“The keys jingled rhythmically in the ignition…”

It was a cold day in late January. Slush and brine had turned the rural Wisconsin highway into a dirty gray track. I had just hit the railroad crossing at a pretty fast clip in my 1998 Chevy Venture. Ok, it technically wasn’t mine – it was the old family van. My parents had upgraded and let me use the Chevy Venture to drive to and from college. It had a working radio and cassette player, and a heating system that took a good half hour to kick in. It was finally warm enough to take off my mittens. Yet another boring drive with nothing but 2010s country and my imagination to keep me occupied.

And then it hit me like a lightning bolt; just the fragment of a story: A humid July night. A country boy was driving his pickup truck down a rutted field driveway. The keys jingled. There was a mystery. There was a body.

From then on, I wasn’t bored on my commute. I had a story to work through, a mystery to create and solve. Story idea #192 had been born – all because the keys jingled in the ignition.

After living in my head, #192 made its way into two notebooks, with fragments of scenes, snarky dialogue, and country music playlists all creating a fictional community in south central Wisconsin. Drawing on my family’s dairy farming background, I crafted a farming family for my main character, gave him a pickup truck like my brother’s, and a dog like the puppy I had played with as a kid. My summer job picking sweet corn became my main character’s summer job.

A storyline took shape, (now on my computer,) names were given (or invented), and the research – oh, the research: ride alongs with the local sheriff’s office, three writer’s police academy events, interviews with family about their farming experience, math equations to figure out how fast someone could drive through a curve without losing control of their vehicle, staying up late to look up obscure misdemeanors in the Wisconsin Blue Book… I sometimes had more fun researching than actually writing.

On summer breaks between teaching, I retreated to my lair at my rolltop desk and wrote. Sometimes, I couldn’t type fast enough. Other times, I had to wrench the words out of me, scowl at the page for an hour, and then backspace. Finally, late on a humid July night, I typed the words “The End”.

The nameless country boy who had driven his truck through my imagination one January, now had a story.

So, what happens next?

The publishing world doesn’t move at light speed and there are plenty of ducks that need to be in rows. I’ll be editing #192 as well as working on breathing life into the next story that’s living in my head. Marketing, proposals, pitching to agents – all the behind-the scenes business stuff happens now. Best case scenario: you get to read #192 in the next few years. Worst case scenario: nope, not going there.

In the end, it’s all a journey. Everything is fodder for a story, from keys in a Chevy Venture, to random research tidbits. Events may make their way onto the printed page or live in our memories. Sometimes, the journey is a fast straightaway, other times, it’s a slow, bumpy ride down a rutted lane. And then, there’s curves you never saw comin’. There’s a lot of uncharted territory and, while we may not know how the journey ends quite yet, we can still choose to enjoy the ride! Life is an adventure. Live it!

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