Happy Anniversary

Happy Anniversary to me and Midweek Musings.

 

On March 24^th last March I launched my blog and it’s been an interesting and challenging year. I have almost reached the 3000 mark for views, from forty different countries. Thank you all for your interest and support.

It’s been great fun writing about all these snippets of life, and I find as I go about my day I constantly find topics for my blog or a new book. Any and all activity can be made into a story of some kind. I should know, I wrote a murder mystery inspired by pigeons on a roof.

When I meet my brother or my friend for lunch, we meet at a half way point. The restaurant knows us now, and that once we’re there, we’re bunkered in for hours. I’m more of a small town driver, two lanes are enough for me; and I’m intimidated by the 4 lane highway leading in and out of the city. When I’m ready to leave for home thousands of others are doing the same, so it’s rush hour on the highway.

To avoid the stress, and as I’m in no hurry, I take the same route, a main street running east across the bottom of the city. Eventually, I drive from city, through a small town, a village and then the rural route home. Its great thinking time as much of our lunch conversation is on writing or some other creative endeavour. My mind is on overdrive, and I take advantage of the stops to make notes for future reference.

So, the pigeons on a roof. One day I was stopped at a red light and saw a house just ahead, with the roof covered with pigeons. I’d never noticed this before, and was intrigued. As I passed by the house I looked down the drive way and saw what I assumed was a pigeon coop at the rear of the property.

Interesting. This was a commercial district, except for the odd house, a leftover remnant of the old neighbourhood. What a perfect place for a murder. By the time I got home I had the basics of a book. And as it was September, I also had my novel idea for the National Novel Writing Month, or what I more affectionately call NaNo. This is the world wide challenge to write a novel in the 30 days of November.

So I started to research, racing pigeons, banding, one way doors on the coop, racing clubs…you get the idea. The racing caught my attention, and an article about messages being sent by pigeons during the war. My first idea had to do with smuggling; after all, the pigeons can cross borders without having to stop at check points. Then I had to think about what the pigeons could carry, and how the races could be used to smuggle…whatever.

It seemed feasible, but not really. So the pigeons took a lesser role in the book, but as a crime scene the coop had merits. And I couldn’t let all that research go to waste, now could I?

The book is titled Hiding From the Night and is in its final edit.

Back to the blog. March was a great time to start my blog as I entered the A-Z Blog Challenge for April and was thrown into blogging with a feeling much like jumping into the deep end of the pool. And here it is almost April again.

The challenge is to blog every day but Sunday for the month of April, which just happens to be 26 days. So each blog is to have something to do with the corresponding letter of the alphabet…from A-Z. I’m already planning and am ready to start. A is for Apple, could I be any more obvious?