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I’m a setting thief. Lots of writers are, but I always set books where I can see what’s happening which probably isn’t true of all writers. I also steal dialogue, people, and events. What that means right now is book seven in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series isn’t the one I expected to be writing. Originally, I had a great idea about using AI to facilitate a murder, and I will get around to that book, but as number eight, not number seven. What changed the story order was what happened at a two-day Christmas faire last year where I was selling my books when opportunities for theft of setting, dialogue, characters, and of course murder, presented themselves and I decided to steal all of them.

The faire was held at the fire station in spaces normally reserved for huge engines and in the other rooms reserved for meetings, food prep, overnight sleeping, and storage of all sorts of equipment and supplies the firefighters use. The engines were discretely relocated outside for the event and I was lucky enough to be assigned a booth in the part of the fire station where they normally were housed.

Fire engines are incredibly tall vehicles so the garage part of the firehouse had ceilings high enough to accommodate them. Lighting was supplied by banks of lights built into the ceiling. As we vendors began setting up our booths on Saturday morning, one of the lights over where I was started strobing, flashing on and off with bright bursts of light. It was disturbing and likely to cause headaches or worse if we had to try and work under such conditions.

The firefighters, as firefighters do, rushed to help. They took a tall ladder off one of the engines and placed it under the offending light. A brave young firefighter climbed it and decided which florescent lightbulb was the trouble maker. He shouted down to us that he thought it would be an easy fix, but when he removed the bulb, the whole bank went dark. A search for a replacement bulb was started, but it seemed the fire station with its vast stores of equipment was out of lights of that length. He replaced the bulb, towels were collected, and an attempt was made to wrap them around the offending bulb. It didn’t work. The only way to stop the light from causing us all to lose our sanity was to cover the entire bank of lights.

The strobing stopped, but some of us were plunged into late-afternoon-post-time-change darkness. We needed light to show off our wares. Many vendors were distraught. We tried to help one another with some booth occupiers switching places, but there were still problems. Lamps, hurriedly gathered from other rooms in the fire station satisfied some of our needs, but there were many unhappy people and one vendor remained outraged at how dark his space was and caused a scene. At that moment, I decided to kill him.

The light situation presented a great opportunity to do so. No stabbings or poisonings for him. No gunshots. He was going to die by electrocution. My creative, or should I say warped, mind immediately came up with some ideas for how his murder would take place and a clever twist about who his killer was. All I was missing was a motive for his murder since it didn’t seem reasonable to kill him for being annoying. By the time the faire was over on Sunday afternoon, I had watched how other vendors moved around the faire, who covered for whom for food runs and bathroom visits, and where firefighters slipped off to for breaks. I had many red herring suspects with opportunity…but still no motive.

Writers know that sometimes you just have to stop pondering and sleep on it; which was exactly what I did. The motive came to me in the middle of the night, not exactly in a dream, but in a moment of sleepless restlessness.

 “A Faire to Remember” will be out later this year. A cover reveal and more about the book in next month’s post.