How to write a book to spec

How do you write 6,000-10,000 words on a topic that you know nothing about, in a milieu that doesn’t speak to you, about a real-life character you can’t afford to offend?
That’s exactly what I had to do a few months ago when my publisher presented me with the challenge to write a murder mystery “to spec”. One of their readers won a competition with an unusual prize: a story about themselves. They got to dictate the setting and they chose how much information about the central character (themselves) they would divulge to the writer.
The setting was a beading shop (yikes!) in London (good, I’ve been to London), Ontario (oops, I don’t know anything about Canada except that they use funny spelling). The character was a woman working in the shop. I was told her name and her age.
And therein lay the biggest problem. Naturally, as a writer, I had no trouble inventing a character bearing her name. Except that the winner of the competition had the right to be portrayed in a positive light. Would she mind being cast as the murderer? Would she agree to her namesake having a dark secret? Would she be offended if I made the character eat roast chicken and she happened to be a vegetarian?
And then there were the beads. What I knew about beads could fill a post stamp at a stretch. So, research time, big time!
I asked around, but nobody admitted to being an active beader, although one of my more adventurous friends suggested an interesting use for beads which I immediately rejected for the purposes of the story. I went to a beading shop: lots of colours, lots of jewellery... I almost bought myself a bracelet before I remembered that the point wasn’t shopping. So I did the usual: I looked on the Internet.
I knew I shouldn’t have. I spent the next two months researching the history of beads, the significance of bead messages in African tribes, the role that beads play in New Orleans during carnival time. By the end, I could tell you how to make a glass bead and what the difference was between a Millifiori and a Silver Foil, but I still had no story. Should I write a spy thriller about microdots placed in crystal beads? Has a particularly exquisite gem been placed among the beads in the shop for safe storage? Should the murder weapon be a large bead that lodged in the victim’s throat, or should it be a bead necklace used to strangle the victim from behind?
With less than a week to the deadline and not a word written, I sat down in front of a blank MS Word page determined to break through the block. After an hour, when the page remained blank, my husband (ironically, a non-writer) suggested in exasperation: “Why don’t you just write a story? Any story you want, like the hacker idea you told me about a month ago. The beads can come later.”
I know it doesn’t exactly sound like Eureka. But it was to me. You see, I had got so caught up in all the specifications, all the “do” and “don’t” and “shouldn’t”, that I totally forgot the basic principles of writing.
I made the deadline with 1 day to spare.
The story, “Murder . A Little Bead Shop”, was published in December 2006 by Echelon Press (www.echelonpress.com) and I got this lovely comment from the main character of my story:
I enjoyed your story very much. I see you did your research into the store and the subject of beads. My children will be very impressed, thank you for sending me a copy of the book. We actually have a bead curtain between the store and the store room. Now that really surprised me!

What surprised me, was that she didn’t mind breaking into computer bank accounts to supplement her meagre earnings from the Bead Shop.