Ken Goddard's
Fiction-Writing Web Site
A Brief Personal History ...
By way of introduction, I'm one of those people who thought he knew what he wanted to do fairly early in life ... which was to be a biochemist.
In retrospect, I have no idea why.
As it turned out, after graduating from Grossmont (CA) High School, and spending an interesting year as part of the first freshman class at U.C.S.D., I transferred to the University of California Riverside campus and finally did manage to acquire a B.S. degree in biochemistry.
But thanks to a fateful judo accident (not to mention an ultimately successful 2-year effort to talk Gena, my best friend, into getting married after I graduated, which meant I really needed a full-time job), I ended up being hired as a deputy sheriff/criminalist with the Riverside County (CA) Sheriff's Department.
And that, in turn, led to night school in
Los Angeles, a transfer to
the San Bernardino County (CA) Sheriff's Department Crime Lab, a
beautiful and delightful little daughter, a MS degree in criminalistics,
an opportunity to set up a Scientific Investigation Bureau for the
Huntington Beach (CA) Police Department, 12 years of homicide/rape/robbery/ burglary crime scenes ... and then an
opportunity to set up the first full service crime lab for national and
international wildlife law enforcement in (of all places) Ashland,
Oregon.
And along the way, I managed to write and sell a fiction book.
The book was titled BALEFIRE, the story of a professional terrorist sent
out to destroy the city of Huntington Beach, CA (where, as you may
recall from an earlier paragraph, I ran the PD crime lab), as a
demonstration against the coming 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. To
my utter amazement --- and realistically, thanks to Bantam's marketing
---
the book got on the NY list for a couple of weeks, and all of a
sudden I was a real, honest-to-goodness fiction author.
Just like I was a real, honest-to-goodness cop and forensic scientist.
Yeah, right.
You see, for all these many years, my cop buddies have been cheerfully assuring me that I'm too much of a scientist to be a good cop. And my scientist buddies have been equally persistent in assuring me that I'm too much of a cop to be a good scientist.
So much for the
buddy system.
But in the process of trying to figure what I was supposed to be doing
with my professional career, such as it was, I discovered that working
crime scenes turned out to be wonderful training for 'getting into the
skins' of fiction characters. And forensic science offers a ready source
of gory technical tricks and twists to add to the plots. And it really isn't all that hard to write a fiction book. All you have
to do is come up with a reasonable plot & set of characters, find 600
hours or so of free time, force yourself to sit down in front of the
computer on a regular basis ... and then get lucky enough to find a
cooperative publisher.
So I did the predictable husband/author thing, and managed to talk Gena
into cooking most of the meals, and cleaning most of the house, and
shooing most of the horses and cows back into the pasture ... proceeded
to write a few more 'thriller' novels [THE ALCHEMIST, DIGGER (which I
rewrote as CHEATER), PREY, WILDFIRE, DOUBLE BLIND, FIRST EVIDENCE,
OUTER PERIMETER, IN EXTREMIS and FINAL DISPOSITION]
... and recently finished my latest one, CHIMERA.
Actually, it really wasn't quite as easy as I described. The hard part
was convincing Gena that writing these books would make us moderately
rich, which would mean --- in my version of the fantasy --- that we
could travel to far distant lands to research more books and she could
hire someone to go find our horses and cows. I figured she might buy that
idea because, as we all know, forensic scientists are sworn to tell the
truth.
Unfortunately, my dear wife is 1) a forensic scientist herself, and 2)
someone who recognizes bull???? when she sees/hears it (which may have
something to do with all that cow-shooing expertise). So I had to
promise to share the cooking, cleaning and cow-shooing duties, and help
weed her gardens in between book projects ... which has
turned out to be a pretty continuous project. Never realized that
a couple of acres could grow so many weeds.
Gotta get going on that next book!