Thursday 12 June 2025: Brainstorming

I slept in again on Wednesday. I don’t know why I’m so tired at the moment. It’s possible I have a cold coming, or I’m fighting a cold as the poet was exactly the same a few days ago before breaking out into a cold, and we always share these things. He went off on an early start and I went back to sleep, hitting first the Snooze button and then the Dismiss button. I woke up at ten to nine! I’m supposed to be at my desk by nine…

I topped up all of the bird feeders and the baths and drinkers, then had my dirty cuppa over my first video workshop of the day. The Christmas cozy mystery novella workshop Zoom call did happen last Friday evening, but it wasn’t uploaded until yesterday, or overnight. So I watched that first, and I don’t think she addressed my query, but I think I’ve sussed it out for myself anyway. Had I been able to attend the Zoom call myself, I would have asked her the question again, for clarification. But there were others who had made the call and whose questions, naturally, took priority.

I moved into the office and watched my next video on the desktop so I could take notes. This was Week 2 of the mystery writing classic workshop, and this time the assignment was to write a cosy mystery story. We don’t get to hand the assignments in when the workshop morphs into ‘Classic’, but the assignments are handy all the same and it went into my notebook as a job to do.

This class was so inspiring, I didn’t do anything else for the rest of the day other than brainstorm and outline short stories. The 50 murder mystery prompts workshop this week already gave me a method of working, and I wanted to see if I could apply the same method to other stories. I ended up with pages and pages of story starters and at least one story idea each for 4 different main characters: a new amateur sleuth, Marcie Craig, Stevie Beck, and a new private investigator called Taylor Costello.

The new amateur sleuth I might make Mavis Braithwaite, as I gave her such a colourful backstory for another short story and liked her so much I wanted to write more for her. And this amateur sleuth’s hobby would suit Mavis, who’s trying to enjoy her retirement in a blustery seaside town in Yorkshire. After this exercise, I didn’t just have one story idea for her, I had 5.

The only protagonist I’ll have to do some research for is the PI. But again, the exercise gave me more than one story idea for her. And yes, all of my MCs are females, although I may make the PI male yet, as it would be easier for a bloke to do things like have a wee while on a stakeout. (Stereotype much?)

Because, of course, I don’t already have enough projects to work on. But I do need short stories, for assignments, for 12 stories in 12 months, and for Words Worth Reading.

I outlined 2 stories, one for the 50 murder mystery prompts assignment and one for this month’s 12 stories in 12 months, I played around a bit more with settings, and I updated my reading log. But I was still too tired to do any catch up and called it a day.

Today I’m going to tidy up the prompts into some kind of order and see if I can find a downloadable number generator. I also have a novella to get on with as well as the short stories and the client edit.