Rocco's guest EJ Copperman!

MEROW! Today our guest poster is the author, E. J. Copperman

EJ is the author of the Haunted Guesthouse series, as well as several other mystery series!  His first in the Mysterious Detective Series with Crooked Lane Publishing, WRITTEN OFF, debuts today!

And now, without any further adieu: E.J. Copperman!

Thank you, ROCCO!

The first thing you have to understand is that writers are crazy.

Our job, first and foremost, is to make things up. And the better we can think of stuff to make up that nobody has made up before (or at least this month), the more novel (you should pardon the expression) the work will appear to be.

So our minds never stop looking for new things to make up. That’s the job and we know it. You might be taking a walk on the beach, watching the ballgame, making dinner, making love, playing Life, living life, walking the dog, doing the downward dog or lying in bed before sleep.

When we’re doing all that, we’re also working. If something happens that might be interesting (re: useful), we’ll be sure to make note of it. If we remember it the next morning, you can assume it’ll show up in our work somewhere.

So when the casual notion of a character I’ve written showing up at my door and announcing him/herself happened into my fevered brain—and it was just an idle thought, in the middle of doing something else—I stopped whatever the hell that was I was involved with and started thinking about it. How would I react if Alison Kerby or Samuel Hoenig called on the phone asking for help on her/his current problem?

Since I write mystery novels, the notion that the character would be asking for guidance on a murder was not a huge leap. I do, after all, concoct all sorts of odd problems for them to solve (in Samuel’s case, questions for him to answer; he’d want me to make that distinction). They’d expect that surely I could provide direction, if not simply an answer out of thin air.

But it wasn’t the character’s perspective that I found interesting. Although my spouse (yet another plug for an upcoming book) and a few others I’ve met would say that I am indeed a character, I’m also an author. I know how an author thinks and if one is going to spend a few months writing a book, it might as well be something the writer understands fairly well.

So what would I do if Alison or Samuel (or now Duffy Madison and his hapless creator Rachel Goldman) knocked on the door and asked me to help solve a heinous crime? In WRITTEN OFF, that’s what happens to Rachel. She writes the Duffy Madison series in which a consultant for the Morris County (NJ) prosecutor’s office works on missing person cases. And when her phone rings just after she finishes the latest Duffy Madison mystery only to be told that her caller is a consultant for the Bergen County (NJ) prosecutor’s office who works on missing person cases—and that his name is Duffy Madison—she has a situation to deal with.

I didn’t stop to consider what my own reaction would be under such circumstance because in writing the book it didn’t matter. I’m not Rachel; she reacts to things differently than I would. It’s only since I finished the book—and if the truth be told, written the second in the series—that I’ve taken the time to consider. And I know exactly what I’d do if that ever happened to me.

I’d slam the door and lock it, then hide under my desk until the phone stopped ringing.

I’m not that crazy.

E.J. Copperman is the author of the Haunted Guesthouse mystery series and the co-author with Jeff Cohen of the Asperger’s Mystery series. On June 14 E.J. unveils the Mysterious Detective Mystery series in which a crime fiction author is confronted by the flesh-and-blood incarnation of her fictional sleuth.

GIVEAWAY:  Win a copy of WRITTEN OFF!

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