Tracey S. Phillips Shows Off Her Hats

The author of Best Kept Secrets plays with both actual and metaphorical chapeaux

Not only is Tracey the Birds’ founder and fearless leader, she’s the author of multiple other thrillers. Find out more about her on her website, www.traceysphillips.com, and buy her books on the Blackbird Writers site.

Back when I was a teenager I collected hats for fun. I loved wearing them too. Cowboy hats, dress hats, fancy hats with feathers, and top hats. My collection grew so out of control that my dad built me a hat rack and hung it on the wall above my closet doors. It stretched about 12 feet, the length of the wall.

And I filled every peg.

Donning a hat is much like putting on a mask. It disguises you, which can be empowering. It makes you taller. It makes you someone else. Someone with a hat. So much like life, where we wear many different . . . you know. Daughter, wife, mother, nurse. Cook. Professional. Author. Caretaker. Sultry vixen. Lover.

Isn’t that what being a writer is? The ability to see the world through different characters’ eyes?

I’m currently working on the second book in my Detective Morgan Jewell Series. Morgan is an Indianapolis detective with a fractured past. When her best friend was murdered, Morgan was diagnosed with Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress. And she stopped remembering what happened in the days leading up to her friend’s murder. The case went cold. Later she became a detective so she could find her friend’s killer. In the book Best Kept Secrets, Morgan believes she has caught up to Fay’s killer. If you read it, you know. No spoilers here!

In book two, Mother of Secrets, Morgan goes undercover. She’s looking for a missing man. She wears a civilian hat to get close to a pair of drug dealers in Wisconsin. In this book her memories of Fay are still returning. Morgan has to disguise her truth –to pretend she’s someone else—to get to the killer in this book. She won’t put her police detective hat back on until she makes an arrest at the end of the book.

While I’m writing, I’m the author, creating her story. And then I put my editor hat on, fix those mistakes, correct my bad grammar and look for misspellings that auto correct missed. During the day I can be correspondent, researcher, publicist and marketer. While I’m at my writing desk I easily shift from role to role without thinking about it much. Like writing a book in multiple perspectives.

My 2025 release, Forewarned, (coming up August 1^st) has three points of view. I love getting into the heads of my characters, learning what they think, how they think, and how they respond. When I’m wearing my Daphne Post hat, (she’s the main character in Forewarned) I think like the 15 year-old me would. She’s a little impulsive, will do just about anything to get in your good graces, and she loves to play the piano. She also gets prickles up and down her arms whenever she touches someone’s skin. Daphne hates knowing her friends’ secrets, knowing what will happen in the future. But that’s her psychic gift—or curse—and she won’t tell a soul.

Lara Vaughan, another POV character in Forewarned, is 17. She can’t wait to get out of Indiana. She dreams of becoming an actress and will do just about anything to kill the numbing boredom of the summer of ’76. Yep. Anything.

And Mark Walters is a young man I’d like to meet. Though he’s been dealt a bad hand and had to spend time in prison, he’s able to see things with an honest perspective. He understands people. His burden is that he can’t go back to prison. He tries hard to make good choices but is sometimes forced into a situation.

One of the best things about being a writer is getting to see the world through another lens and learning different ways of living in it. Wearing another’s hat, so to speak. It’s what I enjoy most about being an author.

Tracey S. Phillips founded Blackbird Writers during the early 2020 quarantine days. She wished to create a community of like-minded authors willing to help promote each other and share their love of stories with readers. Blackbirdwriters.com is that dream come true. Tracey considers herself a serial artist who is an avid gardener and proficient pianist. She teaches piano lessons, loves to draw, and writes in two genres. Her debut, BEST KEPT SECRETS (Crooked Lane Books, 2019) won a Hugh Holton Award in 2018. She is a two-time finalist for the Claymore Award (’22, and ’23) for best unpublished fiction. She and her husband live near Madison, Wisconsin, and are empty-nesters.