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Caffe Vita workers fired or quit over a new policy on homeless giving; did Boeing quash a preventive MAX fix to save money?; Melinda Gates vows $1B to fight the gender gap; Morrissey concert scrapped.
As part of my ongoing obsession with cross-genre pollination (and yes, this does lead eventually into my quest for monetizable work), I’m looking for examples of stories that contain investigations or puzzle solving, OTHER THAN formula whodunits and spy capers.
Examples of what I’m looking for:
UPDATE: Some of your responses (thank you):
“Crying of Lot 49”: structured as a mystery, not solved at the end. “Death and the Compass” (Borges): hard to explain, just read it, it’s short.
Two good reads from local author Erik Larsen: Thunderstruck, and The Devil in the White City. Both tell of non fictonal Murders that are intersperced with signifigant historical events of the time. The seemingley non related storylines converge at the end.
…pre-existing story property can now become the basis of “fan fiction,” erotic or otherwise. Even 1984.
…by people with far too much time on their hands: A comprehensive guide to fictional breakfast cereals.
…all of them made up, await you at the Dutch Geo Fiction Association. As the name implies, all the stories are set in imaginary nation-states and other sites, as the home page states:
“Geo fiction is fictional geography: devising, designing and developing a geo, a fictional geographic entity. In most cases the geo is a country, but it can be any kind of geographic area: a city, a region, a federation of countries, a planet, a star system, it doesn’t matter.”
…what would happen if Jesus ran for President.
OUR NOVEL The Myrtle of Venus is now available at Amazon.com. I earn more money if you buy it from my site, but you’re all still free, nay encouraged, to go to the Amazon page and contribute an unbiased rave review.
And I’m looking to talk to people who’ve worked in local television, here or elsewhere, for research purposes. Email me to set up the details.
CREATE YOUR OWN Law and Order plot!
…feel a lot as if I was a townsperson in It’s A Good Life, the Jerome Bixby story made famous in a Twilight Zone episode starring future comic-book writer and Barnes & Barnes novelty singer Bill Mumy.
Our whole society (local, national, global) is being ruined by the collective equivalent to that story’s boy villain–a pre-adolescent mindset of greed and vengeance. Not only must we obey fully, we must obey cheerfully. We must always think good thoughts, even as everything we love is torn asunder. In “lifestyle” journalism, that means the writer must, MUST, MUST absolutely, gushingly adore whatever the upscale demographic target market’s expected to like. Huge ugly vehicles? Snooty restaurants? Fantastic! Development schemes devised to give the waterfront to Paul Allen? Gotta love ’em! Gutting health-care and education funding to support subsidies to Boeing and Amgen? It was good that the politicians did that!
Some readers have told me they’ve only read the first chapter of my online novel, because they couldn’t locate any links to the subsequent scenes. I’ve now redesigned the whole thing, so you should now have no trouble navigatin’ your whole way through. (This revision is also about 15 percent shorter, and hence tighter and funnier.)
So start readin’ it already!
ANYBODY WHO CARES about the American short story, and how to market same, should look at the (probably unauthorized) online scanning and posting of A Cotton Candy Autopsy. It was the first episode of Dave Louapre and Dan Sweetman’s illustrated-story series, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.
Published between 1989 and 1992 by DC Comics’ short-lived Piranha Press division, Beautiful Stories wasn’t a comic book (not even a “grownup” comic book). Rather, Louapre wrote a different (usually darkly humorous) text story for each issue, to which Sweetman added large illustrations (in a different, appropriate style each time).
The various book and magazine incarnations of Beautiful Stories have all been out of print for years. I’ve no idea what Louapre or Sweetman have done since. But the series remains one of the last examples of a big media company packaging and selling an individual short story as a stand-alone, un-anthologized entity unto itself.
MY RAPID WRITING PACE has slowed this week, but I’ve still got two more new chapters of my beautiful new novel The Myrtle of Venus. As usual, you can catch up to the onset of the story at this link.
IT’S BEEN FOUR WHOLE DAYS, but we’ve got a hot and hilarious spankin’ new chapter of my beautiful new novel The Myrtle of Venus. As usual, you can catch up to the onset of the story at this link.
EVEN THOUGH NOBODY’S yet told me they’ve read any of it, I’m goin’ ahead and posting seven five more chapters to my comedy adventure novel The Myrtle of Venus to this site. As usual, the story commences at this point. The new stuff starts at this link.
Eight more chapters remain to be cleaned up and posted. They should be up within a week.
After that, the whole ruff draft will remain up until I have a revised version ready. That one will be a sales item.
