Dreams by Lynn Chandler-Willis

Lynn Chandler Willis

If you hop over to my Facebook timeline and scroll to last year about this time, you’ll probably see a status update about writing my Emmy acceptance speech when I was a little girl. I’m a big TV fan. Always have been and always will be. The Emmys will be awarded tonight. When I was a kid and wrote my acceptance speech it wasn’t for acting, directing, producing — it was for writing. I even wrote a spec script for a show called “The White Shadow” while I was in high school.

Of all the award shows, the Emmys have always been my favorite. Except for the year they snubbed Robert Duvall for best actor for his role in Lonesome Dove. Still shaking my head on that one.

Well, as I aged, my acceptance speech never really wavered. It always ended with the line “dreams really do come true.” Of course the older I got, the more fleeting the dream seemed. But the more encouraging it was to younger writers because, even at my, um, older age, I was living proof, it can be done.

So…where is all this leading us? To my acceptance speech. No, not for the Emmy you silly goose — that’ll be next year. My acceptance speech for winning the 2013 Minotaur Books/Private Eye Writers of America Best First Private Eye Novel competition. Thanks to the Private Eye Writers of America and St. Martin’s Press, my favorite PI, Gypsy Moran, will come to life!
The award was presented Friday night at the Shamus Awards Banquet, coinciding with this year’s Bouchercon. I wasn’t able to actually attend because, well, it costs money and I’ve got six grandkids with birthdays coming up.

So anyway, Robert Randisi, founder and past President of the Private Eye Writers of America, sent me an email last week congratulating me on the win. He says he understands I will not be at the conference but would I like to make a comment to be read. Oh….Robert….you don’t know how long I’ve had this little speech written.


Dreams really do come true.

Dora here. What's your dream?

Does it seem to be fading as the years pass?

What are you doing to make it a reality?

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A little boy, beaten and left to die in an alley.  A cop with a personal life out of control. When their worlds collide, God intervenes. Detective Ellie Saunders's homicide investigation takes a dramatic turn when a young victim "wakes up" in the morgue. The child has no memory prior to his "rising" except walking with his father along a shiny road. Ellie likes dealing with facts. She'd rather leave all the God-talk to her father, a retired minister, and to her partner, Jesse, a former vice cop with an annoying habit of inserting himself into her life. But will the facts she follows puts Ellie's life in mortal danger? And will she finally allow God into her heart forever? 

Lynn Chandler-Willis has worked in the corporate world (hated it!), the television news business (fun job) and the newspaper industry (not a fan of the word "apparently" and phrase "according to"). She keeps coming back to fiction because she likes making stuff up and you just can't do that in the newspaper or television news business.

She was born, raised, and continues to live in the heart of North Carolina within walking distance to her kids and their spouses and her nine grandchildren. She shares her home, and heart, with Sam the cocker spaniel.

She is the author of the best-selling true crime book, Unholy Covenant. Her debut novel, The Rising (Pelican Book Group) was released in July 2013. Chandler-Willis is the 2013 winner of the Minotaur Books/Private Eye Novel Writers of America Best First Private Eye Novel competition for her novel, Wink of an Eye.