Dance Moms Murder Mystery

Part 11: Special Facts

This final chapter will list several facts and details about my time and the process that I went through when making this story. No point in wasting time: let's get started.

1: I first had the idea to make this story around October 15th. I've always enjoyed making horror themed stories around Halloween, and I didn't want to pass up the opportunity. A murder mystery just seemed like the way to go and write.

2: The story took around seven days to write. Which does explain it's barebonedness, but I enjoyed making it, so that counts for something.

3: One plot-hole that kind of bothers me is that Jack could've went to a different Target store in Los Angeles than Millie and Nia, but I couldn't find a way to fix it, so I left it be.

4: I was considering adding more boys to the story like Bryce Xavier, Brandon Chang, and Johnny Orlando to add a bit more of a gender balance, but I ultimately decided against it, as I felt that I could make a better story with the nine people that I settled on.

5: I decided that Maddie would be the one to die within the first five minutes of writing. This was because it would allow me to connect more people to being suspects than I would if I picked somebody else. For example, if I had Mackenzie die, Millie's relation to the victim would be "friend of older sister of the victim", which would just make things too complicated for my liking.

6: I realized three days after publishing the first three parts that I included Millie, who's a "squad member" with Maddie, but didn't include Grace Vanderwaal, who's also a "squad member" with Maddie. I was a bit sad that I forgot about Grace, but I felt that I was too far into the story to add her. Sorry Grace!

7: It took me two days to figure out how Maddie was going to die. I spent about seven hours looking up combinations of food that people have eaten and died soon after, but nothing could be done unless it was a massive stretch. I then moved onto electrocution, then to a simple pushing off the balcony, then to falling into the tub and hitting her head too hard on the porcelain, but then looked up the effects of ingesting eyedrops, then spent another day figuring out if someone could logically die from ingesting too much tetrahydrozoline, before I settled on Maddie being poisoned.

8: I pondered over the idea of having two murderers for a while, but I didn't 100% settle on it until the 4th day. I figured that it would break from the norm and test to see if people would suspect two people instead of just one.

9: I spent way too much time figuring out what each person would dress as for the party. Simple as that.

10: The decision to add a passcode lock to Maddie and Jack's room was made about a day before I published the first chapter. This was done in order to single out several people who could've truly committed the murder. Aside from Maddie and Jack, the only people how had the combination to the room was Mackenzie and Kalani.

11: Jack and Kendall being the murderers was not the first plot that I created for this story. The first plot had Jojo being the murderer, with Jojo killing Maddie in order to prevent a secret from getting out.

12: To write Jack and Millie's testimonies, I decided to go online and look up Australian and British slang words to make the testimonies seem more authentic. I also wanted to have a bit of fun with it, so I threw in as much as I could.

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Well, that's about it for this story. I enjoyed writing it, and I hope that you enjoyed reading it. Thank you, and I'll see you when I post next. (Which quite frankly idk when it'll be)