So Much For That Idea

Yikes, have two weeks really gone by since my last post? Uh oh. Have not made as much plotting progress as I'd hoped, although I've added some "fit this in somewhere" points to the "how the story works" list, have fleshed out the Ouija board scene to include essential plot points/info drops, and made other small progress.

But, having fallen into recreational reading the past few days, now must junk the "safe combo found in dropped/broken golf trophy" trick, which arose during '07 NaNoWriMo writing, and which I think was pretty neat. That's because early this morning, lounging on a deck chair with a mug of coffee, I finished reading Laura Lippman's Another Thing to Fall, and darn it, a key revelation comes to light when Lloyd drops the Emmy statuette and a hidden paper is revealed.

So, great minds think alike. Anyway, Laura got it into print first (no surprise there, question of if/when mine will ever see print still wide open) and recently, so I'll come up with something else. Since that's current in my mind today, maybe I'll focus on that rather than polishing the Ouija scene, which might benefit from a fresh look after some time away.

Another Deadline

So I went ahead and sent in to the Mystery Writers of America for an entry form for the next "Best First Mystery" competition. And yippee... I got assigned to (I hope) a "good" judge: a woman author whose style and wry humor is similar (I think) to mine. I'm not gonna post her name here yet, 'cause I don't wanna jinx anything.

This ought to light some kind of a fire under my butt: deadline for submissions is 12/31/08, and now that I've been assigned this judge I don't want to blow the opportunity by not getting a submittable, near-perfect draft done in time.

I'm happy to say that the first 4 chapters are now in excellent shape, and I'm plodding forward. Chapters 5-13 are shaping up well, but need some tweaking in the plot department. The storyline itself is evolving painfully slowly still (I can write at the speed of light, but I plot like a fossilized mastodon). I'm trying to keep the plot/mystery reasonably simple -- while still achieving "clever" -- and let the characters deliver most of the fun. With a little luck and some ruthless editing I ought to be able to bring in a complete story draft at somewhere under way too many pages.