A Long Delayed Rendez-Vous

I haven't forgotten you, babe!

Last year, around Thanksgiving, I felt the urge to spend some time with Declan Shaw again. He’s never far in the background (and Love You Till Tuesday was only a few months in the rearview mirror, anyway) but this writing gig tends to pull me in multiple directions, with each project screaming for attention. Loudly.

Short stories are particularly distracting. I’m invited to contribute to an anthology, or a publication comes up with a theme that inspires me, and there I go, pecking at the keyboard. The amount of work involved in these miscellaneous endeavors is misleading. A couple of weeks can easily turn into a month with redrafting, editing, and polishing, and before you know it the submission deadline is right there, knocking at the door. And then, another deadline looms, and so it goes in hops and breathless skips.

All this to explain why I found myself repeatedly telling Declan I needed to delay our meeting and both of us getting itchy about it.

Around November, I had cleared my short story and articles slate and I was eager to get going on a new book in the series. That would be Declan’s third appearance. Catch Me on a Blue Day, that will be released this coming September, is the second one. Apart from a final proofreading run-through, Blue Day was completed and I was free to take another walk in the park with my favorite detective.

I don’t know how it works for other writers, but for me, jumping into a book project is a total-immersion experience. I wake up thinking about the story, I ruminate on it all day, and before falling asleep I replay scenes and hear lines of dialogue. I can set aside a short story to work on something else, like a Substack post for instance, but when I’m in a book that’s all I can think about and interruptions make me impatient. Call it focus or obsession, there’s very little room for anything else. I’m in the zone and it lasts a few months.

With that mindset, you would think that I would sail through a first draft, let it sit for six weeks or so, go back in for a second and third draft, another pause, then deep editing, sending the manuscript to beta readers, more editing, rinse and repeat, and in the time it takes a donkey to have a baby (a year) there’s a book ready to go to a publisher. It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? A good pace for me.

That is not what happened with the Declan story I decided to sink my teeth in.
Well … not exactly. In fact, it happened exactly like that seven years ago.
The baby donkey, cute as a button, was delivered on time, and went to a handful of agents who had expressed interest. It trotted happily for a little while.

We’re seven years later so you can guess what happened.

I don’t recall the exact wording of the email, but it went something like this: “It’s a good story, the writing is superb, but you need to raise the stakes.”

The dreaded stakes. You, writers who read this and have heard these words before, a show of hands please. Maybe I should ask the happy few who have NOT heard it, instead.

I chewed on the comment and decided to leave the story alone for a while, intending to revisit it later, with a clearer head.

The stakes comment kept bugging me, though. Yes, I know, silly me …
Did I need a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter, or a Final Destination approach? Start with the toaster in the bathtub, continue with a brakeless bus, up the ante with a decapitation by fallen window … Frankly, I can’t write like that.

The agent’s comment also reminded me of this wonderful page by Franquin, genius graphic artist, responsible for shaping the sense of humor of generations of French and Belgian kids.

Franquin : “Idées Noires” - 1981 - Les Albums Fluide Glacial

The final panel bubble translates as: “I didn’t believe him when he bet he would die hanged and drowned in a car accident.”

Now, that’s what I call raising the stakes!

Of course, I didn’t sit idle for seven years and I didn’t give up writing either. I also, eventually, stopped obsessing about artificially jacking up tension and, instead, concentrated on writing a good story.

But once a year or so, I opened that old file, pondered and tweaked a sentence here and there, and inevitably the curse of the stakes popped up. Like Dracula, I shivered.

I knew that one day I would have to do something about it.

Because I knew it was a damn good story.

Not a classical mystery. There is no dead body in the first chapter, or the second, or the third. No guns are fired either. Cops barely make a guest appearance.

Essentially it’s a road movie, with a double search, and a chase.

The premise: Declan Shaw is hired to find a woman who decided to disappear. If he can figure out why she left, he might find where she went. He’s good at that kind of stuff. What he didn’t count on, is the other woman who crosses his path. Not a femme fatale, in the classical sense, but she’s trouble and in a lot of trouble. Which is part of the attraction and … before he can say Trouble is my Business, the chase is on.

Last November, I decided to have another go at the story. I knew there was something in there and I was determined to squeeze it out.

The manuscript I sent to a writer friend a month ago is radically different from the old one, even if the premise is the same. I rewrote at least half of it, reorganized the structure, and changed the psychological make-up of one of the main characters which reshuffles the relationship with Declan and the tone of the book.

Normally, Jim (my husband, also a writer as most of you already know) is my first reader and toughest critic. He hasn’t read the new version yet. I’m sure he will have comments. As does my friend and first reader. He just finished the book and made initial remarks with more to come. He didn’t say anything about the stakes. I hope they’re all right.

A Little More About Bop City Swing

Russell Thayer and I did a joint interview for George Cramer’s Blog, you can read it here: Bop City Swing - A Retro Noir.

I was a guest on Ladies of Mystery, here: When Writers Click.

Reviews are coming in for Bop City Swing, remember to add yours! I love this one: “… a tale that twists and turns like a brakeless ride down Mulholland Drive in a 1940s Caddy.” Just perfect!