Refilling My Writing Well

From Blogging to Vlogging

'Tis been ages since I've reported back here, so I thought I'd share what in heck I've been up to the last couple of months!

New YouTube subscribers are so very welcome at my little corner of cyberspace. 😊

~Rumer

New Muse Rising...

 
Hello, hello, my dears!

I know it's been a long time coming, but since my new release last year, I am finally getting the gears turning on my next story. I'm quite excited to share that this will be my first book series, following a team of televised ghost hunters as they investigate paranormal phenomena at various lodging sites around the world (hotels, inns, motels, B&Bs, etc.).

The first chapters are already written, started a while back before I'd even anticipated writing Coattails & Cocktails. The latter (a 1920s murder mystery) came about rather even unbeknownst to me! But I'm so glad the inspiration for that one struck and brought it into being. I had always wanted to write a murder mystery and feel so pleased having one under my belt now.😊

In any case, prior to writing that actual murder mystery, I was already priming myself to write about a murder mystery dinner, which will take place during my next book. Set in present day, this story will follow a group of friends spending the night at a quaint and historic bed and breakfast. They're simply gathering for a 1940s-themed mystery game (all decked out and acting in character), but personal conflicts simmering beneath the surface eventually come to a boil--ignited further by the presence of a TV ghost-hunting team seeking to confirm or deny claims that the property is haunted.

The end result will hopefully be a fun romp through contemporary romantic comedy, historical drama, and paranormal suspense--much in the vein of my debut novel, Seven for a Secret. I also expect it to be a standalone novella where this particular dinner party and B&B are concerned; the series will continue with the same paranormal investigation team, however, just at different locations involving different proprietors and/or guests.

There will also be a special feature of this series that I'll keep secret for now...something totally experimental that'll be a great writing challenge for me. And hopefully something that'll make it a truly "novel" reading experience for you! 😃

Until then, dear readers, I bid you happy days of happy reading--and I promise to return soon. 💋

~Rumer

Madness to the Method, Part 2: The Outline

In my previous post, "Madness to the Method, Part 1: The Brainstorm," I discussed how all of my stories originate from a very sloppy, scattered place: my brain. And the only way to get them out of my head is to kick up a windstorm in there and blow the ideas out onto paper like so much debris. At some point, though, these ideas need to be swept up into a plot pile, which then gets tidied into a story arc.

I've written short stories and vignettes here and there ever since I was a kid, and in crafting those, I usually do just sit and write from start to finish, having a general idea of where I want to go but pretty much making it all up along the way. So when I first took a crack at writing a novel, I automatically assumed I could approach it the same way. Which, when I now think about it, was incredibly naive and insane. Writing a few hundred or thousand words is one thing (don't get me wrong, short stories also benefit from advance planning), but taking on several tens of thousands is quite another. It can become a management nightmare if you just run into such a vast and wild, unexplored frontier with all creative guns blazing and no strategic plan. So as I continued to revise my first manuscript, I had to learn the hard way that backing cohesion and proper pacing into a novel is difficult as hell, and it would have behooved me to have an outline first.

Which is what I did for my second manuscript. I gathered my miscellaneous brainstorming and started to slot it into sections. Still spastic scribblings in my journal, by no means neatly divided into tiers of A, B, C, i, ii, iii, but guidance nonetheless. This bullet-pointed bird's-eye view helped me tremendously by giving a sense of the story's shape and direction without also confining my creativity. I wasn't bound to every idea that I jotted down here, nor were any of them fleshed out enough to dictate every step of the journey. Some writers might prefer a more detailed outline than this, but I've found I personally thrive under this balance between the concrete and the as-yet abstract. The organized and the organic. That gives me the breathing room I need to let myself change my mind if the characters want to head somewhere else, and it allows for those moments of magic when, truly and almost inexplicably inspired, you just write without knowing where it's going and end up creating something better than you could've ever achieved if you'd thought about it too hard.


Giving myself over to the story this way inevitably demands script changes, then, and sometimes I still manage to write myself into a corner. I leave certain aspects open to possibility so reach the inevitable fork in the road where I must commit to one outcome versus another. And I don't always want to go with what I originally planned--or have written myself so far outside that scope that it isn't even an option anymore--at which point I'll sit with pen and paper yet again and hash it out. In the case of both Seven for a Secret and What the Clocks Know, I was closing in on the final chapters when I needed to stop, step back, and brainstorm my way through a State of the Story outline: basically, Here's where my characters are at right now. Is this where I want them to be, and, if so, what are their options from here? It became a decision tree of sorts that ultimately helped me work out the solutions (and bust through my writer's block).

Ultimately, every writer needs to find what method works best for him or her, and surely the process continues to evolve with experience. With only two novel manuscripts down, a third in the works, and a fourth largely in the brainstorm stage, I have personally learned that I will never again attempt one without some semblance of an outline and especially encourage the practice to anyone out there who is writing a novel for the first time. 

What a Coinky-Dink!

This spring, I finally got around to dusting off an old manuscript--my first novel attempt--and getting down to some serious revisions. After two more read-throughs this past week, I'm feeling really good about it. Granted, I once felt really good about my earlier drafts, too, which just the thought of now makes me criiiinge. But room for improving is infinite, so while I'll always be aspiring for that as a writer, I think I've got this little gal ready to query again.

This story is close to my heart for very personal reasons, but also because it indulges concepts that have always met my fancy. Ghosts, séances, déjà vu, synchronicity... I'm a total sucker for coincidences, always hoping to find connections between them even though it's perfectly plausible that they just happen at random. The human mind is such fertile ground for misperception and the consequences of when we see things the wrong way...or perhaps when we view them the right way but question our own memories and judgment.

In any case, I love crazy coincidences, like one Father's Day when my brother was talking about going to a ball game in Cleveland and how the fans kept singing "Hang on Sloopy," which we Illinoisans furrowed our brows at, wondering what the hell significance that song had for Cleveland or the state of Ohio; my dad didn't even know the song, and I said how I hadn't heard it in ages. And then...my other brother gave my dad a speaker to pimp out his TV, and to test it, he turned on one of those TV music channels, which...yes. Was playing "Hang on Sloopy," along with a factoid on the screen about how Ohio adopted it as its state song in the '80s. That is not a "meaningful" coincidence to me, per se, but still. Come ON. That's weird, right?

I notice things like this so much that I once started writing them down to see if I'd ever find a pattern among them. But I stopped that habit, before I could become a crazy lady with maps and articles taped to the walls and a web-work of yarn tacked between them as if it would one day all come together like the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

So that being said, I'm reading nothing into what happened today. It simply makes me happy that after pouring my mind and heart back into the story of a character who loves coincidences, too, today on the Tube ride to the British Book Affair here in London, I cracked open my book of JD Salinger short stories right to an old favorite, "For Esme with Love and Squalor," and the very first sentence ended with "in England on April 18th."

In England on April 18th. Yes, I am.

Cheers, Margot. Here's to coincidence and querying.