My name is Jenna Kinghorn and I’m a recovering technical writer. A few years ago I cashed out some stock options, left the fast pace and high stress of computer networking, and started working on what then looked like a mystery novel.
Five years and nine drafts later (I am fortunate to have an extremely patient and supportive husband), WILD JUSTICE is indeed starting to look like a novel, but more of a thriller with a strong action/adventure component than a classic mystery novel.
With my tenth (and hopefully final) draft underway, I’m starting to look at ways to market my book – first to agents, then to publishers, and finally to readers. One of the items on my marketing To Do list is “start a blog.”
So I’ve been puzzling for months over what my blog should be about. Since my novel, WILD JUSTICE, is the first in a planned series, I want a blog topic related to my writing. I’ve read plenty of other blogs by aspiring novelists, so I know the world doesn’t need another one of those. And I love adventure travel, but there are plenty of travel blogs out there already, and since my adventure trips happen at the rate of one every year or two, it would be kind of tough to stretch that into a years worth of blogging.
But one of the factors that led to me writing WILD JUSTICE was an amazing trip I took to British Columbia, during which I had a slightly-closer-than-it-should-have-been encounter with a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs. (More on that in a future post. Suffice it to say nobody, including the bears, got hurt.)
What I came away with from that amazing trip was a deep appreciation for the amazing natural beauty of Vancouver Island, Knight’s Inlet on the Canadian mainland, and the narrow stretch of water in between. I was thrilled by the wildlife supported by the screaming tides, and mesmerized by the square miles of conifer showing off every shade of green in an artist’s palette. We saw a mink foraging in tidepools, watched eagles snagging salmon right out of the ocean, thrilled to hundreds of Pacific white-sided dolphins surrounding our inflatable dinghy as we motored along, almost fell out of the boat with glee when a pod of killer whales dove right under us, and witnessed a mother grizzly teaching her cubs how to snag salmon as they went upriver to spawn.
That is the backdrop against which WILD JUSTICE is set, and as I played with ideas for what I might contribute to the blogosphere, I realized that the setting of a mystery, and how well that setting is portrayed, is an important element to me.
I read books so that I can go places: places I’ve never been, places I’ve experienced but would love to spend time in again, and places I hope to explore in person someday. Some books take me there; others might promise to, but fail.
So this blog will be a combination of musings about adventures I’ve experienced in person and “reviews” of armchair adventures I’ve taken through mystery genre books. I hope readers will be inspired to take more armchair adventures via the books I review on this blog. And I hope they will be inspired to get out into the real world and see some of the beautiful places I report on. I look forward to hearing about your travels, real and imagined.
Bon Voyage!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment