Terry Shames--Deep Dive

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We are always tickled to have our Jungle Red pal Terry Shames on the blog, and here she is with a terrific new book (and an absolutely stunning cover!)

Isn't that gorgeous? I'd dive right in!

Here's Terry!

TERRY SHAMES:  I’m so thrilled to be with the “Reds” again. It’s always engaging. Today I want to talk about serendipity and the amazing way it works for me as a writer.

Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way:

Several years ago when my husband and I were sailing in the Bahamas on our beloved Black Pearl catamaran, we had a side-adventure that had us riding in a dinghy, lost and fighting winds and currents. And oh yeah, the dinghy had a faulty motor that kept cutting out. Eventually things worked out, but that fraught adventure stayed with me. Not long after, I read an article about pirates in the vicinity of St. Vincent in the southern part of the Caribbean. Travelers were advised not to go there after the pirates murdered a couple in a particular heinous way in order to steal their boat. Add one more thing to the mix: I loved snorkeling, but a few years earlier had gotten certified as a diver—and discovered that I was terrified of diving.

Serendipity put all those things together. I wrote Perilous Waters, featuring a fearless, impulsive young woman, Jessie Madison, a dive instructor in the Bahamas. She gets into bad trouble when pirates board a boat that she is on with a casual date. The action starts from there and never lets up. Did I model Jessie on myself? Goodness no! I’m the opposite of fearless, and like I said I’m terrified of diving.

In order to understand why Jessie was in the Bahamas on short-term basis, I decided to make her a victim of her own impulsiveness. Almost done with FBI training, she made a big mistake and was kicked out. She went to the Bahamas to take stock of her life. Later, this lead to another convergence of events—serendipity. Keep reading!

At the time, I thought the Bahama book was a standalone. My agent, Kimberley, had a different take on it: “Oh, no, this is a series.”

What do you do when your agent says, “Write another one,” and you have no idea what to write? Jessie. Diver. Bahamas. No, I didn’t want her to stay in the Bahamas. Diver. Diver. Wait. Kicked out of FBI training? Hmm.

As serendipity would have it, about that time I ran across an article about the FBI dive team. Who knew there was even such a thing? USERT—the FBI’s Underwater Search and Evidence Response Team. A team sent all over the world to investigate evidence found underwater. This specialized FBI team gets called in for the most difficult underwater recovery cases.

As MORE serendipity would have it, I also read about Project Recover, a private team of divers that works with the U.S. military and families to recover bodies of missing American service members. One of their special projects is finding WWII airplanes and returning remains to families for burial.

So…what if USERT had been called in because divers with Project Recover found something strange when they were on a routine dive? Sounded like an interesting story. Now, all I had to do was figure out a way to get Jessie Madison on that USERT dive team. And because of coincidence or serendipity or magic—whatever you want to call it--the groundwork turns out to have been laid in the first book. Jessie had almost been ready to be inducted as an FBI agent. This being fiction, I managed to weasel her onto the team.

Now, I had the who and what (Jessie and the USERT team and an old WWII airplane) now all I had to do was think of the where the book would be set. I wanted it to be in a difficult dive area. Again, serendipity struck: On that same catamaran, in addition to the Bahamas, we had explored the Aeolian Islands, a string of small, volcanic islands north of Sicily. I looked up diving there and found that there is a spot that is considered such a difficult dive that very little information is given out about it to the public. They don’t want casual divers. PERFECT. That meant I could make up stuff about the area.

Once I had Jessie on site, I had to get into the details of what the diving would be like in such a difficult area. Oh, serendipity you amazing, free-floating genius! One of my friends is an experienced diver. She has been diving in volcanic areas, and could tell me all the perils of those dives—including the presence of deadly currents! But of course serendipity wasn’t about to let me end there! I found out that another friend whom I didn’t even know was a diver was a member of a body recovery dive team. These two people helped me make the underwater world come alive.

One more piece of serendipity? In the Bahamas, I had snorkeled at the site of a small plane that went down in the shallow waters off one of the islands. Even though I knew the pilot had gotten out safely, snorkeling over that underwater airplane was one of the spookiest things I’d ever seen. So describing Jessie’s emotions on seeing the downed World War II airplane in deep water was easy.

I’d love to hear from Red writers how serendipity has helped you make up stories and informed your writing. I think readers would love to know about that part of the “sausage-making.”

Terry Shames writes the Samuel Craddock small-town police procedural series and the Jessie Madison thriller series. She has won the Macavity Award, an RT Critics award, and has been short-listed for numerous other awards, including the Strand Critics Award. Terry lives in Los Angeles with her husband, her dog Monty, and Max the Cat. Their current boat is a 34-foot Catalina called Andiamo—“let’s go!” in Italian.

DEBS: Terry, I love that you are writing about a diver and are terrified of diving! Writing gets us out of our comfort zones, at least on the page.

I've had some wonderful serendipitous magic happen in the writing process, but I'd say the thing to remember, when the idea of making a whole novel out of nothing seems completely daunting, is that you have to start with one thing. Sort of a fictional "If you build it, they will come." What do you think, fellow Reds?