July 2026: Clear skies, then...turbulence

The book is almost finished—we promise.

All this past month, the story was moving along quickly. Every chapter written was one step closer to being done. After years of being in a holding pattern, we could finally see the end.

But then we hit some turbulence—and well, we needed to work through it.

Here’s what happened.

The Trouble With Mysteries

At some point, you have to reveal the mystery—who did it, and why. And you have to do it in a way that's satisfying, not as a character just announcing, "Hey, I'm the killer, and here's why I did it.”

So we got to that scene where it was all to happen, and immediately, we knew something wasn’t working. We just couldn’t figure out why.

So we went back to basics: Why was each character in the scene? What did they want? And how did they get there?

But things weren’t connecting.

The real problem

It took us a while before we realized what had gone wrong: one character had changed their motivation somewhere along the way, and we hadn't caught up to it yet.

They had started as a villain and became something more sympathetic, more tragic, as we wrote. That shift changed everything because the things they were supposed to do could no longer happen as they should.

So, to sort things out, we had to look not only at their actions but also at the actions of everyone else affected by them. There were a lot of moving pieces, and one small fix sometimes messed up other stuff.

The longer we worked on it, the more lost we felt. Then exhausted and discouraged. Then, if we're being honest, not wanting to show up at all—because it just felt like the same old fog.

Getting it sorted out

Untangling the mess required us writing it all out by hand: this character did this, which led to this, which led to this.

Then, because those paths intersected, we had to do it for each of them and map where they crossed. Columns running down a page, linking to other columns with arrows.

And we’d do it again and again and again until we felt we had the story straight.

Then we had to put it all into the book.

But it felt overwhelming. Too much information, too many threads. And we’d ask ourselves how much the reader needed to know and what’s just enough to help it make sense and keep the action flowing.

And most importantly, going back to the initial problem, we didn’t want the villain just monologuing about everything they did and why.

In the end, we found the simpler and more focused we made it, the more it helped untangle the mess.

Where we are at

We are moving forward again, slowly.

We lost half of the month trying to sort things out, and we still have to write a few more chapters to reveal all our characters' secrets.

But once we’ve got it down, we'll get back to the final action that leads to our exciting finale. And then—after almost eight years of sitting on it—we finally get to write the last scene that we've had in our heads since the beginning.

We can't wait.

Until next time, keep reading.

Angie and David