my moment of fame

As I posted on Facebook, I won a writing contest in my new home town. The Desert Sun Newspaper asked local resident and best-selling author, Joseph Wambaugh, to write the first three quarters of a murder mystery short story, then invited readers to finish it in 500 words or less. It turned out to be quite a challenge, especially the "500 words or less" part. As anyone who knows me can attest, I'm a decent writer and public speaker, but concise is not the first description of my prose that comes to mind. In fact, I have a friend with a personalized license plate "WORDY ONE" which I have often thought would have fit me even better.

But I accepted the challenge, pecking away at it in the morning on my patio, when not writing letters to old friends or musings for this blog. It was not an easy set-up to conclude -- too many characters and potential story lines to draw together in such a short amount of space. I decided to follow the great tradition of mystery writing. I chose the least likely character as my perpetrator. Since hard-working, reliable Pepe was in my opinion the most admirable of many characters with which Mr. Wambaugh had salted the field, I chose him. Then I needed to imagine a motive, and set up the conclusion by subtle suggestion. I'll let you be the judge of whether or not I succeeded by visiting www.mydesert.com. My apologies, as it's not an easy site to navigate!