Friday the 20th

They’re up!

Creative People Doing Creative Things: A Murder Mystery, by Gracie Fletcher

Look It Up, by Shea Joy

The Bizarre and Untimely Death of Margaret Spoon, by Elwood Gray

Thanks again to everyone who participated!

Friday the 13th

Today’s the day — join the Valentine’s Day Mystery-Writing Challenge!

Use the crime scene below to concoct a mystery story. You pick the clues (make up all you want as you go along), produce the red herrings, and — in your grand finale — reveal the perpetrator.

Feel free to work in a round-robin with others if you like.

When you’re done, either post a comment on where I can find yours on your own website or send your story directly to me at: gotheca@mcn.org.

Next Friday, the 20th, I’ll post the three most imaginative and watertight stories.

And remember the words of Stanley Elkin:
I would never write about anyone who was not at the end of their rope.

“It was a dark and stormy night. The door of the room was closed and locked from inside. Even the high clerestory windows were shut against the rain, although their latches had long been broken. The fire sputtered on the hearth, and a book with torn pages lay open on a small table by the armchair. The cover on the parrot’s cage had been removed — unusual for this time of night — and the parrot cowered in silence on the far corner of its perch. The bottle on the small table was nearly empty. A broken glass lay under the pool table. The pool game had been left in mid-play. Only the drapes in the corners of the bookcases moved gently as pounding resounded through the room, a deafening banging on the door. And Margaret Spoon lay on the hearth-rug — dead.”

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
Diane Ackerman

No object is mysterious. The mystery is in your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle, as Sherlock Holmes