Changes to The Perfect Crime
Hello, everyone! I hope you are enjoying The Perfect Crime! I’m hard at work on the next chapter, but I wanted to update you on a small change to the project. Relax—it’s nothing drastic!
From the beginning, I’ve been planning to release these chapters as a book when I was done with them. I’ve written 44 chapters thus far, with (approximately) another 13 to go.
However, it’s come to my attention that this book is getting a touch… long. Like, long long. When put into my formatting software, the manuscript to date is already pushing 300 pages—and that’s before I add any of the graphics and tables.
And no matter how I look at it, it seems to me that this length is fighting one of my primary goals for the book, which is to make mystery writing not just comprehensible, but approachable. For that reason, I’m splitting the book into two.
Book #1 will be The Perfect Crime (or perhaps Nuts & Bullets? That work for anyone?). It will contain all the information about how to construct the engine of your mystery novel—creating a strong motive, coming up with a fantastic Sleuth, and—of course!—everything to do with clues.
Book #2 will be The Plot Twist Encyclopedia, which will detail all of the Classic Plot Twists I’ve had so much fun laying out for you.
What does this mean for you? Well, I have a few more Classic Plot Twists to lay out, but I’ll be skipping past those for now so that I can get to the end of Book #1 as fast as possible. That means that with my next newsletter, we’ll begin discussing building a solid, captivating story structure around the crime you’ve constructed for your mystery.
Expect to see that next chapter hit your inbox in a few days! And please, if you have any thoughts about this new direction, I would love to hear them! It’s important to me to put my mystery knowledge into the best format to really serve you and make your mystery-writing dreams come true—and I hope splitting the book into two volumes will do just that. All the best,
Jane
Your reasoning for splitting it up makes sense to me.
FWIW, I prefer "The Perfect Crime" to "Nuts & Bullets" though I could see both working. "The Perfect Crime" is more appealing to me personally because it makes a bigger promise — i.e. a "perfect" understanding of all the mechanics of mystery writing — while also referencing the fun of planning / admiring / unraveling a villain's perfect crime. "Nuts & Bullets" feels like it promises less—a handy manual of useful tidbits, with quirky humor perhaps—but not a comprehensive or wholistic education about the entire genre, which I feel like is what you bring to the table that is unique from other mystery-writing how-tos.
I like Jon Gutierrez's idea of combining the titles, seems like the best of both worlds.
In any case, thank for all your research and analysis.
I agree with Mark. Sounds like an amazing plan. And I love the new title!