Going over some of my books lately - or rather trying to come up with a different idea than what I have written as of late, I discovered that I have a common theme throughout the majority of my works. It is totally subconscious that I do this, but I wonder as to why I often use this particular theme.

That theme being: misperception . . . I have all these stories where one of the main characters has major misperceptions about the other. My book, Deadly Mistakes, the hero, at first, thinks that the heroine is a friend of "Charlie," the person tied up in a murder investigation, when in fact SHE is Charlie. And in Her Passion, the heroine has a one-night-stand with an old high school chum though she thinks he's just a man she picked up in a bar never to see again.

21 out of 27 books have this theme to one degree or the other (and before you say, "Holy cow, Dennie has written 27 books!" know that of those 27 only seven are complete. And two need much editing. The other 20 are in varying stages of crap - I have what you might call writer's-ADD - I get bored very easily with what I write if it isn't flowing at the speed in which I feel it should.)

I have a book where the heroine is kidnapped and one of the kidnappers is an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the boss, and the killer's, inner circle. Another, a woman is on the run from a bad cop and covers her tracks as best as possible, then winds up in the care of a Sheriff with something to prove to his small town. And yet another where the hero thinks the heroine swindled his uncle out his entire estate when in fact she has used up every of her last dimes to keep it afloat and the destitute condition it is really in a secret.

I will say, that some times, the misperception will go on for only a page or two. As was the case with the last story mentioned. But in the case of the kidnapper, he has to keep his cover for more than two-thirds of the book (or rather, he will, if I ever get out of chapter three).

This was not a theme I set out to use - and use excessively, but even as I plotted two new story lines this weekend, it crept into one of them. Who knows, maybe in a house as full as mine, I have latent secret desires to be invisible or hide from the world - but that is getting way to deep for me. Mostly, I write because the dern voices won't stop until I do =)

(and I wonder why my mother always looks at me strange!)