Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts

Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Real Bill





The nice man pictured above is my husband Bill, to whom I refer in my posts.

My (unfinished, unpublished) cozy murder mystery is set on the Dancing Bee Farm, a place much like The Dancing Bean Ranch. The protagonist is an amateur sleuth who, as luck would have it, is a lot like me.

Originally, she was to have a husband, much like mine. I was still outlining the story, however, when I realized the perils in that decision. Would he be a second protagonist? An antagonist? Relegated to a walk on? More troublesome was how to write about a real person--a person I live with--in a way that wouldn't raise, well, let's just say issues.

I finally decided to plunk him into backstory and made my beekeeping sleuth a widow. When the real Bill came home that night, I broke the news that I'd had to kill him.

Being a good natured sort of man, his only response was to ask: "Did I suffer?"

"No," I told him. "But it's just as well you not cross me. After all, as long as I'm still working on this bad boy, I can go back and change that."