How to Write a Dick

Today, we have a guest blogger. Welcome writer and private investigator, Colleen Collins. If you have any PI specifc questions, throw them Colleen's way. I'll be drawing a name from the commentors to win an ebook copy of How to Write a Dick.

From Romance to Surveillance or How Harlequin Made Me Into a Private Eye

By Colleen Collins, co-author of How to Write a Dick: A Guide for Writing Fictional Sleuths from a Couple of Real-Life Sleuths 

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00595K1UK/ Nook:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-to-write-a-dick-colleen-collins/1104170465

Once upon a time, I wrote romance novels.

I sold my first book, a romantic comedy titled Right Chest, Wrong Name, in 1996 to Harlequin’s Love & Laughter series. The following year, I sold them my second book, Right Chapel, Wrong Couple. Then the series closed.

But all was not lost. My editor informed me the Love & Laughter series was morphing into another series called Duets, which packaged two romantic comedy books into one. Cool! I wrote six books for the Duets series. Then the series closed.

I’ll spare you, dear reader, a lot of meshugas (craziness) about the writing life and the rollercoaster world of book publishing and sum up the next eight years with these words: the next two series I wrote for closed as well.

The day the fourth series closed was also the day my boyfriend learned that due to his company downsizing, his job was cut.

Standing in the backyard, staring into each other’s eyes, I uttered the words that would shape our future.“Let’s start a private investigations business.”

Harlequin was, in a roundabout way, forcing me into a life of crime. Investigating crime, that is. But this idea wasn’t my acting out some unfulfilled Emma Peel in The Avengers fantasy. I actually had a logical, practical reason. For months I’d been telling my boyfriend -- a legal researcher and former trial attorney who’d trained many private investigators -- that he’d make a dynamite legal investigator. After all, he had the expertise and contacts, and now he had plenty of time on his hands, too.

On the other hand, I needed to learn the PI biz from the gumshoes up.

Over the following months, I immersed myself learning about private investigations. I took a course taught by a well-respected PI. I read books on various aspects of investigations, from how to conduct background checks to conducting surveillances. The two of us attended private investigators’ conferences where we networked with other PIs, tested investigative equipment and attended workshops. My boyfriend mentored me on the finer aspects of conducting interviews, researching public records, interpreting civil and criminal court files, skip tracing, due diligence and other background searches and more.

Fortunately, we live in one of the five states that do not require PIs to be licensed, so when the cases started rolling in, we started working them.

Certain investigative tasks come more easily to me because of my writing career. For example, I find it easy to conduct long, stationary surveillances – a talent undoubtedly honed from sitting at the computer for hours, staring into nothingness as I imagine plots and characters. Lawyers and others associated with the justice system often need to find lost/missing people, a task that requires pulling together threads of people’s lives through research, interviews, databases and logic.

For me, piecing together a person’s history, personality and traits is similar to building a character from an idea to a three-dimensional entity.

Just as I dug for information as a writer, I learned to dig for information as a private investigator. Sometimes this digging means getting down and dirty in people’s trash. I’ve dug through, picked apart and photographed more debris from people’s lives than a Hollywood gossip columnist rummaging through celebrity dreck. If you want to learn about people, check out the refuse of their lives!

At the start of our PI business, writer pals would sometimes call with questions about their stories. Soon other writers began contacting us. This led to our teaching online classes and presenting workshops at writers’ conferences. Then we started a blog (Guns, Gams, and Gumshoes) geared to writers developing sleuth characters and stories. Eventually, we co-authored How to Write a Dick: A Guide for Writing Fictional Sleuths from a Couple of Real-Life Sleuths.

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00595K1UK/ Nook:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-to-write-a-dick-colleen-collins/1104170465

A few years ago, my boyfriend and I eloped. Just because the girl segued from romance writing to private investigating doesn’t mean she’s cut the romance out of her PI life.I suppose I have Harlequin to thank for that, too.

Colleen Collins co-owns Highlands Investigations & Legal Services, Inc. in Denver, Colorado. She and her sleuth-husband’s non-fiction book How to Write a Dick: a Guide for Writing Fictional Sleuths from a Couple of Real-Life Sleuths is available on:

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00595K1UK/ Nook:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-to-write-a-dick-colleen-collins/1104170465

Got any questions for Colleen about PIs? She's got some doozy stories about the life of a PI. Comment here and you'll be in the drawing to win a copy of How to Write a Dick.