I’m sitting here thinking about “President’s Day”, the next in my Holiday Horrors series. It’s almost ready, but not quite. I feel it needs one more death scene. And I thought, until today, that I knew what that scene would be. I saw it in my head. But as I started to write it, I had another thought: the reveal of that death comes midway through the story and I think the reveal is well-placed and gives the story another layer of uh-oh when we hear about it. Do I really want to spoil that?
My initial thought was to show the death and use it to throw suspicion away from the real killer and onto a red herring, but I can do that with a different death scene, easily. So, do I want to leave the other death alone (it was going to serve as a prologue for the story), and let that reveal come when it does? I think maybe.
That isn’t a decision to just MAKE though, it’s one that’s going to have to be pondered and weighed as I skim the manuscript for where I could possibly put the other death scene I had in mind.
Sometimes caring about how the story turns out can be a real pain in the ass.