March 27, 2023

Daily Diary, Day 937:

The solar panel people got here at 8, and they are still here, so there have been the sounds of pounding and drilling all day. They hoped to finish today, and definitely by tomorrow. Beautiful day for it. I spent the morning working on sales data for October (you can see how far behind I am with this.) This is putting together all the sales in ebook, print, audiobook for the month, at different retailers, by book. This permits me to corelate between promotions and sales. For example, a sale on Amazon for ebooks, often spills over to higher sales of print or audiobooks (someone goes to buy page because the ebook is on sale, and decides they would rather get the print or audiobook edition.)

Anyway, this takes hours, so I have decided to try and do one month a day, to get through January (some of the retailers give their data 2 months after the actual sale, so there is always lag time.) I also had a scheduled phone call, which thankfully came during the hour the installers took off for lunch, so no drilling to contend with. And this afternoon I got through another chapter of the friends manuscript I am working on.

So, now, I thought I would talk a little about my process for doing the research and developing a plot for a story, using Dandy and the Dognappers as an example. First of all, I had the idea nearly a decade ago, when I was doing research for Bloody Lessons, the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, and I came across this headline from the 1879 San Francisco Chronicle.

"$10 REWARD - LOST ON MONDAY night...a small black-and-tan Terrier Dog, with clipped ears, answering to the name of Dandy."

The fact that Dandy was the name of the Boston Terrier who had become a major character in my series (even featuring in my first short story) was the main reason I was struck by the headline, but it also started me thinking about whether stealing a dog in order to get a reward might not be a future plot line.

The second inspiration came from the fact that, over time, four youngsters, Jamie, Ian, and Emmaline, and the servant Tilly, all came to live in the O’Farrell Street boarding house run by my main protagonist. Consequently, I have had fun giving these young people small mysteries to solve, the last example was the short story, Dandy’s Discovery.

Finally, In the last work I wrote in this series, the novella, Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime, I also introduced another young person, Georgie, and his new dog, Belle. Georgie is the grandson of one of the boarders, and at that time I thought it might be fun to get to him to join the other youngsters in solving a crime in a future story.

So, when I realized I was probably going to spend at least a year and a half working on the two science fiction books, I wondered if I could come up with a short story from the mystery series that I could write between the books. That’s when I decided it might be a good time to look into the idea of the youngsters deciding they were going to foil a local dognapping ring.

The first thing I did was research dognapping, and I discovered that the term wasn’t used until the end of the 1920s, but that the idea of stealing dogs for ransom was well established in the 19th century. So, I decided that the term Dandy and the Dognappers was too good to pass up as a title, but that I would be careful for historical accuracy’s sake to use the term dog stealing, which was getting me all sorts of hits when I started searching newspapers of the times.

I will leave you with this example of a “humorous story” in the April 30, 1882 San Francisco Chronicle.