May
18

Sometimes it feels like you almost have to know your characters better than you know your spouse, to be a successful writer. While I love my wife, I can’t say I know all her habits backward and forward. That isn’t essential in a marriage; but to write a novel, you have to know if your female lead uses eye cream or not before bed – something you may not want to be aware of with a spouse.

It’s odd and it feels almost like neglecting your spouse, to know your characters so well. But then, that’s just another good reason to always make sure that I take my wife out once a week on our date night. After all, you can’t snuggle up to a warm character at night… so it’s good to keep those priorities in line.

May
18
Filed Under (writing) by admin on 18-05-2009

I want to create a ghost who’s touchable. That the goal with my latest project. I’m tired of the old conventions that insist a ghost passes through everything and is mere mist. What’s scary about mist? A ghost who is touchable, however, has more impact. You don’t even know you’re being haunted until it’s far too late.

While it may not be as technical as a manual on installing Delta fauctes, believe it or not in the supernatural mystery world, people really care about “the rules” of the supernatural world. However, my job as a novelist is to tell a compelling mystery and you just can’t have that with the stereotypical ghosts found in so many novels.

Mine will be different.

May
18
Filed Under (creativity) by admin on 18-05-2009

I’m finally making progress again on my first Pizza Delivery Mystery novel, Thirty Minutes Or Less. Longtime readers will remember I lost over 100 surplus pages of manuscript during a hard drive crash in which I had no data backup. It’s been a long road toward working up the energy to tackle the novel afresh, but I finally have.

I’ve taken my wife’s advice and found a whole new approach to the plot, jumping ahead in the novel’s timeline after the prologue so that I can get my main character to the action, the novel’s main premise, and all of the important characters that much faster. I am envisioning about a third of the novel taking place in a sort of “frame/flashback” structure before the plot catches up to current action and unreels from there.

This new approach makes me feel more confident about the novel than I did the first time through; by getting to the important stuff earlier, the elements that I believe will hook readers are there early on. That is what will make this novel stand out.