Well, I’m nearly ready to begin writing my new mystery series that I created after I got too discouraged to continue on with my Pizza Delivery Mystery series. I’ve decided to go with a new setting, rather than trying to force the very differently-themed new series into my Hope, Wisconsin fictional setting.

All I’ll say at this point is, I’m looking West, and I won’t have to worry about researching health insurance in NC.

I’ve learned that it’s important with these concepts to play it a lot closer to the vest; I don’t want there to be any chance that my newest creation will be gobbled up by Hollywood again.

Sure, they may have had the inspiration separately; but it’s all a bit to close to the mark for me to be sure it’s only coincidence.

So, just to be safe, the first time I’ll mention details of my new mystery series in detail is when I have something in print.

Sometimes a great title comes to you in a flash. Sometimes it requires the Gulf Coast Jones Act to procure one from one’s stuck mind. Sometimes you just need to start writing and let the title reveal itself as you progress through the process of writing the novel.

The latter looks like it’ll be the case with my newest mystery novel series attempt. I can’t conjure up a title, even if someone would give me a pound of pure gold to produce one. So for the first time in a while, I’m faced with starting a novel without a title for it that I’m in love with.

Maybe that’s better.

Well, I’m back in town, well-rested after a long, fishing-centric vacation that took years to achieve. And after a lot of time out on the lake fishing, I didn’t get a chance to write anything, but I do believe that, at least for now, I’m leaning toward putting my Pizza Deliver Mystery series on hold and crafting a new series around a crime-solving Messianic Rabbi.

It’s a completely different series in subject matter; there will be no ghostly assistant nor any other supernatural element, but at least this is a direction that no one else is trying right now, and the only precedent for such a series, Harry Kemelmen’s excellent Rabbi Small mysteries, have faded from recent, fond memories.

Can a mystery-thriller with an unconventional religious angle still capture a mainstream mystery audience? Only time will tell, but if it catches on, it will be an example of me creating something with no current trend that I’d be following.

The world has plenty of supernatural mysteries right now. There’s as many people writing those as there are weight loss products in your average Walgreens. Virtually no one has tried this sort of mystery recently. It’s time to see if it’s a market that can be mined.

But don’t expect me to write too much specifically about it until the manuscript is complete and has found either an agent or an editor. I want no repeats of the Thirty Minutes Or Less tragedy.

While I’m trying to decide what might be the best franchise to own, either my pizza delivery mystery series, or a slightly less supernatural series on a crime-solving Messianic rabbi, I have to confess that if I go with the latter, the mystery novels of Harry Kemelman will be a definite influence.

Although Kemelman’s series was set in the 1960s and 1970s and focused on traditional Judaism, one would be a fool not to acknowledge his influence, which lasted right up until his 1996 death and beyond. It’s hard to find bookstores that carry his novels anymore, which is a shame because not only are they solid primers on Judaism, they are entertaining mysteries as well.

While my series will focus on a brand of Messianic Judaism that Kemelman probably wouldn’t find appealing himself, his Rabbi Small novels certainly created the forumla by which anyone should approach mixing the rabbinic with crime-solving. Shalom to his survivors.

I’m still not sure if I want to give the soon-to-be-retitled Thirty Minutes Or Less supernatural mystery series a third redo, or if I should just go in another direction entirely, trying on a different series to see if that sparks a creative burst. I’m only days away from my big, week-long fishing and quiet getaway, and I’ll have my laptop with me. It would be an ideal time to begin work on either a third go at my current series, or a great time to start a new series.

The main problem is, if I go an entirely new direction, what concept would I go with? I still want to stay in the mystery realm, I will want something a bit light-hearted. The only thing I’m not sure of is whether I’d go with a supernatural element again, since that concept is what makes my Pizza Delivery Mystery series unique.

One idea I’m batting around is mixing my knowledge of church-planting and ministry with my interest in mystery novels, and coming up with a series centered around a mystery-solving Messianic rabbi. But the concept is so niche, it might be a real hard-sell. But it would certainly help me draw from current experiences of the last few years more strongly. But at least it wouldn’t require me to have intimate knowledge of something completely foreign to me, like stainless steel drums.

In a couple weeks, my wife, my father and I are going on our first real vacation in a long, long time. Considering my wife and I never really had a honeymoon, it will be our first real getaway vacation as a couple. And as for Dad, it’s been over a decade since we went somewhere together for an extended stay somewhere.

So we’re escaping to Webb Lake in Hackensack, Minnesota for a week. It’s a place my mom and dad took me as a kid. It’s not huge, but it’s a great fishing lake. And being out on the water in a boat for several hours a day is, I think, good for the soul.

There will be a few differences from the last time I went. Mom’s no longer with us, for one. Also, we’ll have a lot more electronics with us, even if we don’t plan to use them a ton.

Still, even on a lake, checking in on email and such is nice to be able to do, even if part of a real vacation is getting away even from that.

I’ll be bringing my laptop. Not for daylight hours when I should be fishing. But for the sundown hours? I want a tool I’m comfortable with if inspiration strikes and I start a new novel, or get new energy behind my current one. And I also imagine I may work on some sermons and such, just to have some in reserve.

But fishing? Oh, you know there’s going to be some serious fishing done that week.

When is it time to let one project that you’re wrestling with too much rest and move on to a different one? That’s a question many writers struggle with more than home re-modelers struggle with deciding on the best walk in bathtubs for a split-level north woods cabin.

When I started working on Thirty Minutes Or Less, I had just found out my mom was stage three cancer and wouldn’t be with us much longer. I was dealing with the impending death of one of the closest people in my life to that point, aside from my wife. So instead of wallowing in grief, fear and self-pity, I came up with a fun, lighthearted concept for a supernatural mystery series that allowed me to work out some of my issues with mortality.

By the time Mom passed, I was at least a quarter of the way through a draft, well over 120 pages, and feeling good about seeing it through to completion. Then I had all my hard-drive issues and it’s been nothing but false starts and re-starts ever since.

For a long time, I blamed this on losing that 120-page draft-in-progress. But really, I think at this point, the main reason behind my lack of enthusiasm for the project is that whatever grief-coping mechanism sparked the energy behind the idea is something I’ve more or less worked through now, so writing the novel has become a chore again.

So I still like the concept of a pizza delivery guy who solves mysteries with a ghostly sidekick who just happens to be the ghost of the first murder victim he stumbles across? Yup. It’s a fun concept and definitely a novel worth writing, perhaps even the framework for a solid series.

But is it the novel I should be working on right now? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe there’s something new in me, something more full of energy and verve that would make me eager to sit down and write that story.

Maybe the biggest problem with Thirty Minutes or Less has nothing to do with hard drives or movie-makers who are working on a project of the same title. Perhaps it’s just that this particular novel’s season has past, and if I want to work on a project that I can finish, I need to find a new project than I’m excited about, instead of trying to re-create one I lost when a hard-drive crashed, and have been trying to recapture ever since.

Many authors love to refer to popular music in their fiction; for novels like Bret Easton Ellis’ 80s classic, Less Than Zero, the book’s “playlist” was almost key to capturing a sense of time and place, though as the years roll on, I’m sure it just reads as dated and hard to relate to, for today’s college-age readers.

What’s worse is when a forty-something to sixty-something writer starts referring to favorite musical acts as though they are all the current rage in a present-day story setting. It pays to do the research of flipping on a Top 40 station, or firing up iTunes, just to see that Tiffany and Debbie Gibson are aging moms who’ve let themselves go, and gals like Katie Perry and Jessie James are currently all the rage. It’s a lot riskier, you see, than referencing modern furniture.

Of course, there’s a limit to the usefulness of pop music references in any work of fiction; even for top writers, it’s approximately two years from manuscript to publication, so anything they write is automatically doing to look dated if they include something too trendy. Will anyone remember Katie Perry in 2012?

Food for thought.

I’m not big on composing diet pill reviews, but I am an experienced review writing; for over a decade, I wrote videogame reviews before just burning out and running out of steam on it just over a year ago.

I miss the free videogames, of course, but my life is a lot simpler since dropping that part of my career. I still keep my hand in it with my videogame blog, but now I only review titles I buy and (generally) am interested in reviewing. It makes a big difference and leads to better reviews, I think.

One of the unique opportunities my day-job at my church has given me recently is the chance to adapt some of Stan’s messages into children’s lessons. Taking complex material on the names and titles for Yeshua is heady stuff and hard to get across to kids without a lot of thought about their developmental level.

It’s not as ritzy as, say, some Philadelphia jobs, but I enjoy the challenge. I decided to get across the general concept of why names and titles are important as the first order of business. To make it understandable to kids, I talked about them meeting a strange kid on the streets to introduces himself as Bobby, and acts like he knows all about them, but they don’t recognize him. Then Bobby says, “Oh, you know me as VikingsFan2000 on Facebook” and suddenly they know who that kid is. Why? Because of the name they know him by.

It’s quite a bit removed from Stan’s material, but I think an illustration like that can introduce kids to the concept of why names and titles are important in a way they can relate to.

On their day off, some folks like to puff on those trendy new electronic cigarettes. Not me; I’m not a smoker. No, instead, I like to find time to write… or read, as inspiration to get back to writing more on my novel.

Believe it or not, I’m contemplating a 3.0 start on my novel, not because of losing my progress (yay!) but this time because I’m rethinking the way I’m rolling out the narrative; while it helped get me past my writer’s block on the novel after I lost my first draft to a crashed hard drive over a year ago, I now think that the “flash forward and tell a third of the novel in flashback” approach may not be the right take, from a dramatic standpoint.

I mean, look, my protagonist is being haunted by a murder victim he is accused of murdering, but whom he did not kill. The victim’s ghost knows this, but proving it to law enforcement? That’s another matter.

While starting the novel at a point where he’s captured and interrogated by the local and state police may be a great way to introduce all my plot elements quickly (including the fact that he’s being haunted by a murder victim he discovered), I simply can’t imagine him confessing to ANYONE that he’s being haunted, and then being allowed to go free, even if a guiltier suspect walks into the police station and confesses to the crime. It’s just too much of a stretch of credibility, even for a light-hearted murder mystery dramedy.

One of the most unique authors I’ve encountered of late is Seth Grahame-Smith. While I’m not about to go out and buy custom mugs with his name on them just yet, you have to admire his creativity.

His first novel caught my eye but never really compelled me to buy; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was an adaptation of the Jane Austen classic – he credits her as co-author – with a strong zombie-fighting subplot mixed in by Grahame-Smith. It was an interesting concept but, not being an Austen fan, it was a bit lose on me.

His latest is Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter, and looks far more promising. Disguising literary classics and history lessons as occult fad fiction is a unique take, and hopefully Grahame-Smith can get a couple more out before others catch on and start flooding the market with copycat fiction of lesser quality.

The concept of making Lincoln a vampire hunter is both hilarious and a cagey strategy to make the 1860s US president relevant to the Twilight-era of teenagers. Well done, sir.