Dear Reader, 📚

Floodline (the conspiracy thriller I’m working on) is set in New York City in 2012. And lately, as I’ve been deep in revisions, I’ve found myself trying to remember what life was actually like then. Not the history. Not Hurricane Sandy. But the texture of daily life. All those small things we forget over time.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I dug out my old paper calendar.

Paper. Because in 2012 I didn’t have an iPhone yet. I had a hot pink Motorola flip phone and a calendar I carried in my bag. I wrote in it with a pen.

Flipping through it was a time warp..

First thing to jump out: A standing Friend Date Night almost every Friday, week after week: Stephanie. Central Park. Levain.

Here’s how it worked. My friend Stephanie (legend) and I would meet after work on Friday about halfway from each of our offices, putting us at 6th Ave and 53rd Street. We’d walk up through Central Park, go to our regular pizza and wine bar, and then at some point around 8pm, realize we needed cookies. Specifically Levain Bakery cookies. 🍪 There was only one location then, on the Upper West Side.

One Friday we got there too late. The door was locked. A janitor was inside, cleaning up, and wanting to be left alone.

Stephanie knocked anyway.

He shook his head. Closed.

She knocked again. Open, open.

This went on longer than it should have but he opened the door! Stephanie pointed at the cookies sitting on trays, ones that hadn’t been sold. She asked if she could buy some.

He said they were heading for the trash.

She gave him a $20.

Reader, we got our cookies! 😋 Dark chocolate peanut butter. Chocolate chip walnut. They were, obviously, the best cookies we’d ever had.

That’s Stephanie. She also got me into biking in the city that year, which opened up New York in ways I didn’t expect. We’d pick a destination from Time Out New York (e.g. a century-old Italian pastry shop in Astoria La Guli, if you know you know), in a neighborhood we’d never been to and map out our bike route.

She also made me bike across the Williamsburg Bridge late at night with all its graffiti and pink cables. Well let’s be fair, I wanted to do it.

Me and my bike (That’s the Verrazano in the background.) No regrets.

What else was going on?

I was working in finance at the time, sitting on a trading desk, watching Occupy Wall Street play out on the news. I took the 7 train to Flushing on a random Sunday with Pauline and Missy just to explore. I was going to NY Tech Meetup, quietly building the first version of a mindfulness app called Got Ennui (more on this soon). I was sweating through Soul Cycle classes at the original UWS studio, where people were changing outside because there wasn’t room inside. I was doing Bar Method and meeting friends at Cafe Lalo on the Upper West Side. ☕

There was also a breakup, a work conflict that ended with me resigning from my job, and in October, Hurricane Sandy. That storm is the ticking clock inside Floodline.

What I didn’t know in 2012, was that I was going to leave.

In 2013 I sold my apartment and walked away from New York. Something I thought I would never do. I often miss NYC since I came into my adulthood there, but will be at ThrillerFest next week where I’ll be pitching Floodline to agents and getting in quality time with the Big 🍎.

This is the city where Floodline lives. I wanted you to feel some of it. 🌊

— JM Blooms 🌸

The only proof I can share for now is this picture of how I tracked my progress —- Hank Phillippi Ryan shared this as one of her tracking / reward tools and I borrowed it ❤️. You get one smiley face for every 1,000 words completed ⤵️

I will also share what I did after I finished:

✅ Downloaded everything to Word (originally written in Google docs)

✅ Solid spell- and grammar checked

✅ Asked AI (I prefer Claude) for a full plot and pacing check, and realized I still have mountains to climb 🏔️

Finding the joy in the process, much like it is to actually climb a mountain, you take one step after another, pause when you need to, then take another step after another, pause ….

Floodline takes place over the 8 days leading up to Hurricane Sandy hitting New York City on Monday, October 29, 2012.

Today, I finished draft #3 of Day 1. I did not read it again, but will begin with Day 2’s revision instead.

My goal is to do this until I finish all 8 days and have a solid Draft #3 in front of me.

Then I will read the whole thing.

And finally, I will write the one POV that is still missing in my story.

That of Water… 💧🌊💦

This morning, as my yoga teacher put a pillowcase on a bolster for me, he asked me about my writing style. Without much time to think, I said, “I lean heavily on a solid outline.”

I went on to explain that I didn’t always write this way. That I used to have a general idea and jump into the writing, letting the muse guide me. No doubt I generated content, and it could’ve even been great content.

The problem though, was that I often lost the plot threads writing freeform like this, and no matter how hard I tried on rewrites, I couldn’t string things together to hold water. I like my stories to have complex plot lines, and so I decided with Floodline, I would follow the James Patterson outlining approach (love him, or not).

Mr. Patterson is known for his 60 to 70 page chapter outlines which lay out his entire novel. He could spend months on the outline. My understanding is that when he starts to actually write, he does not deviate much, if at all, from the blueprint.

I embarked on this over the summer of 2025, and quickly realized I needed to do a little prep work. My tools were simple: A Google Sheet.

On my Google sheet, I named one tab in my Google sheet Lifeline where I mapped out all my characters’ life moments. Things like where and when were they born, married, college, etc. This helped me keep dates in place - especially relative to one another - and also track the different time periods, generational divides, and major world events.

A second tab in the same Google sheet is called Storyline. This is where all my plot points for each character are mapped against a timeline. It’s an easy grid to follow. This way I can be sure each character has their own story arc and, when necessary, characters can cross over each other as needed.

I was now ready to write the first draft of my actual chapter outline ala Mr. Patterson. My paragraphs ranged from a handful of sentences to half a page, depending on how much was on my mind, and details I didn’t want to lose. By the time I was done, I had 40 pages, single spaced and in a font less than 12 point since I need to print to edit, and want to minimize how much paper I use.

I’m finishing up Draft #2 of this chapter outline now, adding more to existing points of view, layering in new ones, and cleaning up plot points and typos along the way. It’s a slow process, and I’m on the middle to end of it which is also the busiest section of Floodline.

The novel takes place over eight days, ending on Monday, October 28, 2012. Any guesses on what happened that day to make it notable? And where?