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Scott Spencer's debut novel, A Simple Plan, was published in 1993 and his second novel, The Ruins, 13 years later. On his Web site, he talks about what he worked on in the intervening years: "I spent five years working on a novel, which ended up coming to nothing. Or much more than nothing, actually--too much. I had over a thousand pages, and I was still only a quarter of the way through the story." He wrote the screenplay for his first novel and, as a result, received several screenwriting offers; after five scripts, he went back to novel writing.

"Maddie didn't like bars. Especially cowboy bars. The smoke, the music, the steady stream of beer. She didn't …