Back to Piney Point...

After a great start last year, tax season arrived and my work on the first Piney Point mystery came to a standstill.  I wrote fourteen chapters - one a day for two weeks - and then life intervened.  I wrote Chapter Fifteen in July and then, well, nothing.  I've resolved to get back to it.  Tonight.  For at least the next two weeks - a chapter a day.  I hope...

Join me in Piney Point, Alabama

for the original murder mystery I'm serializing on my new blog, Piney Point, Alabama .  The first mystery in the series is called Dead and Dug Up.  I hope you'll check out the misadventures of my amateur sleuth and her crazy Southern family.  I'd love to hear your feedback!

Holy crap!

I was just posting on my other blog (Dawn & Aggie) and looked down at the sidebar and saw that I haven't posted to this blog in two years.  Two years!  Holy crap is right.  But it's not like I haven't been writing, because I have.  It's just that well, I've decided that I can't do dark.  And I really suck at writing in the third person.  My work is much better from the first person perspective and my characters are funny, damn it.  One of them might be a murderer, but he makes it funny.  And he's a likeable murderer.  I've scrapped anything I've ever tried to write that was dark and serious; I've decided to stick to the light side of death, murder and mayhem.  Weird, but it works for me.  The other thing I'm going to do starting in January - just around the corner - is to serialize a story on a new blog.  Yep, I'm bringing that little southern town and all of its quirky inhabitants to life.  And a few to death.  Hey - it's a murder mystery.  Coming soon to a computer near you...

New ideas...

Well, my western/Tom Selleck film festival this weekend wasn't a total loss. I didn't do much writing, but I got some great ideas. One thing I've always loved about depictions of the Old West is the way people just shoot someone they have a problem with. Bang! No more problem. I guess that's why they say it was a simpler time.

Moving slowly...

I was doing really well (or so I thought) with writing a little bit every night - but I've had my mind on other things for the past week and I have gotten nothing done. I have learned not to bounce my ideas off anyone else, because the story is somehow lost in the telling. Does that make any sense? It's like once the words are out of my mouth, I can't get them back to put on paper (or computer screen, as it were). Anyhow, when I was looking for some stories about my mother-in-law, I ran across a mystery I started several year ago - written in two voices and I've never been quite sure what to do with it. I'd be interested in comments.

Need a last name!

I need a last name for a mysterious, hit-man character in my work-in-progress. Any suggestions? His first name is Jack. Think tall, dark, handsome - yet nondescript enough to blend into a crowd.