Crazy Cozy Mysteries-Cooking with Thieves

Today is the big book launch for two Cozy mysteries! In celebration they are hosting a Crazy Cozy Blogfest. One fun mystery tour which you can read about here. Make sure you take the whole trail and visit some of the other stories as well!  
These are the rules:

Come up with a wacky theme, a zany sleuth, a crazy setting for your OWN Crazy Cozy Mystery idea.

Include:
1)  Sleuth (age, occupation, maybe a little family info)
2)  Sidekick (either friend or foil, but someone who always seems to be around)
3)  Setting (town, city, or other sort of place)
4)  Theme (go nuts)
5)  Twist (be as creative as you like)

Write it up in 150-250 words (so short)--for the blogfest portion anyway—we want people to be able to read a bunch of these without too much burden. Keep the traditions in mind, but we are judging on entertainment value--which we enjoy most, not how realistic it is to make a best seller. We want people to laugh.

My Story idea is about a gang of thieves working as cooks on a cruise boat, hope you get a laugh.

Cooking with Thieves

As a retired police detective addicted to crossword puzzles, Kat was not the kind of gal to take things lightly. She was hard as nails, a penny pincher and not the least bit frivolous. So when she was given a Mexican cruise from her two children as a birthday present, she had half a mind to give it to her spinster sister instead.

“It will be good for you Mom. Dad died 5 years ago, and it is about time you had some fun. You might even meet someone.” They insisted until she gave in, unaware that she was about to sail off into a ship load of trouble. A stowaway cat with thieving paws and a nose for danger was not the kind of friend she expected to meet. When Kat finds herself in the middle of a mysterious death on board the M/S Fantasy and a crew full of suspicious characters, her only back up turns out to be a dirty yellow cat with a taste for gold. Together they uncover a smuggling ring that is run by a gang of vicious cooks, and in a game of cat and mouse they fight to stay alive.

 ************************************
 Links:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Indie Bound
Confessions of a Watery TartLinks:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Indie Bound
Mystery Writing is Murder

Come back tomorrow to see what Eye Spy is up too!

Another Life

Another life

The pitch:

Desperate to make sense of her reoccurring dreams and nightmares, Emma seeks the help of a therapist that specializes in past life regression. What she uncovers sets her on a quest to find one man who holds the key to finding the happiness she so longs for.

Flash fiction using 4 of 5 prompts including a poem-Total word use 199

---Flashes of light danced before my eyes
Another life just passed in disguise
More memories to leave behind
More scars to heal this battered mind…

From a distance children were playing amongst the debris. All of them looked familiar. Before I could place the faces another image appeared. My heart recognized this small boy chasing a ball before my mind could grasp the fact that he was once again gone. Watching from a distance I could see two people sitting together under the remains of a concrete bridge. He was crying as he leaned over a rusted bridge support and stroked her wet hair. The cut on his leg would heal, but his heart might not. Sadness swept over me as I recognized the woman’s face as my own. In one quick flash my life had passed before my eyes. 

There were no more surprises and with calmness never felt before, I opened my eyes and saw the doctor staring at me with curiosity. “So how do you feel?”

“I understand the dreams now… but the nightmares, will they go away?”

 As I left the doctor’s office this "other life" made me more determined than ever to find him.

Please feel free to critique my writing.

If you liked my entry (number 10) you can vote for me, and find out more about the criteria for this challenge HERE.

To read about Rachel Morgans Book launch please scroll down to the previous post.

Killing the Fat Man

The Fat Mans Disguise

Now who of you out there want to lose some of that fat that has set up residency around different parts of your body? With summer on its way, it won’t be long before we are shedding our clothes and it would be nice to shed off some of that excess weight as well. Common sense tells you that there is no fast lane to that slimmer and more attractive you, but if someone tells you that there is a way then you want to believe them. Am I right? Well that is where the fat man steps in and grabs your attention. The fat man I am speaking of lives in the disguise of a beautiful slim woman who tells you how fat she used to be before she tried this miracle and proven product.

This fat man lives all over the internet and is getting trickier at getting your attention. He knows just when to strike, who to aim after, and which words of seduction to use. Now I have trained myself well to avoid looking at these ads while waiting for pages to load, but I was finally caught in the fat mans’ net and lured into a “Try it, you are under no obligation” and other such promises fantasy land. The fat mans’ diet is our vulnerability and he gets fat with our money. This time my money, as I swallowed the words fed me and clicked the fatal send button.

What I got in the mail were pills to speed up my metabolism and stable my blood sugar, as well as patches to wear that would “Detox” me and get rid of all that evil stored in my body. Hey, it was free and I was under no obligation to continue my subscription. Happily I swallowed a pill with my meal and spent the whole night feeling sick. The next day a skeptical me researched this miracle pill and found others that experienced the same thing. They also warned about trying to cancel their subscription with exhausting results and a much emptier wallet. No way was I going to fall into that trap so I wrote the company and cancelled any future packages of misery. That is when I found out that I was under obligation to buy one package at full price before cancelling any future orders. Stupid, that’s me, and I should have done the research first. In a hurry to swallow a miracle I just jumped right into the fat mans’ Net and like a fish out of water, I should have known better.

Let my lesson be one to you. Do not believe the Fat man; do not click on his promises while you are waiting to download. Stay away from companies like Formlife, and promises like Corexin and Life Detox. The only way to kill the fat man is to ignore him. We both know that there is no way to lose those extra pounds other than a healthy diet and exercise. Don’t let the fat man fool you too.



Back to mythology tomorrow, just couldn't stop myself from writing this today.

Street Corner

This caught my attention and I thought to myself, "Oh no...Is it that time already?  Yes, it's time for the First Campaign Challenge of the 4th campaign!  Here is the challenge:

Write a short story/flash fiction story in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, including a poem. 

Begin the story with the words, “Shadows crept across the wall”. These five words will be included in the word count. 

If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional), do one or more of these:end the story with the words: "everything faded." (also included in the word count)include the word "orange" in the story.write in the same genre you normally write make your story 200 words exactly!

In a panic I searched through my notebook of scattered ideas and here is my entry:

 Street Corner

Shadows crept across the wall. She watched them in fascination as she swallowed the pills. Her orange nail polish was chipped, her stockings torn and her cheap dress barely clung to her body. She was mans' every tattered dream and not proud of it. Night after night she waited in the same shadows for someone or something else to come along. The cold and the hunger dodged her attention; all that remained real were the corners on the street in front of her and the sound of her breath. Tonight she felt lucky. There was something strange in the air, something else was coming, and when it turned the corner she caught her breath in surprise.

Beauty floated towards her on a haunting melody and everything stopped to listen. Rats held each others  tails; their meals still stuck in their teeth glistened in the streetlight. Foreign bugs stopped their chattering and sat quietly on the wet pavement. Even the air stopped breathing and yesterdays’ news clung to brick walls with ink stained pages. Beauty was no stranger to this street, its name was death and it knew where it was going as it approached her...so at last, everything faded.

My Darling Someone

Not so very long ago a friend of mine was talking about writing his profile for an online dating service, "just in case." Now I know that he is happily married and was not really planning on using any such service, but the thought of him ever having to join the "dating game" terrified him. I don't blame him. Being married for many years is nothing short of a miracle. Even couples getting married seem to be a rare thing. There are more obituaries in the papers than wedding announcements. I have been thinking a lot about love lately, not surprising considering the time of year it is and the date on todays calendar. Love is starting to look like fast food. Online dating, and flirting in a make believe world through an avatars eyes is an easy hook up. Look around you; chances are that you know at least one couple that has met through the screen of "Data Matchmaker." I don't know, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe falling in love has become nothing more than a processor, and when the thrill is gone another model comes along. Has the world got a shortage of romance, are we running out of love? Do young people even know what love is? So I sat myself down and decided to write a letter to my unborn grandchild.

My darling someone,

Close your eyes and know that I have been thinking about you even before you were born. You are only a dream of mine today, but someday maybe these words will find you in a real world, whether I am there with you or not. There is so much that I would like to share with you; time, places, people, things, feelings and thoughts. A tapestry of everything that is important to me. Trust me; take my hand and I will show you what love is made out of. Its fabric is the most important thing I could ever share with you. There is a place inside your heart where all things are possible, where dreams are born and courage is found. You could get there without me but you could never get there alone. 

Every day there are so many discoveries to make, some grand some rather simple. It is the simple things in life that tend to please the most. Feel passion in the things in life that give you pleasure and you will find them everywhere. In the sounds of day and night, pleasure is laughter when you hear children playing, the birds singing, the wind in the trees, the rain against hot pavement, a fire crackling. Pleasure is love pressed into passion. The silent sounds of night such as soft moans, or the gentle humming of utilities and the even breathing of the body next to you in bed. Pleasure is the unexpected kiss and the way your lover reaches for your hand. It is the smile from a stranger a letter from a friend, the way a puppy cuddles up next to you, and the way you feel when you come in from the cold. It is looking into the eyes of someone and knowing that everything is going to be alright.  Pleasure is in the way things smell. The familiar smell of your lovers’ skin, the smell of a baby and that soft clean body in your arms, the smell of your favorite dinner in the oven, the way the air smells when leaves are burning, or just after a rain. 

Being loved by someone is the greatest pleasure of all. Those three simple words, “I love you”, whether they are from a lover, a friend, a child, a parent, a brother or sister, there is nothing that can compare to being loved. Love is a tapestry of everything and yet it is nothing if left unshared.

With love,

Your future grandmother

Happy Valentines’ Day, I hope you make the most wonderful tapestry to share with someone special. 

Revised from an earlier post of mine.

Origins

Siv

 Inspiration is born some where. Small seeds of it grow in different places, some growing wild and some carefully planted. DL Hammons at Cruising Altitude together with his co-hosts Katie Mills (Creepy Query Girl) Alex J. Cavanaugh and Matthew MacNish  (Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment),  would like us to share the origin of our inspiration. What made us want to write and how did we get started? This is a ORIGINS blogfest, and here is where my seed was planted:
  
Siv is the Norwegian name of a weed that grows in marshes. Isolated stalks, hardy and sometimes ornamental, they tolerate most extreme conditions growing where few other plants can. Whether they knew it at the time or not, my parents could not have picked a name that would suit me any better. Learning to adapt was never a choice but a matter of necessity, as we moved from town to town in a beaten up station wagon and a trailer full of old furniture and boxes. Our father was always busy chasing a new dream, and we would sit in the back seat surrounded by cigarette smoke as he sprouted off about how great things were going to be in this new town. My sisters, my brother and I, had heard it all many times before.

Always the new kid with a name that no one could pronounce, I sought refuge in the school library. Characters in books became my best friends. Friends that kept me company no matter what clothes I wore or where I came from.  It was the summer between grade school and junior high that I discovered the power of my own written words. After seeing Elisabeth Taylor in the movie Rain Tree County I decided to send my very first fan mail. Loving a good story, told on paper or film is inspiring and for some forgotten reason she inspired me.  In my very best handwriting, a carefully composed poem was folded into an envelope then sent to her agent, whose address my mother helped find. Months went by and the letter all but forgotten until one day when my mother brought me a large manila envelope addressed to me. The envelope contained an autographed picture of Elisabeth Taylor and a letter thanking me for the beautiful poem. 

The picture and letter disappeared in an unpaid storage facility, together with all the other childhood mementos of mine. Once again my father had to pack us and his dreams into a beaten up station wagon, leaving most of our things behind. What I did take with me was the desire to keep on writing and it has stayed with me ever since.

Writers Take Note

Writers' Platform Building Campaign 

 

When I first started blogging almost a year ago, I saw these badges on many of the blogging sites I had come across. It didn't take long before I found my way to Rachaels blog and discovered what the Writers Platform Building Campaign was all about. Unfortunately my timing has been off, that is until now.

  

Rachael Harrie of Rach Writes  is once again hosting the Write Campaign which aims at helping writers and bloggers make contact and build their author platforms. Finally I have the chance to participate and to make even more friends in this wonderful community. If you would like to do the same thing then check out Rachaels site now while you still have the chance.

Lost in Words

You are a time thief.  You forget to eat even though your stomach reminds you. Dirty dishes pile up around you. Often you get annoyed at the telephone or unexpected company, find a place to hide so you can think, and sneak out of bed because an idea hits you. You talk to yourself, carry a notebook and pen at all times, stare into thin air, drift away while others are talking, and talk a lot to yourself. Your computer is one of the first things you say good-morning to, and one of the last things you say good-night to. You indulge your imagination, obsess over unusual things, and tend to drive others crazy. You try to avoid tedious and boring, and find beauty in what others might consider ugly. 

You my friend are a writer and like me, lost in words. There is a lot of blog talk about conferences and workshops for writers and I find myself wondering what it would be like to hang out in a crowd, or even a group of such likeminded individuals. To actually see and talk to other writers in person would be a very unusual experience for me. Through this blogging community I have learned that I am not alone and I have met a lot of great people that are just as lost in words as I am. I have even met one of my blogger friends in person. When I was in Denver I got the chance to meet Nancy Williams, a rare treat for me considering that I have never met a real author before. Her book The Treasures of Carmelidrium is the first book that I bought online for my kindle and if you like to read Fantasy I highly recommend reading this one. You can check out Nancys blog and her book HERE. Nancy is a wonderful person who offered me great advice and the kind of comfort only another writer could give. 

Sitting alone in a foreign country full of words that I will never truly understand, it is comforting for me to know that there are places where my word friends can gather, and for a while be lost in the same words together. You are lucky if given this chance, so to Michael from “In Time” and to all my other blogger friends who are attending the SBCWI Writers Conference, enjoy yourselves! Remember that all of you speak the same language and love the same words. I am not the only person who writes in a language foreign to the country being lived in, so please share your experiences with us. What is it like to go to a Writers conference, a Workshop, a Book fair? Do you get to meet other writers in person on a regular basis, and if so are they your friends? I may be talking to myself a lot, but I like to think that sometimes someone is listening.

Falling Apart

Outside my frosty windows winter has arrived and this time it looks as if it is here to stay. Winter in Norway, cold, dark and slippery, sometimes it is even beautiful, but not today. This year winter has been a tease, throwing rain and thunderstorms one day and flutters of quickly disappearing snow the next.  When it finally arrived on Sunday, I knew it was here to stay by the large suitcase it brought with and planted firmly outside the door. The snow blower quickly went on strike so it was time to get out the shovel and toss this unwanted baggage to the side. Why is it that when you need your machines they have a tendency to break down? We have had a major run of machine strike outs. First it was the new refrigerator, then the oven top, the robot vacuum cleaner, the clothes dryer and now the snow blower. My husband has gotten into the habit of asking me as soon as he gets home if everything is working. 

So what do you do when winter crashes down on you, and your machines fail one by one? Well I decided to make them friendlier and more personal by giving them all names. After all, a lot can be said by a name. You have met Spot, here are a couple more of my friends.

Nespresso, named George after George Clooney

Wilfa Humidifier-"Willy"

We call our garbage disposal "Terminator" a nasty bugger that works in secret under counter. Yes, winter boredom has set in as well. At least I have my kindle and a nice fire to sit by. 

What do you do when things seem to be falling apart around you?

Meet Spot M-288

Nani getting to know her new friend

Also known as Intelligent Robot Vacuum Cleaner, the newest member of our family was a Christmas present from our son. At last our very own robot maid (in China.) After several feedings of electrical current and careful deliberation the men in the family resorted to reading Spots user manual. Try and try again, Spot would move around the floor eating dust, crumbs and dog hair. After just a couple of minutes the poor thing would give up, blink its red light and park itself in its little garage. There was something definitely wrong, and the diagnosis was a transplant. We waited patiently for its new heart and prayed that it would take, but it didn’t and Spot slowly just died. Luckily we were able to replace it and today a brand new spot is eating off our floors and shooting our electricity through its body. Hopefully we will not have to suffer another robot loss for a while. Technology, whatever will be next, and will we be smart enough---human enough to deal with it?

Hope everyone has a "Dust Free" week-end!

Looking for Crazy

 Your prey could many things; that blank page, the sketch book, the canvas, the instrument in front of you. They just stare and wait for you to get started. What gets me started is a state of mind, a thought, an inspiration. I am a word hunter, my weapons are forged in ink and I hunt in parts of the mind that many consider crazy.

Let’s face it, if you are a writer or an artist you are part crazy. There is something off about you, and there are many who do not understand you at all so they like to call you crazy. I decided to look up the word. On my hunt for crazy I found some of these definitions and quotes that made sense to me:

Informal departing from proportion or moderation, impractical, erratic, being out of the ordinary, unusual, distracted with desire or excitement, absurdly fond, infatuated, passionately preoccupied, obsessed.

One who is or appears insane: "To them she is not a brusque crazy, but 'appropriately passionate'" ----Mary McGrory

“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?”--- Albert Einstein

“My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said okay, you're ugly too.”  ---Rodney Dangerfield

“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.” ---Hunter S. Thompson

Looking for crazy gets me started. What does it for you?-----S.Ottem

POISON

 Gut-retching, thought consuming and physically painful. Most likely at some time in your life you have experienced being poisoned in one form or another. Like most people I am guilty of keeping a vile of my own poison, but I like to think that I have it stored away in a place so secret that even I cannot find it. Slander and gossip are the worst kind of poison. It is spread by words from mouth to mouth like a virus, and if untreated can slowly cause death. As a writer you are responsible for the words you print, as a human being you are responsible for the words you spread. One person’s poison can lead to the destruction of an others reputation, or even destroy a family. It has taken me many years to recover from the poison my ex-husband tainted my life with. To this day I can still see, still feel, the scars.

Sometimes we need a reminder about the power of our words and the path they take. Rummaging through boxes of old memories this week-end I came across a vile of poison, a stack of letters that I could not ignore. Some people might have thrown them away or burned them with ceremony in the fireplace, but the writer in me cannot destroy words, even poisonous ones. I put them back in their box and stashed them away. They serve their purpose as a reminder to do better and to be careful when I am looking for words to choose. So, what’s your poison? Think carefully.