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 For anyone who’s attempted to follow my blogs, you’re aware that I’ve been away from blogging for a while. It’s the book tour. Eats up all my time. That and trying to meet deadline on the next Cork O’Connor novel. But in the meantime, I did compose a blog entry that I think may be of interest, particularly to anyone who’s stuck in their writing at the moment.
I managed during the early part of my tour to spend a week in Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast. And something amazing happened there.
For those of you who aren’t aware of it, I lived most of my high school years in Oregon. I still have some family in Portland, so I come back periodically. But not just for family. Oregon is a beautiful place, and no more so than along its remarkable coastline.
Lincoln City is a resort town. It has all the downsides of that kind of community. Too many shops selling crap, too many cars crowding the single main street (the famous 101, the Pacific Coast Highway), too many signs screaming at you: “Come in here!” “Buy here!” “See the amazing whatever in here!” It proved, however to be a wonderful place to stay.
 We rented a house perched high on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The view, as you might imagine, was stunning. We watched whales cavort not three hundred yards from shore. We saw seals in the surf. The sunsets were glorious. At night, you could walk on the silver road the full moon paved across the dark sea.
That was all fabulous, of course. But this was also a working vacation for me. I have a deadline to meet—the next Cork O’Connor book—and things weren’t going well. I’d been stymied over the ending. The book is called Vermilion Drift. It’s the story of a serial killer’s spree in the early 60s that comes back to haunt Cork in the current day. There are dark, grisly secrets that Cork uncovers about his family’s past. It’s a pretty good tale, but I simply couldn’t bring it to a close in a way that satisfied me. I’d been stuck for weeks on that ending.
The house had a hot tub. Every morning after I’d put in my time writing, I shucked my clothes, threw on my suit, and hit the hot tub. Like the house, it sat at the lip of a sheer cliff. And like the view from the house, what I could see from the hot tub was nothing short of remarkable. I sat with all that relaxing, bubbling hot water swirling around my body, and with that incredible sky and ocean and coastline to rest my eyes on. And my mind, oh my mind just opened up. The day before I left Lincoln City, sitting in the hot tub in the morning, the closing for Vermilion Drift descended on me, drifting down like a feather from an angel’s wing. And it was good. It was very good.
 I’ve been doing a lot of book events lately to promote my most recent novel, Heaven’s Keep. I’ve been flying or driving long distances, eating badly, getting too little sleep, exhausting myself. And all the time, the next book deadline has been sitting on my shoulders. What I found on this cliff house in Oregon is that there is great value in a vacation. Beyond the obvious—the loosening of knots in both mind and body—currents of creative energy, blocked by the pressures of busy days, begin to flow again and breakthroughs become possible. Weights are lifted. Smiles return. And the future becomes a beautiful thing to contemplate. My wife assures me I could achieve the same sense of peace and purpose with yoga. I don’t do yoga. But vacations I’m pretty good at.
 For those of you who are just discovering my blog, a little up front information: I’m currently rereading the entire Cork O’Connor series, something I’ve never done. This as a kind of celebration of the fine-looking trade paperback editions of my backlist released this summer. I’ve been waylaid for a while by other concerns, but I’m back on the journey.
While driving on my current book tour, I’ve been listening to the audio version of Copper River done by Recorded Books. It’s a terrific reading by David Chandler. And the story, I have to admit, is pretty damn good, too.
There’s an issue at the heart of Copper River. It’s a book that deals largely with the question of those children in our society who we turn our backs on, the thousands of children who go missing every year and are lost to us. They’ve been abused, abandoned, and become the targets for all kinds of predators. In the Ojibwe culture of old, the children were the responsibility of the entire village. Everyone was “uncle” or “aunt” or “grandmother” or “grandfather.” There are no villages today, not for the Ojibwe and not for the rest of us. And our children suffer for it.
 The opening of this book, when I began to conceive it, concerned me. It deals with the killing of a child, which is something I promised myself long ago I would never write. I’m a father, a grandfather. I don’t like to read about children being murdered, so why would I want to write about it? But I knew this was the right opening for the story, and the question was how to compose this scene in such a way that it would be powerful and heartbreaking, but also would not turn readers away. This was the most difficult opening for a book I’ve ever written. And in its way, it may be the best.
What follows is a pretty compelling tale of children who stumble into more than they’ve bargained for, and the adults who step up to the plate to help, Cork O’Connor among them, of course. The story features a kick-ass female security consultant named Dina Wilner (a holdover from the previous book) who, judging from the emails I continue to receive about her, is clearly a favorite with readers.
My own favorite characters in this book are the two teenagers at the heart of the story: Ren and Charlie. Having raised two kids, I recall clearly the teen years. Oh, God, were they tough. Teens are hard on adults. But they’re also vulnerable in so many ways. I tried to capture this dichotomy between the tough surface and all the uncertainty that lies beneath. In the end, I really loved these kids.
 This story takes place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the only Cork book to be set significantly outside Minnesota. And one of the other big challenges was to write it in such a way that even if readers weren’t familiar with Mercy Falls, which sets up the situation of Cork’s retreat to the U.P., they could still fully enjoy the story. If you’re among those who fit this description, I’d love to hear your take on how well I accomplished this.
Listening to the story on tape, honest to God, I kept saying to myself, “This guy’s a pretty good storyteller.” And I love the way this book ends, just language itself. See, I impress myself pretty easily.
Up next, Thunder Bay, which is my favorite book in the series.
See you down the road!
 I’m about to embark on another book tour. This will be my tenth. Let me tell you about a book tour.
When I began publishing nearly a dozen years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that book tours were an essential part of the promotion of a new work. The idea, not a bad one, was that readers would be interested in seeing authors in person and hearing what they had to say. A lot of time, money, and energy went into the planning and execution of a book tour. The results of the tour were tracked by publishers: How many sales resulted from each store event? How did the store feel about the event? Was the event perceived as successful? For some authors, the cost of the tour was clearly worth the expense. For others, the results were less clearly favorable—in terms of sales, anyway. That’s how it was for me, in the beginning.
With my first book, Iron Lake, readers stayed away in droves. It wasn’t uncommon for me to travel a great distance for an event at which were present only me, the bookseller, and the bookseller’s cat. I planned and paid for that first tour. Despite the general lack of crowds at my signings, I never viewed an event as unsuccessful, for several reasons. First, I was able to make a personal contact with a bookseller. This was the person who, I knew, would hand sell my work, book after book. Second, I did sell books. Booksellers generally told me that as a result of the display both before and after the event, many customers bought Iron Lake. And third, those few readers who came to an event gave me terrific confirmation for the job I’d done, not only in the writing but in my personal presentation. I was, they assured me, a big hit.
 Over the years, the glow of the book tour has dimmed. Not for me, but for a lot of writers and for most publishers. Because almost every writer tours, the appearance at a bookstore of yet another hopeful face has become commonplace. These days even best-selling authors can’t be certain of drawing a crowd. Booksellers have become wary of going through all the hassle of promoting a signing that can’t guarantee a turnout. Now, to the uncertainty about the value of personal appearances, add all the possibilities available through the Internet—viral marketing, web promotion, blogs, MySpace, Facebook—that give an author the opportunity for a breadth of exposure almost unthinkable a dozen years ago and at a fraction of the cost of a national book tour. From a purely business perspective—bang for your buck–it might seem a no-brainer that the days of book touring have passed.
Me, I don’t think so. I still do a lot of personal appearances with every book, and for many of the same reasons that compelled me to tour with the first. I continue to believe that it’s important for an author to make that personal connection, with both booksellers and readers. Word spreads from a good event—and most of my events these days are good. It’s always a pleasure to spend a little time with booksellers I’ve come to know well over the years. And I still get such a thrill out of standing in front of a room full of people who’ve gathered simply because they like my work. The expense isn’t, I suppose, justified from a strictly business perspective. But for me, it’s not all about business. It’s also about art, about community, and about connection.
 I still plan my own tours. I set up the events, buy my airline tickets, book my hotels, rent cars and drive myself around. My publisher is usually agreeable in helping to finance a tour, but I also kick in a lot of my own money. In the past, a new book has entailed planning and attending fifty to sixty events in the ten weeks following the release. This year, I’ve cut back a bit, but I’ve never once considered cutting out a tour completely. Honestly, if I didn’t tour, I’d feel that the birth of a new book was incomplete somehow. I’m like a proud father who wants to hold up his newest child for everyone to see.
Maybe this time when I tour, I’ll pass out cigars.
 I graduated from high school just over forty years ago. (Please don’t do the age calculation.) This past weekend, I attended the 40th reunion of the 1969 graduating class of Hood River High School in Hood River, Oregon. It was, all things considered, a pretty remarkable experience.
At some point in your lives, most of you have probably attended a high school reunion. Me, I never had. This was my first. And it was a bit unusual because I didn’t really graduate. I left Hood River just before my senior year, moved to Manteca, California, and finished my schooling there. But Hood River has always been the alma mater of my heart.
There were issues when I left town years ago. It was 1968. We were in the midst of the Vietnam War, one of our most divisive experiences as a nation in modern times. My father, an English teacher at the high school, was profoundly anti-war, a sentiment that in our small town was not looked upon kindly. It wasn’t uncommon for me or members of my family to hear unflattering epithets yelled at us from cars passing on the street. We left Hood River for good reasons, but under a kind of cloud. And forty years later, as I was contemplating my return, I wondered if some shadow of that cloud might yet remain.
Over forty years, people, of course, change. But something in them—in their faces, their eyes, even their gestures—often remains the same and beautifully unique. At the first reunion function, an informal gathering on Friday night, I was astonished at how many people I recognized easily. Like me, most were grayer and grizzled and thicker and bent a little, yet the seed of who they were long ago, probably the seed of who they were from the very beginning, was still there.
But there was also so much more to them. Those seeds had grown and, in most cases, blossomed in rich lives. They were lives that had, for the most part, taken similar shape: marriage, children, careers, grandchildren. The stories I heard were, generally speaking, not astonishing in their particulars, but they were told with satisfaction. People were comfortable with who they were and where they were and how they’d come there.
 As for me, the most surprising realization was that no one really remembered why my family had left Hood River. No one really cared about the conflicts of the past. Time heals in part because it veils.
I did a bunch of typical things a guy might do in this situation. I drove past the house where my family had lived. Yes, it’s smaller now. Visited the high school. Ditto the size thing. I searched out, with some difficulty, the home of my high school sweetheart (who was not at the reunion), where, on her doorstep at the age of sixteen, I’d given—or was it received?—my first kiss. I drove the long valley of the Hood River, a place of astonishing beauty. And finally I went swimming in the Columbia River, where I lost my cell phone and, for reasons I won’t go into, for a brief time caused some real concern that I might have been swept away in the powerful current of that giant of a river.
Like most people, I tend to measure cost against return. It took quite a bit to attend my reunion, in money, time, and energy. (I have a new book out this week, and I should probably have been focusing entirely on that circumstance.) But in the end, I believe I received something not only worthwhile but also necessary. Something that feels to me a lot like peace.
Next week, the ninth book in my Cork O’Connor series goes on sale, and I still don’t know exactly what to think of this work.
 Often at the heart of my books is an issue. With Copper River, for example, it was a question of what happens to the children in our society that we turn out backs on them. Thunder Bay considered the sacrifices we’re willing to make in the name of love. Red Knife was about our culture of violence. But I’ve to tell you honestly there’s no issue involved in Heaven’s Keep. I just tried to write a damn good story.
I’m told I succeeded. Me, I’m usually a terrible judge of my own work. By the time I’ve finished a project, I don’t know if it’s good or bad or will have any impact at all on readers. By the end, it’s become stale for me. I’ve poured my time and my energy and my creativity into the work, draft after draft, and I’ve usually exhausted myself in the process and all my enthusiasm has been sucked dry. Almost always, by the time I send off my final responses to the copyedits, I never want to look at that piece of writing again. And worse, I’m afraid no one else will want to look at it either.
So I rely on the judgment of others whose opinion I trust: my agent, my editor, my writing group, and, finally, the critics. With Heaven’s Keep, the critical response has been overwhelmingly positive. Sally Fellows, who reviews for a number of venues, says, “Things just do not get any better than this.” Ted Hertel, who reviews for Deadly Pleasures, says, “The story grabs you and will not let go. This book – indeed, this series – is not to be missed.” Robin Agnew, of the wonderful Aunt Agatha’s bookstore, wrote in her review for the Ann Arbor Journal, “After nine novels, I think it’s safe to say Cork O’Connor is as beloved by readers as Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn. The fever of anticipation when a new Cork book comes out is as high as the one I remember for a new Leaphorn or Chee novel. This novel is well worth the anticipation, though it will definitely have you reaching for a (large) box of Kleenex.”
Man, I hope lots of people buy this book, read it, and enjoy it. Hell, all writers hopes this for their work. But in terms of sales, writers have little influence. It’s up to the gods or fate or whatever. And I hope if people read it and like it, they write to tell me so. I don’t care if you’re Stephen King or John Grisham. You can never hear enough that you’ve done a good job. Especially if, like me, you’re never quite certain that you have.
Two things you never do in the crime genre. First and foremost, never kill a pet. You can be brutal to human beings, kill them in imaginative, excruciating ways, but an innocent little dog is off limits. Second, never end a book without all the loose threads tied up, all the answers given, justice done, and the world set right again. Readers expect tidy endings. It’s one of the reasons, probably, that they choose books in the genre. The comfort factor.
 But does this always have to be the way? Can a mystery be satisfying even if it consciously doesn’t meet this powerful expectation? That was one of the questions—the biggest question, in fact—that I considered as the story of Mercy Falls formed in my thinking. I began to see a long story arc, one that, more and more, I realized would probably span two books. And I wrestled with how to write this project in a way that would fit neatly with readers’ expectations.
The more I considered the project, the more I realized that there were two significant ideas at work. First, to write a book that would carry the reader only partway across the bridge of the entire story. And then, to write a book in which Cork O’Connor has to confront a whole new mystery and set of dangers, while at the same time keeping an eye over his shoulder for the problems that have followed him from the earlier book. It would mean ending the first part of the project without tying up loose ends, and writing a follow up that would not only complete the story but also be independent enough of the earlier work that readers coming to it without having read the first part would still feel that they’d been given a satisfying piece of fiction.
An audacious idea, I knew. In retrospect, I’m amazed that I decided to undertake the challenge.
I thought out the entire story arc fairly carefully and found a place that seemed appropriate for the break in the two books to occur. I knew it would leave the reader with questions unanswered, a cliffhanger kind of ending, which was a situation I strongly suspected readers might not appreciate. But I liked the idea of trying it, just trying something different. So that’s what I did.
Mercy Falls ends with a threat—to Cork, his family, his entire life—a threat not resolved until nearly the end of the book that follows: Copper River. The novel received a fine welcome from critics. Reviewers loved it. Almost immediately I began to get emails from my readers with a broad range of responses. Some loved what I’d done. Others were perplexed. A number were angry. Pretty much what I’d expected. To those who were outraged, I explained myself and most understood. But there were still some who bought Voodoo dolls, put my image on them, and stuck needles through the heart. They also vowed they would never read another of my books.
I continue to get the occasional email rant from someone who’s just read Mercy Falls, and I continue to offer my explanation and advise them to move quickly to a reading of Copper River.
I confess that I wonder at times if I made the right decision. But the place I end up is always the same. If you never take risks in this art form—and it is an art—you never grow as a writer, and who wants to be a writer stuck in the same place book after book? Even more important, who wants to read that kind of writer?
I’m often asked, “Do you outline?”
The answer (at least for the first nine novels I published) is yes. I’ve done this for a variety of reasons, but one of the most important is that I need to know where the story is going. What this does is free me from the question that can absolutely paralyze an author in mid-book: What the hell happens next?
I followed this process with Blood Hollow and had, I thought, a fine plot in place. Here’s how I initially imagined the story. It would be about a wild young Ojibwe man—a character named Solemn Winter Moon—who is accused of murdering a white girl. Cork, who knows the young man well and has an emotional attachment, believes that despite all the evidence against him, Solemn is innocent. Cork would go about doing what he does well, investigating in a rather stumbling way. He would enlist the help of Jo, his attorney wife, to defend Solemn in court. And Jo, ala Perry Mason, would extract a confession from the true perpetrator of the crime.
Looking at this basic storyline, I can see now that it seems pretty lackluster, at least on the face of things. But I had a few twists in mind that would surprise readers. And it would feature all the hallmarks of the series: the great northwoods setting, the Ojibwe culture, Cork and his family, and, of course, Henry Meloux. I thought the story through, created my outline, and sat down to write.
Midway through the book, however, things changed dramatically.
Here’s how it happened. I knew that at a particular point in the story Solemn Winter Moon would flee the murder charge against him. During his flight, he would encounter wise old Henry Meloux. Meloux would tell him that in order to face his reality, Solemn had to be a man, and he was not yet one. Meloux would send Solemn on a vision quest that would initiate his passage into manhood. It’s an old Ojibwe tradition called giigiwishimowin. In my outline, I had Solemn receiving a fairly traditional kind of vision for an Ojibwe, one that involved an animal spirit of some kind. But that’s not how I wrote it.
On the morning I was due to write the scene in which Solemn relates to Cork O’Connor the vision that he received during his quest, I sat down in the Broiler (the coffee shop where most of my books have been written), opened my notebook, and proceeded to give myself the surprise of my writing career. The scene I wrote was nothing like I’d imagined. In it, Solemn Winter Moon tells Cork that alone in a place called Blood Hollow, he spoke with Jesus. Jesus was dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt, and wore Minnetonka moccasins. Cork can see that Solemn has been profoundly changed. And Solemn’s transformation causes Cork to begin to reevaluate his own spiritual journey, or rather his abandonment of that journey. The story suddenly became about something entirely different than I’d planned, and the outline went out the window.
After I’d finished the book and looked back at that pivotal morning at the Broiler, what I realized was this: I wrote that scene in the week I learned that my mother was dying, and all the questions I’d been asking myself had changed, and the story reflected that in a profound way.
I still outline. It’s still the most comfortable approach for me in writing a story. I still dread waking up in the night wondering in a panicked way, What happens next? But I also try very hard to be open to those unplanned inspirations of the moment that can, if I let them, make all the difference in the world.
I do a weird thing with my books.
Rereading Purgatory Ridge has made me look at the issue of story arc and how I construct a narrative, and I’m honestly surprised. I see that I have often done something without really being aware of it. Simply this: At a certain point in the story, I shift direction dramatically. A story that has had a very specific drive suddenly changes and what’s at the heart of the drama shifts.
Here’s how it works with Purgatory Ridge. After the prologue, the story opens with a bomb blast at a lumber mill, an enterprise that’s at the center of a controversy over the cutting of pine trees sacred to the Anishinaabeg. The blast kills a man, a well-respected Ojibwe elder. The first part of the book is a pretty straightforward whodunit. Cork O’Connor, like every good protagonist in the genre from Miss Marple to Dave Robicheaux, goes about the business of trying to get to the bottom of the crime. Midway through the story, however, everything changes. Cork’s wife and son are kidnapped and the stakes instantly skyrocket. The book becomes a thriller as well as a mystery.
I write my books in my head first. When I conceived Purgatory Ridge, I had a very specific purpose in mind. I’d written two books. One, Iron Lake, was a book with relationship at its heart. The second, Boundary Waters, was all about suspense. With third, I wanted to create a story that was a satisfying marriage of suspense and relationship. I recall that I came up with the second part of the book first, the kidnapping and the idea of Jo O’Connor in jeopardy. I constructed the first part of the book in order to set up the kidnapping and the misdirection. One critic commented that the initial storyline would have been just fine; readers didn’t need the kidnapping. I beg to differ. If Purgatory Ridge had been just a book about a bombing that leaves a man dead, it would have be an acceptable mystery, but it wouldn’t be a thriller. Putting someone in jeopardy ramps up the intrigue and the emotional investment in the outcome. And not just any someone, but someone the readers—and Cork—care about very much. In an earlier blog, I talked about creating suspense in many different ways. The threat of harm to characters we care about is one of the most profound.
This switch of direction well into the book keeps the reader guessing. I did it in The Devil’s Bed, my only stand alone. I did it in Blood Hollow and in Thunder Bay and in the book that will be released this coming September, Heaven’s Keep. But I did it first in Purgatory Ridge, and I still appreciate the fresh energy that the technique delivers to the story.
At the end of Purgatory Ridge, all the answers have been delivered to the reader. The mystery of the bombing has been solved. The dark heart at the center of the all the misdeeds has been revealed. And the mortal threat to Cork and those he loves has been resolved. The book is a harrowing journey with one of the most emotional resolutions in the whole series. On rereading, I think it stands up extremely well. Another book I’m quite proud to have my name on.
 People get angry over prologues. It’s weird. They seem either to love them or to hate them.
Me, I love prologues. Looking at my own work, I realize that almost every novel I’ve written has opened with a prologue, though I don’t always call it that. Boundary Waters begins with Chapter One, but the whole scene is, in reality, a prologue. Blood Hollow, the fourth book in the Cork O’Connor series, begins with a three-chapter scene, a long arc structured to read like a short story. Purgatory Ridge begins with a section titled November, 1966. It’s a prologue.
A prologue can be a powerful technique for grabbing a reader’s interest. It requires no set up and no immediate resolution. It must, of course, be significant to the story in some way, must somehow tie deeply into the narrative, otherwise it’s a cheat, and unsatisfying in the end. One of my favorite prologues occurs in Dennis Lehane’s novel Gone Baby Gone. It’s a brief but compelling portrait of a woman who, clearly, has something to hide. Her secret isn’t revealed until almost the very end of the book, but when the reader understands the connection, left dangling for three hundred pages, it’s a marvelously satisfying resolution.
 So I began Purgatory Ridge with a prologue, a scene in which a great ore carrier sinks in a horrific storm and the sole survivor is left grief stricken. That character doesn’t reappear for several chapters, and the part the sinking plays in the storyline isn’t revealed until several chapters after that. But when the reader finally understands the connection, a great deal of the underlying motivation for the story falls easily into place.
I don’t understand the objection to prologues. If you want to write and give me your own perspective, I’d be happy to carry on a discussion with you. If you’ve got examples of prologues that don’t work—preferably none that I’ve written—I’d love to know what they are, and why they don’t work for you.
In the meantime, I’m going to hold to this literary device. The book I’m working on now, a great Cork O’Connor novel titled Vermilion Drift (due out probably in fall of 2010) opens with a prologue that’s less than a page long and is, believe me, compelling as hell.
I’m frequently asked where my ideas come from. Sometimes that’s a difficult question to answer. Often I simply can’t recall. But Purgatory Ridge is different. I remember well the day this story was delivered to me.
At the time, I was employed by the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. Iron Lake was already on bookshelves. Boundary Waters was nearly complete. I was trying to open myself to an idea for the next novel, but nothing was coming to me.
On my coffee break one afternoon, I sat down with a terrific woman named Kaye O’Geay, one of my cohorts at the Institute. Our conversation turned to fathers, and she told me the story of the death of her own father. He’d been a deckhand on an old ore carrier, a ship called the Daniel J. Morrell. In November of 1966, while making the final passage of the season across Lake Huron, the Morrell encountered one of those horrific gales that occasionally sweep across the Great Lakes at that time of year. In the course of battling the storm, the ore carrier broke in half and sank. In terms of the loss of human life, it was, at the time, the worst disaster ever to occur on the Great Lakes. (The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was still nine years away.) Along with Kaye’s father, 27 other men were lost. But one man survived, a watchman named Dennis Hale. For more than forty hours, he drifted on an open pontoon raft, dressed only in his pea coat and skivvies. The winds raged across the lake at sixty miles an hour; the air temperature hovered around freezing; the water was a bitter forty degrees; the waves towered thirty feet high. Hale should have died. But he didn’t. The Coast Guard found him—nearly frozen—and flew him to a hospital, where he made his recovery.
 It was a remarkable story, and as soon as I heard it, I knew that somehow this was going to be at the heart of the next book. I had no idea what kind of narrative I would build around it, but I had a clear image of the way the book would open: with the sinking of a great ore carrier during a terrible storm, seen through the eyes of the sole survivor.
Dennis Hale has given his account of the incident in a fascinating book called, in fact, Sole Survivor. If you’re interested, you can order it online at a number of sites.
How did I take the seed of that initial idea and create the very complex storyline that became Purgatory Ridge? It happened in the way it usually happens—the result of gestation.
While I was finishing Boundary Waters, I let the possibilities of “story” roll around in my head, all centered on the sinking of an ore boat and what part that might play. I had a few ideas already for other elements that could contribute to building a plot, and all these possibilities bumped around in my thinking. Over the course of several weeks, a complex storyline developed. By the time I finished writing Boundary Waters, I knew most of the plot of Purgatory Ridge: how it would begin, how it would probably end, who was going to do what to whom and why. As I usually do, I sat down and outlined the book. And then I began the writing. I opened with a prologue—the ore boat sinking—which is a technique that creates lots of controversy among readers and writers alike. And that’ll be the subject of my next blog.
See you down the road!
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