[Forward ]

I also believe in giving as I like to receive, so for the next week, I'm going to be laying out the (long) story of how Three Alarm Tenant came to Lyrical Press and why it ended up the way it did.

If we really start at the beginning, we have to go back to when I was seven years old or something, so forget that. I'm gonna skip right up to about 2001 when I was laying on my couch sick watching Emergency on TVLand. Remember Emergency? John Gage and Roy DeSoto running around Los Angeles (though mostly sticking to the Universal backlot) saving lives and having a few laughs. John Gage, my first crush. Sigh.

At that time I had been writing for, um, a long time and gotten a few things published here and there, but what I wanted to do was romance. Up to that point I hadn't been able to come up with an idea that interested me enough to stick with it for months. Emergency became a hinge in the process. It connected some stuff that had been lurking in the back of my brain about a police officer killed several years earlier and the financial effect of the death of a spouse on someone close to me. What a drag, huh? Anyway, this is what went into my pot of stone soup.

At that time kismet also handed me a couple of friends who were especially suited to my enterprise. One, the wife of a newspaper man, was used to listening to stories and analyzing them. Another was the sister of a firefighter. A third had a poetic sensibility and a Masters in creative writing. The last of the core group just happens to be danged intelligent. All of them were perfectly willing to let me bounce ideas off them. I was also working at a bookstore and for people who work in bookstores, writing a book is like training for a marathon so I had this huge cheering section. I was asked daily, if not more often, how the writing was going. If I hadn't finished, I'd have had to quit my job from shame.

Katherine's husband Gary, a cop, is killed on a traffic stop. After his death, she is abandoned by his friends in the department. The loss of the second income sends her into a debt spiral to where she has to divide her house into apartments to make her mortgage. Jack is a firefighter at the neighborhood station who needs to move because he got a dog.

Yup, that's what I started with. Now you know why I needed a team to help me refine the plot before I even started writing. This is where the audience participation starts.

What are the problems with this plot?