Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Work in Perpetual Progress

By Robin Weaver


Back in the Dark Ages (a.k.a. 2010) I had the ever-so-brilliant idea to float a body in my pool.  Okay, don’t call the cops just yet.  The stiff dude was a prop.  For a Halloween Party.

I spent hours making my faux corpse realistic.  After covering a large block of Styrofoam with a white shirt, I attached a pair of jeans and stuffed the legs with packing peanuts.  I completed the look with flip-flops, positioned exactly right and added a straw hat to give the illusion the body floated face down.  The piece-de-resistance, I plunged a knife in Mr. Cad Diver’s back and used spray paint to simulate blood.  Beautiful, right?

Okay, perhaps beautiful isn’t the precise adjective we need, but you get the picture.  I was so proud of my very genuine-looking corpse and couldn’t wait for my guests to view.  The general reaction?  Why did you do that?

Well, duh?  Halloween. Mystery Writer. Fun.

Obviously, not the reaction I expected.  Which made me wonder, why would they have done had the body been real?  So, while my floater wasn’t the life of the party, my novel, Styrofoam Corpse was born.  In my alternate reality, guests were wowed by the life-like, eh dead-like floater and voila, the next morning a real corpse had taken Cad’s place.

With the exception of Mr. Diver, the book was entirely fictional, but somehow, having the prop seemed to propel my writing.  Since then, books two and three of the Corpse series have been under construction.  The victim in Burned Illusions is discovered in the torched vehicle and will likely be called Pyro Corpse. In the third book, the body is discovered hanging from the side of a building, and will probably be called Condo Corpse. More important, all three novels feature heroines in the precarious situation of being the number one suspect. Perhaps I should subtitle my new series, “You’ve got the wrong girl.” 

For a recent virtual retreat, I submitted 22 pages of book two, for our critique sessions.  That prompted me to restart the journey to “the end.”  I needed something to set a fire under my bu...keyboard.  Maybe I should burn a car for Halloween…

2 comments:

Sarah Raplee said...

Loved the background on your Styrofom Corpse mystery! Fun post, Robin. Just remember what they s about playing with fire...

Maggie Lynch said...

So glad to see you are still as crazy fun as ever.

I like the series name, "You've got the wrong girl." (big grin)

As for burning a car for Halloween...um, nah, unless you are just looking for a hot date.