The mystery of plot
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if there was a school where writing was taught with specific subjects (such as characters, setting scene, endings) and I were in said school I would fail Plot. Plot is not my greatest strength. In the past I've simply made nice dolls of my characters and then stuck pins in them to see what happened (metaphorically, of course.) That's worked, by and large, but it's not going to work on the current book project. Why? The current book project is a mystery.
Mystries demand plot in ways other novels don't. The very first book I wrote was a mystery. It was bad. The plot was okay but it had little twists the reader couldn't possibly predict because the author hadn't seen fit to think them through until the very end. Those twists ended up being the ribbon to wrap up the story in a nice neat fashion. Unfortunately, said ribbon was rather terrible in the ways just-tacked-on bits of story usually are terrible.
Lesson learned? Sort of. I'm smart enough to know I can't pull that trick a second time with good results. Unfortunately, I have a hard time thinking my story lines through from start to end. That may strike you as odd. It may be. Being weird doesn't worry me. Writing a bad book does.
So today I made myself go running because that has sometimes made ideas bubble to the surface of my mind. Why physical exercise=mental breakthroughs I have no idea. But the run did help. I've got a kernel of an idea that explains why the corpse is where it is and how it got there and who put it there. Let's hope I can grow this wee idea into a plotline. Because the running? It kind of hurts on hot, humid days.