For years, my wife, co-presenter, and fellow author and Atlanta Writers club volunteer, Kim Conrey, has referred to me as her “plot whisperer.” Kim can write circles around me in the character-development department. She crafts protagonists, allies, villains, henchmen, and even bit players with so much depth and nuance that readers think of them as actual people they’ve met. If she ever struggles in writing her novels, it is sometimes while trying to get her memorable characters from Situation A to Situation B and then C. In such cases, she turns to me, and together we brainstorm what her characters could do to get themselves out of trouble and/or land into a whole new minefield of woes that readers will love to see them escape from.

Sometimes, however, she doesn’t ask for my advice—instead, I just intrude with my diabolical little unsolicited ideas. Thus it was, when she was describing a novel she had begun to write about a woman named Liz returning to her small Georgia hometown and confronting her rough childhood in a Pentecostal church she is now repurposing as an arts center, that I opened my big mouth. Kim was describing a scene inspired by the scary crawlspace in the unfinished basement of the actual church she attended as a girl, when I said, “What if a hundred-year flood washed a skeleton out of that crawlspace? Now Liz would have a mystery to solve on top of everything else she’s dealing with.”

Though Kim loved the idea, she confessed, “I don’t write mysteries—you do.”

“Then we’ll write it together!” I replied. And just like that, I’d inserted myself into her project and subsequently took the lead as she switched her attention to finishing the third book in her Ares Ascending sci-fi series. In short order, I turned the novel from women’s fiction into a small-town cozy mystery. We kept her working title of Southern Fried Nonsense, but that might become a subtitle as we consider making this a series of cozy mysteries, each named for a barbecue sauce.

Why barbecue? Well, we brainstormed a family for Liz that includes a half-brother who runs the most popular barbecue joint in town and who could be the Watson to Liz’s Sherlock. Instead of the good ole boy she had in mind, though, I’ve made him an MFA graduate who can codeswitch between literary snob and downhome redneck. Mostly because I like having someone in every one of my books who uses big words. If you’ve read a variety of my novels, you can confirm this quirk of mine: from Hardscrabble Road to Aftermath to Watch What You Say, there’s always some smarty-pants who grew up reading the thesaurus for fun. Why? Probably because I often thumbed through my own dogeared Roget’s as a kid. (As you might surmise, I didn’t go on a lot of dates in my youth, but I could rattle off umpteen synonyms for despondent….)

Now, Kim’s novel only partially resembles what she had in mind. She’s waiting for me to add more of my contributions to the first draft so we can go over the whole thing together and figure out what needs to change. Not only am I a usurper, but I’m a slow-writing one at that.

If you’re curious about how the manuscript starts—at least in its current version—click on this link and let us know what you think of it!