Ideas, research and writing.

Ideas for novels come from strange places.

Murder on Insel Poel was born on a trip from Geneva to the Baltic island to retrieve a painting for my then housemate. The ride had been full of sightseeing and adventures such as being the only two non-police at a hotel where a police training seminar was being held and seeing former Communist watch towers. We also reduced our checklist of German foods we wanted to eat on route.

The staff at the museum that was showing the painting welcomed us. In one of those serendipity moments, we found ourselves making paper Christmas decorations with them and drinking coffee.

As I wandered around the museum, I saw a model of a ship--the Cap Arcona. I asked about it and was told at the end of WWII, the Germans had loaded the former luxury ship with prisoners from concentration camps. Their intent was to sink it in the Baltic. The British, thinking it was full of German officers on vacation sank it first. Some of the camp survivors were able to make it to the Insel Poel shore.

Suddenly, I had the historical part of my next novel, but I needed a modern part.

The idea of sex trafficking and child abuse came from CNN specials.

The third plot for the book would be about the air force pilot that bombed the ship and his romance with a vicar's daughter.

Research on some of the topics was readily available, but I needed more for authenticity.

My housemate, always up for an adventure, was more than willing to return to Insel Poel to get more information. This time we stopped at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp. I spent a painful few hours listening to oral histories from former prisoners.

Back in Insel Poel, we checked more off our German favorite's checklist and explored the island, which reminded me of a lobster claw. 

I found a boat which triggered the idea for a scene where Annie, my heroine, would be held prisoner.

The cemetery and phone book provided names for local characters.

My housemate’s German was the biggest help. She wandered off and came back with a slew of information that I could never have gleaned on my own.

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As for the English part, at my late friend’s bookstore in Argelès, I met an English air force veteran, not quite from the war, but enough to fill me with technical information the reinforced or added to what I found on the Internet.

It was time to write using my research. During the entire research period, plot ideas were popping up in my head. There are writers that map out everything they are planning. I am not one of those writers. Often, I will sit down with one idea and I veer of in a direction that is a total surprise to me. In Murder in Caleb's Landing, I reached the end and realized the person I'd taped as the killer, couldn't possibly have done it. When I went back to do the necessary foreshadowing, it was already written.

I wish I could say how I built each character. I can't.

Admittedly, I do know some general things such age, profession and general As I write, they develop their inner characters until they are as real to me as friends I see regularly. They dictate to me what they would do. My fingers seem to know when I type a thought or action, that they would never do. In the past characters have almost gone on strike.

How does that happen?

As I write the scene, I feel an uncontrollable urge to go clean the bathroom, iron, rearrange anything even pay bills. It is as if they are telling me I am on the wrong track.

When I write a book, I live a double life…one that everyone sees and one in my head, where I am in whatever world I am writing about.

In the novel I am currently writing Day Care, in the middle of night when I can't sleep, Anne-Marie has long talks with me as to whether she should return to her husband; Maureen worries that they won't discover why her daughter has uncontrollable bouts of vomiting; Ashley is happy that her adopted daughter’s birth mother is doing well in medical school, and Sally knows she will never reunite with her parents. As for Brenda, she wasn’t even supposed to be in the novel, but she shoved her way in as a journalist writing a book and is constantly giving me insights into the other women.
That happened in Caleb's Landing as well when a walk-on role by a neighbor turned into a major plot twist with a dynamic woman that I wished was real.

They say reading lets you live other lives, but then, so does writing fiction.