My Accidental Novel

As a true crime writer, there are often cases that stick with me. Some because of the horrific nature of what was done. Others because they tickle my muse in some way. Usually, because there's a story to tell.

This happened with my novel, Rory. As I researched the Lady of the Dunes case, I stumbled upon the story of Rory Kesinger. In the 1970s, she was a drug dealer, among many other charges. Police also suspected that she was the mysterious lady found in the Cape Cod dunes. DNA tests ultimately proved this wrong.

But as I researched the story more, an idea hit me. And then Camp NaNo 2022 crept up on me, I decided to take the plunge. It was one of the best experiences I've had in my career.

It also made me start looking closer at the historical fiction aspect of my library. Doing that led to my book, The Opposite Of Love, inspired by yet another article that I wrote. This one is about Robert Ray Hamilton and the scandal that ultimately destroyed him.

In both cases, I took liberties with the stories. It's the fiction part. However, I also tried to stay as close to the facts, as we know them, about each case as I possibly could.

Both stories intended to create books. That is not always the case with the stories that I write. Sometimes the intention is something much different but there's no controlling the muse.

Expanding The Time Loop

In 2020, I developed an idea that I was passionate about. It came after watching the Hulu movie, Palm Springs. I wanted to tell a murder mystery in a time loop situation. There were plenty of avenues for me to go with it.

What sparked this idea? Other than the movie, a case I wrote about. Scott Danish was a teen boy in 1965 who wanted to join the army but couldn't because of a heart condition. He faked his death and ran away. While his parents presumed him dead, they began to piece their lives back together. One of the things they did was restart the weekly game nights they had with their friends. As they gathered with their friends one evening, they heard a noise, the father went upstairs and was murdered. Police chalked it up to a robbery, despite nothing being stolen. A recruiter in another city called and reported that they had Scott. This development shocked everyone and the young man was accused of killing his dad. A grand jury refused to indict.

With all the twists and turns in the case, it begged me to tell this story via a time loop mystery. All the elements came together except one. Time. The pandemic saw me putting out an article every single day. It was a lot.

Because of that, fiction was put on the back burner. Eventually, the story fell out of my head and as I refocused on some of my other projects, it got buried deeper in the back of my head.

Back And Longer

At a makeshift writer's retreat, the idea came tumbling back to me. I remembered most of the details about the story I wanted to tell. More impressive was that I remembered most of the cases that inspired it. Nothing was stopping me from going forward with writing it.

Almost nothing, that is.

Under normal circumstances, I can take a few keywords from a case and find the one that I am looking for. That wasn't the case with Scott Danish though. Instead, the words I put in seemed to draw up a plethora of unrelated cases and stories that had nothing to do with what I needed.

After annoying friends with my complaints about not finding it, I decided that maybe I wasn't supposed to write this story. Maybe this was one of those ideas that seem good and intriguing but ultimately not mine to tell.

But the idea wouldn't stop nagging at me. There had to be some way that I could find this case. Every search took me further away from what I wanted to know. It finally dawned on me that I might be able to find it if I searched the platform where I believed I published the article in the first place.

It worked! I found it after going through a comment left by one of my beloved readers.

After finding it, I used the research used for the article to start working on the story. My initial desire was for it to be a short story. However, as I've been writing it, there is no way for it to be a short story.

From Short To Long

Generally speaking, a short story is under 10,000 words. Anything over that is considered a novella or pushing into novel territory. While there are no concrete industry standards, these numbers are widely shared amongst publishers of all sorts.

As writing for Time After Time started, my plan was for it to be a short story. In my head, it was going to go viral and Netflix would buy it for 6 figures. Life has a way of making things like that go haywire.

Having just finished the first loop, the story stands at 3,000 words. Freaking out, I asked my writing group about what they thought. The original plan of five loops would take me to at least 15,000 words if the current trend continued. And that wasn't counting the expansions and changes to the loops that I needed to make to bring the story to a conclusion.

My friend agreed that it had to be five loops. As she said, three wasn't satisfying and four would be odd. Her advice was for me to not worry about the word count and to focus on telling a compelling story. Easier said than done.

I meditated on it and decided that while frustrating, I needed to tell the story the way it wanted to be told. No matter how many words it is.