As much as I love living in New England, the change of seasons has always been a little difficult. Like most people I have my favorites—spring, with the beginning of new life, and then summer with its heat and long days of sunlight. The transition from summer to fall is most difficult for me. It has always seemed more of an ending than the other seasons. So it feels appropriate that I have just completed my third novel, A Detour Home. It is a sequel to A Better Life, following Jenny and Margaret on their journey, and, to quote Robert Frost, “coming with surprise to an end that you foreknew only with some sort of emotion.”

Coming to the end of a work, a story, feels monumental, glorious and a little sad. Accompanying my characters through their many difficulties and dramas and ordeals, coming to a place where their story is complete, leaves me with both a sense of accomplishment and a sense of loss. I will miss being part of their lives, listening to them, feeling for them, hoping and fearing for them and cheering for them.

There is much to do now. I am working with a developmental editor and hopefully will find an agent who wants to take a chance on me and my work. The publishing and marketing of a novel has a life of its own, a time-consuming but worthwhile process. Endings and beginnings. Seasons and novels.

I have always been proud and mystified and grateful to be a writer, to have stories unfold and characters develop, simply (or not so simply) through the act of putting words on paper. Not planning, not knowing anything about what is going to happen, just writing. It’s magic.

As I work on my third novel, a sequel to A Better Life, I find myself looking ahead more and more at what may, could, or might happen, and I write into that, through it, picking up details along the way.. Because I know two of the characters so well, Jenny and Margaret, I do have a sense of how they will act or react (not that they don’t continue to surprise me) and ideas of what might happen. I write future scenes and conversations that come to me seemingly out of the blue and even wrote out a possible ending, all the while insisting it’s not an outline.

A lot of writers outline their stories before they write the first sentence. I don’t know enough (if anything) in the beginning to do such a thing, and I don’t have the patience for it. Once I have an idea or a character or an image, I am anxious to start writing. For me, following an outline would take away some of the magic, the joy of discovery. I may write down what the next chapter or end may bring, but it’s not an outline. It’s simply a possible or maybe even likely road to go down.

Is it an outline if I envision what may happen in the future and write it down? If I write out what could happen next, and after that, leading to this? I don’t think so, because I make sure to use those magical words: may and might and could. They don’t tie me down, don’t hold me to anything, but help get the story moving.

The story starts. At first I focus on the one thing, the one thing happening to this one person, a seemingly small act or a monumental one. Either way, it is important. The story develops, something more happens, details show themselves. This first person is joined by another and another. More people want in, want their say, want to claim their part in the story.

At first it’s great. It’s exciting to meet these new people. At first they are pretty polite, take turns, stay in their own spaces, but that doesn’t last. Their spaces and places and conversations happen more frequently, closer together, then they have interactions with other people at the same time in a different place. Such important things are revealed. But it’s not that easy to put onto a piece of paper and integrate into the story, scenes that happen at the same time. I want to get it all into words and paragraphs and chapters that flow.

Looking out at a stream or river or runoff in a gutter flowing by, it seems effortless and easy.