The article was about the things you should never do when writing a book.  The number one thing not to do was to write without a timeline or base story written out first.  Well pooh, I thought, I messed that up.  I hadn’t written any kind of timeline or outline and was just winging it.  I had the thoughts in my head but that was as far as they had gotten…..

So stupidly, I opened a document and tried to write out a storyline.  I used a bullet list and started at day one of my story.  I found myself having to go back and actually look at the days to see what happened.  I was not liking this process because it was taking away from my writing time, but I could see where it would be helpful.  I got the timeline done up to the point where I had finished writing.  Now I just had to map out the rest of the story.  I put some vague thoughts onto the page and after about a week of lunch hour notes, I had the story mapped out where I thought it would go.

Now I had to write it.  But instead of free flowing words, I found myself trying to adhere to my timeline and it really seemed to cause more of a hindrance than the help it was supposed to be.  I got aggravated and put it aside and didn’t write for a couple months.

One day, I made up my mind that I was going to finish it and started writing again at lunch.  The words came easy and I plugged along for a couple weeks.  I was almost there, almost.  We went on our summer vacation and I took it with me with intentions of finishing the writing while relaxing on the balcony listening to the waves on the shoreline.  Yeah, that didn’t work.  I did work on it a little, but found myself getting way too distracted with all the cool things to do at the beach.

When we got back from vacation and work calmed down a bit, I started back to writing again and wrapped up the story and thought I was finished.  Ha, thought I was.

Once again, I went back to the website for beginning authors and was reading through some of the helpful hints and ideas.  So, the first one after you completed your writing, was to re-read the book from start to finish.  I thought this was stupid because I wrote the dang book, I knew what happened.  But I figured they knew what they were talking about and started at the beginning.

As I read my book from the beginning, I looked for timeline issues, details left out, and made sure I had names right as I went through it again.  I had already done spelling and grammar checks, so that seemed to all be ok.  I was to the last chapter and I read a sentence about the weapon and where it was found.  And my heart about stopped.  Wait a minute, she can’t find the weapon, it was found at the murder scene.  Oh crap, now I have two weapons.  Well, this was not good.  The whole premise of solving the mystery was based on this.  Now what do I do.  Damn, damn, damn…….

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