Hey Syb, it's Undine! I adore your WIP, and I really wanted to ask what your process for planning and writing a mystery is!
Undine!!! Always love seeing your url in my askbo and on my dash <3!
Hehe, here's a secret about Ambergris-- in my mind it's barely a mystery.
Oh sure, there's a murder going on and that's a big concern to the characters, but it's not where my heart is at for the meat of the story. That's about Sentenza and Sylvan interacting and getting what they need from each other in strange ways. There's also kinda a twist later that shifts the tone of the murder plot, but I will keep mum on that :)
But that said you asked about my process; and I do have one!
When it comes to all the major "plot parts" of the story, what I do is separate them into "cadences" of a certain number of chapters. The mystery I want to feel fast paced and driving, so it has a 3 chapter cadence. The plot of Sylvan working through her trauma is a slower burn, so that has a 10 chapter cadence. I consider the Sylvan(+Sentenza) plot to be my "alpha" plot and the mystery to be my "beta". Ambergris has one other "beta/gamma" plot that I'm managing in the background. The last plot would probably be something that's more clear to someone reading it for the second time, or a slow reader who reads for detail.
To get an estimate of how long the novel is to be, o section out the little arcs in their cadence length, till I've gotten through most of what I want to say. So for instance the first three chapters in the mystery have to establish that a man is dead, and it's likely a murder. The next three establish background while my main, Sylvan, gathers more data and considers whether it's a murder. In this way by the end I've got a solid idea where and when my characters need to be doing what.
