Goofing Off in Paradise

What a summer! Generally played hooky for three months, fiddling with the jungles surrounding my house some might call my perennial gardens and played enough golf to keep me going for months. The weather was too gorgeous to sit in front of a computer screen all day.

And now, with the first snow forecast to fall tonight, I return to writing the next great American novel as I face down the grim reality of encroaching winter. It's not that I mind winter per se, it's just that I find six months of gloom and cold and gray a bit over the top.

I'm really pumped about the novel I'm working on now. With working title, Mudder, it'll be a fun read when I finish. Unlike my first two novels, this one is going to be light on research, especially compared to Pestilence which forced me to relearn genetics and biochemistry and to spend countless hours grinding through research papers and books on the subject of prion diseases. The research for Mudder will be limited mostly to researching family annihilators as the book opens with the protagonist discovering her beloved brother swinging from the chandelier after, apparently, killing his wife and two young children. Of course the protagonist doesn't believe her brother is capable of such a dastardly deed, but hey, all the evidence points at his being the bad guy. But enough for now: I don't want to spoil the ending.

I'll probably have to sleep with the lights on and all the closet doors in my bedroom firmly closed once I get into the really scary chapters in Mudder. I just finished writing the sixth chapter and hope to finish the first draft by late winter. Then the real work begins as I sort out the plot, timelines and fix what will be dreadful writing since I just spew the idea out without worrying too much about the end result. Kinda like I do when I first sightread a new piece of music: no matter how bad it is, I try to keep going until I reach the end.

Writing, I find, is kind of a 24/7 proposition - you're always thinking of character arcs or dialogue or plot twists. Some of the greatest ideas -- read as in twisted and evil -- pop into my head on my daily walk with my dog. Hope me and the puppy can continue slogging through the snow to keep that steady stream of ideas coming. I'll let you know.