Murder at the North Pole is the initial installment of the Mistletoe Mysteries.  At the heart, the tale is one of friendship and overcoming racism.  This story started as a weird dream I had one night.  I woke up and jotted down a few notes of what I could remember.  Like many stories for many authors, this one kept wiggling around in the back of my mind.  I wasn’t sure what I would do with it.  I wasn’t even sure I considered myself a writer.

On a whim, I took a creative writing class at one of the local community colleges.  The spark had been ignited and I wanted to do more.  I took more classes and began to grow a network of writer friends.  I put together a rough draft of MatNP and submitted it to an anthology.  It was not accepted and that encouraged me to take that rough draft of a short story and turn it into a novel.

That’s how MatNP was born.  By this time, I was now part of a small writing group and they were invaluable in helping me develop the story.  They were patient enough as I went through several revisions and plot changes.  My first protagonist was TSTL (too stupid to live) and ended up being the victim of the story.

After I wrote this first death, I stared at the page marveling at how this character went his own way and did his own thing as he flowed from my fingers through the keyboard and ended up dead.  I shook my head.  I didn’t know what to do.  Instead of rewriting it, I came up with a new protagonist and the story took on a life of its own.  The racism among the Elves was originally planned, but the heat of that hate surprised even me.

And then there were the “deleted scenes.”  Some scenes just don’t work with the rest of the story.  It was like ripping off a band-aid; it hurt but was necessary.  Removing ten pages of narrative can be heart rending.  In fact, I kept that scene in a separate file in case it fit in later.  It never did and I forced myself to delete the file.

Finally, I took a couple of days off from my day job and pounded out the last chapters and finally wrote “THE END.”  It was a satisfying experience.  It was worth the pain of the entire process.  For any of you out there who are trying to write, whether it be poetry, short story, or novel, you can do it.  You are a writer.