Writer's guilt

Murder by the Acre is off to the proofers, and I've been receiving preliminary feedback, mostly good so far. I confess to feeling a bit of writer's guilt about MBTA because of what I have the murderer do in the book.

In Murder by Dewey Decimal, all the people who are killed might not have deserved death, but they were characters I didn't much care for. They were unsavory at the least and criminal at worse. While I tried to give their deaths as much dignity and wordage that I could, it didn't bother me when they shuffled off their fictional coil.

However, in MBTA, good people die and/or harmed. In particular, one character certainly didn't deserve what happened. I felt like I needed to send a condolence card/apology missive to the family. I didn't kill anyone needlessly. The murderer had reasons. Reasons only a sociopath would act on, but reasons nonetheless. Their deaths and/or maimings aren't senseless, but they still bothered me.

I also found myself feeling some pity for the murderer. I knew the murderer's life and what disappointments and failures led to the first murder and all those terrible events that follow. What the murderer does is wrong, but I can understand why the murderer chooses that path.

At many times, I felt like I was a reporter, just writing down what happened and what I saw. That's when I feel most like a writer. The events unfold, and the unexpected happens. I had several scenes in this book, including one in the last chapter, that were unplanned, at least in how they turned out. I started writing, and eventually I left my outline behind. In all these scenes, the new, unexpected material was better than the old.

Those moments of discovery are a true reward of writing. And I guess worth the occasional bout of writer's guilt.