As far as publishing news, a hardback edition of the revised Luke’s Summer Secret will be coming out soon and available through Friends United Press as well as Amazon. In addition, Friends United Press is doing another printing of A Winding Road to Freedom with a new cover and that should be available later this spring. I will also have news about my new book tentatively called Hoosier Beginnings later this month.
But I’m ready for another fiction project. Although I will be carving out some time to do professional writing, I keep thinking about writing a mystery. I have a lot of notes, character sketches, and background material I have written over the past few years but have not felt clear to begin a draft of a mystery. Over the past few weeks, an idea is taking shape. I’m not 100% certain this will grow into a mystery. But it just might.
Character is where I always begin. Who will solve the mystery? Who will help? Who are the suspects? Why should anyone care about the main characters?
But along with character I think about setting. Where will this take place? Will it take place in real places or a town I create? Or some of both? What specific scenes will be important in the development of the mystery?
And of course the plot. What happened? How does the main character get involved in this mystery when she is not in law enforcement? What clues does she follow? What clues lead her in the wrong direction? How do I keep the reader’s interest along the way so they can’t wait to see how the mystery ends?
For now the ideas are still swirling. Soon, I’ll make some choices and then the ideas will simmer until a point, hopefully soon, when my main character will tell me she’s ready to tell the story and off we’ll go on another adventure. This time a mystery.
Randall Wisehart 