I'm currently working on two short stories and two novels featuring my hero, Phillip Gold. It's an interesting process. I created Mr. Gold about a decade ago while attending writing classes at a Canadian University. He's an homage to the great hard-boiled detectives of the past, like Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, but with the legal twist. Early in his career, Gold is finding the law thing isn't going so well but that he seems to have a knack for investigations. He solves a couple of cases and things start to snowball to the point where people seek him out as a PI rather than as a lawyer (see Sharon Kyle in The Gold Figure). Gold resists the shift but ends up having to accept the inevitable.

My plan is that, at some point, Gold will investigate and then represent in court, finally taking the first steps towards establishing his skills as a lawyer too. We'll see how that goes.

I made a major push last year to find an agent to represent me and Mr. Gold but to no avail. Although I got little feedback, I realised that the two first novels (Fleck and Glisters) don't start with enough punch. I need a flashier opening (since that's the only part most agents you approach will see) and then a more consistent tone. I'm getting contradictory feedback, however: many readers really like the sarcastic, witty, metaphor-filled style while others would like to see it go away entirely. We'll see, I guess.

In the meantime, I've decided to try to write a couple Gold short stories to see if I could get them published in a mystery magazine of some kind. It's always easier to sell your work once you've sold your work. Writing short stories is very different, however, from writing novels. The plots have to be more simple, the characters less fully developed and you have to keep the pace going throughout — no time for a reflective pause. Well, at least not much time. So it's a battle.

But I'm getting very helpful feedback from my old writing buddies, Ross and John, and my partner is amazingly good at spotting "inconsistencies" of both a minor and a major nature (like when a character sits down on a couch and gets up from a chair or when a character is shot in the side of the head and fall forward). I'll keep working. The first story is complete but in the revision stage while the second one is still being written.

Revision is something I really need to focus on. I tend toward verbosity and I often don't have the patience to set something aside, wait for a month or so, then go back and revise and edit it. That's what you have to do to end up with really polished writing. It's something I have to learn to do.

So now I've spent the last ten minutes reviewing and revising this blog. Can't start practicing too soon!

Tags: Phillip Gold, Writing, Mystery