{"id":698,"date":"2015-10-06T23:04:35","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T23:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?p=698"},"modified":"2016-03-25T02:41:51","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T02:41:51","slug":"behind-the-story-crack-up-at-waycross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?p=698","title":{"rendered":"Behind: “Crack-up at Waycross”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"COVER_Murder-Under-the-Oaks_x1500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

First things first:\u00a0the proceeds\u00a0from Bouchercon’s\u00a0<\/em>Murder Under the Oaks go to the Wake Country Public Libraries<\/a>. And folks, reading is cool. <\/em><\/p>\n

In November 2013, thieves broke into a Modesto, CA orchard<\/a> and made off with 140,000 pounds–70 tons–of in-shell walnuts.\u00a0In February 2012, a shade to the north, 40,000ish tons of walnuts went missing<\/a> from a Butte County processing plant. In October 2012, twin thefts near Sacramento, shall we say, bagged 82,000 pounds of walnuts. Investigators were hunting for suspects with Russian accents.<\/p>\n

Nut theft is a thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Grinning a bit? Me too when I stumbled\u00a0on the headlines.\u00a0But the reason why? The root of all evil: an across-the-nut\u00a0spike to record prices. That 70-ton walnut job? The take had a wholesale value of $400,000.<\/p>\n

I said to myself, “I must write this<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

And you know what? I didn’t. Couldn’t. Not for a year.\u00a0All\u00a0I had was a premise. It’d be a heist, no question. I’d light\u00a0a candle to Donald E. Westlake and let it rip. A\u00a0cracking good\u00a0heist, though, isn’t about what gets stolen. It’s about who wants to steal it and why.<\/p>\n

Gangsters! Nope, too hard to make fresh, too shallow to make resonant. A super thief! Nope again.\u00a0Pros like that, 400 large is–cough<\/em>–peanuts. An insider? Bingo. Someone hopelessly overambitious.<\/p>\n

Over time this employee\u00a0guy seeped into my head,\u00a0hell-bent to break into his boss’ farm and\u00a0swipe some nuts. Or drupes<\/a> at this point. For a Southern twist I’d moved on to pecans, technically a fruit. Oh, and another learning: if you’re set on writing agriculture,\u00a0be ready, ahem,\u00a0to\u00a0plow into the research. Growing seasons,\u00a0when and how harvested, how processed and stored, how moved\u00a0to market\u00a0and–gah!<\/p>\n

An\u00a0idea waited. Blossomed. Grew.<\/p>\n

And dropped: I wasted creative energy\u00a0crafting an\u00a0outrageous break-in. The California thieves\u00a0just clipped the fence. No, this story was a journey, and it\u00a0belonged on the road. I’d make my crooks nab a\u00a0tractor-trailer on the move. Nut-jacking. It’s a thing.<\/p>\n

Then don’t let them nab it, make\u00a0a couple non-thinkers\u00a0have to think, try everything, watch it fail and think again.\u00a0Mission No-Pecan-Do.<\/p>\n

In the early drafts\u00a0a proto-narrator, voiceless and nameless,\u00a0stewed over\u00a0a crap bonus and\u00a0craved\u00a0revenge.\u00a0His straight-up bitterness kept him back-of-mind, and of course, nut theft. It’s a thing. The first character to emerge was the boss,\u00a0Mrs. Whitlock. Old, cold and bold.\u00a0Honest, but not a clue her people at the plant\u00a0were actually people.\u00a0The narrator could only moan about her getting rich on his sweat, but his buddy, Deke, this guy had pecan oil for blood.\u00a0Always\u00a0instinctively on-point, whether beer or botany, even found our narrator a name: Brayden.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I have to toss\u00a0words by the thousands<\/a>, more than once, whole drafts zapped until a POV’s voice takes over<\/a>.\u00a0Ditto here. Dammit. But once\u00a0Bray swaggered in, man, did the dude not shut up. A cock-eyed schemer, funny in an arrogant but ignorant way. His big plan:\u00a0jack fifty tons of raw pecans and flip the cash\u00a0into, yes, seed\u00a0money for\u00a0his own orchard empire–Kings of Georgia,\u00a0Deke and Bray. Mostly Bray.\u00a0Somehow he worked, though I didn’t think much of him as a POV. After much critique and corralling, though, something funny happened. The test readers loved him as a relatable kind of stupid. I mean, here’s a guy who thinks beers make for a long night’s sustenance, arena rock is what you need for\u00a0chase music, nobody will recognize him in his uncle’s Ford, and a promotion to Quality Control stamped his ticket as mastermind.<\/p>\n

Yep. Let’s jack us some drupes.<\/p>\n

Next problem: geography. I do not remember this fondly.\u00a0Seriously, the heist parts\u00a0flowed pure and\u00a0natural, but the nature parts came muddy as swamp water.\u00a0The Georgia backcountry vibe had to read true, and accurate. A backcountry chase takes\u00a0mapping out the backcountry, and that takes\u00a0hours checking out road atlases and\u00a0Google Earth. Eventually Mrs. Whitlock’s base came:\u00a0Mitchell County, a lower ventricle in the\u00a0heart of Pecan Country. From that stake in\u00a0the ground, where would a trailer head, hauling all those pecans?\u00a0 Well,\u00a0to\u00a0Asia. But\u00a0first a\u00a0port, Savannah or Jacksonville.\u00a0I lined up highways and\u00a0towns in between, started writing, started changing the route, started rewriting, and started noticing a pattern: in that part of Georgia, all roads\u00a0ran through Waycross<\/a>. Big rail hump yard there. Rather a literary name, Southern,\u00a0apropos. Waycross. Where\u00a0Brayden’s grasp at fortune, er, surely must\u00a0crack up.<\/p>\n

Nut theft. It’s a thing. In 2015, it’s a Bouchercon<\/a> thing.<\/p>\n

\"Waycross<\/a><\/p>\n

Many Thanks<\/h5>\n