Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Typing Skills

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I’ve never had any training in how to type, so am what is known as a ‘hunt and pecker’…which sounds rather rude, now I think about it! 

My primitive technique entails using one finger on each hand to hit the keys. I think that other fingers may sometimes get involved, but only when I’m in full flow. I’m of an age to have once used old fashioned mechanical typewriters, which was an ordeal owing to the pressure needed to depress a key. I dare say that writers of old had stronger fingers than modern authors, who are spoilt by soft touch computer keyboards.

Typewriters were so heavy! I was given a Smith Corona desktop cast iron model, that weighed 35 pounds. It felt more like a potential bludgeon than a tool to help me write.

As is the way with obsolete technology, typewriters have become collectable. Tom Hanks, of all people, recently published a collection of short stories called Uncommon Type, with each story being written on one of his favourite typewriters.

Will Self is also a fan of typewriters:

“Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think…You don’t revise as much, you just think more, because you know you’re going to have to retype the entire thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.”

Other authors agree with him.

I briefly knew a secretary, who’d been trained to touch type, and her hands were a blur. She averaged 75 words a minute, and eerily, knew exactly where she’d made a mistake when she finished typing.

When I’m in the groove, I can churn out 40 words a minute, with only a few mistakes. Looking at the keyboard slows me down, though I’m always surprised that my fingers have any sense of where the correct keys are when I concentrate on the screen.

My writing method starts with making copious notes on my laptop about everything from forensic details to characters’ motivations, to words and phrases and conversation snippets that I want to use. I don’t compose a formal plan of where the plot will be going, preferring a pantser approach by letting my characters’ actions propel the action. However, I always know what the climax of the story will be, including the mood I’m trying to achieve for the end of the action.

I write directly to the screen. Any speed I have in typing was slowed when writing my last novel, as I changed technique by staying on one chapter for several days, backtracking and reworking.

I’ve known a couple of authors who write the first draft in longhand, using their lucky pen, before typing it out on a mechanical typewriter. They spend much time scanning and printing out their novels. Strangely, both of them own computers but don’t like using them for creative writing. They like the racket that an old metal typewriter makes, and they’re proficient at typing, making few mistakes…which might be a benefit of this way of writing, as errors are harder to correct.

How do you write your stories?

Are you a trained typist, or is one finger on each hand blunted and calloused?

Marketing, Publishing, Writing

Pink & Glittery Book Covers

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This article draws attention to a peculiarity of publishing, that could justifiably be labelled ‘sexist’—though, no one’s doing exactly that yet.

(click the BBC link for more of Jojo Moyes’ opinions on chick lit writing)

Many cover designs are formulaic and lazy. If you’ve ever thought that silhouettes were left behind in the 18th- and 19th-centuries, then you’ve never looked at a display of contemporary fiction in a bookshop.

Jojo Moyes makes some strong points about how books written by women are marketed. I’ve always found the pink and glittery approach to be patronising, but I feel the same way about action novels aimed at a mainly male readership—depicting guns, battleships and jet fighters—this is sometimes referred to as dad lit. How butch can you get?

For my own Cornish Detective novels, should they ever be published, I’d prefer something that wasn’t pigeonholing them as being for male or female readers, and I’d also like to avoid overt suggestions that they’re crime writing. I’m fairly skilled artistically and have designed the covers for all of the titles I published online.

I also created a cover for the second story in my crime series The Perfect Murderer, which shows an anonymous figure cycling at night; the serial killer used a bicycle to stalk victims.

Image result for paul whybrow the perfect murderer

I somehow doubt that my designs would be acceptable to a book publisher. The only author I can think of, who’s got his own way with book design is Alasdair Gray—who uses his own typography and illustrations within the text and for the book cover.

What do you think about the clichéd use of colour, glitter and weaponry on book covers?

Is it an acceptable form of targetting an audience, who know what they’re after and don’t care about the packaging?

Are you put off by such book covers, maybe missing a good story? After all, many readers are already deterred by a book being of a genre they think they don’t like.

Hold the front page!

Forget pink and glittery book covers, what we really need are pulp makeovers of classic titles, as this amusing article shows.

I particularly like the Immortal Madame Bovary A BRILLIANT AND CYNICAL STORY OF THE WOMAN WHO FLOUTED THE MORAL LAWS OF HER DAY COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED which has the price of 3 shillings and 6 pence printed on the title character’s bum!

On a serious note, I wonder how many fans of pulp fiction were introduced to serious literature by this marketing tactic?

Image result for chick lit cartoons

Writing

Sensitivity Readers

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I’ve previously posted on clumsy writing about minorities and members of the opposite sex to the author, but it’s an issue that won’t go away, as this Guardian article explains.

Reading it, I found myself agreeing with much of the outrage while being exasperated with the illogicality of some objections. One of the biggest problems with politically correct writing is that it’s one-way traffic. Would a book publisher with a roster of only ethnic authors vet their clients’ writing for sensitive treatment of white characters? Almost certainly not. Do publishers of gay literature ensure that straight characters are not portrayed in a demeaning way? What do you think?

If you’re not of the group being described, whatever the difference is, then you get pulled on your choice of words. To use one example from the article, one sensitivity reader suggested to white author Anna Hecker that, she be ‘more creative with descriptions, saying her initial description of “light brown skin, a wide nose, and kinky dark hair” was both cliched and boring…’ That’s pedestrian writing to me, showing a lack of imagination rather than covert racism. If a black author had written those words nothing would have been said. How ultra-sensitive can you be, before it becomes ridiculous? The character may well have had a wide nose…people of all races do—and they have narrow ones too—so what!

In 2018, I came across an odd case of a publisher evading accusations of cultural appropriation, and though I’ve got no way of proving my theory, it reeks of duplicity. I enjoyed reading a novel called Underground Airlines, published in 2016, which is Alternate History based on the notion that slavery never really ended after the American Civil War. I’m normally a bit wary of this genre, finding it hard to suspend disbelief, but I was gripped by the story which has a complex, tough and cunning protagonist. Author Ben H. Winters came to my attention, as he wrote a trilogy of detective novels (my chosen genre of writing) which I’ve requested from my local library; they had Underground Airlines on the shelves, so I grabbed it.

The thing is, the hero of the story is a black bounty hunter, who for murky reasons, is hunting down black slaves who’ve run away from their white masters. Ben H. Winters is resolutely white!

Related image

While I believe that it’s entirely correct that he should be allowed to write about whatever he wants to, as should we all, his novel was published without an author photograph on the flap of the book cover, which is rather unusual for such a successful writer. Of course, there’s no mention that he’s Caucasian in the brief description of his publishing history. I’m sure they omitted his photograph to help sales….

Are you nervous about tackling anything that might need a sensitivity reader to evaluate?

 (This could be the fate of my crime novels if oversensitivity continues.)

Writing

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

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People who haven’t written a story are often mystified by how authors come up with their ideas. Even regular readers are in awe of the process.

A friend recently asked me if I had a criminal mind, as I write crime stories. She’s acted as a manuscript reader for me, and after critiquing my second novel in which a serial killer was dispassionately taking victims as part of an online roleplay game, she was understandably nervous about having anything to do with me! I answered her, by saying that criminality showed the extremes of human behaviour, so was memorable, for going beyond what is acceptable by society’s rules immediately implies the stories of the perpetrator and the victim need exploring.

It’s difficult to make a story based on the status quo, on peace and quiet: a tranquil sea is boring—we need waves to draw the eye and stir the emotions.

Writers are observers, noticing things that others don’t and storing them away for future use. Any skills I have as a writer were partly influenced by my father, who was a noted industrial photographer, quite a shy man who used his camera as a way of interfacing with people; it was his shield and his magic wand. He noticed the strangeness of what people did, commenting on these aberrations almost as a visitor from another planet sent down to make a sociological study of human beings.

After he died, I came across a poem that made me think of his attitude to people, written by Sir Walter A. Raleigh—not the famous Tudor writer, courtier and explorer, but rather a 19th/20th-century English professor:

 “Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914”:

I wish I loved the Human Race;

I wish I loved its silly face;

I wish I liked the way it walks;

I wish I liked the way it talks;

And when I’m introduced to one,

I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!”

Sir Walter A. Raleigh (1861-1922)

I think that writers have this slightly detached stance, observing people and mentally recording their activities with a view to devising stories that rewrite what really happened. Writers remember unusual names, strange news stories that somehow swiftly disappear from the media, and amusing incidents that made them laugh and which might entertain their readers.

My ideas come from all over the place, including the news. For instance, there were a series of killings in Bombay & Calcutta from 1987-1989, with the victims being homeless people. The murderer was never caught, which in itself is attractive to a writer, for who knows where he is now?

With so many British people homeless nowadays, living on the streets, what if an anonymous killer decided to do clean up?

As a child in the 1960s, I was terrified at the prospect of meeting an escaped inmate of a mental institution, a doctor who’d been incarcerated for killing his patients. The newspapers called him Doctor Death, which was bad enough, but what really scared me about him was that he was 6′ 6″ tall, wore a floor-length raincoat and apparently walked without swinging his arms, owing to shoulder injuries. Imagine how spooky that would look. I watched every man who walked past our house, checking that he was swinging his arms! They caught him after a few weeks, but what a great character to resurrect in a story.

When I lived in America, a local mortuary did a stocktake of their inventory, including their dead clients, and found that they’d somehow got two extra corpses that they couldn’t account for….One would have been bad enough, but two looked even more suspicious—were they connected, and how were they sneaked into the cold storage vaults? They’d both been murdered, from the wounds on their bodies, so presumably, their killers had somehow accessed the mortuary—a real case of hiding something in plain sight. One of the regular characters in my Cornish Detective series is a forensic pathologist with a morgue so I may give her a mysterious guest.

I got the idea for the title of my last novel, The Dead Need Nobody, from a Jo Nesbø novel in which his protagonist Harry Hole thinks just that as he leaves an autopsy of a murder victim. My next novel in the series will be called Kissing and Killing, which was a phrase I stole from a throwaway comment by a member of my writing forum, The Colony. I hadn’t heard it before, but it will be an ideal title for a plot in which my detective is in love for the first time since being widowed.

While planning a story, I make loads of notes, including reminders of expressions my characters use, as well as descriptive passages of how the weather, wildlife, vegetation and sea state would be at that time of year. Ideas are will o’ the wisps, so it helps to pin them down in a document. Having a store of ideas helps my grey matter come up with more while in the throes of typing words on the screen.

Where do you get your ideas from?

Did a childhood memory re-emerge to fertilise a story?

Have you been inspired by a news story?

Or, by an unguarded comment that you overheard?

Even by the lyrics of a song?

Writing

On being Quotable

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I’ve long been a collector of quotes, poetry and excerpts from novels and speeches. I have several ring binders full of them, and they’ve been a source of comfort and inspiration to me over the years.

Some of the aphorisms are pithy observations on the human condition, while others are specifically about writing and reading. Writers like commenting on what they do, and reading a famous author’s wise words about the process of creating a story, makes you realise that you’re not alone.

Words of encouragement are fuel to the fire that sometimes wanes inside of us, and they can also be a call to arms, as with So you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski.

More genteel is Barbara Kingsolver’s poem Hope; An Owner’s Manual, with which she closed her commencement address to graduates of Duke University.

Hope; An Owner’s Manual

Look, you might as well know, this thing is going to take endless repair: rubber bands, crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse. Nineteenth-century novels. Heartstrings, sunrise: all of these are useful. Also, feathers.

To keep it humming, sometimes you have to stand on an incline, where everything looks possible; on the line you drew yourself. Or in the grocery line, making faces at a toddler secretly, over his mother’s shoulder.

You might have to pop the clutch and run past all the evidence. Past everyone who is laughing or praying for you. Definitely you don’t want to go directly to jail, but still, here you go, passing time, passing strange. Don’t pass this up.

In the worst of times, you will have to pass it off. Park it and fly by the seat of your pants. With nothing in the bank, you’ll still want to take the express. Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping in the shade of your future. Pay at the window. Pass your hope like a bad check. You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit.

More laconically, William Saroyan stated:

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Quotes taken from the text of a novel intrigue me, for it’s obvious in many cases, that the author was making a stand in what they wrote, deliberately catching the reader by the ear to make them think about something.

Whether the noteworthy observation seems to come from the omniscient author, as in It was best of times, it was the worst of times from the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, or when a character makes a comment that draws the eye, as in Bilbo Baggins saying All that is gold does not glitter. Not all those who wander are lost, the words touch the reader and they want to read more of them. It’s vital to keep the reader hooked with such unexpected barbs.

Occasionally, while writing my own Cornish Detective novels, I’ve had my protagonist and supporting characters think or say something that feels reflective or portentous—though, hopefully not pretentious! I’ve sometimes wondered if these witticisms might have a life beyond that of the novel, but that’s as much down to fate as attracting readers in the first place. Some of my lead copper’s advice seems throwaway, but carries weight: “The longest journey begins with one step—so does falling off of a cliff.”

Humour also works. In my last novel, The Dead Needy Nobody, a streetwise tart with a heart of lead, has just distracted my hero detective by flashing some cleavage at him: “Men were all the same—they thought with their balls, pointed with their cocks and talked out of their arseholes.“ I’m well aware that, in the light of recent criticism by females of how male writers describe women that I’ll be similarly condemned, but that observation was actually said to me word for word, by an 80-year-old retired madam of a Portsmouth brothel, who was one of my customers on a milk round in rural Hampshire in 1986; her quip went into my memory banks to be regurgitated 42 years later.

Do you have any favourite quotes from novels?

Or wise words from authors?

Have you written anything quotable?

Writing

British & American English

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This article in today’s Guardian fuels the notion that American and English people are separated by a common language.

I lived in Atlanta, Georgia for three years, so picked up some colloquialisms, such as Y’all, Copacetic (completely satisfactory), Fixin’ to, If I had my druthers (Given the choice, I’d rather not), All Get Out, as in the phrase “He was as funny as all get out” and Too big for his britches.

My favourite Southern expression was, “No shit, Sherlock,” meaning you’ve just stated something that’s totally obvious to most people.

My English accent was popular with women while seeming to make some men think I was behaving in a superior way, or that it was proof all English men were gay! I had a bumper sticker on my Chevrolet Camaro, that said CORNISH MEN DO THINGS DRECKLY. This caught people’s attention, and they asked me if it meant the same as the Southern expression Directly. It kind of does, but the rebellious Cornish meaning is more “I’ll get around to it when I feel like it.”

Interested in language, I was startled to find how archaic words and pronunciations had been retained in America. I’d thought that Fall for Autumn, was an Americanism, but it’s what Brits used to say, as it derives from the Old English word ‘feallan’ meaning to fall or die—perfect for describing falling leaves.

Even more surprising to me, was how Americans had retained the French pronunciation of some words, which is why they said “Erb” for Herb, and that what an English person would pronounce as a Fill-it for a fillet of fish was said in the French way for filet—with an accent on the last syllable—Fil-ay. The spelling was also different.

I have an occasional American character in my Cornish Detective novels, an FBI agent, so I make sure that he speaks differently enough to be noticeable.

Separated by the pond, do you have any favourite American or British English expressions?

Writing

Longueurs—the Boring Bits

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It’s said, that when writing a story, nothing should be written that doesn’t advance the plot or add to the characterisation of the protagonist and antagonist, but sometimes not a lot happens!

We’re also advised to make the opening of a novel as attention-grabbing as possible, but however energetic our story begins, there comes a time when the pace slows, while our hero recharges his strength with a meal. How to make that interlude interesting?

With my last novel, I reached a point 20,000 words in, with the good guys reintroduced (it’s the fifth story in a series) and the baddies and their crimes described. My detective protagonist knows what’s gone awry, but not who perpetrated the murders and thefts. He and the reader (and me), are at a point where some quiet contemplation of the facts needed to occur, to decide where to go next. I threw in a couple of red herrings to send readers in the wrong direction.

My protagonist often revisits crime scenes after he’s finished work, attempting to blend in as a civilian. This is helped by him looking like the farmer he once was, and by riding a chopper motorcycle which is at odds with the traditional image of a reactionary copper. He attempts to see the situation through the eyes of a civilian. He’s still working as a detective, but these intervals allow me space to portray who he is as a man.

There are times when your protagonist needs to take time out to eat or go to the bathroom or sleep—they can’t be ‘on’ all of the time.

Non-stop action, of whatever variety, be it fighting, good humour, arguments or sexual shenanigans, soon becomes tedious without a break. We can only stand so much stimulation! Too much of a good thing becomes boring itself. 

Image result for boring story cartoon

I love the crime writing of Walter Mosley, who I revisit regularly, and he handles longueurs very well. His private investigators are men of culture, who were raised to question dogma and who’ve continued their education by reading widely, as well as enjoying music, movies and art. This helps them to reflect upon what’s happening to the people they encounter in their sleuthing. They’re street tough, but while sitting in a seedy bar watching a potential witness, they might recall a scene from a Dostoevsky novel.

My own protagonist paints watercolours of the moors and the sea, for his own enjoyment and as a way of relaxing, but also as a form of meditation. By encouraging his brain to switch off, he gets insights into the case he’s investigating.

How do you handle the boring bits, where your character is out doing the grocery shopping or wiling away the evening after a hard day at the office?

Do your characters regularly take time out to indulge in some leisure activity, and is that a separate event, or do you feel compelled to weave in elements of the plot?

Writing

Pedestrian Writing

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I’m a big fan of the crime writing of Walter Mosley, and I also enjoyed his writing guide This Year You Write Your Novel.

Image result for mosley The Elements of Fiction,

It’s a short book of fewer than 25,000 words, aimed at newbie authors, but any writer would benefit from his common sense advice. It has the welcome qualities of not only offering useful tips but being encouraging in an arm-around-the-shoulder way, as well as gently cajoling you to just get on with writing the words.

One section of the second chapter, The Elements of Fiction, startled me when I first read it until I realised how astute Mosley’s advice is:

the pedestrian in fiction

Maybe your character gets up out of bed and walks across the room to the mirror. You need her to see the bags under her eyes and lines on her aging face. That’s good. But in order to have us feel what it is to get up out of that bed, we might want to add a little more: the sound of the sheets falling to the floor; the urge to urinate, which the protagonist resists to see what time and life have wrought upon her visage; the grit beneath her bare feet on the floor; the pain in her left knee that has been with her since a time, years ago, when she twisted her ankle on a stone stairway while attending her mother’s funeral—the mother whom she now very much resembles. Every one of these details tells and also shows us something about our protagonist and/ or her world.

Most of these details are pedestrian. Why, you might ask, would we want to make the experiences of our characters ordinary? Because everyday experiences help the reader relate to the character, which sets up the reader’s acceptance of more extraordinary events that may unfold.

If your audience believes in the daily humdrum physical and emotional experiences of your characters, then your readers will believe in those character’s reality and thus can be taken further.

Even a rugged hero facing a confrontation with an evil mastermind will have everyday needs and preoccupations, which when mentioned make them three-dimensional, rather than a cardboard cutout representing the forces of justice.

As writers, we’re constantly advised to polish our sentences, paragraphs and chapters—and it’s always recommended that less is more—but, terse brilliance may mean eliminating, (or not even thinking of), the obvious. Even famous authors do this, so focused on the plot, that they forget to mention their protagonist needs to eat or sleep, and that he should have a few bruises after being beaten senseless in an alleyway in the previous chapter.

Sometimes, not a lot happens action-wise, but your characters still have thoughts and interact with people. These situations allow for pedestrian writing that adds valuable elements to the story. In my Cornish Detective series, I always have a chapter where the protagonist detective meets with his best friend, a forensic pathologist, at an Indian restaurant. This device allows me to explore my hero’s private life, for his older friend has long offered him wise counsel and he opens up to her.

By letting readers into the mind of a multi-faceted copper, showing his strengths and weaknesses, I hope to engender loyalty. His doubts and dreams are similar to the readers; he’s an ordinary man doing an extraordinary job, and showing how he navigates through everyday tasks adds realism as well as offering opportunities for plot developments.

In one of my novels, the detective protagonist visited the supermarket, on his way back from searching for the corpse of a murder victim whose head had been placed atop a road sign. As he parked, he spotted a heavily-scarred thug he fancied for the killing, who was peacefully sat on a park bench watching a song thrush sing against the backdrop of purple storm clouds. He went across to chat with him—getting useful insights into how a violent man thinks.

My detective remembered to go and buy his chamomile tea, thus returning to a pedestrian activity after a frisson of excitement.

However, too much detail of the mundane can be a bad thing. I’ve just given up on reading a novel set in the world of art theft, as perpetrated by the Mafia, who use valuable paintings as currency and collateral. Located in Florence, which was described in painstaking detail as the private investigator trudged around when he wasn’t eating restaurant meals or consuming the contents of the mini-bar in his hotel room. All that happened in 200 pages was pedestrian writing and I lost interest. I started to despise the protagonist, who appeared to be lost in a tourist guide. While slogging through it, I was reminded of Mark Twain’s observation:

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

There should be a name for the sense of satisfaction that comes when a jaded reader gives up on a tiresome book.

Do you incorporate ordinary everyday events into your stories?

Are your characters fallible in little ways? Frailties are a good way of generating empathy from the reader.

Image result for boring story cartoon

Writing

Exclamation Marks

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This article from the Guardian, written by Elena Ferrante, about the use of exclamation marks in writing, had me scurrying to my last novel to check how many I’d used in 84,000 words.

The answer is just one, and that was made by a dead forger who added an exclamation mark as an act of protest to her own signature in the corner of a spoiled painting she’d copied, which was found in her flat.

I’ve long known that exclamation marks are frowned upon by writing gurus. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said:

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” 

Usually, it’s possible to indicate shock, fear and anger by word choice.

I admit that I commonly use exclamation marks in emails to friends, which are more colloquially phrased…

Do you overindulge in exclamation marks?

Writing

Turning Suffering Into Writing

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It’s cynical of me to say so, but there’s money in misery. But, suffering is a part of life. As Woody Allen lamented:

Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering—and it’s all over much too soon.

I’ll never be a fan of misery memoirs, though perhaps I should write one, as this genre is said to be the most rapidly expanding. Many stories of suffering have been faked, though I was impressed by Jung Chang’s Wild Swans.

Wild Swans, English edition cover

I write in the crime genre, which enables me to tackle some contentious issues in society, as well as the vile behaviour of criminals and the deplorable attitude of the public who get a thrill out of being gawkers and trolls.

I’ve written about murder, kidnapping, poisoning, sexual assault, blackmail, prostitution, drug dealing, incest, violent assault, genocide and human trafficking. Some of these crimes were prompted by unpleasant human events, such as mental illness, bereavement, suicide and assisted suicide, long-term unemployment and debt, cancer, PTSD, and homelessness.

These are things that have happened to my friends, acquaintances and family members, though I never write so closely that they could be identified. Some crimes, accidents and tragedies are stuff I remembered from the news, going right back to my boyhood. For instance, my last novel includes a corpse being found incompletely embalmed, which is a newspaper story I recalled from the 1960s where a man attempted to preserve his wife in this way, living with her body for thirty years. This only came to light, after he died alone and his putrefying remains alerted neighbours that something was amiss. He was laying on the bed next to his beloved.

I also draw on first-hand knowledge, including violent confrontations and fights, (where I was sometimes on the losing end), meetings with career criminals and racists, a near-death experience, finding a corpse, being burgled and the ramifications of mistaken identity. I didn’t know it at the time, but my suffering has provided me with the perfect material for writing novels! 

It’s said ‘To write what you know about’, but I have no way of telling whether the passages based on what actually happened to me read truer than those created by my imagination. In rough times, I certainly thought “This will make a great story one day,” which only goes to prove that my writerly brain was observant, even while dormant.

Have you ever written anything based on personal suffering, or of sadness that happened to those close to you?

Are there any books that make you howl with anguish? I recently read Plainsong, written by Kent Haruf, in which an abandoned pregnant girl is taken in by two farmer brothers. The kindness of these simple souls to her made me shed a tear—fortunately, I was on the loo at the time—so tissue paper was handy!

Image result for plainsong haruf

What do you think of misery lit?

Is there anything that you wouldn’t write about? I tackled paedophilia in my latest novel, The Dead Need Nobody, which made me uncomfortable, though I wrote about this most hideous of crimes partly as a plot device, to have my protagonist lose control of his temper to batter the offender so severely that he dies, meaning he gets suspended from duty. He was fighting for his life, stabbed with a sword and bleeding out, meaning he’s in a coma at the end. Quite what his fate will be in Book 6, I’ve yet to decide.

If reading can be therapeutic, I guess that writing about the dark side of life could be healing.