One of my pet peeves are generic, forgettable characters. It is something I do my best to avoid when writing any fiction. Yet it’s not easy; slipping into cliche is far more comfortable and quick.

However, speed should not always win out over creativity. One can easily write in a generic sheriff character into any mystery; they’re easy to write. But finding a unique personality quirk or tick that makes this particular sheriff memorable is preferable by far.

Sometimes it can be something as trivial has specifying that his office is outfitted with Maxim lighting; sometimes it can be more idiosyncratic, such has making the sheriff afraid of spiders.

Whatever the case, these minor ticks so show up in real individuals and are the sort of things that, if brought to the fore, make characters memorable.

Sometimes I get to a point in the plot of my novel where my productivity slows down. It’s not that my commitment to writing is waning, but more than I need to think through my story more thoroughly. After all, it’s not like I’m publishing children’s books; I’m working on mysteries, which requires quite a bit of cleverness in plotting.

It can be tedious to write out certain portions of a long, 400-page-plus novel; not every scene is automatically riveting until you think it through and find a way to make it fascinating. Some writers don’t care and will push out boring scenes to keep their page output up and meet a deadline; since I don’t have a book contract just yet, I don’t have to be hamstrung like that.

For about a week, I’ve been stuck on the same part of my novel; while I haven’t been producing new pages, I’ve been working on ways to drive the plot forward while making the scene interesting to read. Finally, last night, I had my breakthrough and produced several pages and now I’m past the problem section and back on track with my productivity pace.

That’s satisfying.

While many people prefer to give green gifts these days, I’m still a fan of the helpful, practical variety. For example, if you have a friend who’s a writer, helping them untie a knot in the plot of their story is certainly going to be appreciated far more than some trinket.

For example, since I am beginning a series of mystery novels, I have to think of clever ways for people to die, and then even more-clever ways for that death to be mistakenly interpreted. After all, if the evidence were clear, there’d be no mystery, correct?

Unfortunately, people look at you funny, even suspiciously, when you start asking questions like, “If someone swallowed a lethal dose of rat poison, how long would it take for them to die, and if they were severely beaten up as well, would the poison be obvious enough to be the actual cause of death on a coroner’s report?”

Still, it’s questions like that that mystery writers must grapple with to come up with satisfyingly hard-to-guess mystery thriller plots, and a little professional expertise is always welcome.

Jobs in retail are far easier to find than a publishing contract or an editor willing to give you the time of day; however, guess which is more rewarding for a person with a creative bent? I’ll give you a hint: it doesn’t involve hawking Nikes to grandmas.

Now that I’m rolling on a novel for the first time in years, I’m starting to give some time and thought to finding a market for my novel. Of course, the best approach I can think of is the most direct: find out the publisher – and if possible, the editor – of the authors and novels that are in the same genre as what you’re working on, and send it to them.

Of course, you have to make sure your own work isn’t to imitative of the novels you enjoy as a reader; if so, yours will be just another sound-alike novel without the name-brand value that an established author brings.

Yet assuming the novel you’re working on has a voice all its own, it doesn’t hurt to send your submission to the guy or gal who handles the same type of book you’ve written. For example, it wouldn’t do much good to send a science-fiction novel to the person who specializes in celebrity biographies, would it?

While the Writer’s Market can be a huge help in cases like these, it’s best not to submit things to a generic submissions editor; if you can find out the name of a published author’s editor, that can sometimes help, although some authors are more willing than others to give out such information.

And remember, always register your completed novel with the US Copyright Office before submitting it anywhere. The government now has an e-version of the Copyright Office that lets you upload your completed work in PDF format for a minor, $35 registration fee ($10 off traditional mail-in registration), so it’s now more convenient than ever to protect your intellectual property!

One of the big troubles with creating a mystery series is explaining why a particular person is always around when death pops up. After all, I’ve been alive and kicking for 41 years, soon 42, and I’ve never once stumbled across a murdered body.

There are as many ways to solve this dilemma as there are writers to tell tales. Some give them a profession where such occurrences are commonplace, which is why so many mystery stories involve private detectives, cops, lawyers and so on.

Others simply choose to ignore the unlikelihood of it all and just ask the reader to accept the happenstance at face value. That works less and less these days; the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew would seem dang suspicious after the first couple of books, it seems to me. At least in the eyes of modern law enforcement.

My solution is another path: I’m giving my hapless murder-finder a supernatural companion. I won’t go into spoilage just at the moment, but consider it safe to say that my unlikely hero is made a lot more likely with this character hanging around him.

And then I’m also borrowing another element that helps: a healthy dash of humor. And that’s worth more than all the San Francisco resumes in the world.

Mediterranean cruises are out of the question until I finish my new novel and get it accepted somewhere, but that’s one of the beautiful things about completing a project; it’s the first step toward getting something in print and reaping the rewards of that success.

It may seem obvious to say this but: you can’t be a published writer if you never finish anything you write. I know, I know, it’s completely obvious. But sometimes one needs the obvious to kick ‘em in the face before it finally sinks in. I really do want to be a published novelist; it’s time to start completing novels.

It may seem odd or insensitive, but my mother’s death seems to be bringing out the best in me creatively. I started my new novel shortly after I learned she had terminal cancer, and although matters of taking care of her leading up to her death, as well as her funeral, have kept my wife and I busy, I’ve been amazed how motivated I’ve been to write, even through those times.

Perhaps it’s because her mortality reminds me of my own. Perhaps it’s because I want to do something that she knew I loved, and finally do it right. Or perhaps it’s God using the event to light a fire under my butt.

Whatever the case, it’s motivating me and it’s a whole lot more interesting to be writing a novel than indulging in, for example, futures trading.

I call it “the James Patterson method,” but it’s working for me; one of the best tools I’ve found in making progress on my new novel and not losing interest is to write in short bursts. Rather than composing a novel of maybe twenty chapters of twenty-to-forty pages each – long, ponderous things to write or to read – I am limiting myself to several brief, single-scene chapters.

At the end of it all, I’m aiming at writing about 120 chapters, with an average length of three to five pages each. It gets me the same place, but the important part from a creative aspect is that, usually, I can compose a single chapter in one sitting, and so feel a sense of completion and accomplishment each and every time I sit down to write.

It also means that unless I slack off and take Orlando vacations several times (which I don’t have the budget for anyway), I should be done with the first draft of this puppy by New Year’s Eve.

It’s a great, achievable goal to shoot toward.

After spending five years doing sports journalism in northwestern Wisconsin, I developed a tribute community as a fictional setting for some of my stories, based on those experiences. Hope, Wisconsin is what I named it, and it’s an amalgamation of all my Wisconsin experiences.

I first visited hope in a graphic novel project I’m still working toward completion on, but is quite honestly on the back-burner at this point. It was a bit smaller and grittier than the version of Hope I’m envisioning for my new mystery novel series.

Although I’ve grown the size of Hope, it is still the same place I first envisioned when I started creating it about eight years ago. While I need it to be bigger to be an appropriate setting for a series of murder mysteries, it’s not growing that much; perhaps you could even say I’m just exploring the previously unexplored neighborhoods of Hope.

While there are not Orlando golf getaways in Hope, there are plenty of interesting folks and plenty of dark places where a human body could be stashed away. Just the perfect place for my mystery series.

It feels great to be writing a novel again, for the first time in over a decade. I’d let myself venture into the world of script-writing, working on comic book and stage projects, but honestly never really finishing anything for the last several years.

Now, I’m a few short chapters into a very exciting-to-write novel and feeling energized like never before about it. And it’s odd, because this burst of creativity comes on the heels of my mother’s death at the hands of pancreatic cancer; at a time like this, you’d think I’d be in no mood to write. Yet I am.

While an Outer Banks getaway would seem more fun, perhaps this is God’s way of comforting me through this difficult time; by giving me a novel idea and the energy to see it through, perhaps it will become my first published novel, and I can dedicate it to her.