Exile vs. Ulysses

Exile on Maine Street is my newest release, but it is a tragedy that’s been with me for quite a while. How long? When I was just a kid in South Dakota, tragedy showed up on my doorstep after an accident involving a local teenager happened on a lonesome stretch of highway near my farm. While the incident involved people I didn’t know, fate latched onto me and reminded me of the details of the event when I won a scholarship given by the parents of the young man who’d died. 

From the frantic knock on the door in 1980 to the conversation with the parents a decade later, the impact of a tragedy on a small community stuck with me, and after seeing it impact the community where I taught, I began designing Ulysses’ Bow.

Although I really loved the original version of Ulysses’ Bow that I published in 2010, I just didn’t have the time or energy to promote it. It tried to connect it with my other books to form a series, but by 2013, I let the five books in the Seven Fires series drop out of print. 

When I got back to the drawing board with my “new and improved” Dreamcatcher Chronicles, I kept many of the characters and concepts with a definitive plan for books one to seven. When I came across Brian Forsberg and Karson Luning, I yearned for the style and world of Ulysses Bow.  Unlike my other stories, there was nothing supernatural or (judgmental farm wife side-eyes) weird. It was a tragic crime story. One mistake led to another and another and the whole thing explodes in violence. 

I really enjoyed making the book, and after a decade, I decided to keep a narrow crime focus with my Mixed-Tape Mystery series, which would feature Sheriff Forsberg and the world of Hiawatha County without the supernatural creatures and concepts found in the other books. 

Although I likely sold only a hundred or so copies of Ulysses’ Bow, I wanted to be forthright that this is a “new and improved” version of the story of Forsberg, Captain Chuck, and Karson. In preparing for the style template for the books in the series, I knew I had to make some adjustments, so here’s an explanation of what STAYS and what got CHANGED.

THE SAME:

As you can see from the two covers, I kept the school vandalism plot point since that was something that Jason Fickett and I experienced one morning arriving at Maple River High School. The evidence left behind after the vandalism (broken door, missing key, spraypaint cans, the graffiti) still leads to the same perpetrator. 

Another key plot point that remains the same is the accident that ends up in Haggard Bay. I cleaned up some of the time and revelation of clues, but that scene is based on the tragedy from 1980 that opened my eyes. 

Finally, there is the hunting accident that came across the news wire in the 2000s that sparked my imagination for the penultimate showdown at the end of the story.

The Changes:

I wanted to start the series with this book since it explains WHY Forsberg decided to become a law officer. Without a badge, he still wanted to defend his home from the corruption, crime and darkness preying upon it since he left home.

So I wanted the focus ONLY on his POV. Unlike my other stories, this is not going to have several points of view. It’s just Forsberg, so I couldn’t show Chuck in the jungle, Karson alone in his room, Leah creeping around town, or Helen dealing with her loneliness. 

So that took some effort to keep so many of the elements that I liked but to tell it in a fast-paced, reader-friendly POV. 

Oh, and Karson is no longer an angry white kid. Despite being a jock at the apex of Split Rock High School popularity, his mom Helen brings some racial dynamics to the family. Having seen how race factors in a small town, I felt these changes to Helen and Karson brought some complexity and depth to the story. 

The biggest change, however, is the framing of having his niece, Cassie Campbell (Becca Thompson back in the day), be the launching point for each novel. She’s the one who is looking at the cold case files within his record collection. Yes, I stole that from myself. In the original version of Cassandra’s Curse, it is Forsberg who finds Sommer’s notes to Jude in her records. In Exile on Maine Street, Forsberg leaves his case notes in the albums, makes a playlist of songs that trigger memories of the case, and much later, leaves personal notes for Cassie, knowing she’d find the albums. 

After the events of 1972, I head into uncharted territory with a mystery per year, so the freedom to explore Forsberg’s career within the boundaries set in the Dreamcatcher Chronicles is a challenge I look forward to tackling.