Twenty-Two Years and Counting

 

BONES FROM THE SKY is now available

 BONES FROM THE SKY, A Raine Stockton Mystery, was published on September 24, 2026.  That makes 18 books in the Raine Stockton series.  That in itself is astonishing. How are people still reading these books?  How can they still be wanting more?

But what really threw me for a loop was when I realized I had been writing this same series for 22 years.  22 years with the same characters, the same small town, the same dog.  If you had asked me before I did the math, I would have sworn the series was no more than ten years old, and I was proud it had hung on that long.  But now I have people telling me they read the first book in high school!  Surely I was in high school when I wrote the first book?  But I guess not. 

For days after the 22-years realization I walked around in a state of shock, wondering how this could have happened. How could time have gotten away from me in such a way?  More importantly, how could I have gotten so old?

But here's the thing,  I couldn't possibly have gotten old because my characters had barely aged at all.  Time hadn't gotten away from me.  It had virtually stood still. 

There is a real danger in writing about children or dogs and it's this: they tend to age out.  Dogs, in particular, have a relatively short lifespan, and I realized early on that unless I wanted the series to end in tragedy I was going to have to do something about that.  I came up with a very simple formula. Each book, published once a year, would represent only one month's passage of time for my characters. Raine, who started out in her thirties, is still in her thirties (unlike myself!).  Cisco started out as a two-year-old golden retriever and is now only four, with a long full life to look forward to ahead of him.  Melanie was nine when we first met her, she's now eleven.

Of course, this has required a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of readers over the years.  When the series started out, the little town of Hansonville, North Carolina was just getting used to cable television; now they're all brandishing smart phones.  Raine and Cisco were the go-to for every search-and-rescue case in the county back in the day; now they're competing with drones. Facial recognition software and automated license plate readers are just two of the advances in law enforcement over the past twenty years, and when you write mysteries, you can't ignore that kind of thing. Clearly, none of these changes took place over the two years that my characters aged. My challenge was to make the rest of the story so compelling that little things like that didn't matter.

One of the ways I tried to do that was to make sure that Raine, while she didn't age in a linear fashion, continued to grow and change with every book. She carried the scars of previous traumas with her, she allowed experience to teach her, and she adapted to every new challenge. With each book she grew a little.  When one reader went back to re-read an early book in the series, she remarked in surprise, "Raine used to be a lot meaner!" And I thought, Good. That means she's getting better.

A character in a series, just like a character in a book, should have an over-arcing goal, a journey to complete, a mission to accomplish.   Someone once asked me why Raine keeps sabotaging her personal life. My answer was that she has to learn to trust someone besides herself. And when she does, the series will be over.

Well, it's been twenty-two years, my friend, and you'd think by now she would have learned her lesson.  Maybe, with Bones in the Sky, she has. Or maybe she just thinks she has. Either way, I hope it doesn't take another twenty-two years to find out...and if it does, that you will stay on the ride with me.