MimiHawthorne's blog

It's Saturday night, and I am at Killer Nashville, a three-day conference for mystery writers.  I have been here for two days now, and I have Hit The Wall.  Not the kind of hitting the wall where detectives will try to discern the velocity of impact by the blood spatters.  Nor the kind where my skin will show recognizable impact marks from blunt weapons one might find lying around the boiler room.  There is no bullet wound with smoke stains around it from a 9 mm.

No, I have hit the wall of Too Much Information.

We started with the proverbial BANG on Friday morning with "Written in Blood:  DNA, Blood Analysis, and Reading Blood Spatter."  It was like a Physics class .... charts and graphs everywhere indicating how you can tell by the shape of the spatter its trajectory and velocity.  I now know what blood spatters look like on carpet, linoleum, glass, leather and metal.  There is a difference.  And of course, the blood cast off from a golf club bashing someone's head is different from that cast off from an axe.  I learned all this is in a dark room, surrounded by a hundred people who were feverishly taking notes, hanging on every word of this former police officer with his powerpoint.