Although it may seems as though I’ve been hibernating these days, I can assure you all I’m very much awake and active. No big secret—I’ve been busy writing. Winter is usually my most productive time since I’m around the house more and can give it more of my attention.

A few weeks after Christmas I started working on a jigsaw puzzle, not just because I enjoy challenges, but because I can come back to it whenever I please or don’t please. Sometimes while I’m burning cooking supper, I’ll take a few moments and study the pieces. The really funny thing about puzzles is, you can look for a certain piece until the cows come how, even convince yourself it must have got left out of the box when it was manufactured, and then you’ll come back to it and find it just like that. A snap of the finger.

I’ve been puzzling my way through a story at the moment, looking for the missing pieces that will help bring it all together. It’s frustrating because no matter how much a writer writes we come upon these roadblocks from time to time. I went through this phase while writing my latest novel, knowing, as I was writing it, something didn’t feel quite right. Something was missing and I couldn’t decide just what that something was. Even as I wrote, “the end” I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more I could do, some other way of telling this story. And why the heck was it evading me like this?

Sometimes we writers get an idea in our heads of just how a certain story has to be told. Once it settles into our brain we have a heck of a hard time making it leave. Surprisingly, I awoke one morning with the answer to my dilemma. I’d found that missing piece. Turns out it wasn’t anything so complicated. The answer was actually so simple I couldn’t understand why it took me until the very end of the book to figure it out.

I found one of the missing pieces I’d been looking for in my story this morning. It actually came to me through the night and I feel quite good about it. Of course it was there all along. It always is. Life isn’t always the mystery we believe it to be. Mysteries only exist when we have some of the information but not the answer. When the piece we’re searching for finally rises to the surface it feels as though things are finally beginning to fall into place, but the answer was really there all along. Sometimes we just have to wait for it to appear.