I've signed up for this for the second time. Last year's 'Holding steady' was a follow-on to two smaller books, finished at about sixty-three thousand words and needed a lot of editing, minor but necessary, and I shall do a little more work before I re-publish in Blurb. I've since written 'Damage limitation' (113,000+ words) which for ease of editing I published in Blurb and am currently reading and re-reading. The follow up to that is at thirty-three thousand words, titled 'Making good' and currently semi-stalled.
But this year's novel will be different. 'Not wanted on voyage' began life as a response to one of Lisa Richard Claro's Book Blurb Friday photos, will be part-populated with half-drawn characters from Thinking Ten prompts and has barely a vestige of a plot, which is a bit of a draw-back when it hinges on murder and who-dunnit and why and how, a genre I knew little of until recently.
So, twelve honeymooning couples (some true some false) four or five crew members (some good, some bad) and a need to convincingly bump a few off under suspicious circumstances, by person-unguessed-at, for reasons I cannot begin to imagine.
In preparation I am re-reading P D James and Ian Rankin and, following a lucrative trip to the Tynemouth bookfair on Sunday, Mark Billingham and Stuart Macbride, with Michael Robotham and Stephen Booth to follow. Not to pinch ideas but for some help in how to construct a plot.
Oh good luck on a crime novel. I love reading them but wouldn't know how to start to write one.
ReplyDeleteI'm planning to expand on something that began as a microfiction (three word week - currently defunct, sadly) but I'm not really sure yet where it's going. I might have to trawl back through some other microfiction to see who I have in the 'storeroom'.
Good luck to you too - storerooms often throw up something totally fogotten which can spark something.
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