by Jinx Schwartz
How many times have we heard that phrase, what exactly does
it mean, and how does it apply to my writing?
For starters, I have a lot of characters in my life. Not the
ones in my books, but living, breathing characters,
the kind defined by Webster as a person with many eccentricities.
I admit that
my lifestyle fairly screams for character encounters. We live half the year in
Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, where cruisers abound from all over the world and
and all walks of life. One thing they have in common is that they’re
adventurous types who have chosen a life way outside the box. I can pick up
enough material from one potluck on the beach (which happens at the drop of a
hat) to fuel many a book. When in port, a walk down the dock or a beer at a
local watering hole and I have new best friends from, well, everywhere. Tuning
into the daily ham radio nets, with boaters checking in from all over Mexico
and the Pacific Coast, with the tale of the day, has me jotting notes for
future plots, or idiosyncratic scenarios.
And then there is the other half of my life, living smack
dab on the Arizona/Mexico border. Not only do we make the headlines frequently,
the city of Bisbee has been named by a national organization as one of the
quirkiest places to live in the United States. And they are right. My gardener
packs a .380 in his boot, my Zumba instructor is a retired, gay, exotic dancer; and my nearest neighbor is a Rottweiler who lives alone. Her owner shows up
with food and water once a day and I give her lots of treats, but otherwise,
she has the house and yard to herself most of the time. Rosa is an equal
opportunity barker; she targets illegal crossers and border patrol agents with
equal hostility. She’s the best dog I never owned.
Even my more normal friends, (you notice I used the word more) are great book fodder. When one of
them was banned from the Kremlin because she set off the radiation detectors (she recently had a nuclear stress test), I filed that away, et voila, and it became part of a plot point in Just Deserts, fourth in my Hetta Coffey mystery series.
And then there is Hetta Coffey. She’s a woman with a yacht and
she’s not afraid to use it. Okay, so she isn’t real, but boy, sometimes it
doesn’t feel that way. Many of my readers actually think I am Hetta, or that Hetta is me. Since almost everyone says I am a
real character, maybe we are one.
The plot thickens . . .
* * * * * * *
Jinx Schwartz was reared in the jungles of Haiti and Thailand, with return trips
to Texas. She followed in her father’s steel-toed footsteps into
construction and engineering in the hope of building dams. Finding all the
good rivers taken, she traveled the world, and like the protagonist in her
mystery series, Hetta Coffey, Jinx was a woman with a yacht and not afraid to
use it when she met her husband, “Mad Dog” Schwartz. After their marriage they
sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and headed for Mexico.
(Excerpted from The Mystery Writers, where you can read her amusing interview and learn more about her.)