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Tonya Mitchell Books In Order

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Publication Order of Tonya Mitchell Standalone Novels

A Feigned Madness(2020)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Arsenic Eater's Wife(2024)Description / Buy at Amazon

Tonya Mitchell
Ever since Tonya Mitchell read Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” back in high school, she has been drawn to dark stories, especially of the gothic variety. Her influences include: Bram Stoker, and Edgar Allen Poe. More contemporarily, she loves reading the work of Agatha Christie, Laura Purcell, Victoria Holt, Margaret Atwood, and Shirley Jackson.

Tonya was an avid reader as a child. There was never a time that she wasn’t reading something. When she was just 8 years old, she told her mom that she wanted to write a book. No idea what she would write, but knew she wanted to write them. To this day, she cherishes “To Kill a Mockingbird”. She still remembers the first time she read it, the color of the couch, and the way the sun was shining through the window.

When she landed on this story about a woman that pretended she was insane in order to write this newspaper story, Tonya knew that she had landed on something that she was meant to write.

She got her BA in journalism from Indiana University. Her short fiction has appeared in Words Undone, The Front Porch Review, and The Copperfield Review, as well as various anthologies, like Welcome to Elsewhere, Furtive Dalliance, and Glimmer and Other Stories and Poems, for which she won the Cinnamon Press award in fiction.

Tonya is a self-professed Anglophile and is obsessed with everything that relates to the Victorian period. She’s a member of the Historical Novel Society North America and resides in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and three energetic sons.

Her writing process involves tea. A lot of it. But even after she wrote her first novel, she still had to figure out what her process even was. It became mostly teasing out the story, and using research not just as a means to extract the details, however to also see if there were any surprises to take the story in some intriguing direction.

For example, in “A Feigned Madness”, she stumbled on a few passages in Nellie’s asylum story and in her personal letters that lead Tonya to believe that there was some romantic relationship happening behind the scenes. So she ran with this, re-imagining what she believes happened, with whom, and how exactly this relationship would have played out. It was an enormous amount of fun.

She also stole this terrific idea from a marvelous author and bought this huge corkboard to hang above the desk in her office. The goal is to decorate it with all the “Next Book” things so she will have materials visible and at her fingertips. Certainly beats the clutter and piles that she accumulated working on her first novel.

The hardest part of the process is the horrible first draft. Facing the blank page is a horrible monster to her. She knows the first draft is supposed to be bad, they don’t call it the vomit draft for nothing. However it is tough to write drivel and just move on. However that is what you’ve got to do, keep writing badly until it is all down. It is the next passes, the revision, that she prefers because she’s got something to work with to improve on.

Tonya cannot listen to music when she writes. It may bring on a lot of creativity for a bunch of writers, but she is not one of them. It’s far too distracting, unfortunately. Tonya’s a noise canceling headphones sort of person when things get loud, like kids playing and the dog barking.

“A Feigned Madness” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2020. The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat trap. Very easy to get in, however once you’re there it is impossible to get back out.

Elizabeth Cochrane has got a secret. She is not the madwoman with amnesia that the inmates and doctors at Blackwell’s Asylum believe she is. In truth, she is working undercover for the New York World. When the managing editor refuses to hire her since she is a woman, she strikes this deal: in exchange for a job, she will impersonate a lunatic in order to expose this local asylum’s abuses.

Elizabeth, once she arrives at the asylum, realizes that she is forced to make a choice, is she just there to bear witness, or intervene on behalf of these abused inmates? Can she actually interfere without ever blowing her cover? While the superintendent of the asylum continues to grow more suspicious, she knows that her scheme, and her dreams of becoming a journalist in New York, is in jeopardy.

This is a meticulously researched and fictionalized account of the woman that would come to be known as Nellie Bly, daredevil reporter. During a time of cutthroat journalism, while newspapers would battle for readers at any cost, Nellie emerged as one of the very first to break through the gender barrier, a woman that would, through her own daring exploits, forge this trail for women battling for their own place in the world.

“The Arsenic Eater’s Wife” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2024. Constance Sullivan has been accused of murdering her husband. However is she actually guilty? Inspired by a true historical case, this spellbinding novel is going to keep you guessing up until the final heart stopping revelation.

Constance is on trial for murder William, except nobody actually knows the truth about her marriage.

She sits in the dock every day and hears them tell their lies. William was not taking arsenic, and how he was a nobleman and would never hurt anybody. That Constance is a deceitful and cunning woman that should hang for what she has done.

Everybody has betrayed her. The family, her own best friend, the servants. Even her lover. They believe that since she bought the arsenic that she is the one that poisoned him. They believe she is mad. That she is dangerous.

However once the trial has ended that will just be the start. Because she will not rest until she is able to get her revenge, even if she will have to claw herself up from an unconsecrated grave in order to do it.

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