Harley Jane Kozak writes:
My first novel, Dating Dead Men, took me 8 or 9 years to write. It started as an idea for a screenplay, inspired by a poem, morphed into a short story, which turned into a novel-length piece of literary fiction, and finally ended up as a murder mystery. And after it became a murder mystery, it went through 16 or 17 drafts before I felt confident about showing it to anyone (except a few hundred writers' group members and writing class classmates, who read bits and pieces over the years.)
I suspect a lot of my friends/family thought "that novel Harley's been writing" would stay a work in progress for the rest of my life. My second novel, Dating is Murder, on the other hand, took 15 months.
Harley Jane Kozak had a successful career in Hollywood, appearing in such feature films as Parenthood and Arachnophobia, before becoming a writer. Dating is Murder, her second book featuring series character Wollie Shelley was just published.
