I finally got my plot points done. I like to come up with 40 of them but only made it to 36 today. Still, that’s enough to start writing. I wanted to move the story to the birth of Jazzi and Ansel’s baby, but if I do that, I have to rearrange my entire timeline. I didn’t think about that before I started plotting, but it would take WAY too long to solve the murder if I waited for Toby to show up. So, he can’t arrive until book 10.

Like me, Jazzi’s as healthy as a horse while she’s pregnant. In fact, I was on a bowling league back then, and my scores got better and better the bigger I got. That took a while, though. I didn’t show for my first baby until I hit five months in. It was a different story for daughter 2. I showed really fast, and I got so big, my doctor swore I was going to have twins. Every time I went in, he checked for a second heartbeat. Turned out, only one baby took up all that space, and I lost the weight fast. Miracles do happen.

Anyway, I’m going to start writing tomorrow. Fanny in chair; fingers on keys. The nice thing about plotting ahead is that when I first started thinking about this book, I pictured some of the characters differently than it turned out I needed them to be. After working with them through all of the plot points, I know them pretty well. In my mind, Doc, the first suspect, was a quiet, ordinary sort of guy, but then Wheels, a later suspect, wouldn’t have been jealous of him. Each character sort of found his place in the story and developed as it limped along in the plotting stages. Then, for the first time, even though I knew who the killer was, I couldn’t figure out how Jazzi and Ansel could catch him at the end. I kept worrying about how to wrap up the book. And then I made a big pot of soup, and it came to me. That’s how my brain works somehow. No logic, just trusting it will finally get there eventually. I don’t like cutting it this close, though. The “got you” scene usually is a natural progression of the story, but in this book, Jazzi isn’t working with Gaff. She’s on her own. And that made it trickier.

While I remember, (because my brain can be a sieve at times), I want to mention that I’m going to publish this book when it’s finished as a culinary cozy mystery. I put two books up for free a while ago, and I marketed A Cut Above as a women sleuth for the first tag and a cozy mystery for the second tag. It went high enough in the ratings that IF it had been a culinary mystery, it would have made into the top 100 free mysteries a LOT sooner than it did. This time, I marketed Black Magic Can Backfire as a paranormal romance and it went into the top free 100 pretty soon, but when I’d marketed it as a fantasy mystery, it never came close. For fellow writers out there, how you label your book makes a difference! The broader the label, the more competition and the harder for readers to find. Just saying!