Character takeover - Jade Blackwell

We have a guest blogger here with us... Jade Blackwell's the amateur sleuth in Gilian Baker's Blogging is Murder.  So I'll turn it over to the professionals...the fictional blogging professional.***Hi there, fellow cozy mystery lovers! I’m Jade Blackwell, the protagonist of Gilian Baker’s new series justly named, The Jade Blackwell Mysteries. It’s so cool to have a series named after you, just sayin’.Lynn asked me to pop in today to tell you about how I became a professional blogger, and I was only too happy to. So, here we go. {Clearing my throat}Five years ago, I was working as an English professor at the University of Wyoming, near my hometown of Aspen Falls. I’d worked there since receiving my Ph.D., and had finally clawed my way to the top to earn one of the few coveted tenured positions in the department. It’s what I’d always wanted to do—teach others about my passions—literature and writing.But with each passing semester, I was losing interest. I felt blasé. I was ready for a new adventure. But where to begin? Teaching was the only thing I’d ever known. But the endless department meetings, apathetic students and mounds of grading were wearing me down. I wanted control of my life back. I worked every evening and weekend grading papers, and was still always buried. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t convincing anyone to study the classics with zeal or to write coherent literary analyses.One day, I was flipping through a literary writing magazine and saw an article about how blogging was changing the writing world. I’d been on very few blogs, and only then to verify them as unfit to be included in a scholarly paper when they ended up on a student’s reference page. What I learned in that article led me to do research on ways to make a living writing online. And so my new adventure began.I started by creating a ghostwriting service for bloggers and other online entrepreneurs. I kept my position at the college for as long as I could, wanting to make sure I liked the lifestyle before going gung-ho. Turns out, I loved it. Instead of  “publish or perish” writing, I got the chance to do research and write on a huge number of topics I’d never known much about. And, I was getting paid handsomely for me expertize. I turned in my notice, effective at the end of the current semester and gave myself over fully to living life as a solopreneur.As my number of ghostwriting clients grew, I added a blog to my repertoire. A Writerz Block is for fledgling writers who are looking to make a living writing online. There I cover topics such as finding freelance writing work, blogging for income, self-publishing fiction and non-fiction, as well as writing and marketing tips. It’s the best of both worlds—I get to teach people who actually want my help, and I get paid to write.You want to know another amazing thing about my blogging journey? I have time to play the amateur sleuth! Even though I taught classic lit for years, to my way of thinking, there’s nothing better than a well-plotted mystery. I got a chance to put mystery-solving knowledge to good use in my first sleuthing adventure, Blogging is Murder. If you’d like to see how I nimbly cracked the case (okay, I did it by accident) follow this link to pick up a copy.***About Gilian BakerGilian Baker is a former writing and literature professor who finally threw in the towel and decided to just show ‘em how it’s done. She has gone on to forge a life outside of academia by adding blogger & ghostwriter to her CV. She currently uses her geeky superpowers only for good to entertain cozy mystery readers the world over. When she’s not plotting murder, you can find her puttering in her vegetable garden, knitting in front of the fire, snuggled up with her husband watching British mysteries or discussing literary theory with her daughter.In her next life, she fervently hopes to come back as a cat, though she understands that would be going down the karmic ladder. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona with her family and their three pampered felines.Blogging is Murder-Though she was certainly born with all the traits of a world-class private detective, blogger Jade Blackwell believed she would do nothing more than solve the murders in her latest favorite cozy mystery book.Set in mountainous south-eastern Wyoming, Jade Blackwell lives in a log home in the quaint village of Aspen Falls with her husband, Christian and daughter Penelope (Ellie). She left her life as a tenured college English professor at the University of Wyoming four years ago, sick of the bureaucracy, mounds of essays to grade and apathetic students. She turns to blogging and ghostwriting as her new career.Jade’s promising career as a blogger halts abruptly when she learns of a hacker who is controlling her friend and fellow blogger Liz Collin’s business remotely. When the hacker is found dead in her home, Liz is thrown in jail.Determined to help her friend regain her life and livelihood, Jade teams up with Liz’s reluctant lawyer, Gabriel Langdon, to get Liz off the hook and out of jail. What she learns will break the case wide open, while unraveling her faith in humanity and the safety she feels living in the Rocky Mountain hamlet she calls home.An exciting thrill ride from the first page, to the last. Read Gilian Baker’s Blogging is Murder, the first book in the Jade Blackwell cozy mystery series!Contact Gilian Baker directly at gilianbakerauthor@gmail.comBLOGGING IS MURDERon AmazonGILIAN BAKER’S WEBSITE