I HAVE FOUND MY GENRE'S NAME....

...and it is "Cozy Mystery."
I am psyched. I was feeling lost because it's not a romance, but not a pure mystery, torn between romantic mystery and romantic suspense, but in later books an urban fantasy will be revealed.... *UGH* -- and then there it was this morning, the Cozy Mystery.

http://www.cozy-mystery.com/

STOLEN SPRING Scene 1 - Revised Introduction

Life is a cycle. Sometimes the cycle breaks. It blows a tire. It pops its last wheelie. When that happens, anything is possible. I know, because I will be the one to write the story. Again.
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People don’t appear out of thin air as fully-formed, functional beings. We all had to come from somewhere, but what about those whose life slipped a gear? Nothing grounds them, guide wires snap as they are drop-kicked into the world. Their life constantly shifts in space when it’s tied only by a tenuous tether to a past that may be a lie. Like a slowly leaking balloon, it floats over the rest of the world going about its daily business while they wonder where they belong, why nowhere seems the right place to land. Bad decisions are like bombs going off in the background, while they spend their time sabotaging every attempt at a personal relationship that comes their way.
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This is nothing new to me. I’ve seen this in action. As a newspaper reporter, I am rarely surprised by human nature. I’ve seen it all. I have seen people at their best and their worst. I have seen them jumping for joy, screaming in pain, quiet in death, and year after year I come back for more. The extreme is what we want to hear about. Extreme is exciting. Extreme sells papers. It’s juicy. As long as it’s not happening to us.
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In the spring of our lives if we are lucky, we are safe, protected and encouraged by family, shown more love than hate. We are shaped by those early years. It is the solid foundation for the rest of our lives, giving us the chance to achieve a grounded life, grow a solid tree to support our future instead of sending up all we have up in that thinly skinned balloon. Our ultimate goal is to avoid the extreme.
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But what if your foundation isn’t solid. What if your foundation is a lie. The chance for normal flies out the window, and suddenly extreme is driving the car.

MY NEW HEADER... I LOVE IT

I am fully invested now in my new revised Elliot Hai Sheng Lake. I even created a new header for the ol' blog. I totally and unabashedly borrowed the eyes of a certain Chinese actor to make the above graphic, and someday if I ever make it big, I will send him a nice, fat check.
Or offer him a part in the movie. *sha*
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"Hai Sheng" as seen in the header in Chinese means "born of the ocean," and this is Elliot's Chinese name. The reason why he was named this is one of the many twists in Stolen Spring, so I can't tell you the significance yet. No spoilers here!
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I am still revising the manuscript to reflect the change of his ethnicity, and really, it wasn't a change to his ethnicity... it was giving him a personality, more levels to exist on, a more intersting background and a chance for us to learn about someone other than what I am beginning to refer to as the TWG -- Typical White Guy. TWG Syndrome continually confuses me when reading many of my favorite authors. Love the stories, the crafting... just a little tired of the TWG as the center of every popular book out there. In fact, I get the heroes mixed up between authors sometimes.
Let's try something new.
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I have also added some of my favorite blogs and links to agents, authors and fun book sites. It helps me, too, especially after this year -- losing all of my bookmarks three times through various sytem crashes, now they are in one place easily accessible to me. *whew* Now hopefully I won't jinx Blogger. It would be a Bad Day if Blogger crashed.
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Peace

A FACE TO WRITE HOME ABOUT

So much of writing is research, and don't I know it...
work, work, work....
I just spent the last half hour pouring over photos of gorgeous Chinese actors, hoping to find someone who sort of brings to life Elliot's face... and I found Lu Yi. He was born in 1976, so hey - by the time my series is made into a movie on the big screen, or the small, he'll be the right age.
:-)
I saw this photo and was like, "OMG - a Chinese John Cusack?"

Okay... so get rid of the wine, add a Sam Adams, ditch that fancy white shirt and tie and get him in a flannel shirt, and then add about 15 inches of hair and we're there:

Brooding Elliot:

I realize I look at the faces of my gorgeous Chinese children day and night, but I am serious - this has to be the most beautiful ethnicity on the planet....

MEETING ELLIOT'S FAMILY - from Stolen Spring

I have begun making a pretty major change to my Elliot... so many things weren't popping into place even after I had finished the first draft, all 70,000 words. I wanted more depth, more history, more motivation behind the actions of my main characters, the Lake family, and then it came to me one night -- what if... Elliot weren't Caucasian. And that is when a new face appeared before me in my mind, a Chinese face. I am surrounded by Chinese faces all day, every day in my real life, so it makes sense for the face in my brain to be Chinese, too.

This is us meeting Elliot's family for the first time, some of his thoughts on his childhood and a brief look at his college years in Seattle. Enjoy!!

(end of Scene 30 and all of 31... meeting the parental units...)

By the time I hung up with Jack I was nearly home. I needed a shower. I needed to think.
Didn't look like either would happen any time too soon.
I had company.
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"Mom. Dad."
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They were sitting at the splintery picnic table on my crooked porch next to the pot of faded plastic flowers I stuck there as a joke one year just to piss off Rose. Dad was petting Bruce, whose tail was thumping. I hoped he didn't thump too hard – might finally take out the porch altogether and all of us with it.
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"Hello, Elliot. We've missed you."
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Mama Meili is something to behold. Perfect, preserved and domineering as the day is long. She is a product of old-school Seattle Chinese. She exhausts me. Raised in a world to be the perfect wife and mother, she has spent her life keeping all of us in line. We celebrated the American holidays, the Chinese holidays, and the Christian ones, just to cover our bases, although every few years they still crash into each other on the calendar. Even the gods in heaven weren’t safe from my mother’s screaming when Easter and Qing Ming events collided on the same weekend. I once said we should just hide the Easter eggs in the cemetery and get them both over with on the same afternoon, and she washed my mouth out with soap. Lava. That was the last time I helped my little mama dragon queen with any holiday planning.
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Once I slipped out from under her control – and it took leaving Seattle to do it – I stopped celebrating everything except the fact I woke up every day in my own house not filled with her energy. I don’t know how my dad does it. I would have left her years ago. I love her, but she makes me crazy.
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My father Robert is the opposite of his wife, and has a soft-spoken manner about him which was always a blessing growing up in a home ruled by Mama Meili’s whirlwind of insanity. Just looking at them, most people see a Caucasian man handsome enough to star in movies and his elegant Chinese wife, which is what they both want, so everybody’s happy. They have their mansion in Madison Park, buttloads of money in the bank, and my sister’s two kids to brag about to their friends, so all is right in their world.
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I, of course, can't even imagine what it must be like to have buttloads of money in the bank. I make nothing at the paper, but I just live down at a level where I don't need much. I have health coverage, I regularly put some toward retirement, but I don't have a big-screen TV or a fancy car, and I don't care. But my nonchalance for the material world has always bugged my family.
"When are you going to burn this trailer down and let us build you a real beach home, Elliot. I thought things like this are supposed to be temporary?” Mom just laughed and laughed. Thought she was being funny, but had no idea how rude she was. She hates my trailer with a passion.
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"Mom, there is nothing wrong with my house." I smiled, and bent over her to kiss her forehead. She was always so glittery – her hair, her lipstick, her jewelry. Her shiny black hair today was swept up in one of her usual elaborate bun things. I wondered how long her hair was. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw it down.
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"Oh, son. It's aluminum. You'll get that Alzheimer's!"
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"Only if I keep licking the siding.” I smiled at her, then glanced at my father. “Hey, Dad."
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"Hello, kid. Your mother's right. You should be living up in the main house. We'd like that, actually. It'd be nice to know someone is living in the house when we aren't here. Turning lights off and on and all that. Make it look lived-in. Less chance of a break-in."
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" What would anybody steal? Ten thousand pounds of Mission-style furniture and black marble counter tops? And you have the lights on a timer to flip on and off. You aren't here most of the time, anyway. Why do you have the house at all?"
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"Well, we love coming here, you know that! We love to come to the beach, and we get to see you – you should move in to our house. It just sits there empty, Elliot." My mom got up and began dusting off her light-colored pants even though they were spotless. Dirt knew better than to leap onto my Mama Meili.
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Their house was the "beach cottage" next door to my pathetic trailer. Thirty-five-hundred square feet of living space, three-car garage, just another McMansion on the coast of Oregon.
I'm not knocking the house. It is very beautiful and well-crafted. It’s gorgeous, it’s huge, and worth every penny they spent to have it built, but I'm at a point in my life where I just stopped caring about the details. Food on the table, roof over my head, regular sex, hot water for a shower. I don't need much more than that.
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The tiny plot of land my trailer sits on used to belong to my parents. They had it legally separated from their piece, and they gave it to me for Christmas with one condition – my job in perpetuity is to keep an eye on their home for them. They only come down once a year, maybe, so everything considered, a good deal for me. Well, except for that week each year they come to pry into my life.
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Time to pay my rent, I guess.
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(chapter break)
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Meili and Robert Lake were both born into money and it shows. I grew up in a horrendously large home in Madison Park, which is a frighteningly expensive neighborhood in Seattle, Washington. I’m sure it still looks exactly the same as it did when I lived there over twenty years ago – enormous, stately homes which somehow manage to look quaint, adorable and desirable, if you could afford the sticker shock to purchase one.
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Ah… Fancy Land. You got your ivy climbing every wall in sight, silent servants bringing in organic meat and shade-grown coffee through the back door, and only appropriate holiday decorations are always removed promptly, of course. Hobbit-like sloping shingled roofs seem to hover over rounded doors sporting castle-like hardware. I’m thinking wrought-iron gates and windows must have been on sale at some point, and picturesque benches no one ever sits in are tucked into nooks overflowing with tiny tea roses. Perfectly manicured front lawns are edged with perfectly manicured boxwood hedges, not an imperfect dandelion in sight. Classic Volvos and BMWs are the car choice for the understated riche, just FYI.
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They’re just like the rest of us, really they are.
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I am pretty sure someone has to die in order for someone else to move into the neighborhood and some poor slob is out there keeping track of the body count, notifying the next eager affluent couple on the waiting list their lucky day is upon them.
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My mother, Chen Meili in China, Meili Chen Lake here, comes from a long line of Chinese-style movers and shakers. Their fingers are still in everybody’s pie, or I guess you could say everybody’s moon cake, but our claim to fame is tea. Tea is serious business in China. Dragon Well tea to be exact, otherwise known as Longjing tea from Hangzhou, the most popular green tea at least on this planet. I haven’t checked the other planets yet.
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The city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province has long been held up as a small piece of heaven on earth in the eyes of the Chinese. I’ve seen pictures, and it is beautiful and the climate is perfect for the gardening Mecca it has become. Only ninety minutes from Shanghai, it is fast becoming a bedroom community for those Chinese who do not want to live in the vertical zoo Shanghai has morphed into. A high-speed train zips you into town for work and brings you back home at night. The ride is smooth and quiet; people work, read or sleep, according to my mother.
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I have yet to see China in person. But Mama Meili tells me every square inch of Zhejiang Province has something growing in it, and this has been adopted in our own abundant yard in Seattle. My mother’s gardener (from Hangzhou, of course) and his staff keep every square inch of the Lake estate hopping year-round. We never lacked for fresh fruit or vegetables and one of my mother’s trademarks is a daily display of fresh flowers from her gardens or greenhouse, no matter what day of the year it is.
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My father, Robert Elliot Lake, is definitely not Chinese. I was named after him, but that’s where the resemblance ends. He is six-foot-five, bright blue eyes, with a sort of a salt-and-pepper thing going on in his hair. A lawyer by trade, he actually deals with international business, which is how you would think he met my mother, but they met in law school. Yes, my mother’s unused law degree is still in its shiny new wrapper, but I have a feeling she had a lot to do with the type of law my father chose to practice. I’d even go one step further and assume she was one of the main reasons my father has done so well in his career, as his firm deals only with China.
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I am their oldest child, a fallen star from a prominent mixed Chinese-American family. My sister Margaret Xiao Xing Lake, now Maggie Jones, was born two years later. Her Chinese name means “morning star,” which is also the name of the bakery we grew up frequenting in the Montlake neighborhood in Seattle. She used to make me crazy telling me it was her bakery and not mine. Now Miss Maggie Morning Star is a mother raising her own spoiled monsters in California.
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I left home as soon as I was able to and moved into the crappiest shared house I had ever seen in the U District in Seattle while I attended the University of Washington. I had two roommates. One played guitar in an alternative rock band, and the other survived by making fake Washington driver's licenses for underage kids and any other scam he thought would fly.
We were all just so creative in our own ways, we were a good fit. I majored in creative writing, then journalism for my master’s, which made my parents really jump for joy. They said they wanted more for me. I was told countless times there was plenty of creative writing in a good, solid law career. Thanks, guys.
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On one side of us was a house we christened the Glamour Mansion. It was full of college girls and it was a dream-come-true, because in Seattle, anytime the sun comes out the clothes come off so the tanning can begin. On the day the hot tub was delivered, there was no looking back. We blazed a trail in the grass between our homes. All I have to say about that while looking back is thank God laurel bushes grow so high without regular pruning. We had all the privacy in the world.
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On the other side of us was a reggae band. The band practiced nearly every night unless they had a gig, and their dining room windows lined up with our dining room windows which resulted in plenty of free dinner concerts and contact highs, unless we were already naked in the hot tub at the Glamour Mansion.
College was so cool.
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But my parents never understood me, blah, blah, blah. It was my sister who did all the right things. The Madison Park Princess lives in Pasadena with her darling husband, a lawyer like her darling Daddy, and their two-point-six children. Little joke – they are pregnant with their third. But they already have a boy and a girl, so I am not sure what they are even hoping for with this last one since they already have a complete set. What they need is a golden retriever, but I don't even think Miss Maggie Morning Star can pull that one off.
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I don't really stay in touch with my family, but I am here should anyone ever feel like picking up the phone. They don't, and neither do I. Life has a way of moving forward anyway. I realized a long time ago the people who are in your life are there because they want to be, not because you want them to be. If my family wanted to be in my life, they would be. If I wanted to be more involved in their lives, I would call them. I don't. I have never really understood their preoccupation with appearances, their society friends, golf, and the expensive vacations that never seem to end. They have stayed in resorts costing five grand a night with Brad Pitt down the hall, for Christ’s sake. Who does that?
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I, however, live my days in my shitty little trailer, having sex with my waitress girlfriend, working at my crappy job that doesn't pay anything, and I am totally fine. Then the parents come down every year and make me feel like garbage because this is the life I have chosen. Fun times.

CHECKING IN...

I am editing for punctuation, missing words and goofy things like that. It's amazing how many errors I am finding now as I begin at the beginning and just read through Stolen Spring as a proofreader.

As I go through it, I am making notes about what I run across that I want to make sure I address later, which is important since a detail from the front of the book tends to get lost by the time I weave my way through 67,000 words. I will need to make sure all those beginnings have ends somewhere, tie everything together and smooth it all down.

The next read-through will be for content.
Exciting!!