by
Janis Patterson
As I’ve said many times before, it
never ceases to astonish me how many – and how many times – people ask me where
I get ideas for my books. Where DON’T you get ideas? They’re as thick,
persistent and unavoidable as a mosquito storm in a swamp.
For example, I am in the final
throes of finishing my Egyptian murder mystery A KILLING AT EL KAB. I tried to
get it done before The Husband and I took off for Boston to attend the wedding
of his battle buddy from his first Iraq deployment. (It was a beautiful and
fantastic formal affair, by the way.) Well, I didn’t, and I didn’t even try
while we were up North. We took a few days to sightsee, and of course my mind
was far and away from murder and mayhem on an Egyptian archaeological dig.
Instead my mind latched onto murder
and mayhem at a Massachusetts archaeological dig. (Yes, I know my mind tends to
run in certain ways.) I had been teasing with the idea of doing a series with a
globe-trotting anthropologist who finds murder and mayhem wherever she goes.
(My kind of girl!) For those of you who don’t know, traditionally Old World
excavators are called archaeologists and New World ones are called
anthropologists, though in many cases they have almost the exact same training.
At least, that’s the way I was taught it was, and if it has changed in the
interim I apologize.
Now you’re probably saying, Wait a
minute! This writer hates series. What’s she doing planning on writing one?
All I can do is plead habitual
inconsistency.
However, in my defense I will say
that the only constant in the series will be the heroine herself. Each setting
will be different. Already I’ve started making notes on books to be set in
Massachusetts, Peru, Midland Texas and England. Other characters from other books
may make small cameo appearances through letters or phone calls, but the main
cast of characters will be different each time. That, I hope, will keep me from
getting bored, which is my main beef with series.
And there is a second inducement –
money. As The Husband does some work as my assistant (for which I pay him, just
to keep the I(nfernal) R S happy) he is a vital part of my writing business.
That means whenever we travel to someplace where I am setting a novel, it
becomes a deductible business expense. The more books, the more places we get
to go. Sweet!
Unfortunately, my desk is stacked to
the skies with stuff that must be finished before I can really progress beyond
the notes stage. There’s A KILLING AT EL KAB, of course, and the idea of
finishing that breaks my heart. It is a world I love, one which I have actually
visited (sans murders, of course, darn it) and when I leave I’ll never really
be able to go back again. After that, I must finish the final re-write of THE
MASTER OF MORECAMBE HALL, a tasty modern Gothic set in a stately home in
England, then get it edited, formatted and a cover made. And I must do a final
read-through of MURDER AND MISS WRIGHT, a contemporary cozy mystery set at a
scholarly Egyptological conference in Chicago. This has been superbly edited by
my wonderful editor Laree Bryant and has a marvelous cover by the inimitable
Dawn Charles of Bookgraphics and all it lacks is formatting and the back cover
copy finalized. It should have been out for sale at the beginning of summer – I
am the one falling down on the job.
A writer, however, can usually tell
when an idea has legs or when it is just a flash in the pan that tempts and
bedazzles for a week or so. My anthropologist/excavator/sleuth has been hanging
around at the fringes of my consciousness for long enough now that I believe
she has legs. I hope so. I’m ready to travel.