Welcome to my writing world

Random thought: Can you get a lifetime warranty on a casket?

I don’t usually thank the muse behind the scenes, but today I’d like to thank Ms. Sandra Cornfield, not only for supplying this week’s prompt, but also for being my highly unpaid Uber driver for the past month while I’ve been recovering from emergency eye surgery to repair a detached retina. She even hauled my otherwise flawless human shell up the Morgan Hill last night, where I caught another ride from anonymous writer pal Chuck Foster (author of the excellent thriller Dead by Monday) to a San Jose writing event. More on that later. And now on to the Story of the Week.

The Circular World of Recycling

Bennie only worked with a few thieves. More than that made it easy to get busted. Too many mouths.

Smarter than most crooks, instead of operating in the shadows, he hid in plain sight. His crew wore fluorescent vests and put out traffic cones when they climbed office rooftops and stole copper pipes and AC units.

After Bennie sold his latest haul to a new recycler, the overall-clad employees yelled, “Police,” and arrested the team.

“Cops pretending to work here?” Bennie said. “Totally uncool.”

“You wouldn’t believe all the pretending we see,” one cop laughed, poking Benny’s orange vest. “Totally uncool.”

Prompt: Garbage Narcs

So … as I was saying before, I was so rudely interrupted by myself. The event I went to last night was something called the Flash Fiction Forum. My little 101-word stories fall into the flash fiction category, and the FFF is a group of writers who meet quarterly to share their work with other writers. This was only the second time I went to one of their meetups, but I’ll keep returning to the scene of the crime because the writing is really superb. I think they had 15 writers share their work last night, including people online from all over the world. I submitted a few stories a couple of months ago, but they didn’t make the cut. I get it. There’s a lot of competition. One of the organizers told me they received around 50 submissions this time. If you’d like to see some of the excellent work being read in person (and via Zoom), here’s a link to their Facebook Page. https://www.facebook.com/flashfictionforum

NOVEL NEWS & NOTES…

During the hiatus from my novel while I await editorial notes, I’ve been keeping busy. Some of it relates to the novel, other parts are still writing-related. One of the items related to Questionable Characters is that I just got back a few chapters I sent to a police psychologist I met at the Mystery Writers Conference in Marin last month. Since my cop protagonist sees a shrink (and that’s all I say about that), I wanted to have a working psychologist put their eyeballs on the page and let me know if my pages ring true or not. She got back to me late yesterday, but since I was tied up with the aforementioned flash fiction event, I haven’t read her email yet to see what kind of notes she has for me. Very cool of her to not charge me for looking at my work. I’ll update you next time on her thoughts.

I’ve also started sketching out ideas for the Questionable Characters sequel. I think I’ve already come up with some fun ideas for how I can bring my two main cops together again to work on a new case. I’m in the very early stages of figuring out where the story will go. So far, I have my entry into the investigation (which takes place before the cops know there’s a crime) and some ideas surrounding who the victim is and why he might have met his demise.

More stuff is happening on the short story front as well, but I’ll save that for another post. I’ve already taken up too much of your time.

Thanks for sticking around.

Scotty out

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