Once I had the 5 W's, I could just write the book, right? Wrong.

First, I was in the middle of finishing my second edit of my first book. Oh, yes, I had written a book previously. It's a well-written piece of complete drivel, in which I made every mistake imagineable while remaining grammatically correct, and even sometimes lyrically brilliant. I plan to use it for parts - someday.

By August, I had freed myself from the 1st novel and could start on Freezer Burn, whose working title was "Hands of Time." I changed the name as soon as it dawned on me that "Hands of Time" sounded like a soap opera.

The first thing I had to do was figure out how my trusty heroine would find the clues to lead her to the solution. Being uber-organized, I put together an MSExcel file laying out the plot, listing problems I needed to address, things I needed to learn about, and defining characters. After all that, I started to write.

I went to the Southern California Writer's Conference in LA-Irvine in September, with 45 pages of a mystery.