Where I Live Now—AKA What I’ve Learned on Facebook

By Kay Kendall

If you watched me go about my life these days, you would think you know where I live. You would say, why, that’s a snap to answer. She lives in Texas. Look, there’s her house on that Houston street. You can look her up on Google Maps.

Yet, strangely, you would only be partly right. In fact, only one-third correct in your answer—to be exact.

Sure, there’s my normal life and it’s lived in Houston. But to that you must add the year 1969. Living in that year makes up the second third of my life these days. That’s when my work-in-progress takes place, Rainy Day Women. I’ve been living in that world for more than a year now. Moreover, for two years prior, I was living in 1968—the year when my debut mystery is set, Desolation Row. Hence, I have been spending lots of time in the late 1960s for many years now. In fact, I’m going deeper and deeper into the detailed past the longer I write about the late sixties.

(I have a vivid imagination and a good head for detail. I’m surprised when people don’t remember things as I do. Some get downright anachronistic, wanting to put cell phones into a plot where they don’t belong. Boy oh boy, can technology change a story—or ruin it if it’s done incorrectly. But, I digress.)

The third and final piece of my life is now lived online. I’m a gregarious person and as my career as an author has solidified, I’m staying put in my writer’s lair more often than I used to. My husband and I are living a quiet life. So, to reach out to other people, I go to social media several times a day. The majority of that time is spent on Facebook.

Kay says CHEERS to Facebook!

Many of my Facebook friends are boomers, as I am. I can start up a thread on a hot topic from the 1960s or 1970s and watch folks chime in. Then they share my head space with me. I enjoy that a lot. This week’s subject has been what people remember about the Watergate saga. Some of the answers have fascinated me. One man had a neighbor who was one of the good guys attached to the Watergate investigation. Another woman worked for a polling firm in Washington DC that compiled data for the infamous Committee to Re-Elect the President (later nicknamed CREEP, no kidding). She recalled going to the airport to pick up documents and delivering them to the office of the special prosecutor for Watergate...and found it a fascinating time to live in the national’s capital. Since I’m a history buff, I would have loved that too, although I’m sure many would disagree.

The great crime writer Tim Hallinan began a thread on his Facebook page a few days ago that asked his friends to nominate their favorite rock albums. Well! You can imagine how cantankerous that got, with many responders irate that their faves didn’t win. My pick did not win—it was a Dylan album, naturally—Blonde on Blonde. I was not irate, however, since I won a free copy of one of Tim’s mysteries. Since the only other thing I’ve ever won in my life was a flashlight, I was thrilled beyond words.

On Facebook I’m drawn to historical detail, interesting trivia, and those silly BuzzFeed quizzes. On the most recent quizzes, I scored ten out of ten for world history, found out that the classic novel that best fits my personality is Pride and Prejudice, and was told that among Jungian archetypes I turn out to be the sage.

Two fascinating posts hooked my interest over the past week. First, one FB friend had discovered a parakeet in her backyard. She wasn’t able to find the owner but did turn up a neighbor who had also lost her parakeet. The neighbor agreed to take the bird, vowing to search for the real owner and if s/he wasn’t found, then she would adopt the lost bird. People commented on this, explaining similar situations. This was fun and interesting. Sadly, a second Facebook friend lamented that her sister who suffered from angina had died. The sister had forgotten to carry her nitroglycerine tablets. When she had an attack, no one could revive her. That true story devastated me.

I guess I’ve always lived in my head. As an only child, I read a lot, as many potential writers do. I just didn’t know that at the time. First it was horse stories and fairy tales, then Nancy Drew and Little Women, followed by the grand Jane Eyre. After that it was more and more classics. Someone told me I should read all the classic novels in order to be prepare for my SAT tests, and boy, did I go at it. At sixteen I was far too young to appreciate the finer points of Anna Karenina, but I could tell you the plot of it and dozens of other great novels.

Last summer I went back to Kansas for my high school reunion. Along with a few dear, long-time friends I trotted around our old high school building and reminisced. Pal Nancy could tell each of us where our lockers had been and where our homerooms were. Most of us had no idea, although I was more clueless than most. I’m guessing I was lost in my head back then too. Nancy, however, must have been fully present in order to recall all that detail of her life in high school.  

Do you live in your head a lot, like me? Do you enjoy Facebook? Do you have another favorite among the social media types? Or do you loathe the whole scene?

That’s all I’ve got for now, my friends. I feel the comments on Facebook tugging at me. Excuse me while I succumb to their sirens’ song.

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 Kay Kendall set her debut novel, Desolation Row—An Austin Starr Mystery, in 1968. The Vietnam War backdrop illuminates reluctant courage and desperate love when a world teeters on chaos. Kay’s next mystery, Rainy Day Women (2015) finds amateur sleuth Austin Starr trying to prove a friend didn’t murder women’s liberation activists in Seattle and Vancouver. 

Kay is an award-winning international PR executive living in Texas with her Canadian husband, three house rabbits, and spaniel Wills. Terribly allergic to bunnies, she loves them anyway! Her book titles show she’s a Bob Dylan buff too.

No Children Allowed

Timothy Hallinan has written ten published novels under his own name and several others under pseudonyms. BREATHING WATER, which will be released by William Morrow on August 18, is the third in his new series of Bangkok thrillers that feature an American "rough-travel" writer named Poke (short for Philip) Rafferty and the family he has assembled in Bangkok -- his wife, Rose a former bar girl in the notorious Patpong district, and their adopted daughter, Miaow, who was a street child until they took her in. In BREATHING WATER, she's ten going on 28. The series has received excellent reviews, including some of the elusive trade review "stars," and the first two books, A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART and THE FOURTH WATCHER, made Ten Best lists both here and abroad. Additionally, all three books have been singled out by the country's independent bookstores as either monthly picks or notables. Hallinan, who also wrote a six-book series Los Angeles PI series in the 1990s, has lived part of each year in Bangkok since 1981.


It wasn't until I came to Internet mystery discussion groups that I realized that a large percentage of readers want to read series in order. It had always been my assumption that one goal of writing a series should be to write individual volumes that can be picked up in any sequence. Book Number Three should be a terrific read even for someone who's never opened Books One and Two.

My first series of novels, featuring the uselessly overeducated LA private eye Simeon Grist, could be read frontward, backward, or sideways. A reader could have picked up Number Four without even knowing there was a Number One.

There are good reasons for series books to work as stand-alones. Let's say you're browsing and you pick up a book by a new author. You flip through it and think it might be worth a few hours. And then you realize that it's the fourth in a series, and you ask yourself, “Am I going to have to read three other books just to get to this one?” That's enough all by itself to stop some people, but suppose it's not suppose you look for the first three titles in the series and they're . . . not . . . there. Guess which book, out of the four you're toting, is going to wind up back on the shelf. (By the way, this is the main reason many booksellers don't like series.)

I'm hoping the information that follows will help some poor writer who is thinking about creating a series and would like the books in his or her series to be true stand-alones. A series that booksellers will love.

If so, here is one thing you do not, under any circumstances, want to do.

Do NOT include a child among your primary continuing characters.

When I decided to write a series of Bangkok thrillers about an expatriate American rough-travel writer named Poke Rafferty, I thought it would give him a deeper relationship with Thailand if he'd created a family there. I also thought that doing that would get me away from the lone-wolf private eye stereotype. Within about 30 seconds of making that decision, I realized that Poke came from a broken family, that he had been scarred by his father's abandonment, and that the family he has pulled together in Thailand is the most important thing in his life.

It's an unorthodox family, to be sure. His wife, Rose, is a former dancer in Bangkok's notorious Patpong red-light district. (Yes, “dancer” is a euphemism.) Their daughter, Miaow, was adopted off the Bangkok streets, where she'd been struggling for a living since she was three or four. She's eight or nine (no one knows for sure) in the first book, A Nail Through the Heart, and she's going on eleven in the third and newest one, Breathing Water.

And there's the problem. Those particular years would be a huge amount of time in any kid's life, but when she's gone from being a semi-literate street child to being a desperately wanna-be middle class kid in a school where everyone is fancier, richer, and more sophisticated than she is, it's a geological era. And because the family is at the heart of all the novels – I think of the thriller stories as rites of passage for the family – the installments in Miaow's development comprise a continuing story, and it can really only be read in one order.

In fact, Miaow's growth and development comprise the most important element in the family's life. In the first book, she's barely off the streets, still learning to read and trying to get used to living eight stories above the ground instead of in doorways and abandoned buildings. By the time of the current one, BREATHING WATER, she's at the top of her class in international school and vaguely ashamed of ever having lived on the street. In the one I'm writing now, THE ROCKS, she's playing Ariel in a school production of Shakespeare's “The Tempest.” And Rose and Poke, as her adoptive mother and father, are deeply involved in all of it.

If I'd realized then the impact Miaow would have on the series, I would have gone ahead and written her anyway, because she's more fun to write than anyone else in the books.

Tim Hallinan