Words, Witchcraft, and a Hell of a Brainstorm

Progress, updates, and a little bit of magic in the margins.

I’m still here, still writing. If you’ve been wondering what’s going on behind the curtain… I was seduced by a book I’ve playfully titled: The Collective

I’ve been deep in the guts of what I hope will be the first in a series of novels. Think, if the Owens women of Practical Magic were a little more morally gray and a lot more stabby. I’ve got a mystery with emotional teeth.

We’re talking family curses, secrets buried under floorboards, women who know what they’re capable of but aren’t sure if they want to be. I’ve got blood on the floor, grief under the fingernails, and characters who keep waking me up in the middle of the night.

I didn’t set out to write a murder mystery. Honestly, I resisted it. I didn’t want to kill someone off. I liked all my characters a little too much at first, even the shady ones. But then it happened. A death slipped into the plot, quiet but heavy, and suddenly everything around it started to hum with meaning. The grief. The suspicion. The way people lie to themselves and each other when the truth gets too sharp.

I didn’t want to do the whole detective angle either, gumshoes and clue boards weren’t on the vision board, but damn it, it works. Not in the traditional, trench coat and monologue way, but in a personal way. The investigation becomes emotional. The clues are buried in family history and a little magic. It’s not about solving the crime so much as surviving it. Maybe that’s what drew me in: the way a mystery can be a mirror for all the things we don’t want to admit. As Detective Poirot himself said,

“It is the brain, the little grey cells on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within, not without.”

Morning Magic

Yesterday morning, over an espresso coffee strong enough to resurrect the dead, I had one of those rare, lightning in a jar conversations. The kind of talk that flips a light switch you didn’t even know was wired wrong. My wife is the kind of person who can listen to my tangled plot rants and gently point out the one thread that actually matters.

One observation from her and suddenly all the pieces of the plot stopped squirming and started aligning. It was one of those moments that reminded me that sometimes your best ideas aren’t born at the desk. They’re born in quiet conversations with the people who know your voice, even when it’s still searching for the right words. It was enlightening and deeply attractive!!

…When I was a kid, I didn’t just watch movies, I transcribed them. I’d sit in front of the TV with a notebook and write down every single word, every movement, every dramatic pause like I was trying to reverse engineer the universe. I didn’t know I wasn’t outlining, I just thought I was doing righteous work, scene by painstaking scene.

Naturally, when I started writing my own stuff, I took that same approach. My outlines were basically screenplays with dialogue heavy, details crammed in every margin, and overwrought little monsters with mood swings. I didn’t know any other way. Nobody ever sat me down and taught me how to structure a story or a book. I just winged it, shaped my writing to fit the container it was going in, whether that was a workshop, a publisher, or the deepest corners of my hard drive.

Enter my wife, a librarian with a long career, a mind like steel trap, and a tendency to shift into another gear entirely when she’s in her element. I call her Madame Director when she’s in the zone, partly for fun, and partly out of reverence. She’s busy. Always. So when she sat down with me to teach me how she outlines, I was over the moon. And not just because I got to learn something. Not just because her brain is a perfectly indexed wonder. But because I got to glimpse how she sees books. The logic, the layering, the way she builds a spine that a whole story can grow from. Reader, it was hot!

She showed me that her outlining method isn’t about control, it’s about clarity. A way to keep track of the major points in a story, to build a map I can actually follow without falling into one of my patented “What if the plot changed entirely and everyone dies.” detours.

And we did all this while both on our periods (yes, both of us), and while I was limping around the house with what has now been diagnosed as osteoarthritis of the left knee. Glamorous. The energy in the room was a mix of creative joy, hormonal sabotage, and the sound of me audibly aging.

Still, what a gift to learn a new skill. To be taught by someone you adore. To find a new path forward when your old methods are mostly vibes and panic. I’ve spent my whole life writing from instinct, but now I’ve got a framework that feels like scaffolding, not a cage.

So now I’m outlining with purpose. Still learning, still limping, still mildly unhinged. But with a little more direction, a lot more admiration, and one hell of a smart woman by my side. More to come. Probably with more outlining. Possibly with better knee support!