The writerโs dilemma is time. (Perhaps that everybodyโs dilemma, but I digress.)
Writers are blessed/cursed with fertile imaginations that donโt come with off switches. Since getting an idea takes a heartbeat and writing a book takes months or years, we all carry around more stories than we will ever have time to write.
My most recent experience of the writerโs dilemma came from having simultaneous ideas for three storiesโone standalone suspense novel, one Faye Longchamp mystery, and one Justine Byrne mystery. The only answer was to put my hands on my keyboard and get to typing.
The standalone, The Dark Library, went out into the world last year, so that meant it was time to turn to Faye. Up to this point, there have been thirteen Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries, and they take her from her early thirties to her mid-forties. Those books show her making friends, going back to school, starting a business, dating some men who were wrong for her, building a life with the husband who was very right for her, and starting a family. They do not, however, show her wedding, which happens offscreen between Book 5, Floodgates, and Book 6, Strangers.
I have always known that I would write the wedding story someday. After I turned in The Dark Library, I knew the time had come to send Faye down the aisle.
She wouldnโt be Faye unless she was obsessed with a historical mystery, so I needed one of those. It came to me (and Faye) in the form of a letter from a woman whose mother has invited Faye to their home, because she knows something important about Fayeโs family. As proof, she encloses an eighty-year-old photo of Fayeโs mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-grandmother, and theyโre all sitting on the porch of Fayeโs own home.
Wild horses couldnโt keep Faye from going to the womanโs New York home, but sheโs getting married in six days. It would make sense to wait a while…but the woman with the secrets, Annika Lange, is over a hundred years old. She doesnโt have much time left to tell her story. And there, again, is everybodyโs dilemma: our time is limited.
Thereโs no help for it. Faye and Joe jet off to Manhattan to hear the elderly womanโs secrets, which lead them straight to the murder of the only son of a Gilded Age robber baron. Faye is convinced that the man convicted of the crime in the 1930s was innocent but, once more, her enemy is time.
Has the evidence she needs survived for almost a century?
Will 101-year-old Annika have time to tell Faye what she knows?
Will Faye rise above her inexplicable terror of getting married in time to buy a wedding dress?
And will Faye and Joe make it home in time for the wedding?
I had a fabulous time writing Something Old. I felt very sure about the core of the story, so I was able to let it take its own shape. I originally thought this core would lead to a short story, but events leading to Fayeโs wedding grew into so much more than that. Annika and her daughter turned out to be fully formed people and their secret turned into a full-fledged murder mystery, complete with clues and red herrings and the need for Faye to pick up a trowel and dig. Something Old turned out to be more than a brief, romantic wedding story, and its ideal length turned out to be a long novella, almost half the length of a novel.
So I made it into a book. Something Old and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction that is anchored by the novella but also includes eight mystery short stories. Several of them are historicalmysteries, and the protagonists lean toward folks with Fayeโs cool logical intellect. Several of them are set in Fayeโs native Florida. I think Fayeโs fans will find a lot to like in these tales.
My next project will be to write the third of the three story ideas that have been begging me to make time for them. The third Justine Byrne mystery will take her to live among the physicists who are racing to build the ultimate weapon, the one that will end World War II. Unfortunately, it also has the power to end us all.
After that, well, I was telling the truth when I said that writers are always overflowing with ideas that weโll never have time to write. But that doesnโt stop us from trying….
Mary Anna Evans is the author of the Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries, which have received recognition including the Benjamin Franklin Award, starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal, the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mississippi Author Award, and the Will Rogers Gold Medallion. Her research on Agatha Christie has been nominated for Edgar, Agatha, HRF Keating, and Macavity Awards. She is at work on the third Justine Byrne WWII mystery.
