What I Learned from Yard Sales

I picked up a wickedly pointed metal object from the dining room table, holding it by its hollow handle, and asked, "Mom, can we sell this garden trowel?"

She looked up from the box of file folders, staplers and paper clips she was sorting and said, "That's not a trowel, it's a bayonet. Give it to your father."

This was some thirty-plus years ago, when I went back to my parents’ house in Yardley, Pennsylvania, to prepare for a yard sale.

Before I arrived, my mother placed ads in the local papers, announcing a garage sale, featuring furniture, household goods and tools. The first customers showed up a little after eight on Saturday morning, while we were still finishing breakfast. They were so interested in what we had to offer that many of them helped us empty boxes, loading books, handbags, jewelry, office supplies and toys onto our folding card tables.

One of our best customers was Tony, of Tony's Auto Repair, the local AAA towing agent. Tony's wife cruised by early in the morning, and walked around back to my father's basement workshop. I was down there with him handling the cash and trying to make sure no one walked off with any of his dozens of hand tools. She looked around at the clutter, the piles of sawdust and metal shavings, and said, "I'm going to bring my husband back here. This is his kind of place."

Tony himself appeared around lunch time, and after scoping out the basement and the garage he bought a couple of wrench sets, a screwdriver, and my father's drill press. Tony's auto shop is next door to the insurance agency on Ferry street down by the river, one of the four streets that make up the center of Yardley. Before he left, he told my father that the insurance agent next door to him was looking for a circular saw, and that he'd send him by. Yardley was still a small town back then, where you know your neighbors and the kind of tools they're looking for. Even though the ad in the paper said the sale was from nine to three, we were still doing business at nine o'clock at night.

One of our late customers was a mechanical engineer who lived on Main Street in Yardley, a block south of the commercial center, which consists of a few dozen stone and clapboard buildings. Back then, we had five real estate brokerages, a grocery, a delicatessen, a state-run liquor store and a number of boutiques, insurance agencies and doctors' offices. The five and dime closed when I was a teenager, and the hardware and feed store at the corner by the traffic light was replaced by a real estate broker a few years back, as the area surrounding the town made the transition from rural to suburban.

The engineer was a referral, from a co-worker at the Navy turbine plant in West Trenton, just across the river. He bought the lathe, which took us nearly an hour to get unbolted from my father's workbench. I found out that my grandfather had built the workbench, something I'd never known. He was a good carpenter-- I knew he'd built the old back porch on our house, the one we took out when we built the big modern deck.

While we were carrying the lathe out to his car, I learned that the engineer had gone to Pennsbury High, as I had, and graduated in 1960. He was from Levittown, the suburban megalopolis on the other side of the highway, but he said he'd had a girlfriend in Yardley so he'd spent a lot of time there. That’s one of the reasons why I set the golden retriever books in a town that’s very much like Yardley, though a few miles farther upriver. So that as I did during those yard sales, Steve could run into old friends and their families, and people who shared his background.

Dogs and cats in books

I've been a fan of Mary Lee Ashford's since I met her and her writing partner (under the name of Sparkle Abbey) at a Malice Domestic conference years ago. Ever since I've enjoyed reading the Pampered Housedogs series, and I've also enjoyed Mary Lee's Sugar and Spice books. So I invited her to come visit my blog and talk about dogs and cats in books.

I am so excited to be a guest on Neil’s blog and even more excited to hear that he had a new Golden Retriever book out this month! Dog’s Green Earth is definitely right on the top of my to-be-read list and I hope it’s on yours as well.

You see, I love dogs (and cats, too) in books and Rochester, the aforementioned golden retriever, is a great example of why. When books have pets that are fully integrated into the story, it makes the story so much richer. And those canine or feline characters help us get to know the human characters in the story.

First off, just like in real life, whether someone has a pet or not tells us a lot about them. If they don’t, why not? Do they wish they could, but live somewhere that doesn’t allow pets? Have they had a bad experience?

If they do have a pet, how they came to have this particular pet tells us even more. Was it a search for just the right cat or dog? A desire for a particular breed? Or are they, like me, an adopter of strays and a supporter of animal rescue shelters? Neither approach is right or wrong, but it may shed some light on this character’s background and what makes them tick.

And how about the other characters in the book? How do they react to the pets? And, just as important, how do the pets react to them? It’s certainly true that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat animals.

When I started writing the Sugar & Spice mystery series, I gave Sugar a cat, Ernest, and Dixie, a dog. Dixie’s dog, Moto, is a mixed breed she adopted from the local rescue. And Ernest, is a six-toed tabby who adopted Sugar. She didn’t plan on having a cat, but…now she does.

Animals in a book not only give you great insights on the characters, but they can also, at times, play a part in the plot of the story. Perhaps, prompting action, increasing conflict, or serving as a cohort in uncovering a clue.

How about you? Do you like pets in books? Do you have a favorite fictional dog or cat?

About the Sugar & Spice Mysteries:

Sugar (Rosetta Sugar-Baker), a down-sized magazine editor and Spice (Dixie Spicer), a blue-ribbon baker, believe they have the perfect ingredients for a successful community cookbook publishing business. When you stir in a dash of small town drama and a dollop of murder the result is a delicious new mystery series…

Game of Scones - Sugar & Spice Mysteries Book 1

Risky Biscuits - Sugar & Spice Mysteries Book 2

About Mary Lee

Mary Lee Ashford writes the Sugar and Spice series for Kensington Books, and also writes as half of the writing team of Sparkle Abbey. She is the founding president of Sisters in Crime – Iowa and a former board member of the Mystery Writers of America Midwest chapter, as well as a member of Novelists, Inc., Romance Writers of America, Kiss of Death the RWA Mystery Suspense chapter, Sisters in Crime, and the SinC Internet group, Guppies. Her delights are encouraging other writers, reading, and enjoying her family, especially her six grandchildren.

And she loves to connect with readers!

Website: www.MaryLeeAshford.com

Yardley and Stewart's Crossing

It’s no secret that I have based Stewart’s Crossing on Yardley, the small town in Bucks County, PA where I grew up. It had once been a river town, with an active business life along the bank and a broad street stretching down to a two-lane bridge. But when the bridge crumbled during the hurricane of '58 so did much of Yardley's identity. When I was a kid, a funeral home, a cafe, a gas station rarely patronized and an inn comprised the riverfront, and small houses and bungalows stretch away in both directions.

You could see evidence of the fact that we lived in the Delaware Valley as we climbed hills outside of town, where farmland stretched for miles. When I took the late bus home from high school, we roved those country lanes and dropped kids off in front of farms and silos.

Back then, the town’s focus shifted a bit west, to Main Street, where the old mill and the florist's greenhouses anchored the commercial district. Victorian houses heavy with gingerbread abut the modern firehouse, with its two bays; the remodeled bank, town hall, the small shopping center, the doctor's offices and the decorator shops, the convenience mart and pharmacies and real estate agents fill the rest of the street.

Today, a lone traffic light still guards the intersection of Main Street and Afton Avenue, that broad street that stretches down to the remains of the old bridge, now a memorial to victims of the war, where a wilting wreath of red, white and blue usually rests. On its way there, Afton Avenue jumps over the canal, which stretches parallel and quiet along the Delaware, and runs past more decorator shops, gas stations, and grocery stores.

In the other direction, Afton Avenue climbs one of the hills that make the Delaware Valley, passing the mill pond and the old library, a Victorian Gothic one-room building with peaked windows and high shutters. It was built in the late 1800s by the townspeople and only in the recent past did the growth of the surrounding area force it to move to new, more spacious headquarters farther out in the country.

The suburbs have encroached on the farmland I once knew. Driving inland now, I hardly recognize any landmarks, the familiar old streets now lined with housing developments and strip shopping centers. There’s even a Fortune 500 company, Crown Holdings, located somewhere in town. When I was growing up, riding my bike along the cracked sidewalks of downtown, I couldn’t have imagined that.

I’ve tried to recreate some of old Yardley in my portrait of Stewart’s Crossing. The Delaware still flows past, shallow and fast, rising up to the low points on the River Road during the spring rains, when it carries with it the runoff of upriver snows. Since so many cozy mysteries take place in small towns, there’s no reason why I can’t immortalize my own home town in fiction, the way Bruce Springsteen did with his in song.

Hi, Neighbor!

About a year ago, my husband mentioned a website he had joined called Nextdoor, a way for neighbors within our gated community to communicate with each other online.

Here’s the way they describe it: “Nextdoor is the private social network for your neighborhood. Nextdoor is the best way to stay informed about what’s going on in your neighborhood—whether it’s finding a last-minute babysitter, planning a local event, or sharing safety tips. There are so many ways our neighbors can help us, we just need an easier way to connect with them.”

The site required verification of your address, so you could know that those who posted were real people who lived near you.

In general, I agree with the site’s premise. I’ve seen a number of posts there about things that relate to the gated community where we live, as well as the greater neighborhood. I’ve learned things about construction project and social groups that I might otherwise never have know about.

My husband was unhappy about things going on in our community, and he found a vocal group who shared his opinions. He made connections with neighbors we might otherwise not have known, and he enjoyed the social aspects of the site. I often heard about the complaints neighbors were making about the way our homeowner’s association was being run.

Those complaints fed into the story of Dog’s Green Earth. Though the ones I reference in the book are fictional (and River Bend bears only the simplest resemblance to the community where we live) I found that framework a great way for Steve to learn about complaints – and about people who might be suspects in the murder he’s investigating.

Who were the Philistines?

In writing David and Jonathan, an M/M romance from the Bible, I did a lot of reading of the Old Testament and various other sources, and after spending a long time on the battle between David and Goliath, I was curious to see who exactly the Philistines were. There are a number of other tribes mentioned in the Book of Samuel. Chief among them, of course, are the Philistines. Sources indicate they were an Aegean people, perhaps from Crete, who settled in Canaan around the same time as the Israelites, in the 12th century BCE.

The Philistine confederacy was composed of five major cities (the Pentapolis): Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath (as we later learn, home of Goliath). And eventually they gave their name to Palestine.

The Philistines are often called “the uncircumcised ones” in Samuel, but I’ve expanded that definition to all the other tribes that are mentioned, particularly because I wanted to give David some experience with a foreskin before Saul commands him to provide 100 foreskins as a bride price for his daughter Michal.

These other tribes include the Jebusites, an ancient Canaanite people that lived in an area called Jebus, on the site of current-day Jerusalem.

The Amalekites were a nomadic tribe living in the Negev, who are frequent enemies of the Israelites, even though they are said to be descended from Esau. One of the many inconsistencies I found in the Biblical story of David concerns the Amalekites. Adonai commands Saul to kill all the Amalekites and destroy all their possessions (1 Samuel 15). Saul disobeys, however, leaving Agag, the king of the Amalekites, alive, and confiscating the tribe’s best livestock.

This leads Samuel to curse Saul, tearing his garments and claiming him unfit to rule Israel. Then Samuel blesses David and anoints him as the future king.

Mount Gilboa

All that’s fine to me. However, when Saul is wounded at the battle of Mount Gilboa, an Amalekite slave finds him. Saul asks the slave to kill him, and then take his gold crown to David. There’s a lovely symmetry to having an Amalekite handle this task.

But if Saul had all the Amalekites other than their king killed, where did this slave come from? My guess is that there were other Amalekite tribes floating around, or that this slave was captured before Saul killed all his people. But it’s a weird anomaly to me.

The Edomites, also descendants of Esau, were an ancient people living in Edom, a region south of the Dead Sea.

The Kenites were a tribe of itinerant metalsmiths related to the Midianites and the Israelites who plied their trade while traveling in the desert rift valley extending from the Sea of Galilee to the Gulf of Aqaba. Before Saul kills the Amalekites, he tells the Kenites to leave from among them, because they have been good to the Israelites in the past. Moses’s father-in-law, Jethro, was a Kenite, so it seems like these tribes lived peacefully together and occasionally intermarried.

The Ammonites lived east of the Jordan river, and their chief city was Rabban Ammon – or Amman, the current capital of Jordan.

Adriel the Meholathite marries Saul’s oldest daughter, Merab—but all I can find is that this means he was from the town of Meholath, in the same way that David’s father Jesse is called a Bethlehemite.

I hope this gives readers some background into the various tribes who play a part in David and Jonathan's story, and my attempt to create a modern M/M romance out of one of the iconic relationships in the Old Testament.

You can buy the book from Amazon, or from other retailers here.

Year-End Holiday Wishes

I want to wish you all the happiest of holidays and the healthiest, best and most productive New Year.!

I’ve been quite busy this fall writing and I thought I’d let you know what’s in the pipeline.

My general practice is to write a first draft, put it aside, then come back to it a few months later. I’ll add in descriptions, make sure the timeline works, and so on. If I’m happy, I’ll send it off to one of the freelance editors I use. Then I’ll do another draft based on her advice, hire my fabulous cover designer to create a great cover, and then put it up for sale.

Sometimes a book takes more than two drafts. I’ve been working on an MM romance version of the story of David and Jonathan from the Bible, for example. In the first draft I took the Bible stories from the book of Samuel and knitted them into a coherent timeline (apparently several different authors contributed to that book, so it’s a mess.) It wasn’t a real love story yet, because the Bible didn’t treat it as one, so I had to do another draft to improve that. I’m hoping after another draft, and then editorial review and revision, it’ll be ready this spring.

Also on my hard drive is a historical MM romance set along the Delaware Canal in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. It’s also where the golden retriever mysteries are set. I’m in a historical mood right now—almost finished with a book I’m calling The Gentleman and the Spy, a romance adventure set a few years later but in London and the Cotswolds. Something about the tumult of that period appeals to me—the US was recovering from the Civil War, and Victoria reigned over India.

And finally, I finished a first draft of the next Have Body, Will Guard book, in which Aidan’s ex, Blake, needs him and Liam to protect Blake’s husband, an Argentine diplomat, at a convention in the Bahamas. You can feel free to tell anyone you know in the IRS that it’s loosely based on a trip my partner and I took in the spring!

If you haven’t read the most recent book in the series, The Same Page, Jon Michaelsen has posted an exclusive excerpt at his website, featuring the secondary couple of the book, young Russian Arseny and his Italian boyfriend Giovanni. I’ve had several readers ask to see them in another book. What do you think? Leave a comment here or at Jon's blog and I’ll choose someone to get a free digital copy of The Same Page—or any other book in the series, if you wish.

While you wait for all that, here’s a brief piece of flash fiction about Aidan and Liam, who can’t seem to get away from protecting people, even if they’re not hired to do so.

Christmas Village in the Place Massena, Nice

“Ice skating, Aidan? Really? You do know it’s eighty degrees outside.” Liam stared at me.

“Yes, but this rink is only temporary for the holidays.”

“Didn’t you get enough of the cold when we were in Chechnya?"

“It’s not like we were there for vacation. Please, Liam?”

“Fine. But if you fall on your ass, I’m laughing.”

“Ditto.”

They drove their Jeep down into the center of Nice, which was jammed with holiday tourists, and found a parking place in a garage near the Place Massena. On their way to the ice rink they passed an animated Christmas village, complete with elf, and a place where kids could have their photos taken with Santa.

“If you tell me you want to sit on Santa’s lap I’ll call you a pervert,” Liam said.

“I’ll settle for your lap, later.”

Beyond Santa’s village was a sugar shack, which was announced as a Canadian tradition. They both followed the instructions, dipping a stick in hot syrup and then rolling it in snow until it became a lollipop. “This is good enough to make me want to visit Canada,” Aidan said.

 They strolled through the rest of the Christmas village, where people shopped for handmade ornaments or crèches, drank mulled wine and ate crepes and waffles. The rink was the size of an Olympic swimming pool, about half-filled with skaters in an odd mix of clothes, from T-shirts and shorts over bare legs to ski pants and long-sleeved turtlenecks.

It was in the low sixties, so they had both worn jeans and polo shirts. While they fitted their skates beside the rink, the fan blowing cold air chilled Aidan’s bare arms and rose goosebumps, but once they were on the rink he didn’t notice them anymore.

His first few glides were wobbly, as he let his body remember how to do this. He had grown up on a lake in Pennsylvania, and when it froze over he joined the rest of the neighborhood kids out on the ice, skating in loops and joining pick-up ice hockey games.

As with almost everything athletic, Liam was better than he was, taking off on a long glide right out of the gate, even though Aidan was sure he hadn’t been on skates since he was a teenager. Aidan focused on keeping his balance, skating slowly around couples and small children.

As he did, he watched the crowd. When he had taken bodyguard school years before, when he first decided he wanted to work with Liam, one of the things he’d been trained to look for was people whose attire didn’t fit the weather. Men in long overcoats, for example, when the temperature didn’t merit it.

But that rule didn’t seem to matter when it came to an ice rink on the Côte d’Azur. A young man, his face almost obscured by his heavy beard and a wool cap over his head, wore a heavy wool coat that hung to his knees. But who could blame him, when the ice was a frosty thirty-two degrees, with cold breezes generated by the fans at the sidelines that had chilled Aidan earlier.

Ahead of him, Liam twirled around and skated backwards toward him, then took Aidan’s hand and spun him around slowly. “You goof,” Aidan said, but he smiled.

Liam let him go, and zoomed off around the rink, and Aidan skated slowly behind him. When he passed the young man in the overcoat, he couldn’t help noticing something in his look. He remembered going to gay bars when he was barely drinking age, back in Philadelphia. He had the feeling he’d looked that way, longing as he watched men come and go with each other. Would he ever find a man to enter his heart?

There had been Blake first, for nearly eleven years, and then Liam, so Aidan knew that his youthful fears had been ungrounded. He had the desire to pull that young amn aside and tell him not to worry, everything would be all right in the end.

But what if he wasn’t gay? Suppose he was just frightened of getting on skates?

“Did you notice the guy in the overcoat?” Liam asked, as he skated up beside Aidan.

“The one who looks like a kid outside a candy shop?” Aidan said. “Yeah.”

“I wouldn’t describe him that way. I’d say the guy who looks like he’s hiding something under that coat.”

“Liam. He probably just wanted to stay warm out on the ice.”

“But he’s not on the ice. He’s on the sidelines and he’s sweating like mad. Why not take off his coat?”

The next few moments appeared to Aidan to pass in slow motion. The young man unbuttoned his coat, and Aidan recognized the outline of a long gun beneath it. Liam saw that, too, and with a strong push on his skates, glided quickly toward the sidelines. He jumped the low fence with the ease of an Olympic skater, slamming into the young man.

The crowd reacted by pulling back, especially when a twenty-something mother noticed the gun that had fallen free and called, “Au secours! Un pistolet!”

Aidan skated close to where Liam wrestled with the young man, but couldn’t do anything to help because he had his skates on. Fortunately a pair of flics arrived almost immediately, securing the long gun and separating Liam from the young man, whose hat had come off to reveal an unruly mop of black hair.

Aidan skated over to the exit, swapped out his skates for his shoes, and picked up Liam’s running shoes as well. As he returned to Liam, he heard his partner explaining how he had noticed the gun. 

The crowd supported him, and the dark-haired man was hauled off to the police station, after the flics had taken information from all the witnesses.

“Just another sunny day on the Côte d’Azur,” Liam said, as he swapped out his skates for his shoes. 

“I’m starved. How about we go back to that Canadian place and try the grilled marshmallows dipped in chocolate?”

“You know the way to my heart,” Aidan said. “Though you did cause it to skip a couple of beats when you launched yourself at that guy.”

“Just keeping things interesting,” Liam said.

Thanks for reading this far! The hardest thing about the Have Body, Will Guard series is figuring out why someone needs a bodyguard. I’ve already done the following:

1.    A courier who needs protection (Three Wrong Turns in the Desert)

2.    A pop star who comes out amid death threats (Dancing with the Tide)

3.    A boy who may be in danger as a pawn in his father’s business deal (Teach Me Tonight)

4.    The young daughter of an opposition politician (Olives for the Stranger)

5.    A businessman building in a sensitive area (Under the Waterfall)

6.    A man who learns dangerous information about the government (The Noblest Vengeance)

7.    A former porn star in danger (Finding Freddie Venus)

8.    A man whose former love is now a government official (A Cold Wind)

9.    A young man who needs to be rescued from Chechnya (The Same Page)

(BTW, all the links are to Amazon, where I sell most of my books, but they’re all available widely at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple and other e-retailers.)

Any ideas I can use? I’d love to hear them, either by email, Facebook message or post here or at Jon Michaelsen’s site.

Love and joy –

Neil

My Manifesto

I’ve been struggling with a new tagline for my books that will encompass all of them—something Jeff Goins calls a manifesto. I used to use “gay men in love and danger,” but that doesn’t cover my golden retriever books or some of the other miscellaneous things I’ve written.

It’s an interesting exercise, to look at all the thirty-plus books I’ve published and see if there is a common thread that runs through them. Though most of my work has involved gay characters, not all has—so maybe being gay or living a gay life isn’t at the core of what I write, or why I write.

Coming out, and what I call “the pain of the closet,” which often drives people to do dangerous or unexpected things, dominated my early work. The early arc of the Mahu Investigations dealt with Kimo’s coming out process—getting dragged out of the closet in Mahu, making gay friends in Mahu Surfer, finding love in Mahu Fire.

Once he was settled down with Mike, I wanted to explore further dimensions of the authentic life he was able to lead—moving in together, getting a dog, fostering a child, eventually fathering twins. But all of this in the end, is about love—he couldn’t have that life he deserved until he opened himself to the possibility of finding love with the right person.

Of course this is rooted in my own life, and the love that I found once I came out. So I began to see that there’s a connection in all my books between living one’s true life, and the ability to find love.

My MFA thesis at FIU, Invasion of the Blatnicks, became my first published book. Steve Berman has to learn to let go of the expectations that surround him before he can fully come into himself. Steve Levitan, in the Golden Retriever mysteries, has to recover from a divorce and incarceration before he can begin to live fully once more. Rochester helps him with that process, giving him unconditional love and teaching Steve how to love again. (And in case you haven’t figured it out, my middle name is Steven, and these two guys represent big parts of who I am, even though both are straight.)

The same is true for my gay characters. Though Aidan Greene of the Have Body Will Guard series has been out of the closet for more than a decade, loving the wrong guy has screwed him up. And even though Liam McCullough chose to come out rather than remain closeted in the US Navy, he doesn’t get to live a full life until he falls in love with Aidan.

And finally, the Love on Series is all about young guys finding their way after college, and opening themselves up to love once they know who they are and what they want.

I’m still struggling with the exact wording for this manifesto, or tagline. One possibility is “Follow your heart to find your authentic life,” while another is “Living your authentic life leads to love.”

Neither is quite punchy enough—but then, since my writing life is a work in progress, why wouldn’t my manifesto be one, too?

Hydra Barrier

Charlie The Yorkshire Terror

One year, soon after we moved into our townhouse, we had a colossal rainstorm. I drowned my Mitsubishi convertible on a street just outside our gated community and had to trudge home in the pouring rain. By the time I reached the house, the water in our street was so high I had to carry the Yorkie we had then to a safe place to do his business, or he’d have drowned.

A couple of storms ago, we had water come in under our garage door, so my partner and I invested in a couple of Hydra Barriers – the big yellow tubes you can see in the picture of our townhouse, just before we evacuated.

The yellow tubes are the Hydra Barriers

They take the place of sandbags, preventing rising water from getting into your home or garage. Since we’re only a mile or so inland, we’re always worried when the forecast calls for storm surges, so these make it easy to prepare. You just fill them up from the hose and drag them into place, and you’re done.

After the threat has passed, all you have to do is unplug the stopper and the water pours out—often all over you, however. Then you roll them up – they don’t take up much space—and store them until the next storm.

I don’t know if we were in danger of rising water because we evacuated, but we felt pretty confident because we had left these in place. Fortunately, one of our neighbors remained at home, and was able to clear the clogged storm drains. 

With all those storms still brewing out in the Atlantic, I thought I'd share these in case anyone else needs something similar.

Description in Love on the Boil

Description Blog

To celebrate the release of Love on the Boil, my newest M/M romance from Loose Id, I went over the manuscript to look for some good examples of description.

I’m lucky that I was able to head down to South Beach to do some observation, and a couple of the people I saw ended up in the book. In this case I’m trying to showcase the character’s attitude while describing:

“A skinny man in his forties walked by, wearing a T-shirt with one of those motivational slogans and a ball cap turned backwards, as if he didn’t know that it made him look like a douche rather than a young guy.”

I read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt a while ago and noticed that she always used three things when describing, layering on those details. It's a technique I use now and then-- that business of the power of three, you know, from fairy tales and elsewhere.

“Eddie and I stepped out onto Lincoln Road, past a beauty store specializing in mascara, concealer, and beehive wigs for drag queens.”

Description can be more than just what something looks like. I hope that this sentence conveys some sense of the melting pot on South Beach:

“Next door was a restaurant run by Argentine immigrants featuring kosher vegan cuisine for Orthodox Jewish women pushing strollers and trailed by little boys with curls hanging in front of their ears.”

And this description of food shows the history between my two protagonists, former lovers who now have to work together to make a business succeed. Once again, I’ve named three things on the platter, and used the verb “jumped” to convey action at the same time.

“The antipasto platter arrived, laden with roasted tomatoes, tiny bites of salami, and wedges of focaccia. As I expected, Eddie jumped on the marinated artichoke hearts. I was happy to let him have them as long as I could eat the prosciutto and melon.”

And I often use comparison as a way to get the looks of the first person narrator in-- at six foot, he was almost as tall as I was, and though our hair was originally the same dull brown, his was threaded with more silver than mine.

Or a more general view. “I was the stud, after all. The butch one nobody suspected was gay. I worked out, I tended bar in the evenings. Darren was the queen who made a big deal out of everything.”

Tio Eduardo

Sometimes I look for images on line, like the dapper gentleman to the left, who epitomizes Eddie's Tio Eduardo, and then I just have to describe what the picture looks like.

And finally, an example of how their different living spaces reflect their personalities.

“The more I thought about it, the more his business seemed to suit Darren. He was fussy that way, an elderly man in a young guy’s body. Everything had to be just so. As I looked around his apartment I saw his Japanese fixation clearly. A single futon in the living room, with a Hokusai reproduction positioned exactly above it. His glass-fronted kitchen cabinets were neatly organized and everything was sparkling clean.

“Not the way I lived at all. My studio was jammed with souvenirs, and the posters on my walls hung haphazardly. My kitchen was clean, sure, but not immaculate like Darren’s. And while I did have a couple of different teapots and infusers, they were all jumbled together in one cabinet.”

If you like these examples I hope you’ll check out Love on the Boil.

Writing Cats and Dogs

When I was a kid, we’d occasionally go to visit my mother’s childhood friend, who had an adorable dachshund, I loved playing with. I began pestering my parents to get me a dog, and my seventh birthday present was Pierre, a black miniature poodle puppy. (My mother, who had grown up with a Chow, was determined not to get stuck vacuuming dog hair every day.)

Me and my puppy

Although like every kid, I tried to duck out of some chores, I did walk Pierre almost every day, he sat on my lap on car trips, and he was small enough that I could carry him around. Pierre set me on my path as a dog lover, though I didn’t realize that I could write about dogs until my partner and I adopted a golden retriever puppy we named Samwise, who became my constant companion, just as his namesake did in The Lord of Rings for Frodo.

But dogs weren’t the only animals to show up in my fiction. I am allergic to cats – but that has never stopped me from writing about them. The first significant cat in my life belonged to my friend Vicki’s mother. Rajah was a regal black Persian who owned that house, and I was intrigued by his personality, so different from Pierre’s eagerness to be petted and loved. Vicki and I would sit on her living room floor, calling for Rajah to come to us—and we were usually ignored.

A six-toed Hemingway cat

That wasn’t the case with my friend Pam’s cats, though. When we both moved to Miami, she got interested in Hemingway cats – the six-toed ones that lived around Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, or were descended from those.  She adopted a six-toed Abyssinian she named Hemmie, and Hemmie and I became good friends. I used her, and her characteristics, for a couple of short stories I wrote for collections of romantic stories sold at grocery store checkouts.

The cat in those stories is named Pilar and she’s as quirky and inquisitive as Pam’s Hemmie. I admit I used both those cats as the basis for Sheba, the tiger-striped cat in my story “Riding the Tiger,” included in the Happy Homicides 5 anthology. I needed a smart cat, one savvy enough to go out seeking the crime-solving duo of Rochester and Steve. Of course it’s Rochester who first notices Sheba, and takes off after her down the street.

So far, cats and dogs are the only animals who’ve populated my fiction. But a neighbor of mine has a couple of brightly-colored parrots who often stand out on the wall at the edge of his house, and my own goldens, Brody and Griffin, are very interested in those birds. So who knows how my criminal menagerie will expand?

Today (May 26) is the last day that the Happy Homicides 5 collection will be discounted to 99 cents. 

Return to the Citizen's Academy

George Piro

I was fortunate to be able to return to the FBI Citizen's Academy as part of my participation in the Academy's Alumni Association. The night I visited, George Piro, Special Agent in Charge of the Miami office, spoke to the  class about the eight months he spent interrogating Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He was the only person Hussein spoke with, and they met for five to seven hours a day. Piro spent additional hours every day researching Hussein and looking for ways to establish rapport with him and identify his vulnerabilities.

“You figure out what really matters to the subject during the rapport-building phase,” Piro explained. Hussein was most concerned with his place in history, as the third great leader of his people – after the prophet Mohammed and Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Piro reminded us that Iraq was the cradle of civilization, and that it was the place where the first laws were developed – the Code of Hammurabi – as well as many other institutions we take for granted, such as the first police force.

And as the child of a single mother, Hussein had a particularly strong bond with his mother, who was the only person he really loved and trusted. Piro used his own relationship with his mother to establish a bond and connection with Hussein.

One of Hussein's favorite photos of himself.
The good guys always ride the white horse, right?

“It’s important to establish the subject’s truth-telling style,” Piro said. He explained that Hussein was also a published novelist, and he read Hussein’s first book, and used questions about that to identify how Hussein looked and acted when he was telling the truth. During this phase of the interrogation, Piro had to already know the answers to all the questions he asked. It wasn’t about the answers themselves, he explained, but about identifying eye contact, mannerisms, etc. that Hussein displayed when telling the truth.

When asked whether his conversations with Hussein were recorded, Piro was cleverly evasive, stating that it was not common policy at that point to record conversations, though today it is.

In a very Miami twist, Piro discovered that Hussein had a great fondness for Cuban cigars, and at their final meeting, he brought Hussein’s favorite Montecristos and they smoked them together. He reminded us that it’s okay for an FBI agent to buy Cuban cigars outside the US – he just couldn’t bring them home.

He ended his presentation with a quote that exemplified his attitude toward the assignment. “Successes belong to the organization; failure belongs to the individual.” He was determined to succeed because he didn’t want to let the Bureau down.

The second part of our evening was a presentation by an agent in charge of the Evidence Recovery Teams – ERT. I'll cover that in another post. As always, any errors here are my own and this blog is not intended to represent official views of the FBI.

If you like this, I hope you'll check out THE NEXT ONE WILL KILL YOU, the first in my new series of FBI thrillers. 

What Season are You?

When I was younger, there were a couple of books which classified your looks as seasons – if you had certainly hair color, skin color and so on you were a winter, a spring, a summer or a fall, and you should choose certain clothing colors to make you look your best. Lately I’ve been thinking about those constraints in terms of books, too.

One of the hardest choices I have to make is when a book is set, because I think the weather, temperature and surroundings add so much to a book. Think of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, or Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. Climate plays a huge part in those books.

For my series books, the choice of season is usually pretty clear. I recall speaking with Craig Johnson once about his first four Longmire books. He said that he’d patterned on Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” – the books cover a year in the life of Sheriff Walt Longmire, cycling through the four seasons.

That conversation inspired me to focus on the seasons as I write the golden retriever mysteries. To keep a certain sense of reality in the books, I needed Rochester, the canine hero, to age pretty slowly. But at the same time I didn’t want my small town location, Stewart’s Crossing, to become a Cabot Cover, where Jessica Fletcher lived, and where murders seemed to happen every week.

So each time I began a new book I think about when it’s happening in the lives of Rochester and his human dad, Steve Levitan. As the series begins, Steve is at the start of a two year parole after serving a year in the California penal system for computer hacking. So his progress plays a part in the timing of the books as well. 

For example, DOG HAVE MERCY takes place around Christmas time, and I had to work around the constraints of that season. Eastern College, where Steve works, closes down for two weeks in December, leaving him at home and at loose ends – lots of time to investigate!

One of my series regulars, Gail Dukowksi, who owns the Chocolate Ear café in downtown Stewart’s Crossing and always has a home baked biscuit on hand for Rochester, doesn’t make much of an appearance in this book, because Rochester can’t go inside the café, and it’s too cold for Steve to sit outside with Rochester at his feet.

Seasons don’t matter quite as much in my Mahu Investigations—since my hero, openly gay Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, ages about a year between books, I can pick when I want to set one. 

The same is true of my Have Body, Will Guard M/M romance adventure series. In both cases, the books take place in pretty warm climates – Hawaii, Tunisia, the south of France – so I can begin immediately layering in temperature and visual details, without worrying too much if it’s winter or summer.

My “Love on” M/M romance series began with the idea of a group of recent college graduates looking for love and careers on South Beach, so it was natural that they begin in May, graduation time. It’s pretty easy for me to add hot steamy days and humid nights, because that’s where I live.

The biggest challenge is when I start something completely new. It often takes me fifty or a hundred pages until something comes up that has to be rooted in time—a school vacation, a blizzard or a big holiday. Then I’ll go back to my schedule and figure out exactly when the story is taking place, so I can then figure out what the weather is like, if the trees are bare or in bloom, and so on.

A long book I've been working on for a while is like that. It takes place in numerous locations around the world, and I’m trying not to lock myself in to a time until I have to. But then, at one point two of the characters just went out for a drink and sat outdoors by the river in a Chinese border city… so I may be figuring out that timetable soon!

I think those details add so much to the realism and atmosphere of a book and I like to think that my experience growing up in Pennsylvania and living through winters there, and then the last thirty years in a hot climate, give me the flexibility to describe what I need.

Time in the Mahu Series

As I began to write books in the Mahu Investigations series, I had to figure out how to handle the passage of time. It quickly became clear to me that I wanted to track Kimo’s coming out process—meeting gay friends, getting a boyfriend, settling down and so on. So I needed to keep track of how much time had passed between books, and try to age Kimo appropriately.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with him! Mahu Surfer, the second book in the series, takes place only a few weeks after the end of Mahu, yet was published in 2007, two years after Mahu debuted. Then book three, Mahu Vice, came out two years later in its first edition from Alyson Books.

So poor Kimo was stuck in a time warp. When MLR Press picked up the series after the demise of Alyson, I sat down to review the books again. When I first wrote Mahu, nobody had cell phones, so Kimo’s search for a pay phone in the early chapters was reasonable. He had a cassette tape deck in his truck, too. Now those details seemed jarring.

Until 1967, there was a law on the books in Hawaii that required all children to have a Christian first name, not a Hawaiian one. Kimo’s older brothers have Christian first names – Louis and Howard. But when Kimo was born, his parents deliberately gave him a Hawaiian name, because they could.

But as I revised I realized that would make him too old. So his birth date changed to 1974, and I had to dump that little tidbit.

Even so, time was going to have to be elastic if I was only going to publish every two years.  I did my best to move Kimo ahead a year or two for each book but I still fell behind. Finally in Ghost Ship I moved forward a couple of extra years to catch up. 

But that caused more problems. One of the key plot elements in the book is the theft of plutonium after the meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant in Japan in 2011. When I began writing the book the disaster had just happened—but with my sped-up timetable, the meltdown became history, and I had to tweak the details to fit.

What’s going to happen to Kimo and Mike now? Well, for a long time I thought that Ghost Ship would be the end of their adventures. I’d tracked them through years of change, from coming out into middle age and fatherhood. What was left? Then Kimo started talking to me again… so we’ll see how I have to massage time for the next book!