Thanks, Mark!

I’m halfway through the final chapter of Wrapt, and up to 57,000 words. It’s kind of weird writing a murder thriller on Halloween.

I expect to finish the first draft tomorrow.

As I was telling my wife this morning, the hardest part now is backing away from the book for a week or two so it isn’t so fresh when I start editing. If you start editing right away, you can easily miss details that should be there but aren’t. You know they should be there, so if it’s too fresh, you might assume the details are there. Weird way to look at it. Also, because I rearranged the structure of the book a few times to set up the right pacing, it’s easy to forget that a section has already passed, or is it coming up soon?

I want the final draft to be over 75,000 words, so there’s a lot of work left to do.

Thanks for reading my posts, Mark!

Serial Killers

Once that you’ve decided on a killing, first you make a stone of your heart. And if you find that your hands are still willing, then you can turn a murder into art. – The Police

It’s good to blog about things in real life that are important elements in your books.

My wife and I have been watching Netflix’s Mindhunters, and we just finished the first season. It’s a 2017 show, so there is no second season, yet. After that cliffhanger,  they’d better start filming season two.

My unofficial minor in college was Psychology, and I’ve had an interest in abnormal psych since high school. What makes deviant minds tick? Why do they draw outside the lines? How are they able to do things that our programming tells us is unthinkable? Undoable?

I’ve been intrigued that the show has been exploring the different types of serial killers, rather than just following one or two. And there’s such an amazing difference between crimes of passion, of vanity, and of opportunity.

The serial killer in my book Wrapt stumbles upon his first killing. He wasn’t planning to commit murder. But the victim dies and it changes him.

The question the show’s investigators try to answer is: How do you discern at what point someone has crossed over to the perspective that it’s okay to kill?

Morbidly fascinating stuff.

Rewriting History

I spent an hour or so last night cutting blog posts from years ago. They weren’t consistent with my branding preferences for this site. Politics. Weather. Personal stuff.

I just want this blog to be about writing. Specifically: my writing.

But also about the act or strategy of writing.

Last night I finished the penultimate chapter in my new thriller, Wrapt. The killer stakes out all the places our heroine has visited recently, which does two things. 1) It adds creep factor. 2) It leaves clues about which of our three primary suspects is the killer.

Over the next week I will write the final chapter of the first draft. It’s exciting because this has been a different approach for me. I’m enjoying what I am and am not telling the reader. Who knew mystery writing was so much fun?

Thriller

I’m two chapters shy of completing my fifth novel, called Wrapt–a thriller about a serial killer. I worried that it would be too dark, considering that most of my books, though they’re about paranormal subjects, tend to be romances, too. This one is barely a romance. It’s definitely a murder story.

Tonight I’m writing the penultimate chapter, the last one narrated by the killer. It’s meant to tie up all of his loose ends before he goes after our heroine. I’ll write that climax within the next week.

I’m having a lot of fun with the story, determining what the clues are, where to place them, when to misdirect.

Happy Halloween!

Slashers

I typically work on several books at the same time. Always getting ideas. Jotting them down. The more interesting ones get outlines. And then I store them in a sequence of most interesting to least interesting, so that when it’s time to start another book, I have the best ideas at the top. This requires that I re-order the entire collection, now up to about 50 titles.
Fortunately, I have finished four books so far.
But writers often do this thing where they do all the things except the thing they really want to do. Or need to do.
Is that a form of punishment?
I was going to write something about my next novel, a slasher called Wrapt. But this came out instead.