Dead Reckoning. Be Happy In Your Work. Louis Shalako.

Maintenon as a very young man.

Louis Shalako

Be happy in your work.

Dead Reckoning, (provisional title), the tenth in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series, is well on the way.

I’ve gotten the story up to well over 10,000 words, since I started it on October 26/24. Interestingly, I had three lines, and a few notations at the bottom of the brand-new document, a grand total of 57 words, when I shut it down for the day and basically, just sat there and thought about the story. It was a form of commitment and I knew I was prepared to work at it.

How does it begin? (A dead body. – ed.)

How does it end? (A variation on a theme. – ed.)

And what do I do to fill up the middle. Almost any idea is good, and I’ve even written one of my own dreams into a chapter, in a book, which if nothing else adds something to the inner narrative of one of our characters.

I think about the stories at work, I think about them driving down the road, I suppose I think about them in the shower.

What really sucks is when you think of something in the middle of the night, and you have to fight the urge to clamber out of bed, fire up the machine, and tack that in somewhere before you forget…which you almost surely will.

My last mystery novel, A Stranger In Paris, took three winters to write, with bouts of about 20,000 words each, resulting in a novel of over 60,000 words. It’s also something of a masterpiece, but then, I did have plenty of time to think about it.

It’s genre fiction, pulp essentially, the only real advantage is that I’ve read hundreds of them and seen hundreds of them on film and on television. We get to see their strengths and their weaknesses, and if we think we can do better, then we should—and good for us if we do.

To steal from one may be plagiarism, to steal from many is pure genius. That’s a cliché, but I will go it one better.

I might steal, but only from the very best. This is how I end up with an idea, a gag, one that came from Conan Doyle, or Agatha Christie, and perhaps others, all mixed up like a dog’s breakfast in a story that is new, it’s fresh, and it is nothing if not original. But if you think about it, Sherlock Holmes was a master of disguise. Agatha Christie was known for gentle gender-benders, for example the accomplished actress who dressed as a man, in order to commit the perfect crime. (Ah, but as an accomplished actress, she was also the only one that could have pulled it off, which might have been her undoing in the end.) I promise you this much—if I live long enough, I will do the parody, where at the end of the book, every single damned character reaches up under the chin, grabs a hold of a little loose bit, and then peels off the rubber mask in order to become somebody else. (Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die.) This is the one where every single character in the book all end up in the same place, and every single one of them is pointing a gun at the next one’s head. Okay, I am exaggerating, but not really…sort of.

(There is such a thing as bad television. – ed.)

Yeah, but seriously. Everyone in the whole damned book is pulling off a rubber mask with one hand, and pointing a gun at the next guy's head with the other...the poor #basterd at the front of the line says, "...hey, wait a minute..." (it's not fair), and then he sort of shuffles along sideways, very, very carefully, until they all form a circle and then he can point his gun at the head of the last guy at the other end of the line. And then, the one you least suspect will pull the fucking trigger...

Probably me, but you never know.

(No one would ever suspect. – ed.)

And if you don’t believe me, you really should read A Stranger In Paris. As formulaic as the genre is and can be, the ending will still surprise.

And then you will know—

You can always throw in another hot babe.

So, if I peck away at this on some small, daily basis, it really doesn’t take much more than five or six hundred words a day to get a pretty good manuscript in two or three months. The key thing is to get to the end of the plot—we can go back and dress our figures, decorate our sets, explain the floor plans, talk about the town, describe the personalities, and add in essential details. We can plant clues to account for little events later in the book, we can take clues out, we can change the name of a character, we can copy and paste paragraphs so that they make a better kind of linear sense.

We cut words out here and add words in there…

I would like to equal or better my last work, and it may even be possible but you just never know.

I enjoy the work. You know, last week I recovered five email accounts. I still can’t get into one Amazon account. I need to get in there and update the tax page…I need to get in there just to change the recovery email and phone number. It took two and a half hours to change my telephone service provider, and the thing is still eating the battery at an alarming rate, and truth is, I’m still messing around with it.

I do not enjoy that work.

Writing is like sex, ladies and gentlemen. When it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

This is not a contradiction.

Trust me, I know.

I’ve done a little bit of both in my life. Which brings me to the last point. If I get bored, I throw in another hot babe, and that helps to keep me interested.

And if some nice young guy falls in love with her, well, it all goes toward filling up that big long middle part.

 

END

Check out Louis Shalako’s A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play. The audiobook is free, the ebook a reasonable $3.99.

Our good friend and colleague Harold C. Jones has just released Shipwrecked on Google Play.

Thank you for reading.