One thing I'd thought I'd talk about on this blog is the back story to some of my work, mostly because I like reading about how writers come up with their ideas. Trigger Point was my first published novel, but it was actually accepted after The Survivors. For several years, I'd served as a freelance writer for Massage & Bodywork Magazine, mainly doing little write-ups on products and stories of interest to massage therapists. As my role expanded a little bit, I was assigned to interview massage therapists about their practice, with an emphasis on how they new practitioners could establish and promote their business. One thing that struck me immediately is how much the attitudes of massage therapists and librarians overlap. Both are essentially service positions, and both careers attract people who are dedicated to helping others as best they can.

As I interviewed more and more massage therapists, the prototype for a character grew in my mind. I was also doing a lot of readers advisory as a librarian, and following trends in popular genres. I was intrigued that patrons seemed to gravitate to mystery stories where the characters were just about anything other than a detective or a police officer. I saw caterers, chefs, lawyers, and just about every profession you can think of represented in the popular mystery series on our library shelves. Which got me thinking--is there a mystery series involving a massage therapist?

I couldn't find one, so I set out to right it. I initially intended to write a cozy mystery. My imagination tends toward violence, however, so that seemed unwise. While I was in search of a plot, news broke about Philip Markoff, the so-called Craigslist Killer. He was, among other things, murdering prostitutes who advertised themselves as massage therapists online.

The associations between massage and prostitution is old. It's one of the banes of the licensed massage therapist (LMT), and I remember several of the people I'd interviewed talking about how they had to educate their own families about misconceptions. Right away I knew I had the basis of my plot: a serial killer would be striking at online prostitutes who shielded their activities under the guise of massage therapy. The twist would be that one of the prostitutes really had been a massage therapist who'd fallen on hard times and made poor decisions. Her murder would bring in my main character, a dedicated LMT and instructor determined to bring her former student's murderer to justice.

The novel was composed pretty fast. I did 80,000 words in three weeks, a real marathon session for me considering it usually takes me 3-5 months to compose the first draft of a novel. The rapid progress was due in part, I think, to outlining the story in advance, which is something I hardly ever do, for whatever reason. Trigger Point, a massage modality, just seemed like a perfect title for a mystery/suspense novel, and it plays an important part in the story as well. I sort of envisioned an entire series based on massage terms--Trigger Point, Release Point, Pressure Point, Reflex Point. 

I've not been able to return to the series so far, but hopefully one day I will. Trigger Point is the most commercial novel I've written, and so its early rejections were more frustrating than usual. One publisher said, "The prologue moves along beautifully and is very tense. But the story really bogs down in the first chapter." Now, in manuscript form the prologue was five pages long, and the first chapter was three pages long. I'm not sure how a story could bog down in that amount of time, but the publisher acted like I'd just cut and pasted something from the middle of Ulysses to start chapter one. 

So I found this on Yahoo news. You know, there was a time when being an alligator, a crocodile or a caiman really meant something. Now an otter can kick your ass. My childhood was spent watching Wild Kingdom and I feel like Marlin Perkins lied to me. He probably had hours of footage of alligators getting taken down by otters, but edited the footage to make it the other way around in order to please the pro-alligator lobby.

This is almost a non-update update, but I do have some news to share. Over Christmas, while visiting my parents for a week, I wrote two stories. I was specifically targeting two anthologies. As of today, I've learned both stories got accepted. I cannot say more, though, until I've signed contracts. I'll be quite happy to be in both publications though. In one situation, I've worked with the editor before; in the second, it was a blind submission. I've been asked to cut the second story nearly in half, to 5,000 words from 10,000 words. I'll gladly do it, as I'd much rather write a great 5,000 word story than a middling 10,000 word one. That Christmas week was one of the most intense writing experiences I've ever had. My house was burglarized the week prior to it, and I'd spent the last several days in shock and dealing with oppressive feelings of violation. A door was kicked in and destroyed, so there was also the emergency rush of having to repair and re-secure the house before leaving it abandoned for so many days. I didn't write one word over those hectic days, so by the time I reached my parents' house in Kentucky I just had this tremendous build-up of writing energy, and a very real desire to just flee into my imagination and leave the turmoil behind. The net result is that I wrote 17,000 words in 4 days, which has to be near the top of my word output over any similar stretch of time. There was an intensity to the writing I had not felt in a long time, and I was reminded of myself around the age of 13 or 14, when I first felt the desire to tell stories and create characters. While not entirely friendless, I would classify myself as a lonely kid, often cheery on the outside but deeply depressed within. That depression and the urge to escape it was part of the same gasoline that fueled my 4-day word binge over Christmas. Often times there is a sense of great satisfaction upon completing a story or a novel, but that's not the same as what I experienced over Christmas, and it's not the same as what I used to feel as a teenager after writing longhand for hours on end. Satisfaction is not the same as joy. 

In that rush of writing in late December, I found joy again. I'll try to hold onto it in 2014.