{"id":4610,"date":"2018-12-19T20:51:29","date_gmt":"2018-12-20T01:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=4610"},"modified":"2020-01-02T16:30:16","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T21:30:16","slug":"about-online-romance-scams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/about-online-romance-scams\/","title":{"rendered":"About online romance scams…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I happened to come across an article in The South China Morning Post<\/a> (global media yeah) titled “Huge explosion in online romance scams in Hong Kong in 2018.”<\/p>\n

If you’ve read my online serial novel The French Emerald<\/em>, keep going.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t, this might spoil things for you, so if you are at all fond of #chicklit or light readin’ fiction in general, click here to read the novel first<\/a> (it won’t take long, it’s really more of a novella) then come back :) <\/p>\n

Okay, you’ve read the novel, now a bit of background: I became fascinated by con men around the time I wrote Free Money.\u00a0<\/a> It started through research I did at the time about a couple armored truck heists that were pulled off in Rochester in the 80s. That led me to a book titled The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man<\/a> (which I recently learned was the inspiration for the movie The Sting<\/em><\/a>). And The Big Con got me thinking about online romance scams …<\/p>\n

It’s funny how novels get started. The French Emerald<\/em> was a relatively easy novel for me to write, partly because my mind just figured out quickly who the characters were and where they were going, but partly because the plot was a mashup of two things.<\/p>\n

Ingredient number one: a legend that Charles the 10th had hidden under an assumed name (Louis Anathe Muller) in a “castle” (really a big cabin–but 12 inch thick, solid cherry walls, oh my) in Madison County in central New York State.<\/p>\n

I discovered this tale when I picked up a 1965 collection of stories titled Oxcarts Along the Chenango<\/a><\/em> by Ray Gallinger .<\/p>\n

Here is a great little piece on Muller<\/a>. A bit more factually accurate than the Gallinger version ;)<\/p>\n

Ingredient #2 was the idea of romance scams.<\/p>\n

As countless writers have shown, you can unreel a nice plot by bringing a con man together with a mark. Add to that a real-life historical mystery and you’ve got yourself plenty of twists to throw at a handful of characters.<\/p>\n

And that’s all I have to say about that. For now. But I plan to visit the Muller site next summer. I’ll bring back pics :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve read The French Emerald, keep going. If you haven’t, do that first and come back because this post (about where I came up with the ideas for the serial novel plot) contains a bit of a spoiler… Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1349,1352,1348,344,778,1350,1353,1351,1354],"class_list":["post-4610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-con-man","tag-microfiction","tag-online-romance-scams","tag-romcom","tag-scams","tag-serial-novel","tag-the-big-con","tag-the-french-emerald","tag-the-sting"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4610"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5937,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4610\/revisions\/5937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}