When I took a creative writing class in high school, our instructor gave us an assignment to choose a natural object like a stone or a stick or a leaf for a "friend" and carry it around with us for a week and talk about what it told us. The other students spoke about how their stones or sticks or leaves whispered secrets, sang songs, or griped about how their humans didn't share their lunches.

While I appreciated the creativity of this exercise, I didn't appreciate the anthropomorphism, and when it was my turn, I inevitably said, "This is a rock. It doesn't tell me anything. It doesn't share any secrets with me. And it's all the more beautiful because it doesn't. It is perfect in its rockness."

The teacher was inclined to flunk me for my stubbornness. (Seriously, he tried.) Or maybe it was because my "friend" looked different every day. (I kept forgetting to bring my particular "friend" to school so I often had to pick one up in the planter beds outside of the building.)

But I still think that way about the non-human. I love rocks and sticks and leaves and animals because they are NOT human. Because they just "are," mysterious and marvelous in their own ways of being.

I don't want to live in a world where everything must obey human laws. Although I recognize that they might be dangerous to me and other humans, I want bears and cougars and sharks to thrive; this is their world, too. So I write books that include bears and cougars and sharks and frogs and raccoons and possums and yes, gorillas. I try to portray all these creatures with all their true fierceness and strengths and vulnerabilities, because I respect them just as they are. They are not lesser because they are not human.

I want to be intrigued forever by walking sticks and spiderwebs and unfurling leaves in the spring and the amazing patterns left by glaciers on rocks. I hope I will always appreciate the qualities of the non-human wonders on our planet. I hope you will, too.

I love the unexpected, don't you? Celebrating unusual experiences is part of being a writer. I've had a number of unexpected encounters with humans and other animals over the years.

Once I was standing at a bus stop in Seattle, along with a number of other people, when a woman walked up to me and asked "Ou est La Bon Marche?" (Bon Marche was a big department store at the time in Seattle.) I pointed in the general direction and said, "La-bas, l'edifice beige." ("Over there, the beige building.") Now, how weird is that? This woman asked a perfect stranger on an American street corner a question in French and that stranger happened to be me, who sort of speaks that language. She didn't even look surprised when I answered.

One time I was scuba diving at night off of Grand Cayman with a group of friends. We were in fairly shallow water (maybe forty feet), kind of down in a canyon, when we heard rumbling and saw lights shining over the ridge. I didn't think much of it because we were in an area with a fair amount of boat traffic, and I knew we were deep enough to be in no danger from boats zipping by overhead. Then suddenly, a little submarine zoomed over the canyon rim and nearly mowed us down. Yeesh! Who knew you had be on the watch for deadly submarines?

During a spectacular meteor shower, I was standing out my yard at around 3 a.m., simply amazed by the light show going on all around. There were so many meteors that I stopped counting at 100, and they looked like they were falling so close that I kept expecting to hear explosions on impact.  Then I heard a loud snort behind me (ACK!!) and whirled around to see a magnificent buck standing only a few feet away, starlight gleaming off his incredible rack of antlers, his breath steaming in the cold air. 

I can never see meteors now without thinking about the "magic buck" I encountered that night.
  

Those are just a few of the weird and wonderful encounters I've experienced in my lifetime. How about you?

When I was in high school, we all took aptitude tests that were supposed to reveal what we were best suited to do in life and thus give us guidance for our paths after graduation. When the results came back, most students felt that they were on the right path in life on the way to becoming a doctor or a teacher or whatever they wanted to be. And we could see how the recommended careers matched the personality that we knew. Most results were along the same line, like "Jane Doe should be A) a Science Teacher or B) a Medical Technologist."

As I answered the questions, I tried to be painfully honest, because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do in life and I was desperate for advice. The results of my aptitude test indicated that "Pamela should be A) a Forest Ranger or B) a Movie Director. I laughed out loud. How was this meant to be a form of guidance? It seemed more like a confirmation of multiple personality disorder.

I'd always loved the outdoors, so the Forest Ranger path seemed more appealing, but at the time, most women in the park service or forest service were clerks, not rangers, and at five feet tall, I'm not exactly a hefty backwoods type. I loved movies, too, but I was a high school kid in Oklahoma, which is not known for its thick forests or its movie industry. So I went on to college, to become many things: a geologic research technician, a freelance drafter, a translator, a technical writer, a multimedia editor, a private investigator, and an author. (Multiple personality disorder confirmed.)

But now that I'm a fiction author, I find these two recommended directions oddly prescient. The protagonist of my new Summer Westin mystery series feels more at home in the wilderness than in the big city. When I'm not sitting at my computer, I'm often hiking, kayaking, snowshoeing, or scuba diving. While working in multimedia, I studied screenwriting and that has greatly affected my novels. And being a fiction author is a LOT like being a director, isn't it? We control the scenes and the dialog, and most of the time we can keep our actors in line.

Have you ever taken an aptitude test? Were the results accurate? How did they impact your life?

Some acquaintances consider me a skinflint because I don't spend money on a lot of the same things they do. They know I'm not poor. I have money in the bank, but as a self-employed investigator and author, my income is variable and the future is always uncertain. I don't want to spend my retirement living in a cardboard box down by the railroad tracks.
 
So I try to make thoughtful choices about my spending. I save my money for the things I truly want to do, like making my third trip to Africa. (I even wrote a little book about how to decide what's most important to you and stop spending money on things you don't care about.)

I decided long ago that I value experiences, especially adventures, more than possessions. So I don't have a flat screen TV (unbelievable, right?) or a smart phone or the coolest clothes, but I am rich in memories. I have been to some incredible places and done some amazing things. I am not bogged down by debt.

I spend my money traveling, hiking, snow shoeing, kayaking, and scuba diving. I have a small fortune invested in all the necessary gear. (You should see my garage!) That's my contribution to the consumer economy. The malls would all be ghost towns if they depended on me as a customer.

I'm a great believer in everyone pursuing their passions in life. For you, that could mean following a sports team, wearing the latest fashions, or getting your child into a private school. But unless you have a fabulous income, you may need to bypass daily distractions and focus on what you really want.

For me, that means that when friends ask why I don't join them at an expensive restaurant or buy that new sweater or go to that concert, I say, "I'd rather go to Africa."    

My flight leaves in November.
   
What is your passion? What are your dreams?

And what are your plans to get there?

Perhaps because I'm a fairly small human, I have always been amazed by the miniature life that surrounds us. As a child, I collected bugs. I wanted them to live in little circus tents under my bed. They had other ideas about places they wanted to live. Oh well, I had the fun of tracking them down all over again.

As a scuba diver, I'm naturally impressed by huge sharks and barracudas. (That's called the instinct of self preservation!) But the creatures that astound me are the tiny ones, like the Peterson cleaning shrimp here at left, no more than an inch long and nearly translucent underwater.

Other miniscule marine favorites of mine are nudibranchs (sea slugs). Most are less than a couple of inches long, but they come with frills and horns and ruffles, and in every color under the sun. They are the butterflies of the sea.

I love all the teensy creatures that surround me on dry ground, too. Who could not be impressed by a hummingbird? The hardy local Anna's hummers come to my feeder even in blizzards. I'd be happy if I were half as tough as they are.

And yes, I'm still impressed by bugs, especially oddly shaped beetles and stick insects and dragonflies and moths that are perfectly camouflaged against wood.

Dramas play out around us every day, but we usually don't even notice because they take place in miniature worlds. When we take the time to notice and appreciate the little things, our own human worlds become larger and richer, too.

I recently spent a week camping on Half Moon Caye, a small island about 50 miles east of mainland Belize. It's a bird sanctuary (mainly red footed boobies and frigate birds) and a World Heritage Site, not too far from another World Heritage Site, the famous Blue Hole.

It was wonderful to unplug and enjoy a world without computers or phones and mostly without electricity (there was generator power for a few hours) for a whole week.

We kayaked, snorkeled, lounged in hammocks, and went scuba diving. It would have been a perfect experience, except that when we walked on the white sand beaches or snorkeled among the coral outcroppings, we inevitably encountered plastic. Plastic bags floating in the water, plastic bottle caps amid the vegetation, plastic rings that hold on bottle caps and hold six-packs together. Plastic toys in the sand.

You can't get away from plastic, no matter how far away you go. It's depressing. What's a nature lover like me to do? You can choose to use cloth bags but you can't get away from plastic packaging in stores these days.

At home, I try to do several things to cut down on my guilt. I use cloth bags for shopping most of the time. When I do end up with a plastic bag, I reuse it until it develops holes, and then I stuff it in the bins at grocery stores and pray that the store actually recycles all those bags.

I pick up all those blasted plastic pellets that the neighborhood boys (who are apparently terrorists in training) shoot out of their fake machine guns. But after I've collected them, I still need to dispose of them. Those brightly colored little round pellets are the perfect size to zip down the storm sewers and wash out to the streams and eventually to the sea, the perfect size for birds and fish to gobble down, believing they are fish eggs. I so wish those pellets were illegal to manufacture. I wish all non-recyclable, non-biodegradable items were illegal to manufacture.

I do have a lot of plastic in my kitchen, because I am a big consumer of leftovers and I need to store them. I wash and dry my plastic zip-lock baggies and reuse them whenever possible. If a grocery item comes in a plastic container with a lid, I wash and reuse that too, whenever possible. My family tends to think it's because I'm cheap, but saving money is only a side benefit: I'm trying to keep as much plastic as possible out of the waste stream. I use aluminum foil when I can, because I can recycle that in my town.

I know that some companies are marketing biodegradable "plastic" items made of corn and potato starch. I recently read that burning plastic for energy may be our salvation in the future; it does come from petroleum, after all.

I hope the solution arrives soon. We are all part of the problem now, but we can all be part of the solution tomorrow.

I dream of a day when fish and birds and sea turtles don't die from eating plastic. I dream of walking on pristine white sand beaches and swimming in an ocean that is clean and healthy.

Everyone who finds out that I am a private investigator as well as an author asks me two things:

1. Is the work fun?
2. What do you do as a PI?

You might be surprised by the range of activities a PI carries out in any given year. Some investigators specialize in only one or two areas, but most of us are generalists who undertake almost any worthwhile job that comes along. At Sirius Investigations (http://siriusinvestigations.com), my business partner Molly Monahan and I do all of the following:

• Assist attorneys in preparing court cases. In civil cases, we might work for either side. In criminal cases, PIs almost always work for the defense. (The police have their own investigators on staff; they are called detectives.) We locate participants, document alleged crime scenes, and interview witnesses. In short, we do anything that’s needed for the case. And by the way, it’s our job to be impartial, not to advocate for any side. Sometimes we end up delivering bad news about witnesses or evidence to our attorney clients; it’s the attorney’s job to decide what to do with the court case.
• Child custody cases, where we determine who is actually caring for the children and if they are in a safe and healthy environment.
• Cases of business fraud, where we document shady behavior such as secret meetings with competitors and sales of “exclusive” franchises to multiple buyers in the same areas.
• Insurance fraud cases, where we sleuth out the “disabled” who claim they are too physically injured to work but can still miraculously go snowboarding or load cases of beer into their trucks.
• Counterfeit merchandise or stolen merchandise cases, where we often pose as buyers to document the transactions and get the physical evidence.
• Locations of individuals for a multitude of reasons, often happy reasons like inheritance or long-lost friends or relatives. We always check out the client carefully in locate cases, because we do not want to facilitate a stalker; and while we are happy to pass on the client’s contact information and relay any message back, we will not deliver the located person’s contact information to the client without permission from the located person.
• Workplace investigations, where we do our best to document internal theft, lack of security, or harassment issues within companies.
• Difficult process service, where the individual to be served court papers has been evading normal service. I won’t reveal our secrets here, but my partner Molly is a positive wizard at serving nearly anyone.
• Deal with paranoid schizophrenics. Sadly, some potential clients who call us for help soon reveal themselves to be mentally ill and are usually off their medications. In these cases, we try to reassure them that government agents are not camped out in their back yards, aliens are not beaming x-rays at their heads, and/or their neighbors are not breaking into their apartments at all hours of the day and night. We recognize that these individuals are truly frightened. We also try to find a relative, medical professional, or appropriate social service to help get the person back into proper care.
• And yes, we do occasionally surveil suspected cheating spouses and domestic partners, but only in cases where there is no history whatsoever of violence or threats between the two parties. Just like locates, we carefully check out the client because we do not want to facilitate a stalker or promote aggression. Some of these cases have to do with divorcing spouses suspecting the other of hiding assets prior to a divorce being finalized. And I’m happy to report that in many cases, we find the person in question to be innocent of the accusation.

Unlike PIs on television, in real life private investigators have no special powers. We cannot legally break into buildings, trespass on private property (except in certain cases of process serving), or threaten or intimidate anyone, and we certainly don’t run around shooting guns, although some PIs carry weapons for protection. In general, we have to be even more careful than the average citizen not to break any laws, because we are more likely to be sued or prosecuted for any violations.

Is investigation work fun? Well, no, not generally speaking, unless you consider reading endless documents, writing reports, and sitting in a cold car for hours on end to be a real hoot.

Is it dangerous? Yes, sometimes it can be a little creepy, but a smart investigator always has a cell phone handy and meets shady characters in coffee shops, not in dark alleys.

Is it interesting? Most of the time, yes. Even if I don’t care about the outcome of a case, I always meet colorful characters along the way. Investigation work is a great sideline to my other job and true avocation: mystery author.

And I do mean learn anything. Because you never know when you're going to need a skill or an esoteric bit of knowledge. The knowledge element is especially true for novelists and private investigators like me because all those pieces of trivia come in handy when you're inventing a story. But an eclectic skill set is equally valuable in this age of job uncertainty where you never know where you'll be working next year.

I come from a long line of do-it-yourselfers (farmers), so I had a big head start. As a kid, I learned to sew and cook, as well as how to build all kinds of things. My parents most often said, "I won't do it for you, but I'll show you how." Bless them; I'm much more self-sufficient than most people.

I have had various odd occasions where I became a local hero by using skills I'd learned previously. One of the oddest was in Kenya when my group's Land Rover got a flat tire. A herd of Cape Buffalo was closing in on us and the driver didn't know how to work the jack. Cape Buffalo are not tame cows; they are well known for charging and killing people. The driver and other passengers were starting to freak out as the herd came nearer, their eyes getting wilder and wilder.

I didn't want to embarrass the poor driver, but I finally shoved him out of the way and changed the tire in record time. You see, when I was in college I was so poor that to pass Oklahoma's safety check each year, I borrowed a friend's tires. Add up the number of tire changes that involves and you'll see why I could compete in an Olympic tire-changing event. When we got back to our research compound in Kenya, the driver ran around pointing to me and telling everyone who would listen, "This is a valuable woman."

See? Expert tire-changing, who would have thunk it could be so handy?

I once landed a job in a big office because I knew how to fix the copier when nobody else did. (That's because I once asked a service guy to show me what he was doing because I was tired of having the dang things jammed all the time.)

My resume was picked out of the stack for a geologic research job because I spoke Spanish and French (learned in college). While working in the geology lab, I also took advantage of an offer to learn drafting. I was also trained in industrial first aid, because the place had a lot of rock saws and drills and a chemical stockpile that any terrorist would be thrilled to get his hands on.

I later got a job at a mining equipment company because I knew geologic terms, could draw blueprints of conveyor belts (ugh), and spoke Spanish and French. I was glad I didn't have to fix the copier or change any tires.

Later I did freelance drafting, drawing mechanical systems, blueprints for buildings, and electrical systems. When I studied to be a PI, I was one of the few students in my class who knew how make drawings to scale.

When my friend broke her wrist when we were out hiking, I cut up a water bottle to splint it and made a sling from a bandana (that first industrial first aid class from the geology job kicking in).

On a technical writing job, I learned more about cardboard manufacturing than any sane person should know. I could talk to the folks on the factory floor because I had the previous experience doing drafting for all sorts of environments. I'm still trying to figure out how to use my cardboard expertise--maybe I'll write a mystery about death in a box factory.

I know I'm not the only the one who has these experiences; we all learn as we move through life. What bits of knowledge have served you well in an unexpected way?

_I write mysteries and romances, but don't think Agatha Christie and tea parties when you read that. I'm a pretty active gal, so most of my books contain a fair amount of action scenes, and I get more compliments on those pages than on any others, so I must be doing something right. Since I have learned so much from other generous authors on the web, I thought I'd pass along these four basic tips.

To write gripping action scenes that will keep the reader glued to the pages:

1. Write in tight point of view. That means getting into your character's head and simply inserting her or his thoughts instead of including "she thought" or "he wondered." Here's an example from Endangered, the first in my Summer Westin mystery series:

2. As the pace increases, use shorter sentences. This is how we all think. When we get excited at an athletic event, for example, we yell "Go! Go!" not "Run as hard as you can; you can do it!" Here's an example from Call of the Jaguar, my romantic adventure novella. Note how the sentences get shorter and we move more into Rachel's thoughts (tight POV):   

_The plane's landing gear connected with the roof of the hut and ripped through the thatch, dipping the plane's nose down. The seatbelt cut into Rachel's chest. Furrows of plowed earth loomed large through the windshield. Her knapsack leapt off the floor and hurtled toward her face. The hell with self-control. She screamed.

3. Choose the right verb. Take the time to find exactly the right word to express the action you envision. Which has more impact: "He ran quickly across the field" or "He raced across the field"?

4. Finally, think of each scene as it would look in a movie, and make sure you're describing all the necessary elements so the reader can picture it.  Here's a scene from my mystery, The Only Witness - can you see it in your mind's eye?

A low grunt sounded from the woods behind her and Brittany stopped and pivoted to look back. Nothing but trees, as far as she could see. She walked another fifty steps before she heard another sound...
"Do you hear that?" she asked Grace.
The noise was a rhythmic rumbling wheeze, like a racehorse running for the finish line. Something big, running hard. Getting louder. Coming their way.

There are all my tips. Now go! Race off and write action scenes that will leave the reader breathless.