BEYOND THE SHELF – Revisiting Characters for New Stories
Welcome to BEYOND THE SHELF on
SHANNON MUIR’S THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF!
BEYOND THE SHELF is general commentary about the blog or the mystery and crime writing business by author and site administrator Shannon Muir that doesn’t fall in the scope of a regular column. This week’s topic takes on revisiting characters for new stories. I hope you found “Taking One for the Champ,” a SHORTS FROM THE SHELF piece that ran recently, to be interesting. It fills in a gap of the history of a character that captured my imagination when she showed up as a teenagers in some of my earlier works and became the inspiration for me to initially try web serials on Tumblr several years ago.
My next SHORTS FROM THE SHELF that I am working on, and plan to not start publishing until completely finished (I’ve been partially done with at least a complete outline before, but found that wasn’t successful; “Taking One for the Champ” was the first completely done before posting in two parts), also falls in this category. There are a group of characters from earlier works I’ve done I’d like to take a little farther into the future and in a slightly different direction. That path feels like it will move into the area that fits the themes that SHANNON MUIR’S THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF covers.
In the end, I may be right. I may not. However, what will matter in the end is that I am continuing to grow and write and improve.
I’ll let you know when the story actually starts up. Until then, see you with another column next week!