Mom once told me she had been blessed with two creative children. At the time, I took it to mean that she thought my brother and I were underemployed.

He’s a musician. I’m a writer. He was also a teacher for many years. I knew from an early age that I wanted to write. So I spent my working life in a variety of jobs, the last being an administrative position at the University of California. It was all in aid of paying the bills in order to support my avocation. I wanted the kind of job I didn’t have to take home with me.

My brother had the same desire to make music. He got his first guitar when he was a teenager. With two friends, he played rock ’n roll. They practiced in the basement after school. Was it my imagination, or did the house shake? Maybe that was the windows vibrating?

They were certainly loud. I once asked Mom if the noise bothered her. She said, “At least I know where your brother is.” True enough.

Me, I was the kid who always had her nose in a book. So, it seemed natural to write one. I wrote what I called a book in the sixth grade. It was more like a short story, a very short story. And I illustrated it, too. It was a mystery, natch.

My brother kept playing music over the years, in local bands in the town where he lived, doing gigs on weekends and teaching full-time. He has multiple guitars and takes several wherever he goes. I understand this is a condition common to guitarists.

I graduated to short stories in junior high and high school, some of them longer. I called them novels, but they weren’t. Novellas, maybe. We will draw a veil over the plot about the circus.

At some point I began writing a mystery. Through various drafts it got better, and I was sending it out to agents. Then I got the idea for the book that became my first published novel, Kindred Crimes, and everything got pushed to one side while I wrote that.

Publishing lightening struck and I won the St. Martin’s Press Private Eye Writers of America contest for best first PI novel. I was to pick up the award at Bouchercon, which was in Philadelphia that year. My parents were so proud and excited they got on a plane and flew to Philly to see me get that award.

From then on, they were my biggest promoters. Dad was a salesman. He’d carry copies of Kindred Crimes in the trunk of his car, telling everyone about his daughter the writer. And if his audience had a glimmer of interest, he’d pop open the trunk and sell them a book. Mom did her part, too, selling books to family and friends alike. She would buy them when a new book came out and give them as gifts, too.

Dad is long gone. Mom died in August, just over a month ago. Mom being Mom, she left detailed instructions about her memorial service, right down to the Bible verses and the songs. She specified that she wanted my brother to sing a song he’d written. Of course, he had a guitar with him. He didn’t think that any of his rock or blues songs would be appropriate, so he wrote a new one for Mom.

The other instruction was that I was to read something from one of my books. As I stood in front of the people at the church, I prefaced that by saying, “Well, Mom, I write crime novels.”

Then I read a few paragraphs from Bit Player. That’s the book where my private eye Jeri Howard gets involved in a decades-old Hollywood murder because she learns that her grandmother, an aspiring actress in the 1940s, was once questioned by the police. It seemed the appropriate choice, since Mom grew up selling tickets and watching every available picture at the movies theaters her family owned. In fact, that’s where she met Dad, at the ticket booth of the family movie palace during World War II.

Here’s to Mom, a love letter from one of your creative children.

I remember the days when I wrote on a typewriter. My mother had a Remington that felt like an anvil when I picked it up. When I went to college, I had an Olivetti portable. I thought I’d gone to technology heaven when I graduated to a Smith-Corona electric.

I always had a pile of manuscript pages on the desk next to my typewriter, ready for me to take a pencil and edit and then retype them.

I got my first computer about 40 years ago. I thought that was quite a step up, not having to retype pages. I could make corrections on the screen, though I printed out each chapter as I finished it.

My first printer was a dot matrix, the kind that used continuous sheets that had a little feeder strip on each side, with holes. I’d have to tear the pages apart. Those strips—well, one of my cats had a really good time with those when he got into them. Strips of paper strewn up and down the hall.

Then I graduated to an HP Laserjet the size of a TV set. It weighed about as much, too. I had that one for years before it finally died of old age. Enter the inkjet era.

I was still printing out manuscript pages, the old-fashioned way of backing up my data. I also copied files to floppy disks. Remember those? Then the floppies became smaller hard disks. Then it was flash drives. And external hard drives.

Then came the cloud, a place where one could store important data and free up space on the desktop or dispense with those disks and flash drives.

Works great. Until it doesn’t.

I recently had a hard drive meltdown. As in fried, toast, kaput. I thought my files would be safe since I was backing them up to the cloud, in this case Microsoft’s OneDrive.

But through some technological disaster I don’t understand, most of the files on OneDrive that were dated this calendar year disappeared—including the book I’ve been working on for over a year. I keep looking at OneDrive and everything on there seems to be 2022 or earlier. Except one lone spreadsheet I created on Excel in May 2023. Go figure.

After phone calls and emails with Microsoft Tech Support, the case has been escalated to the OneDrive department. Which assures me via periodic emails that they are investigating the situation and will be in touch with updates—whenever. These bland emails are meant to be reassuring.

I don’t feel reassured.

I mean, hey, the files should be there, floating somewhere in the cloud. After all, that’s the claim—store things on the cloud and your files will be safe from meltdowns and mishaps.

But no, it doesn’t look like it. I got complacent and relied too much on technology. Right now I’m longing for the low tech days when I printed out each chapter as I completed it. At least I’d have a hard copy. Or a flash drive. Yeah, that would be great. Then I could find my book.

I’m upset, since it seems increasingly likely that the files are lost in the cloud. And I do mean lost. But time spent kicking myself isn’t productive. I’ve started a synopsis of the book, memorializing what I’ve written so far. And I have started chapter one—again, reconstructing that from memory.

Say it the way Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields did: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”

I have a jury duty summons for July. In California, I’ll check my county’s website a few days before that date to find out if I must report in person at the Alameda County Courthouse in downtown Oakland. In the past, I’ve reported several times, only to be told later that morning to go home. A few times I’ve made it into the jury pool, which means a trip to the courtroom to find out more. In a couple of instances, it’s been a civil matter.

I always figured if I was going to be on a jury, at least make it something interesting. More than a decade ago, it was.

On that morning, the jury pool was large, with people crowding the first-floor jury reporting room. To me, that said this was a serious case. We were summoned to the courtroom in groups and informed that this was a murder trial, with two defendants.

Back in the jury room, we filled out long questionnaires. Those who felt they had a good reason for not serving on the jury were told they would have the opportunity that afternoon to discuss their situations with the Superior Court judge presiding over the trial. The jury pool of 150 people, we were told, would be cut down to 75 people. Then a series of interviews to be held the following week would winnow down the pool, leaving twelve jurors and three alternates.

I have no objection to serving on a jury. It’s my duty as a citizen. At that time, I’d never had the opportunity before. But I thought my status as a writer of crime fiction would disqualify me. In fact, a few years later, when I was summoned to the courtroom for another murder trial, the defense attorney in that case dismissed me from the pool in record time.

But this earlier case was different. I made the first cut and was called back the following week for jury interviews.

The judge informed us that this was not a case where the jury would determine who killed the victim. One defendant had already confessed. The jury’s job was to determine whether this killing was murder in the first or second degree, or whether it was manslaughter, voluntary or involuntary. The jury would also determine whether the second defendant was an accessory. There were various other charges as well.

The jury interviews were revealing. Some people felt that anyone charged with murder must surely be guilty and that was that. Others revealed prejudices and biases that led to their disqualification. Many felt that they could be open and unbiased, making their decision based on the evidence presented during the trial, despite the fact that many of the witnesses, as we were warned, had various misdemeanor and felony convictions.

During my interview, the judge remarked on my status as a mystery writer. He asked questions about my ability to sift fact from fiction and used this as a springboard for comments about how this wasn’t an episode of a TV show. The defense attorney asked if this case would wind up in one of my books. My answer was frank and truthful. I told the court that everything that occurs in my life is grist for the mill, and I might very well use my juror experiences in fiction.

At that point, I was sure I’d wind up on the jury. I was right. For five weeks, I was in that courtroom, listening to witnesses, or in the jury room upstairs with my fellow jurors, where we were under strict orders not to discuss the case.

The experience made a lasting impression. At the start, I thought the case was going to be straightforward, another senseless killing in a rough neighborhood. But it wasn’t that simple.

I listened to the testimony of witnesses who contradicted each other, making an effort to determine who was telling the truth. I got a sobering picture of the aimless lives of many of the people involved in this case.

Then there were the crime scene photos. Those images will stay with me. They showed the damage done to a human body by a semi-automatic weapon fired a close range.

We the jury – we took our job very seriously. We were aware that we held in our hands the fate of these two defendants.

We spent days deliberating and discussing the evidence. The jury instructions given to us by the judge became our Bible. All the information we needed was there, if only we could parse it out. None of this was easy, or cut-and-dried.

The verdicts? In the case of the first defendant, guilty of voluntary manslaughter and several other charges. Later that year, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison. The second defendant: not guilty of the accessory to murder charge, guilty of several other charges.

Pantser or plotter?

Well, I’m somewhere in the middle, but probably closer to pantser.

A plotter is a writer who plots before writing the book. A pantser writes by the seat of the pants. Most writers I know are a bit of both, like me.

The pantser-or-plotter question came up recently at a library event, with a question about writing process. A fellow author said that he researches his book for several months, then writes a detailed outline, which could also take several months. Then he writes the book. He needs to know exactly what happens along the way and by the time he finishes a first draft, it’s polished and doesn’t require revisions.

I’m glad that works for him. Not me. My process is messy and always involves multiple rewrites, revisions, tweaks, fine-tuning—you name it.

When I envision a book, I know where I’m going to start and where I’m going to finish. It’s those pesky middles where the hard work takes place. Often the middles get rearranged, because I discover that particular scene works better over here, and another scene needs to be moved there. Sometimes I revise a chapter to foreshadow future events, or go back to a previous chapter to drop in a clue I just discovered.

I start with a timeline, a list of events that happened before the book opens. Those past events are what leads to the current mystery. This process also helps me understand how the characters have evolved. Why is that character the way she is now? Perhaps it’s due to something that happened years ago.

The same is true of settings. In The Sacrificial Daughter, the first in the Kay Dexter series, there’s a long-abandoned hot springs resort. The locals like to hike down to the derelict building and hang out in the creek’s warm pools. There’s a scene at the old resort in the middle of the book, but the place’s back story is important to the plot.

I’ve found that in the middle of writing a book, I need to revise the timeline to incorporate everything I’ve learned since I started out. I also like to leave room for detours and blind alleys. Or, as in a quote attributed to Tony Hillerman, write myself into a corner and see if I can write my way out. Another quote, supposedly from Raymond Chandler, when I get stuck, send two guys with guns through the door.

That happened when Jeri Howard, my Oakland private eye, went to Monterey in Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean. I knew that one character, her cousin, was a person of interest in the death of his girlfriend. I didn’t send two guys with guns through the door, just a cop with handcuffs. I upped the ante by having him arrested.

Instead of writing from start to finish, I often jump ahead. It helps me get past places where I’m stuck. When writing Witness to Evil, Jeri was in Bakersfield, in California Central Valley, investigating a case. Then I got stuck. As in, what happens next? I knew that Jeri needed to go to Los Angeles to follow a lead, so off she went, heading south to the City of Angels. I wrote six chapters in rapid order and when I got Jeri back to Bakersfield, I had a very good idea of where I was going forward, and what I needed to go back and fill in.

So, pantser or plotter? I have one foot in each place.

I want to write. That’s what I really want to do every day. Butt in the chair, fingers on the keyboard—write.

That’s what leads, in fits, starts and detours, to the finished product, be it novel or short story. Then it’s navigating through all the wickets to get the book published. But after that, I can’t just sit there and hope the book sells itself.

Marketing. Translated as doing whatever I can to make sure readers know the book is out there.

Back in the old days, before ebooks and indie/self-publishing altered the landscape, there was sort of a formula. I say sort of because it really didn’t work well.

My first nine books were published by big New York publishers. Their marketing strategy, if you could call it that, was “throw spaghetti at the wall.” If it sticks, well, it might be working.

My first novel, Kindred Crimes, got a better-than-average jump off the published writer diving board because I won a contest for the best unpublished private eye novel. That got me attention, reviews, award nominations.

The way things worked back then, I scheduled book events at local bookstores and hit most of the mystery bookstores in the western United States. I went to mystery conventions such as Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime, meeting readers, other writers, and selling a few books. All of this was on my own dime, of course.

I did have a few small book tours, mostly on the West Coast, on the publisher’s dime. The publicists booked me into upscale hotels. Nice, but I’d rather they spent less money on the hotel and sent me to more cities. At one point I suggested an East Coast excursion, because they had mystery bookstores there, too. The answer was no. Since my books were set in California, how could they possibly appeal to readers in the eastern part of the country or the Midwest? Go figure.

Then I got dropped by the New York publisher and went with a small California press. I still did my own marketing, as I always had. Over the years most of the mystery bookstores closed. I scheduled events at local bookstores when I could. A lot of the local bookstores closed. I remember someone I worked with in San Francisco asking me if my books were available on Amazon. Yes, they were. They were also available at the big downtown bookstore four blocks away. That bookstore is no longer there.

We were in the era of buy it online. Then came ebooks. A lot of big publishers thought that was a passing fad. They were wrong. I’m glad I got back the rights to those first nine books right before that, because I spent a lot of time and money converting those novels to ebooks and I sell a lot of them. The small publisher also closed and I got back the rights to those books as well.

Along with all of this came social media and using the Internet to connect with readers. In these days of self-publishing, readers have so many choices. I contribute to blogs, like this one, and sometimes do guest blogs. My fellow writer D. Z. Church and I send out a newsletter each month. I tried Twitter once and hated it. Couldn’t see the point of that, or some of the other platforms. As for Facebook, it seems most of my “friends” are other writers, mystery fans, as well as a few longtime friends and relatives. I have a personal page for pictures of my cats and the like. And an author page, where I post notices.

Advertising. I’ve done some of that in the past, but not much. Recently I did something different. I participated in the Five-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge, which is free, sponsored by the Author Ad School, which costs money. The Challenge is, well, challenging. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in categories and keywords and have been rethinking blurbs and hooks. I’ve learned a lot and hope it will be useful in building sales.

Maybe when I throw the spaghetti at the wall, I’ll hit the target.