Can I Write Something Without a Murder?

I have been wondering lately whether I am actually capable of writing a novel that does not involve a mysterious murder.

You would think, given the number of stories I have written, that I could answer that question with some confidence.

Apparently, I cannot.

But I may have found evidence that I am at least capable of trying. Recently, I stumbled across an old story outline I had written years ago. It was different from most of what I write now. There was no murder. No dead body waiting to be discovered. No suspicious small town with a secret. No collection of carefully planted clues that eventually lead someone to the person responsible.

It was, in other words, completely normal.

So naturally, I decided to take the old concept and see what I could do with it now. The result is Every Mile Home. At first, I was proud of myself.

I had a young woman named Skye Whitfield arriving at Ashgrove University, trying to rebuild her life after losing her mother in a car accident. She runs before sunrise because running gives her control. She joins the cross-country team. She has a roommate named Jules who refuses to let her disappear into herself. She meets Alex, another runner who understands grief because he has experienced it himself.

There is romance. There is friendship. There is family. There is grief. There is literature. There is Greek mythology. There is an entire thematic exploration of Orpheus and Eurydice and what it means to look backward while trying to move forward.

Honestly, I was doing pretty well. I thought I might actually have done it. I might have written a story about grief and healing without killing anybody.

Then I remembered Dana Whitlock. Dana was the girl who disappeared six years earlier while running near the Hollow Trail. Her presumed drowning became part of the university's mythology. She was remembered as the Hollow Girl, a story everyone knew, but nobody really questioned. Still, technically, Dana was already dead. That doesn't count.

Then Meredith Calloway disappeared. Ah. There it is. Apparently, I can't help myself.

What started as a story about a grieving young woman learning to let people into her life had somehow acquired a missing runner, an old unsolved disappearance, suspicious evidence, campus archives, an inconsistency in the original investigation, and a protagonist who starts digging into what happened.

At that point, I had to laugh. Because apparently I can write a novel without a murder. I can't write one without a mystery.

And, apparently, once the mystery arrives, someone eventually needs to have died under suspicious circumstances.

Every Mile Home isn't really a murder mystery in the way many of my other stories are. The death at the center of it wasn't a planned murder. The murderer didn't set out to kill Dana. Their guilt came from an unauthorized training session that went horribly wrong, followed by a decision to conceal what happened.

The real story is about what people do with grief, fear, guilt, and uncertainty.

Skye's investigation into Dana's disappearance isn't really about solving a crime for its own sake. It's about her own relationship with the past.

That's where the Orpheus mythology becomes important. Skye initially sees looking backward as dangerous. She believes that if she allows herself to look too closely at her mother's death, she will somehow become trapped there. Moving forward feels almost like betrayal. If she stops grieving so intensely, does that mean she loved her mother less?

But by the end, she understands something different. Looking backward isn't necessarily the problem. Sometimes we have to look back. Sometimes we need to understand what happened. Sometimes we need the truth. The important question is why we are looking.

Skye isn't looking into the past because she wants to live there. She is looking because she needs to understand it well enough to move forward. And maybe that's what this story is really about. Not murder. Not even mystery.

It's about the difference between remembering someone and being unable to let them go. It's about learning that carrying grief isn't the same thing as being controlled by it. And it's about discovering that moving forward doesn't mean leaving people behind.

So, can I write something that doesn't involve a mysterious murder? Maybe. I certainly came closer this time. I even managed to write an entire story where the central death wasn't an intentional murder. That's progress.

Of course, there is still a disappearance, an old unexplained death, a cover-up, hidden evidence, and an investigation.

So perhaps I shouldn't congratulate myself too quickly. Maybe Every Mile Home is my attempt at writing something completely different. Or maybe it's simply proof that I can take a story about grief, running, romance, Greek mythology, and healing and somehow find my way back to a dead girl at a footbridge.

Time will tell. But for now, I'll take the victory where I can get it. No mysterious murder. Probably. It gives her a sense of me; that's practically character development.