In Too Deep (Extras)

I'm still working on the final epilogue, but wanted to give you all something special this Tuesday. This will NOT make any published book. It's entirely exclusive to Patreon.

Yes, the photo above is AI. She's my version of Amanda, but probably not yours, which is why I'm ever hesitant to post this stuff, but scroll down for more on that.

Some of you know the backstory to what's now "In Too Deep." I went back into my emails and found a thread I had with Ben Boswell about spy stories. I guess I was bouncing an idea of a spy thriller off of him, and he sent me a story he'd begun that covered a similar theme. I loved what he'd sent, asked him if I could run with it. He gave me permission, and here we are. He's also given me permission to reproduce what he sent me, and so here you have it!

Oh, and he sent this to me October 4, 2014, nearly ten years ago. Maybe I should have saved this post for Friday's. Oh well. There's more after the story, so if you don't want to read it, scroll down.

Undercover (by Ben Boswell)

Gina and I have been married three years, together five.  We met in law school, ended up both doing a Department of Justice internship, started dating and the rest is, I guess, history.

She's a study in contrasts. Just looking at her, you'd think she was a model or something. She's just that good looking. Five foot six, with long, almost black hair, porcelain skin, and deep blue eyes, she's also a hard body with a perfect heart-shaped ass, and the kind of natural, full, boobs flat-chested girls are dreaming of when they go under the knife for implants. But she's also brilliant. Duke undergrad. Columbia law. And tough. She was Army ROTC in college, did two tours as an MP in Iraq, and earned her parachute badge. After DOJ, she joined the FBI as a field agent. All of that by the time she turned 27, when we got married.

She started off doing counter-narcotics out of Miami, and then got assigned to some counter-terrorism in California. I followed along, gravitating toward business transaction work which is more portable given a frequently moving spouse.

A couple of months after arriving in California, she was approached about going undercover. I wasn't crazy about the idea. Heck, I fucking hated it. But she assured me it was a one-time thing. I tried to get more details out of her, but she couldn't tell me more because of classification issues.

It was a very, very rough six months. I'd see her maybe once or twice a week, usually with no warning. I'd come home from work, and there she'd be, usually trying to catch up on some sleep. She was often distant and guarded, probably an inevitable consequence of the job. Then just as quickly as she'd return, she'd be gone again. We tried to reconnect in those brief interludes, but really we were just marking time. I made her promise never to go undercover again. She agreed though I wasn't sure if she was just humoring me or what.

Finally, one day, she was back for good. We got back into the swing of things. She let drop that her work had been really significant. They were going to put away some really bad guys, but for a long while, nothing happened.

Then came the announcement. The feds dropped a whole slew of indictments, apparently breaking up what had been a pretty significant terror plot involving Jihadists trying to smuggle in some shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, and worse, they had apparently gotten pretty far in cooperating with some drug gangs to do it. I'd sort of been assuming Gina was working on some sort of white collar connection, corrupt importers or maybe some sort of money laundering, so hearing that she'd been involved in this sort of thing left me a little shaken.

Even though the indictments were public, Gina's role wasn't, and she still couldn't tell me much.

"Will you be testifying?" I asked.

"Probably not," she replied. "They try to protect undercover agents, and really without getting into it too much, I was sort of at the margins. They'll probably be able to stipulate to some of the evidence and keep me out of it. At least I hope so."

As it turned out, that didn't work out. And instead, after several months of pretrial wrangling, one piece of the prosecution went forward, and Gina was forced to testify. I was secretly pleased. Even though they'd be trying to protect her—by allowing her to testify from behind a screen, for instance—appearing in court greatly reduced the possibility that she'd be going undercover again in the future.

They had severed out the actual terrorists from the drug network, and this first trial was of a guy named Edgar Martinez, who the papers reported ran a freight forwarding business that was apparently deep into all sorts of criminal activities.

As her testimony approached, she was increasingly anxious. I tried to reassure her she'd do great, but I guess she was worried given how high profile the case was.

"Get a good night's sleep. I'll wake you up on time and drive you in and be there when you testify," I offered.

She momentarily blanched. "I'd rather you didn't come," she said finally.

"Why not?"

She sighed. "Look, just trust me. Okay?" She took my hand and squeezed, looking deep into my eyes.

"Okay, baby, whatever you want."

But I was too curious to resist. 

It was a clear November morning when she was called to the stand. I was in the audience, but she could neither see me, nor could I see her, since she was behind a screen. She was sworn in and the prosecutor walked her briskly through a well-prepared testimony.

The only shocker was that Gina had been undercover at a strip club. I didn't like the sound of that, but the testimony really didn't get into any details. Her role in the trial was obviously simply to provide a chain of evidence to various documents and other physical evidence. Reading between the lines, I sort of suspected they were using her as a way to avoid having to disclose other secret methods they might have been using to gather evidence. But her actual role remained well disguised. After three hours of testimony, all I knew was that she'd worked for several months at the Gold Club, though whether as an accountant, waitress, or even dancer remained unclear.

It was not until after lunch when the defense took over on cross that anything really interesting came out. The defense attorney was Darren Clare, a fire plug of a man, early 50s, bald, stocky, with a pair of steel rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. He looked like a school principal more than a polished courtroom maestro.

"So, Ms. Barnes, you worked undercover as an 'exotic dancer' for three months at the Gold Club, is that correct?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever pursued this line of work before?"

"No."

"No experience, no prior training?" he asked with a trace of sarcasm.

Follow-up notes I got after probing Ben:

Well, my idea was that the defense attorney is trying to attack her character. So she'll have to admit that she had to blow the club manager to get her job, and then he'll badger her about lap dances and what she did in the VIP room, and of course, that is just a set up for her having to explain how she became the bad guy's mistress, and what she did with him. I imagined that she'd also slept with some of the other criminals. Maybe she had to work her way up to the big boss. 

Anyway, the defense strategy is to make her seem like a whore, who got jealous or maybe failed in a blackmail attempt. So hubby doesn't know if she was just doing her job, which is bad enough, or if she really was as bad as defense suggests. 

(Read more from Ben Boswell on Amazon or over on Medium, where he's posting a new series about a very slutty girlfriend.)

Inspiration

If Ben had written this story, I don't think it would have been very similar to In Too Deep, but you can definitely see some of the seeds. I can only speculate, but I think it would have been more about what happened after the case, rather than during, and probably would have gone darker with some of those characters.

It's also funny to me that Amanda was there for six months, rather than the three that I'd written (also, Amanda was "Gina"), but she went home regularly. I honestly don't remember that, and I'm not sure why I didn't follow that pattern. Probably would have eased some things, but I'm fine with how it played out in my version.

My Process

I mentioned that I was more of a "pantser" than a "planner," meaning that when I write, I tend to go in without outlining and planning out my stories. This isn't entirely true. I definitely have an idea for the story I want to tell. I'm pretty sure I've outlined it somewhere on my blog years ago, but all I could find was this article titled, "Don't be your story's bitch" (lol). In brief, I write with milestones in mind. I create a set of characters, think of the story I want to tell as a series of milestones to reach, and let myself move from one milestone to the next. Sometimes, based on those characters, I change it up, or maybe a new plot emerges that's more interesting than the original. I stay agile as I go.

But that's mostly for the main characters. I wanted David to go from kind of a hapless husband to someone with more agency, and I wanted to have the straight-backed Amanda, seeing the world as so black and white, to realize that things are much grayer in the real world. Those were my notes. Their experiences then shaped them farther.

Often times, my secondary characters are just sketches in my head, which make them a lot of fun because I can kind of play and experiment with them. Ty and Julia, for example, were there to help drive the story forward, but they ended up infusing a lot of personality into it. Julia, more than anyone, surprised me. She was initially just the bitchy, envious "older" woman, but as I got to wondering why she was like that, she became more than just support. And as a commenter pointed out, she can be read as entirely sympathetic if you want to (although I urge everyone not to think of any of these characters as entirely one thing or another).

As I've stated before, the story originally ended around the end of book 2. There was a big bust, Kozlov went down, the end. But it didn't feel right. That's not the arc that these stories take. There needed to be a third act twist. That third act became, well, the other half of the story!

I knew that Hirsch was behind it the whole time. He always was at the center, but the pawns shifted at times. Ty was once in his pocket (in a very early version), but I really liked Ty just being Ty, a "good" friend and kind of bro-whore. I knew that I wanted a big confrontation that brings all the players together. And I wanted Amanda and David to make it.

This community helped with that last goal. You helped me see just how fucked up their marriage was. It's often hard when you're so close and have such a clear idea of the end, to realize the implications. That's one of the reasons book 3 was so long, and why book 2 took so long to come out. I needed to adjust things and give the characters the space to evolve into the people I needed them to be in the end.

So there's probably a lot more than you ever wanted. Ask questions if you have more. I'm always happy to talk about my process.

Oh, and last thing. This story was probably the most exhausting thing that I've ever written. I've said it before, but it was a lot of work. But I think it's so worth it. It's one of the best things I've put out, IMO.

AI Artwork

Say what you will about AI (it's coming for our jobs, it's scary, deep fakes, etc, etc), but it's come quite a long way, and it's pretty wild. Oh, and for the record, I will NEVER use AI in my writing. I'm not doing this strictly for the money. I enjoy the process (I wrote a whole thing above about it!), and I love watching scenes unfold and having that control. Why give that up to a machine?

But I will confess, AI art is fun. After writing most of In Too Deep, I wondered what it could do with Amanda. The splash image above is one of many I did of her. I used a seed image and ran with it. I'm a little hesitant to post many images, because one of the things that's so great about books over other media is how we bring our own imaginations to it. But here are a few anyway, if you're curious.

(Blue eyes, dark hair)

(Guess she got a foot blown off at some point!)

(Amanda hanging out on the Dominion before the big party?)

So how does AI Amanda live up to everyone's thoughts?

Take care, everyone, and happy Tuesday!