Mystery Monday Musings

Mystery Monday Musings... say that three times real fast! I am currently enrolled in Misa Ramirez's SavvyU Course - Building a Mystery from Back to Front. I'm very excited about this six month journey and I want to take you all along for the ride. Now, it is a paid course, so I won't be sharing the details of the classes, but I'd love to share with you the process I'm going through to create my mystery on Mondays.

For my first Mystery Monday post, I'm going to introduce you to my two main characters. To do this, I'd like to share a little excercise I did called the WalMart Q&A. Please meet Aiden and Lottie:

Me: When was the last time you stood in a long line at Walmart, and how did you react to the wait?

Aiden O'Reilly:

Walmart? *scoffs* You’re kidding, right? I can’t stand to drive by one, let alone go in. The packed parking lots, the swarms of shoppers, the malodor of the store, the shoppers with too much time on their hands and not enough checkout clerks. My ex used to disappear in there for hours. Tell me she was going to one section, and an hour and fifty laps later, I’d find her in the dog food department. We didn’t own a dog. And she wouldn’t even be close to finished.

You can keep your Walmart. I drive right past and down to Gus’s Grocer on 2nd Ave. Yeah, it’s still open, and Gus still cuts the meat with a cigarette hanging from between his lips. I can get everything I need right there. The cashier always has a smile on her face and the bag boy offers to take out your groceries.

Huh, Walmart. *grumbles and looks back down to the stack of papers he was grading*

Lottie Hendricks:

*smiles and looks down at her clasped hands sitting on her lap* I don’t mind waiting in line. Somebody has to be last. Just the other day, Ms. Mirna Fields asked the woman in front of me if she could cut in line. She’d be late for her doctor’s appointment if she didn’t. The younger woman was terribly rude. I can’t stand to see the elderly treated that way. So, I stepped in and told Ms. Mirna she could go in front of me. And her granddaughter was with her, with a separate cart. I let her go too, because they probably needed to leave at the same time. Then, Ms. Rose Etheridge needed to be somewhere. I’m not even sure she’d been standing in the same line as us, but I let her go ahead too. It took me a while to get out of the store that day. But, I did help the others by letting them go first.

*her hands smooth her skirt, and she finally meets my gaze* Nice talking to you, but it’s my day to volunteer down at the animal shelter before helping with spaghetti dinner at the VFW hall, and Lucille is out sick, again, so I have to change the sheets at the B&B myself because Katie has a date.


I hope you get a giggle out of this short interviews! And please, tell me how you react to long lines in WalMart.