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Senior Correspondent

…there was this poster promoting our participation in an event February 8. OK, that’s not the entire truth. We had a secondhand invitation to participate but never had contact with the organizer, even though we thought it would be a fun event and had marked our calendars.

Then, having lunch at Saratoga Grill in Hillsborough, N.C., our waitress, Jessica, said, “I saw the poster announcing your event at the library.” Well, we then had to make a trip to the library and in spite of the cold, we walked over to the library and there on the second floor, behind the circulation desk is this really big poster. It has a lot more than you see here, describing the authors and the books they published. So, there we are front and center.

And a second surprise. Our novel was prominently displayed on the top of one of the book shelves. We didn’t even know the library had purchased our book!

I don’t think of our participation as a ”discussion on inspiration,” that’s too lofty. So far, we have plotted around settings we are very familiar with. "The Long Road to Paris" was based on our own rally experiences and now "Night Watch" will be based on our Bahamas sailing experiences. Our characters are either real people, who with their permission are used fictionally, or a composite of people we have encountered in these settings. the setting for us is the easy part. Now, our convoluted plots? Well, that takes some real effort. But by and large our reality-based suspense is easy compared to some of these other writers. I am really curious about the steampunk and science fiction writers. Where do their ideas come from? My mind just doesn’t work like that. If we run out of our life experiences we’ll just have to quit writing, but then we still have to work our way through Paris, Charleston, a train across Russia…we’re not going to run out soon. And if we do? Well, there’s always travel, moving….

Hope to see some of you on February 8.

Jan

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