How does one go about creating characters? I would be most interested to hear how other writers go about the process as well as thoughts from readers on what they like and don’t like about character development. I first get an image in my mind of who this person is going to be, and this is often modeled upon traits that I possess, those that I admire or detest in others, and conflicting flaws that I find fascinating. Sometimes I scroll the internet to find a picture of somebody who fits the blurry image coming into focus in my mind and put it into my notes, character sketch, and outline document. Underneath this image I start building the description. Tall, short, slim, thick, eye and hair color, and so on. I also like to give characters a descriptive defining trait like the nose of a falcon’s beak or some such thing. But a description is much more encompassing than physical traits. Who are they and how did they become that? Humor, foibles, wit, trigger points, compassion, attention to detail—well, you get the picture. A real, live, breathing human being. The Protagonist: I have five different protagonists in my books, three out there in the world, and two not yet born. Goff Langdon is the star of my Mainely Mystery series. He is a PI as well as the owner of a mystery bookstore. Langdon’s father left at an early age, making him the man of the house before he was even a teenager, and a father to his younger twin brothers. This experience shapes who he is and how he interacts with the world. Clay Wolfe is a PI and a lead in my Port Essex Trap series. He returns to his small coastal hometown in Maine after becoming jaded on the job as a Boston homicide detective. He is a snazzy dresser, perhaps to cover up his insecurities, and has a difficult time committing to a love interest due to his own tragic beginning being orphaned at age eight. Brooklyn born Hungarian 8 Ballo is a naturally large and strong man who has trouble finding clothes that fit. He is ‘woke’ long before his time (1920s), is a product of WWI, and consorts with gangsters as easily as celebrities, even though he is an honest and average person. Max Creed will grace the pages of my new series debuting in April of 2025. His life takes a horrific twist when his bride is killed on their wedding day by an assassin hired to take her life by a billionaire who Max tried and failed to bring to justice for his crimes. After a downward spiral, Max re-emerges as a modern-day Robin Hood looking to bring justice to those wronged by the ultra-wealthy. Jazz Jones is my latest creation. He is a white PI in 1950s Raleigh who was raised by his aunt and her Black husband. This shapes his life as he has one foot in each of two worlds in that turbulent time, and at the same time, belongs in neither. It will be interesting to continue to breathe life and bring to life this man who has his own emotional baggage, some of it foisted upon him, and some of his own doing. The Antagonist: The five PI mystery and thriller series that I have created all need an antagonist, none of whom make the jump from one book to the next. That means that I have now fabricated sixteen villains. Men and women who are just plain bad and evil, but sometimes complicated and with redeeming qualities. They are the most fun to manufacture. A man with rancid breath like the smell of burning tires. That sort of thing never gets old. The Regulars: I like to cloak my protagonist in the warm embrace of a supporting ensemble of friends who throw their efforts into helping, bailing out, saving, and doing whatever necessary to help our hero win the day. They, along with the protagonist, continue to evolve and grow from book to book as the traits not visibly seen continue to be added to complete them as living, breathing, human beings. The Nameless: And then there are those who have not risen high enough in the ranks to get a name. Sometimes they get nicknames based on their physical features. The Mountain. Mouse. Scarface. Crooked teeth. And sometimes, these same people grow and gain a name. The deli owner Tony. The newspaper journalist Marie. Real people who refuse to leave the pages like Dorothy Parker. Creating life is one of the best perks of being a writer. I’d love to hear input from writers and readers on what they think works and doesn’t work in breathing heart and soul into the people of the pages.

In my Clay Wolfe book, Mouse Trap , I traveled down the rabbit hole into the world of genome editing, which some consider Wonderland. On the one hand, it is a place of wildly creative science trying to banish disease and disorder. On the other hand, it is a process that could lead to the demolition of human uniqueness, or what Wonderland represents, a world of absurdity, irrationality, uncertainty and disorder. Genome editing is a process in which the DNA of individuals can be changed at the embryo stage to edit traits such as height, eye color, and just about anything you can imagine using a technology called CRISPR-Cas9. The FDA frowns upon this being used on human subjects, but as often is the case, the science has outpaced the laws on putting any real teeth in restrictions on this being done. It could be used to make super soldiers. It could be used to change skin pigmentation. Do you want your child to have DNA traits common among geniuses, athletes, musicians, or artists? Mouse Trap posits that there are labs out there helping, for a very healthy fee, you to accomplish these aspirations for those goals for your unborn child. At the time of researching that book, it led me to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. The primary place of research in the U.S. was at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York. It started in 1904 as a record gathering facility under Charles Davenport, a zoologist, and would quickly expand to a large part of the Carnegie Institute trying to declare certain individuals as unfit due to mental health, gender, race and other things that would lead to the involuntary sterilization of at least 60,000 people in this country. This movement funded by the wealthiest Americans, backed by a majority of politicians, spearheaded by the lead scientists and medical innovators, was the foundation of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party. Of course, when the horrible atrocities of the Nazi’s and Hitler were revealed to the world, people began to distance themselves from the Eugenics Movement and it went dormant for years, but is now reappearing full-cycle in the form of genome editing. The research I did on Mouse Trap led me to the information that is the basis for my upcoming Brooklyn 8 Ballo book, City Gone Askew . 8 is confronted by the possibility, in 1924, of a horrifying triumvirate of the Eugenics Movement, the resurgence of the KKK, and the emergence of the Nazi party. Coming to you July 31st.

Dixey Bull is generally considered the first pirate in Maine. As these things so often go, even if he dreamed of being a pirate when he was a kid, living the life of a buccaneer of the seas was not his first intention. But, given his moniker, perhaps becoming a corsair was merely his manifest destiny. In the early 17th century, Bull started life off as an honest merchant, but when a roving band of French men attacked him along the coast of Maine, moored in Penobscot Bay, and relieved him of trade items of knives and beads as well as the furs he was bartering them for, something clicked in his brain. The raiders left him his small sailing vessel, but nothing else. Destitute and desperate he visited several English settlements and recruited fifteen men to be in his band of pirates. They started out ransacking small vessels, expanded their treachery to settlements along the coast, and then The Dread Dixey Bull and crew disappeared into thin air, never to be heard from again. Almost one hundred years later we come across Black Sam Bellamy. Much like Bull, Bellamy started off as a sailor, but he was with the British Royal Navy. Stationed in Cape Cod, he’d fall in love with a young lass named Goody Hallett. It is not quite known whether she was already married, and her husband disapproved (funny that), or she was too young, and her parents rejected Bellamy, but either way, he felt it necessary to go find his fortune so that he could return and take Goody away. He initially went looking for the treasure of the Lost Spanish Armada of 1715, but when that didn’t work out, he turned to piracy. In a little over a year, he became the wealthiest pirate ever, capturing the loot for up to fifty-three different ships. And this is where it becomes interesting. Loaded down with loot, he came to Maine. He stopped in Pemaquid Point before continuing to Machiasport with the thought of creating a Pirate Utopia, a democratic community of buccaneers enjoying the splendors of their booty. He had one task left to do first, though, and that was to retrieve his love, Goody Hallett, from Cape Cod. Unfortunately, his ship was caught in a fierce storm and sunk, and he and all but two of his men went down with the ship. And this is where my latest Clay Wolfe adventure begins. One of those survivors carries with him a treasure map that suggests that the stolen riches of Black Sam Bellamy were actually buried/hidden in the area now known as Port Essex. This map is uncovered in a King James Bible by two antique dealers who hire Clay and Baylee to help them find the treasure. Of course, it is not that simple. Pirates, Motorcycle Clubs, and Sex Doll Manufacturers round out the mix of those hunting the treasure. Pirate Trap publishes March 27th. Dead men tell no tales. Or do they?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens is writing about the French Revolution, but he might as well have been writing about the Industrial Revolution that was his time period, or maybe even the world of today, if he was an oracle in line with George Orwell. All three of these eras are ages of paradox. The rich live safe and leisurely existences far removed from the realities of most of the population. The French Revolution, Industrial Age, and Now are times of extreme wealth and of extreme poverty, a polarization of the whole truth, with a middle class plunked down on the lower side of the stratosphere. And this best of times and worst of times is also representative of the paradox of the holidays. Whether you celebrate Bodhi, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Hannukah, Yule, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or something else, it can be a wildly chaotic time. For those with money, family, friends, and love—it can be a wonderful celebration of life. For those struggling to pay the bills, it can be an enormous financial weight similar to cement shoes in a river. Many people feel alone and isolated as the world revels around them. The holidays are a time where it is stressed that is important to ask for help when help is needed. Whether it be money, sadness, remorse—it is essential to realize that you are not alone. And this means that those on the other side of the paradox, those with the means and the relationships of love, are ready to extend a hand. The holidays should not be the worst of times for anybody, not with so many of us living the best of times. None of us should live alone on a mountain top, nor need the visit of three spirits to wake us to the true meaning of the holidays. Nobody should feel the isolation of the Grinch nor the miserliness of a Scrooge. Let us make this the best of times and the season of light. We are all one people. Happy Holidays. Write on.

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The Roaring ‘20s was quite arguably the most exciting time in the history of the US. It was a time just after the Great War, women recently having got the right to vote, Prohibition, speakeasies, rum runners, gangsters, baseball, jazz, moving pictures, and a period of fantastic writers producing books. Paris has always been spoken of as a hot spot in this time period for all of this, but New York City was filled with legendary figures and events like no other place and time in the entire world. Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and the start of The Great Gatsby, Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees VS the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, Coleman Hawkins, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong and so many other monumental jazz musicians; these are just the tip of the iceberg that was New York City in the 1920’s. When I decided to combine my love of history with my passion for mystery, thus, I needed to look no further than a setting of Brooklyn in the ‘20s. It didn’t hurt that I have a daughter living in Bed-Stuy there in the city, giving me the opportunity to research as well as visit. I decided to base my PI, 8 Ballo, in the next neighborhood over in Bushwick, based off a graffiti tour I participated in, and Velma Gone Awry; a Brooklyn 8 Ballo Mystery , set in 1923, was born. The starting point is a German businessman coming into the dingy PI office of 8 Ballo and hiring him to find his missing flapper daughter. 8 will learn through the course of the search that the twenty-five-year-old Velma is an incredibly talented young lady. And perhaps she is missing on her own volition, hiding from something in her past. It is also possible she’s been abducted by the Jewish gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mayer Lansky. The investigation leads 8 to befriending Dottie Parker, conversation with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, meeting with Coleman Hawkins and Smack Henderson, and being threatened by Siegel and Lansky. And that is just the first day. In the days that follow, other legendary figures such as Babe Ruth, Ethel Waters, and Mae West will be encountered in the search, all having connections to the intriguing Velma. 8 Ballo got his curious moniker when his mother was certain that he was going to be born a girl that she had the name Margrit picked out, but no male name. When he was born a boy, and his dad was out to sea, she merely wrote the number 8 down on the birth record, meant as a placeholder to be changed later, but never was. He is college educated, a veteran of the Great War, is in his mid-30’s, and has relationship issues. He is aided in his investigation by a colorful group who represent the melting pot that is 1920s Brooklyn. His best is Pearle Hill, a business entrepreneur he has known since they were boys playing stickball on the streets around the turn of the century. Marty Feldman is a journalist for the Brooklyn Eagle and Stephen McGee is a cop in Bushwick. 8 occasionally sees a woman by the name of Asta Holm, until the mysterious Velma complicates things. Where is Velma and why has she gone awry? Follow 8 Ballo through the streets of New York City in the Roaring ‘20s to find the answers to these questions. Velma Gone Awry is publishing on April 12th. Read on. Write on.

Should characters in books have political leanings? I mean, most people do. Some people claim that they hate politics, politicians, and never vote because they’re all crooks. But that is a political belief as well. Most of the rest of the population are just as adamant in their beliefs, be it left, right, or somewhere in the middle. I understand that you don’t want to alienate a segment of the population. But the same can be said for just about any belief that a person has. Religion. Football fan. Soccer fan. Support Immigrants. Oppose Immigrants. Eat meat. Vegan. The list goes on and on. It is my belief that creating a character in a book is like taking a store mannequin and bringing it to life. To do so, you have to provide a hairstyle, clothing, and mannerisms But this is still merely scratching the surface. If you want to truly bring this mannequin to life, you have to go deeper and reach the core essence. What is the backstory of my protagonist? Sure, Clay Wolfe has commitment issues. But why? The writer has to know this, and share it with the reader, sometimes subtly, sometimes bluntly. His parents died in a car crash when he was eight, is the short version, and the longer version continues to leak out over the course of four books now, with a fifth due in December. Goff Langdon in my Mainely Mystery series votes Independent, sometimes Democrat, and never Republican. Is that wrong? I welcome discourse, of course, on whether his political beliefs are right or wrong. The argument can certainly be made that Republican beliefs are more valid than that of Independents are Democrats. The question is: Is it wrong for him to have an opinion? There seem to be two major rules of thumb of what not to do in a book. Don’t kill a pet, especially a dog or cat, and don’t allow your protagonist to have a political belief system. I am good with the first but question the second. When a writer starts writing to not offend, then the creative process has been stymied. I don’t think we should use fiction to get on a high horse and use our novels as a podium to preach our politics, but to omit something as major as political leanings from our characters seems to be taking a step back to become an inanimate and thoughtless mannequin.

I have recently become engaged with the process of turning my novels into audio books. This has been a fascinating process and has created a few questions in my mind. I believe writers and readers have long thought it was almost impossible to make a good adaptation from book to movie. This is not an easy process as I became aware when I went to write a screenplay on my novel Wolfe Trap. You must strip away just about everything and then allow the director to recreate it in their vision. Thoughts inside the heads of characters disappear. Description of people and places are peeled back to expose the underlying structure but not the flesh and bones of the people nor the richness of the place. The story created by the author is denuded and left to the mercy of the elements in a Maine winter. I can think of several movies that were good, maybe even as the book, but certainly not better. The Shining with Jack Nicholson was pretty darn good, but did it exceed the writing of Stephen King? In mystery books to film you’d have to include Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Big Sleep (1946), and The Maltese Falcon (1941). Perhaps the best book to flick adaptation was The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola worked closely with Mario Puzo to create an honest replication of that towering and intense novel. I’d be glad to hear feedback from others on what books to movie adaptations they think were wildly successful. I recently heard an author saying they didn’t care if the movie made from their book was any good or not (I can’t remember who it was). Their reasoning made perfect sense. Either way, they got paid for the rights. If the movie was a bomb, everybody would say the book was better. If the movie was a success, everybody would say good book, good movie. Win, win. This brings us to audio books which is much easier to adapt, as everything from the book goes into the audio. But there are other factors to consider. For my Trap books, I have a narrator who is pretty straight forward. Jason Arnold. I like his approach and his voice is a perfect match for Clay Wolfe. He has only a slight change of inflection, accent, and dialect from character to character, which works well for Maine. I’ve heard male narrators who try to sound like females and vice versa and it is usually a disaster. In a perfect world, you have a male and female narrator, or an entire cast, but that is not my reality. Wolfe Trap is now available, Mind Trap will be next month, followed by Mouse Trap, and then Cosmic Trap. And then there is the dreaded mispronunciation. My narrator for Mainely Power did a marvelous job, and nailed toughies like Topsham, but thought that Bowdoin College was pronounced like it is spelled, with an oin on the end. This has hopefully been corrected to the release next month of book two, Mainely Fear. It turns out the narrator for my At Every Hazard historical about Joshua Chamberlain during the Civil War is a pastor. This worked fine for that particular book, but it raised problems for the sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as that book has graphic violence, sex, and language. It looks like Emmett Collins’ voice will be changing between books…. My upcoming book, Velma Gone Awry, coming in April, posed another set of difficulties. It is set in the melting pot of Brooklyn in the 1920’s. The protagonist, 8 Ballo, is a second generation American, so his voice is pretty straightforward. But you also have the Irish cop, the Jewish journalist, the Black entrepreneur, as well as a whole host of Italians, Germans, and eccentric characters. For Velma Gone Awry, a narrator with a wide range of voices was necessary, and I absolutely love the job that Colin Martin is doing. It should be available in the middle of January. His range is wonderful and brings the book to life. I find myself thinking, oh, that’s how so and so sounds. Are there any audio books that do that for you? I’d love to hear. I am quite excited to announce the paperback release this past week of the fourth book in the Clay Wolfe Trap series, Cosmic Trap. This time, a government task forces hires Clay and Baylee to investigate unexplained aerial phenomena over the skies of Port Essex. Write on.

On Aug. 4, 2020, Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist approved the establishment of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force. That’s right. UAPs are the new UFOs. On June 25th, 2021, the task force presented a preliminary report that there is definitely something going on in the skies, but they have no idea what it is. The Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of pictures and videos gathered by the Task Force, purportedly showing “what appears to be pyramid-shaped objects” hovering above the USS Russell in 2019, off the coast of California, with spokeswoman Susan Gough saying “I can confirm that the referenced photos and videos were taken by Navy personnel. The UAPTF has included these incidents in their ongoing examinations.” I believe that the government is trying to obfuscate what is happening above our heads so as to not create alarm. The task force has gone through various increasingly confusing name changes over the past two years and have had little luck in getting to the bottom of hundreds of sightings. The phenomena of UFOs began during WWII when pilots began to see unexplained oddities in the sky that they called ‘foo fighters’. This was followed by the Roswell incident of 1947 in which debris was found at a ranch in New Mexico. The government claimed it was the debris of a weather balloon. People did not believe them. Some conspiracists believe the wreckage was spirited to a hush-hush military site in southern Nevada called Area 51, where study of the aliens and their craft continues to this day. From 1952-1969, the US government investigated 12,600 mysterious sighting through a program called Project Blue Book. This investigative committee was disbanded and there was no official program looking into UFOs or UAPs for almost fifty years. On November 14, 2004, a UAP was recorded about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, CA. The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, including the missile cruiser USS Princeton, were performing drills. Among the group were two F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter pilots. During the training, they were suddenly asked to proceed to new coordinates for a possible real-life situation. Before this, a radar operator in the group had been picking up anomalous aerial vehicles (AAVs) — the Navy’s term for UAPs — for several days at an altitude of over 80,000 feet. However, after detecting AAVs at lower altitudes, the two pilots were sent to intercept the objects. At first, the pilots couldn’t see the AAVs, but they did notice a disturbance in the water. Suddenly, a Tic Tac-shaped aircraft appeared, moving quickly and erratically before speeding off. While the encounter wasn’t captured on video, a different pilot was able to record the aircraft leaving. This report was buried for almost twenty years, until the implementation of the Unexplained Aerial Phenomena Task Force in 2020. This and 143 incidents have so-far been unexplainable by the UAP task force. They have recently listed five purposes of the program. Number four is to mitigate and defend US airspace. Possible explanations include foreign aircraft (Russia, China), secret US programs, or aliens. It would seem that UFOs or UAPs are real and fascinating. And now, for the shameless plug. This is also the basis for the December 21st publication of my fourth Clay Wolfe/Port Essex mystery, Cosmic Trap. Clay, Baylee, and gang are tasked with being the local liaison for two UAP Task Force members investigating multiple sightings in the skies of Port Essex. About the Author Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries. Cost has published four books in the Mainely Mystery series, with the fifth, Mainely Wicked, due out in August of 2023. He has also published three books in the Clay Wolfe/Port Essex series, with the fourth, Cosmic Trap, due out in December of 2022. For historical novels, Cost has published At Every Hazard and its sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as well as I am Cuba. In April of 2023, Cost will combine his love of histories and mysteries into a historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry. Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.