From time to time I get questions from readers and reviewers about the Tracking Jane series. I thought I would compile and address them all in one neat blog post.

1. Where did you get the idea to write about a wounded vet, dog trainer?

For a long time, watching stories of wounded vets coming home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I felt the urge to do something. My heart often broke learning of their suffering and swelled at their strength to live on in spite of the gruesome challenges they faced. Organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project have done a great deal to help veterans who’ve suffered grievous injuries while serving our country. But I always felt a part of the story wasn’t getting out there—the personal, at the core part.

Lying in bed one morning, my radio alarm having turned on, I heard the story of a veteran who came home early with one of those injuries, while the military dog he trained remained back in theater. The story told of his emotional anguish as he waited for his canine buddy to come home, and how one day he did—earlier than planned, as it turned out, because the K9 warrior had also suffered injuries from an IED. A story formed in my head, and within a day I was writing Shadow-7. Not soon after that, in a continuing gush of inspiration, I completed Rover. Within a month, both stories complete, I rushed to get them ready for publication as the first two half-novel length episodes in the series.

2. Where did I learn so much about training military dogs?

Well, to tell it true (as Jane would say), I am not an expert in the field. I did some research, yes. However, for me the most important part about the story does not flow from the functional tricks a trainer gets a dog to do, but the emotional connection she and her dog(s) build through shared life and work. There, I must confess to being a consummate canine lover. As such, I’ve built my own insight into how humans and dogs connect on levels I don’t always understand but always cherish. And then there’s all the studies about how dogs pick up on human body language and them pheromones.

3. Why did you write Waiting for Shadow?

Jane’s dog, Shadow, comes home from the war not soon after the start of Shadow-7. By then Jane’s learned to walk with her new prosthetics, and has started—struggles and all—to rebuild her life, now as an Army reservist who provides K9 tracking expertise and services within a civilian context. In other words, I started telling her story when it was well underway, in full stride, or as some term it, “in medias res.” However, I felt some details about her recovery and how she struggled emotionally waiting for Shadow’s return merited more in-depth exposition. I set out to portray this as a short story, planning to give it to my readers for free. I ended up with a novella not much shorter than Shadow-7. In the end I decided to still offer it free, figuring it would make for a nice introduction to my readers, many of whom seem to have connected well with it.

4. Why does Jane speak and write with such poor English?

A related question: does her manner of speaking make her stupid? For many of us living in big cities, or perhaps even in countries other than the United States, our lack of familiarity with regional speech pattern may lead us to a couple of faulty conclusions. First, we may not think many people speak like that anymore, or second, that the few folks that use such non-standard diction are uneducated or… stupid. As much as I’m tempted personally to uphold such a fallacy, I’d like to have a hundred dollars for every time I’ve met a sharp, capable person with a thick regional and/or culturally-driven manner of speech I would assume as “uneducated.”

In fact, if you pay close attention to Jane as she speaks, you will note that in spite of her education, her disdain for “proper speech” is part of the prickly, at times embittered wall she builds to protest and rebel against the world around her. In short, her diction comes out of her character, flawed as it is, and at least in the author’s opinion, forges the strong voice with which she conveys her story.

5. Why episodes and not full length novels?

The writerly answer would say, because the story demanded it. The honest answer is that I did it to speed up the frequency of releases and drum up more attention on the series. In other words, a marketing decision. Does that make me stinky? Maybe. As it turns out, though, my decision is more nuanced. I wanted to try my hand at an episodic approach involving individual stories with self-contained resolved plots that also moved forward a wider, longer-term narrative. Often serialized content out there leaves the reader at a cliffhanger at the end. In other words, a dissatisfied state. With Tracking Jane, I sought to avoid that dissatisfaction. Each episode addresses a specific challenge in Jane’s life—a case, a decision she must make—while also carrying forward the wider struggle of her recovery and the somewhat murky-mysterious aspects of the technology that has aided her physical (and perhaps emotional) healing. While the latter remains unresolved in each of the earlier episodes, it moves forward with each installment as Jane gets more answers in the course of resolving the individual conflict(s) within an individual episode.

6. What exactly is this mystery, and when will we finally know the answer?

Answering this in full will not only spoil the first few, already released episodes, but ruin coming episodes. I’ll do my best to dance around it. If you haven’t read any of the series, I recommend you don’t read the rest of this answer. I’m not a very good dancer…

In short, you will learn early on (in Waiting for Shadow) that Jane’s new legs and what makes them work (how’s that for vague?) are not your mother’s prosthetics. Why did she get them? What do people expect from her for getting them? What program (or conspiracy) do these prosthetics entail? Who else has prosthetics like hers? Who else would want them and why? How will Jane deal with the implications these “fancy legs” represent, and what decisions will she make? These questions and others, along with their answers comprise the mystery that slowly unfolds in each episode.

7. What are your future plans for the Tracking Jane series

You mean, beyond getting it sold for a major movie or TV mini-series deal? OK, right. Back to reality, I am presently working on episode 5, Blood Track. In shorter order, I will also release an “interlude” story, Fleeting Shadow to span a portion of the time period between already released episodes 2 & 3 (Rover & Tahoe-1). Longer term, I plan to write a full length novel to wrap up the wider narrative I described prior. Then, I will wait for reader response as to whether they would want me to carry Jane’s story forward.

8. Does Tracking Jane share anything in common with the Our Cyber World series?

OK, confession: no one’s asked me that question, except maybe the mouse in my pocket. But, if you’ve been reading both series, when you get to Beisbol Libre (Our Cyber World, book 5) and Brownie, you may catch some overlaps. Certain shared characters and locations appear in both stories. How much of this overlap will carry forward, and what role will it play in future Tracking Jane episodes? Well, now, that’s why I write them, and you keep reading them, right?

Do you have other questions about the series? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment here, and I’ll get right to them. Also, if you haven’t already, I encourage you to join my mail list, if nothing else so you can qualify to get your free copy of Fleeting Shadow.