Interview
With Ritter Ames
SC: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I should have been an art class dropout, but I was too committed (okay clueless) to know I
truly had no talent. But I excelled in writing and photography in high school, and loved
doing both, so that went a long way to fill the void and gave me the focus to want to be a
photojournalist. But college ultimately led me into business classes instead, and I worked
on corporate acquisition teams (and loved it) until my daughter was born and the
tremendous overtime schedule made me downshift those ambitions. When she was in
elementary school I started freelance writing, and worked about a decade doing nonfiction
gigs until I signed my first fiction contract. Thanks to crazy writing schedules and
deadlines, my family (including my blonde Labrador) has learned to be very self-sufficient
and is pretty good about raiding the freezer whenever they want to eat. The Lab just
makes sure she’s always near whoever has food.
I’ve always been a voracious and eclectic reader—though mysteries are the biggest wedge
on my reading pie chart. And I love television shows, like “Scorpion,” “Castle,” and “NCIS”
and watch the majority of programming coming through the PBS series “Masterpiece”—a
huge fan of “Sherlock” and “Inspector Lewis” in particular. But I’m not one to watch a lot
of reruns. However, I have watched every Cary Grant movie several times, and most of the
James Bond films multiple times.
And I’m a knitter. My mother started a knitting class at our local Y just as I’d turned five
years old, and she took me along. When the class ended, I was the one in the family who’d
actually learned to knit and I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a project
going. It’s now like breathing to me. When I still worked in corporate and spent lunch
hours knitting, my co-workers were fascinated by the fact I could knit for half an hour and
talk to everyone without ever looking down at my project.
I’m very much a Type A person, and either always having a book or a knitting project in my
bag has kept me sane as I stand in what seems like longer and longer lines every day—or
sit on hold on the phone.