When My Muse Jumps Up and Yells, “Surprise!”

by Kassandra Lamb 

Malignant Memories

After two decades in law enforcement, Chief of Police Judith Anderson thought she’d seen it all... until a young woman walks into her police department, holds up one of Judith’s business cards, and timidly asks if she herself is this Judith Anderson, Chief of Police. The woman has no memory of even her own identity, so Judith turns to her friend, psychotherapist Kate Huntington for help.

 

The same day, a naked male corpse is discovered. Could their Jane Doe be the killer? And as Kate coaxes out more of Jane’s memories, she and Judith realize there may be another connection—to a teenager murdered years ago. Who is this woman, a criminal or an innocent? Or a witness to something that has now made her a killer’s target?

We writers, even seat-of-the-pantsers like myself, tend to have a pretty good idea of where a story is going as we’re writing it. And by the time we are midway into a series, we know our protagonists quite well. 

 

But every once in a while, my muse pops up and yells, “Surprise,” as she throws a new twist at me. Often, one that I never saw coming. (I’ll bet most writers can relate.) 

First, a little background on my protagonist, to help you understand this latest “gift” from my muse. Judith Anderson is a no-nonsense, workaholic cop. And she’s mostly kept others at arm’s length emotionally, until she takes a new job as Chief of Police in a small city in Florida, five states away from her native Maryland. 

With everything familiar stripped away, she discovers what loneliness feels like. Add in a handsome sheriff with an easygoing smile and an acquaintance from Maryland who is determined to be Judith’s long-distance friend, and my hard-nosed cop starts to open up some. 

 

To explain the thick wall Judith has kept around herself for years, my muse had already provided—i.e., surprised me with—the details of a dysfunctional family, including an alcoholic wife-battering father and a sweet but weak mother. Most of this background had been revealed to me via Judith’s dreams and flashbacks of childhood moments, including her mother’s suicide when Judith was sixteen (that one was definitely a shocker). 

 

So imagine my surprise, again, when I was about a third of the way into writing my latest book, and Judith starts having flashbacks—of a totally different kind of event. 

 

This book, Malignant Memories, begins with a young woman wandering into Judith’s police department, holding up one of her business cards, and asking if she herself might be this person, Judith Anderson, the Chief of Police. The woman turns out to be completely amnesiac for her past and even her own identity. 

 

As Judith and her Maryland friend (who is a psychologist) try to unravel the woman’s past, they come to suspect that she might have been abducted as a teenager. And that was all it took to set my muse off.  

 

Boom! Judith is suddenly flashing back to a summer day when she was six. She and her cousins are playing hide-and-seek, and her oldest cousin, ten-year-old Meredith is “it.”  

 

Only Meredith never finds them. She disappears from that backyard while they are hiding. And hasn’t been seen or heard from since. 

 

Whoa! Suddenly I had a new subplot to this novel (which already had a subplot). And as the main plot of the story wound out, I realized there wasn’t going to be enough room in one book to bring all these plots and subplots to completion. 

 

I decided I was okay with that. If my muse was going to spring something like this on me, I was going to make her earn her keep. 

 

So, while Judith solves other more immediate crimes in the next couple of books in the series, she will also be searching for her long-lost cousin. 

 

By the way, if it sounds like I’m unhappy when my muse springs these little surprises on me, I’m really not. Startled, yes; sometimes a little shaken, yes. But I actually love it when this happens. 

 

Her little surprises are a big part of what makes writing fun and exciting for me. 

 

And she’s done this from the beginning. In my very first published book, Multiple Motives (the Kate Huntington Mysteries), there were two minor characters, one a female police officer and the other a hired bodyguard, who were supposed to have just a few lines each. 

The next thing I knew, the police officer is rebelling against her superiors and joining forces with the amateur sleuths. And the bodyguard is flirting with the recently widowed main character (spoiler alert: he ends up becoming her second husband). 

And in my second series, The Marcia Banks and Buddy Cozy Mysteries, I set out to write a Christmas novella as the 4th book in the series, and suddenly a character—who had supposedly been dead for decades—turns out to still be alive! 

I think maybe I should name my muse “The Trickster.” But startling as they may be, I hope she never runs out of surprises for me. 

Bio:

In her youth, Kassandra Lamb had two great passions—psychology and writing. Advised that writers need day jobs and being partial to eating, she studied psychology. Now retired from a career as a psychotherapist and college professor, she spends most of her time in an alternate universe populated by her fictional characters. 

 

 

Social media links: 

 

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