Juliet Kincaid, Fiction Fan
“I don’t remember learning to read,” Juliet has said. “It just seemed like something the people in my family did. I do know we always favored fiction. My dad adored the Horatio Hornblower series. He even took up ship-modeling as a result. My mom loved big, flashy historical novels like Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian and James Clavell’s Shogun. As a grown up, my brother read everything Tom Clancy wrote. As for me, I’ve been hooked on fiction since grade school.”
Juliet first showed her fondness for adult fiction the summer before her eleventh birthday. A playground attendant, a woman in her twenties, caught Juliet reading a historical romance with a half-dressed couple on the cover. (Juliet had swiped the book from her mother’s cache.) “Should you be reading that?” the attendant asked. “Sure. Why not?” Juliet answered.
Juliet’s romance with fiction continued throughout her education and culminated in her dissertation, a study of more than thirty novels and stories written in diary form. Juliet included writing a novel in diary form in the research for her dissertation. As a professor at one of America’s top community colleges for twenty-five years, Juliet taught literature, composition, and creative writing, the latter often with a focus on writing novels. She also has led a popular workshop on writing mysteries.
Juliet’s other experiences with fiction include working as a submissions editor for Red Herring Mystery Magazine and having three mystery stories published, one nominated for a Pushcart Award. Juliet has written ten novels and currently is working on Walls and Wings, novels based on two of the twenty-nine fairy tale mystery stories she’s written about Cinderella, P. I., twenty years, three kids and a few extra pounds after the ball.
“As much fun as reading fiction is,” Juliet has said, “writing it is lots more.” Still, she continues to add three or four novels a month to the “life list” of the books she’s read that she started when she was fifteen.