Today's guest blogger has a foot in each type of publishing and wrote one of the best, if not THE best, opening lines I've ever read. Please welcome Will Simon!
"Here’s a piece of advice you won’t find in any manual,
leaflet, monograph, self-help book, or national talk-show: when an agent with
the FBI’s Violent Crimes Unit opens an email, then spends the next ten minutes
vomiting in the men’s room, do not under any circumstances lean across
the desk and look at the screen…"
From “Spider’s Tango” by William Simon
Thank you for inviting me here today, Suzan!
In my novel SPIDER’S DANCE, readers are
introduced to Nicholas White, a computer security consultant and electronic
evidence expert. DANCE is about Nicholas
slowly bur surely realizing a recent oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico
was not an accident, but a carefully
orchestrated conspiracy reaching back to WWII.
I had a lot of fun writing it, and came to
really like Nicholas himself; an independent kind of guy, old-fashioned in some
ways, firmly rooted in the past while living in the New Millennium.
Every other year or so, International Thriller
Writers publishes a THRILLER anthology.
While working on DANCE, a little vignette with Nicholas occurred to me
and I wrote and submitted it for THRILLER 2.
It didn’t make that particular cut due to the theme the collection was
aiming for but some of the responses were encouraging. I filed it away and continued writing DANCE.
The day came a couple of years after that when
submissions were opened for THRILLER 3, specifically for stories of romantic
suspense. In one of those coincidences
that a writer would get busted on - but happen all the time in Real Life -
Turner Classic Movies had been running a marathon of Spencer Tracy/Katherine
Hepburn movies. Which led to my digging
out the DVD’s of “Remington Steele” and “Moonlighting,” both old favorites.
On a whim, I went back into “Tango” having
overdosed on clever plots and witty dialogue between the sexes. After giving it some thought (approximately
2.7 seconds, as I recall), I re-wrote “Tango” from end to end, making it
lighter, more fun, more engaging.
Without giving too much away, a child has been
kidnapped. It turns out this particular
child could potentially have a severe impact on the security of the United
States; it was a scary plot in this post 9-11 era. The FBI contacts Nicholas, who is supposed to
be on vacation, and we go from there. In
DANCE, Nicholas mentions he was once married a long time ago. In “Tango”, he meets his ex-wife again after
all these years since she is now with the FBI.
It was a lot of fun to write, to try and
re-capture the banter and dialogue of Tracy and Hepburn movies, while
addressing a very real scenario. I liked
it, finalized it, and sent it in.
In a collection like THRILLER 3, most of the
slots are pre-assigned to established authors.
There were only three slots open to freelance writers. ITW received seventy submissions, whittled
that down to fourteen in a series of ‘blind readings’, and the publisher chose
the final three they liked the best to be included. I am extremely lucky and very proud to have
been one of those three that were selected.
I sure hope you enjoy it!
Since 2002, William
Simon has been the owner and lead investigator for a licensed firm that handles
computer forensics and electronic evidence exclusively.
SPIDER’S DANCE, a full-length
novel featuring Nicholas White, is also available.
