One day when I was still employed at Microsoft, I was out walking the trails behind my campus, no doubt in an attempt to avoid committing homicide. (I was not cut out for a corporate career.)

But homicide is not what this post is about. I was walking along the trails in a wooded area, inventing all sorts of creative murder scenarios in my head, when I almost tripped over a creature I didn’t recognize. It was about the size of an adult rabbit, with small ears and gray-brown fur and a short tail. I was, frankly, amazed. It was an animal that I, a lifelong nature lover, had never seen before! It ignored me as I watched it nibble the vegetation. I poked it with the tip of my shoe. It squeaked, but immediately went back to eating and ignoring me.

A jogger trotted by. I stopped her and asked, “Do you know what sort of animal this is?” She shrugged, replied, “Looks like a giant rat,” and jogged away.

“What’s wrong with you?!” I wanted to yell. “How can you not be fascinated by an animal you’ve never seen? Do you spend your whole life on Amazon shopping for athletic shoes?”

Okay, that’s probably not (completely) fair, and such rudeness only takes place in my imagination (most of the time). Personally, I just don’t understand how any person can walk past a tree completely filled with birds without even noticing, or how someone can not want to see a bongo in real life. (It’s a really cool striped African antelope, and no, I haven’t seen one yet.)

I went back to my office, now on a mission to identify the animal I’d seen. (Definitely a more rewarding activity than the spreadsheet I was supposed to work on.) My mystery creature was a so-called “mountain beaver” (Aplodontia rufa), which is actually not a beaver at all and doesn’t necessarily live in the mountains, which just goes to show you how common names can misdirect you. Aplodontia rufa is a “living fossil,” a very primitive mammal that’s been around for thousands of years.

I’ve since run into another mountain beaver one other time (again, not in the mountains). They really don’t register their surroundings much, but are totally focused on their food. I actually picked up the one I found in my yard and moved it away from the bush I wanted to preserve, but it merely squeaked and then went right back to the same place. I had to put these astounding creatures in a book, so I added one to a scene in my second Sam Westin mystery, Bear Bait.

All my books include at least one type of wildlife. As a hiker and scuba diver, I know some animals well: black bears, mountain goats, bobcats, way too many raccoons and coyotes, squid, octopus, morays, etc., etc. I’m always excited to see any kind of wildlife. (Rattlesnakes? Well, okay, not so much.)

In my latest Sam Westin novel, Cascade (#6), I was determined to include a wolverine. I’ve never seen a wolverine, but I’m always looking for them in the North Cascades, or at least for signs of them. So is my protagonist, Summer “Sam” Westin. Of course, Cascade is a suspense novel, so I had to add a couple of avalanches, a collapsed ski lodge, and the mystery of why two teens wanted to trap a wolverine.

Maybe, one day, I’ll be lucky enough to spot a wolverine in the backcountry. And I hope I will find that bongo in Africa, too, someday soon. It’s important to me to see all these rare creatures before we humans drive them out of existence. I want to see vaquitas (tiny porpoises), pangolins (scaly anteaters), blue whales (the largest creature on earth), and oh, so many others I’m not even aware of yet.

I hope you don’t just jog by the Earth’s amazing wildlife, uninterested in any creature that is not a pet. People share this planet with so many other incredible beings! I hope you have at least one mind-blowing encounter with an awe-inspiring, non-human creature in your lifetime.

Not for us. Good luck elsewhere.

Okay, that’s one we’ve all heard, or at least seen, in rejection slips. I no longer take this personally, because I understand that every publisher buys only a certain number of books per year; some slots are taken by their established authors; and my timing is off. (I recognize there’s also a slight possibility that they just don’t like my story or my style.) No problem, I’ll just publish it myself.

“I don’t really read.”

What? I’m never quite sure how to react to that statement. Does it mean that the person I’m talking to has no imagination, or that s/he is just so happy with the status quo of her/his own life that s/he needs nothing more? Sometimes I attempt to sleuth out whether that person at least adores movies so I can be assured that s/he does appreciate stories. But mostly, I just take my glass of wine over to talk to the next person who might know how to read. Personally, real life is just not enough for me.

“How much money do you make from your books?”

Really? Do I ask you how much money you make at your job? When this is followed by questions about lavish book tours or sumptuous dinners with my editor, I know this person has fallen for the movie stereotype of the bestselling-author. A very rare species indeed.

And then, in recent years, here’s one that I’ve heard too often, from the voracious readers that we might expect to be our best friends:

“I couldn’t put that book down! I read it in only two days, so I returned it and didn’t even have to pay for it!”

If you write fast-paced stories (like I always try to), you too may be aware that Amazon allows buyers to return ebooks within seven days of buying them. This is happening to me more and more, and has me wanting to belt out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T! You know what that means to me?” (Okay, I changed that line “just a little bit.”) I typically price my ebooks at $4.99, and these smart shoppers want to keep me from my massive $3.49 royalty? That hurts, readers! How am I supposed to pay my cat food bill? I’ve never even returned ebooks that I detested.

In general, Amazon has been nicer to me than my traditional publishers and certainly nicer than most bookstores, who think nothing of “returning” (or in reality, destroying) print books (that the publishers and authors have to pay for), but allowing returns on ebooks for seven days after purchase? That’s a punishment authors don’t deserve, Amazon. Show us a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T and shorten that up to 24 hours! (I realize anyone can make a mistake and purchase a book twice; God knows I’ve borrowed the same book more than once from my local library.)

Readers, if you really must plow through my ebooks and then return them to Amazon, at least do me the favor of writing me a nice review, okay?

Writers deserve R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Writers often hear “write what you know.” I have found that to be bad advice for many experts, as you’d be amazed how many knowledgeable people simply cannot explain their expertise to us common folk, so they need a translator, in the form of a ghost writer or a developmental editor. I’ve worked as both. But I digress.

Most of us fiction authors cannot experience everything that we write about. God forbid that we actually embezzle funds, dump toxic waste, set fires, or kidnap, torture, or murder people. We must rely on our imaginations or on accounts documented by others for all those crimes. But I do think it’s important to include sensory details from real experiences whenever possible.

So, when I’m out hiking, I’m always trying to truly experience everything as much as possible so I’ll remember the details when I write my Sam Westin mysteries. I would never wear earphones because I want to plug into my memory bank a wide variety of natural sounds: the low whoop-whoop-whoop mating call of a blue grouse, the groan of tree branches rubbing against each other, the roar of a waterfall, the crunching of my snowshoes on icy snow, the rumble of a distant rockfall. Scents are important, too: I inhale into my memory the grape-juice odor of blooming lupines in hot sun, the tang of broken pine needles, the whiff of smoke from a forest fire on the other side of a mountain range.

Touch is usually the most noticeable sense for me when I’m on a trail: I notice the razor-sharp edge of broken granite as I slice my leg on a rock, the stickiness of tree sap or the dampness of moss on my pants from the last place I sat down, the feel of a breeze drying the sweat on my back in summer, the sting of wind-driven sleet against my bare face in winter, the annoying bite of a blackfly in spring. In the Pacific Northwest, we often even have tastes along the trails: the tartness of salmonberries, the sweetness of huckleberries, the numbing taste of licorice ferns, the crunch of fiddlehead ferns.

And of course, sights are absolutely crucial: the myriad greens of a dense forest, the contrast of gray granite against snow, the awesome grandeur of a volcano, the terrifying crevasses in a glacier, the miracle of simply viewing the ocean or the sea of mountains that is the North Cascades. I try to be equally present, a sort of sensory sponge, when I’m kayaking or scuba diving, soaking up all the sensations the experience has to offer, because details can help readers experience the world a writer creates with words.

I’ve attended the Writers Police Academy twice. It’s an incredible experience, where mystery writers undergo some of the same training that police officers or forensics specialists or firefighters receive. I’ve learned about the difficulties of getting and matching fingerprints (fascinating), studied cases to distinguish suicides and accidental deaths from homicides (often harder than you might think), studied blood spatter (gruesome), learned how to clear a building in which an armed suspect was hiding (incredibly stressful), and shot an assault rifle (absolutely terrifying), just to name a few memorable sessions.

Seeing the wall on the US-Mexican border was an experience I’ll never forget, either, and learning from all sides about its impact on the environment and cultures was invaluable. I’ve been there twice. I absorbed so much that I got a whole book, Borderland, from the brief time I was there.

When I sit down to write a new book, I try to incorporate as many sensory details from my experiences as possible.

My next Sam Westin mystery, Cascade, includes a wolverine, an avalanche, and a collapsed building. I’ve never seen a wolverine except in a zoo, so I had to collect that information from books and articles. The book will be out in late August or early September. I’d still like to think a wolverine will appear somewhere in my future, in real life.

I’ve never been in an avalanche (thank heavens), but I’ve seen a few, and I’ve been through avalanche training. I do know what it feels like to fall through a snow bridge (only a couple of feet in my case, again thank heavens) and I’ve been caught in a whiteout in the mountains when the snow is so thick that you can’t distinguish up from down until you fall. And at the Writers Police Academy, I crawled through a simulated collapsed building in the dark. It’s more difficult and more painful than I imagined, but (yes, I’m still thankful) I didn’t have the danger of tons of debris looming above me, as many victims or first responders might in real-life situations.

I encourage everyone to do as much of what interests them as is possible. Even a frightening experience is enriching. I’m grateful that I’ve had a wide variety of memorable experiences to help with my writing, and I hope to have many more.

I am closing in on finishing my 14^th novel. By which, I really mean that I just finished my rough draft. So, as most authors know, the real work begins: soliciting feedback, rewriting, planning for launch. And I absolutely, positively, could never finish without beta readers.

I do have a few critique partners who read chapters along the way as I write, but for the most part, I wait until I have a complete rough draft before sharing it. That’s because I am a pantser who changes a lot along the way, so it can be frustrating and sometimes a waste of time to share rewritten material over and over again.

My favorite description of how the novel writing process typically goes was written by bestseller Lisa Gardner in Plotting the Novel: Otherwise Known as The Real Reason Writers are Neurotic, which you can get from her website. Her description is hilarious, and oh, so true! And it’s how the process works for me every time, except that I rarely create an outline, so my process is even more chaotic. But it’s true that, like Lisa, I always start off thinking I have a brilliant idea, and then, as I work on the dang manuscript over and over, I inevitably end up thinking I have a worthless book that nobody will ever want to read. (We writers tend to be an insecure lot.)

For Cascade, my sixth Sam Westin novel, I wanted to use the experience I gained years ago at the Writers Police Academy of crawling through a collapsed building. My novels mostly take place in outdoorsy settings, so I had an avalanche destroy a ski lodge. And my Sam Westin books include wildlife, so I threw wolverines into the mix (not in the ski lodge!). But did I really have a story? As I wrote and rewrote the scenes, I began to wonder if I’d totally forgotten how to write at all.

This probably happens to every novelist who does not suffer delusions of grandeur. By the time I reach the rough draft stage, I’m so bored with my characters and plot that I want to throw the manuscript in the trash. Every scene, every conversation seems repetitious. But I know this largely comes from thinking, rereading, and rewriting the same material over and over again. At least I hope it does.

So, I really rely on a handful of beta readers to tell me whether or not I’ve created a novel or I should just stick to weeding my garden from now on. Some authors have a whole team of alpha readers to read the first draft, and then a different team of beta readers to read the rewritten version. I like to think that now I’m a little more efficient than that (probably a delusion of grandeur), so I generally skip the alpha step and go straight to beta readers.

These brave souls are willing to read a rough draft and tell me what they like, what they hate, and where I went totally off the rails. (This does not replace a thorough copyedit, by the way; I always hire a real pro for that as a last step.)

I am now in the “Help Me with my Rough Draft” phase, and I can only hope that my beta readers save me again. Meanwhile, I’ll be weeding my garden.