Featured Author on Polka Dot Banner

I am flattered and honored to be this month's 'Featured Author' on Polka Dot Banner (an author gathering place) site:

PDB: Alexander, please tell us about Depth of Deception, an Award-winning Finalist of the 2012 International Book Awards in the E-Book: Mystery/Thriller/Adventure category.

AG: Depth of Deception is set in 1982 and begins in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean where a young woman is found floating on a wooden deck chair. She is wearing an Edwardian era dress and the only identification she has is a ticket to the RMS Titanic. She has no memory of who she is, but she believes it's 1912. As she recovers in a psychiatric clinic in Manhattan, an elderly Titanic expert and survivor named Edward Hoffman is brought in to disprove her claim, but the plan backfires and stirs up shocking details in her tattered memory—including the fact that Edward may be her son.

The other mystery in Depth of Deception involves Callum Toughill, a British insurance investigator, who is assigned the case of a missing brooch that was stolen during a murder in 1909 Glasgow. He is chosen because it was his own grandfather who botched the original investigation. (This murder is based on a true, unsolved crime.)

PDB: When I visited your website, I liked your explanation of why you set the book in 1982, rather than present day. Please share that with our PDB authors and readers.

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Anti-Writer 's Block

Like many of my fellow writers I often find myself in that situation where I sit in front of my flickering computer screen and nothing happens.  I've set aside some time to devote to writing and at that crucial moment my mind is void of ideas. No amount of pacing or reading other writer's blogs help to combat my own writer's block. Not a single drop of an idea. So many times I've lamented that I'm unable to just turn the creativity on like a tap.

But now I have a different dilemma.  I don't seem to have a problem coming up with creative story ideas... I suddenly have too many of them.  A few weeks ago I blogged about working on one novel and getting stronger ideas for another novel. During this time, I wrote a spec script for Murdoch Mysteries, a TV series shooting here in Toronto, and while working on that I got an idea for a different spec script, which in turn evolved into an idea for a brand new TV series. So I start laying down the ground work on that but I still have the ideas for the novel(s) racing around in my head. Just to make me crazy a series idea that I had back in the 1990's comes back.  The latter was deemed "too dark" for mainstream TV at the time.  Since then "too dark" has become the norm and now we have the technology to easily do what I had wanted back them.  Now I'm not sure if I want to pitch it as a TV series, a book series or a blog series.

So now, instead of wringing my brain out for a drop of an idea, a pipe has burst and the ideas are just gushing out all over the place and I'm desperately trying to stay afloat while trying to figure out which story to devote my time and attention to. And if that's not enough, I'm still trying to promote Depth of Deception, which in itself is another full time job.

I'm not sure I'm going to get a lot of sympathy from many writers, and I know I have to focus on one at a time. I just hope that the other ideas don't evaporate in the meantime.