Moving Forward

After a few days of hiatus from writing, I'm back on it today and moving forward on "The Treasure of Mongan Manor," volume 3 of the Windsong Lake books. I'm about to get into the real meat of the story, and I've had some good ideas about one sequence I'd been mulling over. It has the potential to be rather erotic, but I don't really write erotic stuff, as I've mentioned in blogs past. Still, what I'm envisioning might call for some physical description of that nature, because it's an important scene with pertinent information. I'm not to the point of writing it yet, so I'll give that some additional thought.

Another question I'm wrestling with is whether or not there should be a murder involved. As planned thus far, there's plenty of conflict going on, any of which might end up with someone murdered. The murder of someone who might have held all the answers could have a suspense aspect to it, but I don't know yet. As much thought as I've put into mapping out all those conflicts over a missing treasure among members of an extended family, I haven't yet figured out how it all resolves. The characters at this point are just sketches, a statement of a role each plays, so I can't really plan until they become more fleshed out. Once I start seeing who they all are, I can identify a murder victim, a killer, and the motive.

Early on in the planning stage, I began to wonder if there would be a role for Amy, Stefanie's best friend. Happily, I've found one for her. Since Stefanie is a poor reader and even worse at doing background research, Amy will provide information important to solving the puzzle at hand, i.e., the secret to the treasure.

As a side note in the Gotchas category, I was talking to an author at Bookfest last Saturday, and he told me how he had someone proofread one of his manuscripts when it was converted into a Kindle format. My publisher has often told me that sometimes these formatting programs don't "play nice" all the time, but this author's experience proved that in spades. Careful reading of that manuscript found the exact same sentence repeated EIGHT TIMES in various places throughout the book. Now there's an error that would be tough to find without reading the whole book straight through in one sitting.