Books, Hotels, Restaurants, and a Favor to Ask

When Caryl and I began traveling twenty-plus years ago, we had very few options when it came to planning. Life is too short and money too tight to eat bad food or stay in crappy hotels. So about December of each year we would begin shopping, first for vacation spots and then for books about that spot.

The right travel guide (Mobil used to publish our favorite) could steer us toward fantastic restaurants, attractions, and hotels that fit our budget and our demographics. But today, fortunately, something far better than the Mobil Guide exists.

It's you. And you. And you. And you. All of you joining together through a variety of Internet sites and applications to express your opinions about everything from books to restaurants to doctors to handymen. Once our best option was looking at the opinions and evaluations of a few "experts" who wrote for Fodders and Consumer Reports and newspapers.

Now I can ask you - thousands and thousands of you - what you think of a certain book, travel destination, or restaurant. And, like the Olympics, I can throw out the high and low scores and come up with a pretty decent picture of what I'm going to get if I spend my money on this attraction or that hotel.

ReviewPush published an article in 2012 explaining point by point how and why online reviews are so important. You can read it here: http://www.reviewpush.com/blog/how-online-reviews-impact-your-business/.

As the article points out, we are now blessed with the opportunity to hear from dozens, hundreds, or thousands of like-minded people on a variety of subjects for which we share a common interest. As we read the reviews, it is even possible to say, "Wow, this person was having a really bad day. I'm not sure I trust their opinion on that particular restaurant." On TripAdvisor, we can even read multiple reviews by the same person to see if they are easy or hard graders. (Since TripAdvisor almost always sends me to great restaurants, hotels, and attractions, I very seldom need to write bad reviews.)

The moral of the story is this: If you like (or dislike) something, your opinion matters. Those who have read The Ecuadorian Deception are probably tired of me asking them to post reviews on amazon.com. However, I know - and research validates - that book buyers are fiercely reliant on those reviews to help them make their purchases. I even heard one person, in discussing books, say he chose a particular novel because some of the reviewers claimed it had large amounts of gratuitous violence, sex, and bad language. This person, a doctor, said he liked that in a novel. (He may not enjoy The Ecuadorian Deception, by the way.)

That's not how I pick my books, but hey, it works for him. And it shows that even people with very different points of view can do you a great service in helping you make your next purchase. If you're not on sites like www.tripadvisor.com, you're missing out on a wonderful resource.

And, if you haven't written your review yet of the latest book you've read, it's time to get cracking at www.amazon.com. Enough said.

The Never-Ending Movie Inside the Mind

One of the questions I get most often is, "How do you find time to write unless you're a full-time author?" The easy answer is that if you're willing to give up sleep, you find all kinds of time to do things. Actually, that was far more true twenty years ago than it is now. When my wife and I first married, she was amazed someone could get by on only three or four hours sleep a night.

Now I need at least six hours sleep or I'm not good for much the next day. So how do I find time to write? You might say that I'm actually writing all the time, at least in the back of my mind. Currently, I'm working on the sequel to The Ecuadorian Deception. It's called The Ecuadorian Assassin and the scenes of the book are constantly unfolding in the back of my head.

Bottom line, I couldn't turn off the book if I wanted to. It's like that song that you can't get out of your head. It was the same way while I was writing The Ecuadorian Deception. The movie was rolling. I would just step into the viewing room as time allowed.

Right now, I'm working on a scene for The Ecuadorian Assassin that takes place in the La Sal Mountains of Utah, right outside Moab. At any quiet moment, my mind goes back there. It's not so much that I'm writing the scene, per say. It's more like I'm watching it, then rewinding, then watching it again. Then I change angles from which I'm viewing the scene and start it over.

Part of what I'm looking for is which point of view I want to write that chapter from. Many fiction writers follow the lead of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and write their books in the first person. They become one of the characters in the book and simply tell the story from that perspective.

Though I love Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I personally find that approach too limiting. As a reader, I want to know not just what people are doing, but what they are thinking. What's their hidden motivation? And if you become a character in the book, you are stuck in that person's head. Unless you get the other characters to totally spill the beans through dialogue, you have no idea what it is in their past that motivates them. (Or, if you have a Sherlock Holmes, you can have him seem to read people's minds and inform you what they're thinking.)

Regardless of how busy I am with my day job or with my next project, I always make time to learn from other author's work. If you want to be inspired, read inspiring ideas, right? In my last blog, I talked about how much I enjoy Sue Henry and Nevada Barr. They are both excellent mystery writers.

 Another author I admire is Brandilyn Collins. The one thing I don't care for in Nevada Barr's work - the excessive amount of profanity - is one of the things I appreciate about Ms. Collins. She can tell a spine-tingling story without making every other word an expletive.

If you are looking for a fantastic book, I might recommend Violet Dawn or Dark Justice by Ms. Collins. Hopefully, I will have a lot more tips from her about writing gripping prose next month. I am attending the same writers guild meeting she will be at in February.

So if you're an aspiring writer, my advice would be to stop trying to make a plot happen. Treat it like a movie you're watching. Let the scenes unfold before your mind's eye. Then find the right words to capture what's going on. It might not work for anybody else, but for me, that's how it happens.