Meet Award-winning Author Melissa Yi!

It's my pleasure to welcome a fellow Mesdames of Mayhem and award-winning writer, Melissa Yi, to this page!

 Melissa and I have done an 'interview turnabout' - meaning, she set some questions for me, and I did the same for her.  I've started with her interview, and have dropped mine at the bottom.

First, love the pix.  Are we Canadian or what?  Red heels in the snow!  (great title for a short story, don't you think?) 

Here we go!

I absolutely love the first chapter of Sugar and Vice.  Your first line is brilliant.  That last sentence is a textbook way to end a first chapter; perfect foreshadowing.  It also provides a terrific example of my comment above:  one needs a balance between bathos and pathos.  The dialogue between Hope and friends is full of fun, but…here’s the ‘awe’ moment.  We know there is going to be something serious at stake, and Hope will be in the thick of it.  Her own self could be at risk!

1. Melissa, like you, most of my career has been in health care.  I’ve seen a lot of things I wish I could forget.  Do you find writing humorous fiction a welcome escape from your day job? 

Yes! Sometimes I like to write about medicine straight up, like in the essays in The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World collection, which I started after a patient called me the most unfeeling doctor he’d ever met. I do change patient details, but sometimes I want to write, “This happened,” with or without humour.

Other times, I escape hard stories outright by writing comedy, fantasy, science fiction, or romance with a happy ending and/or a new world. It makes life a lot more cheerful and bearable!

2. Why crime?  I know you also write Sci-fi (as I have) but most of your fiction is steeped with crime.  What drives you to this genre?

Ooh, I’ll have to read your SF too!

Crime means that no matter what happens, you end with a sense of justice. Sometimes other writers blow my mind with the cleverness of the villain and therefore the sleuth.

Although my residency in Montreal was tough at the time, like my family medicine clinic had no running water (I literally had to run down the hall to heat up a metal speculum), I can look back at laugh and write about it now. I love a doctor who saves lives and fight killers.

Readers do ask for more Hope, even if they can’t pronounce her last name. Psst, it’s Sze, which you can pronounce like the letter C.

And who says you have to choose? In Hope’s Seven Deadly Sins series, paranormal elements infiltrate Hope’s world, starting with ghosts in The Shapes of Wrath (https://windtreepress.com/portfolio/the-shapes-of-wrath/) and dragons in Sugar and Vice (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/melissayi/sugar-and-vice-a-novel-of-death-dumplings-and-dragons)

3. ‘Sugar and Vice’ is the best title I’ve seen in years, and spot on for our genre. I’m miffed I didn’t think of it first!  What was your inspiration for this particular story?

Thank you! I knew I’d write about gluttony as Hope’s second deadly sin, but how and why would people would die over food? I wrestled over that for a long time.

I started researching mukbangs, videos where people livestream their meals, sometimes in unusual ways, like discussing true crime over cheesy lasagna. Strange but true.

I also took a look at dragon boat racing.

Somehow, my brain invented the Dragon Eats festival, which combines dragon boat racing with food competitions. I knew Hope would run into murder there!

As for title envy, nothing quite fit, and I wished I’d come up with another great title, Sugar and Spite. While walking my dog, I realized that Sugar and Vice fit my book even better!

I have to thank cozies for the inspiration, since I named The Shapes of Wrath after reading The Crêpes of Wrath.

I steal, I mean, get inspired, by everything!

 Melissa Yi is an emergency physician and award-winning writer. In her latest crime novel, WHITE LIGHTNING, Dr. Hope Sze’s romantic getaway at a Windsor Prohibition hotel morphs into a ghost-ridden historical crime scene with potential links to Al Capone. Previous Hope Sze thrillers were recommended by The Globe and Mail, CBC Books, and The Next Chapter as one of the best Canadian suspense novels. Yi was shortlisted for the Derringer Award for the world’s best short mystery fiction. Under the name Melissa Yuan-Innes, she also writes medical humour and has won speculative fiction awards. http://www.melissayuaninnes.com/

 

MELISSA AND MELODIE SWITCH PLACES!

Here I am, in the hot seat now; love these unique questions!

 1.     Sugar or vice? Meaning, do you prefer sweet and cozy or edgy? You can interpret this how you like.

 You could have knocked me over with a cannoli when I saw people were calling “The Merry Widow Murders” a cozy!  It’s neither sweet nor cozy, with many references to the aftermath of WW1, and the deep grief felt from Lucy, my young widowed protagonist.  It is, however, the type of book I like to read myself.  A traditional mystery where the reader is challenged to race along with the protagonist to discover the murderer.  In my case, I can’t help adding a lot of comic relief, mainly in the form of Lucy’s pickpocket-turned-maid Elf, and the banter that takes place between the two of them. 

 So I like a bit of an edge with my crime; a balance, so to speak.  You can’t be laughing all the time, or humour becomes banal.

 2. As "Canada's Queen of Comedy," do you find it effortless to incorporate humour into your writing, or is it like a muscle you have to work?

 I am reminded of the old performers’ adage: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”  So I have to smile and say, no, it’s not easy, but writing serious suspense is even harder for me!  It takes me a year to write a novel.  I can’t stay in a dark head-space for that length of time.

 Perhaps it’s habit.  I got my start writing comedy in the 90s; I wrote standup for comedians, and had a regular humour column in two papers.  I had 24 short stories published before I even tried to write a novel.  Surprisingly, many of them were dark, with twist endings.  But when I came to write a novel, I fell back on what I do naturally: make it funny.  To be honest, I’ve tried to write straight, but every time I do, a natural quip comes to me that I just can’t resist, and the tension breaks when it shouldn’t!  So I’ve given up, and admitted that I will never be the Margaret Atwood of Mystery.  Instead, one reviewer for Ellery Queen called me “the Carole Burnett of Crime."  If only I could find Tim Conway...

 

NEWS! READERS DIGEST TO PUBLISH COLUMN by Melodie Campbell

Just signed contract with READERS DIGEST, for WORLD RIGHTS (22 COUNTRIES) for:

"WHO ELOPES AT 65?  WELL, WE DID!"

pub date to come...

THE GLOBE AND MAIL - by Melodie Campbell, WHO ELOPES AT 65? (Published today, Sept 7, 2023)

 

FIRST PERSON

Who elopes at 65? We did – because, well, why not?

MELODIE CAMPBELL

CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

PUBLISHED YESTERDAYUPDATED 3 HOURS AGO

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First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

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ILLUSTRATION BY CHELSEA O'BYRNE

I could start this story with the day Mike got down on one knee at the dinner table to propose marriage, and then couldn’t get up without help (damned arthritis).

Or the day he said, “We’re going to piss off some people, whatever we do. Why not piss off everyone and elope?”

But really, we go farther back – 47 years, in fact. Mike and I got to know each other in our first year studying commerce at Queen’s University. He was a cool guy, and we both loved sailing and playing tennis. But I was engaged to someone else, so we stayed friends instead.

And life moseyed on, as it does.

My beloved husband Dave had died of cancer a year before the COVID-19 lockdown. Mike’s marriage had ended in divorce. During the bitter loneliness that came with solo living during the pandemic, he found me on Facebook and we started talking. Long story short, he arrived at my house with flowers and an overnight satchel, and we spent the rest of lockdown together, catching up on 40 years.

Until the day he proposed. And then we had some decisions to make.

Public gatherings at the time were limited to 10 people. Our kids and their families added up to more than that, not to mention best friends and our siblings. Any wedding was going to result in people being excluded; how could we choose which ones to include?

That’s when Mike came up with the wacky idea that we should elope. Who elopes at 65? Isn’t that a kid thing to do?

“Think of all the people we can shock,” he said. I said: “Make it the tackier the better.”

He suggested a little log cabin chapel in Niagara, Ont., that does drive-through weddings. “Perfect!” I said.

We got in touch. The delightful people who run the place gave us the following warning: Don’t tell anyone you are eloping in advance. If you do, some will show up to surprise you and they will take photos that will show up on social media, and then people who weren’t told in advance will be upset that you didn’t include them. Sounded like good advice, so we kept mum. And giggled like school kids about how we were planning this secret runaway.

The day came and it was absolutely delightful. The opposite of tacky. The chapel owners knew I was an author, and asked if they could use our wedding photo along with my bio on their website for promotion. Sure, I said. No problem. Nobody I knew would ever think to look at a small chapel website.

Such innocence. But who truly understands the baffling empire that is Facebook?

Mike took me to Tim Hortons for our wedding meal and told me I could have “anything I wanted.” The whole day cost us less than $400; it was something to make commerce grads proud.

We went home and kept ourselves nicely busy in the way of newlyweds. So it wasn’t until the following day that we realized all hell had broken loose.

People started congratulating Mike on Facebook: 20 people, 40 people, then 80 people. I was shocked when my mystery author blogsite became overwhelmed. We were seriously hyperventilating. We hadn’t told our kids, and here it was on Facebook?

Mike found the photo that was being shared around the world: Mike and I at the chapel, holding our marriage certificate up for the camera. And with the photo came a complete bio of my life, books published and awards, so that no one could mistake it for anyone but me. We were perplexed! How could everyone be seeing this?

I have set my Facebook page so that friends and readers cannot share things without my permission. But that doesn’t work for business pages like the one run by the log cabin chapel. Facebook will show you ads/posts that they think you might be interested in. So if your friend group includes me, you might be interested in a post that someone else posts about me.

In effect, my Facebook friends were shown a picture of me in my wedding finery that I had yet to see myself.

Cat out of the bag, we quickly texted our kids. My two girls sighed, said, “What will mom do next?” and something to the effect that, “Thank God Mike is around to look after her because, honestly, someone has to.”

I thought that was a pretty good reaction. Mike laughed.

Other people weren’t as initially cheerful. We learned that – indeed – a lot of friends and relatives want to be told in advance that you are going to do something like this. Mike pointed out that the whole point of eloping is you don’t tell anyone in advance. They’ve forgiven us by now.

That’s where I think the age issue comes in: If you are young and elope, people cheer you on as romantics. When you are 65 and elope, people think you’ve gone nuts.

But when you want to be with someone and you don’t have many decades left, and the world is in lockdown, love is a precious thing. You don’t need the expensive dress, the wedding gifts, the fancy reception.

Making a happy commitment only needs two people, no matter how old they are.

Melodie Campbell lives in Burlington, Ont., with her husband Mike O’Connell.

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