Monthly Archives: September 2011

With October approaching, the time has come for me to begin planning my next NaNoWriMo project. The rules state that you can work our your plot, work out your character descriptions and research all you like, as long as you don’t start actually writing until November 1st at midnight, so I like to spend October in the planning stages.  So far, I have one finished novella from NaNoWriMo (The Christmas Wager) and I’m getting close to wrapping up last year’s project, Murderous Requiem.  Obviously, NaNoWriMo is a good way for me to force myself to come up with a new novel every year.

I’m tentatively planning another murder mystery, but since Murderous Requiem breaks the rules of traditional murder mysteries — and its popularity may suffer, as a result — I’m digging up a very traditional mystery I plotted out in college, or possibly even as long ago as High School.  A magazine — I think it was Woman’s Day, though I can’t say for certain, and I can’t recall how I even came across it — was sponsoring a murder mystery contest, hosted by Mary Higgins Clark (I think).  The only rule I can remember was that it had to include a certain number of clues from a list provided in the magazine, and the only clues I can now recall are a red dress, an answering machine message and…actually, those are the only two I can remember.

I diligently plotted out my mystery, creating a number of characters and a complex plot, but it soon became obvious that my mystery, featuring gay characters, wasn’t particularly suited for Woman’s Day (not in the 1980s, anyway), and was going to end up being too long for the contest, anyway.  I was also not really up to writing it, at that time.  I started it, but didn’t get very far.  It would be decades before I learned how to finish writing projects reliably.

I’ve been searching through boxes in the attic, looking for my original notes, but this may be a lost cause.  I know they’re kicking around somewhere, because I’ve stumbled across them several times over the years, and every time I did, I thought to myself, “I should really finish this someday.”  They might turn up over the next few weeks, but for now, I’m just going to dredge as much up out of my memory as I can.  Chances are, I may come up with better ideas now, anyway.  I know the basic idea behind the mystery, but it isn’t the greatest mystery ever conceived.  With or without my notes, I’ll need to put some effort into reworking the story, if I don’t want the reader to solve it in the first chapter.

But I’m getting excited about it and NaNoWriMo, in general.  I keep poking at the website and tweaking my profile.  If I recall, they’ll open the site up for people to enter the basic info about their novel projects at the beginning of October.

In the meantime, I’ve finally worked out an ending for Murderous Requiem, and now I just need to write it.  Hopefully, I can get that done in the next week or two.  It will require a lot of rewriting, I already know, to fix inconsistencies in the plot and possibly to obscure the solution to the mystery a bit more.  It seems far too obvious to me, at the moment.  But I’ll just finish it and see what the final result looks like.  I still think it’s a fun read, and hopefully others will agree.

Okay, so I’ve set up the muder scenario in my occult mystery, Murderous Requiem; I know who did it, I know how they did it, and I think I’ve obscured it enough so that my amateur “detective” doesn’t seem like a complete idiot for not figuring things out immediately.

Now what?

The murderer probably shouldn’t get away with it.  I think we’re all agreed on that point.  (Be quiet, Tim!)  But how is Jeremy (my main character) going to solve the crime?  I’ve been dropping clues, but most of them are meant to send him off in the wrong direction.  And at the moment, there’s nothing really pointing to the murderer, other than the fact that said murderer doesn’t really appear capable of killing anyone — always a dead giveaway in a murder mystery.

Then there’s the added problem of Jeremy not knowing that the murder has occurred….

Oh, he knows one murder has occurred.  But not the one that’s critical to the plot.  The way it’s set up, I’m not sure if he’ll find out about the second murder until the very end.  If he did, it might mess up my carefully constructed misdirection.  Of course, since this is my first murder mystery, my carefully constructed misdirection might be as transparent as glass to the reader.  But I’ll have to worry about that later.  For now, ignorance is bliss, and I choose to believe I’m a plotting genius.

Except that I can’t figure out where to go next.  I know it can’t be a slip-up on the murderer’s part.  That would just be lame and make my detective look like a halfwit for needing the solution handed to him.  So a new clue has to turn up somewhere, preferrably connected to the mysterious manuscript the entire story is revolving around, and one that points to the identity of the murderer.

Maybe when Jeremy finishes translating the 14th-century Italian manuscript, it will say, “Verily, the murderer is….”

Oh, dear.  We’re back to Jeremy being a halfwit again.