Beginning Again

Edith/Maddie here, writing, still, from north of Boston.

For the thirteenth time – well, fifteenth, if you count novellas – I am beginning to write Scone Cold Dead, a new Country Store Mystery. The first book in the series, Flipped for Murder, came out in October, 2015, over eight years ago.

I love starting a new book. I try to craft a perfect first line. I set up an opening that I hope will draw you into the story. I write my way through a few scenes, giving you a sense of the setting, season, and regular characters, and introducing who might be a victim. I like to let you see the soon-to-be dead interacting with others, including my protagonist.

Sometimes the story of who the poor murdered person is can come later in memories and interviews, but in books when we don’t come across a corpse in the first few paragraphs or pages, I want you to know a bit about who he or she was. I want you to see how they speak with and react to other characters.

And then, when I feel the time is right, we find a body. I write cozy mysteries, so the body is already dead. You’ll never see a murder happening on the page in one of my books.

“When the time is right” is key to my process. I am the most minimal of plotters. I have a scanty outline before I start writing only because my editor demands requires strongly encourages me to hand one over. I love feeling my way through those opening scenes without really knowing what’s going to happen. Have I showed enough? Not too much? When is the right time to drop the body, as we say in the trade?

Once that’s on the page, forward we go. By the end of March I’ll have batted out a first draft, and by my deadline a couple of months after that, the book will be revised and edited and polished to the best of my abilities.

But…thirteen books, you say. Two important questions come to mind: how does the author keep track of everything, and how do we keep a long-running series fresh?

After a few books, I made a “Series History” file for my Country Store Mysteries (it’s in addition to the extensive Characters file, which I started with book #1). The history file lists how old protagonist Robbie Jordan is in each book and which year it’s in. She’s now in her fifth year (I think). I also include the murder method, the detective’s name, and a few other notes. It helps to have that summary at a glance.

As for making sure the series doesn’t go stale, the standard advice is to keep the main characters learning and changing. Nobody wants to read a stagnant series or character arc. Have the Country Store Mysteries stayed fresh?

Hmm. You be the judge. In Flipped for Murder, Robbie was single, twenty-seven, and living in an apartment at the back of her newly renovated country store restaurant. The book opens when Pans ‘N Pancakes does.

Scone Cold Dead brings us Robbie five years later. She’s married to Abe O’Neill and is a few weeks short of giving birth to their first child. The country store is thriving, with devoted regulars and lots of visitors, and Robbie employs five people.

She also has a few investigations (gulp, twelve!) under her belt. She’s more confident in working to figure out homicides, and she’s learned (mostly) not to act as if she’s too stupid to live. Plus, in this book and Deep Fried Death, the previous one, Robbie has a bun in the oven to protect, too. I have tried to keep her changing and learning over the dozen books.

Readers: If you’ve stopped reading a series before it ended, why? How long of a series have you stuck with all the way through? Writers, do you have the end of a series in sight when you start writing it?