I suppose all writers go through periods when they can't think of anything to write. I know from experience that it happens without any warning at all. It happens when I sit down to start a new novel and think, "What can I write about that will sell".
Don't get me wrong here. All writers, well, good writers, the writers that get published and paid, are artists who paint pictures with words, but along with weaving words into sentences and paragraphs that generate pictures in the reader's mind, all writers are concerned with writing something that will be published and sell. It's how we make our livings.
Well, that day that I sat down at my computer and asked myself that question, nothing came to mind. When I mean nothing, I mean exactly that -- nothing, not even an inkling of an idea.
I wasn't too worried because it had happened before. It happened right after I wrote my first novel that was actually accepted by a publisher and made it all the way to the shelves of mainstream bookstores. I sat down to hopefully repeat my success but couldn't think of a thing to write.
That time I'd chalked it up to the fact that I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in the city and it was never really quiet. My upstairs neighbor liked heavy metal music and played it from morning until midnight. About all I could hear was the bass track, but that constant "dum, dum, dum" made it really hard to concentrate.
I solved that with some noise canceling headphones plugged into my stereo system. I could write and listen to Brahms and Mozart and not hear anything else.
After that first novel, a murder mystery about a woman who kills her husband by poisoning him with ant poison after he starts physically abusing her, I sat down to write the next and drew a blank as far as a plot. I couldn't think of anything, so I watched a little television hoping to come up with an idea. Thankfully, my upstairs neighbor was gone so there was no bass track interfering with my television watching. Instead, I was listening to the police, fire, and ambulance sirens outside. That's when I decided I had to move somewhere quiet.
I had enough money from the first novel to do that, so I started looking at places in the country. After a month, I found what I was looking for. It was a three bedroom, two-story farmhouse on two acres. The house wasn't in great shape, but the price was right and I figured I could fix the house.
Well, I did fix the house and in the process got an idea for a novel about a landscaping contractor who specialized in tree removal. He'd come and take down your tree or clean up any fallen branches and take them to his place of business and feed them through his big wood chipper. He let the pile of wood chips compost for a while and then sold the composted wood chips to other landscape contractors.
He also performed another service to certain people in the city who had dead bodies that needed disposing of in a manner that would eliminate the possibility of said body turning up at a later date. The wood chipper ground those bodies into mulch that he mixed with the wood chips. He probably would have never been caught had one of those other landscapers not found what looked like a human molar in his load of wood chip mulch.
That novel sold pretty well so I congratulated myself on finding the answer by buying the house. That's when the owner of the adjacent twenty acres decided he could make more money by selling it instead of by farming it. He sold the twenty acres to a developer who started building houses on three-quarter acre lots, the closest of which was only about a hundred feet from my house.
The couple who bought that house were young but seemed to be friendly. It wasn't until the Fourth of July that I decided they weren't very good neighbors. That night, they had a party with about twenty people in their back yard. It wasn't too bad while it was still daylight. There was a low buzz of conversation that I really couldn't hear except for this one woman's shrieking laugh, but it was tolerable. At about nine though, they started their own private fireworks show and the damned booms and bangs kept on until almost midnight.
Well, at least that gave me the start of a new novel that started with the house being bought by a weird looking couple. Right after that, there were several murders in the nearby city, murders that were unique in that the victims were all missing all their fingers. The police were having trouble solving those crimes because while they had DNA from all of them only one victim's DNA was in the NDIS database. She'd been arrested for prostitution, so the police figured the other victims were as well and that they had a serial killer operating in the city.
That's where everything stopped because they had no leads to follow. It wasn't until the neighbor remembered the couple next door doing something in their garden at about one in the morning the day after the last murder that the case broke.
He called the police who ran the couple through NCIC and discovered they both had records. The man had been accused of murder but hadn't been convicted because they couldn't find a body. The wife had a record too. She'd been tried and convicted of assault on another woman who happened to be a prostitute. The assault was she'd tried to cut off the prostitute's little finger with a pair of pruning shears. According to her confession, her father had been a client of that same prostitute and that caused her mother to divorce him. She'd sworn to make the prostitute pay in some way and thought if she cut off the prostitute's pinky finger she wouldn't get any more customers.
That ultimately led to the police digging up the garden. When they did, they found a bunch of fingers buried in between the tomato plants and green beans. Only one set of fingers had any fingerprints left, but they were able to match the DNA of each set of fingers to the murder victims. At the end of the novel, the couple is convicted of serial murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
That book sold reasonably well too, so I started to write my fourth novel, another murder mystery. That's when I realized I had no ideas.
I sat at my computer for an hour every day for a month with the same results -- no ideas, no plot, no nothing except frustration. It was at the end of that month I saw the realtor's sign in the front yard of the house next door. Two weeks after that, a moving van pulled up at the house and two guys carried boxes for half a day from the house to the van. A week later, another moving van parked in the drive and two guys carried boxes from the van to the house while a woman of maybe late forties, early fifties watched.
I figured the woman was my new neighbor so I kept watching for an opportunity to meet her and her husband. That opportunity came one Saturday when I was mowing my grass. I was almost done when the woman came out, went to the little storage building at the back of the lot and pulled out a push mower.
She got it started and started mowing the back yard, but she wasn't making much headway because she had a lot to mow. I waited until she was close to the lot line and then rode my mower over to where she was.
She smiled and waved at me when I stopped, and then let go of the handle on her mower so the engine would stop. I shut off my mower then too, and got off and walked over to introduce myself.
"Hi there, Ma'am. I'm Todd Kelly and it looks like you're my new neighbor. Welcome to the country."
When I held out my hand, she smiled and shook it.
"Yes, I wanted to get out of the city and as soon as I had the chance I did. I think I'm going to like it out here. It seems quiet so far. I can hardly wait to start a flower garden. I'm Marion, by the way, Marion James."
I nodded.
"Same reason I moved out here. I need quiet so I can work."
"Oh", she said. "What type of work do you do?"
I always liked it when people asked me that. I grinned.
"I'm a writer. I have three novels published so far. What does your husband do for a living?"
She chuckled.
"Well, I'm not sure. He used to be a high school principal, but after the divorce he got fired."
"You're divorced?"
She grinned.
"Yeah, finally. Took a while, but it turned out pretty good for me, not so good for Bob. I got the house, the newest car, half the savings and checking accounts and half of his 401K and his teacher's retirement. He had to pay all the legal expenses too, so that wiped out most of his half of the 401K. That's how I could move out here. I sold the house in the city and had enough to buy this place free and clear."
I was a little confused.
"He got fired just because you divorced him? That seems like an odd reason to get fired."
Marion laughed then.
"He didn't get fired because I divorced him. He got fired because of the reason I divorced him. He was screwing one of the senior girls at his high school and got her pregnant. Man, was her father ever pissed. The girl was eighteen so he couldn't have Bob charged with statutory rape, so he sued Bob, the school, and the entire school board. The school board ended up firing Bob and settling out of court for what I heard was a quarter million.
"Bob didn't have any money left after the divorce so the father dropped the suit against him, but he did get a judgment that Bob will have pay child support until the kid is eighteen.
"The daughter says she loves Bob and she's keeping the baby so he'll marry her, but I don't think it's going to work that way. As soon as Bob got the divorce papers, he left town and didn't tell anybody where he was going. I feel sorry for the girl, well, a little. Bob's forty-nine. You'd think by the time she's eighteen a girl would have more sense than to let some guy old enough to be her father screw her, but Bob has this way of convincing women that he's pretty special. I should know. That's why I married him.
"How about you? You have a wife I can have coffee with in the afternoons?"
I shook my head.
"No, no wife. I used to think about having a wife, but once I start writing, I can't seem to stop. I lost two girlfriends that way. We'd agree to go somewhere, and I'd figure out where my plot had to go and lose all track of time. After the second girl called me at one in the morning to ask what happened to me, well, it wasn't worth all the fighting about why was my writing more important to me than her. Since then, I haven't really been looking."
Marion smiled again.
"Well, I probably need to get my butt working on this yard again. I didn't realize how big three-quarters of an acre really is. I think this weekend I'll go buy a riding mower like you have."
I liked Marion. She didn't seem shy at all, and I was pretty sure she wasn't going to be doing anything that would distract me from writing. I also found her to be a pretty woman with that mature beauty women develop once they turn forty or so. There were a few silver strands in her dark brown hair and her mature figure looked good even in the oversize T-shirt and jeans she was wearing. For all those reasons, I said if she didn't mind I'd do her back yard.
