Inside the Mind - Petra Shaw

As a new writer, my ideas were all over the place. I got myself a book coach who listened to all my ideas and suggested that I put them under one roof, and the closest fit for that was Paranormal Cozy Mysteries. Also, I had some extraordinary experiences growing up that affected me. When I've tried to explain these experiences, people often don't believe me and walk away. My book coach told me that telling variations of these experiences in my writing will resonate with readers who have had similar experiences. They'll know and believe. For example, an older gentleman in my neighborhood heard that I wrote books. He invited me to his home and asked about my peculiar experiences. With tears in his eyes, he told me that his years in the Air Force exposed him to similar experiences. He was ordered never to discuss them, but he is grateful that he isn't alone in his experience.

Well, there are the reader's expectations in the genre that I have to meet. They are expecting the familiar to bring them into the story, and then I can weave in the unique parts into it. Sometimes I come across something that makes me wonder why that something is the way it is—for example, the story of Rip Van Winkle. There is the main story that we all probably heard since grade school, yet it also has a Postscript after the story that rarely gets shared. The story is about a demon who torments men and turns people into trees. There are details in the postscript that made my mind wander one day with the thought: What if the Rip Van Winkle story were true and his descendants still suffer with it today? What if that demon caused Rip Van Winkle to sleep? That became the basis for my second book.

My third book is about the Angel of Death, who collects the spirits of the dead and brings them to be judged. My thought was, what would be a bad day for him? What if the dead had their memories stolen so that they could not remember their deeds in life? Would it be fair to judge them if they could not remember anything? What would the Angel of Death do with this problem? I pitched that to my book coach, and we built on that. Who stole the memories and why? How will my main character get those memories back? We went through sixty-plus titles before we settled on one. It will be called The Forgetful Dead.

Part of the Paranormal Cozy Mystery genre is that the main character always has an animal companion. So, I read a few Paranormal Cozy Mysteries to see how these animal companions function in the story. I found the best stories had an animal companion who was snarky and informational. Although the stories were mysteries, the talking companions were the comic relief, and I found myself loving the lines from the talking animal. I spend most of my days trying to come up with the perfect lines for Mysty, the talking cat. My readers tell me that they love the combination of a little spookiness, danger, emotion, and then some comedy.

The hardest part and the longest part is going through the manuscript to make sure every setup has a payoff, every thread gets tied off in the end, because that is the first thing readers will notice and send emails about. My second book was late getting on the market because I was fixing so much in my first book. My book coach tells me that eventually I'll catch all my errors before I publish a book and that even the great writers had to fix their work or hire someone to do it for them.