Flaming Nora: Plotting and planning next cosy crime

Friday, April 09, 2021

Plotting and planning next cosy crime - my writing week

This week has meant a new start. It's the beginning of a month of research for my second cosy crime novel Set for Murder at the Seaview Hotel. It's the second in the series of Helen Dexter cosy crimes, she's a wonderful sleuth who runs a B&B in Scarborough. The first in the series comes out in August this year and it's here.

Although I'm known as a saga writer and my sagas are hugely popular (thank you, everyone!), I'm writing sagas and cosy crimes alternatively now for the foreseeable future, which is great. It keeps the sagas fresh, new and exciting while I take time away from historical writing to have fun in a contemporary setting with my cosy crimes.

And so to this week, I've been researching. This has involved a flurry of phone calls to Scarborough and to friends in the northeast who are involved in something similar to the business in which the crime in my book is situated. I've been creating the structure of my novel in my mind, turning ideas over, dismissing some and adding others. I've made lists, wrote a one-page outline of the book including suspects, motive, red herrings, sub-plots and of course, lots of gentle humour too.

Next week I'll take the research one step further with a walk in the park with a greyhound. Intriguing, eh? And I'll create profiles for my characters before doing some reading about story structure to make sure I've covered all the bases in my novel. I need to be sure that what I plan to write contains all the twists and turns I want the reader to enjoy.

When all of that is done, I'll start typing up chapter outlines. These are loosely planned as my writing changes as I go, characters I never planned suddenly appear and the book takes on a life of its own. But it needs, for me, to have a structure to begin with, I can't sit down and stare at a blank screen, I'm no good like that. And so I give myself lots of hints and clues as to where to begin telling my tale, where to make it rise and fall, turn up the tension, commit the crime, solve it satisfactorily and always get the reader involved.

Elswehere this week, I'm absolutely chuffed about this, pop-pickers! My new novel THE PAPER MILL GIRL is a non-mover this week, remaining at number 3 in The Bookseller's Heatseekers Chart (for those bubbling under the top 50 bestsellers by authors who haven't been in the best selling chart before). She entered the chart at number 11, then last week went up to number 3 and this week, despite some very stiff competition from books written by celebrities with their own PR campaign (and I have none of this apart from the wonderful assistance from Hype That PR, a fellow Sunderland lass and marketing professional), my book holds her own at the number three slot.

As a child, spending time in the library at Ryhope made me fall in love with books, stories and reading. It's what made me want to become a writer. With thanks to Ulverscroft for sending me my author copies of THE PAPER MILL GIRL this week in large print and audiobook! I've already donated these to one local community library, Fulwell Community Library and will donate more, when it's open again, to Back on the Map community library in Hendon.

I crafted another episode of my weekly soap opera Riverside for The People's Friend magazine. I've been writing Riverside weekly since 2016 and you can find out all about it here.