The Next Big Thing -- Learn What I'm Working on Now

The charming and generous Donis Casey tagged me for this Next Big Thing blog chain. Donis is not only a talented historical mystery author, whose Alafair Tucker mystery series has achieved well-deserved success, she’s a sweet person who posted her own Next Big Thing last week that I'm sure you'll enjoy reading. You'll find that link further down.

At the end of this blog, I’ll also tag other writers who will tell you about their Next Big Thing next week, or at some subsequent date. Each of us will answer the same ten questions about our upcoming books. 

Here are those questions:

1. What is your working title of your book?:

The working title for my current WIP, which I’m pretty sold on as the permanent title, is WHERE THE ROCKS BLEED RED.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

I credit the breathtaking red rocks of Sedona, Arizona for my inspiration, and the history I’ve learned about the original, prehistoric peoples who regarded this land that I cherish as sacred. WHERE THE ROCKS BLEED RED is a contemporary story, but it has deep roots in the past, in some cases, roots that go all the way back to the early peoples who lived on this land. 

3. What genre does your book fall under?

It’s a thriller with supernatural overtones.

 

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmmm…. I would cast Cote de Pablo from the NCIS TV show as my protagonist, Colt Tanner, and Brad Pitt as Erik Wolf, her love interest. Or someone equally cute for Erik, and perhaps a bit brooding. Colt needs to be a woman who is on the small side, with darkish coloring, and who gives off a great feeling of individuality and strength, albeit with a reckless streak.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

When a desperate daughter takes an unconventional path to keep her vegetative father alive, she unearths a secret that could prove deadly to her and others, which demonstrates that the roots of greed ripple through every culture and that secrets corrupt even after generations.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m a traditionally published author, and I intend to remain so. I have not tried to sell WHERE THE ROCKS BLEED RED yet.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It’s hard to say precisely. I write two mystery series, my Tracy Eaton mysteries and my Samantha Brennan & Annabelle Haggerty magical mysteries. WHERE THE ROCKS BLEED RED was my back-burner book for a long time, but now, as I’m entering into the final draft, it’s demanding to be front and center in my focus. I would estimate I’ve invested eight to ten months writing and researching the earlier version, spread out over several years.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

It follows in the tradition of the late Tony Hillerman and Margaret Coel, but it employs more of a thriller pace than mystery, with a thriller’s greater sense of danger.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

It may sound awfully woo-woo, but the red rock energy of Sedona really did inspire me. While sitting on rock off a hiking trail one day the basic premise and the major characters just came to me. I should also credit my husband Joe for encouraging me to write it. Because the storyline and the characters just walked into my mind, it almost seemed too easy — I’m used to struggling with story setup! But Joe felt it had such a strong premise, it deserved to see print.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The Native American history and perspective should interest some readers. I also wanted to address the question of when is a person still alive and when should we let them go; basically, when does the body just become a shell — some people should find that intriguing. Lastly, I suspect lots of readers will vicariously enjoy the idea of rushing off somewhere and reinventing your life. I’ve enjoyed experiencing that along with the character!

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

Here’s Donis Casey’s Next Big Thing blog:

http://www.doniscasey.com/?p=690

And here are the people I’m tagging:

Kate Wyland is the author of Wyoming Escape, a Triple H Ranch mystery:

http://www.katewyland.com/blog/

Lori Hines, paranormal mystery author: http://lhauthor.wordpress.com/

Linda S. Reilly, author of Some Enchanted Murder, will be guest-blogging here on my blog next Monday, December 3: 

--> http://krisneri.blogspot.com/

Sally Carpenter, author of the Eureka! Award-nominated mystery The Baffled Beatlemaniac Caper," who will blog on December 12 at: http://otpblog.blogspot.com.

Real Life Mysteries

When you consider that I write paranormal fiction, in addition to humorous traditional mysteries, and that I really love fantasy fiction, I have no fondness for real life encounters with things that go bump in the night, or any other time.

When you write or read fantasy, it’s not necessary to believe in any of it. That’s why it’s called fantasy. You can buy into some of it, or just enjoy a trip to another world, that might be similar to ours, but really different in other ways, without believing in any of it.

I used to maintain a strictly skeptical bent on all things woo-woo. Although some questionable things did happen to me on occasion, I always found another way to explain them. I’ve also had prophetic dreams, but I wrote those off to coincidences.

Then we had an author come to sign at our bookstore, who was an EMT who claimed she communed with those who had passed over while she tried to help them during the course of doing her job. I didn’t necessarily believe, although I figured she did. I even enjoyed her nonfiction book, although I approached it as if it were fiction.

But when she appeared before the sizeable crowd she drew, a round shadow suddenly popped up on the wall behind her, where there was nothing to cast a shadow. To say I was freaked was a criminal understatement. I kept trying to find a logical explanation, but logic totally eluded me.

After the author left, I tentatively broached the subject of that distinctive orb cast on the wall with a customer. “Oh, sure, that was an entity,” the customer said. “I figured she brought it along with her.”

Wasn’t that nice of her? Shouldn’t she have asked permission first?

In all the years we operated our bookstore out of that suite, which was more than six, I never again saw anything like that, but neither was I able to forget it, or explain it away. Maybe there really are more things in heaven and earth… Even if this paranormal writer doesn’t want to believe it. I wish that incident were unique, but I experienced too, too many things I can’t explain.

We recently encountered another real life mystery that proved to be just as troubling and just as perplexing. While in New Mexico on vacation, we had repeated problems with a super loud TV in the room next door every night. While it playing at different hours, but the TV was always tuned to a soccer game. 

We put up with it one night. When it was repeated the next night, my husband initially went next door to talk to our inconsiderate neighbors. He knocked over and over, but no one answered. By then the TV was at a staggering volume, so he assumed they simply couldn’t hear. He went downstairs to report to someone at the desk, while I remained in our room.

While he was gone, the TV went off. Joe came back with the night manager, who insisted there weren’t any guests registered in that room. We thought that an employee might have used his passkey to enter it, and used that place to hide out and watch a soccer game when he was supposed to be on duty. But the night manager, insisted that there was no indication that anyone had used the room since it was made-up by the maid days earlier.

Maybe so, maybe not. Neither Joe nor I had gone into the room with him, so we weren’t able to verify it either way. The TV had gone off by then, which was all we cared about.

 

Next night, same thing. Televised soccer game played at maximum volume, though at a different time than the night before. This time Joe went straight downstairs. With the night manager off that night, the head of security accompanied him back upstairs.

Joe entered that room with the security guy. The TV was still on, still playing at full volume, airing another soccer game. But the room was dark. When they turned on the lights, the condition of the room was perfect. As the night manager had insisted the night before, there was no sign that anyone had ever sat on the bed to watch the game. There was nothing to indicate anyone had entered the room at all, apart from those checking on a TV that seemed to turn itself on.

Joe pulled the plug on the TV, and it never bothered us again, although we only spent one more night there. The security man maintained there was no way to program the TV to either go on or go off with the remotes the hotel provided. I’m still looking for that logical explanation, though. Maybe there were other remotes that the staff had access to, which had greater capabilities. Maybe some guest in another room had a way of activating TV sets through the wall or from across the hall, just to play with people’s heads. Maybe someone really did sneak in and out quietly, watching soccer games in stealth, and taking pains to leave the room in faultless condition.

The security officer also said that the hotel maids report that strange things often happen in that wing and floor of the hotel. Weren’t we lucky to be placed there?

I’m still clinging to any one of the logical explanations I’ve managed to come up with. But it’s getting harder.

What do you believe? Have you had encounters you can’t explain?

Test Driving Characters

I never set out to test drive potential novel characters in short stories, it just worked out that way. When Tracy Eaton, detective wannabe and the offspring of eccentric Hollywood stars, and her over-the-top actress mother, Martha Collins, walked onto the page of my short story, “LA. Justice,” which you can read on my website by clicking that link, I hadn’t yet written a novel. I had published a dozen or so stories at that point, though, so it was only natural that I would put them first into that form.

Had I been a more experienced writer, I might have noticed that when I finished that story, it was significant that I didn’t feel finished with Tracy and Martha. I felt I knew so much more about them than the story’s action called for. But it was only after the story won the Derringer Award, and readers told me I should put those characters into a novel, that it occurred me to give them their first novel-length adventure. Next March, they’ll make their fourth full-length outing, along with the other characters that have come out of this series, in Revenge on Route 66. And they still find so much to show me about themselves.

I’ve done this many times now. Zoey Morgan, the edgy, troubled triathletes protagonist of my standalone thriller, Never Say Die, made two short story appearances before she told me I knew her well enough to explore the background that I only hinted at in those stories, in effect making the novel a prequel to the stories. Unusual, perhaps, but it worked. Zoey also told me I’d spelled her name wrong in the original publication of those stories, that she was Zoey, not Zoe, which I’ve now corrected in all of her appearances. You'll find one of those stories, "Deadly Obsessions," on my website as well.

Samantha Brennan and Annabelle Haggerty, the fake psychic and Celtic goddess/FBI agent who star in my Magical Mystery Series, High Crimes on the Magical Plane and Magical Alienation, were also born in a short story, "Showtime on the Winter Solstice," which you'll also find on my website. 

At times I’ve approached it the other way — I’ve started stories thinking their protagonists might make engaging novel characters. I once created a mouthy, yet naïve, ex-nun, who inherits a rundown P.I. firm on sleazy Hollywood Boulevard, in “Nun in the Shadows.” That character, Lynn James, and her circumstances, and the short story in which they appeared, seemed to contain the most ideal setup for a darker cozy that could straddle the light/edgy line. But it didn’t happen. I realized by the ending of that story that while I enjoyed our time together, I just wasn’t eager to repeat it. I discovered not merely that I didn’t know much about ex-nuns, but that I also didn’t want to learn any more than I knew.

It happened again with “Audition for Murder.” That character, Lorna Doone, an unemployed actress, who keeps the boat afloat by delivering singing cookie-grams and giving tours of cemeteries where the Hollywood famous and infamous are buried, also seemed idea for a new series. Again, while I liked her a lot and had such fun with her antics, by the time the story was finished, I felt our relationship had run its course.

I’ve come to see it’s not the story’s action and circumstances that will determine whether it will jump to novel length, no matter how good the setup seems. It’s the characters, the connection we feel, the spark we seem to share. It’s whether those characters are too big, too fully formed, to be contained at story-length.

I recently shared that spark with a character again. As a bookseller, I’ve long had an idea of how to use books and a bookstore as part of a crime that extends beyond the bookstore’s walls. But while I’d worked out most aspects of how the bad guys made use of books, I simply never felt inclined to write the story. I came to believe that story idea was merely an intellectual exercise I engaged in from behind my bookstore’s cash wrap, while waiting for a long, slow afternoon to end.

But then I read the submission guidelines for the latest anthology published by my Sisters in Crime chapter, the Desert Sleuths of Scottsdale, AZ. All at once, an engaging character popped into my head, complete with a detailed history, a quirky voice, and an injustice she’d suffered. That character, Plum Tardy, infused the intellectual exercise of my bookstore-connection with emotional color. She made that story, “The Power of Books,” come to life. I’m thrilled that “The Power of Books” made it into through the blind submission of our chapter’s anthology, SoWest: Desert Justice, which just debuted.

And now I find that I want to know more about Plum and the background she shared in the course of my writing that story. I want to explore it with her.

Will we write a novel together? I hope so, but I don’t know. The characters seem to decide. 

Writers, how about you? How do you test drive your characters?

Mercury, you X#&% devil!

Mercury is just coming out of retrograde.  Can’t come too soon for me. I’m used to little electronic oddities popping up during Mercury retrogrades -- broadband slows down,  small, inexplicable changes appear in files, computer applications behave in atypical ways, and other electronic roadblocks show up that require some little time to get around them. But this time, Mercury, that blankety-blank devil,  has really beaten up the Neri household in a memorable way.

Back when I was younger and more of a skeptic, I considered all this doomsday talk about Mercury retrogrades to be pure hooey. The trouble was that even if I didn’t believe in it, my electronics and appliances did. If my appliances were going to break, they did it then. If my electronics were going to burp, those burps also came during retrograde periods. Hey, I might have been a skeptic, but I wasn’t stupid – even I could see the pattern that kept emerging.

If I weren’t a believer now, I sure would be after this current retrograde period. Our biggest mishap was that our bookstore (we own The Well Red Coyote bookstore in Sedona, AZ) crashed, taking with it our Point of Sale software, the only way we have to conduct our business, and the only record of our inventory. It took three dawn-to-dark, exhausting days, two computer consultants and numerous calls to tech support, but at the end of it, we were up and running again. Since then my own personal computer has been doing odd things, such as renaming folders, changing them from words that describe that folder’s contents to a random assortment of letters, and has been falling into such a deep sleep, it’s almost impossible to wake it. The bright red LED lettering on my car’s radio/CD player has faded into oblivion. And finally, my brand new external disk drive developed a glitch. Those last few might seem minor by comparison, but I like knowing what my computer’s folders contain without having to guess, and it’s useful to know what my CD player is playing just by looking. Mostly, though, I’m fed up with electronic mishaps.

A sidecasualty in the Mercury-electronic-failings is that they take with us our confidence in those pieces of hardware and software. The absolute certainty we typically maintain that when we turn them on, they’ll always operate as we expect them to. When serious problems occur, that confidence can be replaced by a knot in the gut, and is often responsible for a financial outlay. Either a little, or in our case this time, a lot of money.

 

I’ve been told that retrogrades are merely planetary slowdowns, but with my schedule, I can’t afford to go any slower. I’ve also been told that retrogrades  are times meant to teach us lessons. I can’t deny that. The backup software operating  in our store’s computer was part of a package we bought from a company providing bookstore POS software. We were assured it would save the day if the worst-case scenario occurred. It didn’t. So we did learn something important, albeit at a high price, financially and emotionally. Now we’ve rectified that with what we think is stronger backup system. I’m grateful for that, although I wish that lesson could have come in a less dramatic fashion.

Sure, I know other planets retrograde as well, but that never seems to affect things the way Mercury retrogrades do. What’s crazy is that Mercury is the ruling planet of Gemini – and my husband Joe is a Gemini, and I have Gemini rising. Maybe Mercury expects more from us. I have news for that $%&# devil – I expect more from it, too.

How about you? Have you had any retrograde mishaps?

Summertime Blues

When I was a kid, I remember a science teacher telling us that the Earth would gradually keep moving closer to the sun until it eventually burned up.

Are we there yet?

I must confess that summer is my least favorite of all the seasons, with fall and spring being my favorites. I have a sometimes-contentious relationship with the sun, both too much and too little of it.

In my early adult years I lived in San Francisco. There is a reason why San Francisco is called “America’s Favorite City.” It is absolutely beautiful, sometimes breathtakingly so. But the picturesque fog and I didn’t always live in joyous harmony. Day after day of gray skies dampened my mood. Summers there also aren’t like summers in most places. I can speak to that. I remember the tourists, in their shorts and T-shirts, freezing in San Francisco’s cool, frequently foggy and windy summer weather, looking for sweaters to buy in department stores. Remember the quote that's usually attributed to Mark Twain? "The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco." Twain wasn't exaggerating.

I discovered when I moved to Southern California that I’m a natural sun person. Too many days of not soaking in those rays makes me gloomy. But even still, at this point in the summer, like many of us, I often grow heat-weary. When I happened to be feeling particularly grouchy about the summer weather, I used to say when I lived in Southern California that I lived in the part of town where we made heat for hell.

Then I moved to Arizona, and I discovered what it really takes to make heat for hell. Though I live well north of it, where we just make heat for Purgatory, the last time I had a speaking gig in Phoenix in late June, the temperature reached 115 degrees. Really? Sure, it’s a often dry heat, but so is an oven, and I don’t climb into mine. Even when Phoenix temps go down to a saner 100-107+ tell me that’s not a sign that my science teacher’s prediction was true, and the burning up process is well under way. But this year, record temperatures have been recorded over large parts of the country. It's getting harder to say where heat is actually made for hell.

But there is a phenomenon here in the Southwest that I’ve come to enjoy, and which has made me fonder of the hot, late summertime. That is the monsoon rainstorms that strike some days here, simply because of their sense-stirring might. Huge gray clouds build up to the heavens, while the air turns a distinctly yellow-green color and smells strongly of ions. When the storm hits, the raindrops can easily exceed an inch to an inch and-a-half in diameter and the swirling winds are fierce. Within moments, the temperature can drop 30 to 40 degrees, and even after the storm moves on, the temperatures rarely rise as high earlier, so it provides a break from the heat.

What’s odd is that the storms are so localized. Recently, we drove up to a high peak outside of town with a 360-degree view. No less than four or five localized storms in different directions draped the ground with wide sheaths of misty gray walking rain, while off to the west, the sun shone brightly through a stretch of far thinner cloud cover. Awesome!

Sometimes these storms are quite destructive — a section of my own roof had to be repaired after one last summer, as did quite a number of roofs in my neighborhood, and I sure don’t welcome that. But short of their creating havoc, it can be quite wonderful to watch them build.

There might not be any cure for the summertime blues, but sometimes there’s a respite. To my great surprise, since I’m not too keen on gray skies, I have come to embrace these wild, raging storms.

What do you like — or dislike — about your summer weather?