What happens when an idea for a book strikes and won’t leave you alone? What if it’s something you know nothing about? Such as organized crime in Santa Monica as in my second Dave Mason mystery titled Rip-Off?
I read Chechen newspapers in English for three years and everything else I could find on the people in this fascinating, war-torn country. In my third Dave Mason mystery I am driving to Riverside, some hundred plus miles away, to talk to a cop about Kurds living in Turkey.
And it’s just background because both books take place in Santa Monica.
I marvel at Christopher Meek’s book, Love at Absolute Zero http://christophermeeks.weebly.com We met and started talking at the Ventura County Book fair and traded books when buyers were few. I was hooked within a few pages, couldn’t wait to finish it. One of those.
Christopher Meeks is an English professor at Santa Monica College, not a physicist writing what he knows. You wouldn’t know that reading this book. Large dollops of quantum physics appear in digestible and even enjoyable hunks.
Meeks insisted he knew nothing about physics but he had an idea and he learned what he needed to convince the reader he was a scientific naïf who sets out to find his soul mate using the scientific method, within three days.
What would a storyteller do nowadays without the Internet where you can read about your idea in ever-widening circles? And when are you simply procrastinating the writing by contacting yet one more expert?
I was rooting for everybody at the end of Love at Absolute Zero, though resistant to the idea that the hero greatly damages his scientific career for love.
But people do that, don’t they?
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. Niels Bohr
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