A Few Questions About the Writing of Blood Will Out

3 months. 3 months (and 4 tiny days) until Blood Will Out hits the shelves. I’ve been getting emails from various readers and they tend to ask similar questions so I thought I’d answer a few of them here.

What inspired you to write a story about a serial killer? 

Hmmm. I think that if I’d known beforehand how hard it was going to be to do the research and how exhausting and stressful it was to go back into this character’s mind day after day after day, I might have thought twice about writing the book. (Interesting side note: an early title for the book was Hindsight. It had many titles- Shafted (that was a joke), The Hollow and Needs Must before we finally hit upon Blood Will Out.) My original idea was pretty simple. A girl wakes up in a cistern and can’t remember how she got there. Most of my books begin with a dilemma, a question that I find intriguing. I began to write with only that much to go on and gradually as characters introduced themselves and situations evolved, the idea of a fledgling serial killer took root. It scared the hell out of me, especially when I decided to write from alternating points of view and that meant getting inside my killer’s head, and finding out what made them the way they were. It was important to me that their personal evolution made sense and that the reader could sympathize or at least understand them without glorifying the violence of it. That’s a tricky line to tread. I’m a firm believer in writing the books that scare me or challenge me or seem impossible so I stuck with it even on days when what I was writing was horrifying me. One day on my way to pick up my six year old from school I dropped a bunch of notes I’d jotted down about Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Fortunately I found them the next day.

Was there anything you had to edit out of the story that you wish you could have kept?

I think the answer to this is always going to be yes, from a emotional perspective but no, from an editorial perspective. This book went through editorial a bunch of times. My agent is an editor, her agency employs a freelance editor, and then there’s all the editing that happens after a publisher buys the manuscript. There was some backstory that I cut to keep the flow of action tight. Some of it was woven back in but most of it ended up in a file called ‘Cuts’. I always have a document called ‘Cuts’ when I am working on a manuscript, and I have to say, I like knowing that the words are still saved somewhere, but in all honesty I have NEVER retrieved something from that folder and stuck it back into the work.

What are some writing rituals you go through before sitting down to write?

I can’t write if there are dirty dishes in my sink. It really bothers me. However, if I get stuck somewhere and go to the kitchen and do the dishes I am often inspired while I stand there with soapy hands staring out the window. So dirty dishes both stall and unlock my writing brain in some weird, wonderful way. Folding laundry does the same thing. And my go-to, my salvation, the thing that keeps me sane, is going for a walk. Any thorny plot problem, anytime I feel I have written myself up against a wall, any instance of not knowing where the story goes now, can be solved with a walk. I jot notes down in my notebook, on my phone, on my arms or wherever there is a blank space. It almost feels like a miracle. The fresh air, the rhythm of my gait, the calm soothing views of tree and land and trail, just unlock everything.

Other than that, I procrastinate and will sometimes do anything other than sit my butt in the chair because I know once I do that I have to write. And I set myself a minimum of 1000 words per day once I’ve written the first sentence. Usually I do 2000 and somewhere near the middle of the manuscript, if I’ve done my job right, it picks up speed and really starts to roll. And that feeling is indescribable joy.