Tag: Gabriel Hawke Novel

Happy Dancing

~ patyjag ~ 6 Comments

I don’t know about other authors but there are times my husband and family give me a look that says, they wonder about my sanity. 😉

Last month, I drove to Wallowa County where I set most of my Gabriel Hawke Novels. He is an Oregon State Trooper with the Fish and Wildlife division. The reason for my trip was to:

1) Do reconnaissance of the area where Hawke finds an unconscious woman in the wilderness.

2) Discover why Starvation Ridge was named that.

3) Attend a powwow in Wallowa County so I can have Hawke and his partner Dani attend one in the next book. I also wanted to see if I could connect with a Nez Perce tribal member who would help me add more of the culture to my books.

As usual, I dragged my sis-in-law and brother into my hijinks. Thankfully, my brother being an artist, he understands my need to see things for my books. And I’ve taken my sis-in-law along on other research adventures. First, we made the trip out Starvation Ridge so I could see it better. I’d used Google Earth and an Oregon Gazetteer to try and come up with a plausible explanation for the car stuck between two trees in the middle of forest service land. But I wanted to see the terrain better and I’m glad I did! The way I had my character discover the vehicle wouldn’t work for the area. When I came home, I rewrote the scenes where and how the car was found. Not only did I get a good look at the area, but I got a better feel for it too. And my brother added nuances to it because the story is set in April when there would still be some snow and lots of mud. Which I had written into the story, but he explained it a little bit more. Wind can blow the snow off the very top of the ridge and it’s just mud where there is snow in the trees.

Road on Starvation Ridge

Sis-in-law and I went to the museum in Joseph to find out if there was a way to discover why the ridge was named Starvation. And while we saw some great photos of the past and learned a bit more about the county’s history, we came up empty on the reason for the name. Of course, as we were driving around up on the ridge, we came up with all kinds of grisly reasons for the name. But the next day at the suggestion of a local historian, we went to the Wallowa Museum and the woman there found a book and we discovered the reason for the name. And it was nothing like what we had thought. In fact, it was pretty pathetic. According to the book, it was named Starvation Ridge because a man named Billy Smith came up on the ridge and discovered that a large herd of sheep had eaten all the grass off the ridge. He called it Starvation Ridge and it stuck. Kind of lame and not worth putting in my story. I’ll let the readers fantasize about the name as we had.

The Tamkaliks Celebration was as moving and colorful as I remembered. I’d attended this powwow a number of years ago, but after taking a class on writing Native American characters and the teacher suggested attending powwows and taking in the ceremonies and talking to people, I decided I needed to get to this one again. I also plan to have my characters attend the powwow in the next Hawke book. The songs, the welcome they give everyone, the friendship dance (we danced), and the reverence they pay to one another was so worthwhile.

Ceremony of the riderless horse. symbolizing the ancestors and those tribal members lost the past year.

The best part of the whole day was a woman that sat down in front of us. She openly explained what was happening to those around her and taught a young couple how to say her dog’s name which meant, Moose. This isn’t how you write the word, only how you say it, “Sauce Luck.” And she taught us how to say Good Morning. Again, not the way you write it but how you say it, which she explained. “Tots MayWe.” After watching her so enthusiastically sharing her culture, I sat down beside her and thanked her for explaining things and asked if she’d be interested in helping me bring more Nez Perce culture to my books. She was excited to help me! She told me about her education and her B.S. in American Indian Studies and Business and her new job that was basically teaching the Nez Perce culture to those who were interested. We exchanged names, emails, and phone numbers. I have sent her an email and she responded right away. I’m excited to have found another connection to help me make my books true to the Nez Perce culture.

And that, my friends, is why I am happy dancing!

Dealing with a Tough Topic

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

My latest WIP- Work In Progress-came about from two separate things my parents told me at different times. My mom was a nurse at a clinic. She commented that there were too many teenage pregnancies in the county. And years later my dad made the comment about a deacon of a church who cheated people and slept with other men’s wives.

Fast forward to now and my overactive imagination putting those two things together to come up with a murder mystery set in a small community where the pastor of a church “teaches” young women how to be good wives.

I have a secondary character whose point of view is shared in the book. She is a midwife who has brought the pastor’s offspring into the world after he sexually assaulted the teenagers and young women. The midwife tried to get the police to do something, but the charismatic pastor shined a bad light on her, and they wouldn’t listen. She is trying to keep the women’s names out of it knowing how many families and lives will be torn apart should it come out. At the same time, she wishes something would happen to the man.

And it does.

I am halfway through this book and my newest critique partner quit on me after saying the story was too dark and she didn’t like the way my main character Gabriel Hawke was acting.

Whoa!

The new CP thought I wrote cozy mystery like her. I never said I wrote cozy and had thought she would have looked up my books. I tried to look up hers, but she is a new writer. She has been giving me good thoughts and information coming into the series at book 11. But her last comments made me sit back and think about how the story is being portrayed. She said I was doing a good job with the midwife. She liked her attitude and how she was going about helping a suspect and keeping the victims from being brought public. But Hawke was too insensitive.

I have readers who say they love Hawke. I don’t want them to not like him after reading this book. Thinking long and hard about what she’d said, I realized, I was portraying the midwife how I would want someone hiding my secrets to be and I am portraying Hawke as a person out for revenge.

Stepping back, I roll things around in my head.

I know that the revenge comes from things that have happened in my past. Things I would love to have Rosa, the midwife, keep secret if she knew. But I’m instilling my revenge for being a victim into my Hawke character. While he does champion the underdog and will find justice even for a nasty piece of work as the victim, he needs to be more sensitive to the dead pastor’s victims.

And so, I spent all of last week with printed pages of my manuscript, going through and moving scenes, adding more scenes with Hawke learning from Rosa and his partner about how the victims of this man’s assaults have justice now that he is dead but need help to heal and not be put in the headlines of the local paper.  Or brought in for questioning about something that can no longer be punished.

I have to override Hawke’s need to put the last piece of the puzzle in the right place. And my need for revenge.

And though I wish my CP was willing to keep working with me, she did me a major favor by telling me how she felt about the story and my characters.

Happy Holidays!

~ patyjag ~ 6 Comments

I hope everyone who reads this blog, writes for this blog, and guests on this blog has had a wonderful year reading all the unique and interesting posts. I know I enjoy each post for different reasons. Some are about how to write a mystery, some are about marketing, and some are about how the writer came up with the story, premise, characters. Some are vignettes about a writer’s life. There is always something interesting to learn from a post at Ladies of Mystery.

Today, as I write this post, I am starting a read through and edit pass before book 10 in the Gabriel Hawke series heads out to my critique partners. By the time you read this, the manuscript will be in the hands of my CPs and I will be fleshing out the next Spotted Pony Casino book.

Even with the holidays, I still have books in my head that want to get out. I have slowed down the last few months which has driven my on time, schedule-to-keep-self crazy! This book that is just now being read by critique partners was (on my white board) to be published by now. Life got in the way and while my disciplined self is kicking my backside for not getting it done on time, my family self is saying, it’s okay. Things happen and you begin to see that hanging out with friends and family are more important than getting that next book out on time.

And that is why, I backed off on my goals for 2023. Next year I have two wonderful trips planned. One with family and one with friends. They will take away a month and a half of writing time. And I plan to do more in-person events, which when you live as far away from where most in-person events happen, I have to add 2 extra days for travel.

I’m taking a marketing class while getting ready for company for Christmas and helping my daughter with a wedding 2 days after Christmas. Yes, life is always interesting!

Have a wonderful Holiday Season and a Healthy Happy New Year! See you in 2023!

What To Write

~ patyjag ~ 9 Comments

While I always have a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head, when I finished the latest Spotted Pony Casino book, I wasn’t sure which idea I should write next.

Should I just pick one of the titles? I have a list of gambling terms that I use for the titles in the Spotted Pony Casino series. Or should I use one of my ideas and figure out which term/title would work for it? I pondered this as I began the next Hawke book. I like to be thinking about several books ahead while I write the current one. It’s how I can finish up one and dive right into the next one, because I’ve been thinking about it in the back of my mind.

I had a little help from my subconcious.

One night as I was taking a shower a scene popped into my head and I knew which idea I’d be using. I got out of the shower and wrote the scene down. Now that I know the direction the next story is heading, I can pick one of the ten titles I have to go with it, and I can begin plotting the suspects and motives.

When I finish writing the current Hawke book, Bear Stalker.

Because I write two series, hopping from one to the next I have also been wondering which of my Hawke ideas would be the next book. There are times I can have two to three books in a series lined out in my head and on paper, but I’m working on book 10 in the Gabriel Hawke series and while I have three more ideas written down, I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to go.

The other night, just as I was about to drift off the opening scene for the next Hawke book trickled through my mind. I immediately grabbed the notebook by the bed, went into the bathroom and closed the door to not wake hubby and the puppy, and started writing it down.

As I wrote the opening scene, I realized the story would play out differently than I had originally planned for this scenario. I love when my brain figures out a better story line than what I’d first thought.

This new idea should make the readers who like when Hawke tracks in the mountains happy and will keep them wondering how many bodies Hawke will come across. 😉

When ideas come to me like this- out of the blue when I’m not trying to figure something out-I call them gifts. Because they are always better than what I had come up with while forcing myself to figure out a story line.

The mind is a wonderful thing. I hope we don’t lose our originality and creativity to machines.

Titles- where do they come from?

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

Ask any writer and they will each give you a different answer to where they get the title for a story, book, or article. Most will even say they come up with the title differently for each story, book, or article.

So how does that tell you where titles come from…it doesn’t. From talking to other writers and reading the struggles they go through to find titles, I can tell you there is no set way a writer comes up with the words that are on the front of their book or draws a reader to their story or article.

If the writer is published with a traditional publisher, they have no say over the title. The publishing company decides what title will go on the book based on past book sales. Not sales by that author but by all the authors in their house and what titles readers were drawn to.

A self-published author can give their book a title and it will stay with the book. We don’t have the algorithms that the traditional publishing houses have. But we can google the title, see if there are any others like it. Then we can see if the words in the titles are used in top selling books. And so on. If you are a writer who tries to piggyback off the top selling books.

For me, the title either comes as I am “stewing and brewing” the story –this is where I’ve come up with a premise, or the means of murder, or a unique idea I plan to incorporate into the story. If that doesn’t bring about a catchy title that matches other titles in the series, then I start writing. Adn at a point while I’m putting the story down in words, a few will string together and a lightbulb comes on and I realize that is the title of the book. This has happened to me, mostly with the first book of a series. Then after that the rest of the series has to have similar titles.

As for my Shandra Higheagle mystery series, the titles all come from either the way someone was killed or how they came to be killed.

With the Gabriel Hawke series, since he is a Fish and Wildlife officer (game warden) I wanted to have animals in the titles of the books and on the covers.

The Spotted Pony Casino mystery series, I chose to use gambling terms for the titles of the books. I found a dozen terms that I liked and have been slowly incorporating which ever title I pick into the murder mystery that I write. This has actually been the easiest way to come up with a title. I have the list and just have to decide which term works with the premise I come up with for the book.

Currently, I have started book 10 in the Gabriel Hawke series. When I first came up with the idea for the story and formulated the premise of the murder, I had called the book Fleeing Swan. But after researching the area and getting a great photo of a bear while traversing the wilderness where one of the characters will be hiding, I decided I wanted that photo on the cover and have changed the title to Bear Stalker. While the character who I was referring to as swan in the original title swims away from a threat, I decided to give her the Cayuse name of Small Bear (kskɨ́s yáka). Since she is being stalked by the killer- I came up with the title Bear Stalker. And now that I have my title and my story, my fingers are flying across the keyboard telling Small Bear’s story.

I haven’t decided what the next title will be in the Spotted Pony Casino series. I have an inkling of what the story will be about, at least the secondary plot since I left it hanging in the last book, but I want the title to reflect the main plot of murder in the book and not the secondary plot that will be left hanging in the next few books. I don’t want that little time bomb to go off just yet. 😉 But until I get a clear picture of what the next book will be about, I’m not sure what the title will be other than one from my list of gambling terms. 😉

Does a title of a book draw you to discover more about the book or is it the cover image that draws you to the book? Especially if it is an author you have never read before.