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Such a Long Journey to Perilous Facts by Debra Loughead
For pretty much my entire life I’ve considered myself a writer. Buried deep at the back of a filing cabinet in my home office, file folders contain tattered scribbler notebooks from my elementary school years, filled with the poems and stories that I dreamed up while not paying attention during math (much to my detriment in high school.) I’ve saved my scrapbooks where I pasted all of the compositions and even essays that I wrote between grades two and thirteen. Why? For posterity perhaps? Who can even say and who would ever want to read them?
Once upon a time many years back during my kidlit era, I was often invited to visit schools to talk about my books and where ideas were born. I brought along some of those elementary school scribblers and scrapbooks to illustrate to the students how long I’d been working on my writing skills, and how invested I was in turning words and sentences into books. Plus how much grit, determination and time it took to finally achieve my goals. Ten thousand hours of deliberate practice, as they say, in order to master your particular craft.
One of my earliest YA novels, Time and Again, was twenty-five years from concept in 1981 to publication in 2004. But most of those were the exhausting three-sons child-rearing days, and much of my writing life had to be put on hold. Every creative endeavor took longer.
Nevertheless, back in the 1980s and 90s, whenever I could manage to find the time, I was writing short stories, and found some brief success in submitting them to various Canadian print magazines, which sadly don’t even exist anymore. One of them was called Storyteller Magazine, a quarterly which published quite a few of my tales. One of them, a short mystery called Small Miracle, was subsequently short-listed for ‘The Great Canadian Story Contest’ in 2006.
The characters and events in that story waylaid my brain. Ideas for developing the story into an actual novel began to emerge, and I started tapping away on my keyboard in between writing middle grade and YA novels, as well as various book series and language arts materials for educational publishers. I’ve always believed in saving everything you ever write, because you never know when you might need it someday. I’m glad I saved up all those copious notes and rambling early chapters. I’m glad I never gave up, and pushed through all the self-doubt and imposter syndrome (still have it), while asking myself ‘how do all of those thriller and mystery writers manage to pump out an new novel every single year’?”
And now, well, my original mystery story Small Miracle from twenty years back is finally about to become a full-length mystery novel, Perilous Facts, next month, thanks to BWL Publishing. It’s a relief to finally see it becoming a reality, except for the fact that it isn’t easy for a writer to let go of a manuscript, since there always seems to be another word or phrase that you can tweak. But at some point you have to release it into the wider book world and hope for the best. It’s truly a leap of faith. And here’s the maddening thing—once you’ve devoted so much time and effort into developing your characters, you don’t want let go of them. Which is when you start toying with the idea of a sequel.
I’ve written plenty of book series for kids, and they were all mystery-type novels. But none of them over 30,000 words or so. I loved returning to the lives of the characters I’d created and finding brief new mysteries for them to solve. But adult novels are three times longer and even more. And there are so many more characters and sub-plots and red herrings to develop. And in my humble writerly opinion, it feels utterly daunting.
I once had an opportunity to speak with a well-known Toronto author, the late Pat Capponi, at a book event. She had just signed a copy for me of her second novel in a mystery series that was set in the Parkdale neighbourhood, an area just west of downtown Toronto. Pat had previously written a number of successful non-fiction books related to her career as an advocate for mental health and poverty issues with CAMH in Toronto, before tackling this mystery series. And she earnestly admitted to me that her second book would probably have to be the last one in the series, because she honestly found the entire process of mystery writing far harder than any other writing she’d ever attempted in her life.
I wholly agree with Pat Capponi. Except that I can’t shake off all those characters in Perilous Facts, and there are still a few storylines that I’ve left wide open just in case I might like to go back and explore them. At this writing, I’ve already made many pages of notes. And I’ve already written quite a number of pages. It’s just that I have another sort of mental-health thriller on the go right now which I really need to get back to, because I’ve already written ‘the end’ on that one, and now I have to revise it about a hundred times!
But I know for a fact that the numerous unique characters I’ve created for my first ever adult mystery novel will always be waiting in the wings to put in another appearance, and to take up space yet again in my too-busy brain.
Perilous Facts, coming in May 2026 from BWL Publishing
