That’s okay, sometimes I don’t get me either.

Creating unlikable people in your head who wreak havoc and cause human suffering is not normal. Asking your sister to stop the car on the side of the road on your way back from vacation so you can work your way down the ditch to get a photo of a swamp with your camera phone is not normal. Having to google how to spell “Dahmer” so you can reference the notorious serial killer in a story line is not normal. Choreographing in your head two people having sex is probably very normal, but writing it down and presenting it to the world is not.

But this is how I am. It’s taken me decades to even come close to accepting that; some days I fall short. But to be honest, I’m not sure I could tolerate not having that active imagination running all the time. What does a person do with a brain that’s quiet and orderly. Is it peaceful, or just boring? What do you fill it with when you are lacking other worlds that need tending to? Lots of schedules and to-do lists? Itineraries and life goals? Important dates? Do you practice what you’re going to say to people with all that free time not spent absorbing their personalities and cherry picking the memorable aspects for future characters?

I too have goals, but most of them are pretty short term. My to-do lists are usually half written and more of a guideline than a hard fast rule. The things most people take for granted to get through life, I have to make room for around the twists and turns of murders, kidnappings, and love-hate relationships that only exist between the electrical impulses of my hard working neurons. I don’t expect you to get it. I just hope you like it.

I’m not one of those people who is good at writing when there is a lot of extraneous noise around. I’m also a procrastinator. That means when my life gets chaotic, it’s actually hard to sit down and write.

This has been the issue with the last half of Blonde on the Backwater, the fifth book in the Dairyland Murders Series. I wouldn’t say I’ve been blocked. I’d say I’ve been preoccupied. I’ve been fixating on things that are happening in my real life, when I should be concentrating on the alternate universe in my head.

That’s why the garden was so important to me last year. This year, not so much. I’ve been using my free time to hang out with my husband and run off on fun little excursions.

But that doesn’t mean my brain hasn’t been whispering to me the whole time.

This last Saturday, I was working at my second part time job, and it was unusually quiet there. So I took that as a sign that I should just take a few minutes and catch up on my outlining.

That catch-up turned into two pages of outline to fill out another quarter of the book.

And my brain came up with plot twists that simply hadn’t occurred to me until that very moment.

I recognize that I need to be more disciplined with my time. I need to create those pockets of quiet contemplation. Waiting for them to happen is not really an option.

And I know your counting on me. For your sake as well as mine, I’ll get there.

Remember when your grandparents (or possibly parents) complained about when they were kids, they had to trudge 5 miles through the waist high snow to get to school and back, “up hill, both ways”? Sometimes, that’s how it feels, writing a series.

Like you, I assumed it would get easier as I went along, but that has not proven to be the case. It’s harder.

Every book introduces new characters that help to drive the plot of that particular book. Those characters need descriptions and back stories, and depending on how their roles evolve, they may or may not come back in a later book. That’s work.

The core characters each evolve differently with extraneous factors that round out the series itself. Simultaneously, they are also driving the present book plot with the above introduced characters. That’s more work.

A character driven story still has to be a story. There still has to be a central theme, and in my book there are sub plots that act as catalysts for that theme and literally drive the point home. What’s the point? What are the motivations? Why is the story taking the reader down these paths, and how do they come together? Yep, more work.

Because I chose to write a character driven romantic suspense series, there is a lot of research required to make Dairyland Murder’s universe believable to the reader. There’s history, geography, language, forensics, culture studies, current events, technology, civics, even a little botany now and then. I like to think my books are short but dense with information presented in a way that is entertaining but still makes the reader think.

So, while I enjoy writing the books, and I feel validated knowing that I have fans who really enjoy reading them, I still have to make myself sit down and bring it all together. Metaphorically speaking, I appreciate the privilege of going to school, but it’s still five miles through the waist high snow. And it’s still up hill, both ways.