Saturday, October 9, 2021

 

Continuing with Lee Hollis Weekend. 

Here's a word from Lee! 

📙📖📙📖📙

Hi all and Happy fall. 

A big thank you to Lisa K for allowing our book to shine for the weekend!!!

I’m sitting here wondering where in the world has this past year gone?

Here we are already into October and I still haven’t even finished the books I collected for my summer reading, I guess they will become my winter reading books.

But on the bright side we just finished another book in the Hayley Powell Food & Cocktail Mystery series “Death of an Ice Cream Scooper” Which will be released 2022 and we are already working on a new one after that.

All this looking forward is great but recently I was asked to participate in a Twitter event being held by Cozy Mystery Book Club Oct. 12 at 7 p.m. 

The book that they are reading is our first book “Death of a Kitchen Diva” and I honestly haven’t read this book since we wrote it back in 2011 so I recently picked it up and went through it again and it reminded me why when asked I’ve always said this is my favorite book.

“Death of a Kitchen Diva” is my favorite because it the book that started it all and I have enjoyed every minute of it.

Diva as my brother and I call it was loosely based on my life at the beginning.

I was an office manager at the Mount Desert Islander Newspaper in Bar Harbor Maine, a single mom of three children two girls and one boy (Hayley has two kid's) and I wrote the food and cocktail column for the newspaper.

I told stories about my kids or myself with food involved and for some reason and I’m definitely not complaining it became a favorite among readers.

I loved writing that column and did so until I decided to make a change in my life and move to North Carolina where I still reside but go to Bar Harbor as often as I can to visit my son and grandchild, friends and eat as much seafood as possible.

I’m grateful every day for all of you that enjoy the series and continue  reading which allows us to continue writing it!!!

I hope everyone is having a great fall and keep in touch and let me know what your reading and how we are doing.

We have more Novella’s coming out and Hayley and her friends are still in the sleuthing business with lots of new and exciting changes.

No spoiler but for those of you who have read “Death of an Italian Chef” you have seen a major change happen.

Love to you all and keep reading

Lee Hollis

Rick Copp was two years out of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts when he was tapped at 24 years old to become a staff writer on the enormously popular NBC sitcom The Golden Girls in 1988. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, especially for a boy from Bar Harbor, Maine, who grew up dreaming of living underneath the famous Hollywood sign, a dream that became a reality soon after his arrival in Los Angeles.

He spent the next five years writing for a number of series including the critically acclaimed and commercially successsful hits NBC’s Wings, FOX’s Flying Blind and HBO’s Dream On.

In 1995, he teamed up with screenwriter Laurice Elehwany, who wrote the popular MaCauley Culkin comedy drama My Girl and together they co-wrote the big screen TV remake The Brady Bunch Movie, which was a major box office hit for Paramount Pictures. This led to many more feature writing assignments for Universal, Warner Brothers, Imagine Entertainment, The Jim Henson Company among others as well as uncredited rewrites on Howard Stern’s Private Parts and The Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas.

But Rick has also stayed very busy in television co-creating and executive producing a campy, fun TV revival of the ‘80s David Hasselhoff hit Team Knight Rider where he also played the recurring role of Clayton the Chef. He’s written for a wide variety of series including Secret Agent Man, Barbershop, executive produced by Ice Cube, and Jack of All Trades starring Bruce Campbell. He’s created and written many television pilots for most of the major networks including ABC, CBS, MTV, Lifetime, USA, Nickoleon and Logo including two produced one hour prime time mystery pilots Homewood P.I. for CBS starring Tony Danza and Soccer Moms for ABC starring Kristin Davis. Recently he’s written five episodes of the late night Cinemax anthology crime series Femme Fatales under the pen name Richard Hollis, which also provided him the opportunity to return to acting playing a befuddled professor in three episodes. Acting is a hobby Rick still loves to indulge.

Rick has always kept a strong presence in children’s television programming as well, which began with him co-writing the popular animated feature Scooby Doo and the Witch’s Ghost. Its success led to him writing multiple episodes of the Cartoon Network smash hit Teen Titans as well as story editing the first season of Warner Brothers’ Loonatics Unleashed. His passion in life is traveling so it was a special treat for him to work abroad on another successful animated series called Chi Rho -The Secret produced by Cross Media and broadcast by KiKa in Germany.

In 2001, Rick decided to fulfill another goal and write a mystery novel. He had been playing around with a character named Jarrod Jarvis, a former child star on a hit ‘80s sitcom called Go to Your Room! who had his very own catch phrase, “Baby, don’t even go there!” Jarrod’s unbridled curiosity led him to investigate a series of sordid Hollywood murder mysteries in between acting audtions. The first book The Actor’s Guide to Murder (Kensington, Nov 2003) was very well received and was followed by two sequels The Actor’s Guide to Adultery (Kensington, Nov 2004) and The Actor’s Guide to Greed (Kensington, Nov 2005), which was nominated for a LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Mystery. He wrote a stand alone book called Fingerprints & Facelifts (Kensington, July 2007), an homage to his favorite TV series as a child, Charlie’s Angels. A crack team of female private investigators known as the LA Dolls, who had a very successful detective business in the late ‘80s were long retired and living separate lives, but were forced to reunite when someone from their past began targeting their children. Lifetime Television optioned the book for a TV movie and hired Rick to adapt his own novel as a teleplay.

Another childhood obsession of Rick’s was collecting comic books and he was able to realize yet another dream by writing a graphic novel Celebrity Zombie Killers (Ape Entertainment, March 2010), best described as “a twisted, hilarious mash-up of MTV's The Hills meets 28 Days Later.”

Holly Simason is an award winning food and cocktails columnist who worked for the Mount Desert Islander newspaper in Bar Harbor, Maine for ten years. While working at the paper, she won her first award for her column in 2010. And the successful Hayley Powell Food & Cocktails Mystery series was born!


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2 comments:

  1. Thank you! It's so interesting to find out more about the people behind the books. Such interesting lives! Looking forward with great excitement to reading "DEATH OF AN ITALIAN CHEF".
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