For the past three Novembers, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month journey, and this year I’ve signed up for Camp Nano.  I’m going to use the month of June to try to get  Wilde Wagers, my historical mystery, cleaned up and ready to submit to publishers.

Writing Wilde Wagers has been a long road.  It was my favorite book while writing i t– the characters were so alive, and the story flowed beautifully.  It was my mom’s favorite too — after each chapter I’d send her, she’d proclaim, “Write faster!”

I often wonder if she knew what was coming.

She died suddenly before I’d gotten to the end.  Finishing the story was difficult, but I felt I had to.   Unfortunately, I was so depressed and so unhappy that I couldn’t bring myself to have anything bad happen to any of my characters.  I also couldn’t force myself to create evil or nasty-behaving people.  Not an effective technique when writing a murder mystery.

My mom died about 18 months ago, and although I’m still sad and depressed, I think I can start murdering characters again.

At the end of June, I’ll let you know how my revisions at Camp NaNo went.