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.