JENNIFER K. MORITA – Journalist by Day – Murder by Night

Feb 20, 2025 | Mystery, Thriller | 6 comments

Former newspaper reporter Jennifer K. Morita writes stories for Sacramento State by day and murder mysteries by night. She is a member of SinC, Crime Writers of Color, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. Jennifer is also active with her local SinC chapter, Capitol Crimes, where she served as vice president and president. She edited Capitol Crimes 2024 Anthology Farm to Foul Play.

Jennifer was a runner up for the Sisters in Crime Eleanor Taylor Bland Award in 2022.

She is a former Sacramento Bee reporter, is a senior writer for University Communications at Sacramento State. When she isn’t pushing Girl Scout cookies, she enjoys reading, experimenting with recipes, taking leisurely hikes, doing Zumba, and doing hot hula.

Her debut novel, GHOSTS OF WAIKĪKĪ, has been nominated for a Left Coast Crime Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery. It’s about an out-of-work journalist who reluctantly becomes the ghostwriter for a controversial developer. When she stumbles into murder – and her ex – she discovers coming home to paradise can be murder.

Where do you write? What, if any, distractions do you allow? I wrote Ghosts of Waikīkī in my old kitchen. We moved last summer, and now that I finally have an office with bookshelves and a good Zoom background, I’m still writing in my kitchen—or at least part of the time. I work at the kitchen island when I’m baking or needing to keep an eye on dinner and to be honest, I love writing about the heart of our home. Only now, I have the luxury of retreating to an office when a few extra squealing teenagers are in the house.

But being a mom means constant distractions—the kind you can’t ignore. So, I have to be flexible about where I write. I like cafes where I can get a good cup of coffee and ignore the giggling teens because they aren’t mine.

I also work out sentences on my phone while waiting in the pick-up line at school or on my iPad, guarding my front row spot in Zumba an hour before class. My writer friend, Hawaiʻi noir author Scott Kikkawa, told me he likes writing in bars and mentioned one in Kaimukī. I’m adding it to my list of places to go to write the next time I’m on O‘ahu.

What are you currently working on? I’m working on a second Maya Wong book. I’m not under contract, so fingers crossed that my publisher will want more of Maya. I have a few more ideas rattling around, including a mystery set in Sacramento’s declining Japantown about a woman who runs her family’s hundred-year-old mochi shop with her grandmother and secretly writes a true-crime blog.

I’m also mulling over a dual-timeline standalone about a bartender in San Francisco Chinatown whose customer drunkenly confesses a terrible secret and is found murdered in Portsmouth Square hours later.

A while ago, there was a dust-up between two women vying for a front row spot at a popular Zumba class I attend. I missed class that day but heard all about it the following week. Talk about spilling the tea! The chatter died down, but tensions flared again the other day. And now I have to write about murder in a Zumba class. But I won’t use my real name for that book ‘cause I want to keep my front row spot.

How do you come up with character names? I’ve always liked the name Maya, but I couldn’t sell it to my husband when I was pregnant with our first daughter. While I’m not the “yes dear” kind of wife, he was a middle school teacher at the time (now an elementary school principal) who had multiple Mayas in all of his classes. Fair point.

So, I used the name for my protagonist in Ghosts of Waikīkī instead, and I think it worked out for the best. I also shamelessly stole names from friends and acquaintances, raided my Hawaiʻi school yearbooks, and consulted the Social Security website to come up with character names for my first book.

Now, I collect names I like. I’ve got them scattered in random notes on my phone. The guy at the Hertz rental car stand in Honolulu, a kid in my daughter’s fifth-grade class, the woman who helped me put on my yukata for Obon Odori – they’ll all be character names someday.

I am picky about central character names, though. A lot of thought goes into them, and I play around with how they sound for a while before I commit. It’s almost as important as naming a child.

How long did it take you to write your first book? Twenty-plus years ago, when I was working at a suburban weekly covering local government, I initially thought of writing an amateur detective series featuring an Asian American newspaper reporter. I thought it was going to be set in Sacramento. I played around with character and plot ideas, but nothing gelled. Years later, when I was a stay-at-home-mom doing freelance writing, I started thinking more about that book I’d always wanted to write. The pandemic gave me the chance to finally do it.

I began plotting in September of 2020, writing in October, and finishing my first draft in January of ‘21. Mind you, we were sheltering in place, so there were no school drop-offs or pick-ups, no shuttling kids to dance classes or Girl Scout meetings. I didn’t even have to change out of my pajamas in the morning.

I sent out a few cold queries, got instantly rejected, and tinkered around with my manuscript, query letter, and synopsis before querying again. I signed with my agent, Lori Galvin, in May of ‘21.

How long to get it published? It took me two years to rehaul and revise my manuscript before Lori, and I felt it was ready to pitch to publishers. It was all over the place, with too many characters and themes. I scrapped a whole storyline, cutting about two-thirds of my manuscript. I had to stop saying I was “revising” and finally admit that I was rewriting my book.

Lori recommended Paula Munier’s PLOT PERFECT, and it helped me figure out what story I wanted to tell and how to structure my plot. I took many online writing classes, including just about every webinar offered by the Sisters in Crime Guppy chapter.

Of course, this is when my kids went back to school, and all their activities slowly ramped up again. I also returned to work full time, writing for University Communications at Sacramento State. I also served as vice president of our local SinC chapter, Capitol Crimes.

I got frustrated with myself for taking so long, but in retrospect, it might have been a blessing. Those two years gave me time to join a writing community where I could watch and learn from other writers about the craft and the business side of being an author. I’m grateful for Capitol Crimes, Sisters in Crime, and Crime Writers of Color because they gave me a better idea of what to do once I got a book deal.

We went out on submission with my book in June of ‘23, and I signed with Crooked Lane on my birthday in August. GHOSTS OF WAIKĪKĪ was released in November of ‘24.

Do you outline, or are you a pantser? Most people would be appalled if they saw my “outline” for GHOSTS OF WAIKĪKĪ. It’s over a hundred pages in 14-point font, Google Docs with red strike-throughs, yellow highlighted passages, and comments in the margin. It’s part of the messy, weird, stream-of-consciousness process I need to go through to know my idea is enough to carry an entire book.

I tried a more organized, cleaner method to plot a cozy idea I’ve since put aside. Basically, I stuck to one or two sentences per scene, and I had a much harder time writing it. I think I need to hash out the action and events more thoroughly so I can play around with the words. I guess I can’t make up stuff and compose well-written sentences at the same time.

I also can’t move forward until I’m satisfied with the sentences I’ve put together. It’s self-editing as you go, and you’re not supposed to do that, but I think all those years as a journalist trained me to perfect the writing as much as possible the first time around.

The way I plotted Book 2 falls somewhere in between, and so far, it’s working for me. I wouldn’t recommend what I do, but it seems to be my process.

You can learn more about Jennifer at www.jenniferkmorita.com or follow her on social media.

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/authorjenniferkmorita
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/jenniferkmorita/
Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/jenniferkmorita.bsky.social
Ghosts of Waikiki is available to purchase at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.