The tradespeople win eventually

I build and repair things with my hands all day, which sounds meditative in theory and is extremely loud in practice. Fifteen years of carpentry work in Portland, mostly residential, some commercial. I'm good at it. I am not in any way distracted by it when I'm doing it. At night I write crime fiction, which I've been doing since about 2010, and the fact that it took me this long to tell anyone outside my house about it says something about the culture of the industry I work in. My crime novels are set in Portland, in the kind of neighbourhoods I actually know, not the Pearl District or the version of the city in TV shows. The antagonists in my current manuscript are property developers. The protagonist is an electrician who finds something during a renovation job she wasn't supposed to find. I read mostly from Powell's on Burnside, which is the only bookshop I have ever been in that I genuinely could not leave in under an hour. I read James Lee Burke and Megan Abbott and Patricia Highsmith. I do not read books in which tradespeople are stupid or incidental. There are not enough books in which they figure things out themselves.