Floating - A Seattle Mystery

Join a quirky cast of characters as they navigate themselves through the streets and waterways of Seattle.

Sheila Jackson works on a crab boat with her brothers in Alaska, but spends the off-season cracking jokes while she drives tourists around in an amphibious vehicle.

Steven Munchausen keeps trying to strike it rich but his schemes always seem to circle the drain.

The novel begins:

Nestled in between the cold, gray waters of Puget Sound and the dark green wrinkles in the earth, Seattle is often shrouded in mist and rain. All that moisture has a way of getting under your skin, or invading your thoughts. Some people can take it, some folks can’t. The short, dark days and long nights of the rainy season push those folks too far. The perfect summers beneath the bluest skies you’ve ever seen can even help tilt a mind past the point of no return.

Of course when you’re normal, you don’t think about the weather like that, but who’s normal anyway? With all the bluffs and high rise condo towers in the city, lots of people think that all that rain looks pretty good when it finally pools into the lakes and runs into Puget Sound. When you’re floating face down in the ship canal, you don’t get to continue the debate about where normal stops and crazy starts.

Last month I jumped into the new campnanowrimo.org on a whim to spark my creativity. I’ve been participating in the November sessions of nanowrimo for four years, and I usually spend the last two weeks of October thinking about the story line for the project. I spent an hour thinking about the plot on July 31st before I committed. Now I have a first draft that clocks in at 53,000 words, but I still need two more writing sessions to wrap it up.

So, here’s my current problem. I have one book in proof form that I’m editing and another draft that needs a little massaging. That leaves me with three works in progress that I need to get whipped into shape before I dive into another project in November! I just updated the cover art for the e-book version of Cheap Tequila, which was released into the wild in March. I got a couple of nice reviews on GoodReads, but I need a couple more on amazon.

I also need some guinea pigs.

I need a few good readers that want to be the first to lay their eyes on the three new projects.

Project 1: A story set in Hoquiam, WA that involves some mystery and a sasquatch. There’s something for everyone in this book, unless you’re looking for another recipe for pozole, that’s not in here. You will find an account of a chainsaw juggling act that goes terribly wrong and you’ll find out why a bigfoot doesn’t need to yell like Chewbacca.

Project 2: The newest story, which is a vampire novel set on the Island of Hawaii. If you’ve ever wanted to explore lava tubes or hear from an 800 year old teenager, this might be for you. This is the beginning of a three book series, so put on your seat belt.

Project 3 (Floating): A quirky little mystery with some wacky characters thrown in for good measure. This story uses Seattle as a backdrop and actually has some autobiographical material stirred in. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what part of the spicy mix it is. You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, and you might crave a Dick’s cheeseburger before the tale is done.

If you think you can stomach a few typos and want to read and advance copy of any of these books, leave me a comment or an email.

Steven Munchausen keeps rounding up odd jobs to
make ends meet. He’s a bouncer, a bartender and
would-be educator, trying to teach the children of
Seattle to be frightened of strangers offering free
candy.

Gretchen, Suzi, Marie and Sheila might be able to
catch lightning in a bottle with their fledgling all-girl
rock band, if they can keep Suzi, the dentist, from
tinkering with the lyrics.

The jokes will make you laugh, if your fear of blood
doesn’t get to you first.

What is it about all that water that drives some
people crazy?

Read on and you might figure it out.

Then… I’m going to do an edit of this story and get a few proofs printed for beta reading. So, if anyone wants to volunteer to read my wacky story, let me know.

Then… I have to dust off the other two and get them polished up.

Plus… I have to start another project, but not until this year’s wrimo is written.

I need to look up the name of this one...

“Can we get some more pizza?” Andy asked Sharon as they walked slowly down the hill to the apartment.

“I think you’ve had enough for today,” she said, reading the label on his prescription. “You could sell these pills for about five hundred bucks if you knew where to do it.”

“I don’t want to share,” he said, enjoying the feeling the drugs gave him. The high was much softer than the pot he had been smoking. Everything felt like memory foam, including his head, which suddenly fell off his neck and bounced on the sidewalk.

“What are you doing?” Sharon yelled as Andy bent down to chase something along the ground.

“MY HEAD!” he yelled, still hallucinating.

Sharon jumped ahead and in front of him, stopping his head from its downhill course and bouncing back up onto his neck.

“Wow, thanks. You’re my best friend,” he said, trying to hug her.

Sharon let him hang on her shoulders as she looked at the label on the pill bottle to check how strong the pills were. “How many of these did they give you?”

“None yet. When I woke up, the nurse pulled my pants down and gave me a shot in my ass,” he said, rubbing his derrier.

“I think you’d feel better if you just hung out on the couch for the rest of the evening,” she said, grabbing his arm to continue the walk down the hill.

Sharon kept him on an even keel until they reached the apartment building when he started asking about the battlestar. She didn’t have any idea what he was asking about and didn’t respond, not wanting to get involved in his drug induced fantasy. Once she had gotten blankets and pillows arranged on the couch, Andy crawled in and went to sleep. She figured she could wake him up in a couple of hours to give him another happy pill to dull the pain.

She walked back outside to find some kind of vegetarian food to eat for dinner. There wasn’t anything in the apartment but energy bars and moldy bread. She remembered the buddhist themed cafe on the next block and got some rice and vegetables to take out and ate on the concrete wall above the freeway, watching the sun set over Puget Sound.

As the twilight faded, she got up and walked back towards the apartment. She was tempted to buy another coffee when she got to the cafe on the corner, but decided that she had better get some rest. Andy was still sleeping on the couch when she opened the door. She quietly set her self up in the bed and watched television until she fell asleep. It wasn’t long before she woke up staring at the television, now on a completely different show.

“Andy!” someone down in the alley yelled.