During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, a mother and daughter, both sharing a love of literature, each finished writing their respective novels and got them published within months of each other.
Pierina Procino Di Zazzo just finished writing her second book, Coastal Fear, a murder mystery that’s a sequel to The Locked Door, published in 2016.
“This is the second installment from my murder mystery series. It’s the same characters, the two sisters,” Di Zazzo told Global News near her Montreal home.
Di Zazzo says she’s always had a love of writing and is already thinking about a third book to the series.
Coastal Fear was published earlier this year just before Di Zazzo’s daughter, Amanda, wrote and published her first novel, Flashes, on Oct. 31.
It was a book the mother of two and contract lawyer started when she was only 12 years old.
“I was quite surprised with myself, to be honest, because just to see how my brain was wired so many years ago. It was interesting to know how I developed and how I thought at the time,” Amanda said.
She started re-writing the book a couple of years ago and took advantage of her maternity leave and self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m very pleased with it, absolutely. I’ve gotten some good feedback and it was an accomplishment,” she said.
Amanda grew up in a home filled with books and literature. Her mother is thrilled with her daughter’s accomplishment.
“Words cannot describe how proud I am of my daughter that she did something that she also wanted to do,” Pierina said.
Both Coastal Fear and Flashes are self-published, an inexpensive way for authors to get their books to market.
“Today, people choose to self-publish, they want to self-publish. They don’t want to go the route of a trade publisher. They want control of their book, they want their book out in a more timely fashion,” Suzanne Anderson, author of Self Publishing in Canada, told Global News.
The three books by the Montreal authors are available on Amazon and could be great fictional reads during these non-fictional pandemic times.