"Can't you write any faster?" is a regular complaint from my mother, who gets to listen to each new chapter immediately after it's written. It's kind of like following Dickens' serial of The Pickwick Papers. My mother easily gobbles up three novels a week, so getting a mere chapter a week from me seems to her a lot like watching the grass grow. Throw in the fact that I may be working simultaneously on three different novels, and her annoyance quotient rises accordingly.

Then there's my husband. "Playing games again? I thought you were supposed to be writing. You are such a procrastinator."

It's true. I'd be lying if I claimed otherwise, but I do have a defense. While I'm playing games or scrolling through the Facebook newsfeed, I am also thinking. And that, ladies and gentlemen who don't write, is a very necessary part of the writing process. At least it is for me.

Though I have no trouble coming up with story ideas, and I positively itch to get at the keyboard when I'm starting a new project, I still have to think about what I want to say and how I want to say it. I have to visualize each scene and hear my characters talk in my head (yes, I hear voices!), before I can write a single word.

But the thing that holds me up most is the logistics of writing. Just as I imagine it must be for a director when shooting a movie and dealing with issues of lighting, staging, sets, editing, action shots, doubles, etc. -- all of which mean nothing to the movie watcher, the director has to get them right or his movie will be a flop. So it is with writing. No matter how fabulous the story is, the details have to work or the story is nothing.

"Easy reading is damned hard writing." I don't know who said it, but it's true.

Let me give you a few examples.

In one of the novels I'm currently working on, the central character is dead and it is his job to safeguard the graves of all those buried in the cemetery. That's all well and good, but it's going to make for some pretty boring reading if every scene is set in the graveyard, and since my dead character is the narrator of the story, that would seem to be how it must be. My character is compelled to do his duty as sentinel, but I must find a way to get him out of the cemetery while he's doing it. Hmmn? A definite conundrum.

This is what I refer to as a logistical problem.

In another novel, I have a character pretend to be a ghost in the woods to scare someone she shares a cabin with. The thing is the perpetrator of the prank is supposed to be sound asleep in the cabin, and the victim of the prank is on her way to the cabin when she sees the ghost. So here's the problem: How does the ghost get back to the cabin before her roommate? This logistical issue clearly needed to be sorted before I could write the scene.

Same novel, same ghost, same victim -- different logistical issue. The girl pretending to be the ghost is abnormally tiny, so to make her a credible spectre, I had to adjust the legend about the ghost, and instead of her being a woman, I had to make her a child. Also, in order for my readers to believe that my victim would believe she really had seen a ghost (mandatory if the prank is going to be successful), I had to establish beforehand that the victim is a very superstitious person.

Author dusts hands and sighs. Logistical problem solved.

There is no novel written that isn't plagued by these sorts of logistical dilemmas, and the solutions often affect other aspects of the story too -- it's a domino effect, so the author is always making changes. The thing is that I hate making work for myself, so rather than race through a draft and then do a massive rewrite, I try to get these logistical issues sorted right at the outline stage.

And that sometimes requires a great deal of thinking.

So, Mom, though I am able to type quite quickly, it takes me a bit of time to figure out exactly what I should be typing. And, dear husband, when I'm playing games, I really am working.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.