My Challenge

While thinking about my progress with Murder in a Small Town: The Tragic Death of Stacey Burns, I'm sensing that it may now be inching its way toward being "ongoing" in much the same way as the police describe their investigation of the murder of Stacey Burns. My writing time now is spent on background material, fleshing out parts of the narrative already in existence while the final two chapters ( Arrest and Trial/Conviction) await what I hope will be a conclusion soon.
My challenge now is to have the book in its best form possible so that when the inevitable arrest does occur, the book will be only two chapters from completion. With this challenge to me comes an equally important challenge to those people out there who have chosen not to participate in this book yet who have valuable information that deserves to be included. I will admit that there are holes, including some substantial ones, in what I have written so far. For example, I know what a special person Stacey was to her family but that information has come to me through her friends. I know what her marriage to Ed Burns appears to have been like, but that information comes to me through her friends, not from a "primary" source. I know how devastating it is to lose an adult child from first hand experience and my daughters know how devastating it is to lose an adult sibling but this project isn't about our loss; it is about the loss of Stacey Burns and the enormous hole she left behind in the lives of so many people. I cannot begin to speculate how other people feel and that is a weakness in this book as I try to tell Stacey's story. The depth of loss is palpable in those who have spoken to me and I've tried to convey that depth in the book.
"Write a book you can be proud of," Robert Newton Peck once told me. With the Stacey Burns book, I could only say to him that I'm doing the best I can.
Duker