Meet Suzanne Baginskie

 

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Suzanne Baginskie. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Suzanne, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

I definitely credit my father, who always told us we could do anything we put our mind too. I grew up in household of four children, three girls and one boy. As the eldest, I assumed the responsibility of taking care of my younger siblings. My father worked hard in those days, but he had an artistic knack and love for drawing and painting. Every house we lived in had a desk in the living room until he passed away. He’d rise around five a.m. and worked on his craft, before going to his employment. I watched him steal off-time moments to consistently meet deadlines and pursue his passion. He never let the rejections get him down. Eventually, he became a well-known cartoonist and sold cartoons to many markets, such as Woman’s World, and the New York Times. He gave me the greatest example of applying yourself and I still followed his work ethic example and prioritize my writing time.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

After retiring from my position as a paralegal-office manager at a law firm, I now devote my days to writing. For several years I wrote and sold short stories of fiction and non-fiction. During covid, I wrote my first book and submitted it to a couple of publishers. My goal was to be an author and have a book cover with only my name on it. Luck have it, Magnolia Blossom Publishing offered me a contract to write romantic suspense. I came up with a series title called FBI Affairs and they have published four of my novels, with the fifth one on the way. All the titles start with Dangerous, such as Dangerous Charade, Dangerous Revenge, Dangerous Innocence and Dangerous Undercurrents. When I write, I weaved together elements of mystery, suspense and a bit of romance. I have a particular fascination for strong female FBI characters and their equally captivating male counterparts. Their stories often revolve around cybercrimes and the harrowing world of human and drug trafficking. The Special FBI agents work side by side to combat these dangerous criminal activities and at time fall in love, I have achieved my title of author and I’m now working on my sixth book.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I took a good look back at my life and realized when it pointed me in the direction of writing. The first is the five-year diary my mother gave me at age eight. I faithfully wrote my daily trials and tribulations in there. Another was my first library card, that opened up a world of reading that turned into my love of books. Later in life, I took up pen-paling with thirteen other women. Before I knew it, I had sixty pen pals, worldwide. When I started writing for the confession magazines with no byline, the payment I received funded my conferences where I picked up more skills and also networked with other writers. I believe a new writer who wants to break into today’s writing market will need to start with determination and persistence. They’ll need fresh ideas, good typing and computer skills. Rejections are the hardest major hump to get over, but that first sale will cure all the pain. They’ll need to keep trying and to focus hard on their structure and correctness. Plus, make sure they connect with other new writers and join some critique groups. Their advice is invaluable, and they’ll also need a pair of strong shoulders to take the criticism, but in the end, it will help them succeed.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

I’ll dedicate this answer to my Literary Ladies of Crime critique group. For short, we call ourselves LLC. This group all started when I read a callout for new writers who wanted to form a critique group in a 2009 Florida Mystery Writers of America newsletter. They said they would place you with other writers in your area, so you could form a local critique group. My sister and I are both writers and live close by, so she did the same thing. But their response put us together with three others who lived miles and miles away. Through a couple of emails, we compromised and decided to meet each other in the center of the state. The first meeting went well. None of us knew each other, but by the meetings end, we were all anxious to meet again. We met twice a month for many years, until two members moved further away. So, we started to critique by email, and it worked out well for us all. Fifteen years later, we are still together, and we attend the annual Bouchercon and Sleuthfest Conferences every year and all of us have been published.

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