How Lydia Started: From Murder Mystery Game to Novel

Right before we moved to Michigan in 2015, I hosted a murder mystery party with my family and we had SO much fun. The problem was finding a good game for 14 people. They were expensive, you could really only play them once, and the host had to know everything beforehand. So the person who bought the game, organized the party, invited everyone and did all the work was rewarded by not getting to play.

I remember thinking, I could make a better one.

An impressive amount of confidence for someone who had never written a murder mystery before.

By then we’d moved to Michigan and I was deep in the trenches of young motherhood. My kids were tiny and my days revolved around meals, naps, diapers, laundry and keeping everyone alive. I couldn’t stop thinking about that dang game. If I were to write one, what would the story be? Each night I would put my babies to bed at 6:30pm, and then I would sit down and disappear into another world. At first it was just loads of thinking which then I started putting down on paper.

I wasn’t trying to become an author. I wasn’t thinking about publishing a novel. I was trying to make a game. Which then really turned into a whole world. Before I wrote one word, I had created 14 characters and their motives to kill a 20 year old girl.

I wanted to fix everything that had frustrated me about the other games. I wanted the host to be able to play. I wanted the murderer to change so you could play more than once. And I wanted all 14 characters to have a believable reason to kill the same young woman.

Which sounds simple until you realize that fourteen motives require fourteen histories. And secrets. And relationships. And grudges. One person’s secret affects another person’s marriage. Someone else’s past becomes another person’s motive. Everyone needs a reason to lie, everyone needs to look suspicious, and somehow the whole thing still has to work no matter who the murderer is.

I LOVED it.

What I didn’t realize when I started was how much I needed it at this time of my life. It was my little passion project that added so much creativity to my life. Those years with little kids were wonderful, but they were relentless. So much of my day belonged to other people because that’s what that season of motherhood required. Lydia gave my brain a grown up place to go.

It took me almost a year to create Lydia: A Murder Mystery Game. Fourteen interconnected characters, fourteen motives, one victim, and a murderer who could change every time you played. I turned it into a downloadable game, people started playing it with their own families and friends, and technically that should have been the end of Lydia.

We launched the game in 2019 and it exploded. It was so fun to see the game being played by different people all over the world. Because it’s a download and you can print it, anyone can get it that same day, plan their party, print it out and go for it. Click here for Lydia: A Murder Mystery Game

There were groups of teens playing for their activity for prom, to couples playing at halloween parties. People went wild. And the best part, you can play again and again and every single time you play you fall deeper in love with the characters and their stories.

After the launch, I couldn’t stop thinking about this world.

I’d built so much history to make the game work that I started wondering about everything that happened outside of it. Who were these people when they weren’t murder suspects? What had really happened between them? What was Lydia’s childhood like? Which relationships mattered most? Which version of all these tangled stories was actually true?

And, eventually, the question I couldn’t leave alone:

What really happened to Lydia?

For almost ten years, I kept coming back to the idea that there was a novel buried underneath the game. Not a longer version of the murder mystery, but the actual story of these people I had created. I wanted to know who Lydia really was before she became the victim at the center of everyone else’s motives.

Life wasn’t exactly waiting around for me to figure it out, so Lydia stayed in the background for years. But she never disappeared inside of my brain. I’m learning that a lot of great novels take years of thinking.

Finally, my kids and I have reached a season where I can go back for her.

The game gave me the bones: the characters, histories, relationships, secrets and this entire world I’d accidentally built while my babies slept upstairs. The novel has asked me to take all of that apart and figure out what the real story is.

I’m doing that now. Every single word gets me more and more gitty to finally share this with the world. I’ve finished the first draft, and every day Lydia becomes a little less like the game I wrote almost ten years ago and a little more like the novel I’ve always suspected was hiding inside it.

It’s funny to think that all of this exists because I wanted to host another murder mystery night with my siblings.

I thought it would take me a week.