I’m a plotter, which means I usually work out the plots for my books in advance. I even have an Excel spreadsheet I got years ago from Delilah Devlin’s plotting bootcamp that makes you lay out your story chapter by chapter. I have to admit—the plot usually changes once I start writing (and I’ve been known to summarize a chapter by saying something like “bad stuff happens”), but I usually have a general idea of what’s going to take place in a book before I start writing.

I did this with my most recent Konigsburg book, Fearless Love, available now from Samhain. In fact, I did it twice.

When I first started working on Fearless Love, I was going to use something like the plot in one of my favorite movies, Songwriter. I knew the heroine was a struggling singer, MG Carmody, and that she’d come back to the Texas Hill Country after some problems in Nashville. But in my original version, MG was being pursued by bad guys because she’d taken evidence that they’d stolen one of her songs and put it out under someone else’s name. Or she had a tape of one of her songs being sung by somebody else and she wasn’t getting the royalties. Or something. I don’t exactly remember what all was going to happen but it involved bad guys from Nashville and MG hiding out under an assumed name and all kinds of intrigue.

It was the intrigue that finally did me in. I was trying to work it out, chapter by chapter—when the bad guys would find out where she was, what they’d do, what she’d do, what the hero would do—and I got lost. Totally. I’m sitting there, staring at my spreadsheet, wondering how I can pull all of this together when a simple thought occurs to me: if I’m lost, the readers will be even more lost. I don’t want to do this.

So I threw it all out. That sounds simple, but let me tell you, it was terrifying. I’d spent a lot of time working over this plot and now it was gone. Where was I supposed to go next?

Where I went next was to step back and look at the basics. I had a hero, Joe LeBlanc, who was the chef at a classy restaurant. I had a heroine, MG Carmody, who was a singer living on a chicken farm in the Hill Country. How could they get together and what could happen when they did? As it turned out, they got together because Joe bought eggs from MG and then gave her a job in his kitchen. And MG, down on her luck and trying to get her singing mojo back, started playing gigs at a couple of honky tonks in the neighborhood (it’s the Hill Country—everybody has honky tonks in the neighborhood). And MG’s Great-Aunt Nedda, who had the mortgage on MG’s farm and a grudge against MG’s late grandfather, provided an extra bit of conflict but not nearly as much as thugs from Nashville. Oh yeah, and there’s a cooking competition and a petty thief. Still not exactly The Wire.

Fearless Love has great food and great music, something the Hill Country provides in abundance. It also has a simple, straightforward plot so that you can get to know Joe and MG and understand what happens to them.

And the next time I find myself lost in the intricacies of the Plot From Hell, I’ll just tell myself “Back to basics, honey, back to basics.”

Here’s the blurb for Fearless Love.

Fearless Love, Konigsberg, Texas, Book 7

Sweet music doesn’t come without a few sour notes.

MG Carmody never figured her musical dreams would crash against the reality of Nashville. Now the only thing she has going for her is her late grandfather’s chicken farm, which comes with molting hens that won’t lay, one irascible rooster, and a huge mortgage held by a ruthless opponent—her Great Aunt Nedda.

With fewer eggs to sell, MG needs extra money, fast. Even if it means carving out time for a job as a prep cook at The Rose—and resisting her attraction to its sexy head chef.

Joe LeBlanc has problems of his own. He’s got a kitchen full of temperamental cooks—one of whom is a sneak thief—a demanding cooking competition to prepare for, and an attraction to MG that could easily boil over into something tasty. If he could figure out the cause of the shy beauty’s lack of self confidence.

In Joe’s arms, MG’s heart begins to find its voice. But between kitchen thieves, performance anxiety, saucy saboteurs, greedy relatives, and one very pissed-off rooster, the chances of them ever making sweet music are looking slimmer by the day.

Warning: Contains hot kitchen sex, cool Americana music, foodie hysteria, and a whole lot of fowl play.

Buy link: http://store.samhainpublishing.com/fearless-love-p-7011.html