Welcome to my writing world! |
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Random Thought: Hey, Mar-a-Lago—the name Lake Ontario is now available! |
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Welcome, kids, to another edition of my writing world. Let’s start off with 101 words or so, inspired by the prompt “Desperate lack of purpose,” sent in by longtime subscriber Cooper Attaboi. Thanks for the fun suggestion, Coop! |
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Emperor’s Clothes |
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Solomon was a brilliant inventor who obsessed over “filling a need nobody knew they had.” |
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His friend, Gary, stood in Solomon’s workshop, confused about his latest creation. “So these gloves you invented—they’re transparent, offer no protection, no warmth, no privacy, and they feel like nothing?” |
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“Right. They’re called ‘Sheer Madness’.” |
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“So why the frown?” Gary asked. |
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Because I sold $10,000 worth, but got paid in fake cash, and the money got seized!” |
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“To review, you sold a fake product, got paid in fake money, and wound up losing both. That’s insane, that’s—” |
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“Please don’t—” |
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“That’s what I’d call sheer madness.” |
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Prompt: Desperate lack of purpose |
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NOVEL NEWS & NOTES… |
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The only news I can report on the Questionable Characters front is that my editor is now predicting I should see her notes on the latest draft in three weeks. In the meantime, I’ve been splitting my writing time between dreaming up my plot for the next novel and working on polishing one of my short stories featuring a hard-boiled detective. When I typed that out, my brain instantly wondered what would happen if he got knocked out like movie detectives do. Would that give my hard-boiled detective a scrambled brain? Was that a painful pun? Eggzactly. |
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On a semi-serious front, I’ve been referring to Book Two as my sequel, but then I realized that that’s probably not accurate. I don’t see this next one as continuing on with the same story. That one solved the mystery, justice prevailed, and only a thread or two remains for the future. Instead, this next one (I’m using the working title “Bad Timing”) will be the further adventures of my two lead characters (the undercover cop and the homicide detective, which may have been my two favorite assignments back in the day). I’m bringing back a few of the other characters as well, but my undercover guy has a whole new batch of bad guys he’s hanging out with, and I have a much more serious body count than I had in Questionable Characters. |
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The short story has gotten a lot of nice compliments from the writers who offered to read it for me, and I also received some excellent ideas for fixes. I was waiting for all of the suggestions to come in before I took another swing at the story. I think I’ve now reached that point. I’ll make the fixes based on the notes I liked, kindly leave out the other ones, and then start submitting the story and see if anyone wants to publish it. If I get any good news, you’ll be the first to know. Well, maybe not the first, but certainly in the top ten. |
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Thanks for listening. |
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Scotty out |
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PS: If you’re anywhere around Morgan Hill, Gilroy, or San Jose next week, I’ll be participating in something called Book Karaoke at Ancora Vino, 17337 Monterey Rd. Morgan Hill, on Wednesday,Sept. 23rd at 6 p.m. Stop by and say hi. |
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PS: Wanna catch up on the posts you’ve missed? Click on the red button below. |
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