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A branch in our yard during the big freeze last month. We were without power for three days.

I was asked recently in an e-mail if any of the events in my novel, Deception Pass, were inspired by real life. One day about a year before I wrote the book, I was leisurely paging through the Sunday Seattle Times when I came across a unique article apropos of nothing, which told a strange story of a quadruple murder in a cabin in an orchard back in the 1930’s. The crime had never been solved. I filed it away for future reference and, with slight alterations, it became the genesis of Deception Pass. A lot of ideas come in the newspaper. Others come from the crumpled papers under my desk. (I write with a word processor — WordPefect — so there aren’t really any crumpled papers under my desk.) The point is, failed projects frequently turn out to have silver linings.
For instance, one of my favorite characters in the Thomas Black novels is a seedy detective who sometimes joins forces with Thomas. His name is Elmer Slezak but he likes people to call him ‘Snake.’ He generally evokes a favorable response in readers. One reader told me he was the spitting image of her uncle. Another asked why I didn’t write about him instead of Thomas Black. Elmer is a rewrite of a character named Boden Kill who had his own book at one time. The book did not succeed and never sold, but out of it came Elmer. It was almost worth the eight (wasted) months I spent on that book.
Recently I wrote in this blog that I was round-filing Order 17, a manuscript I had been working on for quite some time. The good news is there are characters and situations in that discarded manuscript which will undoubtedly turn up in future novels, perhaps the Thomas Black series, perhaps elsewhere. When they do turn up, my suspicion is that they will be matured and fully-fleshed in a way they never would have been had they remained in the castoff manuscript, just as Elmer Slezak is the fully realized Boden Kill and not the half-baked original.