We watch NCIS on Hulu. It’s one of those TV shows that we use as filler during the week when we don’t know what we really want to watch. Anyway, there are about 17 seasons, so this habit will last forever unless the story suddenly goes South and gets boring (I somehow doubt that due to the 17-season run).

Anyway, there was an episode where the killer was killing characters from the writer’s book that McGee was still writing. In fact, he was stuck on a chapter and didn’t know where to take the book. The mystery was centered around who the killer was and how he got inside knowledge of McGee’s book (there may be spoilers). But what made the story work was that McGee used real people for the characters in his book. He just changed the names by a tiny bit. In fact, the names were “on the nose.” Of course, they did that to add comedy to the show and make it obvious who he was referring to in the book. Most of the characters were his co-workers, who were quite angry at what he wrote.

He made up personalities for random people he had encountered in a coffee shop and other locations. Those were people that he didn’t know personally but used in his book anyway. When the NCIS team did their investigation, he discovered that some of these people were not like his impression of who they were. That was interesting.

Of course, the story comes to a conclusion where the guy doing the killing can’t separate McGee’s stories from real life. We were able to figure out who the killer was because there was only one character near the beginning that they introduced, then didn’t come back to until the end when he showed up to do another killing.

Anyway, it was funny that McGee was using real people as characters and pointed out the hazards of doing something like that. I have to state right now that I’ve never used a real person for characters. I make mine up out of whole cloth, so fear not, if you’re a friend or family, you’re not in any of my books. If I wrote murder/mystery, I might be tempted to put people in as the antagonist, just as a joke. I know that there is a SciFi author out there who takes requests from people to have their names used as some throw-away character or bad guy in his books. I thought that was clever and really cool.

The other thing I notice about writers on TV is that they always throw in the usual tropes. Writer’s block, mechanical typewriters, killer deadlines, they have an agent, their book arrives in hard-cover, etc. For once, it would be cool if they would create a writer that produced an EBook and is an indy.

Other TV shows that have writers include Bones and Castle. Same tropes, except they don’t integrate their book writing into the show much. In the case of Bones, she writes books, and Castle is an author who wants to get down and dirty with detectives to improve his stories.

Ah, fun times.

Progress on Survival (The Traveler Book 2)

I’m still behind on my rough draft. I’ve been slowly catching up and anticipate getting more words in during the break between Christmas and New Year’s. I have ten days off and no real plans. So, I should be able to get a couple of 10k writing days in, maybe more. Right now, I have 23k words completed for book 2. I’m not adjusting my schedule. I’m still planning to complete the rough draft by February 24th and have the book published before the second week of March.

Now it’s back to my writing…