Ask The Author
A Short Bi-Monthly Q&A with me where you get to ask me anything you are dying to know.
Welcome to another edition of Ask the Author, where you get to ask me whatever questions are on your mind. As a reminder, if there is a question I am uncomfortable with answering I will feature the question anyway so as to be transparent about the question, and why I am uncomfortable answering if it isn’t already obvious. Well then, lets get to the interesting and fantastic questions from you.
What is your most favorite kind of k-9 dog to use when using one in your writing and why?
It really depends on a few factors. What I am wanting the k-9 to do is a big one. Particularly because different breeds have different skill sets. Like I might choose a beagle to sniff out contraband (think the Beagle Brigade). Labradors are typically good with bomb sniffing and search and rescue. German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois are good at chasing suspects down. There are also many other examples. So, while that is the major consideration, another is my patience level. Like I can’t spell Malinois for shit without looking it up. If I am going to be focusing on a dog chasing a suspect, I might just go with German Shepherds because I can at least spell that darn breed. The final consideration is if I want to do something fun with the writing or not. If I am going to portray a serious story, I am more likely than not to use one of the more common breeds in these jobs. If I am going to go with something fun, however, I might just go wacky and have some random breed in a job completely ill-suited to the breed and watch the insanity unfold.
What fantasy animal would be the least likely you would use in your writing and why?
Unicorn hands down. They just don’t have a mean bone in their body so wouldn’t work as a killing instrument and I have enough bad luck as it is there is no way I am going to kill one even if it is fictional.
What made you choose to write in the crime genre?
Well there are two versions of the answer. The Short One, and The Long One. I’ll start with the first.
The Short One: Necessity
The Long One: Well, I guess it started in high school. I never had any intention of making writing my full time career. I always planned on it being a side-project/career, but I knew what I wanted to do in high school. So when I finished high school, I went to John Jay College to complete a Criminal Justice Degree. In the course of getting my bachelors I was accepted into the BA/MA program allowing me to get my masters at the same time.
Around that time things went off the rails and I was diagnosed with a brain tumor causing Cushing’s Disease. Other unnamed medical issues followed and it became quite obvious to me that my initial plans were not going to work. But I was also stubborn enough I wasn’t about to quit my program when I was so close to the end.
At the same time, I knew I wanted to do something with all that useless knowledge in my head. Writing crime fiction became my focus. I knew pretty quickly that I didn’t want to do your run of the mill mysteries where the bad guy has nothing redeemable about them and the good guy is amazing, so then it was time to figure out how to put a twist on this concept. From there I decided to combine genres and move into other weirder concepts playing with POV.
And so that is how I got to be working with this sort of twisting crime in different directions. It allows me to use some of the knowledge that I learned for my initial career plans, and fits to my desire of doing something different with this knowledge and writing.
How do you come up with who your suspect is?
That is actually a bit of a mixed bag. I normally decide, before I start writing, what I want the motive to be, and what I want people to think the motive is. From there I decide which of the characters these motives would fit for that I already have planned to feature in the story, and I decide if anymore characters need to be created.
Have you ever worked in law enforcement?
No. It was my dream to, but well see previously mentioned health issues.
What type of crimes do you write about or is it only murder?
It’s probably like 99% murder. I might write about other crimes but chances are there is going to be a murder in there at some point.
Will you incorporate more Sci-Fi into your Crime stories and if so what type?
I don’t like saying absolutely or absolutely not because life is full of uncertainty and twists and turns but in this case, I feel quite comfortable with saying ABSOLUTELY NOT. You are looking at the person who almost failed every single science course she ever took, and one test was so bad that I got a negative four. Why? Well I got every question wrong and that day I was apparently too stupid to remember how to spell my name too. In order to write sci-fi you have to understand how this stuff works to understand how to reasonably fictionalize concepts. I pity the person who tries to teach me sciency concepts because my eyes just glaze over.
Will you ever write a Fantasy Crime that takes place in space?
Absolutely not. See previous question. Space is still way too sciency for me.
How did you come to choose Urban/Fantasy Crime as a sub-genre to write in?
A dream. Yes I have completely bat-shit dreams. But I had this scene one day of my detective walking out of his home to go to work one day and a temperamental dragon picking him up by his suit, cursing him out and dropping him when he insults her. It kind of spawed from there.
Will you ever write a non-fiction crime book and if so what would it be about?
I hope to one day, but I probably need more contacts to get to that. I think I would like to do a more obscure case (cold or solved) rather than of a well-known case (like Jack the Ripper), but further details I never really decided on. I’ve also kind of wanted to do a book featuring a different criminal each chapter, though that would certainly take even more contacts.
Have you ever thought about being a journalist and writing a crime column? If so what would you name it and why?
Absolutely. This is something I would love to do though it would need to be a work from home job which kind of complicates things. The name of it would probably vary based on the general types of crimes I typically covered, if it was more in a specific area or a much wider area, the length of the column, the retail space in the publication, and other such issues. So yeah, while it is something I would love to do I don’t really have a name idea that I insist on.
And that’s it for this month. See you all in two months with the next set of questions!