I’ve been chugging along on this book, but now I’ve reached the point where I have to start moving toward solving this thing. I’ve spent so long trying to hide clues, and now I have to reveal them. This is where it gets tricky, trying to make things hard for my sleuth (and for readers) while still needing my sleuth to uncover things. One challenge I have is that the situation makes it hard for her to find and interview suspects, so I have to come up with ways for her to meet up with them.

Mysteries are a lot harder than they seem to write. It’s strange, the Enchanted, Inc. books were essentially mysteries, just without the dead bodies, but I don’t seem able to move what I was doing there over to this structure. I think there was less pressure to make things tricky there because the story wasn’t really about the “case.” It was about the magic and all the other stuff that was going on with the characters. I think, to some extent, that in a mystery series, readers follow it more because they like the characters and situation than for the actual mysteries, but to get readers to that point, the case in the first book has to be good. I just read the first book in a mystery series in which I liked the sleuth and the concept, but the case was handled so badly that I don’t think I’ll be reading any other books in the series.

What I’m having fun with is building a new “world” and creating new characters. That’s always been my favorite part of writing. The actual story and the plot have always been my challenge. It took me a long time to figure out what to do after I came up with a situation, a setting, and the characters.

I’m afraid Thanksgiving is going to kill my momentum, just as I’m getting close to the end. I guess I’ll just hole up in the guest room while everyone else is watching football.

I’m getting close to the halfway point on the book I’m working on, but I realized after yesterday’s very productive writing session that I did something wrong with that scene. Today I’ll have to backtrack and rework it to move things in the right direction. I’m trying to figure out when to introduce a particular element that will move the plot forward dramatically but also complicate things for the main character. I think I moved part of it up way too quickly and need to add the other part first.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve fallen in love with my setting, which is a problem because it doesn’t actually exist. I believe there’s a particular word in one language (that I don’t recall) that translates to homesickness for a place you’ve never been. This is like that, except it’s a place I can never go. I created a fictional small town that’s very loosely based on a couple of actual towns. I stole some geography from two places and put them together to get what I wanted. Then I started adding the elements I needed for the story, along with giving the town a background that explained some of the things. The result is a town I would like to visit, maybe even live in.

There’s a “downtown” area with a main street and a couple of side streets built in those turn-of-the-century downtown-style buildings you see in a lot of Texas towns. Sadly, in a lot of these towns, those buildings are now empty or torn down. People try to start businesses there, but they don’t last long. If a business is doing well there, the building no longer meets its needs, so they end up building a newer building on the edge of town. But in my town, they’ve found businesses to go in these buildings and have even built apartments on the upper floors. The town’s in the process of turning around and finding a new identity after it almost withered away.

One of the businesses in my old downtown is a Mexican restaurant. Either it used to actually be a saloon or it looks like it because that’s the vibe it has. It has wooden floors and a pressed tin ceiling, a big bar at the back that’s now counter seating, and the traditional mirror behind the bar. The food is excellent, and it’s the town hang-out. Late last week and over the weekend I was writing a scene set in this restaurant. My main character’s been stuck in this town after a lot of things happen, including one of those sudden cold fronts that takes it from a pleasant morning to sleet by evening, and she walks to this restaurant, where she meets a lot of the other characters, since it’s one of the few places still open and a lot of the people who were in the vicinity of the murder have come there for dinner. That meant I spent days craving Mexican food, but the problem was that I wanted to go to this restaurant, which doesn’t actually exist.

Fortunately, there were tacquitos at a party I went to over the weekend, which eased the craving somewhat. And I found a recipe for cheese enchiladas that sounds like what I like, so I’m going to try making that this weekend.

There’s also a diner in town that’s in a remodeled old train car. That one is based on a restaurant I went to in Oklahoma, which is in an old train car. I somewhat modified it, but I liked the idea, and it fits with the town’s story.

Today I need to decide what kind of library they have and what its building looks like.

A book on writing and publishing I was reading mentioned a piece of Stephen King’s advice from his book On Writing, so I thought I’d check that out of the library and read the whole thing. I haven’t read a lot of Stephen King because I’m a massive weenie who can’t handle a lot of tension and who doesn’t like to be scared. I’ve read a collection of his short stories. I read The Dead Zone after starting to watch the TV series. Oddly, it wasn’t the spooky supernatural stuff that made that series too scary for me to watch all the way through. It was when the creepy politician became the focus that I got too freaked out. I guess it’s the same reason I can’t watch or read courtroom stories. I know vampires and monsters are fiction, but lawyers and politicians are real, and that’s truly scary. I also read The Colorado Kid, which was the (very loose) basis for the series Haven. He’s an incredibly talented writer, so even if I’m too chicken to read most of his work, I figured I had something to learn from him.

The first half of the book is essentially a memoir about how he came to be a writer. I came away from reading that with the sense that I’d actually like him a great deal if I met him. I might even need to give more of his books a shot because, from the sounds of things, I get what he’s trying to say, and it seems like the impression I have is more from the movies made from his books, which tend to take a very different perspective.

The second half gets into more how-to, at least how he approaches writing. I think my biggest practical takeaway is his advice that the second draft should be 10 percent shorter than the first draft, tightening it all up and getting rid of any flab. In my case, I would probably adapt that to say that after I think the book is done, I should do another pass to remove 10 percent. My first draft tends to be fairly bare bones, almost like a screenplay, so it’s mostly dialogue and action. There is some flab, certainly, since I tend to process things on paper, having the characters think about or talk about what they should do or have done, and once I’ve figured all that out, I can cut the process part. But I also have to add things like emotions and description. My second drafts usually involve cutting huge chunks and adding huge chunks. But after that, trying to trim 10 percent, whether it’s in whole passages or individual words, might be a really good exercise. He even has an example of how he edits a scene to show the kinds of things he cuts.

There’s also some good inspirational stuff that I need to keep in mind when I get discouraged about the business that comes with writing. The quote I probably need to embroider on a throw pillow is: “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”

Now maybe I need to try more of his novels. Any suggestions for weenie-safe Stephen King books?

I’ve finally made it back to my old proven working schedule, writing before I do anything else in the morning, and I’ve already written almost half of my target word count for the day. I guess the proven schedule really does work, as much as I hate it.

I write in an application called Scrivener. It’s designed primarily for fiction writers and has a lot of fun little functions I’m still discovering. One thing I like is that it works like a binder where you can keep all documents relating to a project, so research notes, character lists, etc., are all in one handy place. You can put each scene in a separate document and the software compiles it all into one Word document when it’s done (it’s a pain to write in separate documents in Word). While you’re drafting, it’s easy to jump to other parts of the book if you need to fix something, and it’s easy to move scenes around. There’s a spot on each document where you can write notes about what the scene’s about, and there’s a mode in which you can see those notes as notecards, which helps for plotting. You can lay out the scenes you know by writing on the notecards, then go back and actually write the scenes.

One of my favorite features is the project tracker. There’s a little window you can bring up where you enter your target word count and target daily word count, and it shows your progress. The bar starts as red, gradually turns orange, then a yellowish color, and gradually turns bright green as you near your goal. Or you can set a target word count and a deadline and which days of the week you plan to write, and it will calculate how many words you need to write a day to hit that deadline. It recalculates if you go over or under your daily target. One of the great joys in writing life is going over one day and then opening the application the next morning to see that the daily target has gone down. It’s a great motivator to do just a little more. The closer you get to the deadline, the bigger the impact going over (or under) the daily target has because it’s spread over fewer days.

I also like that there’s a quick reference panel you can bring up without leaving the document you’re in. I use that for a character list. When I come up with a character, that person’s name and any vital info I need to remember go in the list. Then it’s easy to check when that character appears again and I need to be sure of his name and how to spell it or if I need to remember something like a character’s sister’s name that was only mentioned offhand once earlier in the book.

You can put pictures in the documents, too—not to appear in the final compilation, but showing up in the notes on the side. There are places to put reference photos in the binder, and there are character and location sheets where you can put photos, but if something is critical to a scene and you need to refer to it frequently while writing the scene, you can put it in the notes for that document.

Today I’ve already watched my daily tracker turn yellow, and the project tracker has gone from red to orange. My daily target word count is dropping gradually. It’s already below my usual daily output, so I feel like I might be able to draft this book this month. Then again, I haven’t hit the dreaded middle slump yet. So far, I’m still getting scenes in my head every night and am just having to transcribe them the next morning.