MY STORY OF THE MONTH 3/23

My story of the month is my story of the month. I woke up about 3 weeks ago at 4AM with an almost complete manuscript story. It happens to me on occasion and my usual reaction is WOW, I don't know where that came from. Fascinating! I'll write it down when I wake up. When I wake up, it's always been: now I had an interesting idea, what was it? 

This time I said, No, you'll forget it. It's March here in Tavira and three weeks ago the nights were still a bit chilly. So I wrestled with: I'll write it and It's really warm and comfortable under the duvet. But no, it was too interesting an idea to waste. Yet it would be complicated.

Five minutes later I put on my gorgeous, warm-as-a-duvet cardigan. I had bought it as a 9/11 survival gift and wore it daily for 22 winters every day. A cup of hot chocolate was in order. And I sat down to write what?

A murder mystery that opens in Paris and is about: rhino horns, poaching and smuggling for they are worth a fortune, a deadly massacre of around a million people, the death of a policeman and a symphonic orchestra conductor, the injury of a woman in the killer's escape that left her with a limp, her loss of graceful mouvement and her anger about that loss that causes her to decide to spend the insurance money to find the killer rather than return to her job in NY. So she moves through the Paris police file that is short, because the killer left but one unoticed trace. She spots it and it leads her to an Africa from whence she came.

Well, you don't wake up with one of those every day so I'm beginning the research and have the first 25 pages or so written. Parts of the subject are going to make two governments unhappy, maybe uncomfortable, because it is fiction based on real facts of corruption - both criminal and moral.

Does it sound like it's of any interest. Wish me well. That's my story of the month and I'm sticking to it!