Researching Your Novel…Can You Go Too Far?

“So are you up for a little adventure?” my fellow indie writer asked, blue eyes bright with anticipation.

A little adventure. Sure. I’d recently quit my nine-to-five job and was living the vida loca, writing full-time from home, and figured I could use an adventure. Shake up the old synapses, give me some good material for the further escapades of one of the protagonists in a popular action-adventure series I write. What the heck, I thought. Couldn’t hurt.

I was wrong. Continue reading “Researching Your Novel…Can You Go Too Far?”

Don’t Try This at Home

Bound & gaggedThat’s right – don’t try this at home. I’m a professional…professional lunatic, perhaps. Although my good friend and martial artist Dennis Lawson once told me that because I’m a published novelist, that makes me eccentric. Otherwise I’d be certifiable.

It started in New York City while I was working on my first novel, Lust for Danger, with a screenplay writer (Mykel). She’d read the draft my agent gave her and loved it. We were in her office, and she got to a scene in which Special Agent Night was nearly discovered snooping for evidence during an illegal search. There was only one place for my agent to go – under the suspect’s desk. Mykel said she wanted more depth – more suspense – in that scene. I was stumped.

“Have you ever tried hiding under a desk?” Mykel asked me.

In fact, I hadn’t (that I could remember). What could it hurt? I figured out how much time it would take for the suspect to do what he had to do in the office, set a timer, and crawled under the desk. Wow. It’s amazing how perspective changes…how suddenly the space closes in around you. Mykel was quite pleased with my re-written scene.

You realize, of course, she created a monster. Continue reading “Don’t Try This at Home”