I Shall Not Want

KISS ME DEADLY; OR; YES, I DO LOVE CHOCOLATE IN MY PEANUT BUTTER

My first serious attempt at writing a novel wasn't Romance. It wasn't Mystery, or crime fiction, or suspense, or however you want to characterize what I write today.

It was science fiction. Space Opera, to be precise. My other great, youthful love. I'm not sure why I decided on trying my hand at sf, other than the fact I had fallen in with a cheerful and enthusiastic writer's group all pursuing that genre. My knowledge of science derives largely from watching NOVA on PBS. The then-current trends in sf publishing left me cold-I didn't want cyberpunk and nanotechnology, I wanted rocket ships and Thuvia, Maid of Mars. And finally, my world-building skills, in a word, sucked. I wrote half an entirely derivative novel, copying Lois McMaster Bujold's style so slavishly it's a wonder I didn't name my lead character Viles Morkosigan.

I workshopped it with pros, and was told:

I had great characters

My writing was of publishable quality and it was clichéd, unoriginal and unlikely to sell in the current market.

If this were an inspirational tale, this is the part where I would have gone home, clenched my fist, vowed to never, ever abandon my book, and then segue into accepting a Nebula Award for my space station romance.

Or not. What I really did was reread my 50,000 words, looking for what was salvageable. Two things stood out. First, a lot of the energy in the story came from the relationship between the two leads. They had been lovers, briefly, years before during the war, and, rediscovering each other, had to overcome distrust, baggage, and two distinctly opposite agendas. Maybe I could write a romance instead?

Reader, I tried. I made him a Green Beret and her a former intelligence officer. I made him an FBI agent and her a reporter. Him a sheriff, her an escaped militia member (I still like that one.) Every time I tried to tell a love story, people died, children went missing, vehicles blew up.

I mentioned two things stood out in my failed space epic. It gradually became apparent the second was most significant: the heroine found a body on the third page. She and the hero both set out to find out, well, whodunit. Everything else, the love story and the EV suits and the cool aliens, existed to serve that plot. That…mystery.

Maybe, I thought, I'm a mystery writer?

I started over. I created a new hero and heroine, a world-weary police chief and a freshly ordained Episcopal priest, and I put them in a tiny Adirondack town. I wondered, what if a baby was found on the church steps? What if someone was desperate to conceal its parents' identities? What if the police chief found the young mother's body and suspected a couple in the priest's parish who were dying to adopt? What if?

Six books later, I'm still asking what if. What if the person we think is the killer can't be caught? What if there was a murder no one ever knew about? What if someone stumbled into manslaughter and would do anything to escape the consequences? As for the romance in my series, Kirkus says, "…its nerve center is the lacerating relationship between two people who can't live with or without each other."

I've come to believe that the work chooses the writer, and not the other way around. We're not creators so much as we are dowsers, wandering over the literary landscape until our forked twigs twitch. We dig, and in the digging discover if our wells are sweet or bitter, rock or clay. I thought I was going to be a science fiction writer. I would have liked to write romance. But it turns out what I'm really good at? Is killing people and hiding the bodies.