Rainy Day Writing

Stormy last night. Slept pretty good. Pretty involved dreams all night. I didn’t remember any worth writing down this time. Well, okay, there was one. I was going along as an observer on a balloon flight. Huge balloon, made up of light clear plastic, like dry cleaner bags joined somehow. Wasn’t hot air or gas, we were riding inside the bubble somehow. Anyway, I didn’t really get inside. A couple of women I’ve known were going up and inviting me along. There was a rope ladder through a hatch in their ceiling that led into the balloon, but the opening in the trap door was too small for me to get through. there was a larger opening nearby, but that led to a different balloon they had. Somehow one of them switched things so I could climb on up through the large opening and still get there. Not sure I want to cogitate too much on the connotations. That’s about all I remember of that dream, anyway. It ended about the time I crawled into the balloon. It was a large open space with a lot of braces.
I mostly intend to do some work today on my Deputy Constable Penn Sadler story. It takes place in a precinct of mostly small towns in central Texas. A fictional county and so forth that bears a great resemblance to where I grew up, and where I live now. I’m planning a series of novels for the same area. I was a bit taken aback by Bill Crider’s “Sheriff Dan Rhodes” series. He has very much tapped the same vein. I love the books, though. Encouraging to see that it can indeed be done and well.
My main character, whom I’ve named Penn Sadler, is a native of the area, which I’ve called Shin Oak. He had been a county Deputy Sheriff, spent a little time as Acting Sheriff when the previous one left office under a scandal. Penn was defeated in his run for the office by some political chicanery and left the department, which pleased both him and his new boss. Penn is a good officer, so he got a job as Deputy Constable with an old friend, Constable Sam Hart, under his local Justice of the Peace, Sara Beth Adams.
Penn keeps up with matters in the Sheriff’s Department through his old friends there, as well as friends in other state departments. Contacts he cultivated through his previous career and a few high profile cases he had helped with. These contacts serve to draw him into many of the sorts of cases a Deputy Constable wouldn’t normally handle.
I've also been consciously using my tarot system for plotting/outline both the book and the series. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out, huh? As the man said, I can hardly wait to see what I write next!

Research

I've had several other things going on lately, so a lot of my writing has taken back burner. I have, however, been spending some time in Giddings, Tx, lately and taking advantage of faster internet capability to do more research for my proposed "Small Town Texas" mystery novel series. I'll reserve the name for now. I've been able to download pix of small-towns in the area, to add to my own collection.


I do have to admit that reading the "Sheriff Dan Rhodes" series of mystery novels by Bill Crider is also a huge inspiration. I really like his use of description in the novels to really put you in the scene, and having grown up in a similar setting, I can't help reading with a continual sense of "oh, wow, I remember that!" I hope I can come somewhere close to the same result with my own book(s). I have been working on just one novel about it, but in the process it has been interesting to build a fictional town and populate it with businesses and characters drawn from my own experiences in several locations in Texas. The area of my novels will be an amalgam of my own hometown mixed with many other towns around the state. I have developed such an extensive amount of detail for my "town" and countryside that it almost has to be utilized for more than one story. There are times that it is a pastime of its own to research it.


O well, it will pay off!