Dick Sabel, Private Eye

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a serial blog post to practice my hand at writing fiction.  Since I have been a teen, I’ve been interested in writing and I have several ideas for novels that I wanted to write.  I actually did NaNoWriMo once.  With both of my daughter’s birthdays in November as well as Thanksgiving being a regular extended-family time, it didn’t work out so well.  I’ll try again one day, but for now, I think I will practice my writing with some serial, fiction blog posts.

One of my big concerns is in writing creatively on a schedule.  I started doing this blog series over Lent, in part, to practice the discipline of writing regularly.  Obviously, writing creatively is a bit more of an issue, but if I take some time to do a little prep work, I may be able to accomplish it.

The question is what to write about.  Here are my few ideas and thoughts for three different genres that I’m considering.  Feel free to let me know if you might be interested in any of these.

Science Fiction – This is my home turf.  If I spent the time, I could find folders in my closet that contain characters and plot lines and an entire universe that I’ve come up with to contain the stories I’ve wanted to write.  When I was a teenager, I enjoyed Louis L’Amour’s Sackett novels.  I always wanted to come up with a series of Sci-Fi novels similar to that, where I trace a family line back and forth through the history of my universe.  At the same time, I have the overarching concept for a trilogy of novels surrounding my main character, Jason Faraday.  Maybe I can write a few serial style stories covering Jason and a few of the other characters in the novel to flesh out their background.  If I can ever find it, I actually have the prologue for the initial novel that I wrote years ago.

Noir Detective – This is where the title of this post comes from.  The story is a little long, but here it goes.  If you know me very well, you know that my brain is rarely not moving over topics at a high speed pace.  I used to get frustrated (and still do sometimes) at how often I would be thinking about things so fast that I would lose the previous thoughts before I could write them down.  Over time, I’ve found the good ones and the important ones come back.  Most of the time.

This is where Dick Sabel, Private Eye was born.  Bear with me, here’s where the story takes a crazy turn.  Every morning I drive to work through the south side of Memphis.  Directly south of downtown are several industrial factories.  I’m not sure what they produce, but some mornings the smell is quite overpowering.  It can hang in the air and I can still smell it when I get out of my car at work.  The through crossed my mind, “It smells like dead hookers.”  Now, I’ll confess, I don’t know what live hookers smell like, much less dead ones.  But that was the first thought that I had.  I imagined the cast of CSI making this observation (if you haven’t watched it, a hooker dies in Las Vegas approximately every 2.137 episodes).  Then I though, “No, it actually sounds more like something from a cheap, pulp fiction story.”  After the opening, “It was a dark and stormy night…”, the second or third chapter would open with, “The damp air in the city the next morning was thick with the smell of dead hookers the next morning.  I knew PD would have a busy day.”  Yeah, it is cheesy, but that’s kinda the point.  If I write this as a serial, I’ll have to do my research with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.  That could be fun.

Fantasy – After Science Fiction, this is my favorite genre’s to read.  Since I have played role playing games in the past, so I actually have toyed around with writing a first person journal format of a party member going through the particular quests and describing the events in a journal each time the party camped.  I’ve not read much in first person, and never a Fantasy novel, so I thought the concept might be a little unique to explore in.  I’d have to decide on a scenario.  Unfortunately, I have a few, but I also have a gaming group now playing Pathfinder, and I’m hesitant to use up my good ideas anywhere that might spoil them to my group.

 

~cc