Momentous Day

I should commemorate this day with something special.  Like prying the sunflower seed shells from between the planks on the back deck.  Or rearranging the dust bunnies beneath the furniture.  Or popping a bottle of V-8 and swigging a glass.

What are all the joy and good times  about?  Today I started writing my stand alone book.

Not a mystery.  A different genre.  Something humorous.  Well, I hope it will be humorous when it is finished.

The book takes place in rural Missouri (shock!) and features Darla and Parker Fleeker and their assorted neighbors and townsfolk.  I've been stewing with the plot for a few days and have that down, but I couldn't get going on the writing.  The trouble is, I'm one of these people who has to have it all figured out and perfect before I apply fingertip to keyboard.  I can't "fill in" later with information or names or such.  My beginning has to be The Beginning; there is no starting several paragraphs down on the page and then coming back some time to add it.  I need to know how it starts and then, when it's time for the second draft, I can tweak it.  So it took me a day to mentally write the beginning before I actually wrote it.  In fact, I thought of it in bed in the wee small hours this morning.  Rather than turning on the bedside lamp, I jotted down my super sentences on a pad of paper I keep stashed beneath my pillow.  I've got quite good at writing in the dark so that the gems of inspiration are legible in the daylight.

Which these were, O Joy!

I hope to have it finished in a few months.  This book doesn't demand an extensive plot as a mystery does.  Just a story line.  No deep thinking on my part (maybe I should've done it, if it turns out to be a bomb).  I'm writing it under an assumed name.  Not because I'm ashamed of it, but because I don't want people who like my mysteries to get this book, thinking they're about to read another English detective novel.  They would be incredibly disappointed...and mad.  So I'm taking the pen name Nicole Jayne  for this little book.  Think "we" will become a known author some day?