The best stories come from the heart, not from trends

After pestering you guys all last week with my new book cover, I thought I'd end the week with somebody else's cover. The above is my friend Tim Bowen's memoir from when he was an LAPD officer, which I read while researching my detective thriller CHIMERAS. I needed to learn the LAPD lingo and the added bonus was that Tim's stories are simply hilarious. The following year, Tim and I met up in Los Angeles and he escorted me to both the old and the new Parker Center (the LAPD headquarters), the 911 dispatch center, and the LAPD Air Support Division. Fun times!

Tim's book is not the only book I read while researching CHIMERAS. I also enjoyed Miles Corwin's true crime books: Corwin spent a whole year "embedded" with the Homicide Special Detectives (CHIMERAS' main character is a Homicide Special LAPD detective) and followed "live" some pretty controversial cases. Even on the most gruesome crime scene, all dressed up in black suits and formal attire, these guys will look at one another and crack up a joke. And they always say asshole. I mean, always. As Tim taught me, it's not "Freeze, police!" as they do on TV. It's actually: "Freeze, asshole!"

I wrote CHIMERAS over the course of two years. I queried agents for about three months, got a first offer of representation, and after that the offers kept flocking. With 8 offers of representation I had no doubt my book was going to get published -- maybe not by one of the "Big Six", but certainly by a traditional publisher.

My book is a hard-boiled detective thriller, and my main character is a modern Philip Marlowe with a genetic twist. Yes, talk about mixing genres. I got comments along the lines of: "I get the genetic twist, but could you turn it into paranormal?" And about my writing, which I honed after Chandler's noir tradition: "I found the writing exceptional, but could you remove all the descriptions?" Another one praised the sensitivity to smells as a great novelty but wanted me to turn my detective into a woman because heroines are trendier than heroes.

So, what does a wannabe author do in a situation like this?

It really depends on what your priorities are. If all you want is getting your foot in the door, then you're probably ready to do anything to make it happen. Then by all means, do what they tell you.

For me, the priority was this: TO BE TRUE TO MY STORY. This does not mean to be completely closed to feedback. Like I said before, I had 8 offers of representation AND every single agent requested some changes to the story AND no two changes overlapped.

Stephen King, in his memoir On Writing says, "Don't lie." It's not that writers lie, but they do need to be true to their story and characters. As readers, we've all come across characters that feel stiff and unrealistic. You see, the writer has to fall in love with his/her characters in order to make the readers fall in love with them. If you let others pull and tug at your story, and you start making one change here to accommodate X, and another change there to accommodate Y, and the changes become one too many, you end up losing track of your original story. And that chemistry you had originally built with your character(s) gets lost.

Back to my book: if all editors and agents hit the same nail, I would've known there was something wrong with my story. But some requests were literally at the opposite ends. Some made sense, some didn't. I wasn't going to change my main character just because gals are trendier than guys. I fulfilled the requests that made sense and ignored the others. As an author, you've had some time to get to know your characters. Don't trash them just because somebody told you they're no longer trendy. You might try and write something trendy, but great stories aren't made with the head only. Great stories are made from the heart. And believe me, readers can tell stories that are made from the heart from the ones that aren't.

Trends eventually grow old, but great stories last. I'm publishing my book so I can finally claim that Track Presius -- and most importantly his quirks and uniqueness -- is mine. Maybe my book will never soar. But whatever happens, I remained true to my story. And for the first time in four years I feel liberated.

Another interview... with me this time!

Self-portrait - by EEG

Last month I had the privilege of doing my very first cover art for the amazingly talented Jack L. Pyke, an erotic romance/BDSM author from the U.K. The premise of her thriller Lost in the Echo intrigued me -- I'm a sucker for suspense -- so I hired a model and set off to work. Creating an image based on a premise is something I started doing last year and I confess I enjoy it very much. It's completely different than planning a landscape or a portrait shoot. When you are given a theme you have to think ahead, jot down a bunch of ideas and be ready to try out many different things until you nail the one you love. I loved working for Jack, and after a few iterations we ended up with an image we both loved for her thriller.

And guess what I got as a thank you? My very first interview! I enjoy interviewing authors here on the blog, but I confess I was also very flattered when Jack asked me to be the interviewee for a change!

Here's an excerpt of the interview:

JLP: Besides providing the image for Lost in the Echo, I have a few of your prints here that show the scope of your talents. This shape shifting, surreal effect to the print below is one of my favourites. I know you’re a photographer from these, but can you tell us a little bit about you? Who’s the person behind the camera?

EEG: The story of my life in a nutshell: I was born in the UK, grew up in Tuscany (Italy), and lived in 4 different European countries and 4 different states in the U.S. before settling in beautiful New Mexico. As for “what” I am, I’m first and foremost a scientist -- that’s how my brain works. But I wouldn’t be who I am without my two creative outlets: writing and photography.

JLP: There’s a lot of scope for inspiration in all of the places you have lived, and it’s sparked a writing talent too. How long have you been a photographer? What influenced you to first pick up a camera?

EEG: I’ve been drawing and painting since I could hold a pencil and paintbrush. My first camera was a Sony point and shoot, which I used mainly to take pictures of things and people I wanted to paint. Painting is a demanding activity, though: you not only have to find the time to do it, you also need to have the right space. It’s a lot easier when you can afford a studio where you can keep up your work in progress for as long as you need. In my case, life took over: for about a decade we kept moving every other year, and the paintbrushes and paints ended up in a box, and, well, they stayed there. All those pictures I was still taking never turned into paintings. It finally dawned on me that I might as well perfect the one thing I was already doing: photography! I bought a used DSLR from a colleague, and once I discovered the freedom of being able to choose my own settings (aperture, ISO, exposure time, etc.) I felt like I had a whole new world to unravel. I started doing landscapes. I live in a place (New Mexico, USA) that offers staggering views and incredible skies, so it was the natural thing to do. I progressively moved on to macros, portraits, and now I’m doing the one thing I enjoy the most: photo composites, images that I create combining different pictures and backgrounds. It’s as if the cycle closed back, because compositing allows me to do what I used to do with my paintbrushes, except now my canvas is a JPEG file and I no longer need a studio. All I need is my laptop.

JLP: Along with your photography skills, you’re also an agented author. What kind of novels do you write?

EEG: Thrillers. I love action and I love to get my characters in a lot of trouble. I think it makes up for my long days spent in a cubicle at work.

JLP: Can you tell us about the novel you’re working on?

EEG: I just finished writing the first book in a new series set in the future. It features a murderous and sexy computer hacker, the biothreat federal agent who’s after her, an eccentric medical examiner, and a deadly pathogen. The world building was daunting at first. Even when I’m writing fiction, I research everything (location, people, history, etc.), but here I actually had to make up a whole society on my own. I solved the conundrum by doing both: I researched all the current state-of-the-art technology and then tried to imagine what it would look/be like one hundred years from now. I actually ended up having lots of fun with it. My agent just started shopping the book around, I’ve got fingers and toes tightly crossed!

JLP: I can hear the scientist and a love for facts in there. Do you think you’re more comfortable with writing from a male or female point of view, or doesn’t the gender of the MC hold any barriers for you?

EEG: The real “barrier” (though it doesn’t stop me from writing, so more than a barrier I would call it a challenge) is the voice more than the POV. No matter whether it’s male or female, young or old, I strive to give my characters their own voice. Success comes when you can tell the gender from the voice without knowing the character’s name. My first book series is written in first person, and the main character is a male LAPD detective. One of the agents who offered representation made me the best compliment ever: she said she had no idea I was a woman until she read my full name. At the time, I’d read all the Philip Marlowe books and loved the voice. Like Marlowe, my detective is also from Los Angeles, so I wanted to continue in the noir tradition with the first person, witty and sarcastic narrative. I guess the ultimate judges will be the readers.

JLP: Knowing you’re both photographer and author raises a curious conundrum. Do you find there’s anything you can express more in photography than you can in writing, or vice versa?

EEG: That’s an interesting question. There are instances when I can picture the setting of a scene very vividly in my head but I struggle to find the right words to describe it. I find myself thinking, “If only I could take a picture...” But for the most part it’s the other way around. Photography has made me very aware of the light around me, and it does affect the way I write. I’m often describing light sources in my scenes and how the light falls on my characters and how it affects their vision.

JLP: The idea for Lost in the Echo came from a photo supplied by a reader through a reader challenge on Goodreads. It’s a very intimate and annual author-reader challenge on Goodreads. Have you ever used any of your own prints to inspire your writing?

EEG: Not my own pictures, but I do browse images to inspire my writing all the time. For example, when I was researching the world building for my last book, I browsed a lot of futuristic buildings and architecture and I had a lot of fun doing that. Whenever my brain draws a blank on a particular setting for a scene I go to Google images, type a few keywords, and then inspiration suddenly comes to my screen in the form of beautiful images.

You can see the sparkly new cover I made for Jack and read the full interview on Jack's blog.

Jack L. Pyke is the author of the BDSM thriller Don't, a rainbow award honorable mention, nominated for the 2013 Goodreads best debut novel and best BDSM. The sequel, Antidote, is to be released in April. You can find Jack on Amazon and on Goodreads.

So, how does one become a computational biologist?

(Starting today, for the next two weeks, I will be guest blogging over at Scientopia, which means that the posts here will be cross-posted over there, too. As a first post, I thought I'd tell the story of how I ended up being a computational biologist. Forewarning: there are better and more linear ways to become a computational biologist. But, as we all know, life is hardly ever linear.)

I used to think genes dictate what we can be and the choices we make dictate what we end up being. Well, that's not quite true. I haven't accounted for opportunities.
When I finished college I wanted to be a mathematician. Math is pure and beautiful. It's like a Michelangelo painting, perfect all around. You follow the steps dictated by logic and you can't be wrong. It's Socratic. I got accepted into graduate school, and my husband arranged to finish his dissertation off site so we could both go. We fit all our belongings into two suitcases (that's all we had) and left. We were young, enthusiastic, and clueless.

The bus left us in the middle of nowhere in Massachusetts. The motel we'd booked was five miles away. A lady took pity on us and gave us a ride. I forgot the lady's name, but not her baby's: Timothy. He was the cutest baby.

I grew tired of doing pure math. Yes, it's beautiful and perfect. There's Banach spaces, and then Hilbert spaces, and then Banach spaces of Hilbert spaces, and Hilberts of Banachs of Hilberts... I felt lost in one of Dr. Seuss's pictures. Oh, the thinks you can think... Yes you can, but do you want to?

(My mathematician friends, please don't hate me. I'm in confession mode, so bear with me.)

So when my husband got a postdoc in Vienna, Austria, we packed again and left. By then we had four suitcases and a baby. In Vienna I started freelance writing. I wasn't paid a penny but it was fun.

Vienna is beautiful, by the way. If you have enough money to enjoy it. We didn't.

The following year we moved to Valencia, Spain. We had four suitcases, five boxes, and a baby. Two years later we moved to Pasadena, California. We had four suitcases, twenty boxes, and two babies. Gosh, it's exponential, isn't it? Not the baby part, though. We stopped at two and glad we did.

In Pasadena I started missing my job. Did I mention I felt poor in Vienna? Haha, that was nothing compared to Pasadena! That's what Southern California does to you. I looked around but as it turns out with a degree in pure math there's not much you can do besides teaching. And I wasn't much into teaching. I continued to do freelance writing, and even though by now I was getting paid a little, it definitely wasn't enough.

So I decided to go back to school.

I applied to the biomath program at UCLA, the computational biology program at USC, and the biostat program at USC. I got accepted to all three of them. At the time I was stubbornly convinced that I could survive in Southern California without ever getting on a freeway.
Haha.

I got up one morning at 4 a.m., took a bus, and three hours later I was at the UCLA campus, which is a whole city within a city. Never seen a campus that huge. The commute drained me. The next day I went to downtown to check out the USC computational biology department. The faculty there is impressive--gods in the field. Now that I knew I wasn't going to be a mathematician, I really wanted to become a computational biologist. That's where all the cool stuff was happening--genetics, protein folding, sequencing. And, they even offered me a scholarship.

Unfortunately, the USC downtown campus is not in a charming part of town (to put it in mild terms). And again, the commute from where I lived was going to be a killer. 

Finally, I went to the USC medical campus, which turned out to be ten miles down Huntington Drive from where we lived (no freeway! Can you believe it? I could get somewhere in LA county without getting on the freeway!), and met another god.

There's many gods in my life.

Stan is fantastic. If you live in Pasadena, go listen to him play the piano at the Parkway Grill on Thursday nights. He's amazing.

So, anyways, I got into the biostat program. Like I said, Stan is fantastic, and the no-freeway thing sealed the deal.

Statistics is not beautiful. You know the old saying: "There's lies, there's damn lies, and then there's statistics"? Well, it's true. I set off wanting to do pure math, which is perfect and beautiful, and here I was, doing dirty and very much imperfect stuff. But it's useful. And life, the way we describe it, is very much imperfect. So there. You can't apply perfect and beautiful to real life.

I decided I wanted to be a biostatistician. Even got a job as one. By then I could handle Californian freeways. Sort of. I still screamed from time to time. And I still got off at the wrong exits and stuff like that. But hey, the adrenaline high the morning commute down the Two-Ten gives you is unbeatable! (I don't miss it, BTW).

And then my husband had us move again. This time we filled a truck. Heck, give it enough time, you start buying furniture! No, let me rephrase that: give it enough time and a close enough Ikea.

On a side note, my husband hates Ikea. He's the one who has to decipher the cryptic drawings.

We moved to a remote part of Northern New Mexico, so remote that for a while it was only known as a "mail stop." But that's another story. For now, all I will say is that it's not the desert. It's got mountains, and trees, and forests, although the forests do tend to burn down every ten years or so...

Anyways, I'm getting carried away. The point I wanted to make is that we came out here and I met yet another god, my wonderful, amazing, gracious mentor. And guess what I ended up doing? Computational biology. Yeah, where all the cool stuff is happening.

Looking back, I did choose to become a computational biologist, didn't I?

Photo: water creek, Twin Falls, WA. Canon 40D, shutter speed 1/20, focal length 85mm, ISO 400.