Weeks 8-9: First Things

The Skinny

I continued to plot, chose a working title, and identified my characters as the biggest selling point for the book. I deepened my market analysis, searching for data on mystery book sales, but not finding recent reports.

The News

• After referencing Scott Norton's twenty methods for creating a title from his book Developmental Editing, I am happy to announce a working title for the book: The Dagger-Pierced Heart.

• I have created eighty scenes so far. The typical mystery novel has about 180 scenes, so I'll include forty more scenes this week.

• The publishing industry guards its secrets jealously. The only data on mystery book sales that I could find came from a 2010 survey. The big takeaways were:

  • Seventy percent of mystery readers are women.

  • Seventy percent of mystery readers are over age forty-five.

• I've continued to consume mystery stories: The Maltese Falcon, La Brava, and Presumed Innocent are titles I finished recently and strongly recommend.

The First Idea

The inspiration for this book came in college. I had homework, so naturally I was on a website full of free documentaries watching anything that looked interesting. I came across the title The Mark of Cain.The narrative follows inmates at Russian prisons who give interviews about their routine as a prisoner and their former life as a gangster. One man, with a long dark mustache, shirtless for his screentime, describes the purpose of the many tattoos that cover his torso. An executioner means that he is in for murder. A spider's web means he is a drug addict. And through these symbols, the man explained, whenever two strangers meet in the criminal underworld, they know immediately who the other person is, what he or she has done, what he or she would do.I felt the hot rush of an idea.  This was a perfect metaphor for the effects of choices on the human person, indelible marks on the skin symbolizing indelible marks on the soul.