Fall 2003 to Spring 2014 was my mystery writing decade. Naturally, there were breaks for holidays and personal matters, but most of my writing hours were spent on Deadly Fall and its sequels.

In 2009, a longer break provided the time to start the new To Catch a Fox. I wrote my protagonist Julie and her stepsister onto the plane to California. They found their way to the Italian-styled retreat.

At this point in the writing, I attended the 10 day summer Sage Hill Writing Experience Fiction Colloquium facilitated by author Catherine Bush. The colloquium gave me writing time to finish the draft and Catherine’s feedback assured me my new concept wasn’t totally off-base. Her comments launched me into the second draft, which I completed that fall.

The next spring Deadly Fall‘s acceptance by TouchWood Editions shifted me back to mystery. I spent the summer working on the manuscript with my editor. In the fall, I polished the mystery sequel, sent it to my publisher and started a third book in the series. Almost three years passed before I returned to the fox.

From winter to spring 2013, I finished the third draft and applied once again to the Sage Hill Fiction Colloquium, this time with facilitator Lawrence Hill. This would be my third visit to Sage Hill and I find its isolated and enclosed environment condusive to writing and learning. Hill’s critique helped me improve  the book and my writing skills. His advice at the end of the program was, after my next draft, to get a manuscript evaluation from the Writers Union.

It took me a year and a half to finish the fourth draft, largely due to pulls to the mystery side. My publisher was leaving to join a new company. She had problems with both of my sequels and didn’t feel she could recommend it to her successor. I talked this over with my friend and mystery author Eileen Coughlan, who gave me a clue for a fresh start. I wrote a new first chapter, moved the former opening to chapter three and quickly edited the rest of the novel to make sure the whole worked.

With draft # 4 complete, I looked into the Writers Union Manuscript Critique service, which functions anonymously. The writer doesn’t put her name on the manuscript and doesn’t know who the evaluator is. I’m sure there are advantages to this approach, but I decided that for the same cost I’d rather go with a writer/editor I knew. Among other things, there might be some back and forth comments and clarifications after the evaulation was done.

I stumbled upon author-editor Pearl Luke, whose novel I had enjoyed in the past. Pearl’s comments on my manuscript were both encouraging and a challenge.  I also gave the novel to my two critique group writer-friends. I revised the book based on Pearl’s remarks and asked two relatives who are avid readers to review the manuscript. The husband of one of them got a hold of it and provided feedback too. Then, a friend from an email writing group suggested we exchange our work and I gave her the first 200 pages to critique.

It wasn’t easy to assemble this multitude of varied remarks and decide which to accept, which to reject (at least for now) and which to use in a modified way. Editing isn’t my favourite summer project, but I didn’t want to delay this to fall or later. Somehow, I managed to get the job done while enjoying a summer of outdoor activities and visits from family and friends. Getting up two hours earlier than ususal a few mornings helped. Who needs sleep?

At the summer’s end, I had a manuscript that I believed was as good as I could get it for now and ready to send to the world.

In a way, it feels like I’ve been working on To Catch a Fox forever. The novel has been there in some form since almost the beginning of my writing career, even when I put it in the drawer.

On the other hand, the current story feels like it was written in my spare time, during the breaks from my main job of writing murder mystery.

Sometimes the real stuff happens when you aren’t looking.

Will Calgary will always be a little out of sync with the rest of Canada? Alberta author and Alberta Views humour columnist Fred Stenson tells us why he thinks this.

In the earlier versions of To Catch a Fox, Julie travelled from Toronto to Vancouver to search for her mother. Now that I had moved from eastern Canada to Calgary, I envisioned her living in my current city. Vancouver, just over the mountains, didn’t feel far enough for her quest.

I was pondering such draft basics after returning from a holiday in Italy. Tuscany would be an appealing setting. Guests at my story retreat would be largely North American transplants, so I could use this exotic location without having to research local culture too much. Except, I couldn’t see Julie hopping on a plane to cross an ocean based on the minimal information she’d have.

My husband Will and I were planning a trip to Los Angeles the next winter. Southern California was the sort of place people went to escape the past and find opportunity. Its meditteranean climate was similar to Italy’s.

In the 1950s, industrialist J. Paul Getty began work on a villa in Pacific Palisades modelled on a country home in ancient Rome.  I decided my story retreat could be a similar Italianesque fantasy planted a two or three hour drive south of LA.

On the holiday, Will and I toured prospective locations and chose one near mountains in the orange belt. We also visited the Getty Villa when we stayed in nearby Santa Monica. The apartment we rented inspired another setting in the book.

Previously, Julie had travelled alone on her journey. This time, she’d have a side-kick, a stepsister Delilah with whom she has a prickly relationship. In the old versions, Julie’s father and stepmother had only appeared in flashbacks. Now they would be in the main storyline.

During the novel’s eight or so years in the drawer, Julie had aged six years, from 32 two to 38. Her maturity gained her a husband, Eric, a dentist/poet. They had separated about ten months before the story start due to Julie’s psychological problems. In versions one and two, she’d suffered from depression. I now thought this might be too ordinary. Psychotic would add interest.

From my work in genre fiction, I’d learned about the need to raise the stakes and challenge your protagonist to the core.  Mentors advised, make things as bad as you can for her, then make it worse. Since Julie’s main issues related to her mother, I gave her a child she had trouble mothering. Psychosis … troubled mother … Women who kill their children.

Their actions so rare and beyond the pale always shocked me and everyone else. It was unfathomable, intriguing. As I mulled this, I could see how Julie attempting to drown her child would work in the novel. I’d find it hard, if not impossible, to create sympathy for her character, but the idea was there and it would be cowardly to scrap it for that reason.

Multiple viewpoints would help. If readers hated Julie, they might stay the course with one of the other viewpoint characters, whose reliablity would balance Julie’s sometimes skewed observations. My villains would be narrators too, so readers would know what they were up to and worry about Julie. I hoped.

Before starting to write, I also contemplated the novel’s structure. Around the 1/4 point,  Julie and Delilah would board a plane for California. Around story mid-point, they’d arrive at the Italianesque retreat. How they got there and what happened along the way would come out in the writing of the story.

Next week, the twelfth and final installment of my writing journey: How to Write a Novel in Your Spare Time.

Whenever I drive to Westhills Shopping Centre, I’m always intrigued by the numbers on Signal Hill. So was Calgary native and author Ellen Kelly for personal reasons that she spent a lifetime figuring out.

While waiting to hear from publishers about my first mystery novel Deadly Fall, I wrote a sequel, Secret Spring. After the second draft, I sent it to the Alberta Writers Guild for a manuscript evaluation.  The anonymous evaluator said what intrigued him or her most about the book wasn’t the mystery and its assorted twists; it was the relationship between my protagonist Paula and Adriana, a main story antagonist. The evaluator suggested I focus on that and forget about the pure mystery aspects.

I didn’t do this because I was setting up a mystery series, but the prospect of writing a novel that was more suspense-oriented appealed to me. It also got me thinking about the difference between traditional mystery and suspense/thriller novels.

In a mystery, what drives the story is the question ‘whodunit?’. Mysteries are told by a single narrator, the sleuth. The reader learns the answer and experiences other twists along with the protagonist. Since sleuths are usually bright, she or he might be a step ahead of the reader. Genius detectives, like Sherlock Holmes, might be light-years ahead. This makes the mystery genre great at surprising the reader all the way to the big reveal at the end.

Suspense or thriller novels are typically written in multiple points of view that give the reader information the protagonist doesn’t know. Interest is sustained by the questions: will the protagonist figure it out, how will she react when she does, will the bad guy achieve his evil objectives and will the protagonist and other innocent characters die or survive?

While I enjoyed writing murder mystery, part of me longed to try the other approach.  Then, to my surprise, I had the idea for a third version of  To Catch a Fox, my old novel in the drawer, using the techniques of suspense. I can only suppose that, unknown to my conscious mind, my subconsious hadn’t given up on that novel and was churning away, trying to figure out how to write the story  and grabbing bits about mystery and suspense I was writing and learning about.

What my subconscious came up with was this: keep the title, the basic character of Julie Fox, my protagonist with psychological problems, and the jumping off point of her going on a quest to find her mother. Almost everything else about the story would change.

In this reboot, Julie  would encounter an antagonist with qualities like Adriana of Secret Spring. The reader gets this bad gal’s perspective and comes to realize that her goal would destroy Julie psychologically. Julie is in the dark about this. I’d also have a bad guy, the Adriana-type character’s unscrupulous colleague who seduces Julie. Will these villains succeed? Will Julie realize in time what’s going on, battle the evil ones and emerge emotionally and mentally stronger? Or will they push her deep into mental illness, with its risk of suicide?

With no publisher yet for Deadly Fall, I finished my revisions on the mystery sequel but didn’t want to start a third book in a series that might never get off the ground. This gave me time to work on the new To Catch a Fox. I would begin the the story from scratch and didn’t even consider looking back at the old manuscript.

But first, I had to decide on a few basic details,  like the setting, the supporting cast and Julie’s particular psychological problems.

Shaun Hunter’s post this week Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers features local author Betty Jane Hegerat’s novel Running Toward Home, about a foster child who finds himself trapped overnight at the Calgary Zoo. I don’t know if Shaun planned this post for Hallowe’en weekend, but a night alone in the zoo would be scary – or exciting! This is a Calgary novel I’ve read. Hegerat juggles five point of view narrators, who are all sympathetic, real and memorable.