Award-winning novelist Lori Rader-Day is making a stop at the Jackson County Public Library to speak about her books and writing career and answer audience questions.
The conversation with the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award honoree will be at 2 p.m. April 13 at the library, 303 W. Second St., Seymour.
Registration for the free event is limited to 75 people and required by Tuesday by visiting myjclibrary.org/events or calling 812-523-4636.
Janet Hensen, information services manager for the library, said there are still some spaces available for the event, but those interested should sign up soon.
Rader-Day’s books will be available for purchase from the Friends of the Jackson County Public Library for $15 each via cash or check, and she will sign copies. The titles available for purchase will be “The Black Hour,” “Little Pretty Things,” “The Day I Died” and “Under a Dark Sky.”
Hensen said the library received an email from Indiana Humanities about the Novel Conversations Speakers Program and applied for a grant to have one of the authors on their Novel Conversations list come and speak.
“We were able to submit our top author choices as part of the grant request. We are very excited to have her here,” Hensen said. “I think anyone who enjoys mysteries or thrillers would be interested in her books. We want to thank Indiana Humanities and the Friends of the Library for making it possible.”
Rader-Day has been a resident of Chicago for more than 15 years, but she is originally from central Indiana and grew up in Boone County — the literal boonies.
“I lived in a town of about 15,000 until I was 12, but then we moved out into the country 4 miles from the nearest town, and that one was only 400 people,” Rader-Day said. “You learned to make your own fun, that’s for sure. I have written about this area of Indiana several times.”
Rader-Day said she was the first person in her family to go to college. In the process, she decided to switch gears from journalism to creative writing. Journalism as a career made sense to her parents, but she did not use her degrees to become a journalist. Instead, she worked in public relations for higher education and health care.
“This is the career track I quit a couple of times over the years to engage more deeply with fiction,” she said. “A decision my family, including my patient husband, Greg, has supported, even when they didn’t get it.”
Rader-Day first started writing when she was 6 and wrote most of her life off and on. She started getting serious about writing in 2006 and started a short story in 2007 that eventually become a full-length novel, but she was not satisfied with it.
“I put that draft away and in 2010 started a new novel, the first time I ever started writing something knowing that it would be a novel,” Rader-Day said. “It took me about two and a half years to write and revise while I worked a difficult full-time job.”
She said her book was published in 2014, and things have gone pretty quickly since then, but she was still a novelist, 30-plus years in the making.
“Mystery writing chose me. When I started that short story that got long, it was pointed out to me by a writer I had just met that the first 10 pages contained a crime, and he asked if I was going to solve it,” she said. “He saved me years of trying to figure out who I was or what I was trying to do.”
She said it all made sense once he pointed it out because she had been a fan of Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clark when she was a young reader — too young, possibly. The mystery/thriller division is much harder to decide, and she gets called both but doesn’t mind.
“The most important element of any story is a good protagonist, by which I mean a fully realized protagonist who gives the reader his or her lived experience,” Rader-Day said. “Not one that is always well-behaved and after that, you need something to happen. It doesn’t have to be car chases on every page, but I am a big fan of some kind of conflict.”
She said in a mystery, you need a secret or a crime to assign blame for, while in a thriller, you need a ticking clock against which your characters must act.
Her books are low on car chases, but she loves characters that have lots of inner turmoil that sneaks out. That’s what she look for when she reads, too.
Rader-Day is nominated for an Edgar Award for her book “Under a Dark Sky” and will be attending the banquet in New York City later this month. She has gone before as a nominee for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, but this is her first Edgar nomination, and she is really excited about it.
“I just sold my next two books to HarperCollins William Morrow. ‘The Lucky One’ (maybe that title will stick) will be out spring of 2020,” Rader-Day said. “I’m working on what would be my 2021 book now, a mystery set partially at Agatha Christie’s estate, Greenway, during World War II.”
“Under a Dark Sky” is set in Michigan at a fictionalized version of the Headlands International Dark Sky Park in Mackinaw City.
“Dark-sky parks are designated areas that have complied with standards set by the International Dark-Sky Association to keep night skies dark for stargazing,” Rader-Day said. “Also for the health of the environment and all the living creatures who live nearby, including humans.”
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Who: Author Lori Rader-Day
Where: Jackson County Public Library, 303 W. Second St., Seymour.
When: 2 p.m., April 13
Registration for the free event is limited to 75 people and required by Tuesday by visiting myjclibrary.org/events or calling 812-523-4636.
Rader-Day’s books will be available for purchase from the Friends of the Jackson County Public Library for $15 each via cash or check, and she will sign copies. The titles available for purchase will be "The Black Hour," "Little Pretty Things," "The Day I Died" and "Under a Dark Sky."
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