Maui Mysteries - Myths and Memories
Now that Launch day is past, I’m back to working full-time on Myths and Memories, the second book in the Maui Mysteries series. But my friend and mentor Bill Bernhardt did ask me for an article for his Red Sneakers Writers Newsletter and I was happy to comply. Since it discusses my experience writing Eyes of the Beholder and the rest of the series, I decided to include a link below for those of you who don’t get the newsletter.
By the way, if you are a budding or established writer, this newsletter is always filled with great information. Check the bottom of this link for information on how to join.
Now, lets talk about Myths and Memories. In the article above I talked about what ifs:
This got me thinking about story ideas. And, as many budding writers do, I started thinking in terms of what ifs. My first two what ifs were “What if a man came to his senses and discovered he didn’t have any?” and “What if, in an instant, right became left and left became right for one person, but no one around them?” These were the basis of the first two books I wrote after my retirement and move to Maui.
If you’ve been following these blogs you already know that the second what if formed the jumping off point for Eyes of the Beholder. But what happened to that other what if? It formed the jumping off point for Myths and Memories.
In my first blog about this book I included the prologue, where a shooter in a sniper’s nest in a palm tree draws a bead on his target:
He could see the target with his naked eyes. The grey-haired man in the flowered aloha shirt stood calmly on the stage between the stream and the imu pit near the taro pond exhibit.
I’m not giving too much away by telling you that that man, that target, Dr. Robert Lister, helped me answer that first what if—What if a man came to his senses and discovered he didn’t have any?”
Now, many people smile at that what if, assuming I mean the man is stupid, but that’s not it at all. When Robert Lister becomes aware again, sometime after the shot is fired, he literally discovers that he has no senses. No sense of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, or even that other sense people usually forget about, proprioception. Proprioception, otherwise known as kinesthesia, is your body's ability to sense movement, action, and location. Without proprioception, you wouldn't be able to move without thinking about your next step.
Why does Rob have this problem? That’s what he’d like to know, and his exploration of this is key to one of the two investigations contained in Myths and Memories. I first attempted to create a story around just this, when I wrote and self-published Something More. But that book seemed unconnected to the first book in the series and confused a number of readers. Luckily they pointed out the problem to me, and I’m addressing it in Myths and Memories. Rob Lister’s memories are very important in helping Sgt. Angela Beyers, from Eyes of the Beholder, determine who was responsible for his shooting. But this time, I don’t ignore what her friend, Det. Sgt. Keone Boyd is involved in at the same time.
Although off with his new wife on a honeymoon cruise of the Mediterranean Sea and under under strict orders from her to avoid any detective work, Keone becomes caught up in a Europol investigation of an alleged serial killer, who just happens to be on the same cruise. A killer who believes he is a mythological creature, a Greek god. This second investigation was absent from Something More and only mentioned in flashbacks in my third book Pele’s Fire. Now we get to follow Keone’s investigation in real time in parallel with Angela’s investigation of Rob Lister’s shooting.
Together these two investigations are informed by myths and memories. And we get to follow both of our detectives as they pursue their quarry—eight thousand miles apart. This raises a question, “Is it still a Maui Mystery when a Maui detective works on it, no matter where they are?” You can deduce the answer if you look at the definition of a Maui mystery on my Rick’s Books page, but I’ll state it clearly in Myths and Memories.
About the pictures:
These pictures were taken in July of 2015 at the ‘Iao Valley State Park. In the top picture is a palm tree that figures in this story as a sniper’s nest. In the bottom picture I’m demonstrating where the sniper’s scope is pointed at Dr. Robert Lister. Rob is a retired biochemist and writer, whose initials are R.L. Figure it out.