My newest book, Last Flight, is available now. It is the fourth book in the Last Healer mysteries series. This time, Katie and Joe witness a plane crash and become involved in investigating who sabotaged the aircraft, even though Katie is almost nine months pregnant.
A scale is used to discuss authors and their writing styles. On one end is “plotters.” Plotters outline their entire story before they start writing. Some hardcore plotters create a very detailed map of events from beginning to end, while others create only a rough draft of the story.
On the other end is “pantsers.” These are authors who fly by the seat of their pants. I belong to that group. A famous pantser is Stephen King. A pantser develops characters and a general idea of a story and then puts those characters together and waits to see what happens. It is almost as if the story writes itself.
The idea for my first novel, Identity Crisis, came to me about twenty years before I started writing it. I thought I needed to be a plotter. I tried hard to imagine the story from beginning to end, but I couldn’t do it. Finally, in 2018, I started writing. I ran into many mental roadblocks along the way and put it on hold several times, but after my job went out of business, I started writing again, and soon, the story seemed to write itself.
This time, I had a better idea of this book’s direction. I knew the bad guy from the start and had a good idea of how it would end, but a strange thing happened. The story took me in another direction. Suddenly, I had a new bad guy, so my ending became completely different than my original plan.
I’ve already started my next book, which is not part of the Last Healer series. This time, I am back to being a hardcore pantser. I know who my main characters are, but I still haven’t figured out what the crime is yet.