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The Scarlet Pen by Jennifer Uhlarik
Enjoy a tale of true but forgotten history of a 19th century serial killer whose silver-tongued ways almost trap a young woman into a nightmarish marriage.
In 1876, Emma Draycott is charmed into a quick engagement with childhood friend Stephen Dee Richards after reconnecting with him at a church event in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. But within the week, Stephen leaves to “make his fame and fortune.” The heartbroken Emma gives him a special pen to write to her, and he does with tales of grand adventures. Secret Service agent Clay Timmons arrives in Mount Pleasant to track purchases made with fake currency. Every trail leads back to Stephen—and therefore, Emma. Can he convince the naive woman she is engaged to a charlatan who is being linked a string of deaths in Nebraska?
Get your copy of The Scarlet Pen
Jennifer Uhlarik discovered the western genre as a pre-teen, when she swiped the only “horse” book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next ten years, she devoured Louis L’Amour westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. Armed with a B.A. in writing, she has won five writing competitions and finaled in two other competitions. In addition to writing, she has held jobs as a private business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, and her favorite—a full-time homemaker. Jennifer is active in American Christian Fiction Writers and lifetime member of the Florida Writers Association. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband, teenaged son, and four fur children.
Transcript of the podcast:
Liz: Welcome, everyone to this episode of Christian historical fiction talk. I am so glad that you were able to take a little bit of time today to join us as we chat with another fabulous author. Before we get started with today’s guest, I just want to remind you. Yeah. Here comes the reminder. You’re used to it by now. If you have not subscribed to Christian Historical Fiction Talk on your favorite podcasting platform, please be sure to do today. You don’t want to miss out on anything that we have to say. Because if it’s happening in the world of Christian historical fiction, it is happening right here. Also, be sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook because we have some great conversations over there as well. And that’s another great way to be able to find out when we have new podcast going up. Sometimes you also get to have a little bit of input on what we talk about here on the broadcast, And I love it when I’m able to include some of your thoughts into the podcast Today’s show notes could be found on my website, which is liztolsma.com. So be sure to stop over there after you listen to the podcast. You can find out more about today’s author, about the book that we talked about, and there will be a link there for you to purchase the book as well. Be sure to go to liztolsma.com and check out today’s show notes. All right, without further ado, let’s get to today’s guest. She discovered the Western genre as a preteen when she swiped the only horse book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next 10 years, she devoured many westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began writing her own story of the old West. She earned a BA in writing, and she has won five writing competitions and finialed in two others. In addition to writing, she’s held jobs as a private business owner, schoolteacher, a marketing director, and her favorite job of all time is that of a full-time homemaker. And she will tell us a little bit more about herself when she joins us, which is going to be right now. This author is Jennifer Uhlarik. So please join me in welcoming Jennifer to the show today.
Jennifer: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Liz: For the listeners who don’t know you, why don’t we just start with you introducing yourself.
Jennifer: Alright, my name is Jennifer Uhlarik, and I live in Florida. I am a wife, a stepmom, a grandmother, and an author. And I’ve been writing since I was 12, which is a very large part of my life. And so, I’m actually blessed to be able to write full-time.
Liz: You do have a busy life with all that going on with the kids and the step kids and grandkids and everything.
Jennifer: I do.
Liz: With such a busy life, how do you find time to write?
Jennifer: Well fortunately, I’m moving into a stage now, where my son who’s still at home is graduating from college, and he’s looking at hopefully going off into the Navy and, you know, maybe just getting out doing life on his own. So I’m finding a lot more free time for it now but actually, when I started my career, I was a single mom and had a young toddler at home. So I would work my day job and then I would come home and play with him and get supper done. And I would put him to bed and then I would sit down for anywhere between 4 and 6 hours at night and I would write.
Liz: Oh my goodness. You must not need an awful lot of sleep then.
Jennifer: Well, I need a lot more now that I used to. I just can’t, I can’t do those late-night writing stints as well as I once did it.
Liz: Well, good for you, though, for being so dedicated.
Jennifer: Determination. It is, it was a different life.
Liz: Yeah, so your latest release is a romantic suspense called The Scarlet Pen. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the book.
Jennifer: All right. The Scarlet Pen is the last installment of the True Colors series put out by Barbour, and it tells the tale of the historical serial killer Stephen D. Richards, who was known as the Nebraska Fiend or the Nebraska Butcher. And he was known to have killed seven people across a three-year span in the late 1870s. So I tell his story with some fictional characters mixed in. He actually was engaged to a woman and so I have fictionalized his fiancée. And she becomes the romantic hero or heroine in the story. And then Stephen was also passing counterfeit money. And so the romantic hero in the romantic suspense portion is the Secret Service agent who was investigating the counterfeiting.
Liz: Sounds interesting and kind of chilling.
Jennifer: Actually, it was a little different than things that I’ve written in the past. And yeah, it is in some ways. Its darker than anything else I’ve written.
Liz: Yes. Because you usually write westerns, don’t you?
Jennifer: Yes, I do. And there is a Western flair to this story. But yeah, it’s probably not as Western as most anything else I’ve written.
Liz: So then why make the jump from Western to romantic suspense?
Jennifer: A long time ago, I decided that if I was given the opportunity to write things and I had the availability in my schedule to do it, that if somebody was going to entrust me with that opportunity, then I wanted to take it. And I was able to make this, I think, Western enough that it still fit my brand but it was also something that allowed me to grow and stretch a little bit. So it was, you know, it was fun for an intro into a little bit different genre than what I was used to.
Liz: Did you find it really hard to make the jump? And to write the suspenseful portion of the book?
Jennifer: I guess, in some ways, a little bit. But you know, there’s always some suspense in my stories. Not, I mean, I don’t write true suspense, you know, that’s not my typical genre, but to me, there’s always an air of suspense in any good story. So it was just playing up that angle a little bit more.
Liz: Yeah. That’s very true. I think every good story has a level of suspense, so I can see where that would come into play for sure. Yes. How did you go about finding out about these crimes? Because I never heard of them before.
Jennifer: Well, it started with a Wikipedia search about serial killers, and I stumbled across Steven. And actually, my husband was the one who found him, and my husband is a Nebraska native. He was born and raised in Nebraska until he was eighteen. So it really caught his attention that there was a serial killer from Nebraska that fit my timeline. And so, he brought me the idea when he knew I was researching these things. And when I started looking around, in Steven’s case, he actually wrote a 64-page book of confession. So he actually confessed to all of his crimes and the book was published by a newspaper person back, you know, shortly after his death. But it has been reprinted more recently, so I was actually able to buy that book off of Amazon and read from his own mouth the things that he did.
Liz: So that must have made the writing of the book in, especially the part that you write from the villains POV, did it make it easier to do that or was it a little bit more difficult? Because you actually had the real historical facts of it.
Jennifer: I did find that it was. I had to adjust the timeline in order to make things fit into an 80,000-word book, but it was really very interesting to have his confession. And what I was able to do, my husband actually spent 26 years, he worked in the sheriff’s office for 26 years, so he’s got law enforcement training, and he actually worked in the jail all 26 years. So he dealt with people who had committed crimes, and he’s talked with these people, he’s interviewed them, you know, for various reasons and investigating crimes that happened there in the jail. So he was very good at being able to look at what was confessed and you know, kind of what the historical perspective was and help me figure it out where he might have been expounding on things and playing down things. And so I really tried to tap into my husband’s understanding of law enforcement to come to what might have the truth, really bad, because I didn’t necessarily trust everything that Stephen wrote in his confession.
Liz: Good point. And what a great resource to have, right? Right there at your own house.
Jennifer: It was really a godsend on this particular story.
Liz: Was it kind of chilling, though, to delve into the mind of a villain?
Jennifer: It was, yes. You know, I enjoy telling from different perspectives, you know. I liked the stories that have a lot of different points of view, so it was not unusual for me. I’ve written other stories where I’ve gotten into a villain’s perspective, but knowing he was actually a real historic person that was kind of, you know, a little bit strange and chilling.
Liz: So, knowing that these crimes actually happened, I would imagine that really would make it, give you goosebumps as you were writing it at times.
Jennifer: Yes, for sure.
Liz: So, how can you take something like historical crimes factual crimes that these real people did such heinous acts and turn them into a Christian historical novel? How do you go about doing that?
Jennifer: In this particular case, as I was researching the different serial killers that I was considering, I was looking for one that had something redemptive about it already in the story, and there is a truly redemptive portion to the story of Stephen D. Richards, and I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to ruin anything for the readers. But there is a redemptive element in that story that was naturally there, is in the true history. And so that was a lot of what attracted me to that particular story, is there was already something that was, you know, of a redeeming nature. But then I also took the fictional characters and made them believers and there’s actually a lot of play back and forth between the hero and the heroine because she’s engaged to Steven, she doesn’t want to entertain any advances or do anything that might be seen as untoward with the hero. But she does agree that she would share scripture with him. So they’re actually writing back and forth. He becomes the clay, though the hero becomes friends with her family while he’s in their town investigating. And he really becomes good friends with Emma, the heroine’s younger brother, and sister. And so, when they say will write to you, he kind of coyly asks, “Would you also write to me?” to Emma and she says, “No, I won’t write to you. But what I will do is share Scriptures with you. So the two of them are sharing scriptures and prayers back and forth through their letters. So I tried to add that element in there as well.
Liz: What do you hope your readers take away from the book?
Jennifer: I would love for my readers to take away, just the picture of how good God is, and that he is always with us, no matter what we’re going through, you know, in the course of many of my stories. I really put the characters through their paces, as far as the things that they face. And sometimes I push them right to the point where they feel like they just can’t handle anymore and sometimes even up to the point of death and, you know, God shows up and that’s so how God is in real life. So I would love for my readers to be able to see through fiction, and not just min, but through anyone’s fiction, Christian fiction, that God is present and that he is always right there with us. And that when we need him the most, he does show up.
Liz: You mentioned that you were a young single mom when you started off on this writing journey, that you had another different career. What got you into writing? What made you want to start down this path?
Jennifer: Oh, that’s a fun story. Actually, I got bitten by the bug. I think I came out of the womb wanting to write. Actually I have pictures of myself as a young toddler in diapers, sitting at my kitchen table just with pen and paper, and I would just scribble all day long. So I always had a fascination with writing but when I was 12, when I was, seventh grade, I guess, I wound up in school with a friend by the name of Holly, and we would sleep over at each other’s houses quite often, and Holly wound up telling me… She pulled out a spiral notebook one day and said, “I’m writing a novel,” and I said, “A novel?” and she proceeded to tell me. So we sat and read some of what she was writing, and I was so impressed, but at the same time, I was also kind of having this crisis of, you know, I’m now at the age where it’s not really cool to play pretend anymore. All my friends are getting into boys and older things‑makeup and whatever-and I wasn’t ready to give up playing pretend. I still had all of these great adventures and things I wanted to play out. And so when she said to me that I’m writing a novel, I decided, well, she can do it, I can do it too. And so I started writing, and all of a sudden, I figured out I can play pretend. I just have to write it down, and then everybody thinks I’m writing, but I’m actually playing. That was what got me into it. I have not stopped.
Liz: I love that. The idea that writing a novel is a grown-up’s way of keeping playing pretend like they did when they were kids. Now, you know, my secret, I think it was the same way for me too. I never thought of it that way. But yeah, I always had a million stories going on in my head, and we had quite elaborate imaginative games we played when we were children, so it makes total sense.
Jennifer: Yes, absolutely. And you can come up with more.
Liz: There are never enough hours in the day. I will never live long enough, I don’t know about you, but I will never live long enough to write all the ideas that are swimming around in my head. That’s for sure.
Jennifer: That’s right.
Liz: This is the last book in the True Colors Crime series, as you mentioned, book number 12, and it’s coming to a close. I know some of the readers will be quite sad about that. It’s been very popular series, although Barbour has a couple of other series they’re starting. What’s up next for you?
Jennifer: I am currently working on one for the Doors to the Past also through Barbour. That is their split-time series, and so I am writing Love’s Fortress, and I’m not exactly sure which book that’s going to be in the series. Each book is supposed to take place in and around a landmark, and so the landmark that I’ve chosen, I’m actually for the first time ever writing about Florida where I live, and so I chose the landmark of St. Augustine and the Castillo de San Marcos which is the big fort that’s up there. And the thing that really attracted me to the fort is that in the 1870s, they incarcerated Native Americans in the fort. It was called Port Merrion at the time, and so my historical timeline takes place in 1875 when the Cheyenne and Arapaho in a few other tribes, 72 of the Indians were taken from out west and brought to St. Augustine and incarcerated there in the fort. So that’s my historical timeline. And then, my contemporary timeline is set in present-day also in St. Augustine. And it will deal with some of the artwork that was drawn in the 1870s. So that’s the tie-in between the two timelines is the artwork the Native Americans made while they were there.
Liz: That sounds really interesting, very fascinating. And you still managed to slip a little bit of Western in there, didnt you?
Jennifer: Yes, I did. Yes, I did.
Liz: Like you said, staying true to your brand. I like that.
Jennifer: That’s right.
Liz: And when does that one release?
Jennifer: That one releases next March, March of 22.
Liz: Okay.
Jennifer: And I’m actually a really enjoying the chance to write in the Contemporary genre again. I have not done so for, oh gosh, probably 15 or 20 years, and I’ve never written a full novel with the contemporary timeline. I’ve only done short stories. So I’ve always been historical, but I’m really enjoying diving into the contemporary and having that instant access that, hey, I can pick up a cell phone, actually call someone, not have to go spend it on a horse and ride somewhere to tell somebody.
Liz: That is true. So if listeners want to connect with you, where can they find you?
Jennifer: Well, I am on Facebook. I have both an author page and my personal page, and I accept readers, and listeners, both on my personal and my professional. I do have my Pinterest page, and Ive got Instagram. I’m pretty much all over the place. I’m not terribly active anywhere. I need to be more active, and then, of course, you can look up www.jenniferuhlarik.com, and that’s my website. That’s where I keep a list of all my books and awards and so forth. So, where you can see sample chapters of everything that I’ve written.
Liz: Fabulous. Do you have any last words for the listeners?
Jennifer: Well, I would just say that with the True Colors series coming to a close with my story that I hope you all will enjoy it and be blessed by it. That it will hopefully make you think and just really evaluate where is God in your life.
Liz: Thank you so much for being with us. Jennifer. We certainly have enjoyed having you.
Jennifer: Thank you, Liz. It’s been wonderful to be here.
Liz: That about does it for our time with Jennifer. Wasn’t it great to get to know her a little bit? She and I have both worked for Barbour for some time and have been in several novella collections together as well as both part of the True Colors Crime series and as well as the Doors to Past series. So it’s great to chat with her. If you’d like to find out more about Jennifer, about the Scarlet Pen, or if you’d like a really convenient link to purchase the Scarlet Pen, please head over to my website, which is liztolsma.com, and you’ll find all that information right there at your fingertips. Please join me next week when my guest is going to be another terrific author, Ann Gabhart. I’m looking forward to our conversation. And I know you’re going to want to be here to hear what we have to talk about. That’s about all the time we have for today. Thank you once again for joining me, and we will see you next time.