Random thought: I’m so good at sleeping that I can do it with my eyes closed!

Despite your better judgment, it appears as though you returned for another adventure of Scotty Cornfield, Storyteller-at-Large. We’ll start off with our Story of the Week. The inspiration for this 101-word tale came from a guy named Bob Cornfield (no relation). At least that’s what he told me ever since I was a little kid.

        The Agony of Da Feet

When Leonard told the picnic guests he was an Olympic champion, they were impressed. Then they found out he was a race-walker.

“You got a medal for walking fast?” someone asked. “How fast?”

Leonard demonstrated.

“Big deal,” the guest said. “When I got explosive diarrhea in Walmart, I walked just like you—except faster.

“Do they use a starter’s pistol or just one of those Walk/Don’t Walk signs to start races?” another asked.

“Hey,” someone else added. “If they combine race-walking and ribbon dancing, you could lead parades—really fast.”

“Screw you,” Leonard stomped off, completely abandoning his Olympic form.

Prompt: Walker

NOVEL NEWS & OTHER NOTES…

In my last post, you may recall I talked about pouring through the fantastic notes I received from my editor. After reviewing the latest draft of QUESTIONABLE CHARACTERS (my upcoming crime novel), she gave me all kinds of ideas about how I can make the book much stronger. One of her key suggestions was that I needed to have more suspects. Creating a larger cast of bad guys is one way to add more layers and threads to the story, something mystery readers love. Following her advice, I spent a lot of time creating a few more villains, and I’m excited about my new evildoers and how they’ll enter and exit my story.

Creating these miscreants (OK—enough playing around with my thesaurus) led to one interesting epiphany. I was in the process of creating a new outline when I decided I needed to pump the brakes and change my writing process. Instead of outlining each scene and individual story beat, what made more sense was to focus on one character at a time. I came up with ideas for each character (like Alfred, a security guard obsessed with true crime TV shows—and late night prowling and peeping), and after completing rough notes on his story, I moved on to the next character. Once I have them all sketched out, I’ll return to the overall outline phase, where I can weave the various threads throughout the entire story. One of the new plots involves a thief who is selling stolen Pre-Columbian artifacts. This led me down a cool path of research that I’ll tell you about next time, including meeting up with an art dealer whose inventory of Pre-Columbian artifacts was stolen in a brazen burglary.

If you promise to stay tuned, so will I.

Thanks for listening!

Scotty out

PS: Want to go back and see all the stories you missed before you joined all the other cool kids? Click on the secret word. Here’s a clue. It’s in this paragraph and it looks different from all the other words. You can do it! LINK