It’s such a pleasure to bring you the amazing Melissa Yuan-Innes (Melissa Yi). ER Doctor, Award-Winning Author, and much more. She’s going to tell you all about her writing journey.
The Travelling Killer: Words and Wanderlust
By Melissa Yi
Would you like to travel the world in exchange for writing novels? asked an email in my inbox from a travel company. Sure! I wrote back. I mean, I was an emergency doctor with a husband and two little kids, but why not? No, I didn’t get kidnapped. I fell asleep before a night flight to Quito, missed my plane, and spent 24 hours stranded in Mexico City.
I travelled to Egypt next. Although I’d never obsessed over mummies before, I plunged into ancient Egypt, literally and mentally. The scale is otherworldly. After my plane landed in Luxor (once called Thebes) they drove me past Karnak temple. The stone walls kept going. And going. And going. And going. It was sort of like a mall that had taken over city block after block. Only the walls were thousands of years old.
I had no idea that I’d casually driven by 200 acres of temple that took two millennia to build. Then I climbed on a ship that looked like a white multi-story hotel on the water, with an enormous suite for me and my roommate. A few hours later, we visited the Valley of Kings and Queens.
Yes, where they buried King Tut. That evening, I sampled English tea while reclining in a teak lounger as the sun set.
At the same time, I knew I was being sheltered from poverty. The water wasn’t safe to drink – someone told me that their pipe infrastructure contaminates the water – and I realized that the Aswan dam we visited later took water away from other countries. Such things always make you think and as such being aware of my carbon footprint I limit my big trips to once per year.
That’s the travel, the beauty and the inequity. I just had to add the murder. First I wrote for the travel company. Then I set about creating my own thriller.
I struggled with the opening until I started Scorpion Scheme with an event I’d missed. My tour group had been close enough to hear and feel the vibrations from a bomb near the pyramids in Giza. I’d started my tour late because of my son’s birthday party. Later, I asked the very calm locals what that was like. They shrugged. “You know how you have school shootings? We have bombs.” Yikes!
I threw my protagonist, Hope Sze, into her first bombing, and Scorpion Scheme unfolded from there.
Doesn’t my friend Ragini look fantastic.
In 2025, as our world becomes more grim, I knew I wanted to write something lighter: Pride & Provocateur is a variation on Pride and Prejudice that is set in Dildo, Newfoundland. Which meant I had to go to Newfoundland and Labrador.
One day, I drove my kids up to Elliston to see the puffins. This is the closest you can get to puffins on land in North America.
We also sang in the mines on Bell Island, which was one of the few places in North America attacked by the Germans during WWII. And of course we visited Dildo, snapping this photo.
As an emergency physician, I figured I might as well help people while I was at it, so I applied for privileges in the province (an epic task in itself) and served as a hospitalist in Clarenville.
I wrote Pride & Provocateur according to Jane Austen’s recipe, meaning that I followed her chapter beats and points of view, with a modern twist. As soon as I finished the first draft, I felt compelled to describe Merry/Mary Bennet’s story, because she gets the least page-time. I decided to send her to – you guessed it – Egypt! She boards a cruise ship and solves a mystery in the Valley of Kings and Queens.
Merry’s adventure, “The Sailing of the Serpent Goddess,” is now a cover story at Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine .
You can read the opening here: The Sailing of the Serpent Goddess.
The Kickstarter crowdfunding for Pride & Provocateur will open soon.
Please follow if you want to laugh and watch the showdown between the Lixie the glass artist and D’Arcy the tech bro!
If you prefer to stick closer to (my) home, Dr. Hope Sze fights the deadly sin of sloth in Montreal, Canada, in Killing Me Slothly, her most harrowing tale yet.
While a cult threatens to end the world today, Hope heads to the hospital for her neurology rotation. Her first patient says, “I shot a man six times in the head, but I didn’t kill him. You have to believe me.” Hope’s second patient may be the death of her. Meanwhile, someone else wakes up in a hotel with a sinister form of amnesia.
Killing Me Slothly debuts October 1st – it almost broke my brain.
What’s next for my travel and fiction? My family bought tickets to Italy. I may find inspiration for my travel mystery series, which starts with my heroine celebrating her 40th birthday at The Italian School for Assassins. Or I may pen the beginning for the next Hope Sze thriller.
Otherwise, I’ll stick closer to home with our big dog, Roxy, who’s turning 13 on October 7th and is recovering from Thursday’s surgery.
How about you? Are you travelling and/or finding inspiration for your stories?
~ June Lorraine Roberts
Murder in Common is #26 on the Feedspot Top 80 Crime Novel Website
Canada – FIND your local bookstore
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