It’s finished!
I’ve talked about HARBOUR OF LIES for so long you probably assumed I’d invented it as a figment of my imagination. This story took me more than ten months—making it the slowest of my 29 books to write. My only excuse is that this has been a year of distraction. Besides the daily bad news, I spent the first half of that time hunting for a fix for my knee arthritis, and the second part of the year recovering from my knee surgery I eventually admitted I needed.
I’m a pantser or discovery writer which is a polite way of saying I make it up as I go and hope for the best. In HARBOUR OF LIES, I spent at least the first half of the book trying to discover why my victim was dead. I grossly outlined the story numerous times but when I was actually putting the words down on the page, the outline wasn't working.
HARBOUR OF LIES is a story set in the Door County peninsula of Wisconsin. It features five 60-something women who bond over pickleball and amateur sleuthing. All five spent their careers at various alphabet intelligence agencies in Virginia. They've been looking for ways to use their spy brains now that they're retired. Is retirement supposed to be this dangerous?
Lucy, my occasional writing partner would like it noted that she did not contribute a single sentence to this book and is deeply unbothered by that fact. She is by far and away the most indifferent cat I’ve ever owned even though I acquired her as a foster mom at 10 days old and she’s now 8. She generally comes inside around 5-6am every morning. She has a gourmet breakfast of dry kibble and whipped cream, then finds a spot to nap until 6-7pm. She may have another snack at that time, but mostly she operates her cat megaphone and loudly proclaims her need to go outside and hunt.
She disappeared for 12 days last month, then casually showed up looking a little leaner and missing her collar. That day she got 3 bowls of whipped cream and all the cat treats she wanted. I thought she might have been carted off by one of the Bald Eagles nesting in the nearby trees, but like a surly teenager she didn’t tell me where she’d been all that time.
I look out my window at the bay while I work and so I’m like a 4-year-old with an exploding imagination and an inquisitive mind. This week it was a ship that left Finland filled with wood pulp which is used here to make Charmin among other products. Naturally, I abandoned actual work to trace its route: south through the Baltic Sea, north around Denmark into the North Sea, across the Atlantic Ocean, down the St. Lawrence Seaway, and then several Great Lakes before reaching Green Bay. Now I’m left wondering what it is returning with to Finland in its hull as surely it doesn’t go home empty? That’s today’s rabbit hole, lol.
Happy September,
Alec
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