Re: Larry M. Rosen Novels
Posted by:
Larry Rosen
()
Date: January 03, 2012 10:26AM
Thanks for the kind words about my four Haley and Willi novels. I'm currently some two-thirds through a spinoff novel, the first in a Maxine Kordell series. It's titled Max-imum Penalty. Haley, Willi, and Mena are in it, but it's definitely Max's show, as she returns to Phoenix for a high school reunion. The novel involves painters Francisco Goya and Francisco Goitia, several chapters in which Sherlock Holmes appears, The Cluster and The Tracer, Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II, the Bush Administration, a character based on Nelson Rockefeller, and a rogues gallery of professional assassins—Vedova Nera, Ustasha, Mantide Religiosa, and El Encarnizado. I'm hoping to have it completed by April, but you never know.
I really can't answer your question about how I write the novels. Each one developed rather differently. I was trained in the consulting business to create a detailed topic sentence outline before writing. A fellow author told me years ago to drop that approach, and let the characters take you where they want to go. So that's what I try to do. Neil Simon once said that he never outlined, because if he did, he'd know how everything turned out, and then it wouldn't be any fun doing the writing. I agree with him. In the first novel, I had no idea that Haley had an alter ego when I started. He just showed up at a park and surprised me. I didn't know if Willi was 10 years older, 10 years younger, or about the same age as Haley. Then I watched Michelle Williams on TV, she smiled and puckered, and Willi was born. In the second novel, all I knew going in was that Willi would go down the dark side and execute a serial killer at the end. I wanted Haley and Willi to be equals, so she'd be more than a damsel in distress or a vehicle for moving the plot along. In the third, I had no idea whom the serial killers PKU and DPU were, until I was writing the scenes that unmasked them. The serial killer Johnny Bench was originally named Mister Anthony, until he told me that made him sound like a hairdresser. So you can see the process is rather unpredictable.
I have no master plan. The books just sort of come out of the air. I have no editor. My books are totally self-published. It would have been nice to have an editor to discuss plot points and phrasing. I'm never sure my decisions are best, and hearing another viewpoint can't hurt. Sometimes I fear my characters are too shrill or bloodthirsty. Other times I wonder if I should have left more corpses behind. But that's why it's an art, not a methodology.
Thanks for reading the books, and taking the time to reply. It's nice to learn someone enjoyed my novels.