Sometimes, when I’m writing, the words come easily. I put my fingers to the keyboard, and there’s a steady flow, a stream of story from my mind to my fingers, to the screen. They seem to flow into my mind from somewhere. I call that somewhere the basement, my subconscious, where “the girls” are hard at work creating stories.
Other times, when I’m writing, the words come hard. I stare at the screen for ten minutes before the next sentence comes, and then rewrite it three times. After an hour of that I have a paragraph. It takes all day to make my page quota.
Usually, when I reread the difficult scene later, it’s not that bad. It just felt bad and came with great difficulty.
But this time, when I was writing ARSENIC AND OLD LADIES, the words came like Niagara freaking Falls. They came so fast that when I reread them later, I found I had skipped words in my speed.
The story kept on coming, too, all day long. I’d tear myself away to make dinner or do some mundane household chore, and the words would keep coming, pounding down on my brain like a deluge, demanding to be released onto the page, into their story.
I haven’t felt this powerful a flow since the very beginning of my writing career, when I was a starry-eyed, hopeful romance writer. Back then, in earliest 1990s, I had five little girls, from 4 to 14, and I could write with all five of them raising hell around me. They used to like asking me for things while I was in the thick of my stories, because I would usually wave a hand at them while saying, “yeah, sure, uh-huh, okay.”
Anyway, I’ve been writing for thirty-one yers since those early days. Even when the flow is brisk, as it has been for most of my books, it hasn’t hit this level in a long time.
My friend, colleague and publisher Tanya Anne Crosby is to blame, I think. She made an offhand suggestion that had worked for her. Instead of looking at my books-to-write list when deciding what to create next, why not give my muse free reign and just see what came to me?
That was how I used to do it, but once storytelling becomes your day job, you start letting other things creep into the decisions about what to write next. Which series needs to be given some momentum, which are readers asking about most, which series needs to be completed, which are selling well, that sort of thing. And you forget…it’s not a job, it’s a calling.
Anyway, that was the reminder that unlocked the doors inside my mind and let the girls in the basement have their say. They’re always down there, creating the next story like the elves in the shoemaker’s cabinets. And they help out on demand, sure. But they’re always working on something in the background, too. And that something is more well-developed, because they’ve been working on it for a while, beneath the surface.
That’s how it feels, anyway. So I gave the girls the go ahead to send me whatever they’d been working on down there. And then I went to bed. The next morning, I had four sixty-something best friends inside my head, telling me their stories.
Bonnie, accidentally killed a pedophile, they told me. She didn’t mean to, it just happened. But the circumstances looked pretty bad, and she would know because her son’s a cop.
“Wait, her son’s a cop?” I asked.
Yes, out of state. So she knows the circumstances look bad. She calls her best pals, and they come to her rescue, and the four of them brilliantly hide the body.
But someone saw them—another pedo, live-streaming from a hidden camera. Bonnie wasn’t the guest they’d been expecting.
“Right,” I said. “They were expecting a girl. A girl Bonnie knew, as a retired and sometimes substitute teacher. That’s why she was there in the first place. She was onto him.”
Exactly. The next day, after a night of body disposal, Bonnie learns her son is moving home with his twin fifteen-year-old daughters. He’s taking a job as a detective with the Cortland County Sheriff’s Office, and the first case that lands on his desk is the missing man his mother killed.
“This is good,” I said. “This is very good.”
So that’s the story the girls gave me, and I could not write it urgently enough. I spent so many hours a day at the keyboard, I was causing some back/shoulder/neck issues and didn’t even notice. I just wrote and wrote and wrote. First draft in nine weeks, second draft in two weeks, third draft in ten days. Then I sent it to my most trusted editor, who suggested simplifying an overly complicated element, and smoothing out a relationship that seemed off, and found a few other rough spots or inconsistencies. She’s so good and I don’t write a book without her input. Jena from Practical Proofing if you’re looking.
When I was finished and tried to return to normal life, my neck didn’t want to turn or bend without excruciating pain. It hurt my back and neck to twist or bend or reach. My shoulders were kind of locked up and shooting spasms of pain down both arms It took a month of PT to get myself out of pain.
Then I started the sequel.
I am in love with ARSENIC AND OLD LADIES. I have never written a book like this before.
- The audiobook is being recorded by the amazing Anna Maste as we speak.
- The paperback, hardcover, and ebook all release on Tuesday September 22
- Paperback and hardcover are everywhere books are sold
- eBook is an Amazon exclusive.
- The audiobook will be at Audible and iTunes
- The Sequel, ARSENIC AND OLD LADIES II: A FESTIVE FATALITY will be released this December.
The audiobook might have a release date and/or preorder link by the time this post is released, so please check the website for the latest information.
See you online!
Maggie Shayne
Arsenic and Old Ladies: MaggieShayne.com/arsenic
@MaggieShayne on Bluesky, Instagram, and Facebook
