You Can Go Home Again by Susan Van Kirk

 

It never fails. Whenever I finish a book, go through the publishing process, and launch it, I take time off from my writing to recharge my batteries and consider my next writing project. This can be a good thing because it gives me time to think about the new plot, but it can be a bad thing because I put off writing. This is the only place in my life where I find myself procrastinating. Then, of course, I say to myself, “Really? Can I really do this again?” I plan and plan and plan. Finally, I get myself in the chair and start writing after way too much planning.

Right now, I’m at a transitional stage with my writing. I spent the last four years leaving my town of Endurance while writing a trilogy of mysteries about an art center. I loved those art center characters, especially Jill and Angie. The characters in the two series are quite different from each other. The settings are similar since I write about the small-town Midwest. [Reminder to self: Do a word find to make sure you don’t write “Apple Grove” instead of “Endurance.”] The art center books helped me continue to learn about the craft of writing mysteries, and now I’m going backwards to continue the first mystery series about the town of Endurance that I wrote starting in 2012.

The four novels and one novella in the Endurance Mysteries have been in the rearview mirror for a while now, so I’m once again catching up with Grace Kimball, Jeff Maitlin, and TJ Sweeney. I’ve been reading the whole series, so my mind will once again be in that small town with my Endurance characters. No, not Apple Grove. Endurance.

It’s like going home to think about Grace Kimball again. Lots of things have changed in her life. She married Jeff Maitlin after The Witch’s Child, and she left the home she shared with her first husband, Roger. My thoughts about the upcoming book will place her in the past with Roger and in the present with Jeff. My readers never knew Roger except through Grace’s descriptions of him. Their marriage was brief because of his unexpected death. Into her life will come a stranger who returns her thoughts to an unsolved mystery that occurred in her neighborhood in 1984.

In the present day, the gang will all be there. Lettie Kimball and Del Novak are married and are living in the carriage house next to the Lockwood mansion. Detective TJ Sweeney is still loving her good-looking boyfriends but leaving them in the dust. Jeff Maitlin is facing serious threats to his job at the Endurance Register. Hmm. Can I do this again? I think I can…I think I can…