Gus, I'd be extremely unlikely to write a straight detective, unless I had him doing it a la Josephine Tey: bored, investigating a historical unsolved mystery, stumbling across the ghost story.

My mystery-solvers aren't detectives, they're just people who accidentally come across a situation.

Deb, I added it to the previous post, but I just thought of "Wish You Were Here." Sort of made to order, isn't it? If the length is right?

I wonder if I can pull it off?

Sure you can.

My mystery-solvers aren't detectives, they're just people who accidentally come across a situation.

Well, sure. I was using the term generically. It seems that the role is core to mystery writing, carrying a badge or license or not.

I don't think much of Coben, actually, Deb. Pretty unthrilling thrillers, imo. Maybe his greatest mystery should be "Who is this guy blowing?" That was rude, wasn't it?

Heh. So long as the folks at Tor - I'm acquainted with a few of them - check Coben's editing, I could care less. Because, well.

Hmmm. Hmmmm.

Bev, I need to be careful about too many elements; the dark erotica in Wish You Were Here is probably too much, and the fact that there's also a scifi element to it, while probably pleasing Tor, would likely scatter what they want.

Eh, I'll mull this over and see what I can come up. 3500 words is a day's work when I'm on a roll, so if something suggests itself, and I actually get on said roll, I'll be begging for betas.

Right here if you need me. I'll bow to your knowledge on Wish You Were Here. I'd just like it to see wide readership because I think it's dark and dangerous and tremendously well written and I'd like it to give somebody else the heebies it gives me.

Oh, I agree - scary shit. But it's a horror story essentially, and this one is through membership in the Mystery Writers of America.

Still, dark, ghosty, supernatural, attachment. Something in me is in one majorly weirdo headspace, since my brain went to a double haunting, killer and prey, with a protagonist/detective dangerously inclined to Stockholm Syndrome...

Well.

ANother for the Bells challenge. The quoted language is from Joni Mitchell.

Distant Mirror

Again and again the same situation for so many years...

I sit, and I wonder. I'm looking at my own history, and wondering at myself. Apparently, there was a point at which I wanted to be alone with one particular man so badly, I made myself invisible to the rest of the world.

Tethered to a ringing telephone in a room full of mirrors...

Something falls on the back of my hand: tears, cheap and hard, fixing nothing.

In the far distance, my youth rings like cathedral bells. I wonder what is left of me. I wonder what I need.

I've been reading mystery anthologies a bit recently, and the stories are often very divergent from the "standard" mystery format.