Tags
Confessions in the Mural, Creative Writing, fifteen years, murder, mysteries of the past, mystery, opening, reevaluate, regroup, republish, research, The Writing on the Wall, updates, Writing
With TV carrying shows about investigating crime, and mostly murder, we realize (or should) how difficult it would be to kill someone and not be found out. Forensics has changed that landscape in the last several decades and can now detect anything in a toxicity screen (blood sample), and, of course, identify just about any weapon, and let’s not forget about DNA left behind with even a hair falling out.
So, what happens though when you want to kill someone in the 1940s? Well, there are ways!
I ended up doing my research for The Writing on the Wall because of where the book was leading as I was writing it. The idea of the novel have an old murder (actually murders, plural) was not on my mind when I started writing it. Hadn’t crossed my mind. Only thing I knew was that there was going to be writing on the wall found under wallpaper in an old house during a renovation. I wanted the novel to be my first mystery but that’s tough when you’ve written women’s fiction all along. Of course there had to be some romance in it!
So how do you begin a search like that? Lucky for me, I actually work in the medical field so I know a great deal of side effects of even more medications. BUT… what would have been detected and not detected in 1947?
We are so accustomed to what technology gives us today that we forget that much didn’t exist a hundred years ago, and less.
The Writing on the Wall is the first in a romance/mystery series that I’m writing. I’m in the middle of edits on the second book, Confessions in the Mural, and hope to have it out by the end of this year.
It is not my intention to wait another five years before I bring out the next book in this series. I just have to come up with a good working title! I had a whole page covered in them back in 2011 but I can’t find that notebook so I’m back to square one.
It is also my intention to re-release The Writing on the Wall with updated information and release it for the first time for Kindle. I will post that information here and on my website as I work on those projects.
As I have said before, it has been fifteen years since I started writing add I’ve come a long way. Confessions will be my tenth novel plus I’ve been teaching for the last five. It’s time to regroup, reevaluate and move forward with whatever my decisions are.
Ultimately, I would love to share my work with the region by renting the upstairs of The Button Factory and have an opening of sorts with a reading or two and, of course, a signing.
Now I just have to figure out everything else!