From a certain point of view

Mystery may not be the best genre for discovery writing.

Especially discovery writing a narrative in first person. I've been delivering information as my protagonist discovers it. She doesn't know what the full plot is. This isn't Columbo, where the identification of the murderer is given in the opening.

The problem is that I don't know it either. I mean, I know more than my protagonist does. But I don't know the details, because I didn't need to know the details before I got to the equivalent of the "I imagine you are all wondering why I have gathered you here today" scene.

Of course the other big difficulty in First Person is that even if someone confesses (and given how people are, even when), the motivations and knowledge remain murky. The writer doesn't have the option to cut away to the villain monologuing to themselves what they've done or what they know. 

(Makes it both convenient and frustrating when you've got the proverbial man coming through the door with a gun. How did he know she would be there? Um...she'll never know, so the reader probably never finds out either.)

***

In any case, my current exploration of what all these people actually did or know was touched off by the scene in which Penny goes to the 46th Medical on-post to get a blood draw.

And I really don't know how you would go screen someone for potential radiological contamination. Usually, this would start with a swab. But this is all happening several days following the incident. There's also an informational problem; this was touched off by her visit to Site Theta (that's what she calls it -- she thought Site Tango was silly. And the guy who called it that, Jackson, admitted he'd made up the name as a place-holder).

Site Theta is something "they" are trying to sweep under the rug. So they aren't going to go around telling anyone, including Penny, that they suspect she's been in contact with hot material that was there.

So instead this is probably a signal. Either a paternalistic warn-off; "There's dangerous stuff there, honey. You shouldn't poke at it." Or it is more of a Silkwood warning; "We're going to haul you in for more and more tests if you keep messing with it."

(A little harder to make happen if she isn't your employee.)

At the end of all of this, the only thing I am relatively sure about with Colonel Flowers is that he probably wasn't in his current posting at the time Evil Kitty cleaned up Site Theta. But I'm still not sure what he knows. And what he wants to do about it.

And my protagonist, point-of-view character, and narrator knows less than that.

***

The first Reacher novel is in first person. The second and third are in third. Apparently Lee Child goes back and forth. Having also watched the Prime series, I feel as I do about Holmes, or The Doctor; this is a character that works better at a remove. Not that his inner life isn't interesting, but his process is better when you don't really know what he is thinking. Or if he is actually bluffing.

I've gotten tired of First-Person. I've gotten tired of writing in Penny's voice, both the voice itself and the restrictions of the particular flavor of First Person I picked.

And I thought of something.

So the story that opens with an amnesiac Penny waking up in a strange town, into a Jack Vance situation: that is, she doesn't know where she is or what is going on, but everyone knows who she is -- and half of them are trying to kill her.

Except don't do that. Open in a hospital bed as she wakens from a life-saving surgery that also wiped out her last couple of weeks of memory. And again, surrounded by people who know her. Or, rather, who know this girl with her name that did things that Penny finds hard to believe.

And they have material. They have police reports, and new articles. Enough for her to piece together what happened, but there's a catch. The continuity of human consciousness is an illusion. You really can't step in the same river twice. We change all the time, and we can't always understand the "I" that existed even a week earlier.

Especially if that "I" had gotten involved in a murder, taken down a gang, learned to play trumpet, and fallen deeply in love.

So the rest of the story, everything after this framing scene, is told in third person.

***

Could be fun. But I have a different book to finish. And after that, I really should switch gears. Work on a bit of SF....with a twist.