Meredith Mansfield, Author

I’ve started the rewrite of THE IGNORED PROPHECY.  The revision is significant enough to call it a rewrite, I think, even though I’m mostly rearranging things I’ve already written.  There is some new material as well.  And quite a bit of what was there is being cut, too. 

And that makes me think about mystery and how to create it in a story, because THE IGNORED PROPHECY is at least partly a mystery.  At the end of THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, the main character had just come to terms with his own magical abilities–something he had tried to reject during most of the book.  Now, at the beginning of THE IGNORED PROPHECY, all kinds of strange things are happening to his magic, things he doesn’t seem to be in complete control of.  Some things are odd.  Others are disturbing.  And one scares him to death.  (Well, not literally.)  And he won’t find out what the causes of these phenomena are until the end of the book.

The last revision was pretty good (compared to where this one started out), but I need to increase the tension and up the stakes.  I also took pity on my protagonist and resolved (or at least proposed the correct solution for) one of the mysteries way too soon in the current version.  I’m trying to reorganize things so all of these strange things happen within a very short time.  This structure pushes the “big scary thing” a little further back, but hopefully lets me build up to it so that when it happens the main character is already off balance.

I’m going to have to employ some misdirection as well, to keep things from being resolved too quickly.  There was a little misdirection in the last version, but not nearly enough.  Then the answers should start coming during the last quarter of the book.  But, again, I need to try to arrange that so that answering one question just raises another or makes the remaining questions look more serious.

This mystery thing is harder than it looks.