Today we
welcome Alec Peche, author of ten books split between two mystery series. Learn
more about her and her books at her website.
Reading
romance and writing it are two completely different things...
For twenty or so years, I was a romance book junkie.
This was prior to ebooks, so I was on a first name basis with my local used
bookstore owner. It was the only way a reader could afford to support a several
books a week habit. Perhaps twelve years ago I switched to the mystery genre,
and a little more than six years ago, I decided there were some real duds in
that genre and I could do better. So I started my career of writing two mystery
series.
Circling back to my current work in progress, The Girl From Diana Park, it was time to
get my protagonist together with the woman inhabiting his life. I felt that it
would be disingenuous to do anything else, as both my characters were single,
of a similar age, jointly raising a teenager that wasn’t theirs, while fighting
off bad people trying to kill the teenager. The teenager is a secondary
character, so this is not a Young Adult genre book.
So after twenty years of romance book reading,
writing this single scene of romance (and what leads up to it) should be easy,
right?
Wrong. As a female author, I’m trying to write the
male romantic brain and to be consistent in a mystery genre tone, not in a
romance novel style. My lead guy is not a Stone Barrington, or Jack Reacher, or
Roarke. I’d modeled him initially after MacGyver, from the 70s show (and a new
series in 2016) - a brainy, gentle, good-looking, widower (in my books) in the
prime of his life. Oh boy!
The next problem is what readers expect from my
traditional mysteries. Up to this point, I've had no graphic sex and less than
five cuss words among my ten books, so even if I wanted to throw some 50 Shades
of Grey into the story, I'd disappoint my readers as that's not what they
expect from my previous series books. I also know of a twelve-year-old boy who
is reading book 2 in this series, and his mom would have a conniption if the next
book was unfit for that age group.
To add to my misery, I’m a pantser style of writer. I pick a location for the murder and how
my man or woman got dead, and then I start writing. The story inside my head is
rarely more than a chapter away from the typing my fingers are doing. So how do
I work a little romance into this book, building in each chapter to a crescendo
later in the story? How do I stop from over-thinking this minor story arc?
So what did I do? I decided to take a June Cleaver
approach with them going back to her house, sipping wine and kissing, and him
in the kitchen the next morning letting the reader's imagination fill in the
blanks.... Sometimes that's the best way to write a scene. Readers’
imaginations can be just as powerful as the writer's words.
The Girl
From Diana Park
A Damian
Green Mystery, Book 3
Damian Green lives alone on a remote island in San
Francisco Bay, he invents things and he's a computer geek who can manipulate
large amounts of data to find the truth underneath.
In this story, Damian is asked to assist retired SJPD
Detective Natalie Severino with a five year old child abduction case. The
abduction was a cold case having not been solved in the first year after the
child's disappearance from a local park.
Meanwhile Damian and Ariana continue caring for
teenager, Hermione, while Damian explores new angles in the search for the
girl's parents. While Hermione may not know where her parents are, or if they
are even alive after men kidnapped her parents from their home nearly a year
ago, someone else is convinced she does know where they are. That person is
planning to use her to smoke out the parents. Damian has his hands full chasing
multiple mysteries while protecting the two women he's come to love.
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