I am currently working on draft one of the Zamboni Zealot (yes, I did drop the idea for the 26th book being about cannibalism to be about something more central to Denver: the Avalanche – sorry to all of you looking forward to a gruesome zoo story). I am also in the process of working out the detailed plotline for the 27th and final book in the series, The Absent Ally.

And I am finding that the process of finishing up the series is harder than I expected.

No, it’s not that I don’t have an idea of what the mystery is, who the villain is, or how MacFarland solves the crime. Those are the easy parts.

I am having difficulty pushing myself across the finish line because I don’t want the task to be over.

When I was a consultant, I used to call this condition “Pre-project Termination Depression” or PTD. When I knew that a project was almost over, I would get depressed. My work would be completed, I would have to say goodbye to a lot of people I had worked closely with for three intense months, and I would be moving on to a new assignment.

I suspect this kind of a psychological reaction occurs in many areas of human endeavor. In one sense, it’s hard to believe that such a reaction should exist. After all, completing a project should be a source of joy, filling one with a sense of accomplishment.

But as a writer, I have lived with MacFarland, Pierson, Rufus, Lockwood, and all the others for more than five years now.

I don’t want to say good-bye to them.

But The Hot Dog Detective series deserves its ending, and I will suck it up and push ahead.

 

I must confess. There are some people I am incredibly loyal to. My tax accountant, who keeps me out of jail, my gardener, who knows that he should never cut those flowers that look like weeds (they’re the only ones I’ve been able to grow in my garden), and most especially, my hairdresser.

I’ve had the same hairdresser for more than twenty years. She knows what color my hair should be (so that I look young and svelte), what length my hair should be, what styles look good on me, and she knows how to tell me how stupid some of my stylistic wishes are without making me feel as stupid as I am.

And fortunately, she’s not a murderer.

But in The Harried Hairdresser, she is a murderer. The problem is, she’s only a part of the puzzle that Mark MacFarland must solve.

In my former life, I travelled a lot. To twenty-six countries, twenty-seven states, and one territory. In all those travels, I have met a lot of remarkable people. People who have overcome handicaps, circumstances, and life’s impediments to become extraordinary people.

One such person is the protagonist of The Groping Gardner, Tomas Aleciades, also known as El Tentador. He had a promising career as an architect, but blindness appeared to end that path in his life. He, like most of us, fell into his life’s work more by chance than choice, but he transformed that bit of ill fortune into an amazing ability. The ability to use smell to replace vision.

But like most people, the most wonderful of gifts often comes with a price.

Aleciades’ price is to be misunderstood, distrusted, and exploited. By a society that cares little for the less fortunate, by spoiled teenagers, and by a justice system that looks for quick solutions to thorny problems.

It’s a situation only MacFarland can handle. It’s up to MacFarland to save one of the amazing people of our world.

Here’s another trailer, this time for The Eager Evangelist.

The origins of this story go way back in my past. Similar to most teenagers, I grew up with a strong religious background at the same time that I was learning to question everything in the universe around me. At one point in my young religious career, I was asked to participate in a debate in our Sunday School about whether God existed. My opponent wanted to prove that God existed (which actually I thought was the more challenging position to take and frankly the one I wanted), but I had to prove that God didn’t exist.

Unfortunately, it isn’t hard to prove that God doesn’t exist, especially to impressionable teenagers. The result of my resounding debate victory was that the parents of many of the students became outraged that one of the Churches ministers was permitting such sacrilege to take place. He was severely reprimanded and forbidden to interact with teenagers thereafter.

Of course the minister’s message was lost in the whole debacle. God isn’t a concept of logic, but a concept of faith. It is faith that gives a person the grace that is the blessing of God.

When it came time to write this story, I wondered, what would a minister be able to accomplish if his goals were directed towards teaching people how to acquire the power of God’s grace…but for personal gain, rather than the blessings of spiritual enlightenment? Thus was born Reverent Samuel Bryce, pastor of the Church of Blessed Grace.

 

The Desperate Druggie was a great story to write. The “love” connection MacFarland has is based on a woman from Mexico who inspired me with visions of adventure, world travel, and unending mystery. And it’s partly inspired by my half-hearted attempts to “try” marijuana when it became legal in Colorado. Unfortunately, I wasn’t desperate enough to become a repeat user.

One of the things I do in my stories is combine elements of my past into a new and different interpretation of events. The Desperate Druggie is a prime example of my attempts to do just that. In Desperate Druggie, I take MacFarland out of his comfortable confines of the Denver landscape to the picturesque and wonderful environs of Cuernavaca, Mexico, a place dear to my heart.

I’m a firm believer that locations are important to a story. The location provides more than a hint of the weather. It presents a clue to the culture and values that might impact the characters in the story. People are influenced by the places around them, and while some aspects of human behavior are universal, many aspects of how we live our lives are shaped by our environment. While it is true that MacFarland didn’t spend enough time in Cuernavaca to be shaped by it’s charm, I must admit that I did.

 

 

My current work in progress, The Xanthic Xena, has been on my desk since January 1, 2020.

I started  off the year making fairly good progress on the novel, at least for the first couple of months. Not spectacular progress, but good progress. But I had two previous works at my editor’s office, and I wanted to focus my attention on those works. A story simply doesn’t sell if it’s sitting on your editor’s desk.

The problem was, my editor had run into a road block of her own.

It was the shutting down of the school system and the need for her to start home-schooling her three school-age boys.

Now, it would be fun to blame my lack of progress on The Xanthic Xena on my editor, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. She did give me frequent and appropriate nags to keep writing, praised my limited progress, and harassed me for failing to get a scene completed on schedule. But I found myself getting caught up in the daily drama of increasing numbers of Covid-19 cases, the spread of the disease around the world, and eventually the spread of the disease across the country.

The novels in the Hot Dog Detective series average about 75,000 each. Writing at a rate of 1,000 words per day, it should take me a little more than two months to complete a draft novel. The rest of the month is spend editing and rewriting, getting Beta-reader reactions, and just mulling over the story. Then it goes to my editor for final edits and formatting. And finally it gets published.

But with my current WIP, I am falling way behind, barely averaging more an a hundred words per day. Now I am paying the price of that, since each time I sit down to work on the novel, I have to spend a lot more time reviewing the plot, making sure the characters are consistently presented, and ensuring that any research I have done is still fresh in my mind.

Taking longer to write my novel doesn’t make it better. But putting in the extra work, I hope that The Xanthic Xena will maintain the reader’s interest and continue the adventures of Mark MacFarland.