wasn’t easy for any of us. Both my brother and my sister developed schizophrenia while I was still a child, and while that made me, by default, my mother’s favorite – the good child – the price was way too high. That story of adaptation – that resigned frog – wasn’t simply a fable. We made do. We moved on. Family dynamics being what they are, we had other issues over the years – issues I poke loving fun at in Shades of Grey, as Dulcie fights with her neo-hippie mother and mourns her absent father. In a way, my life was designed to make a writer out of me. When I wrote about our family, in Mad House, my first nonfiction book, this caused my mother pain, I know. But whatever else was going on, I could always count on her to read my work. Once I started writing mysteries, I think she quite enjoyed them.

I am very aware of another sad irony. While I’m loving Dulcie Schwartz, I have another project out making the rounds. Called Dogs Don’t Lie, it’s my tongue-in-cheek hardboiled mystery, what I’ve labeled a “pet noir,” with a bad-girl animal psychic, and I and my agent thinks its some of my best writing yet. I’d told my mother something about it while I was writing it. But I didn’t tell her all. Because, you see, dementia plays a role in Dogs Don’t Lie, and it’s not a pretty one. For months, I wondered about this – wondered how far I dared push it. Would any publisher take an interest? If so, how long would publication take? Now, I know I don’t have to worry. Even if we were to get an offer tomorrow, my mother will probably not live to see it published. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to read it. I’m launching a new book and a new series, but it’s my mother who is fading into shades of grey.