On Starting a New Novel

The Merry Family by Jan Steen Source: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

It’s been almost a year since I last worked on a novel. That’s quite a long time for me. For most of the past eight years, I’ve always had a novel in the works.

Since finishing the manuscript for Calamity Lake in December 2021, I’ve waited to hear back from agents. In the meantime I didn’t want to begin a new project. It’s not that I don’t feel committed to Rock Hudson as a protagonist. It’s more a sense that he offered limited possibilities for a series. How many crimes can a consulting geologist solve?

I wrote a couple of stories, spend time revising a few old ones that lay dormant on my cloud. Between those editing ventures, I read reports and analyses released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Continue reading “On Starting a New Novel”

On Time and Writing

Photo by S. Sepp

In his book Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman points out how ridiculously short our average life span is. He explains how pretty much every method to manage that amount of time is bound to fail. The reason? Our lives are limited and the amount of stuff that needs to be done isn’t. Time management is premised on the false idea that if we were only efficient enough, we could reach a moment when we’ve answered every email, returned every call and completed every task. Like a mirage, the illusion of free time hovers just over the horizon, driving us forward.

Burkeman points out that our efforts at time management are little more than a futile attempt at battling our own finitude. Since we think of time as something external to us, we make every effort to “use it well,” to avoid wasting it. For writers “using time well” is a continuous battle. When progress is measured in words on the page, every use of time that doesn’t generate those words seems wasted. Going for a walk when I’m a few thousand words behind my goal feels like an unaffordable luxury. No matter how often I tell myself that the mental efforts of sorting out plots and nailing down character traits are necessary work that will result in better words on the page at a later point, the word count at the end of the week remains to true measure of progress.

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The World as Inspiration

Where do you get your ideas? That’s a perennial question, authors of crime fiction face. And the answer is different for every one of us. So let me tell you how I get my ideas. The path is a little circuitous, but bear with me.

For the past thirty-odd years before I retired from academia, I’ve had the following conversation innumerable times.

Person at a party: “What do you do?”
Me: “I teach.”
“What do you teach?”
“World Politics.”
“Oh, that must be really interesting right now.”

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Money Laundering 101

Euro bills hanging out to dry. Public Domain Image

Say you just made a cool million dollars. Except, it wasn’t by legal means. Also say you’re the careful sort. You know that buying a big car, or blowing it on $1,000 bottles of Crystal is going to attract attention of the sort you can’t afford.

How can you enjoy your ill-gotten gains without running afoul the authorities? You’ll need to launder it first. That means make your newfound wealth appear to come from perfectly legal sources.

The traditional way, expertly portrayed in the Netflix series Ozark, involves mingling the illegal cash with legal income to hide its provenance. That’s why Marty Byrd is to eager to buy businesses around the Lake of the Ozarks. The marina, the funeral home, and, eventually the casino are all cash based businesses. They provide a perfect way to get the illegal money into legal accounts. But even then, a sudden spike in income would arouse suspicion.

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Everybody Is A Spy Now

The scene is a trope in many spy novels and movies. The undercover agent moves through a foreign city, she is nervous. She looks at each passerby, is that man an opposing agent? Is the old woman by the vegetable stand really selling potatoes or is she a watcher? That man with the newspaper, is he on the lookout for her? The couple with the dog, innocent pedestrians or counter-intelligence operatives?

Going for a walk in the age of COVID-19 feels a lot like that. Every person on the street is a potential carrier. That old man without a mask, what is wrong with him? That woman sneezing, are those allergies or is she symptomatic? That guy with the water bottle, is that a dry cough or did a swallow go down the wrong pipe.

This is my city, but it is foreign all the same.

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