I once cut eleven pages from the middle of a manuscript in a single afternoon and felt physically lighter afterwards, the way you do after finally taking a splinter out. Those eleven pages contained a scene I had been quietly proud of for months, a long conversation between two characters that revealed a great deal about their history and almost nothing about why anyone should keep reading. I knew this before my editor told me. I had simply chosen not to know it, in the way a person chooses not to check a bank balance they suspect is bad news.
It can be embarrassing when a reader emails you to say the drive you described takes forty minutes longer in real life than it does in your book. I have not had that email yet, and I would like to keep it that way, which is roughly the whole reason this post exists.
My husband read the first draft of Checked Out at the Imperial twice before he said anything true about it. The first read was encouragement, the kind you give someone who has just handed you four months of their life and is standing there watching your face. The second read was the one that mattered, and it took him three days to work up to telling me that the murderer's motive didn't survive contact with chapter nine.
There's a type of writer's guilt that comes from opening a chapter with the weather. Somewhere along the way, "it was a dark and stormy night" became the punchline of an entire genre, and a lot of us absorbed the lesson a little too well. We stopped trusting weather to do anything except sit there being weather, and started apologising for it before we'd even used it.
Every book in the Paula Langford series starts with a problem. Not a murder, that comes later, but a structural problem, the kind that keeps you staring at a blank page long after you should have gone to bed. For Checked Out at the Imperial, the problem was: how do you write a murder mystery set in a hotel without it feeling like every other murder mystery set in a hotel? For Murder Most Dramatic, it was: how do you make an amateur dramatic society feel genuinely menacing rather than merely eccentric?
I spent longer on the reward tiers for this Kickstarter than I did on some entire chapters, which tells you something about my priorities, or possibly my anxieties. I wanted them to feel like a genuine thank you rather than a loyalty card you stamp until you get a free coffee. Whether I've managed that is for you to judge, but here's what's actually on offer, and what backing it means in practice.