"I'm gonna give all my secrets away..."

The taste of surprise, the flavor of mystery, breathless excitement, the shockingly unexpected, shiver of the unknown...elements of a mystery. All reasons why I love to write mystery...not only is the reader guessing what will happen next, but so am I as the author. Sure I start with the basic frame of the plot...I usually know whodunit, who gets murdered...all the questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. But just the very basic information. Like a reader, I like to be surprised with where the story goes. The brilliance of mysteries is how you never know just where they'll go next. I am often more surprised than a reader when an unexpected twist appears in my stories. It's devastating when a character I've fallen in love with has to be killed off...even if the original plot doesn't include her/his death, sometimes it just happens.

The wonderfulness of mysteries is that whenever you're stuck, you can just throw in something that even you did not expect. Go all out...the majority of the time it will just work out perfectly...occasionally it takes some scene revisions to get it all to tie in, but the greatness of mysteries is that unexpectedness and strangeness and even absurdity, at times, is the norm.

Mysteries are the unpredictable.