Oh how I wish I had been at Bouchercon! Reading about everyone's experiences, both in this blog and on Facebook, has made me realize how much I miss in-person conferences where I meet old friends, make new ones, laugh, learn, commiserate, and celebrate with kindred mystery lovers, both formally during the panels and informally at the bar, lounge, patio, etc.
I haven't been to a conference since before the pandemic, and although I was sorely tempted by this one, Labour Day weekend is always a very busy one, and the costs can get out of hand when you factor in a flight from Eastern Canada. Sadly, the Nashville Bouchercon is on Labour Day weekend as well, but I also greatly enjoy Left Coast Crime, so maybe I'll go to Seattle in the spring.
I had hoped to be able to brag in this blog this week about finishing the first draft of my new Inspector Green novel, which has been trundling along at a leisurely pace since last winter. I had set the goal of September 15 to get to the end, but unfortunately, this novel refuses to end. It is rambling on and on, which I know is not a good thing in any novel, let alone a mystery, but new complications keep cropping up and right now it feels like a tangled string.. It's supposed to be 90,000 words (give or take) and I am already at about 93,000, with the ending tantalizingly close but still playing hard to catch as I approach it. During rewrites, I do delete and tighten, but I also expand and enrich, so normally I end up with a fairly stable word count.
When I am writing the first draft of a novel, I'm in creative mode and don't want to lose that edge and momentum by editing or rewriting as I go along. It's full steam ahead and fix the plot holes, wobbly characters, and dropped loose ends once I get the whole story down. Since I don't outline and only plot in fits and starts as the story evolves, I don't know what the story is about or its full shape, until I reach the end.
A lot of fixing and tidying happens in second draft, or third or fourth.
I suspect when I finally reach the end this time, I will have a lot of tidying up to do. I like my books to pick up momentum as they near the end, not ramble on with endless complications to be solved. I hope when I write my next blog in two weeks, I will have written The End and will have good news to report. It's a book, it's going to work, and I can fix this.
