Escaping Winter

I’m escaping winter in my California mountain village. So I’m looking for a furnished rental place of some kind in Ventura, California.

It’s not so easy because I want to bring my two cats along. Landlords have had bad experiences, and I understand that.

Since I grew up in northern Ontario, I’m well aware this is baby cold. Nonetheless, it bothers me. I’m also looking forward to bright lights, a choice in restaurants, and places to go after dark. Like most villages, everything shuts down here after dark. And there are no streetlights. Sometimes I get tired of my own company, I must admit.

Sooner or later, my plan is to move to Ventura.

Ventura is warm and sweet and there’s somewhere to go after dark.

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I’ve made a lot of friends on the California coast through Sisters in Crime. Moving means taking a look at the books I need in my life. I’m a fast reader and go through books way too fast. I’m always scrounging for something to read. Some of my books I want to keep, but which ones?

I mostly read fiction when I read actual books. I read nonfiction online, not that that makes a lot of sense. Since I write crime fiction, the fiction I read is—no surprise—crime fiction. But I’ve collected paperback and hard-bound reference books on police procedure, police science, and forensics. Those I keep.

Most crime fiction novels I read once. Some of them I read all the way through and enjoy. Those I pass on to my mystery reader pals at Sisters in Crime Bakersfield meetings. I go to writers conferences and there are always books available and books for sale. I’m looking at my six book shelves now.

I’m not going to throw out the dictionary my parents bought me when I went away to university, or the Norton Anthology I used in my first English classes. This is where sentiment and nostalgia creeps in.  This must be suppressed ruthlessly. I don’t dare to go through the boxes of photos because of the avalanche of emotion.

When I was young and foolish, I thought that having books on my shelves told the world that I was smart. I don’t care anymore whether people think I’m smart.  That’s a freedom to put books in other people’s hands who will appreciate them now.

Some are going to the English teacher at the nearby correctional institute. Many inmates are poor readers, and using these books as teaching material makes me feel good about giving them away. Our nearest library is 18 miles away. Some will go to the Friends of the Library Sale.

I’m finally giving up my Guide to Literary Agents 2005. Some books don’t have any value to anyone.

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You might be curious about the crime fiction novels I've written . Payback is set in the village where I live. The others are set in glitzy Santa Monica.

A sequel to Payback, titled The Most Dangerous Species  is moving slowly through the publication process.  Sign up here for my yearly newsletter and I will notify you when it is released.
 

 

Gee, That’s A Lot Of Typing

I don’t talk to my friends a lot about my writing life.  When I have a new book coming out, they’ll ask what it’s about and some even read it and tell me they like the book. But in the year or so between books, the life of a mystery writer isn’t that exciting.

One of my close friends asked me about how the new book was going, not something I get asked all that often because I do a lot of other things like animal rescue and good cause volunteering and that’s more exciting to talk about.

I was prepared to rattle on about my progress on a new book set in the village where I live, but her interest was short-lived.  I told her I had about 75 pages so far.

“Gee, that’s a lot of typing.” Her comment stopped me short.

Well, yes, it is a lot of typing.  I didn’t say that I would rewrite, and revise those pages three or four times before I sent it off to my editor. Perhaps it’s even more. You don’t just type a book.

I guess the excitement of the writing life happens between your own ears. I love that moment when you type the first sentence that comes to mind just to move the plot along. Suddenly the psyche provides a twist on a familiar phrase that makes your heart sing.

However, the magic only occurs when your fingers are holding the pen or dancing on the keyboard. You can’t think a book down on paper. You have to type it.

The excitement, it seems, can’t be shared. 

What do you share about the daily business of your writing life?

 

http://www.amazon.com/ ebook/dp/B00I82BFVK/

The Flawed Detective

I read a lot of mystery fiction. I suspect you do too. I’m looking ahead to a couple of weeks of enforced idleness, so I’ve been loading up my Android reading machine. Lately I’ve run into a string of improbable sleuths.  They’re tall, leggy blonds who run five miles every morning and speak French. If male, they have six-pack abs, are rich, former Navy SEALS, and master chess champions. And I’m not talking romances or cozies.

Please, if you’re writing character sketches for your protagonist right now, give your detective some flaws, but nothing too crippling. Maybe he leaves the seat up. He’s addicted to fried Snicker’s bars. (That’s pretty awful.)  He’s afraid of clowns. He cheats on his income tax, or lies straight-faced to his mother.

These flaws make him human, unlike James Bond in the spy story genre. Does James Bond have flaws?

When I first began writing mysteries, I talked to a detective in the Santa Monica Police Department. He said, "Please don't make your detective alcoholic, depressed, and divorced. We're not all like that.” You want your detective to be somebody you'd like to have a beer with, or a coffee, and somebody human your reader can identify with. Your reader has flaws too. But overwhelmingly, despite his flaws, your sleuth must be likeable. You want to urge your sleuth on, root for her. You want her to win.

The tall, leggy blond?  I just hope she slips on her stiletto pumps and falls on her pert, little upturned nose. 

 

 http://www.amazon.com/ebook/dp/B00I82BFVK/

The Writer as Watcher by Mar Preston

Writing police procedurals as I do, I read a lot of police procedural fiction because I enjoy it. It’s not as if I want to imagine myself in the role of the first on scene investigator. Imagine the stress of that in real life? And the smell? The bossing people around. And the responsibility.

I know I don’t have the personality to be a cop. I once checked out becoming a private investigator. In California it means indenturing yourself to a seasoned detective for thousands of hours. I went as far as meeting a private detective in a bar. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and told me he had a gun in the waistband.  I could have the job but I’d have to move to Denver. No, that wasn’t going to happen.

As far as being a cop, I made a mistake turning up for my ride-along.  The civilian who had made the arrangements sneered at me and told me straight out, “You could never be a cop. You can’t follow orders.”  Okay. It hadn’t occurred to me to want to be a cop.

One of the components in being effective either as a private investigator or law enforcement is being able to ask hard questions.  That would be questions that make people cry, run away, or punch you on the nose. I’m not good at that. I’m not good at asking a hard question and then being silent while the pressure cooks.

What I am good at is observing from the corner. I’m a watcher, as I suspect all of us writers are.

Lie detection is fascinating to me.  The latest research states that trained observers are only slightly better at spotting the liars in these videos than the average person. I took the tests and discovered I am slightly better.

Writers are trained observers, I suspect. Ever since we discovered the joy—and the agony—of recording the human experience we’ve been watching. We take the observations one step further with the what if? question. The truly talented among us can play the “then what happened” game and come up with clever plots.

The hard part will always be writing it down.

Are you a watcher from the corner? Can you ask hard questions?

Guilty Pleasure of Crime Fiction

I've asked myself countless times why I’m fascinated enough with murder and mayhem to write three crime fiction novels about Santa Monica? Why do I feel such glee in learning the forensic details of death and dying?

I happily confess my guilty pleasure in crime fiction but I also know that crime in real life ripples outward and causes misery and suffering.  A mass shooting left five dead recently in Santa Monica.

What kind of fantasies does a young man raised on television and action movies have as he barrels across town dressed in black, wearing body armor and a helmet and brandishing a military-style assault rifle, a shotgun, a handgun and an ammunition belt? What stories is he telling himself as he shoots up a bus, a SUV and the college library, then dies in a glorious blaze of gunfire at the hands of a cop?

That cop or cops—however the story is finally told—will never forget or get over what he or she has done in the line of duty. Everyone involved will still be processing some kind of what if question. What if I had been in that library? Riding that bus? Many of them will still be shaking, wondering, going over it and over it, unable to let it go.

We enjoy writing about reading crime fiction with its thrill me, chill me, scare-me- to-death aspect of getting up close to Hannibal Lecter on the printed page. We love Halloween, death-defying roller coasters, tornadoes.  Don't we?

Crime fiction has its appeal because we’re assured that in the end goodness will prevail over evil and the villain will be punished. Things will end up right.

Sometimes there is no closure. The villain goes unpunished. The good guy doesn't always win and we are left burning  with a sense of injustice. Such is the world of victims of crime.

It will take months to uncover the backstory and assess what happened at the nine different crime scenes.

And will we be any further ahead then in preventing or dealing with this kind of craziness? That’s up to us to answer—and then do something about.

Mar Preston is the author of No Dice, Rip-Off, and the upcoming On Behalf of the family, crime fiction novels in which the hero is a Santa Monica Police Department Homicide Detective. They are available on amazon.com.