November has long been my favorite writing month on the calendar; for years, I’ve been an active participant in National November Write a Novel Month (often abbreviated NaNoWriMo), though it wasn’t until 2019 — and with a ton of support from my family and writing friends — that I managed to actually finish my first novel. That manuscript eventually became Blindsided, and introduced my two main characters, Sean Colbeth and Vasily Korsokovach, to the world. Blindsided is by far the shortest book I’ve written; part of that has to do with having crafted it during NaNoWriMo, where the goal is around 50,000 words. The other, though, was my fear that I might put too much background into the book and drag down the plot; it was something of a balancing act to sneak in just enough about Sean to make him interesting enough that readers would want to see more of him. To my great delight, it seems to have worked out for the first three books in the Sean Colbeth Investigates have done remarkably well; presales for his latest adventure, Duality, have me seriously thinking about the changing publishing order I had planned for next year.
Having said all of that — and as much as I love writing both Sean and Vasily — I thought I would do something completely different for NaNoWriMo 2022. I’ve been living and breathing these intermingled universes for a number of years now; like many authors, I worry about keeping the stories fresh and the characters real. The effort to do that, though, always keeps fears of burning myself out front and center. As I have so many more adventures planned for these two, it would seriously not do to have the stories abruptly end.
So I decided to write during NaNoWriMo, but make good on an earlier promise I made to myself to dip a toe into a slightly different genre. I’ve long wanted to try my hand at writing Urban Fantasy, and with my predilection toward mysteries, wondered what sort of trouble I could get into when magic is mixed in with a standard police procedural. And not any sort of magic, but something with roots in the ancient myths of the Mesoamerican cultures I’d studied in college (and a gleeful chance to make use of those research papers I’d had to write).
But maybe the magic has specific rules as to its use — and maybe those powers belong to someone who’s not quite mastered their abilities. Add to that a jaded young detective who finds herself thrown into a situation that at first seems incomprehensible, only to find that it’s actually deadly real. Mix in a human trafficking ring that seems to be operating within a multinational corporation and the outlines of an interesting adventure begin to appear.
I’ve written about half of the story so far and as much fun as it has been to discover these new characters, it’s truly an abrupt turn for me, and to be quite frank, I’m not entirely sure I’m happy with it. While the story feels solid to me, having written so much grounded in the awful reality that is modern police investigative work, having that fantasy aspect woven throughout is giving me some pause. I did work out in advance just what I would allow to happen in my universe, for I didn’t want the story to be full of moments where a character snapped their fingers and received a vital clue; but then again, I can see how the reader would expect that very thing, given how I’ve framed everything. It feels a bit like I’m working at cross purposes, trying to write a realistic mystery that has magic at it’s core.
I’ll finish out this draft and then give it a thorough read, but I’m not certain it will ever see the light of day. Maybe — never say never, I suppose. I do wonder, though, if I should have simply gone for a traditional fantasy story and left out the mystery part — or simply created a new set of detectives working in a new city completely different than Sean or Vasily. I guess I never truly realized how built for my chose genre my brain actually was — maybe I just had to wander away slightly to get the hint that I needed to stay in my lane.
Or not. We’ll see…