Long-time readers of this blog will remember I’ve previously featured award-winning author Susan Kroupa. (If you haven’t discovered her Doodle series, you’re in for a real treat!) I’m delighted to report the award nominations from the Dog Writers Association of America continue to roll in.
Sue has earned three nominations in the DWAA Writing Competition. The first is her blog about losing Shadow, Fly Away Home . She earned another nomination for her serialized memoir-in-progress about raising a very independent Shadow inDoodlewhacked. And the third nomination is for her short story Balance Due. Congratulations, Sue!
Bad-Mouthed is currently on a Kindle Countdown sale that runs through Friday, Dec 14th.
Read on for a sample of great writing by this terrific author!
Walter’s Christmas-Night Music
A little magic, a little Mozart, an unexpected miracle on Christmas Eve. . .
Nothing has gone right for Walter Gunther since his wife died. He had to sell his music store to pay her medical bills and take a job as a clerk in Disks Galore, a big box music store. His manager bullies him and knows nothing about the classical music Walter has cherished all his life. The man can’t even pronounce Mozart’s name correctly. But when Walter is forced to work late on Christmas Eve, he receives a musical gift beyond his wildest imagining.
Originally published in Realms of Fantasy (December 1997), “Walter’s Christmas-Night Musik” was hailed for its “affectionate musical expertise and good-natured charm,” by Locus reviewer Mark Kelly, who also chose it as the best story of that issue. A warm and wonderful story sure to delight music lovers everywhere.
A Most Magical Christmas
Brimming with hope. Touched by magic. . .
A collection of five Christmas stories by award-winning author Susan J. Kroupa. A hapless clerk working late on Christmas Eve, a telemarketer who starts receiving mysterious calls promising a once-in-a-lifetime offer, an airline mechanic trying to prevent a disaster, and a pair of dogs who show that second chances can come wrapped in fur, all find a little Christmas magic when they need it the most.
So grab your e-reader, cozy down with a quilt, and celebrate the season with tales to warm the coldest winter night.
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Both “Balance Due” and “Walter’s Christmas Night-Musik“, which made editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Special Holiday Recommended Reading List, are in A Most Magical Christmas, and also available separately for $0.99. A Most Magical Christmas is priced at just $2.99 and it will be on sale on Kobo for 40% off Dec 12-17th. Find it on Kindle and Nook and itunes and Kobo too!
Mysteries, amateur sleuths, and dogs: a common combination, some might say. Browse the shelves of any bookstore (physical or virtual) and you’ll find a fascinating collection of mystery fiction, with no two books alike. Each of us brings a different twist to the story; sometimes it’s the regional setting, or perhaps the sleuth’s occupation, and it’s certainly the dogs! You’ll find all sorts featured, to include Basset Hounds, Beagles, Labrador Retrievers, and Poodles. Then there are hybrids, mixed breeds and of who-knows-what dogs, all equally loved and cherished for the wonderful companions that they are. That’s certainly true about the dog in the series featured today.
First, an introduction to today’s honored guest:
Susan J. Kroupa is a dog lover currently owned by a 70 pound labradoodle whose superpower is bringing home dead possums and raccoons and who happens to be the inspiration for her Doodlebugged books. She’s also an award-winning author whose fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, and in a variety of professional anthologies, including Bruce Coville’s Shapeshifters. Her non-fiction publications include features about environmental issues and Hopi Indian culture for The Arizona Republic, High Country News, and American Forests. She now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Southwestern Virginia, where she’s busy writing the next Doodlebugged mystery. You can find her books and read her blog on her website, as well as her Amazon Author page.
Now here’s Susan, sharing the background that inspired her terrific series:
Doodle, the highly independent labradoodle who narrates the Doodlebugged mysteries, is not afraid to admit he’s a service-dog flunkee. “Smart and obedient don’t always go hand in hand,” he says unapologetically about his “career change.” In the series, he works as a bed-bug-detecting dog for “the boss”, Josh Hunter of Hunter Bed Bug Detection. Doodle and Molly, the boss’s ten-year-old daughter, who’s equally independent, always seem to end up in trouble and with a mystery to solve. Bed-Bugged cover
I can see you crinkling your nose already. “Bed bugs?” you ask, barely suppressing the “euwww” that comes to mind. “How did you happen to write about that?”
The answer lies in the misfortune of one of my sons, an attorney who lives in the Arlington, VA. He called one day, quite upset, to tell me he was covered in tick bites.
“Ticks?” I asked. “Are they still attached to you?”
“No,” he said. “Just bites.”
“Can’t be ticks, then,” I told him. I live in the woods near the Blue Ridge Parkway where there’s no shortage of ticks. Inevitably, a tick bite comes complete with a tick, at least for the first few days. (And can also come complete with months or years of disease, but that’s another story.) “Could the bites be from bed bugs?” I asked.
At the suggestion, my son investigated the possibility and discovered that bed bugs had infested the apartment directly over his. He complained to the manager, who promptly sent out a bed bug inspector. With a dog. The sniffer dog, as scent-detection dogs are often called, promptly found evidence of a substantial colony of bed bugs in my son’s apartment.
Bad luck for him, but great for me, because I’d been toying with the idea of writing about a scent detection dog that—how should I put it?—wasn’t in one of the glamour jobs of nose work. And I envisioned the books to be light cozy mysteries, suitable for dog lovers from kids through adults. Sniffing out bed bugs wouldn’t put Doodle in the potentially gritty situations that being a narcotics or police dog would. Plus, I’d already decided that he would be a labradoodle, a cross between a poodle and a Labrador retriever, not the kind of dog that generally works in those professions. As Doodle puts it in Dog-Nabbed, when an undercover cop asks if he’d like to be a police dog, “Not sure what he means, since everyone knows German shepherds are the ones who go into police work. A little too intense for my taste, but in my experience German shepherds are all about intensity.”
I set out to do research and discovered that while sniffer dogs in the bed bug profession generally tend to be beagles or Labrador retrievers, there were, in fact, some labradoodle bed-bug dogs. I already had a model for Doodle in mind—the extremely independent, often challenging, and sometimes affection-impaired labradoodle we’d adopted as a puppy a few years earlier. His antics gave me plenty of material for a starting point.
But I wanted the series to be more than “cute dog solves mystery”. Other than the fact that he’s the narrator, with some admitted stretching of his understanding in certain situations, Doodle acts like a dog: nose driven, literal (as in metaphor-impaired), attuned to body language more than words, and prone to misunderstanding what the humans around him are saying. He can’t speak except through his own body language, and he’s the first to complain how clueless humans are in understanding that.
And more than having him be a semi-realistic dog, I wanted him in a real family who has real problems outside the mystery of the moment. Though Molly drives the action and is the one who solves the mysteries, throughout the course of the books, the reader sees “the boss”, Josh, struggle as a single parent, sees his own fears and triumphs, and the budding possibility (beginning in book two) of romance—all filtered through the eyes of a dog, who sometimes gets it and sometimes doesn’t.
The series now has four books with a fifth one due out in the fall. You can read an excerpt of Bed-Bugged, the first Doodlebugged mystery, here. And you can read all about the books on Susan’s Amazon sales page or on her website. And here’s a special offer from Susan:
And, for a limited time, you can get Bed-Bugged for only $0.99 at most ebook retail sites and learn just how Doodle got himself into the bed bug detection business, and, more importantly, how he met the boss and Molly.
Doodle would call that a win-win situation. I hope you will too.