The proof of The Wedding Fatality will arrive on Friday. I expect I will be able to make any corrections over the weekend, and then publish it on Monday, October 5th. I'm excited.
Even better has been the result of spending time with Amy and Paul and Christine. I've gone back to the stalled outline for Amy VI. Ideas are surfacing. Amy will be back to her private investigator business. Her client will turn out to have destroyed his own property to avoid a dangerous entanglement with some bad guys. Amy won't be able to bring in her police contacts because her client has done something wrong, even if it was for a sensible (well, peculiar but not all that sensible) reason. And candlelight will glint off the front teeth of the client's son.
Dirty little secret about writing mysteries: there must be at least two interim confrontations between the hero and the bad guys before the denouement. More than two is better. The hero must lose the first battle, although not fatally. In the earlier books, Amy has been shot, she's been dumped in a bayou to drown (Ah, The Rothschild Jewels isn't out yet...), she gets stabbed (Ah, The Wrong Twin isn't out yet...), she gets attacked by a person of interest and into a fistfight with a suspect in The Wedding Fatality. It's way too early for even a working title for Amy VI, but she goes undercover to get information about a bad guy. Alas, the bad guy catches her without her disguise and recognizes her. First idea is for Amy and Paul to go out the second story window, fall five feet off a dislodged rain gutter, and scrape her dazed self off the pavement where she landed and have Paul drive off while the bad guy is hurling epithets at her. Possibly the bad guy will, uh, customize the back of her yellow Benz diesel with a .45 revolver.
For now, the bad guy actually is a team of three men: alpha leader, beta follower, and someone's idiot giant of a nephew who actually has a heart of gold, but gets manipulated by alpha and beta...until he rebels. The confrontation I've just described is with beta. The one with alpha will have to be more serious (sharks with friggin' lasers!), and Amy will lose. I expect idiot giant to take care of beta later in the story. And then Amy and Paul will have to take on Alpha yet again, only this time they will snatch victory from the jaws of death, or some such purple prose. I'm tempted to think Amy will have to kill Alpha (and have a totally justifiable reason) since she can't call in her police buddies, but that may change.
If Amy agrees that she cannot get the police involved, everyone will have to live by Bob Dylan's rules. Huh? In "Absolutely Sweet Marie" Dylan sings, "To live outside the law you must be honest." If you are in a universe where outside authority cannot be counted on to enforce justice, it is suicide to try to cheat people; they have no option but to punish you themselves.
As excited as I am about being thisclose to publishing The Wedding Fatality, I'm even happier about wanting to go back to outlining Amy VI. Wish me luck!
Even better has been the result of spending time with Amy and Paul and Christine. I've gone back to the stalled outline for Amy VI. Ideas are surfacing. Amy will be back to her private investigator business. Her client will turn out to have destroyed his own property to avoid a dangerous entanglement with some bad guys. Amy won't be able to bring in her police contacts because her client has done something wrong, even if it was for a sensible (well, peculiar but not all that sensible) reason. And candlelight will glint off the front teeth of the client's son.
Dirty little secret about writing mysteries: there must be at least two interim confrontations between the hero and the bad guys before the denouement. More than two is better. The hero must lose the first battle, although not fatally. In the earlier books, Amy has been shot, she's been dumped in a bayou to drown (Ah, The Rothschild Jewels isn't out yet...), she gets stabbed (Ah, The Wrong Twin isn't out yet...), she gets attacked by a person of interest and into a fistfight with a suspect in The Wedding Fatality. It's way too early for even a working title for Amy VI, but she goes undercover to get information about a bad guy. Alas, the bad guy catches her without her disguise and recognizes her. First idea is for Amy and Paul to go out the second story window, fall five feet off a dislodged rain gutter, and scrape her dazed self off the pavement where she landed and have Paul drive off while the bad guy is hurling epithets at her. Possibly the bad guy will, uh, customize the back of her yellow Benz diesel with a .45 revolver.
For now, the bad guy actually is a team of three men: alpha leader, beta follower, and someone's idiot giant of a nephew who actually has a heart of gold, but gets manipulated by alpha and beta...until he rebels. The confrontation I've just described is with beta. The one with alpha will have to be more serious (sharks with friggin' lasers!), and Amy will lose. I expect idiot giant to take care of beta later in the story. And then Amy and Paul will have to take on Alpha yet again, only this time they will snatch victory from the jaws of death, or some such purple prose. I'm tempted to think Amy will have to kill Alpha (and have a totally justifiable reason) since she can't call in her police buddies, but that may change.
If Amy agrees that she cannot get the police involved, everyone will have to live by Bob Dylan's rules. Huh? In "Absolutely Sweet Marie" Dylan sings, "To live outside the law you must be honest." If you are in a universe where outside authority cannot be counted on to enforce justice, it is suicide to try to cheat people; they have no option but to punish you themselves.
As excited as I am about being thisclose to publishing The Wedding Fatality, I'm even happier about wanting to go back to outlining Amy VI. Wish me luck!