The creation of “Regrets Only”… the 5th story in the Gwen Andrews mystery series… required more hours than the previous tales. Opting to take Gwen and her sister out to Nantucket for a Halloween party brought with it an entirely different challenge.
And here’s why. The first four stories in the series took place in the fictional town of Harbor Falls, Massachusetts, a place of my imagination with street names I’d chosen and buildings where I needed them.
But on Nantucket, streets carry established names. The ferry docks, police station, and mid-island grocery store are located in particular sections of the island. Because I couldn’t fake these details, my daytrip friend suggested we ride the ferry to explore the island’s nooks and crannies. After three days of gaining a good sense of the island and its details, we headed back to the mainland and I continued the writing.
But as usually happens, my original plot veered off, taking twists and turns, leading me to a ending different than I’d planned.
Now here I sit, working through my completed manuscript one scene at a time. Adjusting character dialogue. Eliminating unnecessary words. Summarizing repeated passages. Tightening the prose. Making sure the foreshadowing matches the events that eventually take place.
When I finish this last edit and feel proud to release “Regrets Only” to mystery lovers, I’ll place the file in the hands of my very capable publisher for her review and final suggestions. When all adjustments are applied, she’ll upload to my Amazon page, and submit the order for printed copies to be autographed.
When that banner day arrives, I’ll turn to Gwen in my mind and ask, “What mystery would you like to solve next?”
Every fiction writer knows the frustration of plotting their story. Especially with a mystery, such as I create, the plot not only needs to proceed logically toward the climax, but the characters, dialogue, and actions within each scene need to be believable to the reader as the clues are subtly inserted into the story.
As I settle into my third year of snow-birding in Florida, I continue to work with my writing group back in Massachusetts by emailing chapters back and forth, soliciting comments and suggestions. Our system seems to work very well, and in fact, I think we’re more productive!
Whenever the members of our writers group are unavailable for a face-to-face meeting at alternating houses or libraries located between us, we have found that emailing our chapters for critique works very well.
So excited to open my inbox yesterday and find an email from my editor/publisher Stephanie Blackman, owner of Riverhaven Books in Whitman, MA! As scheduled in our contract, yesterday was the due date for her to provide me with suggestions to fine-tune ‘Bed, Breakfast, & Blackmail’.
As I approached the final edit of ‘Bed, Bath, & Blackmail’, I loaded my manuscript into a website called ‘Wordcounter.com’, a most useful tool.
There is nothing more satisfying than to walk into a bookstore and see both of my mysteries displayed on the shelf in the local author section.
For the past two years, I’ve been presenting my Author Talk centered around how I learned to write a mystery. I was thrilled recently to receive an invitation from the Friends group for my local senior center to speak to them again this April with an update on my writing career and my work in progress.
Debi Graham-Leard 