Francie May 1952 It couldn’t be Margie, because she would cry, and besides, she might bring the children, which would turn the whole thing into a circus. Jimmy hadn’t come out and said it, because he was trying to spare her feelings, but he was playing golf with his father today–the club had called to confirm their tee time. That left Alice. As usual. “Mother, do you want the blue with the feather or the tan?” Alice called from upstairs. She had skipped her painting class this morning to help Francie finish packing and to say goodbye to Vi. Vi’s two boys worked for their father’s publicity firm, and all three of them were currently in the middle of the Mojave Desert getting ready to launch a client’s nuclear tourism business. It was just like Harry to leave his wife to make her shameful departure from an empty house, even when he was the one who’d smashed their sacred vows into smithereens. “Oh, the blue, I suppose,” Francie called. “Though it hardly matters, does it?” “Don’t be glum.” Alice came down the stairs carrying the hat under one arm, leaving the other free to hold on to the handrail. “It’s…

I love worldbuilding. It’s fun, the best kind of neverending logic puzzle, and it’s easy for me to spend days or months layering details onto a burgeoning universe. Nobody wants to read what amounts to a history book about a fictional world, though. No matter how intricate and interesting the worldbuilding is, it’s the people who populate it who are going to be the tethers that pull readers across a landscape. I’m not one of those authors who knows everything about a character down to their blood type before I put words on pages. In fact, often the non-physical truths (i.e. things other than height, age, eye color, etc) I know about a character when I start writing can be listed on one hand. I treat characters like strangers I’m meeting for the first time, and I write partially to unveil the core of an individual. For me, worldbuilding is layering up. Building characters, though, is more a process of stripping down. Everyone has a core of principles, beliefs, motivations, and needs. Sometimes (okay, rarely) these are all in easy alignment and sometimes they’re diametrically opposed, but no matter what, the core of a person is what drives everything they…

The Plot: It never fails that someone asks me where I come up with the story lines for my books, and I’m always happy to talk about it. Sometimes the plots are based loosely on something I investigated in my career. Other times, not so much. Sometimes I am simply inspired by something, or in this case–someone–I encountered on the job. While I was not completely aware of it at the time, the plot behind Dark ’N’ Deadly, the third of my Federal K-9 Series, started marinating in my head more than five years ago while I was assigned to my agency’s Denver office. The Colorado State Patrol Academy hosted a sovereign citizen seminar given by Chief Robert Paudert (ret.) of the West Memphis, Arkansas Police Department. Many Americans are unaware that the FBI considers sovereign citizens to be a growing domestic threat to law enforcement. Until relatively recently, law enforcement agencies were unfamiliar with this threat, and some paid the ultimate price. Chief Paudert’s son and another police officer were killed during an exchange of gunfire with members of a sovereign citizen extremist group. Since then, Chief Paudert has dedicated his life to educating law enforcement officers at all…