Live Bait

I recently published my story Live Bait and Doughnuts: A Kakanoe Mystery as a Kindle ebook on Amazon. It's actually been ten years since I first wrote this story, but back then ebooks didn't really exist yet. It's been sitting around gathering dust ever since, waiting for me to do something with it. I decided to just throw it out there and see what happens.

Interestingly enough, the story is actually a joke aimed squarely at the writer's group of which I was a founding member.

It all started like this: One day we were talking about doing some collaborative storytelling, and somebody--pretty sure it was Herb--mentioned some writers who had worked together to develop characters and settings and that each then wrote their own stories using those characters and settings. Each person in our group came up with a setting and then the group voted on which we would use (two were chosen) for our stories. Once the settings were in place we each created characters that would go into the grab bag of sorts from which we could all choose when creating our adventures.

Since I was really excited about the setting I'd created, I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't one of the two chosen. That was fine. I created a couple of somewhat outlandish characters around which to build stories in the chosen settings--one of which, I was determined, would be far different from any other character in play.

Meanwhile, a little idea had taken root in my mind. One of the chosen settings had opened the door for it, and since the opportunity was there, I was going to use it.

I was going to cheat.

I would write my story in the chosen setting, but I'd found a loophole that allowed me to sort of pull my setting into the mix and to introduce one of my original characters to the pool.

And thus, Live Bait and Doughnuts: A Kakanoe Mystery was born. I'm not sure, but I think only one other group member knew that I'd cheated.