The spookiest winter story I’ve heard recently wasn’t crafted by Stephen King or Clive Barker. I heard it on the news.

A married couple in Oregon decided to go up into the mountains to get a rare breed of pine tree for their Christmas tree. This happened about a week ago. They haven’t been heard from since.

While a chupacabra pet franchise might scare some people more, this is in my eyes a whole lot eerier. Just the unknown aspect of it. And the fact that it actually happened.

OK, I know Minnesota is famous for its snow, but this is almost silly.

A person might need low cost health insurance to recover from stats like this: although forecast by today to receive only 2-4 inches, we already have 6-8 inches of the white stuff. That’s supposed to grow to 12-18 inches by the end of Friday when things die down; but I’m betting it could top 20 inches, maybe even 24, by the time the actuals come in.

Still, with all this snow, there’s a lot of free time available to me now I wouldn’t otherwise have; I’m going to make sure I get some writing done with at least part of it.

Good ideas are as hard to come across as affordable Ferrari parts. But after I posted it, I realized I kind of stumbled across one.

That thing I wrote about a kid with seemingly incurable acne, but who finally finds something that starts to work, but with dark consequences? That’s pure gold, now that I think about it.

Sure, it’s more of a horror concept than mystery/suspense, but… there’s something there. Hopefully I can find some time to work on that, before someone rips it off and makes it their own.

Heh.

One of the big questions my mystery novel series is going to test is whether a series of mysteries set in the upper Midwest can be compelling to readers nationwide. I’ve set my characters in a fictional amalgam of my experiences living for nearly five years in northwest Wisconsin.

You see, Stephen King made Maine work for horror. But seldom to commercial writers who write novels set outside of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago do well. Only in mysteries can you sometimes break through. After all, Tony Hillerman’s novels are set in the southwest and they do well. I think there’s even someone who sets their mysteries in Myrtle Beach South Carolina.

But will Hope, Wisconsin be compelling? I hope so. I’m filling it with enough interesting characters that it ought to be. But only time will tell.

Quite often, writers meet eccentric characters in real life but then hesitate to make their own characters quite so quirky. And yet it is the quirkiness in characters that makes them memorable.

Nearly two decades have past since David Lynch’s Twin Peaks hit the airwaves, and I can still recall unique characters like the Log Lady and the Man From Another Place with greater clarity than who Jerry dated on a particular episode of Seinfeld.

Too much these days is made of issues like relatability and makes characters an “everyman/everywoman” type. But that’s just the opposite of what good writing does.

Tell me about the kid who keeps trying acne treatment that don’t work, but then finds one that does… but with dark consequences… and then you have me. Tell me about the guy who asks a gal to prom with no self-esteem problems because he’s the quarterback on his high school team, and you’re telling me about just about every character like that who’s ever appeared on page or screen.

So I say, let the quirkiness commence! It’s the key to making your characters unique.

While I am still working on my mystery novel, my sermon and commentary writing has taken up more time than I had anticipated this past month or two. Certainly, I don’t mind the sacrifice of novel-writing time; my ministry work is more important to me, after all.

Yet I do quite look forward to digging back into the world I’ve created for this novel. For those interested in suspense, there’s a lot of tension; for those interested in a supernatural touch, there’s a haunting; for those looking for disability appeal, they’ll be interested in Zach’s parents. There’s a lot to like about the cast of characters I’m assembling.

I just wonder if they’ll mind having the holidays off?