When you’re a first-time author, things don’t always go according to plan. Just ask Tracey S. Phillips.
Nine years ago, while in her mid-40s, the Middleton-based piano teacher, who holds a degree in music production and engineering from Berklee College of Music, began working on the first title in a planned series of romance novels. When she completed that manuscript, she was excited to pitch it to agents.
“I thought I’d written the next New York Times bestseller,” Phillips says. But she could not find a publisher.
Undaunted, she kept writing — a second title in the romance series, followed by a young adult novel. But it wasn’t until she conceived the idea for a nasty and neurotic female character named Caryn (pronounced “CAR-in”) Klein that Phillips found her groove.
Caryn wound up a central figure in Best Kept Secrets, which was published in October by New York City’s Crooked Lane Books. It’s a combination whodunnit and psychological thriller that features multiple female characters with smoldering secrets. Morgan Jewell is an Indianapolis homicide detective who meets Caryn while working on a grisly case with eerie similarities to the brutal murder of her best friend 16 years earlier.
“The psychological impulses of females drive my stories,” Phillips says. “The likeability of those characters is not really that important to me. I think women characters on the page are more real today, just like we are in real life, and I enjoy digging deep into my female characters.”
Phillips pitched the manuscript for Best Kept Secrets on #PitDark, a Twitter event for writers of unpublished dark fiction, and it caught the attention of an editor from Crooked Lane, which offered her a one-book deal.
“Without an agent, I’m sort of navigating the publishing industry blind,” Phillips says, adding that she still doesn’t have an agent but would like to find one to help her with the business side of writing books: “I still have a lot of questions.”
Best Kept Secrets readers are posting generally positive reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, which took Phillips by surprise. “I spent years getting rejection letters, and then when Best Kept Secrets sold, I just hoped for the best,” she says. “I was really nervous.”
Phillips grew up in Indiana, which is why she set Best Kept Secrets there. She moved from Colorado, where she owned a recording studio, to Madison in 2000 with her husband and children.
Now, at 55, Phillips refers to writing fiction as her “second act.” She’s putting the finishing touches on a psychological thriller about a Colorado woman whose husband dies in a tragic bicycle accident. She then begins receiving mysterious texts from a former boyfriend she hasn’t seen in 30 years.
Phillips plans to pitch that manuscript to Crooked Lane in early 2020, and she’s also working on a second Morgan Jewell book that is set in Madison.
“I can’t stop writing,” Phillips says. “I’ve got lots more.”
