Confessions of a Starving Mystery Writer

For anyone still visits this blog, as you have seen, I have been in the slow slide away from posting with any regularity. Unfortunately, my writing has suffered the same fate. This wasn't exactly by design. A few things occured that shifted my focus away from writing and back towards life and the "real job". Wandering. I guess that's what the last few months have been. As Moses did for 40 years in the dessert, I, between projects always, and I mean always wander the tortures of the damned. Like a pinball I bounce between conflicting and often diametrically opposed vocations and eventually something pops or smacks me in the head as to the appropriate direction my life is to take. Well, as of today, I have many balls bouncing - in that pinball machine - with a possible tilt in the offing. I continue, futilely, to pump more and more quarters into the damn machine with little hint of the end game. Life, as I know it, will definitely change... But, where will it all lead?

Jason Evans had a pretty cool contest last week to write a 250 word story about the below picture. The 250 words that follows was my entry.... I lay, gasping for breath, bleeding from a sucking chest wound, face down on the floor, just below my favorite Monet painting. I felt the cold wood floor against my cheek and tasted something bitter and metallic as the puddle of blood reached and surrounded my face and lips. Bathed in the dim light by two antique Victorian lamps, my vision blurred as life began to leave my body. The painting had been purchased at a Sotheby’s Auction in New York after I had won my biggest divorce case several years ago, my lover’s case. This pleasant memory ebbed and flowed as my breathing became more ragged and I started to loose consciousness; I struggled to take in air but my lungs wouldn’t cooperate. I tried to stand only to feel the icy steel of the blade that had been shoved into my chest only moments before against my neck. I slumped back to the floor, res