I actually enjoy the act of writing. Even editing. After the book is “written” I know I will have to read it several more times. Countless. The first few editing passes will be to correct major issues. Perhaps the thrust of the story changed as it was being written, or during the first edit I saw a direction the story was already moving that was unrecognized before. The first pair of full reads after the initial draft will be to work on those problems.

Over and over I will go back and reread the story. Checking timelines and making sure actions and characters have workable progressions. Then, I need to clean up the language and read for typos and grammatical errors. (Don’t worry… there will still be some when I’m done)

But, after living with a story for months, it is time to slap it on the but and send it out into the world.

That’s when things get difficult. Until one builds a fair amount of success, their new books are invisible. They are just sitting there in the warehouse of availability… but nobody knows they are even there. Even people that “search out new authors” really don’t. They are people that are willing to read new authors. But they need to be found.

That’s where “the share” comes in… You, enlightened reader, have the ability to be the influencer. Those intrepid souls that seek out new authors are really intrepid souls that read unknown authors their friends have read.

My friends and followers on social media… THEY are the ones that can make or break a book. By sharing their reads with their friends, a market can be found. Instead of languishing in the vastness of the virtual warehouse that is Kindle, a few brave souls may wander by, looking for something unique. If they share, in turn, then a few more may make the discovery.

So, right now… today… you have the opportunity to be the influencer. Give one of my books a read. Give it a share. Start the process. Then you can say that you read my stories back before… I know that I would be grateful.

The fog has rolled back in from the sea and my time is short.  I hear the call again as the lights of the village are being choked out by the supernatural mist.  The voices cry out for me to join them, and the pain of not going is too much to bear. 

It was twenty years ago that our only son disappeared into the fog.  He had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday and was going fishing with his friends.  He left for the docks, walking from our door into the thick morning mist.  Three of his friends were to join him, but none made it to the boat.  Their plan was to meet at the boat and get everything ready so they could leave as soon as the fog burned off and the visibility improved.

Their phones were neatly lined up on a picnic table across from the marina.  Two other phones were there, two other people missing.  No bodies were found but the police quickly ruled the disappearances as accidental deaths. 

My wife succumbed to the fog ten years ago.  She was to meet me at the beach house.  She’d had a meeting at her firm that ran late, so I came ahead.  Soon after sunset, the fog rolled in, thick and cloying.  I sat in the living room watching through the picture window, seeing shadows dancing behind the veil that night. 

In the morning I found her car parked in the driveway.  Her purse on the seat, her phone on the dash.  Her keys were still hanging in the ignition, the car running. 

“Didn’t you hear her pull up?” the Sheriff asked me as he investigated her disappearance. 

“No… I heard nothing.  The fog was so thick.”

I expected to be named a suspect… it’s always the spouse… but instead, he closed the investigation, burying her unexplained disappearance.  He said she probably was disoriented and walking into the bay.  He wouldn’t look me in the eye when he told me. 

Last year I was sitting in the living room watching as the thick cloud rolled across the bay into the village.  I’d walked out to the deck to see it better.  A couple of blocks away I saw a stray dog running from the roiling cloud.  His tail was tucked under, and the panic was evidenced in the way he scurried from the evil vapor. 

Then, tendrils of it touched his feet as they crept silently across the ground.  He stopped and lowered his heard.  He raised it in one lonely howl, the anguish pouring from him.  As it swirled around his chest, he turned and slowly walked into it, disappearing in a blink. 

I shuffled back into my house and slammed shut the sliding door.  Before the door closed all the way, I thought I could hear the vices of my wife and my son beckoning me to join them.  I quickly turned on all the exterior lights and closed the shades. 

***

The Sheriff wouldn’t answer any of my questions.  Over and over, I asked about the fog, but he deflected me each time.  I started my own investigation, looking for the origins. 

It was older than I thought.

I quickly moved through the twenty-first and twentieth centuries.  The news items were sparse, but I had learned where to look.  I found the obituaries.  Never was a cause listed, and the ages varied.  But they were all premature.  When Chad MacFarland died in his sleep at the nursing home, he got a quarter page.  Every day was a slow news day.  But when six youngsters disappeared without explanation, there was not even a blip… just the announcement of memorial services. 

It took months for me to figure out the patterns.  Then, with almanacs I gained the ability to track it back and find hundreds of cases spread across five centuries.  Sometimes there would be three of the deadly fogs in one year, while other times it would abate for a decade, as it had done between the disappearances of my son and my wife. 

Over the last year, I found myself travelling to Iceland and Greenland.  I found written accounts of Viking legends.  They had explored these lands and seas before Columbus was even born.  Viking expeditions had arrived a thousand years ago.  But then, their attempts at colonizing this rich area ceased. 

Historians wrote it off as conflict with the local native populations.  But I found an account that had been passed down of a man named Aric the Mason.  He wrote of a fog and having watched his fellow explorers walk into the fog one by one, never to be seen again.  He took refuge in the smithy.  He stoked the fires hot enough to keep the mist at bay, sweating through the night.  Aric wrote of hearing the voices of his friends calling to him as he waited until morning. 

He walked three hundred miles to another Viking outpost in the new world.  He told his story, and then turned and walked away.  The account I found said that they thought he went looking for the fog.  Whether it was to try to rescue his friends or to let himself be taken, they didn’t know. 

But I knew. 

The accounts didn’t stop there, though.  I found Native American legends.  Local tribes had recorded the fog for as long as they had history.  When the moon and the conditions were right, whole villages would leave.  They would walk away from everything, leaving their entire world to sit and wait for their return.  Some tribes would leave a sacrifice to appease the angry gods that sent the mist.

Snapping back to the present, he saw that little had changed.  The soldiers looked younger, but that was because he was no longer a child.  Before, the nineteen-year-old with the rifle had loomed large.  Now, the soldiers looked like kids, scared they might actually have to do something beyond standing merely looking imposing. 

His mind seesawed back and forth between the past and the present… between being twelve and fifty-one.  Then, as he’d approached Customs, his mother had tightly held his hand and walked him through the door.  This time, his mother was in his hand as he held her cremains in in an urn in a box, twine wrapped around it.  Memories of that old trip flooded back into him.  Wonderful moments and looming heartbreak.  He wondered what memories this trip would hold. 

There was one constant between the two adventures.  His lack of control.  In the prior trip, his parents had set the itinerary.  This time, his recently deceased mother had made the arrangements.  Everything had been in place before she passed and set into motion during the reading of her will.  As before, he didn’t know what would be happening.  He climbed into the back of the taxi for the hour drive to Manta from the airport, pondering the immediate future. 

The cab stopped outside of the house on the bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  He gathered his bags and the box holding the urn.  He carried everything inside and settled in to rest after his trip.  After unpacking, Edward went to the balcony to sit and watch the sun setting over the ocean.  He let the tears flow freely as he thought back to the last time he’d sat in this very chair.  Smiling through the tears, the memories slammed into him harder than he expected.  He picked up the glass and swirled the rum and Coke.  The last time, the only Rum and Coke he’d enjoyed were two of the family dogs, the third dog being named Whiskey.  Taking a sip, he let it burn down his throat as he watched the bobbing lights of the boats start to twinkle in the fading light. 

“Well, Mom, I don’t know your plan, but it’s underway,” he said as he held his glass aloft before taking a sip.

A scarlet macaw lit on the edge of the balcony, thirty feet away.  The large, colorful and majestic bird sat and watched him as he split his attention between the bird and the magnificently painted sunset. 

***

“Eduardo,” the woman standing in the doorway said as she was framed by the morning sun at her back, “I heard about Mom.  She was a great woman.” 

When they had visited before, his mother was known to all as “Mom.”  Family, friends, everyone they met.  That was how she was introduced, and she relished the name.

“Marcella,” he said, pausing to look at her, “it’s been so long.”  Words caught in his throat when he saw her for the first time in almost forty years.  “You’ve barely changed.”

She crossed the living room and wrapped her arms around him.  He couldn’t help but notice that she fit perfectly, as if they belonged together.  “Do you need anything?  I’m here to help you with Mom’s plan,” she said, shaking him from his thoughts.

“Half of her ashes were interred back home; I’m spreading the other half in a few places.  A couple places that she had been and a couple others that were on her bucket list.”

“What is a ‘bucket list’?  I’m sorry, it’s a new term for me.” Marcella asked. 

Ed laughed.  He forgot that not everyone used the same slang.  “It’s what we call that list of things we want to do before we die.” 

“I guess she didn’t get to all of them,” she said, her smile soft and as beautiful as he remembered.

“Not even close…” Edward laughed.  “But I would be grateful for your help and companionship.  It’s been a long time.”

***

Twelve-year-old Edward had made a new friend.  Marcella was his exchange sister’s little sister.  And he thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.  She also only knew about seven words of English… eclipsing his five words of Spanish.  But she seemed as enamored of the exotic blonde American as he was with her.  As the two families travelled around the country, Edward and Marcella became inseparable. 

They didn’t speak a common language, but that never stopped them from talking… or understanding each other.  Each spoke their own tongue but conveyed their meaning through their actions and expressions.  They walked hand-in-hand through markets and cathedrals, along the beach and in the mountains. 

At eleven and twelve, they were far too young to be in love, but they didn’t care.  They were busy living in the moment.  After spending a few weeks travelling the small country together, they had to part, though.  Standing in the terminal, the jet that was to take him home sitting outside, Eduardo kissed Marcella.  It had been impetuous, and it happened before either could think about it.  It was the first kiss for both of them.  For a couple of years after that, each sharpened their new language skills by writing letters to the other.  Eventually, the letters slowed, but they each never forgot the other.

***

Marcella sat on the edge of the couch, turned toward Edward as he sat next to her.  Their knees were touching as she reached over and touched the inside of his left knee.  “Do you still have the scar?”

“It’s faded,” he replied, “but it’s still there.”

Her brother Patricio had been riding his motorcycle to the beach, Edward on the back, when a car ran a stop sign.  He had almost recovered it, but the bike fell over onto Edward’s leg.  The exhaust burned his knee. 

“My brother was still upset about that when he passed away last year.”

“I was so sad when I heard about Patricio and the cancer.  When I was a kid, he was my hero.  He’d done such amazing things and was so fearless,” Edward said.  “I wanted to be like him.  I’ll never forget when he taught me to waterski in the bay… then, after I got up on the skis, he told me there were usually sharks there.”  Edward laughed at the memory.

“I remember when Miguel beached the boat because you wouldn’t let go of the tow rope, too,” Marcella laughed.  “What’s funny, though, is that he kind of idolized you.  When he went to live with you, he was touched by your generosity and the way you welcomed him into the family.  Even after that motorcycle accident, you never condemned him.”

She smiled at him, thinking of her brother and his relationship with his “Little American Brother.”  She didn’t mention that her brother had often compared her boyfriends to Eduardo… to see if they measured up as having the same heart.  They seldom did.

“Do you know where we are taking your mother first?” she asked after a moment.

“I think Otavalo.  I am supposed to rent a motorcycle for the trip.”

“Carlo will deliver the motorcycles just before lunch.  We can have lunch with him and his wife before we head out.”

“Are you riding up there with me?”

She nodded and smiled at him.

“Are we going to the market?”

Again, she smiled.  “And maybe a few other places.”

The two sat together on the couch and talked a little longer.  When it was Edward’s turn to talk about his mother’s passing, she took his hand to comfort him.  It remained firmly in hers for the remainder of the conversation.  Separately, both were at ease with the touch of the other.  They had missed it the years they were apart. 

Honestly, it can get convoluted. Some… I just don’t know. Planning Vengeance/Dig Two Graves just sort of happened. I had a plan, and it was COMPLETELY different than the story that emerged. You might think it is crazy, but the characters moved me to tell a story (which also spilled into Who, What, When, Why?) and I was along for the ride. I used to joke that I had to write fast because I wanted to know how it would turn out.

You Don’t Know Jack was a little different. I had the basis of the idea. I just had to figure out how Jack got into trouble… at the genesis of the idea, he was already in a bad place. And the end of the book… was actually in another book. But I felt it fit more with the theme of YDKJ.

Lies and Omissions was a little different. I was still “pantsing”… writing by the seat of my pants… but I had a scene that I really wanted to write. The first thing I wrote for that book was the chapter The Heather Trap. The rest of the book flowed from that chapter, although not the way I expected. I had another villain, but I just couldn’t get mad at her. The funny thing with that one, though, is that bits and pieces of a lot of the characters are people I know. They have been sliced and diced and hidden, but some friends will recognize episodes from the story.

Other stories have beginnings that are similar to that, but different. One of the ones I am working on right now, tentatively called At Arm’s Length (a title I actually like) started with someone I used to know. Everything that makes the story happen is an outlandish “what if…” but it started with that one person. Other stories have that same kernel of reality. In some cases, the kernel is smaller, others are bigger.

Most of the books, though, have a scene that resembles reality. The conversations between my father and me before he died were the basis for those between Nick Tower and his father in Lies and Omissions. They were really hard to write, even twenty-four years removed from his passing. Some of the events in volving Ed Dixon in Unknown Caller are rooted (loosely) on my grandfather and his battle with Alzheimer’s Disease and the people that were able to sooth him.

I have been lucky to know a lot of interesting and cool people, and to have vivid memories of many of them. Some of the stories, both things from novels and short stories I have on places like Vocal, are like the highlights reel from those folks… but obscured and run through a filter. Some of those highlights are embarrassing… or could be… so I try to obscure the party to whom damage might occur.

In other instances, there are allusions to things which are not real. The one that springs to mind is that a friend, upon beta reading Lies and Omissions, commented that she didn’t know I had that type of relationship with another character from the book… yes, she easily recognized a character that wasn’t her (and she REALLY recognized the part of a character that was her). I hadn’t really known the person in question all that well. But it was easy to infer I might have known her more than they thought.

So, the easy answer is that they come from memories twisted out of context, expanded until they are unrecognizable, and then filtered to remove the reality. Mostly.