I’ve been going through the reviews on Amazon for Paradigm Lost, which are beyond flattering. Any and all reviews are appreciated (they are an indy author’s best friend), even critical ones; but the reviews I’ve gotten have blown my highest expectations clear out of interstellar space. Seriously, thank you! I’m glad so many of you have enjoyed the book.

NCIS, the television show based on the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, gets mentioned in the reviews from time to time, understandably so. I saw one comment referring to how the criminals don’t have much character development; the reader basically gets the motive(s) thrown at them. This was intentional. 🙂 It also illustrates one of the things that I set out to do when writing this book: to make it feel as “realistic” (it’s sci-fi, after all) as possible. Partly because of this, I also wanted to write it solely from Special Agent (SA) Ward’s perspective, except for the prologue and epilogue.

I did this because I wanted the reader to experience an investigation from the perspective of the investigator. In NCIS, viewers are showed scenes of events that are not known to the main characters. It’s a decent TV show, I’m not knocking it (though don’t mistake it for real life); but I wanted you to walk through the story from SA Ward’s perspective to experience not just the challenges involved but to really appreciate the investigator’s viewpoint–to make it feel more “real.”

Well, real minus all the tedium that makes up 96.28% of real-life federal law enforcement. While I want it to feel real, I still have to tell a story that won’t bore you to tears, and I don’t think you want to read a few hundred pages on the finer points of financial analysis. (Though, I’m sure there’s somebody!) But the point is that when you’re investigating someone, you rarely know their whole backstory or motives upfront. It is this perspective that I thought would generate the “reader experience” I was aiming for. Hopefully it was enjoyable! Though I reserve the right to do things differently in the future, I’m about 1/8th done with the sequel and it is also written from this perspective.

And being a little selfish … it’s also really fun to write it this way. 😉