On Being a Wanna-Be Mystery Writer

Sometimes I worry that I'm crazy.

I had an ordinary suburban childhood with no trauma to speak of, yet I'm fascinated by stories of serial killers. I don't think I'd ever have the courage to shoplift a stick of gum, yet my favorite movies include The Italian Job and The Thomas Crown Affair.

While working on NaNoWriMo 2005, I carried around a reference book on poisons -- to find the perfect poison to use in the murder mystery I was attempting to write. My husband's classmates (he was in night school at the time) told him he should be nervous. The irony of it all? My mother-in-law gave me the book as a Christmas gift the year prior.

I look forward to developing IDPA stages to test out my plots surrounding gunfights. A coworker shares a tale about a little-known way to kill a person, and I mumble "I can use that...." And the most fun I've ever had in a role-playing game was when I took the reigns to figure out how we were going to break into a mega-corp to get the antivirus to whatever it was that had infected our decker. (Yes, I've played a few games of Cyberpunk. Am I a geek yet?)

Each time I get a tidbit of information that might be useful down the line in a crime story, I note it in a memo on my Treo. I now have hundreds of these memos, and I've had to develop a keyword filing system to keep them all organized. They have their own category, just like my recipes and knitting patterns. And now blog posts.

Tell me, what normal person carries around a database in their PDA describing all sorts of ways for a person to die? I keep waiting for Homeland Security to bust down my door, or at least commandeer my library records.

But in the last year or so -- since I've gotten more serious about writing fiction -- I've found that I'm not alone. Many other mystery writers, or at least wanna-be mystery writers, think the same way I do. Maybe, could it be, I'm normal?

Naah...