Copper Top

July 1 marked a new time for me. A time I can put aside the trials of dealing with my mother's passing and closing her estate and begin concentrating on my writing again.

It also marks a time when I broke open my packed-away novel and began putting some serious effort to finishing it before the end of the year.

The working title is "Copper Top" and it's a "cozy" mystery set in the Southwest Michigan area where I live. It's about a young woman who is trying to become a mystery writer, but in the meantime works in a place that is a combination bakery and yarn shop, named "Copper Kettle Yarn and Bake Shop." She happens upon a mystery that is decades old and figures it can't hurt to look into it.

I've been working on this on and off (mostly off) for about three years, but I still love the characters and the plot - it deserves a fair shot at me finishing it. So I am fitting in time each week among my other writing projects to move it forward - 2,500 words a week - 10,000 words a month.

I've also decided to use the main character, Margo Lee Booker, as the central person for the series of short stories I'm writing for my Writing Quartet project of "birds." This way I can explore the personality of Margo a little more while I'm deep in the process of putting her through the paces in the novel, and still satisfy my monthly writing requirement for the Quartet (which, if you remember from an earlier post, has to include a bird somewhere in the text).

It feels good to just let my mind wander into these other worlds of my writing and not have to worry quite so much about the world I'm actually living in.