Confessions of a Starving Mystery Writer

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time. Pablo Picasso The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense. Pablo Picasso

Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies. Aristotle There is no remedy for love but to love more. Henry David Thoreau

Click. “Son of a bitch!” Trevor Barrow removed the cold gun muzzle from his temple and let his pistol hand fall and began to sob. “I can’t do anything right.” He leaned back against his late model, dark blue, Mercedes. His double-breasted suit was rumpled, a silk tie hung loose around his thick neck. He drew a half empty fifth of Glenlivet Scotch to his lips and gulped. Wiping his lips on a shirtsleeve, he smeared Scotch across the raised monogrammed cuff. Trevor’s car sat under a bridge in a seedy part of downtown Detroit between two abandoned factories. The cars exhaust fumes commingled with the wafting sewer steam to create a toxic fog that enveloped him. The acrid smell of rotting garbage, urine, and sewer gas made him cough as a chill went through him. Flames licked out of a nearby rusty 55-gallon barrel. He sat the bottle on the roof of the car and steadied it. In a quick movement, he racked the slide to chamber a round. Shadows danced in a se

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy. Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Friedrich Nietzsche

Life has gotten busy of late, in very good ways. Blogging, unforunately took a back seat. I have decided to get back into the dating world and restart my career in consulting and law. I've found an office, started wearing a suit, tie, underwear, and socks and re-entered society. I'm working out daily, eating right, and consuming less alcohol. This past week I've returned to court, the art scene, and smoozed past and future clients. I've been out on an excellent date with a beautiful, intelligent, woman and traveled a bit. These distractions were well needed and long in coming. Writing and blogging are now back on my agenda and you should see a notable difference in the topics I choose to blog about. Thanks for stopping by...

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. Anais Nin It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Anais Nin Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country. Anais Nin

To be published, at what cost? The end game is getting published, but with the current proliferation of e-publishing, vanity publishing and the like ,what does a writer gain for being published at any cost? As some of you know, I am in a mystery writers critique group. A recent potential new writer came to our last meeting and was so distraught over her recent publishing experience that she had been unable to write since publication. She received no advance, no editting, and no marketing, advertising, or distribution of her book. She did give up the rights to her book and the characters involved thereof. I was wondering why the hell she would want to be published this bad, but really you and I know why. In the pursuit of publication, authors give up too much, with little in return. Preditors and Editors Website is supposedly a watch dog but I have heard horror stories from writers that have published with houses that receive passing marks or negative marks and authors had an opposite e

What is past is prologue. William Shakespeare I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. William Shakespeare The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. Peter F. Drucker The best way to predict the future is to create it. Peter F. Drucker

For some unknown reason, creativity courses again through my mind. After a prolonged fallow time, writing creatively has returned in full force. Why now? Personal resolution? Dark clouds passed? The storm has moved beyond me? I have no idea why, it just happened. How do you spur creativity? Go to a special physical or mental place? Is there an exercise?

The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense. Pablo Picasso Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. Martin Luther King, Jr. The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. John Updike

Detective Harry Beam sat way outside his jurisdiction in front of a disheveled house in rural North Carolina. As he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray of a non-descript black sedan, he opened the door and stepped out on the gravel-strewn driveway. He walked and entered the disintegrating side door of the house without knocking. The air was thick with grease, cooking seafood, and cigarette smoke. A one-eyed black pit bull lay motionless on the floor in front of the kerosene heater. He stepped over it. An older woman slowly breathed oxygen through the airlines fished throughout the door casings of the decaying house from an oxygen machine that wheezed silently with every breath. She sat at the Formica kitchen table in a well-worn nightgown, aged glasses, no teeth and a complacent look. Very pretty at one time, now her hair was black with gray streaks, matted and hung in sweaty stringy clumps. Now she was just old. Beauty remained but very faint, hidden, subdued, and masked by old

"I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe Where I'm bound, I can't tell But goodbye's too good a word, gal So I'll just say fare thee well I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind You could have done better but I don't mind You just kinda wasted my precious time But don't think twice, it's all right Bob Dylan

The Earth At Night 

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. Robert Frost Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. Robert Frost A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. Robert Frost