Thursday, September 13, 2007

Confessions of an author...

The last several weeks, I have literally lived and breathed my latest suspense WIP, starring one tough chick and one bitter cop. I've become immersed in it, consumed by it, even to the point of incorporating it into my conversations as if the characters were real (well, they are, aren't they?!) and the setting not made up. I finished eating dinner last night at my parent's house, and actually stood up from the table and announced, "Thanks for dinner, I've gotta get back to Darkness Falls now."

Thankfully, my family doesn't blink at such comments anymore.

Then again, today, I was out making bank deposts for my company downtown. A cop car cruised past me down the street. I pictured myself, in vivid detail, running after the car in my high heels, waving my bank bag and shouting all my curious WIP questions. "Wait! What are the lights on your dashboard called? If a dirty cop was discovered in your department, what would you do to him? Would he get a trial? Would the other cops beat him up off the record? How much $ do you make in a year? What kind of GPS system do you have installed in your cruiser? Do you carry a glock? Would you let a fellow officer work a case in which a family member was murdered? Does your cell phone ring tone play Cops?"

This picture of myself was so vivid that I actually started laughing, right there on the middle of the corporate sidewalk. A man with silver hair longer than mine, dressed in a really bad, brown pin-striped suit leaned against a column nearby, smoking a ciggerette and looking at me like I was the weird one.

Well, I am a writer.

4 comments:

Delia said...

I should probably ask you this in an email or something but...

Do you have a cop that you can ask these questions? My husband's uncle is a cop (small town, but still a cop) and if you want I will ask him if you can pick his brain.

Timothy Fish said...

It must be nice. I don't have time to get that emersed in the plot of my new book. I am in the process of revising it at the moment and I get to some sections and think did I write that? Thinking that isn't so bad as long as my next thought is hey, that is pretty good, but when the thought is what was I thinking? then it isn't so great.

Georgiana Daniels said...

LOL, I love it! So many questions, so few cops left to nail down. HAHAHA. You did a great job, girlfriend!

Lisa Jordan said...

Bets, I do the same thing. I'll be talking to my sister and mention Paulina. She'll pause and ask, "Who's Paulina?" I'll roll my eyes at my goof and mutter, "Oh, you don't know her." :-P

I think writers spend as much time immersed in make-believe worlds as they do in the real one.