Published Quarterly by Lifeloom.com

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Sir Walter Scott

Summer 2004 Volume II, issue 1

	Together, Karen Weisner and Chris Spindler write the the Falcon's Bend mystery series. A prolific fiction and non-fiction writer with 25 books published in the past six years (which have been nominated for or have won 27 awards), Karen Weisner's first writers’ reference with Writer’s Digest Books, First Draft in 30 Days, will be released February 2005 and will be a Writer’s Digest Book Club Main Selection. Ms. Weisner's website is http://www.karenwiesner.com. Chris Spindler is the award-winning author of the Inspector Terry mysteries. She studied physics and languages in Heidelberg and worked at a translation agency for 15 years before becoming a full-time writer. Ms. Spindler's website is http://www.christinespindler.com.

A Collaborative Dream

            A strangling had just occurred in the park. The victim? A dancer from the local scandaleux strip joint. When the local small town lieutenant, who’s longing just to go home to his new wife, goes to the nightclub to investigate, he encounters the radical personalities of the other dancers: one far-too-young-and-innocent; another older, vengeful and jaded; and a blond bombshell with unfathomable depths. What happened next took the lieutenant through a wild chase to hunt down...and capture...a killer.

             When I woke from this intense dream, I immediately started writing. My pen flew over the paper as I wrote down everything I saw in my dream-movie. When it finally faded out, leaving a heaviness in my chest, I’d filled pages with in-depth notes about a book I couldn’t imagine myself ever writing. I was a romance writer who occasionally wrote writers’ reference books. I didn’t write mysteries or even psychological thrillers, though of late the occasional suspense plotline had slipped into my contemporary romances—always as a secondary element. So I put the notes into my plot cupboard. Little did I realize then that it was the beginning of what would eventually open a whole new writing adventure to me. This story continued to haunt me as time passed, and the plots of my romances became more suspenseful. Seems my imagination didn’t want to be contained simply because I’d started out as a contemporary romance writer, and my vivid dream-stories were pushing me toward new frontiers in writing.

            My friend Christine Spindler (author of the award-winning Inspector Terry mystery series and who happens to live in Auenwald, Germany) and I started talking, almost casually at first, about writing a mystery novel together. My first thought was the dream I’d had about the small town detective tracking a killer in a strip joint while missing his wife. I told Christine about this idea gathering dust in my cupboard, and she told me about an idea she had about a mystery involving twin sisters.

             When she sent me the notes she had on her story, I knew this was something that was meant to be.

             Without a break, I spent the rest of that day combining the best elements from both of our ideas, and Degrees of Separation — a whodunnit — was born. Soon two authors who had never met in person were brainstorming non-stop from our ends of the world. In under two months, we’d completed the novel, which was so much like the dream I’d had that I couldn’t doubt that destiny had brought us together. We both accepted that we wouldn’t want this to be a single book. We’d become enchanted with Pete Shasta and Danny Vincent, investigators for the fictional Falcon’s Bend Police Department, and together we plan to visit often the "small, sleepy Wisconsin town that owns more taverns than churches but fills both on the appropriate days. A place where nothing seems to happen...except the occasional murder."

             In detail, this is how we do it. All work on the series has been via e-mail. When beginning a book together, Chris and I start by brainstorming and doing as much of the research as possible. I put together the first pass of a detailed outline, which Chris goes over and makes much more workable. Together, we hammer out something plausible over the period of a month or so. Once the outline is basically set, I interview the patrol sergeant in the town I live on any areas we're not certain about after our research. We generally let the outline sit for a few months, if possible, before writing the book. This gives us the ability to look at the outline with fresh eyes, to make sure it's as solid as we believed before putting it on the shelf. I do the first pass on the first draft (which is generally the final) as well as very light editing before sending it over to Chris for finishing touches. It's a system that works. I never would have believed myself capable of working with a partner simply because I'm so controlling and impatient, but it's been wonderful thus far. I feel Chris and I are sisters who mesh perfectly regardless of the fact that we've never actually met in person.

             Degrees of Separation wasn’t the first time I dreamed what would later become a fully fleshed out story, though it was one of the few times the story came to me almost completely during the dream instead of after I woke from it. Since then, I’ve also used part of a dream to write two Falcon’s Bend short stories:

             “Blind Revenge” (from Falcon’s Bend Case Files, Volume 1) began just as I was about to drop off to sleep one night. In black and white, in that fragile twilight of drifting, I saw a woman walking down a hall. I saw a man ahead of her. The woman kept walking past him, then she looked back at the door, and he was looking at her, too. The woman went outside, got in her convertible, and a second later the passenger door opened and the man got in. At that moment, my subconscious mind turned creepy. Suddenly this woman was blindly kissing her stranger like it was the end of the world. I knew that, for her, it was the end of the world. The witch was coming for her eyes.I would have fallen deeply asleep in another few minutes and had a disturbing nightmare along these lines, but at that moment my husband got out of bed, saying he couldn’t sleep and was going in the living room to read. I was awake now, and this idea started to bloom in my mind like Chia pet. I finally turned on the lights, put on my glasses and started writing. Less than a half hour later, I was out of bed, e-mailing my ideas to Christine.

            “Fixated” (in Falcon’s Bend Case Files, Volume 2) is a much older story that I had in my plot folder for several years before I took it out and used it. I woke up after having a dream about a woman who was being stalked by someone. Only this wasn’t in the point-of-view of the woman being stalked, but in that of the man on the balcony above the woman and her stalker. The concept of a stalker being stalked stayed with me, and I wrote the dream down when I woke up.

             Is it a little...well, disturbing, to have so many disturbing dreams? Actually it is, but writers can always make lemonade out of lemons.

Copyright 2004 by Karen Wiesner

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Sir Walter Scott