The fall of 2006 brought two exciting ventures. In November, MYSTERY MUSES: 100 CLASSICS THAT INSPIRE TODAY’S WRITERS (Crum Creek Press) was released. It was an honor to be asked to contribute a chapter, and great fun to see whose writing has influenced some of my favorite authors. If your local book seller doesn’t have it, you can contact the publisher directly. Check out the website at  http://crumcreekpress.com/titles/muses.htm.
 Between edits of a suspense novel, I wrote a short story for an anthology to be published by the Indiana chapter of Sisters in Crime. It was my first and let me tell you, short is not easier. Rebecca Moore is again the protagonist, but the story pre-dates her novels by ten years. In “A Sure Bet” she’s just been hired by the Washington Post. To celebrate, Uncle Walt is treating her to a weekend at the Indy 500. It doesn’t turn out quite like she’d planned.

2007

 

From here it looks like a blank page waiting for words. So full of potential that it’s both exhilarating and terrifying. But then I have a problem with bound pages.
     Does that sound like an odd admission for a writer? Notebooks should be my best friends, tools of the trade and all that. Some are. Like spiral bound pads: 3"x4" ones, skinny reporter’s notebooks and dingy-paged steno pads. I buy them by the dozen: every one Gregg ruled on recycled paper. Those pages are inviting, greedy for lines of scribbles, made while driving, or in the near-dark of a sleepless night. Everything goes into them. Plots, snippets of dialogue, dentist appointments, measurements for the basement door we need to replace, the day we saw an Indigo bunting. And endless grocery lists, which I’ll extract then forget,

leaving them on the kitchen counter when I head to the store. There are three pads with me at all times, shedding those annoying strips of ragged holes that get caught in the spiral binding when a page is ripped out, crumpled and tossed it at the nearest wastebasket.
       Wastebaskets I like. (Did I tell you about the five wire mesh baskets, unused, still with price tags, that I rescued from the dump in Georgetown, Maine? Really cool. Now each edited version of a story gets its own receptacle until it’s ready to be discarded.)
     But journals set my heart racing. I’ve bought many, of course. Some as gifts, a few for myself. Enter a new bookstore and I’m lured to the shelves with journals as if by a magnetic force. I squat down and take out one after the other. Smile at the clever quotations written in the margins, admire the line drawings on every left-hand page, let my fingers drift over the vellum until they touch the binding. 
     The binding—that’s the problem. The permanence of sewn pages between earnest covers. Knowing that whatever I would write down is meant to stay there, always, unedited, immutable. Bad grammar, cross-outs, spelling mistakes, sophomoric observations all marring a once pristine page.
     A Moskekine journal, designed for traveling writers, sits on my desk right now. It’s divided into sections for jotting down sights, food, people, facilities. There’s an elastic to hold it shut, a bookmark to keep your place and acid-free pages. Lined. Empty. I can’t remember how many years ago I bought it. I meant to take it to Mexico last fall but of course, I didn’t. It’s still wrapped in plastic, waiting. Unless I give it to my globe-trotting friend, Lisa, it will have a long wait. I know my limitations. While the potential of an empty journal is electrifying, fear of filling it with the right words guarantees a blackout. 
     This year, like every other, I’ll pull the steno pad closer and write with abandon, knowing that the words are temporary, just fleeting notions jotted on scrap pages. Some will be incorporated, some discarded without a second glance, but all start out with the same importance. Which, now that I think of it, sounds like a solid approach for the new year. Give each day equal weight, enjoy every one, and hope that by the year’s end there’s at least a paragraph worthy of inclusion in a bound journal.

Judith