Finishing Your Fist Mystery by Mar Preston

Chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve  written a lot of words, some pages, some chapters, which are causing you a lot of pain. It feels like you’ve done a lot of thinking, a lot of typing, but it isn’t a book. You know that. And you’re about to give up.

I know that others reading this are pros. But all of us have an unfinished project somewhere.

In the beginning you couldn’t wait to sit down with it. You were in love with your hero and the rest of your characters. It was fun and the words tumbled along as if you were taking dictation.

Now you’ve found it was a lot harder than you thought. Writing a mystery which was once a lark, has turned sour. Your characters have gone flat; the plot has fizzled out; and you haven’t a thought in your head about how to finish it. Or whether it’s even worth it. Or whether you want to work this hard.

Please don’t give up. I want you to continue.Quoting one of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman:

Creative work is often a slog and the only way you’ll really get good at it is to finish what you start even when it’s not going well. You’ll end up learning from that experience more than if you quit.

There’s a lot of wisdom in that. I am resentful of writers who say they have such fun with their characters. That’s not the way it is with me. It’s work. It’s a slog.

In fact I’ve just sent a 12,000 word eBook on the subject of finishing your first mystery to my editor. Stay tuned. I've also just sent off my 6^th mystery to another editor.  Finishing it was like leveling Mount Everest with a bent plastic spoon. But it got done and I learned something in the process.

Stay tuned. In the meantime, please check out my recent book, A Very Private High School.  Skewed romance, embezzlement, & murder among the Santa Monica elite & dangerous. 4th in a well-reviewed whodunit series.


http://www.amazon.com/Private-School-Detective-Mason-Mystery/dp/0984495258/

Confused and Defensive about Cops

.... by Mar Preston 

I write crime fiction about a cop and his world, a homicide detective in the Santa Monica Police Department.

Detective Dave Mason has his faults, of course, but try as I might, I do not have the imagination to fit him into being a member of the Ferguson Police Department. I’ve written before about worrying that I have too rosy a view of cops because I only interact with the good ones. I know there are cops who like making DWB (Driving While Black) busts, cops who like busting heads, cops who should be kept on a chain at the back of the station.

Knowing that, I still believe there are few of them, and others in the department know who they are. The vast majority of cops still have a broad streak of protect and serve built into them.

I also know that law enforcement is set up as a paramilitary organization. Militarization of police forces has filtered down from big cities, to suburb, even small towns. Today’s riot police officers wear military-style camouflage and carry military-style rifles, their heads and faces obscured by black helmets and gas masks sitting atop an armored vehicle.

SWAT teams generally came to prominence in the 1970s as an answer to quelling urban demonstrations, but  those paramilitary tactics and equipment have spread almost everywhere in America through the 1033 program. This program makes available surplus Department of Defense equipment, meant to defend against a terrorist attack.  Not peaceful demonstrations.

The number of SWAT deployments has exploded since 1980, and the growing militarization of U.S. policing (even to make routine search warrants) seems to have overcome all the precepts of community policing. What’s happening to Officer Friendly?

I’ve read police bogs and commentary stating that this tactical equipment obtained from the Department of Justice is not accepted and used without local consideration of their impact. But not in Ferguson. I have read the statement and seen the video the Ferguson police have issued and I’m skeptical. However, this is a story that may unroll in ways that we cannot imagine now.

Yet we cannot help to form perceptions on the way things look. The military gear looks damn scary to me and to everybody else. I dread to see the day when sniper rifles are pointed in the face of peaceful demonstrators (like the people I know and demonstrations that have been part of) in Santa Monica.

I’m glad I write fiction and don’t have to decide what is truth in an increasingly complex world in which I have very little, if any, impact.

Tell me what you think about this as crime writers?

On Behalf of the Family - a Pollice Procedural

Confused and Defensive about Cops

….   By Mar Preston

I write crime fiction about a cop and his world, a homicide detective in the Santa Monica Police Department.

Detective Dave Mason has his faults, of course, but try as I might, I do not have the imagination to fit him into being a member of the Ferguson Police Department. I’ve written before about worrying that I have too rosy a view of cops because I only interact with the good ones. I know there are cops who like making DWB (Driving While Black) busts, cops who like busting heads, cops who should be kept on a chain at the back of the station.

Knowing that, I still believe there are few of them, and others in the department know who they are. The vast majority of cops still have a broad streak of protect and serve built into them.

I also know that law enforcement is set up as a paramilitary organization. Militarization of police forces has filtered down from big cities, to suburb, even small towns. Today’s riot police officers wear military-style camouflage and carry military-style rifles, their heads and faces obscured by black helmets and gas masks sitting atop an armored vehicle.

SWAT teams generally came to prominence in the 1970s as an answer to quelling urban demonstrations, but  those paramilitary tactics and equipment have spread almost everywhere in America through the 1033 program. This program makes available surplus Department of Defense equipment, meant to defend against a terrorist attack.  Not peaceful demonstrations.

The number of SWAT deployments has exploded since 1980, and the growing militarization of U.S. policing (even to make routine search warrants) seems to have overcome all the precepts of community policing. What’s happening to Officer Friendly?

I’ve read police bogs and commentary stating that this tactical equipment obtained from the Department of Justice is not accepted and used without local consideration of their impact. But not in Ferguson. I have read the statement and seen the video the Ferguson police have issued and I’m skeptical. However, this is a story that may unroll in ways that we cannot imagine now.

Yet we cannot help to form perceptions on the way things look. The military gear looks damn scary to me and to everybody else. I dread to see the day when sniper rifles are pointed in the face of peaceful demonstrators (like the people I know and demonstrations that have been part of) in Santa Monica.

I’m glad I write fiction and don’t have to decide what is truth in an increasingly complex world in which I have very little, if any, impact.

Tell me what you think about this, my fellow crime writers?

http://www.amazon.com/Behalf-Family-Detective-Mason-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00I82BFVK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408252352&sr=8-1&keywords=mar+preston

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?