Getting Away to Work on the Book

            About this time last year, I posted a piece about getting away from it all to do book revisions. I had just returned from a week in Point Reyes, northwest of San Francisco, where I had been editing my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away. The concentrated effort, in an environment apart from the usual distractions, was highly beneficial, I wrote at the time.

            And I said then that I’d do it again for the next book, which I’ve just done. My third Quill Gordon mystery, Not Death, But Love, is about to go to my editor, Lauren Wilkins, for a final look, but I had to get the early-draft kinks out of it before she sees it. Ergo, another week in Point Reyes.

            For those unfamiliar with the area, Point Reyes Station is a town of about 350 people near the Point Reyes National Seashore. For my purposes, the town is just right for this sort of working getaway. What makes it so? Well, there are several factors.

What’s Your Environment?

            Probably I should begin by saying that’s a personal question. Different writers need different work spaces for this sort of thing. Some would be quite happy in a basement office in central Manhattan. Others would consider Point Reyes too cosmopolitan and distracting.

            Point Reyes Station is just right for me as a working base. It has a grocery store and hardware store where you can pick up just about anything you might have forgotten to bring from home. It has an Auto Club-approved garage (more on that later), three nice restaurants, a good coffee shop, and an excellent bakery. It also has a number of boutiques with lovely merchandise (good for gifts to take home) and a sweet little bookstore, where I bought three books.

            In short, just enough to provide a bit of a diversion when needed, but not so much as to be a distraction. That works for me. I need to be able to get away from the work a bit, and a short visit to town for a latte and a stroll-through in a couple of shops is just the ticket.

At the Edge of the Marsh

            Home for the week was a little cottage behind a house about a mile out of town. It had a small kitchen area, a living area with room to set up a folding table I brought along, and a nook to the side that housed a queen bed and a bathroom with a decent-sized shower. There was an enclosed outdoor patio, where I worked a couple of sunny afternoons, and the main window looked out on a yard full of sheep behind a fence.

            The property backs onto a marsh, which offers a great deal of solitude. Perhaps in the summer it’s an insect factory, but in early February, that wasn’t an issue. It was a good, quiet place to work, and I got a lot done.

            But I didn’t quite finish. The last morning, I was going to head into town for a pastry, but the car wouldn’t start. The garage sent out a truck to get me jumped, and I had to take the car to a Ford dealer in Petaluma, 35 miles away, to have it looked at. It turned out a battery cell was shot, and a replacement battery was installed under warranty. It took six and a half hours, and kept me from making the final changes on the last chapter. No harm, no foul. I finished the work when I got home, and the drive to Petaluma took me on a beautiful road I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

What It Was Like in 1970

            In my third Quill Gordon mystery, due out next summer, one of the clues is the murder victim’s journal for the period covering September 1970 to February 1971. I just got through writing the first draft of the section that quotes excerpts from that journal and found that I enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

            As you might guess from the photograph that accompanies this blog, I am old enough to remember 1970 and remember it fairly well. But that good personal memory is only a starting point for accurately depicting the time in a book, even a work of fiction.

            To be convincing, that section would have to be correct in relevant details, some of which are critical to the story itself. What I found in the course of writing it over the past couple of weeks was that my memory told me what I needed to look for and check, and that, in the process of checking it, I struck some gold I wasn’t even prospecting for.

God Bless Wikipedia

            I’ve said before that there are days I love the internet and days I hate it. Looking up stuff from the 1970s made it all the first kind of day. How did an author ever survive without Wikipedia? Without it, I could have spent weeks trying to pin down one little fact that was at my fingertips online.

            It struck me, for example, as I was writing the section, that the woman keeping the journal would likely have been a fan of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” My memory told me it was on in the early seventies, but would it have been on the air during the window covered by the journal? Yup. In fact, I had the keeper of the journal watching it the night of Sept. 19. 1970, and checking Wikipedia, I found that this was the date the first episode aired. How good does it get?

            Elsewhere on the internet, I was able to quickly pin down the years in which two pieces of legislation were passed in California, both of which were critical to the plot. Whatever else the reviewers on Amazon might ding me for, it won’t be getting the facts wrong about the timing of those laws.

The Serendipitous Finds

            Despite what some people think, not everything is online, and I had to get some information the old-fashioned way. Three days of the journal describe events in San Francisco just before Christmas, so one morning I went to the Santa Cruz public library and looked up the San Francisco Chronicle for late December of 1970 on microfilm.

            They had great columnists then — Herb Caen, Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, Stanton Delaplane, Royce Brier, William Hogan, and even that over-the-top sexist Count Marco. A two-line item in Caen’s column became a scene described in the character’s journal. The movie listings prevented the character from seeing “Love Story” before it actually opened. And an ad for a long-gone department store provided a window into what things cost in those days.

            The internet is great for looking up specific things, but it’s lousy for stumbling across things by chance. The three issues of the Chronicle that I looked at on microfilm provided a snapshot of San Francisco at that moment of time. As with any picture, there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the frame. Still, the details I came across will, I believe, enliven my book, and coming across them in that way was a reminder of what we will be missing if (or when) newspapers go the way of dinosaurs.

What the Future Holds for Quill Gordon

            Like the first blossoms that herald the advent of spring, signs are appearing that my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, is gradually beginning to develop a readership beyond my circle of friends and acquaintances.

            This past Saturday I offered the book free as a promotion on Kindle, and it moved 18 percent more e-copies than were downloaded in my March Saturday promotion. Paid sales have increased every month this year, and as I write this, it appears that April will continue that trend. In the past three weeks, three fresh reviews were posted on Kindle, bringing the total number to ten, all legit. Seven of the reviews gave the book 5 stars, two gave it 4 stars, and one gave it 3 stars. And on top of all that, I just got a free plug from the alumni magazine at my alma mater, UC-Santa Cruz.

            Friday night, I finished the first draft of the first chapter of the next book, working title, Wash Her Guilt Away, which I hope to have published by the end of this year. It’s all beginning to prompt some thoughts about the future of Quill Gordon, my lead character.

The Perpetual Vacation

            When I wrote this book, I did it with a running series in mind, and without giving too much away, I can say that by the end of The McHenry Inheritance, Gordon has decided he’s made enough money in the stock market that he doesn’t need to keep his day job any more. That means he can go fly-fishing whenever he wants, and each fishing trip is an adventure (or mystery) waiting to happen.

            Quite a few people have asked if I’m working on a sequel. If you’ve read the first book, you’ll understand the question; if you haven’t, you will when you do read it. But a sequel generally suggests the same characters in the same place or places, and that’s not happening in the second book.

            In the next book, the fishing trip is to a place a couple of hundred miles away from the setting of The McHenry Inheritance. It’s a different location, with a different feel, a different type of story, and different characters. Gordon is the only repeat personality; he even has a different, and more edgy, fishing buddy than in the first book, and my plan is to switch off the two sidekicks in future novels, depending on which one suits the tone of the particular book.

Fly-Fishing in San Francisco?

            From the very beginning, it was never my intent to have Gordon keep coming back to the same place, as Martha Grimes’ Superintendent Jury does to Long Piddleton, or Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache does to Three Pines. Aside from Gordon and his sidekicks, the places and characters will generally change from book to book.

            That doesn’t mean, of course, that Gordon couldn’t return to Summit County, scene of the action in The McHenry Inheritance, or that one or more characters from a previous book couldn’t make an appearance or play a part in a subsequent one. All I’m saying is I want Gordon’s vacations to be without too much baggage so that I have maximum freedom to create new and interesting situations for him.

            It’s even possible, since Gordon lives in San Francisco, that I might set a future book in The City, with fly-fishing scenes introduced through flashbacks. I don’t have a story to fit that concept yet, but what I’m saying is that readers should feel that anything could happen in a Quill Gordon mystery. Keep reading, or you might miss it.