The Creation Of A New World (Patricia Potter)

I started a new book today and thought it might be fun to bring you along on the journey with me. So I plan to start a blog diary to record every messy step I take in the often laborious journey to the end. You can – if you wish – share the occasional writers’ block, the times I write myself into a corner (it happens all too often), and brandish a whip to keep me apace of my schedule. If I do not complete at least forty pages (but hopefully much more) a week, you can savage me.

I should have had pages finished by now but I’ve also been working on a proposal for a historical series. So I’m actually putting down the first lines today.

The title of the romantic suspense work in progress is, at the moment, “The Devil’s Shadow,” but if the book is published with that name it will be a minor miracle. Probably 80 percent of my titles are changed by the publisher. I’m hoping “Shadow” will survive because it’s second in a related series of books revolving around an Atlanta newspaper. The first, “Tempting the Devil” was a September book. I rather fancy finding different ways of using “Devil” in a title.

But first . . . a little about the story. My heroine is Kirk Carroll. A former newspaper reporter squeezed from her job by staff cuts, she’s now a paramedic, determined to be a participant in life, not an onlooker. My hero is Jake Kelley, former Navy Seal and now newly released convict. He was unjustly convicted of stealing more than six million dollars during a mission in South America. Other members of his team are dead or missing but having been badly wounded and left for dead, he doesn’t know how or why.

During his last days in prison, he receives a communication from someone who says they can clear his name. He has to violate his conditional release to meet that person, but just prior to reaching an arranged site, he watches helplessly as a pedestrian, someone who looks vaguely familiar, is struck by a hit-and-run driver. He starts toward the injured man but stops when he sees a ghost from his past, a man supposedly dead these past seven years. And as the ghost disappears into the crowd, Jake turns back to the injured man and watches as a paramedic arrives and kneels beside the fallen man. An envelop passes between them.

It's been a rotten day for Kirk and grows only worse when she's called to a hit and run victim. The man insists that she take an envelop. To calm him she does. Then she's forced to make him a promise. It's a promise that sends her headlong into danger, leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Along for the ride is a rascally rescue parrot named Merlin.

“The Devil’s Shadow” is one of those books that has been fermenting in my head for years, just waiting for the right time to emerge. I wrote the first page of a synopsis about ten years ago and then stuck it in my “ideas” file. Now the time is ripe for Kirk and Jake.

I have a twenty-five-page synopsis to guide me. But if practice holds true, the final result won’t resemble the synopsis. An author prays from the bottom of her/his soul that at some point (preferably close to the beginning) the characters will take over and write their own story. It was a joke with a former editor that any resemblance between my synopsis and the final draft was purely coincidental.
But during the journey, I will paint myself in corners and run back to that synopsis to try to find a way out. I’ll share those unfortunate trips with you as well.

If anyone would like a copy of the synopsis, I’ll email it to you and you can see how well I hold to it. Not very, if the past is any indication, but then this might be a first. Just email me at papotter@aol.com. In return, I ask for your encouragement and occasional flicks of that whip. Castigate me if I do not make my goals. First draft finished by end of January. Polished by March 15th.

The first sentence, as of today: “The day started as one of the worst in her life, and was accelerating downhill from there.”
Tomorrow it might change. Will keep you posted.
Next week: Week 1.