Author Tammy Kaehler Her Book Kiss the Bricks and Women in Racing

Mystery/Racing Novelist Tammy Kaehler joined 33 Dreams of Indy to talk about here series of books that follow the racing career of a fictional female racer - Kate Reilly. Kiss the Bricks is Kaehler's 5th book and it takes place during the month of May leading up to and including the Indy 500.

Tammy's book is not just an edge of the seat mystery story. It also explains some aspects of racing in detail that all can understand, race fan or not.

She also explores the challenges faced by her character, Kate Reilly, as she is a female racer facing barriers that are not just on the track.

During this interview we talk about the book, Tammy's path to racing and about challenges faced by women in racing in 2020.

I hope you enjoy and would love your feedback and comments. It is my intention that this interview is the first of many in a series on women in racing and why there are so few opportunities for female drivers.

Here you go, Episode 21:

Robert Earl: Welcome back to 33 Dreams of Indy. I'm your host, Robert Earl and today I'm joined by Tammy Kaehler. Tammy, how are you doing?

Tammy Kaehler: I'm good, thanks. How about you?

Robert Earl: I'm doing fantastic. Tammy is a mystery novelist. Her books have followed the adventures and career of a fictional Kate Riley as she pursues her dreams of Indy in her racing career. And I got my hands on her fifth entry, Kiss the Bricks, and matter of fact spilled coffee on it, and had to actually get it on Kindle as well, because I could not put it down. But this is the fifth in a series at Dead Man's Switch, where Kate follows her American Le Mans series as she starts out. Breaking Points, which is set at Road America and Petite Le Mans. Avoidable Contact, you jump into the 24 hours at Daytona, I'll be there here in a just a couple of weeks. And then Red Flags, where she participates at the Long Beach Grand Prix, but then also starts to test Indy cars and then is a? To set the stage, she's a full time participant on the IndyCar series and is successful in the Indy 500 when we enter into the story, correct?

Tammy Kaehler: Yeah, that's correct.

Robert Earl: Fantastic. Welcome to the show.

Tammy Kaehler: Thank you.

Robert Earl: How did you get into writing?

Tammy Kaehler: I've always been a writer in my career. I started out in college admissions actually, strangely enough. But I gravitated to any of the writing or the publication tasks in that job. And then I had the good fortune to be hired as a technical writer by a manager who was looking for someone who wasn't actually technical, but could translate. And that sort of launched me into a tech writing career. I was very active writing websites and things for the web 1.0 version, when all of a sudden everyone needed a website and no one had anything. And I specialized in small technical companies. So I've continued that. I still do a lot of web content these days. Everyone needs web content, got to have content got to have content. So I do a lot of that kind of writing.

Tammy Kaehler: But fiction didn't come along because I was not one of those kids scribbling stories or writing all the time. Never wrote fiction. I'd have told you I couldn't write fiction.

Robert Earl: Really?

Tammy Kaehler: Yeah. Yeah. Strange. I just didn't feel like I had that in me, but that came along in 2003 so it's been some years now. I woke up one morning with an idea, just this scene in my head that wouldn't go away. And I kept going, "That's weird, that doesn't happen to me, this is fiction." So I think I'm running into probably some of your other questions, but I'm just going to keep talking. I found a class actually near me at a very good independent bookstore that was called, Do You Have a Book in You? Because I figured that that was the question. And so I started writing and I kept writing. This was not mystery, this was not racing,