Jim: Ha! I guess I disagree with your premise here. I do see glamour and excitement in Helen's job as an investigative reporter. Journalism is a fun and irresistible challenge for people determined to sift through the BS and find out the truth about people and governments and companies. By it's very nature, though, it's also a stressful, confrontational and exasperating job. So I tried to capture it  all, and keep it true to the spirit of the job, but at the same time have fun with it and, in some cases, satirize it.

JC: Helen and Roger are so fully-realized. Did you always know who they were or did they evolve as you wrote? When did they become real to you?

Jim: Good question. At what point to characters come alive for me and you and other authors? That's one of the mysteries that I find difficult to explain. But it's right at the core of why novels take so long to write. It doesn't take me years to get the sentences the way I want them, but it does seem to take that long to get to know my characters well enough to make them real to me and to throw them into action and make them pop off the page.

Roger and Helen were initially conceived as imaginary adversaries--Mr. Seattle vs Ms Snarky Reporter. The seed for Helen's personality was a tough young woman reporter from Chicago whom I worked with and admired.