Alec Peche's Blog

Last week I finished my 11th book overall, THE GIRL FROM DIANA PARK, book 3 in the Damian Green series. Damian assists his friend Natalie Severino with an abducted child cold case, and will this be the book where Hermione is finally reunited with her parents? It's available for pre-order now:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H9BMWTM and will be released November 5, 2018. When I finished the book, I celebrated with 2 glasses and wine and 2 bags of Bit of Honey candy from my local Dollar store and a mani/pedi. I'm sure every author has their way of celebrating the end of the book. As I cruised toward the grand finale of my story, I worried in the back of my mind of where the story should end. You don't want to overshoot your mark, so the story ends in boring the reader, but you need to pull together all the loose threads in the grand finale, and I'm anxious about hitting the exact right note for the ending and yet I'm relieved to be coming to the end.

I allowed myself a few hours of brain rest than I go back at writing. When I was struggling to write this book, I began my 12th book back in April. I stopped writing it after 874 words, as I realized it was an excuse for not working on my assignment of the moment – THE GIRL FROM DIANA PARK. Now I've gone back to my 12th book and begun work as I do with every new book. I start by naming the new story. When I wrote those words several months ago, I saved the text under the name ITALY STORY, an uninspiring name for a novel. I know many authors wait until a book is done to title it, or the publisher chooses the name, or they publish the book under different names in the United States and the United Kingdom, and I'll admit I don't get that. JK Rowling had different names for her books, and frankly, I would have bought them if the title was Harry Potter book 5.

So the name for book 9 in the Jill Quint, MD series, is SICILIAN MURDER. I'm working on the cover which is easy for the books in this series as all of my covers reflect where the person is going to die, and my guy is going to die on Mount Edna in Sicily. I also Googled the title and checked it on Amazon to make sure there wasn't already a book by that name and surprisingly, SICILIAN MURDER wasn't taken. It's not that I'm prohibited from taking the name, but I hate to add to reader confusion. There are a few titles that are similar, and they're related to the mafia, but this story will have no connection to organized crime. At least I'm not planning on a connection, but I never know where a story will take me until I write the words!

In a few weeks, I'll do another blog post including the cover reveal for this next work in progress.

Cheers,

Alec

I'm a little more than a third of the way finished with my latest book, THE GIRL FROM DIANA PARK, book 3 in the Damian Green series. I've struggled with writing for the last few months for a variety of excuses, but knowing that they were excuses didn't move me beyond the wall of not writing. I finally found two things that jump-started my progress: a picture of a frowning Elmore Leonard and a mechanical keyboard.



I added the words “Get your butt in the chair and write” to his picture as a reminder that if I'm not sitting, attempting to write, then I'll have zero output. It's as if, he's scolding me for not writing more. The first step is putting yourself physically in a position to produce. That gave me my first production boost. 'A word after a word after a word is power' (Margaret Atwood). Finally, my power meter is spiking.



The second boost came from a mechanical keyboard. I'm of an age that I took typing in high school and paid for college papers to be typed by professional typists. Now despite writing a million words as a writer, and after another career in business in which I wrote something every day, I still have to look at the keyboard keys to see what I'm typing. A writer site mentioned a mechanical keyboard as a writing tool. I'd never heard of such a thing as I've never played video games or coded on a computer. I did a Fortran class with keypunch cards in college. I remember being underwhelmed by the use of keypunch cards as I could always figure out in my head faster than the time it took making keypunch cards to make the computer think. For this blog post, I looked up the Fortran and was surprised to find that it is still used by IBM. Who knew? But I digress...

​see my author website for the pictures in this blog www.alecpeche.com

 

The picture above is my new mechanical keyboard. I'm guessing the flashing colors mean something to gamers, but they serve no relevance to me, other than to look happy while I type. What I liked about the keyboard is the loud sound I make hitting keys – it makes me feel productive to hear the speed of the key-stroke. The sound of the key-strokes is like the music emanating from the creation of a story. This is probably not the keyboard for anyone writing in close physical contact with someone else. I daresay that if I took the keyboard to Starbucks, all of the patrons would be staring at me in no time, and someone might actually ask that I leave.



While I was researching mechanical (or WASD) keyboards, I also did some research on the online games that people play and the amount of money the best players can make. It's astounding. I also watched a few YouTube videos on gaming and how to cheat. There are multiple ways to cheat, and you are generally banned by the game maker if you're caught cheating. One famous player wrote his own code to add a bot to his screen to improve the accuracy of his rifle shots in a game. Don't worry Damian Green doesn't cheat at video games, although he does enter an illegal gaming casino in search of answers about Hermione's parents.



Stay cool,

Alec

I’m on my seventh week of my local police Citizens Academy. It’s been interesting just learning more about my community reflected by the crime that occurs inside its boundaries. The good news is we have only about ten bonafide gang members. This information was useful as I wash bedding and rugs at a launderette next to the where the gang members live. I’ll still use that laundry, but I‘ll be a little more observant of my fellow washers.

Our SWAT team rarely is called out – they do much more training practice than actual SWAT incidences. We’ve discussed the hostage negotiation team and how officers try to talk people down in high stress situations or suicide prevention, and even in serving search warrants which can quickly go south..

In a prior class we had a presentation on programs in our locals schools that the police have to promote good parenting, reduce truancy and crime, and be a friendly law enforcement face to students. In a different session we were educated on narcotics and I was blown away by how horribly methamphetamine ages a user, besides all the other nasty stuff the drug does to your body. Now I know what to look for if I’m wondering if someone is a user of that particular drug.

Last night I was killed in action.....We spent time on the police simulator. Before the simulator started, I was given an empty gun that clicks, a Taser, and pepper spray and instructed on their use. I was told that I was a police officer that came upon an alley where two men were arguing and it was just around the corner from a bank ATM. Then the video started... I asked the men to back-off and let's try to settle the conversation peacefully. Can you tell I'm an author? Too many words and not enough action....All of a sudden the one man turned toward me firing a gun through his sweatshirt pocket. Instead of ducking behind a barrier, I stood full frontal at the shooter while firing the taser that I didn't turn on. Yep, I was dead. I should have used the gun instead of the taser and if I was going to use the taser, I needed to turn in on. Whoops. I think I died the quickest among my academy classmates. I then had to tell the instructor “what I saw”, “what I did”, and “why did I do it”? It was a great exercise in your own personal decision making when you have adrenaline coursing through your veins. To be sure I don't play video games and perhaps my decision making would have been better if I had some prior practice, but I probably still would have gotten killed.

So far, I haven’t learned of anything to be used in the current books I’m writing in part because nothing is related to forensic pathology (Jill Quint, MD) or cold cases (Damian Green series). I am learning new respect for law enforcement and I'm glad of the thin blue line that stands between me and the crooks. It's been a very informative class and I would encourage everyone to attend their own Citizens Police Academy in their home town.

I'm 8,000 words into Crescent City Murder, book 8 in the Jill Quint series. I'm loving the story and enjoying my writing and learning more about New Orleans as story quirks arise. But a word of caution, never, ever, sit next to me in a bar.

When I visited there last fall, I tried to talk to as many people as possible about life in New Orleans. It's my way of soaking up the culture with the thought of material for a future book. I spoke with my servers in restaurants, my bartender at Juan's Flying Burrito, a woman on a trolley who had just come from a funeral, a forensic pathologist at the city coroner's office, Uber drivers, and many more. A man that spoke with me at a bar will end up dead in book 8.

It was a Sunday night and the Green Bay Packers were playing the New York Giants and I was sitting at the bar at Archie Manning's Place to watch the game. A young man sat next to me at the bar and we chatted off and on over the next couple of hours. He lives in the Ninth Ward, that region of New Orleans that suffered the most from Hurricane Katrina. He has a son that he shares with the child's mother and he worked in Baton Rouge. He explained why he commuted to that city and what it was like to live through Katrina.

I don't know why I ended up killing him as opposed to anyone else I met in NOLA. I guess his story visually impacted my brain as I could see the struggles of this nice man both now and in the past. His words were still on my mind when I visited the Hurricane Katrina museum the next day. Again his struggles of that time played on my brain so that I was imagining him during the video segments of the hurricane that played inside the museum. He felt that the government had not protected the Ninth Ward and they had purposely flooded it by blowing up the canal dykes to save the French Quarter, the large source of tourism dollars. Based on what other residents said and the explanation for the depth of the damage at the museum, I came away with disagreeing with his opinion.

Or maybe it's his fault for sitting next to me at the bar distracting me from a Packers' game…Never sit next to me at a bar…during a Packer game, unless you're going to be quiet and cheer for the Pack!

In December of 2015, I began the seventh book - CASTLE KILLING, in the Jill Quint, MD Forensic Pathologist series. I typed "The End" this morning, nineteen months later. Granted I also began a new series producing Red Rock Island and Willow Glen Heist, but I did it because my 'pantser' ways were not yielding the written word and I wondered if the first series had come to an end. It hasn't.

Last week I decided I would finish the book at the sixty-thousand word mark as I couldn't think of any exciting story threads to take it beyond that point to the usual eighty thousand word mystery.

Now the manuscript is with my first reader in an unusual form - first draft. I simply don't know whether to discard this story to my dud pile, and move on to the Jill Quint book number eight, set in NOLA.

I tried three writing exercises to see where to take the story next - I picked a random noun and tried using it to create plot. I don't remember what my word was, but it wasn't helpful. I tried jotting down scenes, but the mind was empty. I brainstormed what could happen to the story and characters but couldn't figure out how to tie it in to the story I had been telling. Most bestselling authors say there is no such thing as writer's block, and I agree. My block wasn't over writing in general, rather it was this specific story that refused to tickle my imagination.

I have an entire sheet of notes on where I want to go with my next story in the Jill Quint series. When I was in New Orleans last years, I specifically wandered around collecting ideas for a book to be set there and I'm ready to go.
The Damian Green series on the other hand is stalling out in my mind. Hermione will be starting school as a junior in high school, and Damian and Ariana's business and personal relationship will grow, but I haven't figured out the role of Hermione's parents yet so I can't start on that series.

CASTLE KILLING opens with Nick Brouwer being shoved off the clock tower at Cardiff Castle. No sooner did I kill him than my imagination shut down on the 'why' of his murder. There's a connection to WWII, but I had to link it back to Wales and Scotland which was no easy story telling feat as the Nazi's never occupied the United Kingdom. This was of many story line struggles with the story.

My next blog post in a week or two will announce which book is next - CASTLE KILLING or an as yet unnamed mystery story set in NOLA!

I’ve been working hard on Castle Killing, a book that starts with a murder in Wales and moves on to Scotland. I had to research Scotch whisky ratings so that I’d know what Jill Quint and crew would enjoy in a bar in Edinburgh in the storyline. I decided that while writing the remainder of the book (the final 53,000 words) that it would be helpful to have a single malt Scotch to fuel my imagination. 

So while I was in Costco, I picked up a bottle of Laphroaig Single Malt 10 year old whisky. The Los Angeles Whisky club gave it a B+ rating which means it’s “Great and you definitely want to own it”. I’ll have to say (me being an extremely untutored drinker of Scotch!) that I thought the first taste was magical. Up to this point I haven’t got the attraction of a single malt Whisky, now I can see I’ll enjoy drinking this while I write the remainder of the story, or at least part of the time I’m writing since my most productive hours are 5-7am Pacific Time, which is of course, 1pm in Scotland. Perhaps I’ll try the Scotch at the early hour and see what happens to my writing day (something even Hemingway would have frowned at).

Along with the bottle comes the opportunity to own one square foot of Islay Island (off the southwest coast of the Scottish mainland) which I applied for and they’ll be sending me my ownership certificate in the mail. How cool is that! It’s rather like the Green Bay Packers - instead of owning a square foot, I owe one share of stock. So imagine my resume - NFL Team Owner and Landowner, Scotland! The Distillery will even supply me with the right attire to visit my one foot plot including size 12 Wellingtons (Oh no!). I think I’ll be heading to Islay Island in the future, but I’ll bring my own Wellingtons and certainly I’ll enjoy the whisky once I arrive.

My latest book is in the final stage of publishing before it goes live on August 1. It's available for pre-order now on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01I795500 Here's a preview of the opening of the story, a brand new series for me!                                                        
                  Red Rock Island

                 By Alec Peche

                       Prologue

Thirty Years Ago

The summer of 1988 in Morgan Hill, California was shaping up to be dry and hot. Tempers were flying as people had the radio on too loud listening to Faith by George Michael, or Need You Tonight by INXS. Yellowstone National Park had been on fire since June and it was already August. Debbie Altman was tired of the heat, the music and the endless ads for the United States presidential candidates. Really, the election was several months away and yet the news had been incessant about the political race.

She grabbed her keys off her kitchen counter and decided to head north to her friend’s house in San Jose. At least she had air-conditioning included in her apartment rent. Holly had invited her to stay at her house earlier in the day, after Debbie complained about how hard it was to sleep in the heat. She’d take Monterey Highway past the cherry orchards up to San Jose. The road could be scary at times as it earned the name Blood Alley for the bad accidents that occurred as a result of head-on collisions at high speeds. On this Friday afternoon though, hopefully the traffic would be light with the majority of cars heading south for the weekend. Debbie left the traffic lights of Morgan Hill and crossed the signpost indicating it was San Jose. Then she heard her car’s engine make a few weird noises. She drove nearly a ten year old Datsun 240Z. It got decent gas mileage and was fun to drive. The car coughed and started slowing down. Darn she’d have to pull over and walk to find a telephone to call for help. The day just kept getting worse and worse.

She locked up the car, grabbed her purse, and set out on foot to the nearest business; fortunately she knew there was a concrete pipe company about one mile ahead and since it was only three in the afternoon, it might still be open. After walking just a few steps, she felt like she was going to explode from the heat bearing down on her. She heard the noise of a truck behind her and looked over her shoulder to see a pick-up truck slowing down. A woman in the passenger side seat rolled the window down and asked if she wanted a ride somewhere. Debbie smiled, said yes, and hopped in the truck’s cab and that was the last time anyone saw her alive other than her killer.

Chapter One

Damian Green stood on the red rock looking west. On his right was the Golden Gate Bridge, and in the distance Alcatraz Island and the San Francisco skyline. Directly in front of him, floating on the water, were three floral wreaths. It was the seventh anniversary of the murder of his wife and two daughters. He’d had them cremated and spread their remains on their favorite ski run at Lake Tahoe during a heavy snowstorm and so he honored their existence with the wreaths and an imaginary conversation with the three of them on the anniversary of their deaths.

Behind him on the hill of this little island in San Francisco Bay, stood retired detective Natalie Severino. She’d solved the case, shot the bastard dead that killed his family, and had remained in his life the seven years since. She brought the wreaths on the first anniversary and it had become a ritual each year. His oldest would have graduated from high school this year, but that and all of his children’s other milestones would never come to pass.

He had survivor’s guilt and his life since that time had drastically changed. He’d bought the island, built a house and designed a computer alert system to prevent any further errors like the one that had taken his family from him. Using his computer skills he went to work erasing his existence after his family tragedy; reporters had been relentless at the time of the manhunt and subsequent killing of the convict. Part of his core after that was making sure he was impossible to locate or for people to figure out whether he was dead or alive at any given moment.

As he lost sight of the wreaths on the waves, Natalie said, “I have a job for you,” and then she winced. She’d left Damian to his own silent thoughts for the past twenty minutes and she was itching to tell him about her latest case. Talk about throwing cold water on the grieving man, damn it Natalie you’re so uncouth.

She’d met him in his office at a research lab of a major technology company in San Jose to notify him that his wife and children were dead and later, after a short manhunt, she notified him their murderer was dead. She’d come to know him better over the years since and when she opened her own detective and security agency, he’d help her in a variety of ways, usually related to technology, computers, or some amazing engineering feat. She was a decade his senior in her late fifties and she found him to be a renaissance man – traditional, polite, and very, very smart. He’d invented so many things and either sold the patent for a large sum or the invention became part of his ongoing large royalty checks. She became familiar with his background when she’d researched him at the beginning of the investigation into his family’s murder.

Damian stood a moment longer searching for sight of the wreaths, and then he sighed and turned. Another year without his family; it seemed like an eternity and yet it seemed like yesterday. Each year as the anniversary of their deaths moved upon him, he was depressed and morose, and yet the wreaths sailing away on the waves somehow eased his grief and he could go on again for another year, each slightly less painful than the previous one.

The man was six foot, and rugged looking from both the permanent lines of grief and from the climate of living on this rock of an island. His blond hair was in transition between blond and white depending on how the sun hit it. He was muscled from swimming in the bay in a wetsuit, clambering over his rocky cliff to his house and the twice weekly treadmill runs. His island wasn’t big enough for him to run around it. Besides parts of it were a bird sanctuary and he wouldn’t want to disturb the natives. His eyes were blue and if he passed you on the street, you would wonder if he was a tourist from the Nordic area of the world - perhaps Sweden or Finland, but you would be wrong. His ancestors came from the North Sea region of the United Kingdom and his heritage was Norse. All in all, Damian was a very pleasant man to look at.

“What’s the job?”

“I need a computer analysis,” replied Natalie.

To Damian, a brilliant computer analysis creator, it was like saying you needed a white shirt. There were so many options that he couldn’t even respond to Natalie’s request.

With a sigh he asked, “What specifically do you need analyzed?”

“So you know that my former department, the SJPD is short on officers. It’s hard to live in Silicon Valley on a cop’s salary. They’re down nearly twenty percent of the force. So they contracted with me to work their cold cases since they have no personnel to devote to them at the moment. It’s sort of a dream job for me, and I was really excited to go to work on them until I discovered how bad the backlog is. There are over 200 cases and no one has worked these files in the last three years. That’s just wrong, those families deserve justice!”

“Have they all been electronically cataloged?”

“Yes.”

“So what do want me to do with them? You’re the retired detective,” Damian said.

“I want to use that brilliant brain of yours to find a process to approach these cases. They aren’t calling out to me, saying ‘solve me first!’ I’m afraid to waste time on cases that I’ll never be able to solve in my lifetime even if you, genius Damian, gave your every waking breath to solving a case. I don’t want to waste time on lost causes.”

“Aren’t they all lost causes? That’s why they weren’t solved the first time around.” 

“Aren’t you the pessimist? I said this would be hard, not impossible. With you helping me, I would think your brilliant mind would come up with some angles that weren’t thought of the first time around. If your brain fails me then I have to think your computer will come through.”

“There is that. Can you send me a few cases so I can see what the data possibilities are?”

Natalie did a happy dance in her head at his interest. She was sure that with his help she would go so much further and faster. She watched him for a while longer knowing this was always the saddest day of the year for him. She felt bad for his suffering but since she’d never met his family, she felt no personal loss; rather it was his suffering that weighed on her. She wondered if he would ever ask her not to bring the wreaths on the anniversary, but she wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t intrude on his intensely private thoughts.

Red Rock Island is schedule for publication on August 1, 2016. The manuscript is presently down under in Australia with my editor for final edits which will be returned to me next week. Amazon requires your final manuscript be on their system for ten days prior to publication. I think that’s to give them time to look for any banned material and perhaps to check for plagiarism.

As part of my refreshing my imagination for the next book, I find myself doing a major home improvement project between each book. I’ve installed tile floors in bedrooms, painted all the shelving in a large kitchen, and my most recent project while my book is in Australia has me ankle deep in cow manure.

California cities place varying degrees of water restrictions on their residents. In my city, I’m allowed to water twice a week for a maximum of 15 minutes. Needless to say, it ain’t doing it for my thirsty lawn. So I decided to do the good environment thing by removing two-thirds of my lawn for a garden of water wise plants. I consulted the Master Gardeners in this community on what to do and they said simple, “Just cover your lawn in cardboard ,add 2 to 3 inches of mulch and after 6-8 weeks, the lawn will be dead and the cardboard decomposed into one big happy compost pile”. When you’re talking about more than 800 square feet of lawn, it would take an entire lifetime of shoe box cardboard to cover that size of ground. I spoke to some local businesses and was able to take a few ‘back of the SUV’ loads of large sheets of cardboard home for this project.

For the compost, my town is the mushroom capital of California. I’ve never liked them as they feel weird between my teeth, but they provide jobs in this town. Mushrooms are grown in greenhouses in sterilized cow manure. There’s another reason not to eat them… ..

One of the local mushroom growers sells their compost for $25 per pickup truck load. I’ve now wheel barreled two truckloads of the stuff into my backyard to be dumped on the cardboard. Once I’m finished next week, I’ll wet the whole mixture and cover it with plastic and hopefully once I finish the next book, I’ll be ready to plant my new water wise garden.

My puppy had taken to eating the cow manure. He apparently finds it more tasty then his Kirkland puppy food. The puppy is also why I’m covering the smelly mess in plastic as given the chance, he’ll track as much of it inside the house as possible. Last night as I entered my bedroom, I smelled poop in the room. I turned the lights on looking for a pile of puppy poop. There wasn’t any thankfully; it was the ‘eau de manure’ waffling in from outside.

I’m included some pics of my backyard after the two truckloads of manure on my website blog. Sadly I couldn't figure out how to include them here. I’ll be ready and refreshed to dive into “Castle Killing”, book 7 of the Jill Quint series next week once I finish their manure project. I set the book aside in March in order to write Red Rock Island. Once that’s done, my compost pile should be as well. I’m looking forward to the fall when I can move on from this mess.

My current work in progress, Red Rock Island, which will be published mid-July is an interesting case study in pantser writing. Pantsers are writers who write by the seat of their pants. They sit down at the keyboard and begin a story with no idea of where it’s going. Compare that to J.K. Rowling who appears to be an outliner based on the storyboard that I’ve seen regarding her Harry Potter series. There are pros and cons to each style of writing and most writing instructors end with the advice to go with what works for you, the writer.

When I began my second series I started with a single premise. I’d put a guy who lives on the only private island inside San Francisco bay and he would solve crimes based on an engineering background combined with computer skills. That was all I started with. Today I’m sitting with the book 75% finished at over 60,000 words and I know I’ve got to solve my two cold cases, but I still don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I know it will come to me. The reason I can’t outline, is I don’t know the story ending without knowing the details I’ve come upon along the way.

Since the story began I’ve added eighteen characters, two cold case victims, a dog and two cats. Some of the characters will be specific to this book only and other will continue as the series goes forward.
I had a teenager pop into the storyline out of nowhere and I’m fairly sure I won’t solve her mystery for a few books yet.

My main character, Damian Green, I thought would remain static throughout the story. He’d start alone and end alone, but he wouldn’t stay in the box I had planned, and so a woman along with a teenager appear in the story. Again I had no predilection that this was going to happen from the start rather it fit the story as it unfolded.

I understand that Lee Child writes his Jack Reacher series much the same way. He starts each story with Jack arriving somewhere and when he begins he doesn’t know what kind of trouble is going to find Jack in this new town, only that he will.

It’s both the agony and the ecstasy of each new story. I’m excited to see where a story takes me, but I can get stuck if I occasionally write myself into a dead end or when I don’t hear the story’s characters calling out to me.

Weird huh?

I wrote a post last year on research that I do for my books. Perhaps because I began a new series, it seems like there are many more questions to be answered. One of Stephen King’s basic seven requirements of writing is to TELL THE TRUTH and so I’m using Google several times a day to find the answers as the story unfolds.

Over a two day period last week, I kept a log of the questions I looked up on Google as it pertains to my current work in progress, Red Rock Island. See if you know the answers:

What are the top African-American first names?
How do you built a smoke-bomb?
What is the favorite gun of retired cops?
Who are the Aryan Brotherhood?
What is the San Jose Police department organization?
What happens with currents in San Francisco bay?
What was mined on Red Rock Island?
What are the ferry paths in the bay?
What are the traits of Portuguese water dogs?
Is it illegal to read prison inmates letters or emails?
Who are the enemies of the Aryan Brotherhood?
Which prison houses the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood?
Can hair fibers be used as evidence?
Once a car goes to a junkyard, does the junkyard notify the state of the presence of that car in their salvage yard?
If you don’t have a victim, can you use DNA from siblings to compare to DNA at the scene?
What's the smallest horsepower motor engine for a boat?
Can you buy beer on Amazon?

You may wonder what some of these questions have to do with a murder mystery, while others are obvious. For example, I needed a dog for the story that played in the water and decided upon the Portuguese water dog, but then I had to TELL THE TRUTH and make sure the breed loved to swim; and they do!

The answers to these and other odd questions are found in Red Rock Island which should be available for pre-order in June or July.