Z Is For Zero, Zealot, Zip and...

Z is for Zero, Zealot, Zip in Cold Water and Zero Cemetery Lane

The grand finale of this A to Z Blog Challenge tour should end with a huge number, but instead it ends with the least number, zero. It could be Zero Cemetery Lane (A Cricket Sawyer paranormal Romantic Suspense) 

Or the address of The Bed and Breakfast Murders.

 Or, perhaps, our little friend Zip from Knapsack Secrets in his own young adult mystery suspense Cold Water.

All of these novels have one thing in common, the mystery element. Zero itself is a mysterious number, it holds the place of miniscule amounts or unfathomable mega amounts. 

The strangeness of the address number, Zero Cemetery Lane, is no accident. It is a real address in a tiny burg in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The address itself led to the creation of the mystery based on a piece of real estate not far from that address. Ask yourself who would feel safe having their address zero—no one—nothing could exist at zero—but it did— and the cemetery was close at hand with room for more to be planted.

Then whatever possessed a mystery novelist to name a character Zip, the character himself. Once profiled, an active African American teenager preferred the nick name to the moniker Ziegfeld. His nickname fit because of his restless, hurried manner of zipping from this to that and here to there. ADD, no, just super hyper activity of a busy mind and a need to move and the circumstances that wouldn't allow him the peace of home and mind.

All three novels play with Z. It may be the last letter of the alphabet, but when you are always last you try harder. And Z seriously delivers for a mystery suspense author.

P.S. Sign up for The Mystery Readers Connection today and get the free short short story "Black Roses." Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will receive a copy of the short short "The Hanging Tree."    

Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection. Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors join us to present their unique look at mystery and story. 

There is a safe unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't want to miss a single episode.

Y Is For Yesterday, Yellow Crime Scene Tape and...

Y is for Yesterday, Yellow Crime Scene Tape and Faith Yachne in The Pink Lady Slipper

Yesterday is a fascinating term, especially, when surrounded by yellow crime scene tape as it is fairly often, if not always, in a mystery.

Yellow itself is a fascinating word for a mystery writer. Yellow, cowardly, yellow skin, yellow scrapes along the concrete where a body was found, was it perhaps, dragged, heels leaving their marks along the way. The Yellow Wallpaper, that story haunts me. I wish I had written it. Was the woman being slowly poisoned by her husband as she hallucinated about the people living in the wall paper? I have a lime green and yellow patterned wallpaper and matching paneling in my bedroom—this story frightens and engages my mystery inclined mind.

Faith Yachne, a religious zealot in The Pink Lady Slipper is a different shade of yellow. She hides behind a skewed vision of herself as prophetess and evangelist, but her real mission  might be to save herself from her abusive mind-controlling preacher, husband.

Don't discount yellow, its muse food, just as a yellow legal pad creates the landscape of a novel that, the blank white page or computer screen cannot, for me and my pen and many other writers I know of.   

Yellow is all sorts of things.

Dandelion yellow became "Dandelion With Angel Wings" my very first published story. Published in Thema Magazine in 2000. It is a story about cancer survival and a daughter born against all odds, with the tenacity of a dandelion and the beauty of an angel.

Engage your mind in color, technicolor - vivid as the scene you see in your mind and your readers will follow to see what new color you see.  Is it new, or is it a clue. That's up to you. But Yellow is certainly a good place to start. Yellow sky means strong winds - April Shauers was warned about the tornado before it trapped her, she just didn't listen she was tracking a serial killer in my book Tracker.

P.S. Sign up for The Mystery Readers Connection today and get your copy of  "Black Roses." Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will receive a copy of the mini-mystery "The Hanging Tree."   Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection. 

Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors join us to present their unique look at mystery and story. There is a safe unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't want to miss a single fun filled issue.

X is For Xray, Xylophone, Xena-Transplant Labs and...

X is For X-ray, Xylophone, Xeno Transplant lab, Xhosa Tribe and Skull Music or Diamonds, Death and Deceit.

Skull Music, the mystery suspense novel began as a writing prompt including an x-ray of a skull, a tape cassette with a weird sound, and a dolphin. The x-ray became the key that unlocked the story for me…I have no idea how I found or concocted the xeno-transplant lab.

Any word could be a trigger. Who would think a xylophone might be?  Orchestrated Murders, [A Works In Progress] a whole, life-sized orchestra suspended from a real museum ceiling with life sized mannequins—or are they mannequins? The sight sparked an amazing story for me that is still unraveling.

An old Piano, an even older theatre, a piano man and his cast came from a man's face in a piece of wood-grain wall paneling where I lived one cold lonely winter, his image haunted me until he became a character in Ghost Music of Vaudeville and I changed his name to Piano Man.

Give me a word or three and I'll give you a mystery, because that is what I do, that is my livelihood and my life.

My mother's penchant for a quote or saying to fit every occasion created many stories for me. When she told me her grandfather, who I never knew, always began his story telling with "Back when Tag was a pup and turkeys chewed tobacco..." That became the thread that created Watch ForThe Raven  in a practically non-stop writing marathon.
She died before I got it finished. Matter of fact she died before I finished any of my thirty some books, having never read a one or even knowing I was writing for publication.

If you want to be a writer watch for a phrase, a word, a picture that strikes a note. Jot it down and at your next opportunity examine it with x-ray vision. What can it say to you? Write that story, write it now!

Read with a writer's eye. Take that first sentence, make it yours and write its story. X-ray, Xylophone, Zanadu.

P.S. Sign up for The Mystery Readers Connection today and get the free flash fiction story "Black Roses."
Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will receive a copy of the flash fiction mystery "The Hanging Tree."   Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection. Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors join us to present their unique look at mystery and story.
There is a safe unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't want to miss a single issue.

W Is For Way-out, Whodunit? And ...

W Is For Way-out, Whodunit? And Writing Wide, or Watch For The Raven

 

A way-out is crucial for your sleuth, and at times it will seem the antagonist whodunit, will be the only lucky one—the antagonist is always the one with a way-out, always-- until the end that is.

When you are writing a mystery, your sleuth must always have a way out. Even when he doesn't know whodunit, and the future looks its bleakest—that is when your protagonist will shine and her true strengths will come through.

As a writer of any genre when the dreaded writers block threatens you – you could crack open a copy of Writing Wide, or Writing Wider to find writing prompts, writing tips, writing exercises and a way out. You are the protagonist of all you write. The forward thinking answer to the way out. Whodunit? Yoududnit, when you hear a reader rave (not to be confused with Watch For The Raven) about your latest creation.

Pick up that pen writer soldier. March to the front line, and write like the wind in whatever strength and direction it blows you.

Sure paint yourself (your protagonist) into a corner but always have a target so you know instinctively where to find the way out. Good Luck!

P.S. Sign up for The Mystery Readers Connection today and get your copy of the story "Black Roses." Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will receive a copy of the flash fiction mystery "The Hanging Tree."    The next issue is due out April 26, 2012 - that's today = )

Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection. Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors join us to present their unique look at mystery and story. There is a safe unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't want to miss a single issue.

V Is For Villian,Vegetable and...

V is For Villain, Vegetable (poison, edible Zucchini) Valentine Express

Villains come in all shapes and sizes.  They wear many hats and not necessarily always the black hat of the days when villains dressed in black and good guys dressed in white. Their motives for their vicious treachery are often as varied as the characters possibilities would suggest.

Sometimes in an inanimate object, a string of beads, the power stones of the goddess Ebony, as in Diamonds, Death and Deceit, become the villain with accomplices.

Sometimes a vegetable (poisoned by accidental bad zucchini or mushrooms) turns deadly at the hands of a caterer or an act of Mother Nature. Capricorn Goat, a catered meal turns deadly. Did Echo Folio, the caterer) poison her ex-boyfriend and his fiancé at their engagement dinner? (But there's more – you can find out on the contest page for this mystery novel.) Food propels the means, method and motive for many a genre.

A simple meal will never again look the same once visited by a mystery author's romantic suspense in Valentine Express. A railroad engineer and a bubbling brew of spaghetti sauce provide the milieu of another Cricket Sawyer bit of short fiction.

P.S. Sign up for The Mystery Readers Connection today and get the free flash fiction story "Black Roses." Recommend a friend sign up and when they do you will receive a copy of the flash fiction mystery "The Hanging Tree."  

 Hurry sign up today you don't want to miss a single fact, and entertainment packed issue of The Mystery Readers Connection. Once a month, in your in box, several columnists, several new (to you) authors join us to present their unique look at mystery and story. There is a safe unsubscribe link in every newsletter so you never have to stay (though we hope you will) if you don't want to. Hurry – get your name in quickly! You won't want to miss a single issue.