Join us for our annual Holiday Dinner at Olive Garden on Hurstbourne. We’ll be celebrating another great year, awarding Elaine Munsch for her services as Volunteer of the Year, and electing our new board for next year. If you can’t attend, please be sure to email Lynn Slaughter with your vote for the board. Our nominees for 2023 are:
We’ve had very few opportunities to meet as a group over the past year, so I hope you can join us at the signing and/or the dinner later in the day. We look forward to seeing you on December 3!
Our next speaker will be Private Investigator Susan Spaulding, on October 8 at 1pm, at the St. Matthews Eline library. Our meeting will be a hybrid in-person/zoom meeting. An invite with zoom details will be sent out closer to the event.
Susan Spaulding is a licensed Private Investigator covering the state of KY for the past 16 years.
She is the owner of Confidential Investigations and Surveillance and travels IN, TN, and MO as well conducting surveillance.
Sue is originally from Upstate New York having moved to Louisville in 1995.
She specializes in Surveillance covering cases such as Workers Comp, Child Custody, Insurance Fraud and Infidelity.
She finds her job most interesting and rewarding helping and talking to new clients every day.
Hot Off the Press: Update on our August guest speaker!
We’re delighted to announce that Judith Turner-Yamamoto will be our guest speaker at our August 13 meeting.
Her debut novel, Loving the Dead and Gone, comes out on September 6 from Regal House Publishing, Sour Mash Southern Literature series. Chapter member Miki Reilly-Howe will be interviewing the 2020 Petrichor Prize finalist about the long process from writing to publication, as well as the masterful steps she has taken to ensure her novel’s success.
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Judith Turner-Yamamoto’s work has appeared in StorySOUTH, Mississippi Review, Snake Nation Review, and American Literary Review, among others, and in many anthologies, including Walking the Edge: A Southern Gothic Anthology, Show Us Your Papers, and Gravity Dancers. Her awards include two Virginia Arts Commission fellowships, an Ohio Arts Council fellowship, VCCA and Fundación Valparaiso fellowship residencies, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, the Washington Prize for Fiction, and the Virginia Screenwriting Award. Her article assignments, which include interviews with such luminaries as Frank Gehry and Annie Leibovitz, have taken her all over the world, and she has published more than a thousand cover stories and features on the arts, design, architecture, interiors and gardens, travel, food, fashion, and books in such publications as The Boston Globe Magazine, Elle, Interiors, Art & Antiques, The Los Angeles Times, and Travel & Leisure.
Agatha Christie often broke the “rules” of mystery writing. And yet, one could argue her reliable storytelling kept readers coming back book after book. With juicy twists and surprises, of course. What can we learn from Christie’s measured, deliberate, but irreverent approach to bring new dimension to our stories?
Lisa Haneberg loves to explore Galveston Island’s gritty back streets, stellar seafood joints, magnificent natural areas, and all points in between. In addition to the Spy Shop Mysteries she’s authored over a dozen nonfiction books. Lisa is a founding board member of the Lexington Writer’s Room, a nonprofit coworking space for active writers. She earned an MFA degree from Goddard College. She lives with her husband and dog in Lexington, Kentucky.
Spring is finally here, with all the tumultuous, roller coaster weather so typical of Kentucky. Trees are leafing, flowers are blooming, and Derby Rotten Scoundrels is spreading its wings towards our first, in person meeting since 2020.
Kathy Stearman, Former FBI Agent
On May 14, we will welcome as our guest speaker, former FBI Special Agent Kathy Stearman. The Middletown Library will be hosting the event, and we will be providing some light refreshment. The event will be open to the public, and this will be our first hybrid event – we will combine the in-person with zoom, for those who can not attend. We really hope we can get good participation from our members. Louisville’s locally-owned bookstore, Carmichael’s, will be providing books for sale – both Kathy Stearman’s It’s Not About the Gun, and our anthology, Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon.
Please email me to RSVP for the event. The Middletown Library needs to know how many people will attend. We hope to see you there! I’ll send out a second email about this event, and the particulars. Stay tuned for that.
Kentuckiana Independent Authors Fair
Susan Bell
The Kentuckiana Independent Authors Fair was held on April 9th, in LaGrange. In lieu of an April chapter meeting, a few of your fellow Scoundrels participated in the event.
On a rainy and snowy morning, Susan Bell, Lorena Peter, and Gloria Casale put on their book-seller hats (plus winter coats) and trekked out to Eastern Jefferson County. It was a cold, blustery day, which reduced crowd size, but we did have some success selling books. DRS sold six bourbon anthologies and three older Derby anthologies (for a net return of $91 + change). In addition to that, we sold one of Elaine’s Dash Hamond series books.
Gloria CasaleLorena Peter
Thanks to Gloria Casale and Lorena Peter for participating. And special thanks to Lorena for her deft skills in wrangling customers to the table and engaging them in conversation . . . leading to sales!
And a special shout out to Karen Block, who made delectable bourbon balls – the recipe for which is in our bourbon anthology – these were a big hit with customers and also led to sales.
I didn’t count the total number of authors there, but some of our previous speakers participated: Lee Pennington, Erv Klein, and Bill Noel.
One wonders: are these events worth the effort? It’s a long day, physically challenging loading books into and out of the car, hours of sitting. But there are benefits outside the sales. First, we’re promoting the organization by attending. One gentleman there was interested in setting up a book fair in Louisville, to rival that of other cities. He took our contact information. Second, an event like this is a reminder that there is a community of writers here in the region. I enjoyed chatting with Lee Pennington and his lovely wife. It turns out Lee taught my brother Benn writing, at JCC, many years ago, and they are still good friends. Building connections with other authors has merit in its own right, but you never know where those connections may lead in the future.
We’re Growing
DRS boasts two new members: Pamela Hirschler and Sherry Youngquist. Pam is out of Frankfort, a published poet, current member of SinC, and is an unpublished mystery writer. Sherry is out of Bowling Green and is currently working on an amateur sleuth/cozy mystery. Both Pam and Sherry have joined our Critique Group – more on that below.
Critique Group
For the past seven months, a small group of Scoundrels has been meeting bi-weekly to share our manuscripts for review. Our merry band includes Elaine Munsch, Miki Reilly-Howe, Lorena Peter, Susan Bell, and our two new DRS members, Pam and Sherry.
Every two weeks, we get together via zoom and share our feedback on three manuscripts per session. We try and offer useful commentary to the author, while supporting their effort to tell their tale. I find it very useful to know, as I write content, that there will be intelligent minds reading the material, and soon. Writing is such a solitary journey, it is very helpful to remember that you are doing this to be read by others. This focuses the mind: entertain them, make them think, make them feel, don’t disappoint!
Here’s a brief blurb about each (the titles indicated are sometimes working titles):
Saving Remy (Miki): this story focuses on the murder of a single mother from Ukraine. Her orphaned son is the only witness, but his refusal to speak forces a child psychologist to work with police to find the killer.
Maud – working title (Elaine): another installment of Elaine’s delightful Dash Hammond series; this time Dash must solve events surrounding the death of his distant Irish cousin, Maud, and resolve loose ends of her mysterious past, including murders and a missing girl.
Inexplicable Dread (Lorena): Lorena explores the fevered politics of our time in a mystery melded with a little science fiction and tarot cards.
Drowning in Doubt (Susan): Hannah is a 14-year old girl who witnesses what she thinks is a murder, but which authorities believe to be a tragic boat accident. She and her cousin Luke seek to reveal the killer.
Tree’d (Pam): Quarreling neighbors lead to unintended consequences in this funny take on the hazards of living in suburbia.
Coastal Town Georgia – working title (Sherry): in this cozy/mystery, Sherry introduces us to a colorful array of small-town inhabitants, white squirrels, cheddar-bacon ranch pretzels, and murder, all set in a small coastal community in Seabrook, Georgia.
Bourbon Anthology News
A big shout out to Elaine Munsch, who has been quite busy the past several months marketing our bourbon anthology, Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon. She has cold called multiple distilleries, museums, gift shops, and traveled to Bardstown to find anyone and everyone who might be interested in stocking our book for sale. So far, we have the book on shelves at The Frasier, in downtown Louisville and at Shaq & Coco bookstore in Bardstown. The book is also on the shelf at Carmichael’s, here in Louisville.
Elaine has made contact with Old Forester, Maker’s Mark, Keeneland, Kentucky Horse Park, the Talbot Inn, the Derby Museum. We actually left a copy with Old Forester for their buyer to peruse before making a decision. We hope to make further inroads with these initial outreach efforts in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
Member News
Leisha’s Song by Lynn Slaughter is a finalist for the Imadjinn Award for Best YA Novel.
Lynn’s novel, Missed Cue, won the Florida West Coast Writers contest for unpublished work in the mystery-suspense category.
Join your sisters in crime for a book signing at Barnes and Noble on Hurstbourne. Books make a perfect holiday gift. Authors participating:
Join us for our annual Holiday Dinner at Olive Garden on Hurstbourne. We’ll be celebrating another great year, awarding Elaine Munsch for her services as Volunteer of the Year, and electing our new board for next year. If you can’t attend, please be sure to email Lynn Slaughter with your vote for the board. Our nominees for 2023 are:
We’re delighted to announce that 
Judith Turner-Yamamoto’s work has appeared in StorySOUTH, Mississippi Review, Snake Nation Review, and American Literary Review, among others, and in many anthologies, including Walking the Edge: A Southern Gothic Anthology, Show Us Your Papers, and Gravity Dancers. Her awards include two Virginia Arts Commission fellowships, an Ohio Arts Council fellowship, VCCA and Fundación Valparaiso fellowship residencies, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, the Washington Prize for Fiction, and the Virginia Screenwriting Award. Her article assignments, which include interviews with such luminaries as Frank Gehry and Annie Leibovitz, have taken her all over the world, and she has published more than a thousand cover stories and features on the arts, design, architecture, interiors and gardens, travel, food, fashion, and books in such publications as The Boston Globe Magazine, Elle, Interiors, Art & Antiques, The Los Angeles Times, and Travel & Leisure. 
For the past seven months, a small group of Scoundrels has been meeting bi-weekly to share our manuscripts for review. Our merry band includes Elaine Munsch, Miki Reilly-Howe, Lorena Peter, Susan Bell, and our two new DRS members, Pam and Sherry.
A big shout out to Elaine Munsch, who has been quite busy the past several months marketing our bourbon anthology, Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon. She has cold called multiple distilleries, museums, gift shops, and traveled to Bardstown to find anyone and everyone who might be interested in stocking our book for sale. So far, we have the book on shelves at The Frasier, in downtown Louisville and at Shaq & Coco bookstore in Bardstown. The book is also on the shelf at Carmichael’s, here in Louisville.
Leisha’s Song by Lynn Slaughter is a finalist for the Imadjinn Award for Best YA Novel.