A look behind the writing of “Voice of the Victim”
Let’s peek behind the scenes, shall we?
The initial idea for the story that eventually became Voice of the Victim came from a writing exercise I tried back before I started writing full-time called What if . . .
At that time I was working as a Research Advisor for a major pharmaceutical company in the midwest, evaluating emerging technologies for integration into our research programs, and I had just written a memoir about my successful battle against suicidal depression. I’d decided to keep writing stories part time as a form of therapy. The What if . . . was as follows:
“What if a gifted scientist came to his senses one day to discover he didn’t have any?”
This led to a story that exists in the final novel as the manuscript written by Rob Lister, the victim. The manuscript appears on his computer after he is shot and seriously wounded in the ‘Iao Valley on Maui. I didn’t write the Maui sections until many years later after we moved there, but most of the rest of the manuscript, which I called Something More, appears in Voice of the Victim.
When I moved to Maui in 2008 and started writing full-time, I had put this story aside and decided to tackle another what if idea, “What if, in the middle of driving home from work, right suddenly became left for the driver?” For those of you who have read my first Maui Mystery, Eyes of the Beholder, or have read earlier blogs of mine, this topic will be familiar.
After I self-published my first story, Mirrored (the precursor to Eyes of the Beholder), I looked around for a new adventure for my Maui detective Keone Boyd to tackle and remembered the idea about the guy who came to his senses to find he had none.
I wrote the story and called it Something More, but it didn’t work with Keone as the detective, so I decided to give a minor character from the first book, Keone’s friend and fellow police sergeant, Angela Boyd the case and sent Keone off on his honeymoon. To make it work, I had Angela tell Keone that she secretly wanted to be a detective and he put a bug in his boss’s ear about trying Angela out on a case while Keone was away.
Many readers loved this story, when I self-published it, but said they missed Keone. People had gotten very attached to my Big Hawaiian. In the third book I brought him back and gave him the lead again, but I always wondered if there was a way to allow him to take a greater role in the second book.
In the original third book, which I first called Ports of Call and later Pele’s Fire. I caught my readers up on what had happened to Keone while Angela was pursuing Rob Lister’s shooter, using flashbacks. After Babylon Books kindly published Pele’s Fire, I got a lot of feedback about my overuse of flashbacks in that story.
When I got the chance to rework the first two stories for publication by Babylon, a light went on in my head, and I decided to incorporate the first part of the third book, all those damn flashbacks, into the second book as real-time events. I thought that would be easy, since the events took place simultaneously with those in Something More. How wrong I was?
But I’ve gone on enough for one blog. I’ll tell you about that in the next blog.
Best wishes and Aloha.
Rick
Cover of Voice of the Victim.
Blow-up of back cover synopsis from Voice of the Victim
About the pictures:
Top picture: eBook and paperback copies of Voice of the Victim.
Bottom Picture: Blow-up of back cover synopsis of Voice of the Victim