BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Anyone who has read any of the books in the Rowan Gant Investigations series knows who Detective Benjamin Storm and Special Agent Constance Mandalay are. Furthermore, anyone who has talked to me, or attended one of my writing or Q&A seminars knows that everything is book material in my way of thinking. That includes using various quirks or physical descriptions from the everyday reality to enhance the fictional reality, which is still fiction even if I call it a fictional reality. Make sense? Yeah, it doesn’t to me either…

But, here’s where I’m going with this – I use what I know to write stuff that I make up, but what I make up is exactly that – stuff I make up. It’s not real, and it doesn’t actually reflect a real reality.

Case in point, Ben Storm and Constance Mandalay. I should also say here – SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t read my books, or are only just starting to do so…

Ben is loosely – and when I say loosely I mean LOOSELY based on one of my very best friends of all time, a Metropolitan Saint Louis police officer. Their similarities being that they are both 6 foot 6 and the last person on Earth you would want to see coming through a door at you if you are doing something wrong. Other than that, I get “cop slang” from my friend, and of course, procedure and the like. However, that is where it ends. Ben is NOT my buddy, and my buddy is NOT Ben.

In the first few novels of the series, Ben was married to Allisson. She, in turn was LOOSELY based on my cop buddy’s wife – also a very dear friend. Hell, she took me shopping and acted as my fashion consultant when I was desperately trying to woo E K. She’s like a sister to me. However, once again, the LOOSELY based is just that. My friend worked in the medical field, so I made Allisson a nurse.

Constance Mandalay is a Bride of Frankenstein sort of character. By that I mean she is literally a hodge-podge of personality and physical traits from countless individuals, some of whom I know, some of whom I don’t know, and some of whom are also fictional characters from TV shows and movies. That isn’t to say that the pieces didn’t fit well together, because they did. She’s a great character… After all, she even has her own spin-off series now…

But moving right along…

Somewhere around the fourth novel, Ben and Allisson started having some relationship issues. My cop buddy and his wife were NOT mirroring this. Said issues were between the two fictional characters and only on the page. By the fifth novel, things had ended for them and Ben was moving on with his life. Since the young, pretty, intelligent, Sig Sauer packing FBI agent, Constance Mandalay, had been at odds with Ben on more than one occasion a natural progression took place – Tension turned into sexual tension, and they ended up dating.

Back here in the real world, my cop buddy’s wife was none too pleased about this, and she has been sure to let me know.

Every. Single. Time. I. Talk. To. Her.

And so, just the other night we were all together at Double D’s Pizzeria, which is owned by their son. We were having a bit of a planning meeting about the release party for In The Bleak Midwinter which will be taking place there at Double D’s. I brought them one of the ARCs of ITBM as a gift, and as she started flipping through it I made the preemptive comment, “Yeah, Ben and Constance are still dating.”

She looked across the table at her husband and said, “So you’re still having an affair with Constipated, huh…”

It’s a good thing Mandalay is fictional, because gun or no, I’m thinking she wouldn’t stand a chance against my buddy’s wife, and the nickname would be the least of her worries…

More to come…

Murv

Yep, social networking is a part of our lives. How’s that for title-content disagreement? Well, read on…

Like I said, social networking is a part of our lives. You can’t get away from it. Oh, I suppose you CAN get away from it if you are an off the grid sort of person. Perhaps you can even get away from it if you are a somewhat-on-the-grid but not-on-the-griddle sort of person. Fact is, I have a buddy who is not on Faceborked. He even refuses to be on Faceborked. I’m not sure if it’s because he fears getting borked, or if he’s just afraid he’d get addicted to Farmville.

The thing is, if you are like me, you don’t really have any choice but to be “into the social networking scene.” Honestly, I’m one of those “on the grid off the griddle” types. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t poke social networking with an elebenty foot pole. I have too much other stuff that needs doing—but, again, I chose my career and with it comes the pain of social networking, which is why you can find me on most every social network out there.

Well… You “yoosta could.”

Over the past few months I’ve done some informal analysis of my own. I’ve taken some scrapings from the various social networks, dissolved them water, then proceeded to experiment with various acid/base titration setups, whirl crap around in a centrifuge, and even grow a few cultures in Petri dishes. (The little, round Pyrex dishes, not Rob and Laura Petri… Although, Laura was definitely a dish… but I digress…)

Here’s the thing – I’ve found that there are some social networks out there that are more or less worthless to me. This revelation, of course, prompted me to jettison said networks. The other thing I discovered is that on certain networks – Faceborked, for instance – my presence was split in such a way that I was ending up doing double work for half the benefit. This wasn’t helping my productivity in the writing arena at all. So, while jettisoning Faceborked wasn’t an option, consolidating it a bit was.

Therefore, if you are a “friend” of my Faceborked “profile” you have probably been seeing this message (or one very similar to it) lately:

I’m streamlining my social networking, therefore the M. R. Sellars PAGE: http://facebook.com/SellarsMR will soon become my PRIMARY Facebook presence. This Murvel R. Sellars “profile” will be DELETED at the end of AUGUST. To stay connected go over and LIKE the M. R. Sellars PAGE.

I will be repeating myself, on Faceborked, daily, right up until the end of August. Why? Because I want this to stay current in the newsfeed, and because not everyone logs onto Faceborked daily, therefore I don’t want to be receiving strange emails in the middle of the night from people I don’t really know, all asking me WTF happened to my profile and why did I leave Faceborked.

I didn’t. I just moved into a bigger house.

Who am I kidding? I’ll get a truckload of those emails anyway. At least I’ll be able to respond with a link to this blog entry instead of explaining myself 4617 times.

More to come…

Murv