Years ago on a Saturday afternoon while listening to Prairie Home Companion I heard a folk artist who was new to me. Her name was Iris DeMint, and the words to one of her songs really touched me:

Sweet is the melody, so hard to come by
So hard to make every note bend just right
You lay down the hours without a trace
‘Til a tune for the dancing is there in its place.

Whether you’re writing music or murder mysteries, that’s what writing is. A lot of it is utterly invisible. You lay down the hours with absolutely nothing happening and nothing to show for it, often staring off into space. In this instance, space includes an M.L. Coleman painting of an expanse of the Colorado River looking up from the depths of the Grand Canyon. I may be looking at the painting, but I’m not really seeing it. I’m thinking; trying to make friends with the characters; trying to understand what motivates them to do the things they do.

And yes, it does take hours–hours of thinking as well as hours of typing. Every book is good for about 600 hours of thinking and 300 hours of typing. You can break those hours up however you like.

At the moment, I’m working on Tagged for Death, the next Ali Reynolds book due out next February, but starting the book was complicated by a case of what I call literary postpartum depression. It’s been difficult to let go of the last Beaumont book, Second Watch, and get into the groove with Ali and her friends and relations.

It turns out that a lot of my “staring into space” time happens in the middle of the night when I’m tossing and turning and trying to figure out what’s happening. You’re probably thinking, “Wait a minute. She’s the one writing the book, and she doesn’t know what’s going on in it?”

The answer to that is yes. Most of the time I have no idea. Some people assume that if you write murder mysteries you must know who the killer is from the get go. That assumption would be wrong as far as I’m concerned. I almost never know who the killer is. I start by finding out who’s dead, or as in the case of the book I’m writing now, almost dead (I write murder mysteries, remember!) and then I spend the rest of the book trying to figure out who did it and how come.

And don’t even TALK to me about outlining. I don’t DO outlining.

I start at the beginning of the book and write to the end. This probably sounds easier than it is. Over the years I’ve discovered that if a book comes to a grinding halt, somewhere ten or so chapters into it, that probably means I have a motivation problem on the part of the killer. It took a lot of trial and error to say nothing of thrown away chapters before I finally came to that realization and figured out that I had to be sure the killer had a reason to do what he did and also that he was physically capable.

When my kids were much younger, I was a soccer mom who was also a writer. One day at soccer practice when the book I was writing had stalled out, one of the other moms asked me how I was doing. “I’m having a terrible time with Chapter 11,” I said. She looked at me with real sympathy, shook her head and said, “I had no idea you were having financial difficulties.” Okay, it wasn’t THAT kind of Chapter 11!

So back to Tagged for Death. On this sunny late March morning in Tucson, I’m 34.11% into the book. How do I know that? I count the words every day. That’s how I know if I’m making forward progress.

But I feel better about this book now than I did earlier because the characters are finally starting to talk to me; to tell me things; to give me hints about what’s going on.

If that sounds a little nuts, so be it.

And now, after taking some time to write the blog which is also writing but not REAL writing, it’s back to staring into space and finding out what Ali Reynolds is really up to.