Ken Blaisdell

I grew up in the small coastal-New England town of Rowley, Massachusetts.  The same town that is host to the central action of my second novel, The Nightmare Murders.  I attended grades 9 through 12 (class of 1970) at Newburyport High School, which is the setting for pivotal plot elements in The Weaver Conspiracy.  Also featured in Weaver is the fictionalized “St. Jacques Hospital,” which is based on the real-life Anna Jaques Hospital, where both of my daughters were born.  I currently live in the Phoenix, Arizona “Valley of the Sun,” where (although, as of this writing, their husbands are all alive) my immediate neighbors were the inspiration for The Wives of Logan’s Point.  And the opening scenes of the forthcoming novel, Guardian, are set in downtown Phoenix during a summer monsoon rain storm.  Are you beginning to see a pattern?  I like to write about things that I know.  Accuracy and detail are important to me—as I believe they are to readers—so a great deal of time and effort goes into research for each of my stories.  One reviewer, after reading Weaver, complimented the authenticity and detail in the book by saying that he found himself expecting to hear updates about my characters and events on the evening news.

 

The first story I recall writing was when I was probably 10 or 11.  It was the early 60’s and the cold war was in full swing.  The one-page hand-written story had heroic Air Force pilot, Jon Garret, dropping an H-bomb on the USSR.  The final line of the story read, “Russia was gone!”  (At that age, I had greatly over-estimated the power of a single hydrogen bomb, and conversely under-estimated the size of Russia!)  I found it interesting, however, when, 20 years later, President Reagan unwittingly said into an open microphone that, “... I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."  Apparently, I was just way ahead of my time!

 

In the ensuing years I’ve written countless short stories for my own and friends’ enjoyment, including the “Legend Series,” which featured The Legend of Chivo Falls, The Legend of a Jeep Called Bunky, The Legend of the Sibley Curse, and The Legend of Mary Clark.  I have also had several technical articles published in trade magazines (I am a mechanical engineer by profession; essentially, an inventor of specialized machines.)

 

I completed my first novel, The Weaver Conspiracy, in 2003— almost one year to the day from when I started it.  It has taken a long time, many rewrites, and long hours of editing to finally bring it to print, but it has been a labor of love.

 

I am currently in the rewriting/editing phase of my second-to-be-released novel, The Nightmare Murders, which, as I mentioned, takes place primarily in the small town of Rowley, Mass., where I grew up.

 

A third work-in-progress is titled The Wives of Logan’s Point, and features five close neighbors in an affluent community who conspire to kill their husbands for various reasons from jealousy, to rage, to greed—and even for the simple thrill of it.

 

In the planning and research stage is a novel tentatively titled Guardian.  It is a mystery about an eight-year-old “guardian angel” who has inexplicably become manifest to her human charge, and who helps her to solve the disappearance of a young girl that neither of them even know is missing.

 

I attended Newburyport High School from 1966 through 1970, and attended many assemblies, pep rallies, and football games in the concrete stadium that figures so prominently in the early chapters of The Weaver Conspiracy.

 

I was not a great student—mostly C’s with the occasional B offset by a D to keep the average truly average.  Had the term existed at the time, I would probably have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, because my mind always seemed to be somewhere else.  “He could do it if he’d only try.” was a recurring theme in the comments section on many of my report cards.  In reality, “He could do it if he was only interested.” would have been a more accurate assessment.  I wish that I could say that I was bored the way that Einstein was in school, but the truth was that whatever was going on in my imagination was simply more interesting than what the teacher was saying.  There were a couple of notable exceptions, however, and they have made all the difference.  The first was Mrs. Kelley.

 

Katherine Kelley taught English, and she somehow made nouns and pronouns, verbs and adverbs, adjectives and prepositions all click for me.  To this day, I don’t know what she did differently than the host of English teachers who preceded her, but I finally “got it” in her class, and English was suddenly not so much a foreign language any longer.  Thank you, Mrs. Kelley!

 

The other exception was an elective senior-English class called “Gothic Novel.”  Up until then, I was not much of a reader, having been force-fed classics in which I had little interest.  Little Britches and The Yearling come to mind.  Both great books, of course, but not when you’re 17 or 18 and inclined more toward short stories (remember that ADD?) in the action/adventure genre.  The book chosen for that one-semester class was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles.  Perhaps not one of the world’s literary masterpieces, but it made me actually enjoy reading for a change!  I aced the class, and was hooked on the written word!  I wish that I could remember who taught the class, because I would like to thank them, also.

 

A couple of technological developments that allowed me to finally tackle a full-length novel were that word-processors displaced typewriters.  (After, literally, millions of keystrokes, I am still a terrible typist!)  And that someone invented “spell-check”!  (I am as bad at spelling as typing!)  I think that’s why I became an engineer; math doesn’t have rules like, “I before E, expect after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh.”  (So why is “height” spelled that way?)  There are no exceptions in math rules.  Okay, maybe when you get into the Einstein-level, but that’s a different world.

 

But the only other worlds with which I am immediately concerned are the “alternate realities” that I can create for my readers through my fiction.  I hope that you will enjoy experiencing them as much as I have enjoyed crafting them.

 

Sincerely,

Ken Blaisdell

Ken & Diane Blaisdell