A really good book.

"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" by Steig Larrson. Read it.

Painting Murder

This was how it always started. The familiar scent of paint, wet paper, compliments and then a jarring plea for help. Micha Mason lay a wash of blue and gray paint across the top of a sheet of cold-pressed paper, moving the sable bristles in soft curves creating a storm filled sky. Cindy Lowen stood permanent as a fire hydrant, waiting for her answer. Mica frowned, apprehension rounded her shoulders, tightened her grip on the paintbrush. “Hire a real investigator,” she said as she rinsed her brush.

The woman shook her head. “Daddy has an investigator, some creature who comes and goes, or so I hear. I want you to find out why. It’s like Daddy doesn’t want me involved.” She wobbled back and forth, her plump little feet spilling from the sides of her expensive red Italian heels.

“What about your brother?”

“Not talking to him either.”

Mica shrugged and looked down at her work. “I think I’ll stay right here and you need to leave. I can’t concentrate.”

The shapes of leafless trees appeared under her rapidly moving brush in the drying blue color. They faded into the glaze of cerulean giving the illusion of being in the far distance. Then she added a touch of alizarin, and ultramarine generating a hint of mountains. She felt the coolness of the painted sky on her skin, caught a slight whiff of fallen leaves, then realized the coolness was coming from the drafty window, and the smell from rotten garbage wafting up from the alley bins five stories below. She jammed the window closed with a palette knife, and stirred a bowl of potpourri that rested on the sill.

Mica concentrated on her work, steeling herself against the burn of her friend’s worried eyes, and then her heart cracked with compassion. Resolve fell into the crevice created and she carelessly dribbled water, like falling rain, onto the painting in front of her.

“If your Dad really needs help.” Her mind reacted like a cut to turpentine as words emerged from her mouth. She slapped a hand across her lips, too late to stop the unleashed words.

“Please go. I trust you. I wouldn’t ask if Daddy wasn’t acting like a man with a mess of bad moonshine.”

Mica knew when Cindy lapsed into her mountain dialect she was worried. She looked at her artwork searching for an answer. Rivulets of water ran like tears down from the beautiful mist-shrouded mountains she’d created. She frowned, turned the ruined painting over on the table, then looked up and smiled gently at her friend. Someone was going to die.

“Maybe I better go,” she said as her mind switched from the creative right side to the analytical left

Name A Horse Novel

Bought a horse last week and I need to think of a barn name for him. Perhaps you can help? His registered name is Country Wild. He's a tall, skinny thoroughbred off the track about a year, and totally not what I was looking for. Except for his mind. He has the best attitude and the calmest disposition of any TB I've ever known. He actually stands when I ask him to, goes when I want him to, and whoas when it's my idea. I'd thought I was too old for a ex-race horse, so it's good to know there's at least one more face in the wind, get up and gallop dream chaser in my life.

Maybe I'll quit working on my mystery for awhile and write about an over fifty, bad backed writer finding the one horse on which she can fulfill her dream of riding in the local Hunters Division of the Steeplechase before she turns sixty. She lives in a small town in the country and is experiencing writer's procrastination. Browsing Equine.com instead of working she stumbles upon this horse. The horse's name could be Novel...

A Tiny bit of Painted Black

OK, I've decided to start posting a paragraph from the mystery novel I'm working on once a week. The book is titled Painted Black. Only one paragraph, taken out of context will be posted. Just some samples of my writing. Let me know what you think. Thanks, Deborah
Ok, here goes. This paragraph is from Chapter Two

“I don’t suppose you know who I am?” He drew in his already concave stomach and hitched a thumb in the black studded belt he wore. “I’m in charge around here. Got that baby ready for you.” He nodded toward the jeep. Brown juice oozed from between his teeth when he smiled. His breath had the sour smell of whiskey, and his eyes became silver slits, sharp as knives. “Name’s Peter Lynch.” He cocked his hips. “Big Peter most women call me once they get to know me.” His weak chin rose. “Want anything you come to me. I make the decisions.”

My Novel Painted Black- It's A Mystery

My novel, sigh, has turned into a mystery. That's good and not so good. I've always intended it to be a mystery, just not the mystery its presenting at the moment. I can't seem to put on those final finishing touches. They keep falling off into the delete pile.

Someday it will be good enough to submit to agents, at least I hope so. I've written the whole thing, that was easy. It's the little bitty part called revisions that seems to have turned into a task as gargantuan as King Kong. Especially those pesky first few pages. No matter what brilliant idea I have for a first sentence, when I re-read it the next day, it, well it sucks.

Maybe I'm starting in the wrong place? You see that a lot in agents complaints, this writer started the book before it got interesting. Lop off the first five chapters. I've tried that and my special readers lamented the loss of some juicy tidbit or another. Then I tried a prologue to heighten the tension. Writer's Digest forum readers said I gave too much away.

Hmm, I guess I'll go back to the beginning, where I first found my protagonist Kate Callahan. She's lying on the veranda of a Southern Mansion and tells the man who offers her a hand up she wants to hang him. Do you think that's a good enough hook?