Authors Supporting Authors: M.M. Justus

What is your name?  (Include pen names)
My pen name is M.M. Justus.  My legal name is M. Meg Justus.  My mother is the only person who gets away with calling me Mary Margaret.

Where are you from?  
I live within sight of Mt. Rainier, in western Washington state.

What genre are you in?
I've written in several genres including contemporary romance and travel memoir, but most of my books aren't that simple to categorize.  They all have romantic threads, and they all have supernatural elements, but they're primarily adventures set in the not-so-distant past of the late 19th and early 20th centuries of western North America.





Please list your books and the year of publication.
These are original publication dates, which are not the same as what's on the Amazon pages, which record the last time changes were made to the record.

Time in Yellowstone
Repeating History, 2011
True Gold,  2012
"Homesick" (a short story), 2012
Finding Home, 2013
Tales of the Unearthly Northwest
Sojourn, 2014
"New Year's Eve in Conconully" (a short story), 2015
 Reunion (coming this spring)
Much Ado in Montana (contemporary small-town romance), 2014
Cross-Country:  Adventures Alone Across America and Back, 2014

Why are you an Author? 
Because I love to write?  I've wanted to be an author from my earliest memory, and I've been writing since I was a teenager, with only a ten-year gap in my twenties and thirties proximately caused by the university creative writing teacher from hell, whose reason in life was to discourage young writers.  I publish what I write because, as a character (an actor playing an actor) in a movie I enjoy once said, I don't want to practice my expressions in front of the mirror anymore.  I want to share them.

What inspires you?
All kinds of weird things.  My Time in Yellowstone series came to be because, as I was standing awestruck in front of my first eruption of Grand Geyser (not Old Faithful, mind), five incredible 200+ foot bursts, I thought, wow, wouldn't that make a terrific time travel device.  My Tales of the Unearthly Northwest were inspired by two things.  One was the tiny remote town of Conconully, Washington, and its historic flood, and the other was a plaster pig in a store window in the hamlet of Molson, Washington.  My contemporary romance came about as an homage to my favorite Shakespeare play, and my travel memoir because I'd always envied William Least Heat Moon, Bill Bryson, and John Steinbeck for their solo trips.

Where and what times during the day do you work best?  
Have laptop, can write anywhere (where there aren't too many distractions), from the wing chair in my living room to a campground out in the middle of nowhere.  One place I like to go when I'm stuck is the Carbon River area at the northwest corner of Mt. Rainier National Park (about an hour from my house, so I save that for when I'm really stuck).  It's a beautiful rain forest, and a very inspiring place.  I normally write best during the late morning/early afternoon, but I can and do write whenever I can fit the time in -- back when I was working full time, I used to write on my lunch hour. 

Who is your target audience?
That's a hard one, and one I've had a difficult time pinning down in the conventional sense.  If you like stories about a world just odd enough to keep you guessing, events barely plausible enough to feel real even though you know they're fantastical, then you'll like my books.  If you like your history accurate even when you know you're reading about something that couldn't possibly have happened, you'll like my books.  If you enjoy a strong sense of place, and reading about characters who feel like Real People , you'll like my books.

How do you want your readers to feel as they read your book? 
Curious.  Intrigued.  I want them to care about my characters and to be fascinated by the unusual circumstances they've been thrown into.  I want them, just for a little while, to be convinced that time travel, or ghosts, or anything else that we don't think can be real, is.

What is one piece of advice you would give aspiring authors?
Do your due diligence.  Know what you're getting into before you start.  Realize that the actual writing is only half of the job, that no matter how you're published, you have to be as much salesman as writer.  Which means you have to be as much extrovert as introvert.  Which can be a hard pill to swallow for some of us.

Share one thing about yourself that you would like readers to know.
I am an extremely place-oriented person.  I measure my childhood by two things, where we were living at the time (my father was an engineer, and his job caused us to move quite a bit), and whether it was before or after a particular trip we took.  For instance, we rode the mules down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon when I was twelve, and we drove from Southern California to Alaska via the Alaska Highway (back when it was 1200 miles of gravel and 300 miles of frost heaves) when I was fourteen.  A great many of my favorite childhood memories took place while traveling.

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 Blurb for Sojourn:

 Time isn’t everything it appears to be.

State trooper Daniel Reilly never thought he’d wind up in his stepmother’s favorite movie. Chasing a suspected drunk driver through Washington’s desolate Okanogan Highlands is part of his job, but crashing his cruiser and waking up in a ghost town

definitely isn’t. And when that ghost town starts to come to life?

His version of Brigadoon is not a carefree musical.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpt from Sojourn:

Why was I doing this again?

Right. I was trying to catch a probable crazy person who’d most likely already slid off into the canyon herself by now. The dirt under my tires was turning into something resembling a slip ‘n slide, and the track was getting narrower and narrower, and more and more overgrown, although I wasn’t sure that wasn’t just my paranoia making me think so.

I could have reached out and touched the barren rocky hillside through the driver’s side window, and on my right the land dropped away into darkness. Someone’d had a heck of a time blasting this road out of the hill. I edged around yet another curve, hoping for a spot wide enough to turn around and go, well, if not home, then at least back to Omak.

Less than twenty feet ahead of me, a cluster of weirdly flickering lights wavered across the road like giant fireflies in the woods, except we don’t have fireflies here. Not flashlights, the light was too yellow. And were those people? Vague shadows, and I couldn’t tell if they were moving or not. My gut made me slam on the brakes even though I knew better. Not that it did any good. The Vic slid across the mud as if I’d hit the gas instead. I heard someone scream, even through the rolled-up windows. I steered into the skid trying to regain control, but I might as well have yanked the steering wheel loose for all the good it did me.

The very last thing I remember was seeing one of those damned orange larches careening through the windshield straight at me