Julia Spencer-Fleming: I Shall Not Want

Reader, I tried. I made him a Green Beret and her a former intelligence officer. I made him an FBI agent and her a reporter. Him a sheriff, her an escaped militia member (I still like that one.) Every time I tried to tell a love story, people died, children went missing, vehicles blew up.

I mentioned two things stood out in my failed space epic. It gradually became apparent the second was most significant: the heroine found a body on the third page. She and the hero both set out to find out, well, whodunit. Everything else, the love story and the EV suits and the cool aliens, existed to serve that plot. That…mystery.

Maybe , I thought, I'm a mystery writer ?

I started over. I created a new hero and heroine, a world-weary police chief and a freshly ordained Episcopal priest, and I put them in a tiny Adirondack town. I wondered, what if a baby was found on the church steps? What if someone was desperate to conceal its parents' identities? What if the police chief found the young mother's body and suspected a couple in the priest's parish who were dying to adopt? What if?

Six books later, I'm still asking what if. What if the person we think is the killer can't be caught? What if there was a murder no one ever knew about? What if someone stumbled into manslaughter and would do anything to escape the consequences? As for the romance in my series, Kirkus says, "…its nerve center is the lacerating relationship between two people who can't live with or without each other."

I've come to believe that the work chooses the writer, and not the other way around. We're not creators so much as we are dowsers, wandering over the literary landscape until our forked twigs twitch. We dig, and in the digging discover if our wells are sweet or bitter, rock or clay. I thought I was going to be a science fiction writer. I would have liked to write romance. But it turns out what I'm really good at? Is killing people and hiding the bodies.