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| Every writer gets stuck |
Recently I was working on the ending for the second book in my Detective in a Coma series, Cannibal City. In the book, a killer is on the loose. He's kidnapping men, force-feeding them, then killing them and eating their livers.
It was all going well, then I got stuck, I mean really stuck.
I needed there to be something that would lead my detectives to finding out something about the person they were chasing and it couldn't be something obvious. Nor could it be a lead that landed on their laps. One of the characters had to have I for this lead.
There's nothing I hate more than crime thrillers or mystery novels where the crime's solved by the detectives getting lucky.
I tried everything I could to solve my problem. I took time away from the novel and wrote something else. I did other non-writing activities - household chores that I should have done a long time ago, I played baseball with my rescue dog Benjy and I played a crime game on my Nintendo DS (it was called Awake - you should check it out).
When the link I needed came it was out of the blue. A coiled snake bracelet of the kind Cleopatra might have worn.
I wracked my brains trying to figure out this where this bracelet idea came from. Had I seen it on a TV show or in a movie? Read about it in a book? Seen it in a painting?
It came to me so fully formed it had to have come from somewhere.
It wasn't until days later that I found it in one of my storage boxes. Here's the picture below as proof -
Footnote - Vile City, the first book in the series featuring Inspector Duncan Waddell will be published by Caffeine Nights in 2017 under my full name Jennifer Lee Thomson.
I'm working on the third book in the series, Vigilante City.
