It's Been a Hell of a Week

In keeping with Dana Denburg’s advice, I’ll keep this short.

Some of my compadres are attending Bouchercon in Baltimore. Some have just returned from Europe or Africa. I’ve just brought my husband home from the hospital. 

Everything is under control, let me assure you of that up front, Dear Readers, but we had a touchy moment or two, there, including a trip to the emergency room followed by two days in the hospital watching my him suck up blood transfusions.  They topped him off with five pints, and we got home this afternoon.  Sounds like he had an accident, doesn’t it? But he didn’t, so where did all his blood go?  Is our house infested with vampires, or giant invisible mosquitos? No one is sure, therefore many tests to follow.

I was very unhappy that I couldn’t manage to go to Bouchercon this year, because I really planned to, but if I had, this might not have had a happy ending.  I’ve made all the arrangements to attend Women Writing the West in San Antonio in two weeks, but it looks like I’ll be defaulting on that one, too, and I’ve already paid for it. 

This morning at 10:00, I’ll be conducting a mystery writing workshop at Tempe Public Library for 15 or 20 people.  I’ve done this so many times that I joke that I could do it in my sleep, and now I’m going to get to find out if that’s really true.

Funny how none of the above bothers me very much. Remember how 2008 was supposed to be the happiest year of my life?  I think it just might turn out to be.

Chapter Two- Later that same day...

Don is fine.  He got to watch the Oklahoma-Texas game on tv, which made him very happy.

Apparently you can teach a workshop in your sleep because it went very well.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Being there....Or Not

I am still working on a scene in a place I’ve never been and a situation I’ll never be in. I'd like to visit one day, but I'm a middle-aged mom with teenagers; if I enlisted in the military, someone at home would want to shoot me first. Fellow blogger and author Charles Benoit, who has been not only been in the place where I’m putting my opening (I think) scene and was also in the army, has been incredibly helpful. And it’s been loads of fun exchanging emails and imagining his experiences. So much fun that I had to call him and have a real-time conversation, which was a riot. I could hardly write ideas down fast enough.

A couple of things come to mind as I look at my scramble to describe a place I can’t visit. First and foremost, this endeavor, on paper and off, has to be fun. I love doing research, and this is the best kind. Chatting with Charles about his wild experiences reminded me of twenty-some years ago when my brother and I would sit on the lanai and drink beer and cook up thriller plots. For years, we just had fun—we never wrote them down. Finally, we both began to put them on paper.

Then the fun began in earnest, and I’ve had to branch out in terms of how I do research, which not only makes my writing better, but enriches me as a person. I’ve taken the eleven-week Citizen’s Police Academy class, I have the Medical Examiner’s direct phone number—and he talks to me in vivid detail (how lucky and fun is that?!). We (a group of writers and fellow crime fiction enthusiasts) started a Sisters in Crime chapter and we have authors, firearms experts, forensic entomologists, K-9 corps, and other experts speak to us on a regular basis.

So when I get a bit down about the publishing industry, book sales, how to publicize my next novel, travel expenses, and whatever other obstacles pop up, I think about how fortunate I am. How my world has expanded because of the active, intelligent people I’ve met in my work. How my TBR pile on the bedside table teeters even higher with gripping books. The rest of my family has begun to “borrow” from the stack—I have to make sure I get them back!

And I thank my lucky stars for being able to sit in my little office and visit Kuwait, where I’ve left my protagonist and six members of his platoon on night maneuvers near the Iraqi border, where something bad is about to happen. So please excuse me. I’d better go, they need my help.