Some of those refusals are stories

I have worked in the planning department of Dublin City Council for twenty-five years and I have approved and rejected planning applications for property developments all over the city, and I want to be very clear that this page contains no confidential information about any real application. Crime fiction is the genre because crime fiction understands bureaucracy in a way that literary fiction often doesn't. The corrupt planning decision, the letter that shouldn't exist, the variance that gets approved on a Tuesday afternoon when three of the committee are at a conference. These are not extraordinary events. They are the ordinary texture of institutional life. My protagonist is a retired planning officer, not a detective, and she has twenty-five years of document knowledge and no official standing, and these are her primary tools. I live in Drumcondra and I write on weekends. The Irish crime fiction scene is a small community and I've been to a few events at Dubray Books on Grafton Street where writers I admire have read. I haven't read publicly myself. I'm not there yet. The manuscript is on its second draft and the second draft is better than the first in the ways that matter and worse in ways I haven't entirely identified.