The Mystery Starts Here

It’s a hot, dry sunny day in Southern California and I’m sitting here in the family room with and A/C blasting, cool and comfy, working on the next in a series of mysteries I’m writing and…I got to wondering. How many of you out there in cyber-land plot your books? How many fly by the seat of your pants?

I’m a pantser and always have been. I know it takes me longer to write a book but I don’t care. I have to take the time to go over the book – several times, to put pertinent in information, add clues and red herrings, but, for me part of the fun of writing, is finding out what happens next! Oh, I have the main ideas down – whodunit, why, when, etc., and of course how the books ends, but I keep finding folks who walk into my books and refuse to leave and often they are the most entertaining of all. There was Harvey Martin, the neighbor of my protagonist in a yet-to-be-published book called, “Finder.” She stops by to have tea with the man and when he tells her about his hobby, taxidermy, she realizes that the fluffy white dog she thought was sleeping in the corner is really -dead. Or, from the same book, the vertically challenged Vegas P.I. named Buddy Strange. His firm is called, Strange Investigations. He made a lot of money when a Sci-Fi convention hit Vegas and mistakenly thought he investigated UFO – they all wanted him to get the skinny on Area 51.

Oh, I’ve tried to plot books, but I find by the time I’ve got everything ready to go – I don’t care. It’s almost like I’ve written the book so why do it again? Maybe I simply haven’t found the right way to plot yet. So, write and tell me – which are you, a plotter or a pantser?

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