Christopher H. Jansmann's Blog, page 15

Soggy Inspiration

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If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that while I tend to plot out my stories, the characters often have a mind of their own and take me in directions I’d never anticipated. I’ve learned over my years of writing to let this sort of thing happen and see where it takes me; often, the end result is far better than what I’d been planning, and feels much more realistic, too.

One weird side effect of this is that much like my characters, there are times when I don’t always know who the bad actor is until it becomes obvious; or, in the case of my latest, Requiem, I buy into the evidence I’m laying out and accidentally fall for the misdirection. I know you’re probably saying to yourself, But wait, he’s the author! How can he not know who did it?

Easy: I write my books the way I would like to read them.

Today was an interesting example — I’m at the part of Requiem when the little clues begin to add up into something bigger, but the pattern that was developing seemed off kilter to me. I’ve kept at it, but it wasn’t until I was in the shower today that the rest of the puzzle pieces fell into place, helping my brain connect all of the dots I’d been dropping throughout the story to that point. It’s not a perfect straight line — not yet — but that feeling I always get when I can see the entire story from start to finish appeared — along with an intense desire to get back to the keyboard.

It’s odd how many times a key piece to my novels comes to me while I’m putting in my daily 5K or going about my morning ablutions; my guess is that’s when my brain is focused on something else for a bit, allowing the creative part free reign to do what it needs to do. In my early days, I used to file them away with an eye toward using them later, only to find I’d forgotten the idea entirely by the time I’d returned to my computer. These days, with my trusty iPhone never far from my hands, I immediately pop open my note application and jot down the thoughts before they can drift away, never to be used. I’ve even made use of the voice memo feature a few times when I didn’t have the patience to stop and type out the flood of ideas.

I even found that elusive secondary meaning for the title of my latest book — I always try and choose something that seems obvious to the plot line, but also has a deeper, slightly hidden connection to the story. Those sorts of epiphanies are really cool when they come along, underscoring for me just how much fun this writing process can truly be.

Theatrical Entrances

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I’m quite far into book ten as I write this – tentatively titled Requiem. It will be my fifth Vasily Korsokovach book, designed to reveal some of the rich backstory I’ve developed for Vasily. (Bewitched does something similar for Sean Colbeth.)

One interesting angle I wanted to delve into was that watershed moment when Vasily gets outed to his family before he’s truly ready to face the world; that, of course, ultimately leads him to the University of Eastern Maine and his lifelong friendship with Sean. In a prior novel, I’d already established that his boyfriend at the time had a hand in what transpired, but aside from the residual pain Vasily had from enduring the experience, left the details appropriately vague.

Not wanting to do a flashback-type of story led me to develop a plot where Vasily encounters his former boyfriend nearly twenty years later while investigating the case at the heart of Requiem. I wanted those initial scenes between the two to have some dramatic punch to them, but also a bit of theatrical flair; I had to believe that seeing the person who had once captured his heart would be both difficult and yet subtly revealing.

It’s been one of the harder chapters to write, for the raw emotion that bubbled up as I got deeper into it reminded me that humans can be complicated critters. I wasn’t sure what Vasily would truly feel until I started to write the scene where he watches his former boyfriend get out of his car during their first meeting; that’s when I knew that time, it seems, doesn’t always heal old wounds. What it can do is dull the pain — at least, until something causes it to flair back up again.

I’ll probably have to circle back to this chapter during the editing process and smooth it out a bit, but overall, I’m happy with how it turned out. What’s less clear to me is how it’s shifted the storyline I’d originally envisioned, for Vasily didn’t exactly react the way I’d anticipated. I often say that these characters feel like living, breathing people, and because of that, they tend to act far more independently than I expect.

Speaking of — back to the grind — for I don’t want to leave Vasily hanging…

Masters Swimming

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Both of my main characters – Sean Colbeth and Vasily Korsokovach – are former Olympic Swimmers who have since transitioned to the world of Masters Swimming. Fairly early in the beta reading process for Blindsided, I discovered that most people were unaware of this particular arm of competitive swimming; far more know about the sister group, USA Swimming, which is generally featured rather prominently during Olympic Trials here in the States and is the overall governing body for the sport.

It took me a bit to come up with a simple way to describe the differences between these two groups; for me, it boils down to what the swimmer’s focus on the sport happens to be. For those interested in competing on the world stage in events like the Olympics, sticking with a swim team affiliated with USA Swimming is the way to go; for others who are somewhat more interested in the workout benefits of swimming, but not as likely to want to go to the marquee events offered by USA Swimming, they tend to gravitate to a Masters-affiliated team.

That’s not to say there aren’t elite-level swim meets for Masters Swimming; on the contrary, they have a very similar structure with regional and national meets that recognize the best of the best. And on occasion, some of those elite competitors have continued on to the Olympics, though it is far rarer; those in the Masters circle tend to have day jobs and swim on the side, making it rather hard to consistently dedicate the insane amount of time in the pool needed to be competitive at that level.

We’ve not seen either Sean or Vasily at one of those meets (yet), though the fact that they are still competing is woven into the fabric of their characters. Fortunately, I’ve gifted them with a career that allows them to spend a significant amount of time in the water, even if, for you as the reader, most of it happens off stage (as it were). I also freely admit I am living vicariously through them, since I definitely don’t have that sort of time to dedicate to swimming these days…

Coffee

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Some of my earliest memories of my father involve working on our model railroad in the basement of my childhood home; often, in those early days, he would be puffing away on a pipe as he considered the next phase in construction, only pausing long enough to reach for the omnipresent mug of coffee he’d carried down from the kitchen. The twin smells of the Borkem Riff and Dunkin’ Donuts used to fill the space, background set pieces that will forever be linked with cork roadbed, solder and plywood whenever I think of my father.

Later, after Dad gave up smoking, the coffee mugs remained — and often multiplied; as has happened to me on more than one occasion, he would set a mug down in one part of the workshop and lose track of it, only to find it immediately after returning with a second, fresh mugful of coffee. Before college, I would generally join him with a hot cocoa or nothing at all; after college, though, and the long nights of studying that required, I returned home with my own caffeine addiction. I have fond memories of two mugs sitting side-by-side on the layout during those first years after college; even now, when I head back East for my annual visit, we continue the practice, though for both of us, and for various health reasons, the quantity of coffee is markedly reduced these days.

I’d never understood until about a decade ago how my father could drink his straight; I started off with more sugar and cream than coffee back in college, but that was mostly due to the poor quality of the actual coffee I was drinking at the time. I wouldn’t say I became a connoisseur, but over the years, I began to gravitate toward better beans and better blends, getting to the point where I, too, hardly ever put anything into my coffee now. I told a friend of mine that, and he laughed; he’d had a similar epiphany as a graduate student, though it may have had more to do with his lack of funds to purchase sugar.

I won’t entirely admit that Sean got his love of coffee from the author, but the evidence is pretty clear. Hopefully, though, he will listen to Suzanne and cut back a bit on the quantity; I, too, am starting to fear for what it might be doing to him…

College Move-In Day

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I never really looked beyond the University of Maine when I was considering what college I wanted to attend after high school; my father had attended it, scoring his Engineering degree a few years after marrying my mother and embarking on a life outside of the Army. I’d been to the campus on a number of occasions, and though I’d grown up on the outskirts of Portland — the largest city in the state — the idea of being crammed together with 15,000 other people in one spot seemed rather exotic. (Full disclosure: I am well aware that the flagship campus in Orono now hosts far more students these days, but back then, that was still a rather impressive number of students to be living all in one spot.)

Move-in day wound up being far more emotional than I’d expected, though; nothing quite prepares you for watching your parents pull away from the curb outside the dorm, and that sinking sensation that you are, for the first time, truly on your own. I mean, I wasn’t, of course, for there were literally hundreds of first year students going through the same thing. Still, that first awkward dinner at the Dining Commons was an evening I will never forget.

I met my roommate that same day and marveled that it was possible for two people to be the polar opposites of each other. Where I was the quiet nerd, he was the former high school star athlete, gregarious and all muscle. While I was still rather fit at that point in my life, I’d given up swimming a year earlier and the resulting workouts that would have let me match his bulk; not that it mattered, for I’d never been one to use — or be swayed by — physical intimidation. It turned into my first life lesson as a college student; finding a way to be successful in such a situation has proven extremely beneficial in my professional career.

That’s perhaps especially true in my particular field, which demands people of varying talents and specializations come together to solve thorny problems crossing multiple disciplines. I honed my ability to work with disparate personalities in the crucible of that dorm room, and then later, in the endless series of group projects my upper division courses required for my degree. I found that leadership came in many forms, from quiet moments prodding a recalcitrant team member to action to times where a more vocal vision needed to be espoused; understanding the situation, and reading the room properly became part of my success toolkit, tools that I still use today.

Thinking about the dorm reminds me of the smells and the fantastic custodian who had the thankless task of cleaning up each morning after the young men of my wing spent yet another night carousing about campus; seeing her, hose in hand, literally washing down the bathroom has stuck with me to this day, along with her gentle smile and kind words. She’d been there far longer than I knew, and seemed to have this perfect sense of just when one of us needed a bit of a pick-me-up. In my time on campus, I met many people like her, including the grandmother who swiped my meal card twice a day and the hairnet wearing cook who proudly walked the buffet line each and every meal, taking note of what we were eating (and what was left behind).

I discovered the internet by accident when one of my courses invited someone from the Computer Center to talk to us about this nascent idea of computers being connected to each other all over the world; considering the closest I’d ever come to that was seeing the Banyan Vines network at my father’s office, I was, to say the least, intrigued and marched myself down to the Computer Center to get myself an account. That I had to also book time on one of the terminals seemed like a minor inconvenience, though to be honest, simply surfing the various chat groups, news feeds and library databases was initially underwhelming. Less than five years later, I was one of the beta testers for what would become the Microsoft Network, a competitor to the then-dominate America Online; in ten, I had a cable modem at my house and was sending email to friends in California.

Sadly, I was only able to spend a year on campus; as with most things, the price went up for the privilege, and the mix of scholarships and self-funding I had at the time could only go so far. Still, I spent my final days on the Orono campus soaking up all it had to offer, from the rooftop solarium on my dorm to the quiet corners of the main library where I could do homework in peace; the plays and movies and musical groups that came though exposed me to the arts in ways that made me a fan for life — especially music, for it was in Orono I discovered jazz. I wish now I could remember what my final meal at the commons had been, though I suspect it was a nice salad accompanied by whatever the hot dish of the day was on offer. I do remember the room was rather empty, a result of the fact that I’d been forced to stay to the final day due to the finals schedule; that the campus was as empty at the end as it had been the day I moved in seemed like the perfect bookends to my time there.

I spent the next three years commuting from my parent’s home to the University of Southern Maine, finishing out my degree while working an ungodly amount of hours in retail to help pay for everything. It was an interesting juxtaposition to the (seemingly) more relaxed lifestyle I’d enjoyed at the Orono campus, though in the end, those final years taught me time management skills that continue to stand me in good stead. I’ve often heard that collegiate athletes have the same challenges, though honestly, how anyone could spend twenty hours or more at the pool and try and keep their GPA up seems like it would be impossible. (Vas and Sean, of course, were superior scholar-athletes, though I do wonder how much their social life might have suffered. Well, maybe not Vas.)

My brothers went into the service after high school, and there, too, learned life skills that have turned them into the finest people I’ve ever known. It’s further proof that we often take what we need to from experiences life presents to us — and that they affect us in ways we don’t realize until many years later.

Summer Camps

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I was thinking the other day about the various summer camps I’d attended during my middle and high school years; as you might expect, there was quite the mixture of sports and other pursuits, each memorable in their own way. I think I learned how to play frisbee golf at one; I know for sure I mastered swimming at another. I joined my first swim team at twelve — I was a late bloomer, competition-wise — and did a six-week attempt at trying to become a springboard diver when I was seventeen.

A succession of soccer camps were sprinkled in there as well, a nod to the fact that my father had spent his formative years in Europe. While I excelled at swimming, soccer was a bit harder for me to get into, though I did have the incredible opportunity to attend a special one-week camp in New York hosted by an insanely talented player from Brazil who was just coming off of a successful World Cup run. Much like swimming, I still follow soccer and carve out the time to watch the major competitions when they appear on the calendar; my wife will tell you the television rarely tunes away when the World Cup is in progress.

Then there was the summer of Chicken Pox, the one where all ten of us who had shared a shuttle van to Camp Something-or-other in Freeport contracted the virus from a guy who’d unwittingly picked it up from his younger brother. I spent ten days at home, every square inch of my body covered in itchy boils I was implored not to scratch; it hadn’t helped it was the dead of July, hotter than the hinges at a time when air conditioning was something only people in Florida had access to. I’ve often wondered if it would have been easier to handle had the internet been around; binge watching Miraculous Ladybug or Star Trek would have certainly taken my mind off of the misery.

More than a few weeks were spent at Camp Hinds pursuing the seemingly endless series of Merit Badges I’d needed for my Eagle Scout award. Spending the night in an old Army surplus tent has its own unique attraction, one that I still remember with great fondness; the friendships I made during those summers remained strong right up until we all scattered to the four winds after graduation. My favorite week, of course, was the one-and-only time they offered Aquatics Week; spending nearly the entire day, from sunrise to sunset, in, on, or around the water was like being in heaven for a swimmer like me. I’m not sure if I should admit this, but I changed into my swimsuit the Sunday I arrived and didn’t change back out of it again until my parents picked me up the following Saturday. I’d hoped to get quite a tan that week, too, which was something of a rarity for a competitive swimmer in Maine as most of our pools are indoors. It went horribly awry, though, for a day at the beach without sunscreen turned me into a bright red boiled lobster, making even soft cotton sheets feel like torture.

I’m not sure what camps are like these days; honestly, the sorts of activities available to us back then are probably considered passé by today’s teens. Still, the experiences left an indelible mark on me in so many ways, and I learned things about myself while attending that I’m not sure would have been possible elsewhere. College is kind of like that, too, but I’ll save those horror stories for another day…

Book Ten

Not one to rest, I dove right back in and began work on my next novel shortly after doing the first edit on the last one. Typically I would wait until the next NaNoWriMo event as an excuse for creating a new project in Scrivener, but for whatever reason, the idea for my next story featuring Vasily Korsokovach decided it wanted to be written now — and who was I to refuse?

Part of the insistence was my fear that, given I’ve written two straight books in the voice of my original main character, Sean Colbeth, I’d have a hard time recapturing the unique worldview that is Vasily. I shouldn’t have been worried, though — as you can tell from the screenshot, I’m already 15,000 words into this new work and it’s chock full of his trademark dry wit, somthing I’ve come to adore. Of course, not everything is roses and peaches for our poor Deputy Police Chief — I have to throw him a few curveballs, right? — but nothing he can’t surmount with the love of his significant other and the support of friends like Rosie Frankenhoffer.

Tentatively titled Requiem, I expect it will be out sometime next year. I know that is a long time to wait for another standalone Vasily novel; depending on how this one works out, I might be a able to promise another one right behind it. We’ll have to see how it goes…

Book Nine

I’ve been a bit quiet here on the blog — and with good reason; if you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I participate in the various NaNoWriMo writing events that come along during the year, and the most recent one (April) just ended. These month-long excuses to write have always been high points on my calendar, and usually wind up generating another novel in one of my series.

That was definitely true this time around, though total disclosure: Bewitched sprang into being in late February, and I honestly couldn’t keep myself bottled up until April. So I split the difference and started work on it in March; nearly 100,000 words later, another Sean Colbeth story is (literally) in the books. I’m going through the first draft now and doing that correct-the-grievous-grammar-mistakes edit before I hand it off to my initial beta readers; often, I find it to be a valuable process to do this initial revision while the entire story is still fresh and top of mind.

This latest book for Sean digs a bit into his backstory, revealing some of the motivations that made him an Olympic star and, later, renowned investigator. Most of those threads have been present in the back of my mind as I’ve written his prior appearances, so it was fun to pull a particular one from the skein and see where it led. Honestly, it got a bit darker than I expected, but in the end, I feel like we come out on the other side knowing quite a bit more about Chief Colbeth.

I didn’t expect how draining the experience would be, though. Enough that I think Sean is going to take a brief vacation before I tackle the next story in the series; which is good, considering Vasily has been impatiently awaiting my return. Seems he’s got something he wants me to look into out there in Rancho Linda…

How Vasily’s Hair Led To Another Book

I should start off by saying this post might be a bit of a spoiler if you have not already read Downhill. If you haven’t yet picked up a copy of my latest work, please feel free to do so now… I’ll wait for you to return…

Okay, if you are still here, you’ve either read Downhill or are curious enough about Vasily Korsokovach to continue despite my warning. Last chance… going once… going twice…

If you’ve spent any time with Vasily, you probably know that when he first appears on the scene in Blindsided, Sean Colbeth describes him as something like a prototypical Southern Californian surfer dude, right down to the long bleached-blond hair Vas typically keeps in a quasi-professional ponytail. We find out later that the long hair was something of a protest by teenaged Vasily; though he wasn’t truly a fan of the length (or having to keep it in a ponytail when working out or competing in the pool), the very fact his mother despised the look meant he continued to wear it that way right through college. By the time we see him in Blindsided, the style has become such a part of Vasily he’s more or less forgotten the original reason for choosing it.

And as far as I was concerned, as the writer, that was that.

Except, it wasn’t.

There I was, minding my own business and writing Downhill last year; I’d long planned for it to be the reunion book between Sean and Vasily, but to my surprise, in the very first scene where we see the two together, something strange happened… but maybe I’ll let Sean take the explanation from here…

Deciding to put him out of his misery, my eyes went to his hair.  “I like your new style,” I added, taking in once more the unusual way it had been cut.  Gone was the long ponytail he’d worn for years; in its place, the sides had been cut short, but not shaved, and the top seemed to lean into his natural wave, looking quite literally as though he’d just woken up and done little more than run his hand through it.  That there appeared little difference from how he looked that morning — having truly just rolled out of bed — and the way I’d seen him at the airport told me there was a good chance it was exactly how he styled it now.

Vasily smiled and ran a hand through it, more or less confirming my suspicions. “It was time for a change.  And to be honest, long hair in the summer heat is a killer out in Southern Cal.”

Downhill (2022)

I’ve said before that these characters seem real to me, and this an excellent example of that. Way in the back of my mind, I’d long known that Vasily was unhappy with his hair — and that it was a manifestation of other, deeper issues he’d not entirely dealt with. There are some hints about this as the series progresses, some subtle, some not; but after I wrote that paragraph, I realized Vas had turned a corner. Not only was he finally happy in his own skin, he was allowing himself to be happy for the very first time in his life. It’s just one of several obvious ways that Sean picks up on the changes to his friend in Downhill, and we’ll see more of that in Duality later.

As I finished up writing Downhill, I began to realize I’d once more left a gap of a few months between appearances of Vasily and started to wonder what he’d gotten up to in that time. I knew I wanted to delve into some of those changes I’d hinted at in Downhill; I was also more than a little curious how his relationship with Alejandro had weathered the move to the West Coast. And — all right, I admit it — I missed Rosie Frankenhoffer, too, and all of the crazy energy she brought whenever she appeared in a story.

But most of all, I somewhat crazily wanted to know why Vasily had finally decided to cut his hair. What was the watershed moment? How did he decide on that particular style? And, more importantly, how did Alex react? Those are the sorts of weird questions I find myself asking as I write these amazing characters, and in Bygones, I’m fairly pleased with the answers I provided. So in some ways, I think you can accurately say that Bygones is an interesting byproduct of wanting to know more about my character.

All while still solving a mystery at the end of the day.

Off and Running

Downhill (Book 3)

My latest book, Downhill, became available for purchase today.

It’s the third book of four so far featuring my original character, Sean Colbeth. After spending quite a bit of time with Vasily, I think it’s kind of fun to check back in with Sean and see how life has been treating him; of course, since Downhill takes place just a few months after Vasily’s abrupt second departure from Windeport, I’m not spoiling much by saying things are… complicated… between Sean and his best friend.

For me as an author — and I’ve said this in an earlier post — I was worried about my ability to slip back inside the head of Sean; as it turned out, he was there, waiting for me, ready to set out on another adventure. Like Vasily, though, I’ve found that Sean has subtly changed as the books have continued. Some of that is me hitting my stride, knowing the characters far better now than I did at the beginning; the rest is that strange organic growth that takes place entirely out of my control. Sean, Vasily and the rest of the universe that has come to life around them seem very real to me, to the point where I let them go where they wish as I write; often, that results in compelling dialogue I’d not originally planned for, or a sudden visit to a location that winds up holding the key to something important.

Anyway — no rest for the weary! I’m currently writing a fifth book featuring Sean as part of Camp NaNoWriMo 2022; my hope is to have the novel debut sometime in 2023 (all things being equal). After that… well, Vasily has been anxiously waiting in the wings, not-so-quietly reminding me that I’ve now written two Sean books back-to-back. It appears the Deputy Chief for Rancho Linda has his own version of the Fairness Doctrine… and who am I to argue?