Niwot author publishes debut novel

R.L. Maizes is a Niwot local whose debut novel "Other People's Pets" is set in a fictional small town on the front range of Colorado.

For Maizes, setting the book in Colorado was a natural choice.

"It's so inspiring to look out your window and see a red tailed hawk, to see a fox when you're on your evening walk," said Maizes. "I recently saw a bobcat going behind a neighbor's house. There's incredible wildlife both in Niwot and in Colorado, so it was really a perfect place to set a book about animals."

After earning acclaim for her first book, a collection of short stories called "We Love Anderson Cooper" published in July 2019, Maizes quickly followed up with her novel, which was published this summer.

Here's the setup, according to Maizes, "Other People's Pets" is about a young woman named La La Fine who is an animal empath, raised by her father to be a burglar. In the novel, she has left a life of crime behind and is in her fourth year of veterinary school, engaged to a chiropractor named Clem, when her father gets arrested.

"In order to raise his attorney fees," said Maizes, "she feels she has to go back to robbing houses, justifying her actions by taking care of animals in the homes she robs."

The book is a work of magic realism, the genre where realistic stories have surreal elements of dream or fantasy, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Generally, characters in novels of this genre treat these magical elements as commonplace or usual, and the magic is woven into everyday, mundane life.

Maizes took inspiration for the book from her own life. "The dogs in the novel-Black and Blue-are very roughly modeled after a pair of dogs I had about 10 years ago."

Her dogs were a lab mix and an Aussie mix, like the dogs in the book, and, "It's a little bit of a tribute to them," she said.

The connection to Maizes' own life stops there, though. She was not trained as a child to burgle houses. To research that aspect of the novel, and set herself in her character La La's shoes, she read lots of interviews with burglars from police and sociologists. She even undertook her own interviews with an assistant district attorney and a bail bondsman, "all to get a better idea of how burglars work."

"So that even though I don't have that personal experience, I did a lot of research so that it would be authentic," said Maizes.

Maizes wanted to be an author since she was very young, but her path to the profession was not a straight line. She had multiple careers, "first in children's publishing and then as an attorney. I didn't really pursue a career as an author until I was in my 40's," said Maizes.

Even then, she spent over a decade studying, learning, and taking classes and courses on writing, before finally completing her first short story collection.

Her novel "Other People's Pets" was published in the midst of the pandemic, in July 2020, and Maizes said, "There's nothing like coming out with your debut novel during a pandemic to let you know that it's not going to be all fame and fortune from here."

Nonetheless, she's managed to do events on the virtual book circuit. Signed copies of the novel are available at Boulder Bookstore.

Maizes said interested readers can go to her website at http://www.rlmaizes.com to view some of these events, or listen to news stories such as those from KGNU's radio book club or KUNC's olorado Edition.

Doing events online is "not quite as nice as being able to meet your readers in person and having your readers able to purchase the book from the bookstore," said Maizes. But there is a silver lining as the virtual events "do get recorded, and it does give readers and listeners a chance to view at their convenience."