Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Sherry Knowlton's passes the "Alexa test" with spirit bears & rogue hippos

HALLIE EPHRON: Sherry Knowlton writes a classic thriller heroine, Alexa Williams, who pushes boundaries and thrives on danger, all the while remaining utterly human. The Midwest Book Review praised her newest book, DEAD OF WINTER, for its "beautiful prose" and "intriguing, suspenseful story which grabs the attention of the reader from the very first page."

For Sherry, that old saw, "write what you know," clearly doesn't apply. And yet...

SHERRY KNOWLTON: The heroine in my Alexa Williams suspense series is a young attorney who keeps finding dead bodies and dangerous situations. In the newest book, Dead of Winter, Alexa becomes the target of an angry mob, has to fight for her life using hand-to-hand combat, and confronts terrorists.

She’s certainly not an invincible superhero type. Quite the opposite; Alexa often second-guesses her own capabilities. She’s a bit of a crusader who has a dogged determination to do what’s right.  The downside is that sometimes she gets carried away and that gets her into trouble. At her core, Alexa is a very brave woman.

As I was editing Dead of Winter, I thought about the challenges I have this fictional heroine face in book after book and wondered: how would I react if I encountered one of the hurdles I throw at Alexa? The closest I’ve come to a test of courage in real life is in encounters with wild animals.

This past autumn, my husband and I took a small boat adventure to see Spirit Bears. These beautiful white bears are found on three islands off the coast of British Columbia.  We spent a day on one of
the islands, hoping to catch a glimpse of a Spirit Bear. I assumed we’d observe the bears from a viewing platform.  Not quite.

I was perched on a fallen tree in a creek bed when the Spirit Bear came meandering down the stream.  Our guides had told us to sit still and not panic if a bear approached.  Easier said than done when a several hundred-pound bear stops twenty feet away and looks you in the eye. 

So, I sat there in a mixture of awe and terror, snapping photos and hoping she didn’t decide to investigate this woman with the camera.  But, she seemed more interested in fishing for salmon than me. Soon, the bear ambled away, and my heart rate returned to normal.

Did I meet Alexa’s standard of remaining cool in the face of danger?  Maybe. I followed instructions to remain still (meaning I didn’t jump up and run away screaming). And, being that close to a wild bear, one I traveled hundreds of miles to see, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The magic of seeing a Spirit Bear in the wild outweighed the fear.  When she left, I had tears in my eyes – not from fright but from wonder.

I was less sanguine in an earlier animal encounter.  My husband, our guide, Josef, and I were cruising by motorboat down a narrow channel in Botswana’s Okavango Delta when a rogue hippo rushed our boat. He swam straight at us, stopping just a few feet away to open his mouth in huge roar.

A note: Rogue hippos are solitary males cast out of the herd.  Living alone makes them ill-tempered and very dangerous.  Hippos kill more people in Africa each year than any other animal. 

When the animal continued to rush us, Josef raced the boat to the shallows, trying to make it harder for the hippo to flip the boat and attack us in the water.  He told my husband and me to get ready to dash to a nearby palm tree and climb it.  The gravity of our situation sank in when I weighed the odds of reaching that tree, chased by an enraged animal with the size and speed of a small car.

Just as we prepared to run, the hippo backed off.  The guide jammed the boat into gear and fled. As we rounded a bend in the channel, the hippo fell back and abandoned the chase.

Did I pass the Alexa test in the hippo encounter? Sort of. I was very scared and aware of my own physical limitations. If we’d been forced to leave the boat and run for that scrawny palm tree, good chance that the hippo would have flattened me. But, I didn’t scream, faint, cry or blubber. Instead, I channeled much of my fear into worry for my husband, who was taking photos each time the hippo leapt at us.

What did I learn from these experiences? Danger can appear in an instant.  There’s nothing to be gained by falling apart. The time to give into the shakes is after the situation has ended. Despite these lessons, I suspect I can still learn a lot more from Alexa.

Readers: Have you ever used information that you’ve read in a book to deal with an unexpected or dangerous situation?  Do you prefer kick-ass heroines?  Or would you rather read about women who show vulnerability?


ABOUT Dead of Winter
A lighthearted trip to test a new drone turns deadly for attorney Alexa Williams
and two close friends when they find a stranger’s bullet-riddled body in a remote field in
rural Pennsylvania. Next to the dead man is a note that declares: Allahu Akbar.

When a second man is executed near Harpers Ferry, Alexa’s old flame, Reese, becomes a suspect, leading her to question just how much he changed while working in Africa. Fear of Islamic terrorism spreads like wildfire through Alexa’s small town after a third murder. When police arrest the oldest son of her Syrian refugee clients, the family becomes the focus of mounting anti-Muslim rage, and a dangerous militia group turns its sights on Alexa.

One dark night in the dead of winter, Alexa discovers who is behind the murders and must race to stop an attack that could kill hundreds. If she fails, she could lose everyone she loves.

ABOUT Sherry KnowltonSherry Knowlton is the author of the Alexa Williams series of suspense novels: Dead of Autumn, Dead of Summer, Dead of Spring and the most recent release, Dead of Winter.  Passionate about books at an early age, she was that kid who would sneak a flashlight to bed at night so she could read beneath the covers. All the local librarians knew her by name. When not writing the next Alexa Williams thriller, Knowlton works on her health care consulting business or travels around the world. She and her husband live in the mountains of South Central Pennsylvania.
www.sherryknowlton.com
@sherry.knowltonbooks (Facebook)
@KnowltonSBooks (Twitter)

45 comments:

  1. Sherry, I doubt that I’d have been as calm as you were if either the bear or the hippo had confronted me, but it must have been amazing to see those animals up close.

    I don’t necessarily prefer heroines to be either kick-ass or vulnerable; I’ve certainly enjoyed stories about both types of women. I’m looking forward to reading Alexa’s newest adventure . . . .

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    1. I believe people often find more strength than they imagine in tense or dangerous situations,Joan. You might be surprised. By the way, I'm not always calm. I freak out when a mouse gets into the house!!

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    2. Sherry you ARE an adventurous traveler! Not sure I'd take either of those trips. But I can see how useful it is to have experienced raw terror be when you're writing it.

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  2. Sherry, I doubt that I would be all that calm when confronted by those animals in the wild experiences you wrote about. Oddly enough, if I was to choose to have some kind of similar experience, it would be swimming with dolphins.

    As for whether I prefer heroines to be kick-ass or vulnerable, can't they be both? Or do they have to be one or the other? I like those bad-ass females that find their ways to being spies, assassins or some other kind of specialist in dealing out violence. But in their own way the women who show more vulnerability (usually in cozy mysteries) are bad-ass in their own way as well.

    Of course, I don't like when showing vulnerability means the characters are walked all over by the other characters in the story.

    And I now have to add your books to my want list.

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    1. Thanks for your interest in my books, Jay. You should absolutely experience swimming with dolphins if you ever get a chance. I did that once in Mexico, and it was amazing. I agree that strong heroines with some vulnerability are usually the most interesting -- and the most realistic.

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    2. Jay, I like heroic characters who are real and flawed and complicated, too. If it's so easy for them to be tough and heroic, then it's, well, too easy.

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  3. Wow. I was close to hippos in a river in Niger once - but they weren't rogue! Sherry, are the Spirit Bears polar bears or another kind?

    I'm not sure my own protagonists are kick ass, but they are brave and resourceful when they're faced with real danger (at least once a book, LOL).

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    1. The Spirit Bears are actually a species of Black Bear called the Kermode bear. It's my understanding that the mother can be the traditional black but have a cub that's white. We also saw several black bears when we were on the island of the Spirit Bears. The Spirit Bear's coat is more of a champagne color as opposed to the Polar Bear's purer white coat.

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    2. Sherry, how do they compare in size to polar bears? (Our black bears are considerably smaller.)

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    3. Spirit Bears are considerably smaller than polar bears -- although the bears we saw in British Columbia (both Spirit and Black) were much larger than the black bears we see in here in Pennsylvania -- almost Grizzly size, but not quite. I've also been to Hudson Bay in Canada to see polar bears up close. And, they are simply huge!! On their back legs, standing, they can be 10 feet tall. I found one of the most startling things about polar bears is the amount of ground they can cover in a few strides -- just because they are enormous.

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  4. Sherry - the book sounds fantastic, can't wait to read. I've got to love that your husband was still taking pictures during the hippo attack, which it seems you handled with extraordinary aplomb.

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  5. Yes. I'm thinking,"Oh, no. We're going to die." My husband is loving the great hippo close- ups!!! The picture above was one of the many he took during the incident.

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    1. Ha ha ha! This is making me think of the Darwin Awards - This one, for instance: May 2018, India || Driving home from a wedding, Prabhu Bhatara idled his car on the roadside to relieve himself in the woods. From a squatting position he spied an INJURED bear--and thought, 'Selfie!'

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    2. Someone should write a book about all the selfies-gone-wrong. As a cautionary tale.

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  6. Sherry, no way I would have remained calm in either of those situations. I was expecting to read that one or both of you survived after several surgeries!

    I’m pretty sure I would flunk any Alexa test!

    DebRo

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    1. One of the key reasons fiction exists is so we can "live" something exciting or exotic or dangerous without ever leaving our reading chair. It's fun to write about a character who is braver than I am.

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  7. Snakes, snapping turtles, and coyotes...and the neighborhood Shar pei who attacked my standard poodles. The poodles were bloodied but uninjured. My coyote encounter was the scariest: early spring, rural Cape Cod, the coyotes moving the pups out of the den. Big Daddy stood on a hill, fifty feet away. When I realized it wasn't a large dog, I tightened up the leashes on my mother's small dogs and headed toward home at a brisk pace.
    Hippos and bears! What next? Sharks or alligators? Looking forward to reading your new release.

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    1. Some Shar peis are more dangerous than they look. My one sister-in-law had a black Shar pei who was part dog, part demon. He bit my other sister-in-law in the posterior when she bent over to pick something up. Like your poodles, the sister-in-law was bigger than the Shar pei and survived, but dealt with a lot of pain for a while.

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  8. A rogue hippo!? A ROGUE HIPPO? OK, I think the closest I’ve ever gotten is Boston traffic. This is a wonderful essay, and incredibly inspirational. Let me think… And congratulations!

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    1. I can help attest to Boston traffic being akin to a rogue hippo. The traffic is so bad there, I refuse to drive into the city on my own unless a matter of national emergency. Or a Beth Hart concert which was the last time I drove into the city and that was more than 2 years ago.

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  9. I guess I have some pretty good raging fire and teargas stories from television reporter situations, but seriously, nothing like a rogue hippo. Seriously, I do think about this too, sometimes, what what I do in a war, say. Or in some dangerously confrontational situation with a person. I hope I don’t find out.

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    1. I've been back to Africa since the rogue hippo incident and have steered well clear of even the most placid looking hippos -- just to be safe. But, what would I do in a bad situation with a person or in a war? Unfortunately, people are generally more complex and more dangerous than wild animals. So, it's hard to predict how I would respond.

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  10. Spirit bears, what a beautiful animal, only 400 left in the world. Let's keep them away from trophy hunters. I think my most dangerous animal encounter involves snakes. The poisonous sea snakes were a concern while snorkeling in Okinawa. In Florida, I have to watch for cottonmouths and alligators swimming in the Hillsborough river. As far as I know the pythons are not in Tampa. A 16 footer was found about 30 miles to the east of my house.
    Unlike mammals, you cannot reason with a snake. The book that helps me with these critters is: Atlas of Amphibians and Reptiles in Florida. Kinda obvious. and it is online.

    As for my heroine? Unless this is a fantasy, I am looking for someone who learns what does work or not work for her over the course of a series.

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    1. Oh gosh, I hope I never need a snake identification guide. Biting ants got me in Costa Rica. Also cannot be reasoned with.

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  11. I prefer reading about your encounters with spirit bear and rogue hyppo than living them myself.
    The subject of your book is actual and interesting. My favorites héroïnes have vulnerabilities they can overcome when needed.
    I usually do what I want to do but I don't tend to seek danger.
    When afraid of something, I remember what I once heard in Beauty and the Beast TV series : Fear makes your ennemies more frightening than they are in reality. But it doesn't apply in the case of your hyppo.

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    1. That's a great quote from the Beauty and the Beast TV series. I watched that show religiously.

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    2. agreed. That hippo didn't need any help.

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  12. I have not encountered any real-life siutations like books (thank goodness). I think I would have been okay with the bear. Not sure about the hippo...

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  13. Wow, I have to say that my own travel plans have NEVER intentionally brought me that close to unfettered wildlife. I'm more the "let's sample the local food" type of tourist. As for my heroines, I have a hard time with the ones who accomplish all kinds of daring-do with nothing more than a MacGyveresk mentality.
    I agree with Jay. Your books need to go on my want list. Congratulations.

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    1. Thanks for the good wishes. While my husband and I enjoy wildlife-related trips, not all of our travel is to wild and remote places. We do our share of more sedate travel as well.

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  14. Wow! The hippo story had me on the edge of my seat! Yikes! I like kick-ass heroines who can show vulnerability when pushed. Alexa sounds exactly right for me. Can't wait to read Dead of Winter - brave and doggedly determined are qualities I enjoy in a sleuth. Congrats on the latest book, Sherry!

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  15. I hope I'm never in a situation where I'll need to use the information I've read in a book to get out safely. I'd rather just read about those incidents. Alexa sounds pretty awesome.

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    1. I agree that reading is a great way to travel without leaving the house.

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  16. Sherry, that must have been such a special experience to see the white bear up so close. The hippo experience is one I'm sure no one envies, except some of those extreme danger junkies. But, you're right in that there's nothing to be gained by falling apart. I remember one time when I was driving on a highway and passing a couple of vehicles. One of the vehicles didn't see me and started coming into my lane. I didn't panic, honked and carefully steered over some, and the truck got back in its lane. My friend with me said she couldn't believe I handled it so calmly, to which I replied that if I hadn't we might be dead.

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  17. I just watched a news story about someone caught in quicksand--the person was rescued, but I was so annoyed, because that they didn't say exactly how, or what the person should have done. (Besides not go into the quicksand in the first place.) What if we were in quicksand? It would have been the perfect moment for some pointers.

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    1. Yeah. In the movies, there's always someone around to throw the person a tree branch or a rope. But, what would you do if you were all alone and stepped into quicksand?

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  18. Isn't some book about this? Like--everything you need to know if terrible stuff happens?

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    1. I'm surprised there isn't one of those "For Dummies" books like "Not Becoming A Nominee For The Darwin Awards For Dummies".

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  19. I like it, Jay. Where Not to Take Selfies for Dummies could be another popular title.

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  20. Once in a while I have a good idea or two.

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