Just because I haven't published all of my books doesn't mean I haven't written them. It would not be out of left field to say I've written more than 100 books; it's just most people don't count journals or diaries as authored books. Let's see, each journal over the past few years has been over 220 pages and I've hand-written all of them. I could, if I wanted to, canon a few, type them up and produce one right after the other so that the official count could be, well, official. I wonder if I could get even three people to read the contents of those dull and mundane "write" of passage. I doubt it.
I have published six times I think. I have a couple of books ready to be published, and I have one that is just about ready to be put to the pen in its first fully developed skeleton form. What I do usually (always) is buy a new composition notebook so that I can write all the thinking thoughts I have while I'm thinking about the stories that will be told in the book. There has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end, but because I believe the end should be known, I find myself working backward, but not in reverse chronological order by any means. I jump all over the place when I write. I think this thought, scratch it, come up with three new thoughts, and scrap those. I read and watch old shows to get ideas. I write more, scrap more, think more, and finally come up with the best idea there is; to ask the dog!
I've been asking my dog(s) life questions and boundary questions for years. Rover was certainly the king of knowledge, by the time I was three he was two and we were inseparable. He may have carried my sister's middle name, but he was MY dog! I don't think there will be much of a fuss about it when we all see Jesus. Nope, that dog, unless he is stuck in my grandfather's arms, will run straight to me! I know he will. If I have to take my gramps out by the knees to make that happen, well, there you go! LOL...you'd have to know...gramps only had one knee!
Tomorrow it is! Not only is it my baby girl's 32nd birthday, but it is also the day I decide to write down the names of all or most of the characters in the murder book. I'll also dial up a few interesting facts about each of them, and I'll try to start them out on their own to see if they leap off the pages and create the story on their own or if I'll have to still push and nudge a little. Tinny cheesy music may help a bit, the book does take place in the mid-20th century before Spotify, the internet, and even phones really. Most people didn't have them, only the police and other important people. Niki's character will no doubt need a phone. She's exotic. She'll have whatever she needs. Jeannie's character, on the other hand, will talk big about having her own phone and make a fuss about such extras, but hers is a more modest true-to-the-times story to tell. Her passage on the ship was not necessarily an accident, but she didn't have to pay her own way. She was a class A bargainer! A networker before networking was really all that big of a deal.
It's happening!! I bought a few books from Amazon tonight to go through and get a nice little foundation of interesting facts and provoking thoughts going. An obscure author named Richard Miles wrote a couple of books in the 50s that may be of some interest. He was an actor in Perry Mason before turning to the typewriter. He also became a teacher, and in one of his books, he murdered several faculty members of the school! I wrote a blog about doing something similar in 2021, and it cost me my job at the middle school where I was teaching! Some people don't have any sense of humor! Now, the Miles books will feed my brain - - and your interest indirectly, I suppose.
This book introduces Nick Posh, the rough-cut detective with dual citizenship from both America and Great Britain. His intentions to remain in America as much as he possibly can have been interrupted by a wee inconvenience involving the murder of a colleague several years ago. The wee inconvenience occurred when the body (or part of it) was found. Something obviously didn't go as planned, and the truth was about to be shared before the courts. Just his luck, Nick's that is, that upon returning to the scene another inconvenience occurs; the only witness to the possible disposal of the body was unceremoniously murdered by his wife, a woman whose family more than wanted to never see Posh's face again. Couldn't she have waited another week before sending the singer to his last curtain call?
I can't wait!! I'll probably not sleep well either. I'll be thinking of decorations from the 1930s in both Chicago and New York. I'll have to find books on Edinburgh from that time period, and do a bit of research to see when the libraries were open, what streets they were on, and so forth. It's not going to be a book full of too many fluffy details, but I don't want to make the mistake of inputting a 1970s wall hanging in a 1930s period book - - geez, that would embarrass me. Or would it? I could add a bit of Tesla teasing at that point and have little Barron Trump make an appearance, again, you have to know to know.
FUN TIMES!!
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