So, here we’ve arrived at another writing post! Note the exclamation point, whereby I’m going to whip up your enthusiasm in listening to this…
It’s funny, I was actually sitting here deciding what to write about this time when I came across (all right, technically I googled it in desperation, trying to find something to write about!) a story suggestion that said you could detail your writing process.
This is fairly difficult for me, since I really don’t have one. But, on the third hand, maybe I do. Let’s start out with this clip below:
“No, Charley, it’s not even legal. You’ll get in so much trouble! It’s practically a monument!”
Charley shrugged, “I need to see it. I need to do it. You don’t need to be here, just help me set my pitons and leave. I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”
Laura frowned, looking into his eyes. “I have a bad feeling about this. Climbing alone, at night. It has all the marks of a bad ending.”
He sighed, “You knew who I was, you used to glory in it. I can no more turn this down than I could the Eiffel Tower, and that came out OK.”
“The French are a lot more laid back than the authorities in Thailand. You’re liable to wind up rotting in jail if they catch you.”
He gave her a quick kiss. “You’ll be there to break me out of jail though, right?”
In spite of her fears, she gave him a smile. “Always.”
He nodded and began hammering in pitons at the edge, her following and testing each one. After attaching the ropes, he made his way to the edge.
Laura followed him, and gave him a big hug and a long kiss. “I’ll wait here. Don’t go too far down.”
Lightly he said, “I only have a couple hundred feet of rope, I’ll be back once I hit the bottom.”
She gasped, “Don’t say it that way, Charley. It’s not funny.”
He stroked her cheek. “I’m sorry. It was too much to resist.”
Charley backed away from her at that point, beginning his descent over the edge of the “leader” of the Whale Rocks formation. It was the last Laura ever saw of him. Hours later, when the rope went slack, she pulled it back. It was sheared off cleanly, nearly a polished edge.
Laura overstayed her visa, finally giving up and going home after days of wandering through the brush and trees under the great rock formation. The police were strangely disinterested in helping the search.
It was almost as if they’d seen things like it before.
Finally, she went home, moving on with her life, but she never forgot. And never told anyone what she’d seen.
This little bit comes from a picture I saw when I was looking for something completely different. Long live serendipity! Anyhow, it was a picture of the Whale Rocks in Thailand. Now, they’re pretty impressive and you might consider looking them up yourself. But that’s not what this is about, so I’ll try to keep on point.
I wrote the bit above just because sometimes you get an idea and you write it out. It might not go anywhere, but then again it might. The first Jane Bond story came from just such a bit of nothing and you know what happened with that! Or if not, you should run right over to Amazon and buy the first Jane Bond story.
So, this little bit of text has been sitting for a couple years and a few days ago, it hit me that it might be the perfect lead story for a new Jane Bond book.
It’s likely that a slightly brushed up version of the story you see there will be polished up and dropped into the first page of the new Jane Bond 6 book. (arriving probably some time in late 2022)
So, that bit is there. Then the story will go to Jane sitting talking with Jean, her home-robot. Obviously Jean is much more than a simple home robot, but the concept suffices. Jean has talked Jane into tasting gelato for her. One of the problems of being an artificial intelligence that’s never had a body or an existence in the real world is that you don’t know how things taste. So, Jean hatched this plan to manufacture foods with a best-guess as to what it would taste like by using complicated alien technology that is best not looked at too closely. 😉 Then she talks a human into actually tasting the food and giving her feedback on how close she got, and then she can modify it and have them try again. Naturally, some of her ideas are not stellar:
“Ew. No, that’s not right. No no. It’s .. ew. It’s worse than the last one!”
Jean looked a little put out, but I had run out of ‘nice’ after about fifteen minutes.
I was reminded of the scene from Ghostbusters, where Venkman is checking the psychic abilities of students.
After the little intro vignette, I assume that probably we’ll have an intro vignette for Olive and likely one for Bailey. Although, Bailey is pretty distracted by a boyfriend right now, and we might not even hear from her at all in this book. Hm. Comments?
Next up, we’ll see Jane talking with her mother over lunch, possibly in the Take A Break cafe in Dryden, WA. We had breakfast there the other day and it was amazing. Jane’s mom Jeannie will mention idly about a friend’s granddaughter who lost her boyfriend in Thailand, and will ask Jane to look into it, since of course, Jane’s a detective. Thanks, mom, for bringing in non-paying customers.
But, you see from all the above that I have the bones of a start to a new Jane story, and even the first several chapters of such and I haven’t even started to write yet! Impressive, no?
It’s my belief that Jane will go to Thailand and do some scouting around. And since Maui is one of my favorite places on earth, she’ll probably have to go there to follow something up, since Thailand and Hawaii have some interesting similarities and history.
This may seem a rather haphazard way of starting out a book. That is, just letting things kind of coalesce on their own. But, you know, it worked for the planets and stars, why not for a book?