In this special post, learn a bit about how EQMM regular Terena Elizabeth Bell drew on her life experiences as well as a popular TV show to come up with her debut novel, Recursion, which will be published next year by Sagging Meniscus Press. In the meantime, don’t miss her latest short story, “Good Fences,” in our July/August issue, on sale now!

My debut novel, Recursion, publishes in September 2027 with Sagging Meniscus Press. It took roughly ten years to write and another six to sell.  When I first had the idea, I was driving to work and got stuck behind a van with this really weird painting on the back that for some reason made me think of my college boyfriend. He was a real ass, but also my first love, and first loves are hard to shake. This was just after our five-year reunion and we’d started talking right before; I was trying to make up my mind as to whether five years was enough for him to have changed. So there I am on my way to work, stuck behind this van, and all of a sudden it hits me: If we’d gotten married after college, we would have already been divorced. This got me thinking about why smart women stay in bad relationships, and the core of my novel was born.

In Recursion, the main character uses the 2002 Washington, DC sniper shootings to cover up the murder of her college boyfriend’s wife. Her goal, of course, is to free him up so she and he can be together. But almost immediately after the wedding comes the regret — not regret necessarily that she killed someone but regret that she’s even with him: Shouldn’t she have just moved on? Now there she is in a horrible marriage she can’t exit from because how do you divorce your husband when you killed someone to be with him.

I say the novel took ten years to write, but the first two to three were really more thinking. I kept writing the first page or two over and over, which is unlike me. In both life and writing, I make a decision then execute. But I couldn’t figure out how she killed the wife or where the story began. Initially, I had her hiring a hitman with Bitcoin, which was still brand new back then (this is how my character got her job as a coder—something still in the book today); however, the more I thought and the less I wrote, it hit me she had to do it herself.

I don’t remember when I shifted the story to her using the sniper shootings to camouflage the murder. In fact, I had completely forgotten my original plotline was a hired gun until tonight (hey, it was 16 years ago!). I’ve been bingeing “Castle,” the ABC program about a mystery novelist who helps a NYPD homicide detective solve crimes. I watched it religiously when the show originally aired—around the same time I started thinking toward my novel. I liked it so much that I scheduled work flights for the morning after it aired so I wouldn’t have to miss. The show’s streaming for free on Roku, so I decided to rewatch it for the first time since. (And yes, it does hold up better than a college relationship!) I’m midway through season 4 and get this: episode 9 is about a DC copycat sniper.

Now, I didn’t steal my idea from “Castle.” Outside of the premise, the plots are radically different. But I do believe everything we take in as people sits in our heads as writers and great fiction comes from a combination of the sundry that lies therein. This episode aired in 2011, back when I was still focused on the Bitcoin plot—obsessed, really, with the idea that my main character needed to dirty her hands, reworking crypto into a cash transaction where she physically gives the money to the killer, which set up other problems with the then-increasing technological surveillance that an in-person handoff would create. It was important she get away with it. Otherwise, how could she marry the husband? And how could the only justice stem from the psychological battle within herself? She had to pull the actual trigger. The character is from rural Kentucky, just like me, and when I was a child, my father taught me how to hunt plus every child I knew took riflery through 4-H. The sniper shootings were also still pretty strong in the American zeitgeist then, hence why they could be used in an episode of “Castle.”

So this is what was sitting in there, this is what was in my brain, and maybe how it might have come together. But then again who knows? How do any of us ever get our ideas?

Terena Elizabeth Bell’s short story collection Tell Me What You See was named one of the “best books of the century” by New York Society Library. The title story was a New York Foundation for the Arts grant winner, and another from the collection has been optioned to become a feature film. A Sinking Fork, Kentucky native, she lives in Manhattan.