Unofficial good news

I've been holding off posting this but I think I can post now, since I really did need to update my blog and put some good news around. A guy came on the Short Mystery Fiction yahoo forum and posted a link looking for stories, wanting to keep them about 1500 words, and to keep them at a 6th grade reading level or so. They are using the stories to put on the 5-minute mystery site (which will be up soon) and so I emailed him after the posting hit the forums. I told him my story idea of using each state as the mystery and writing a bunch of children's stories. I have all the information gathered and this idea has been brewing for a couple of years now (since Train of Clues won a shared second place on Armchair Interviews' fan mystery contest for Silence of the Loons, which came out at the time of the contest. I had that story edited by a professional editor, asking for advice on how to expand the story out, how to make a series of the stories, et cetera. She gave me some wonderful advice. So I've changed my mind about a dozen times about how to go about coming up with 50 stories that are different yet similar and getting the kids from one place to another without the stories feeling like fill-in the blank type things or cookie cutter stories.

I received an email from Randy saying that his partner, who is either an educational publisher or works for an educational publisher, was very excited about my story ideas. He asked if I would give him my phone number to pass to his partner so he could call me. I completed the first story Wednesday night during the last few hours of NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) and had a few more questions, so I emailed him again and put a little, btw - I haven't heard from your partner yet but I know he's probably busy and all. His partner, Tom, called me Thursday. We were on the phone for over an hour discussing my ideas and so my kind of like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego stories are being looked at a complete "Geography Mystery package" to be put in the schools, kind of as a supplement to the curricula in social studies, ELA and maybe science. Now I have to write the stories. I've written two for the 5-minute mystery site but the second one kind of sucks. I need to work on it and then write the other 20 (starting with about 20 to have on hand and then will go from there) so that we can talk more than just 5-minute mysteries.

So maybe within the next couple of years, these stories will be expanded out and will be in the schools complementing the curricula around the United States. Good news for me and this will keep me quite busy from the way Tom was talking. Let's just hope I can keep up the pace and get them turned around like he wants.