Maybe I should say FIGHT LIKE A FIGHTER…

Over time, I’ve advanced from just testing what I needed, to enlisting others for help. I needed specific help though, not just random people on the street.

My first helper was my husband—then on his way to an MMA Black Belt. “Honey, come strangle me! What if I just drop to my knees? Can I bend your finger? What if I put you in a choke hold?” He was a really good sport, and that produced some writing gold. Later, I graduated to my kids’/husband’s dojo. I went in and found the upper level Black Belts who were readers and got them to stage fights for me. (These are them. Look at all those MMA blackbelts!!! I called them ‘my ninjas’ and other writers quickly got jealous of me for having a whole ninja crew to turn to!)

They were wonderful. But they kept asking me these pesky questions I hadn’t thought of:

“How tall is your character?”

“Five feet and some change.”

“Is she right or left-handed?”

“Does that matter?”

“She’ll escape toward her dominant hand. A leftie may have an advantage if a fighter expects a right-handed attack.”

*Huh! I did not know that!*

Then they asked these questions:

“How well trained is your fighter? And how well trained is the other fighter? And if trained, in what styles?”

“What era is your fight in? Are they armed?”

“Where are they fighting? Are there objects or weapons nearby at easy reach?”

So many things to think about. Blocking. Who hits first? Who wins and what defines winning?

This made my writing even better. I was good with the choreography of fights, but that last one was a doozy! What defines winning? 

Does it mean my character lives? Gets away? Unharmed? What about the one (or many) they are fighting? Are they even alive at the end of the fight? If so, what shape are they in? And are they going to come back in a future book hell-bent on revenge? They just might.

(Want to read a trilogy with the fight scenes these ninjas helped with?)

HAPPY READING!

Remember the first time you saw someone using a cell phone and it was soooo cool? And then you saw the same thing later and your eyes bugged out because it was a brick?

Yup, that’s exactly why I don’t do details about the tech in a book. I will gladly tell you how the science works, but I don’t like to discuss limitations and I don’t describe how they perform it in detail. If you want more on DNA and how the science is evolving, go check out part 1 of Writing with Science.

Let’s talk about things other than DNA because there’s a lot of science growing in those areas too

1 – Footprints. You’ll see on TV and in movies that they can tell someone is wearing the wrong size shoe. Well, we still can’t do that. It’s been used in court, but the science is pretty strong that we can’t get it right often enough. Places where shoes leave prints, like mud and snow, tend to contract and expand – so we can’t tell size with as much accuracy as readers and viewers have been led to believe. BUT we can tell where the person is putting their weight, and we can certainly tell what kind of footwear they were wearing. (Lots of manufacturers share treads though, so sometimes that’s helpful and sometimes not.) This is an area where the science is showing we don’t know as much as we thought we did!

2 – Collecting footprints from stranger places! We can now do more than just snap pics of footprints left in the dust, we can collect them and keep them for evidence with electrostatic dust print lifters. (Ask me the super simple way to see them!) I haven’t used this yet in a book but it’s super cool and I think it’ll go in the next NightShade book, Termination Dust. (Wait. Did I already reveal that title? Hmmm.) This is interesting science, because we’ve had it for a while, but many police stations and CSI units aren’t trained on these techniques, so evidence is getting lost. But my characters can definitely use this.

Staying ahead of the science also means staying ahead of how it’s getting used!

3 – Fingerprints! I had a police officer yell at me online for suggesting gold dust fingerprint lifting. He said he’d been “in forensic evidence for 30 years and had never heard of it.”  A – he apologized later but B – see above, I also have to stay ahead of how it’s getting used. I’d known about this technique for a handful of years at that point, and someone performing this evidence collection was so far behind he called me a liar. That’s a problem for a real world day. This technique is not locally available – meaning you can’t walk into someone’s house and do it. You have to collect the print and bring it to the lab and use a specific chamber.

4 – Saliva. Oh, we can test the hell out of this now. Pillowcases from old murders can be used as evidence now. Like with bloodwork, the future is smaller and smaller samples, better and better data from those samples. And, maybe most importantly, finding those samples.

5 – Hair! Whoa, don’t get me started. This is a great one because as I write this, we are on the precipice of having hair protein analysis entered into court regularly as evidence. I’ve already used this in a book! In the past, hair evidence was looked at under a microscope and could only be claimed as ‘consistent with.’ That means, we can say it could be their hair, but we can’t say it is. (It also meant we could “rule out” or say it couldn’t be a person’s hair. Now, protein analysis can pinpoint a person by their hair. We each grow our own hair, so we each have a unique protein structure in that hair. We can now match it like DNA!

I always invite you to read my books, but if you like the science of these things and you’ve already read my stuff (There’s a LOT of this in the new Hangman’s Shadow series because they solve cold cases) then go check out these two other authors who use a lot of forward thinking science in their books too!

Andrew Mayne – Orbital and Station Breaker are favorites of mine!

Kendra Elliot – She had a forensic odontologist in her books. I read about one before I became one!

Happy reading!

When I started writing fight scenes, I did it by feel. I knew how the fight should go, where the fight should go, and where it should end up. So, as a writer, fight scenes weren’t that different from other scenes. But getting them to sound and feel right? That’s another level.

I had an advantage: I’m a dancer! I know choreography, movement, contact, lifts, and more.

I had a big disadvantage, too: I’m not a fighter. I spent my time in pointe shoes and tap shoes. When I started, I don’t think I’d ever set foot in a dojo, and I’ve never been in a good brawl.

I did have one more advantage though: I love small textured details in books. So I often found myself on my roof—if that’s where my character was. Or taking notes on a long drive, like my character did. So, when it came time to write a fight scene, I did what my character did.

Clearly, there are caveats. Please don’t murder anyone or beat anyone up for the sake of the book, but do stab a watermelon with a big kitchen knife. Hit a punching bag. Break a full beer bottle on a cement step—it’s probably harder than you think. When you hit like that, you get a reverberation up your arm. When you stab the watermelon, there’s a moment when you break through and suddenly you’re slicing with ease. The beer bottle almost explodes in a blast of foam and glass shards. That’s exactly the kind of detail that brings a fight to blazing life.

So when I get reviews like this one: “I love this author she puts you right in the middle of the fight!” I feel a little like I earned it. 

(Read the books that review came from!)

HAPPY READING!

“He reached under his desk to turn on his Dell computer, then waited while the robot screamed as it connected to the internet. After checking his AOL email account, he logged into MySpace.”

How many of you can date that pair of sentences to a year or two time span? Ouch. 

And that’s exactly why I won’t do it!

As a writer publishing crime thrillers, forensic mysteries, and suspense novels in today’s changing world, I try not to stay on top of the science. I work to stay ahead of it.

I won’t even tell you how my characters used a GPS! Is it a device they put on their dash with a suction cup? Is it an app on their phone? Google maps? I’m not saying. I don’t know what that will look like next year. And I don’t think you’ll ever hear me naming an email provider or a social media platform! But let’s talk about what is coming:

1 – blood analysis. We are getting better and better at analyzing blood and getting more data. We can now reconstruct partial genomes from old DNA and sometimes it’s enough for a match! This is helping to solve cold cases like the ones I follow in the Hangman’s Shadow series.

2 – We can get more and more information from DNA. We can now tell if the person likely had blue eyes, or curly hair, or was tall. We still don’t have a guarantee on those things, but it can help narrow down the subject pool and solve crimes (which is the part I’m mostly interested in! But you probably already guessed that.)

3 – We can get DNA from more and more places. Like half a fingerprint! If we don’t cover it in magnetic powder then we can scrape it. Because we are constantly able to get more DNA from smaller samples, this is now enough, and in the future the amount needed will get smaller. Also, there are new methods being pioneered as I write this, to lift the fingerprint and collect the DNA simultaneously, so we don’t have to choose. I’ve been using this in the NightShade Forensic FBI Files books!

4 – We can also now separate multiple blood samples from a single source. I touched on this in the Vendetta Trifecta – when Sin realizes she can’t clean the blood evidence she’s left, she mixes it. And this is EXACTLY why I write ahead of the science. When I wrote that, it was a game changer. They couldn’t find her. But now we can separate blood samples as long as the mix is 20% or greater. Thank God I had her mix it thoroughly and do some confusing spatter.

The story holds. You can read it today, and the science is sound, because I wrote ahead of it.

*There’s too much for just one post! I’m going to do a part 2!

If you’ve read all my books and want more authors who write with science, check out these…

Laura Griffin – She created the fictional Delphi labs in the Tracers series.

Axel Blackwell – is writing more from the police side of things, but stays on top of the evidence and such.

Happy reading!

Friendly neighborhood thriller author and forensic scientist here! Time to answer your questions ☠️🫆

I got questions about this from a reader: “CSI and NCIS do DNA work that seems to get done in minutes – how long does it actually take and how expensive a test is it? Regular people expensive or Elon musk expensive?”

Let’s dive in!

Short answer: a few hours. We used to do all this by hand. Add reagents, swirl, let sit, centrifuge, wait… but now we load reagents into a machine, add our sample, push the button and come back to find it done. So that’s realllly nice.

Real answer: days and weeks and months even. But this depends on what you need done.

General paternity test? A few weeks. This means you provide the hair, spit, etc samples and you send it to a lab that operates open to the public and it’s probably not admissible in court at all.  These are usually less than $100. And you should be able to get it back within a month. However, they aren’t as reliable. If you’ve had bloodwork done at your doctors office, those same places will do paternity and general DNA testing, but you can see the distinction between “at home” and “legal” and the price starts going up to ~$500ish for now.

This is where the back-log comes in. In order to be used in court cases, there must be a known chain of evidence. We have to be able to see if the sample was damaged, mishandled or even purposefully swapped out at any point. Also, this has to go to labs that are certified for evidentiary work and supposedly unbiased. (This isn’t always the case! Lots of police stations have their own labs that can do some testing.) But basically no one has a lab that can keep up with the need. The wait is the backlog. (Don’t even get me started on rape kits.)

So it’s not Elon Musk expensive, but it can climb up there to pay for speed! It might be cheaper to just do a basic DNA testing and get those results if paternity was needed. Paternity tests only check a known sample against another known sample–so you have to first suspect the match to test it, and if you’re wrong, you’re just wrong. Whereas a DNA testing company is checking the sample against their entire database.

If you’re in a court case and in need of evidence to go through the system fast, then yes, being billionaire rich is helpful. The irony is that you wouldn’t likely even pay for the push then, just be influential enough to make it happen. You can also go through faster if your case is high priority. So make sure to be splashy if you’re gonna need that bloodwork done legally! Get media coverage and hit the social media and make the public demand a timely response. Otherwise, you can wait 6 months or more.