In reading through old hand-written journals, I came across a novel idea. While I have plenty of ideas for novels, it was fun to read the idea and some of the description that I had noted for the story. I started out writing mysteries because I enjoyed reading ones that didn’t have violent deaths and were more of a puzzle to solve. Also, I thought it was a good structure for fleshing out my writing skills.
I’ve never self-published any of the mysteries although I did query many agents with several of them. Many of the stories are very dated—things could be resolved by having a cell phone, which is very difficult to explain not having. So I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything with the mysteries I wrote.
More fertile ground might be the children’s stories I worked on. Now that my first grandchild has been born, perhaps I’ll look into polishing them up. If nothing else, I can read them to him.
I tried to publish them via the traditional route, but didn’t get anywhere. By the time I accepted that I wasn’t going to get a traditional publisher, my kids were well past the reading level of the books.
Getting them in shape to at least self-publish might be a good use of my time. Another good use of my time, though, is watching my grandson’s facial expressions. He is adorable.