Holly Messinger's Blog, page 3

Review of CURSE at Tangent Online!

Wow, this has been a week of unexpected treats. First the Daily Deal from Audible.com (which put Curse at their #1 bestseller slot, temporarily displacing the Game of Thrones and Outlander series), and then the review from Down Under at SQMag, and today Dave Truesdale emailed me with the news that his review at Tangent was going live today:


"What a great stage-setting, atmospheric opening

Jacob Tracy review in SQMag

This review of THE CURSE OF JACOB TRACY in the latest SQ Mag is maybe the most lucid and insightful I've seen. 

I was especially intrigued by this bit: 


"The first half or so of the book, it felt as though she had yet to fully engage with Jacob’s voice, but heading toward the climax to the end, the author’s presence totally fades into the characters and setting, letting them tell the story."

COMING SOON: The Romance of Certain Old Bones

Hello internet! It is with pride and trepidation that I announce the imminent arrival of my new Trace & Boz novella, "The Romance of Certain Old Bones," which will make its official debut at Planet Comicon, Kansas City, May 20-22, 2016.

I will have paperback first-editions for sale, with cover art by Chelsea Mann. Ebook edition will launch shortly after the convention.

In the meantime, here's

horse thieves

Boz's and Remy's cattle were clustered together at the near end, their mounts tethered to the tie-rail and the others standing patiently behind. On the other side of the rail were three dirty, hard-bitten white men, clearly fresh off the trail, and a forth inside the corral, bent over beside Remy's mule and the bundle of wolf-pelts roped across its back. "Hey!" Remy said immediately. "You wanna

Trace & Boz get optioned for TV

It gives me enormous personal satisfaction to announce that The Curse of Jacob Tracy has been optioned for television.

Holly Messinger's debut THE CURSE OF JACOB TRACY, a gothic Western about a Civil War veteran who sees ghosts, his levelheaded trail partner, and the mysterious English bluestocking pulling their strings, to ITV with Deborah Spera (CRIMINAL MINDS) and Maria Grasso of One Two

getting around in 19th century St. Louis

A reader asked,

"I'm a St Louisan myself, so I know that Hyde Park is a good long distance from Carondelet. These days, it would take two hours to walk it, and I bet it would have been at least double that in those days. Did your characters ride, take the horse drawn omnibus or streetcar, or what?"


This is one of those things I like to think about, and one of the unexpectedly frustrating bits

top 5 ways to die in a mine shaft

I'm finally doing some much-needed research into mining towns and mining techniques of the 19th century for to finish the end of my Boz and Lily story. I knew mining was dangerous but Holy Hera. Here are some of the leading contenders, in no particular order:

Heat exhaustion. At depths greater than 1000 feet the air temperature could be 120º or more. 
Falls. Sometimes when men were brought up

clarion/clarity

So Neil Gaiman said something about Clarion and a whole lot of people got uptight about it and I'm like, I dunno, man. I maybe wanted to go to Clarion for like, a nanosecond, circa 2001 when I first heard about it? But I was still young enough to remember how badly I'd wanted to take creative writing in the 10th grade (and later, sophomore year of college) and how disillusioned I was, both times.

now this is high praise

I stumbled across a random review of Curse over the weekend. I was amused first by the reviewer comparing me to Tarantino:


This is Tarantino on steroids. The action and gratuitous killings and deaths we have grown to love and hate in a Tarantino film is what our Ms. Messinger provides in print. She provides different scenarios in the novel as Quentin provides chapters in his movies. I hope he

Trace gets a starred review from Publisher's Weekly!

So, this happened; thus providing a kind of validation I hadn't known I wanted.

Yes, I was hoping to get more reviews from more sources before the book came out, but I was thinking peer reviews, advance readers, bloggers & such.

This is really cool.

An "amazing" debut.

Yeah.




 The Curse of Jacob Tracy
Holly Messinger, Author 

Stellar writing and a strong story define Messinger’s amazing