Most of my books involve near history. That means, at any given time, someone might read a book I have written who lived in or visited the place where it is set, at the time it is set, and who remembers what it meant to them. Making near history a bit of a minefield. With historical fiction, the author takes us back to a time that we know from various historical sources. But near history, well, we lived through it.

For instance, CDR Byron Cooper is stationed at Alameda Naval Air Station in Head First. The air station has since closed. But in 1972, it was the boom and the bane of life in Alameda, CA. People remember the bustle, the jets flying over, the massive gray aircraft carriers at anchor. And the view. The Air Station was a vibrant organism then, not the runways with weeds growing through them, housing developments, and shopping centers of today. For those who remember, it is my job to reflect the energy of it as they remember it. For those who don’t remember it, the job is to create an image of it as it was. The difficult part is avoiding dissonance for one set and creating a breathing organism for another.

Pay Back, the third book in the Cooper Quartet, charts the fall of Saigon, day by day. The surrender and the U.S. exodus packed an emotional wallop for the country. People remember where they were, what they were doing and how they felt. You don’t want to get it wrong. Placing characters into the events and sharing the emotion of the moment is an honor and a tightrope. Get it right. The Cooper Quartet charts the emotional journey of a Michigan military family. Consequently, Pay Back is set in Saigon, on an aircraft carrier on Yankee Station, and in Michigan. Getting the timing right across all these locations was a challenge but essential. I was dealing with near history, history people remember, some from newscasts, some from demonstrations, some from the killing field.

My book, Perfidia, takes place in Barbados, shortly after its independence from England. The population of the island consists of the descendants of blacks brought over during the slave trade, and lily-white British landed gentry. Read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for a frame of reference. Since then, the gene pool has been generously stirred. Yet, in 1972, when the story takes place, it was still better to be a landed white Barbadian than a black Barbadian with a folding house. In the book, one of the few remaining Barbadian plantations is at stake. Three men vie to inherit, one is a little bit Latin, another lily-white, and the third is mixed race. So, as historical fiction, it is essential that the plot address the subtle prejudices of the time. People remember.

When the story takes place, Sam Lord’s Castle is a fixture of the island. It burned down a few years after. People who visited after never saw the castle, for those who visited before it was a treat. Don’t get the par terre wrong, or the staircases, or the type of plants or the view of the ocean. You’ll hear about it.

Near history. Challenging. Although historical fiction of any sort carries its own dangers. The history we rely on was created by contemporaneous historians, revisited, and reinterpreted repeatedly by more historians, reported by the daily newspapers of the era, and defined by biographies and interpreted by encyclopedias and textbooks. Many of these sources have or had prejudices, ideas they wished to put forward, and axes to grind. Was General Bedford Forrest a tactical genius or a beast?

So, there you go. Historical fiction of any sort – near or long ago. Challenging. I had a reviewer tell me a character knew nothing about how hard women worked in the 1870s as though she had firsthand experience. She must be very old indeed. It is enough to make you write a contemporary detective series.

Nope, not for me.

There is nothing a mystery author likes better than a question that could have a hundred possible answers, especially when it comes in the form of a dead body (gruesome!) or a missing person (my personal favorite).

So how does a writer come up with a scenario that fits this bill? If you are writing a cozy or a closed-door sort of mystery, you create a situation where a crowd of people have motives and opportunities to bump off the victim. But what if, like me, you prefer to set your stories in rural or wilderness environments? At first, you might think that there aren’t dozens of perpetrators to investigate “out there.”

I am often slapped in the face by real-life problems like these. The first came when I was attending a Great Old Broads educational campout near the border wall in Arizona. I’m naturally focused on wildlife and wilderness issues, but as I learned more about the human situations on both sides of the border, I had no choice but to set a mystery of a Hispanic woman’s disappearance in that area.

Because, heavens, anything could have happened to my character, Jade Silva. Americans of Hispanic descent are often stopped by Border Patrol agents for questioning. A few who could not readily supply documentation have even been mistakenly deported. Women have been kidnapped for human trafficking. There is drug running and killing of competitors and witnesses by cartels. Desperate migrants traveling in secret often die in the desert. Such an environment cries out for a missing-person mystery. The one I wrote is Borderland.

I am an avid hiker, so I am often exploring public lands—national forests, national parks, BLM areas, state parks, etc. In Washington State, we are blessed with millions of acres of wilderness. When I start off at a trailhead, I am frequently greeted by a poster featuring a missing hiker, sometimes a recent one, sometimes one from years past. More than 1600 people are currently listed as missing on US public lands. And that’s only the ones whom someone bothered to report; there are probably far more. And anything could have happened to most of these hikers. In some areas, it’s easy to get lost and succumb to cold or heat or thirst. It might be easy to fall off a cliff or into an abandoned mine shaft. There are raging rivers to cross, and ice-cold mountain lakes that may look inviting but can quickly incapacitate the unwary. Rockslides. Avalanches. Bears. Cougars. Elk. Moose. Wolves. And of course, the most dangerous animal of all, humans, especially those who are careless with guns.

So, I’m setting my new suspense novel in the North Cascades area, which has all those possibilities for a hiker to get into deadly trouble. To add to all that, in the northern states like Washington, many public lands border Canada. Like our southern border, a hiker here might cross the border and vanish into another country. So, it is with all these possibilities in mind that I’m crafting my new novel, so far untitled and only half finished. (Hey, it’s summer, I’m hiking!)

And did I mention that my hiker Sam Westin’s adventure is only half of the story? The other half belongs to Neema, the signing gorilla star of my other series. How will I straighten out this tangle of plots and scenarios? Talk about a question with a hundred possible answers!

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.