Writing mysteries is addictive

This morning, I created this blog. I've got a couple of other blogs out there, one about cooking and the other called "What's Brewing in Maine" for my beer book in progress. But I thought I'd have a blog about the process, my process, of writing mystery novels. Or not writing them.

It was a long time ago, sometime in the early 1980's, that I began writing in the first person. I'd read a bunch of Robert Parker's Boston-based mystery novels, and since I'd lived in Boston attending college and law school, I loved knowing exactly where Spenser was going in his beloved city.

I'd always wanted to write creatively, and when I'd "heard" Spenser's first person narration enough, I thought, "I can so that."

Not so easy, cupcake. But I slogged away at it, beginning with my first novel, Like Tears Over a Cheek (a line from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa), a fictionalized version of a real murder that took place at my alma mater, Colby College, in the early 1970's. It took me awhile...I was having three kids, failing as many Bar Exams (failing sounds easy, but in order to take the Bar exam, you have to study for months, and wait for months for the result, and worry your head off the entire time). I remarried and moved to Harpswell, Maine. I found Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and through that saving grace, found my first writers' group. I was in heaven.

That recession of the early '90's forced me back to the workplace, a law firm that almost drove me crazy. I swore I'd finish the novel before returning to work. And I did. I had a local print shop print out fourteen copies, mailed them out after studying The Writer's Market to find appropriate publishers, got several rejections, some of them encouraging. I took another Bar Exam, this time in Maine, and came within 1.9 points of passing. The Board of Bar Examiners in Maine was run then by a person whose response to, "Can't you review my answers?" with, "Just take it again." This person will be a victim in a novel....idea!....how about my current work in progress!

I digress. I went to work for Shipyard Brewing Company when they had just opened their Portland brewery. An agent then told me, "Write a beer book, then it'll help get your fiction published." With big Bambi eyes, I said, "Okay!"

I wrote What's Brewing in New England, which was published in 1997. During the editing process, which I thankfully didn't have to do, I began writing a second book in my Griffin Kane series, and at another agent's advice, I changed the setting from a restaurant to a brewpub. I worked with this agent for a year, but found I was writing for her, and not for me. So I went back on my own. I also got divorced, moved with my three kids, two of them teenagers. I went to back to work in another law firm doing title searches, and with the divorce drama and busy real estate market, the fiction writing came to a halt.

It took another five years, when I decided to get a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, to get No One to Bury (a line from a T.S. Eliot poem) going again. I was also going through a bankruptcy, then, the most dreaded thing: a foreclosure. My kids were getting to be young adults, but needed me more than ever.

Several years later, here I am, writing regularly, writing another beer book due out in 2015, and finally after 30 years, attending writers' conferences, albeit local ones, co-sponsoring a reading series in Portland, Maine and getting that second novel finished.

Yes, it's set in a brewpub, now located in Portland in a former Catholic church. When will it be done? By the end of this year. I'm going to Crimebake, a conference hosted by Sisters in Crime, and am determined to come back with an agent. We shall see.