I’m not a bestselling author, but I still have loyal fans who write to me, especially readers for my Sam Westin Wilderness Mysteries, which currently includes six books, and my Neema the Gorilla Mysteries, which has three. The number one reason fans send me email is to ask when the next book in the series will be out. This question makes me simultaneously cheer and groan. While readers excitedly report that it took them only two or three days to finish the book, I remember that it took me ten or twelve months to write and publish it.

So, I recently had the bright idea to solve this dilemma by writing a crossover novel, in which the characters (or at least the main ones) will appear in the same novel. Bright idea? The problem is that these two series are very different. The Sam Westin mysteries always involve wild animals in wild places, so there’s a lot of hiking and descriptions of rugged areas. The Neema series involves captive gorillas that are learning American sign language, and a beleaguered small-town police detective who gets drawn into vague mysteries when the gorillas observe something frightening and give him cryptic clues, such as snake arm and tree candy. (Poor man, trying to interpret gorilla signs that could be vital clues about a crime or hints about what Neema wants for lunch.)

How the heck am I going to get these two series to mingle? What the heck could these characters ever have in common? In the Sam Westin series, I’ve already focused on cougars, bears, sharks, and wolverines, so I decided to include wolves in her next adventure. How could captive gorillas and wild wolves ever mix? And the answer is: of course they don’t! And they won’t in this next novel, either.

Although my books include a lot of animals (obviously), the crimes are always committed by humans. So I need a human thread—something mysterious, of course—to bring the gorilla world and the wildlife world together. I mulled this challenge over for a while on my break for the last five months. (Some would say this was actually my prolonged period of procrastination, which I have perfected over the most recent years.) While I was in Vietnam last November, I met a fascinating woman who works for the Red Cross locating refugees and their relatives in the United States and elsewhere. I asked her a million questions about immigrants (both legal and illegal) and refugees, which are a legally designated and protected category of migrants here.

Migrants who come to the U.S. are often seeking to join relatives who are already here, and sometimes groups of migrants get broken up, either by the need to travel separately or by one person successfully entering the country while another can’t.

So I plan to have one undocumented immigrant mysteriously killed in the vicinity of the gorillas, leaving behind a toddler who cannot speak English. (Sorry, but this is a mystery and we all know some tragedy is called for.) Poor Detective Finn gets to figure out what happened to mom and who the heck this abandoned child is and how she connected with the gorillas.

Meanwhile, Sam Westin is going to backpack into North Cascades National Park in hopes of finding wolves that have been reported there, only to discover an injured foreigner and an injured horse lost in the wilderness. And then someone will try to kill them all before they can reach civilization.

Okay, there are so many questions left. Who the heck is the foreigner lost in the wilderness, and why is a horse wandering in the woods? And most urgent of all, who is shooting when Sam is trying to rescue the unfortunate man and beast? And what is the possible connection between the abandoned toddler and the illegal migrant Sam has encountered?

I’m not going to tell you all that (okay, so far I only have vague ideas about those challenges), and I can’t even tell you the title for my new novel, because the Neema series books always have “The Only” in the title, and the Sam Westin books are usually one word (Endangered, Bear Bait, Undercurrents, Backcountry, Borderland, Cascade). So what title can I use that will make sense? And how will I advertise this crossover novel?

Only time will tell whether writing a crossover novel will please the readers of one series and introduce them to the other (thereby saving me a year of writing another book), or whether I’ll be the next victim running through the woods, trying to escape angry fans.

I recently watched the delightful holiday movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas. Charles Dickens, played by Dan Stevens, is irked by poor sales figures on two recent books. He’s got family issues, financial stress, and this leads to writer’s block.

He needs money, so he must write another book. When his publishers pass on his idea for a Christmas novel, he vows to publish it himself. Sound familiar? Yes, it does these days.

Trouble is, Dickens doesn’t have an idea—yet. It creeps into his head, fostered by his habit of writing down interesting names and collecting words and phrases. Then he searches for an appropriate name for his main character which, as any writer knows, must have the right sound and personify the character.

Scrooge—if ever there was a perfect name for a character, that’s it. Dickens speaks the name and quicker than you can say “Bah, humbug!” Ebenezer appears, grumpily played by Christopher Plummer.

He’s not happy. He’s not cooperating either. Neither are the other characters who show up to plague Dickens. Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig, Marley’s Ghost—they’re upset that Dickens plans to kill off Tiny Tim and they won’t shut up. As for Scrooge, he’s nasty and on target when he lobs his opinions and observations at Dickens.

All the writers among you, raise your virtual hand if this has ever happened to you.

It does to me, despite the fact that I say, “Wait a minute, you’re not real. I made you up. How dare you have a mind of your own.”

In Till the Old Men Die, I was sure that one character was responsible for the deaths of two murder victims. Then another character jumped up and down, hands waving, and said, “No, I did it!”

Then there are the characters who are supposed to be walk-ons, there to further the plot of one particular book. However, not content with being one-offs, they start showing up in other plots. I have a character from an earlier Jeri Howard book, Water Signs, who appears in The Devil Close Behind and my new book, The Things We Keep. Another character who had a brief role in Jeri’s case Witness to Evil wound up as the protagonist of my suspense novel What You Wish For. And there’s Tidsy, in Death Rides the Zephyr, the first in the Jill McLeod California Zephyr series. She’s in two books out of the next three and may wind up with her own novel.

Ah, well. Follow where the characters lead. I’ve discovered that if I try to make them do things they don’t want to do, I wind up wandering through the writer’s block maze.

The character who now exhibits a mind of her own is Jeri Howard, the protagonist of my long-running private eye series. After The Devil Close Behind was published, I thought it might be time to close the book on Jeri. After all, 13 books is a good long run. At the time I didn’t have an idea for #14.

Then it began to creep into my head, shoving aside the historical novel I’d just started and elbowing its way to the front of the line. A house in Alameda that looked neglected, one I saw in the neighborhood near the Saturday farmers market. It wasn’t abandoned, though. Someone was living there.

The writer in me began asking questions. Especially, what if? What if there was an old Navy footlocker hidden in that house? What if Jeri opened it, and found human bones? Of course, Jeri is going to find out whose bones and what happened to those people.

Find out in The Things We Keep, which will be published in March 2023.