A couple of years ago, I started writing a comic mystery novel. It would have been the first novel in a series, and I was planning for each book to have a central mystery, with a long-term story arc that would stretch across ten books or so in the series.

My protagonist was an American secret agent who had just been laid off. Stranded in New York with no marketable skills, he takes to solving crimes for under-the-table payments in order to get by.

A couple of chapters into it, I told my agent what I was up to. He was unenthusiastic. He didn't like the plot, and didn't like the idea that the proposal was for a series character. There were probably some other gripes, but those were the main two.

So last night after The Starter Wife finished up (and I'm comfortable enough with my masculinity to admit that I watched it with my wife and rather enjoyed it), a new program starts up. It's called Burn Notice. Guess what it's about?

Secret Agent? Check.
Unemployed? Check.
Turns Private Dick? Check.
Cash Payments? Check.
Loopy Ex-Girlfriend? Check.

It even started the way I started my novel, with the agent out on one final job that turns into hash. Only in the TV series, the agent's life was derailed in the middle of things, and the why seems to be the ongoing mystery. In mine, the way he handled the job was enough to prove that he was no longer relevant, and his life went into the toilet during his debriefing.

Ah, well. This isn't the first time something like this has happened.

So, more pages for kindling. I wish some folks would just shut up and let me write. Or at least take some of my ideas seriously.

Or maybe I should just ignore people and write anyway. There's no terrible sin in having a closet full of unsold manuscripts, I suppose.

Listening: "Right Through You" - Stan Ridgway (Partyball)

Okay, it only took me eight weeks to get back here. Not bad, I guess, considering that I really thought hard about not coming back at all. But in the end, I think I really can't help myself. I really can't stop.

("No. Really. I can quit anytime")

Anyway, in the time since I pulled the plug on White Moments nee The Word Foundry, things have been busy, and in a way they haven't. My mother has been in and out of a nursing home for physical rehab, and we've been scrambling to get my daughter ready for a trip overseas (she's now back), another trip to a church work camp (she's there now), a trip to Saint Paul to see my son (going with my wife soon), and then an extended stint in Siberia via Rotary Youth Exchange.

Meantime, I was also tapped by my buddy Henry J to be a Producer/Director for his show Random Acts of Music. I've been on a couple of shoots already, calling the shots (sort of) and having a great time, getting new wrinkles in my brain from doing something new.

All this time, there had been nary a thought of picking up a pen again, unless it was to scribble down some song lyrics... until tragedy struck.

About two weeks ago, a young white woman who was nine months pregnant disappeared from her home, leaving her two-year old alone in the house to fend for himself for a day and a half until he was found by a family member. What he told them was chilling: "Mommy was crying." "Mommy broke the table." "Mommy in rug."

This ballooned into a community wide search, with 1,800 volunteers beating the bushes at one point. Finally, the girl's boyfriend, a philandering black cop who was cooperating with authorities, apparently broke and told where the girl was - miles away, in a nature reserve north of Akron.

But not before the media descended like locusts on the town, with the likes of Greta Van Susteren joining the fray and leading a televised tour through the woman's house. It reached the point where one local paper, the Massillon Independent, quit covering the disappearance and instead covered the coverage. The media storm became the story.

And when I realized that, something clicked inside of me. I realized that there was something in the idea of the media becoming the story and overshadowing the actual news. And I knew it had to go in my long-thought-about UFO novel. So I've been eyeing my custom made pen and stack of yellow legal pads and thinking... a lot...

I may do it. It may take a few years, especially since I'm thinking about writing it by hand. But it might be worth it. Hey, it's not like I have tons of readers out there waiting on me, or a publishing deadline.

Meantime, things are going to get ugly here before this whole case is tried and over. The NAACP, which was starting to protest the media's painting of the black cop as being guilty (I don't think they had at all, at least not locally) has gone silent, but some black women are up in arms. Their opinion is that the cop kept dating white women, but when the time came to help hide the body, he called on a "sistah" (their word, not mine) to do it (and yes, a black woman has been arrested as an accomplice). And now some white supremacists have hit town and are passing out fliers as a warning to white women, comparing this to the O.J. Simpson case.

See, this is why I only want to deal with UFO's.

(For local coverage of this case, here's the index page for the story from the main local paper on the case, the Canton Repository.)

Listening: "Hell Bent" - Kenna (New Sacred Cow)

Blow the fire extinguisher into the circuit boards one more time. Blink and wave the smoke away from your face. Yeah, it wasn't pretty, but it looks like we made it through, all right. A lot of stuff got fried on the way through, but we're pretty much intact.

Okay, now that we're here, what do we do next?