No damn character arcs: The story behind the missing Owl and Raccoon novella

In January 2015, I sent a breathless get-stoked message to my email list. "The third Owl and Raccoon novella is coming! A kindergartner disappears from a moving school bus! Here's the gripping opening chapter!"

Cut to July 2016. I finally published the third Owl and Raccoon novella. Except it was called Not With A Bang. And the missing kid was a teenager. And the bus was a city bus. And, yeah, obviously not the same book.

So what happened to the novella I'd titled Last Child Missing?

One of my goals when I sat down to write the very first Owl and Raccoon novella, The Single Staircase, was to avoid anything that looked like a character arc. Owl and Raccoon were adults uniquely suited, in different ways, to hunt for missing children. The decision they make in that book's final pages was based on decades of dedicated police work and frustrated personal lives. They weren't meant to evolve, they were meant to find Sophia Grey.

But after the second Owl and Raccoon novella, WDYG, I started to get a clear vision of where Owl and Raccoon were going in their lives. I knew them as humans. And I wanted to let them follow their different paths.

So when I wrote Last Child Missing, I ended it with a moment that would irrevocably alter the course of their lives. And here it is:

Raccoon executes a pedophile and Owl covers it up.

I came so close to publishing that book. But I couldn't do it. Because I hated my ending. It was like the serial killer from The Wire. Or the episode where you learned Buffy was hallucinating. Or that whole arc where Crockett got amnesia. It was a moment so stunning it eradicated the grinding, quiet, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other universe I had worked so hard to create.

So I sat on Last Child Missing. For sixteen months.

This was harder than it sounds. While Sin Walks Into the Desert is my most successful book, it's had tons of advertising, awards and reviews supporting it. Meanwhile, the Owl and Raccoon novellas just kept plowing forward, earning readers through giveaways, word-of-mouth, and the support of blogs like The Locked Room Mystery and The Invisible Event. I needed to keep the momentum going with a third installment, but I couldn't make myself publish Last Child Missing.

Unfortunately coming up with a third mystery was hard. Wait, that's inaccurate. I came up with dozens of great mysteries. It was coming up with one great solution that took forever.

But eventually, I figured it out. And I'm glad I waited. Not With A Bang moves Owl and Raccoon forward in a way that's true to the characters and the series as a whole. The title is an allusion not only to the book's end, but to the struggle I faced writing it. In the real world, there's no big catharsis and there's no dramatic closure. There's just people making the best decisions they can with flawed and incomplete information.

Or as Owl himself says, "We're all good men. Things just go sideways on us."

[Ed. - If you've never read any Owl and Raccoon books, I recently published The Single Staircase, WDYG and Not With A Bang in one collected box set entitled Owl And Raccoon: Locked. You can get it on Amazon now.]

Maybe you shouldn't try to disrupt your category after all

I work in advertising. For almost 20 years, I've been telling clients they need to stand out in the sea of sameness. Zig when the market zags. And so on.

When I started publishing the Owl & Raccoon series, I took my own advice. I looked at the covers of competitive police procedurals and flipped everything on its head. Instead of moody photos, I went with bright colors. Instead of modern type, I went with hand drawn titles. I asked for metaphorical illustrations instead of clear depictions of starring characters.

The authors I know told me I was making a huge mistake. They said my covers looked like they were meant for children's stories. And that crime readers are more likely to buy books if they are clearly marked as a series.

But I stuck to my guns. And I have to admit, when I put paid advertising behind my giveaways, the covers do pop off Amazon's Top 100 Free page. But the Owl & Raccoon books aren't making money. The Single Staircase has sold about 300 copies, WDYG half that. (Yes, I still give all proceeds from The Single Staircase to charity.) Compare those sales figures to Sin Walks Into The Desert, which has sold more than 9,000 copies. True, Sin Walks Into The Desert has that big fancy award, but most readers review the Owl & Raccoon novellas just as highly. What's more, Owl & Raccoon have actual fans. People tweet and email me to ask when their next case is coming out. I feel like The Single Staircase should be just as successful as Sin Walks Into The Desert.

Maybe it's not the covers' fault. But I want to try something. So yesterday I republished the cover art on the books' Kindle pages. If I see a sales bump, I'll finesse the layouts and apply the change to the print covers too, as well as the upcoming third Owl & Raccoon novella. In the meantime, if you have thoughts, let me know.

Why do you write?

I never really asked myself that question. Why do I write? I don't know. Why do you breathe, jerk? But then there's this from Field Notes:



"I'm not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now." That's just inspiring as hell. So I decided maybe I'd think about why exactly I've spent the last 40 years writing. (And it has been about that long.)

People tell me I have a recognizable voice. I disagree. The dizzying Manhattan chapters of Regret Things aren't anything like the cop dialogue of The Single Staircase, which is nothing like the haunted noir of Sin Walks Into The Desert.

And the themes of my books seem disparate to me, too. Sin is about family and violence, while the characters in Regret Things are obsessed with materialism and driven by a need to be desired.

I asked, ok, what do my books have in common, then? And I came up with this. They're all about how our lives are ruled by ghosts. About the things we do to get right with the dead. About our search for the vanished.

Owl & Raccoon are barely human. They're detectives defined by their hunt for missing children.  And they know their mission is hollowing them out, stealing their evenings and ruining their relationships, but they can't stop themselves:

Back in the Explorer a few questions later, night fallen all around. "This is what I do," Owl thought. "I get in and out of this car chasing shadows."

It's the same in Sin Walks Into the Desert. As a child, Sin spends his days in his big sister's empty room, writing her letters he will never send. And years later, he leaves his job and girlfriend to hike into the desert, guns on his belt and go-bag over his shoulder, to learn if and how and why his uncle has disappeared.

It'd be a spoiler to tell you whose death begins the cycle of violence in Regret Things. But Nicki's no dummy. She knows she's committing a terrible crime to get right with someone who'll never know what she's done. When her accomplice asks her if the dead would even want revenge, she replies it doesn't matter:

"The dead don't live through us. We live through them."

So why do I write? Maybe I'm like Owl. I got shadows to chase. Shadows I never expect to catch.

New novella dropping within a month

When I was writing The Single Staircase, I'd send rough drafts to a cop I know. He'd tell me whether the dialogue and investigation felt authentic. He'd also explain the interworkings of the police department. His insights were the inspiration for WDYG, a new novella starring Owl and Raccoon. I got a printer's proof yesterday, and hope to have it published on Amazon within a couple weeks. The cover art was designed and donated by Jen.

Like the first mystery, this novella is a combination of modern police procedurals and classical locked room mysteries. What's new is the focus on Owl and Raccoon's contentious relationship with Homicide and SWAT.

I have another piece of news, which is almost surreal considering how busy I've been at work. I've finished a first draft of my first full-length novel. It's something I have been working on, in fragments, for almost 13 years. It's sort of an epic story of crime and consequences, stretched out over a decade and played out in places like Manhattan, Las Vegas and the high plains of Wyoming. I have no idea when I might get it published. Don't hold your breath. But it's coming.