A New Project Makes Me Happy

c2011Shalako


I have a new project and that makes me happy.

Because it was so much fun to write 'The Handbag's Tale,' my first detective story, and because I like detective or mystery stories, and because there is a market, I was definitely interested in doing more of them.

As far as story length, that really doesn't matter. If it's not a novel, so much the better. That's because the short-term marketing strategy is to submit it. If I can place the story somewhere, make some money and gain some new readers, that's fine.

The story is 'maintenon gets a vacation,' and Inspector Gilles Maintenon is on a walking tour of the moors in southwestern England because as a boy he read a lot of Serlock Holmes...and then of course there is a murder and he gets to solve it.

The whole thing revolves around a mysterious missing aircraft and one dead pilot who just happens (or happened) to be under consideration for an international seaplane racing team.

As usual in a Maintenon story, there are plenty of twists and turns, and surprising characters that say the damnedest things.

Luckily, I already know whodunit! In the first Maintenon story, I had to write it to find out.

The really great thing about writing the same character is of course marketing. With a half a dozen short mysteries featuring Inspector Maintenon, I can package them up in collections, publish them as Amazon 'shorts,' or when I develop some more relevant skills, develop it into a TV pilot/proposal.

It is nice to take a break from the incessant round of social networking and sales/marketing, and do some actual work for a change.

Gilles hasn't actually said this yet, but I suspect he will before the end of the story:

'A change is as good as a vacation.'

And now if the reader will forgive me, I must rejoin Maintenon and a certain Esther Phelps, a tall, athletic, brown-haired woman in her late thirties or early forties. They're at a remote farmhouse on the verge of Exmoor, and Jimmy is about to arrive on his sidecar-motorcycle and break the news...a lady down the road has a body in the parlour and would the nice inspector like to come and have a look at it?