Last Monday, Cynthia Toney tagged my in the writing process blog tour (or blog hop, if you prefer). For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a blog hop is a chance for one author to “tag” another author in order to keep a particular discussion running around the blogosphere while encouraging us to get to know other writers out there.

Cynthia Toney is the author of Bird Face, a young adult novel about bullying. She kindly tagged me to answer the four questions being passed around in this blog hop, so here goes . . .

1. What am I working on now?

Last week, I revised a short story that I had originally written in college in order to enter it into a short story contest. Now that I’m finished with that, I need to return to revising a middle grade mystery that I wrote two summers ago. I’ve got a lot of work to do on it, and quite frankly the Fourth of July activities this weekend have caused a bit of procrastination. 🙂

2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I guess I should first explain what it’s similar to. The mystery is sort of like The 39 Clues series in that my main character must solve a series of riddles in order to inherit a fortune. However, unlike The 39 Clues series, my main character is a selective mute. He can’t talk to adults outside his own home, which makes the scavenger-hunt-style riddle solving a bit difficult. Also, he’s not trying to inherit the money to save the world. He’s just trying to save his little Catholic school from closing.

The book is also a little like The DaVinci Code in that the clues require my protagonist to decipher clues in the artwork in Catholic churches. It is, of course, different from The DaVinci Code in that there are no church conspiracy theories. 🙂

3. Why do I write what I do?

I write middle grade and YA literature because . . . well, that’s simply my thing. I’m a middle grade reading teacher, so I’m always reading and discussing middle grade and YA books with my students. Junior high was also the time I began to dream about becoming a writer. In fact, in my eighth grade yearbook, each graduate had a page in which their responses to a series of questions were printed. For future career, I put down “author of teen novels.” I wonder how many of my classmates followed through on their eighth grade dreams.

4. How does your writing process work?

In fits and starts. Sometimes I’m consumed by an idea, and I simply have to write it out out. One spring break, I became obsessed with the idea of L.M. Montgomery’s book The Blue Castle becoming a movie. So just for fun (!) I wrote out the screenplay. I finished it in a week. It sits in a drawer.

My debut novel, Angelhood (available April 2015), was like that, too. The idea struck me on Saturday, October 29, 2011. In three days, I sketched out the main characters and the basic story arc. I had been planning on spending NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) drafting the aforementioned middle grade mystery, which I’d been researching for months. However, I was so consumed with the idea of Angelhood that I put away the notes for the middle grade mystery and wrote all of the draft for Angelhood during November as part of NaNo.

Other times my writing is exceedingly slow and laborious, or downright non-existent.

When I am writing, I definitely follow the Save the Cat strategy for basic plotting. If you’re a fiction writer and not familiar with Save the Cat, definitely check it out!

That’s it for my share of the writing process blog tour. Now it’s time to tag the next writer!

Margaret Reveira was away from the Church for 16 years, but returned, at the Lord’s directive, in September 2011. Her blog was designed to express her passion for Christ as well as to make people aware of His promises and covenant blessings. You can find her at www.exuberantcatholic.com.