Dear Subscriber,
Those of you who’ve read any of my Portia of the Pacific Mysteries, know I enjoy writing about strong women. In fact, my current paranormal novel The Borderland is also about strong women. As you can see, I changed the title, and I’ve also changed the plot, as it’s obviously a work-in-progress.
Those who know me understand that I believe everything’s connected, and it’s an artist’s job to find connections to make things “resonate” with true meaning in the artist’s way.
I watched an excellent but perhaps a bit anti-climactic film by the French called The Night of the 12th and everything connected in my brain with my current paranormal novel The Borderland. I love when that happens!
Anyway, the French film was about a toxic and misogynistic culture where the young men and women take sex as it comes (not to be crude about it), but when murder intervenes, it changes everything. The protagonist detective gradually sees that all the possible suspects to the girl’s murder could have been the guilty one, as they all spoke about her as if she were a “slut and whore,” even though she simply did what men do and had sex for pleasure.
So, my plot is changing into what I told Katharine Louise Frost Hemingway. There will be two villains. One from Katharine’s waking life, wherein she was blamed because of a horrendous rape by knife point that happened to her, which perpetrator I will call the “waking villain.” I will also stay with the original villain from the past who was stalking Miss Ida Craddock. Anthony Comstock.
The “paranormal twist” is going to be my climax as the villain from Kate’s waking life joins in her lucid dreaming world to appear in the climax with Comstock. In other words, my novel will be transformed into a paranormal murder mystery. Katharine will be cured of her psychosis by Dr. Locklear, but he also finds evidence to convict the “waking world stalker,” which allows Katharine to sleep well at night at home and become a surreal artist in peace.
In the French film, the killer was never caught, and in the U.S.A. today, even more than in France, where 20% of homicides go unsolved, it’s now over 55% in the U.S.A. that never get solved. Also, in the U.S.A., most rape kits never get processed nor do rapists go to trial.
The greatest line from the film comes from Marceau, a former partner of our detective, who says, “We have a weird job. Men are most of the killers, and men are most of the police. So, it’s a man’s world after all.”
