LIGHT
ON
WHITE
ALIGHT
Tag: Mystery
In the calculus of double-dealing by one or both
How do people with full-time careers and even families slash serious relationships find time to cheat?
Can they even be trusted on their paying jobs?
While watching the Perseid meteors early one morning
The naked eye saw only white sometimes tinged with pink or blue. The cell phone camera using a 4-second exposure saw this and much more. Was anyone really expecting northern lights?
Do you understand a Carlos Williams kind of morning?
Or even one along Puget Sound?
Slow rain outside, misty, foggy, nothing pressing to do, you just want to stay abed a while longer – or return after a leisurely hot shower. Maybe there’s some activity in the next room or down the hall, but it doesn’t matter.
Reminds me of a visit to a neighboring college back in Indiana, when I cracked open my poetry course assignment to an appropriate new vision – one of several breakthroughs that October weekend, actually. Savor another cup of coffee, reflect, recharge. You need those, at least in some proportion to the rest of your goals and life mission. Even if an ingrained Protestant work ethic guilt tries to kick in.
The fog around the island also reminds me of Washington state and visits to friends on the other side of the Cascades mountains. The same smoky indolence.
Do you have any memories of a special time or place of moody experiences like these?
What’s your take on the season finale of ‘Only Murders in the Building’?
Yeah, those of you addicted to the series.
Anyone else feeling a degree of letdown?
Or did you find it dizzyingly brilliant?
As for the teaser for next season?
Gee, I really do want to discuss this with someone without having to skirt around a spoiler alert.
Kinisi 33
ever so English good reasons
to be wary with servants
that that butler, not that valet
does it all deadly
right in the end
Along Friar Roads
From behind a curtain of time
IN THE RECIPE FOR A MYSTERY NOVEL
Does a mystery novel have to revolve around a detective? Even a charming amateur? Or can it focus instead on the leading suspect?
In proposing a book with the working title, Dinner to Die For, I envisioned an anonymous restaurant critic who works for an independent television station. How to handle the visuals for each review would have posed an interesting challenge, something quite unlike the so-called Phantom Gourmet who has since become a popular staple on a New England cable news channel. He’s widely recognized on the street, for one thing.
Well, the novel never moved forward. This project was predicated on two collaborators, who eventually declined, however discretely.
Still, enough remained to slip into my newest book, Along the Parallel Tracks of Yin and Yang.
As a further twist, my biggest novel on the way is also about food and restaurants. This time, from the inside. And I promise, it won’t be a mystery.
~*~
For these stories and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
RUNNING INTO YOUR YOUNGER SELF AS A STRANGER
As I revisit the abandoned plans for two early novels, what I encounter feels strange and wondrous – and sometimes sophomoric. Yes, I wrote what appears here, but these days the words could be by a stranger – a youngster I wouldn’t mind meeting. In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential campaign, what had seemed outrageous in my “political science fiction” draft four decades earlier now has an air of prophecy. The other work, a detective novel, revives memories of a potential collaborator no longer among the living. Put together with a little bit more, they create a new book of fiction, one that runs Along the Parallel Tracks of Yin and Yang. As we might say in Zen, these works are what they are. Or what you, too, bring to the story. Enjoy the ride.
~*~
For these stories and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
Jnana's Red Barn 