Write Something Already!

Shame on me for blogging so infrequently. But I took my own advice to stop wasting time, get back to the business of writing, transform the outline and ideas I had been working on for far too long into a third novel.

I'm at the two-hundred page mark and the story line is getting so frightening, it's even starting to scare me. I just might have to start sleeping with the lights on and a baseball bat under my pillow.

Mind you, those two hundred pages, now printed out and sitting in my three-ring notebook, are garbage writing. I just needed to get the flow of the story down on paper, make sure the sequence and triggers for scenes made sense. The real work lies ahead, after I finish about another hundred pages.

First I'll do a complete rewrite, filling in character descriptions, plumping up their personalities through back story, dialogue and actions and making sure the timeline is plausible. Because I bounce back and forth between events leading up to the family's annihilation and Kate's real-time efforts to prove her brother's innocence, I get a little crazy making sure the climax of both story lines intersect at just the right moment.

After the rewrite, which I hope to complete during the summer, I'll start the repetitive, tedious task of editing, a process repeated um teem times before I start submitting to agents.

Currently titled, "Mudder", the story line revolves around a man who's been labeled a family annihilator after purportedly murdering his wife and two young children and then hanging himself. It's sad how timely that conceit has become with the many cases of murder/suicide reported in the news these days.

Anyhoo, Elliott's sister, Kate, is the only one who believes in his innocence. Elliott has been crucified in the press and his wife's family has refused to allow him to be buried in the family plot. In spite of damning evidence of Elliott's escalating instability in the months preceding the crimes and the crime lab finding no sign anyone else was in the dead bolted home the night of the murders, Kate refuses to accept the coroner's ruling of murder/suicide.

Her only ally in her battle to prove her brother's innocence is her neighbor, Rob, a handsome man her age who, by chance, was with her the night she discovered the bodies. Rob becomes her rock, her protector in the months following her family's deaths.

Battling alcoholism, a curse afflicting first her mother and then her brother, Kate refuses to move out of Elliott's house despite escalating nocturnal visits by the one they call the Mudder, clear warnings to Kate to get out or else. Her refusal to move will culminate in a terrifying confrontation with reality.