Tell Me What You Wrote...What You Really, Really Wrote

I have a question for you.

Did you write anything over the holidays?

If your answer is yes, I’m so happy for you!  It’s about time, and you have to remember that it’s never too late to begin.

If your answer is no…shame on you!

You have no excuse.  You could have written at least a paragraph or two!

Let me give you an example of what putting your mind to writing does for you:  I had planned to take most of December off from writing.  I thought I was tapped and tired.  Turns out, I was wrong.

I started thinking that it would be nice if I had managed to write a Justice Security Christmas story before I stopped for the year.  This was around the first week of the month…maybe as late as the tenth.  Then, I started thinking about what Christmas song I could use as a basis for the story…and, since The Little Drummer Boy had always been a favorite song of mine, I started thinking about that…and it occurred to me that Justice Security would, of course, have provided security and protection services for various rock bands appearing in the city.

Both Saturday In The Park and MacArthur Park were necessary to lay foundation for the upcoming Nicholas Turner/Justice Security team-up novel, Hell’s Bells. I still felt that one more short story needed to focus not just on Dexter and Louie, but feature Megan…foreshadowing upcoming events in Hell’s Bells.  Suddenly, a picture focused in my mind:  Dexter and Louie with a story from the early days of Justice Security, snowed in during a blizzard and inside a church, along with one of their clients.

The story then wrote itself.  I mentioned here that a Facebook friend thanked me for writing such an uplifting story.  Patrick Peterson, who is producing the audiobook, read the story through, and told me that it was something really special.

The story was slightly over five thousand words, and I wrote it in four days.  I was determined that it be available for you readers by December eighteenth.  I had given myself a week to write the story, and I had time left over.

So, if you didn’t write at least a paragraph over the holidays, shame on you!  Time for you to play catch-up, and, as always,

Keep reading!

Michael  (T. M.)