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.

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