LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN

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With a B.S. degree in Chemistry and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry it’s a pretty good guess that I’m predominantly left brained.  My wife Elaine is excellent at all kinds of crafts and is an accomplished weaver.  It’s a pretty good guess that she’s predominantly right brained.   We can see the ‘he’s from Mars and she’s from Venus’ stuff when she edits my manuscripts.  I tend to plot and write linearly while she craves visual scenes and better realized minor characters.  We had several excellent examples of this dichotomy in the current WIP, “The Deadly Dog Show”.  For example I originally wrote a scene in Chapter 2 with Roger introducing Suzanne to hot pastrami sandwiches in a stereotypical New York City Delicatessen as follows.

THE REAL JULIET

In the current WIP, tentatively entitled "The Deadly Dog Show", Roger and Suzanne, with a lot of help from their Nanny Bruce and Roger's new partner in his detective agency, Vincent Romero, go undercover to investigate irregularities allegedly occurring at a series of major dog shows in California. As part of their cover identities they borrow a dog for Bruce to train and show, called Juliet in the novel. The fictitious Juliet is modeled very closely after our Jolie, AKC Grand Champion Von Der Nacht's Classic Beaujolais, JH, SH, especially when her behavior and personality are being described. To avoid concerns about quarantine regulations and the potential adverse effects of hot, humid weather on the dogs during the shows, this novel is set mainly in California rather than in our more usual locales in the Southern Cone of South America.

Jolie has spent most of her life as a member of a family dog pack, the first three years with just Mom, Vinia, and the second three years with Vinia and Jolie's daughter, Schone. Jolie deferred to Vinia until she had her first litter of puppies, but is probably the dominant bitch in a very mellow pack these days, at least in some ways. For example, she gets to go out of the door first when the pack heads for the back yard. She loves to give big slurpy kisses to humans, including strangers if they have a positive attitude. Like all three of our dogs, and like Juliet, she is a superb athlete in the field and in the back yard.

This book has its origins in Elaine's wanting to see one of these novels having a dog-based theme, especially if it could capture some of her interests in German Shorthaired Pointers and dog shows.  Throw in a badly concealed version of one of our dogs and she seems to be happy, pending some heavy editing still to be done.  Stay tuned to this blog, and hopefully we'll be announcing this book's publication some time this Spring season.

The Next Big Thing

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My friend Pat Bertram invited me to participate in this blog chain. 

The idea of this ongoing blog chain, called "The Next Big Thing," is to answer 10 questions about my current Work In Progress, and in turn "tag" 5 other writers who will write posts on their blogs. I thought this might be a good excuse to tell you about the next novel featuring Roger and Suzanne; this time they'll be investigating crimes closer to home rather than in South America.  The fun part for me in this work in progress is trying to integrate my love of mysteries with my (and my wife's) love of German Shorthaired Pointers.  I'm also toying with the idea of a future trivia question on this blog asking how many references readers can find to German Shorthaired Pointer dogs in the previous books in the Roger and Suzanne series.  I can think of several.

What is your working title of your book?  "The Deadly Dog Show"

Where did the idea come from for the book?   My wife, who has been urging me for at least a year to get Roger and Suzanne to buy a dog, to go to dog shows, and to solve the killing of an unloved dog show judge.  The suggestion was recently reinforced by a reader of a short story I wrote about a P.I. and a dog who asked me on Facebook to write a Roger and Suzanne novel with a dog-based theme.

What genre does your book fall under?   Hard-boiled mystery

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  I think I see Kristanna Loken as Suzanne---a tall, blond, and athletic woman of 30-ish.  If you are asking WHO at this point, look her up on Google or The IMDB (try the name or the SyFy Channel series, "Painkiller Jane").  Roger---how about Aaron Eckhart?  They'd make a nice couple.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?   It's too soon to know, but let's try this one:  Roger and Suzanne