How do you get ideas for your stories?

Image by Amal Manikkath

Authors are often asked where we get our ideas. I get mine from fortune cookies.

Just kidding. 

I got the idea for CANALS after driving over, or next to, yet another irrigation canal in Modesto, California. One day I thought, what if there was a monster in the canals? Man, no one would be safe because those canals are everywhere. Just about everyone who lives in Modesto and has a decent arm could throw a rock into an irrigation canal from somewhere on their property.

I got the idea for THE MIGHTY T from a newspaper article about the O’Shaughnessy Dam and the Tuolumne River. That dam is still a hot topic today. Environmentalists want it torn down so the Hetch Hetchy Valley can be restored... Well, not all environmentalists. The ones in San Francisco don’t because they get their clean, pure drinking water form the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. 

I wrote DEATH OF A MATADOR after attending a Portuguese bloodless bullfight in Stevensen, California. It was one of the craziest things I’d ever seen and I thought it would made a good story.

SUNSET HILL followed MATADOR, but wasn’t inspired by anything other than the fact that Mindy got away at the end of THE MIGHTY T. She was too good a character to just let go like that.

The idea for THE KING OF ROUND VALLEY sprung from a location: the place Grant ended up at at the end of SUNSET HILL. That’s where he was so I began looking into what might be going on in Mendocino County...

Image by Vjeran Lisjak

Then, yesterday morning, I was on the treadmill at the gym listening to a podcast titled Predicting The Future, an episode from the NPR: TED Radio Hour Podcast. (You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, like I do, or download it directly from the site.) 

Because I only walked for 30 minutes, I only made it up to Marc Goodman’s section, What Does The Future Of Crime Look Like? I was particularly struck by Nina Tandon’s and Richard Resnick’s segments. Tandon’s company is growing bones from stem cells and Resnick says sequencing genes will likely change the way we live.

Now, couple this with my recent experiences in ordering a new iPhone and iPad and ... BAM! An idea for a story sprouted. At first it was a short story, but after I’ve a couple of days to play with it, it’s gonna be a novel. And I think it’s gonna be really good.

It’ll be about the way we pick our children in, oh, about a hundred years from now.

The King of Round Valley eBook Released

Yeah!

The eBook version of my new novel, The King of Round Valley, was released on Kindle, Smashwords, and Nook today. Smashwords will distribute to the iBooks store and a few other small retailers. The paperback version will be available in about two weeks.

(At the time of this posting, Smashwords is the only retailer where the book is live. I'll update this page and my blog when the other sites go live.)

The King of Round Valley was a fairly easy book to write, but fairly difficult to edit. The entire editing and pre-publishing process too four months—way too long. I blame my wife because, hey, isn't that what wives are for? (Joking, of course.) It just was a difficult book to edit.

As usual, I came to like many of my characters. In past books, some of my favorite characters were bad guys. Take Death of a Matador. I really liked Manny, the murderous, greedy mayor. Perry Dillard, not so much. I liked writing Mindy in The Mighty T and Sunset Hill. Lightfoot was far too cruel to like.

I can't say that I liked Johnny Pipe, the main bad guy in The King of Round Valley, but I sympathized with him having to work with so many dimwitted people. That's gotta wear on you eventually. I enjoyed writing Acorn and Bear because they were so dumb they were fun, but I could never empathize with them. They were too brutal.

I hope you enjoy the novel.

Acorn and Bear and Worms

Here’s one of my favorite scenes from The King of Round Valley, my most recent and about-to-be-released novel. (I’m currently going through the paperback proof.) It features two of five bad guys in the story, Acorn and Bear. I like it because it demonstrates a couple of things:

One, the life of the criminal can be soooo boring. Acorn and Bear are sitting in front of Hopper Rigo’s house, waiting for Hopper to come out. Sitting around and watching a house is boring, and the time has to be filled with something. How about some idle chatter?

Two, the scene shows that these guys are dimwits. Violent and vicious, but dimwits nonetheless.

The setup: Hopper has been selling meth for Joe Pina at his school in Covelo. Hopper’s in middle school. Joe was selling meth without permission, got beat up by the main bad guy, Sergeant Johnny Pipe, then was told he had until the end of the day to get out of town. Joe wanted his cash and leftover meth from Hopper because all he had was a hundred forty bucks and change. How far would that get him?

Pipe sends Acorn and Bear to Joe’s trailer to make sure Joe leaves town on time. They get there a little early, and because they’re not real bright and didn’t quite understand their instructions, they beat Joe to death with baseball bats and bury him in the foothills surrounding the reservation.

Acorn and Bear set up this meeting with Hopper under the pretense that they’re going to score some meth from him. What they’re really planning on doing is recovering Joe Pina’s cash and leftover meth for their boss, Pipe.

Acorn and Bear sat in Acorn’s pickup, across from the Rigo’s house, down a bit on Lovell.

Bear said, “How long do you think it’ll take Joe’s body to become, you know, all filled with worms and shit?”

Acorn said, “I bet a couple of days.”

“That quick?”

“We didn’t put him in no casket or nothing. We just stuck him in the ground and threw dirt on him. The worms don’t have to chew through anything so they can get to him faster.”

“I thought it would take more like a week, maybe two. The worms gotta find him first, then dig down to where he is.”

“Don’t you know worms are everywhere in the ground? They don’t gotta dig down to Joe, they’re already down there with him. We probably cut some up when we were digging Joe’s grave.”

“I don’t think so. There would be too much, you know, weight on top of them. From all the dirt. It would smash them.”

“Then how could they dig through it if it smashed them?” Acorn turned and looked at Bear. “Huh?”

“Because when you dig through dirt, you make a hole for yourself. So you don’t get smashed.”

“Man, you don’t know what you’re—”

Someone exited the Rigo’s house through the front door, a slender youth with hair down to his shoulders.

Acorn said, “About time.”

In my next post I’ll relate the story I found online that gave me the names Acorn and Bear.

eBook Cover for THE KING OF ROUND VALLEY

Just six months after posting the eBook cover for my last novel, Sunset Hill, I'm posting the eBook cover for my upcoming novel, The King of Round Valley. Let me show you the cover, then I'll tell you a little about it.

The cover was created using Swift Publisher 3 on my iMac. It's not Photoshop but it suits my purposes, and talent, fine. I applied a light shadow around the title text, but didn't feel it enhanced the rest of the text so I left them plain.

Here's the image before cropping:

Back property of Pacific Star Winery

It was taken on an iPhone 3Gs by Ned Raggett. I found it on his Flickr stream. I ran it through DxO 8.0 to improve the lighting and contrast and to increase it to 300 dpi. Ned graciously permitted me to use the photo for the cover, provided I remembered the second 't' in his last name.

The picture is of the back of the Pacific Star Winery, which I renamed Pacific Point Winery in the book. I like the moody atmosphere of Ned's picture. I felt it suited the novel.

I used two Emigre typefaces for the cover. The King of Round Valley was set in Dead History Bold and the rest of the text in Arbitrary Regular and Bold. I've owned these typefaces since the mid-1990s but feel they're still fresh.

This will be the subject of another post, but I enjoy setting my novels in real places as opposed to imaginary places, and I enjoy using pictures of those places when possible. I used my own pictures on the covers of The Mighty T and Death of a Matador, but I've never been to the Pacific Star Winery so I had to find one. I think readers who live locally enjoy reading books set in familiar settings; I know I do.

I'm waiting to get the paperback proof from Creatspace before I publish the eBook. It seems there is always one or two more tweeks before I feel a book is ready to be released.