New Lives for Old Titles

Recently I finished an historical novel and published it on Amazon using the free resources of Kindle Direct Publishing. The process was so easy I resurrected two novels I had completed ten and twenty-five years ago, both mysteries and both relying on my earlier career. I tried to get them published and to find literary agents without success so they went into the digital desk drawer.

Tiny Details was my first book completed in the early aughts, before Almost Home. I originally imagined myself a mystery writer and built on my law enforcement career for procedures and language colored by being a parent with a child in daycare. After I retired from my day job in 1999, I was enthusiastic about my new career as a writer. I sat in on preschool classes and flew to Los Angeles to drive around and get a sense of local color. The reality of the setting was different than my recollections and I adjusted many details. One surprise was a preschool named almost the same as the one I finally used in the story. I'm sure the photographs (not digital) I took on the trip are around somewhere.

The cover is a shot I took in about 1979 of ice cream cartons repurposed as kiddie lockers. Because the children did not always read, symbols were used to mark each one. The title refers to the kids and to clues. As luck would have it a Clint Eastwood movie came out at the same time featuring new information to exonerate a death row prisoner, just like my story. This book never found a home in bookstores.

I got work as a freelancer doing history essays which evolved into work as an historian and author and co-author of eight books and a video documentary.

Almost Home started its literary life as a screenplay for a class I took in San Francisco in the 1990s. The instructor at the University of California Extension was a firefighter and a graduate of Columbia who spent his tours in the fire house working on screenplays. My fellow students seemed to be people disillusioned with their lives looking for easy money.

That experience gave me a good understanding of the genre and a realization that the screenwriter was separated from the viewer by producers, directors, actors, editors, and publicists. I preferred the direct approach, words on the page. After a few years, I recast Almost Home as a novel building on my experiences investigating environmental crime.