Well, that was interesting. Thanks to the thunderstorms, I spent far too much time in an airport yesterday, and didn’t get home until midnight. But the end result was more work on that piece of flash fiction (which may no longer be flash, I’ll have to type it up and word-count) and managed to overcome several plot problems I’ve been having with my most recent mystery: Add a character!

One of the main assets that a real police inspector would have, after all, is underlings: both for doing some of the dirty and boring work, and for protection and making arrests. So, I am now introducing Sgt. Popper! Er, to be renamed once I get more of a feel for the character, of course. (I enjoy my little puns, but they get tiresome after the fourth or fifth revision)

So, why didn’t I start out with such a character as a matter of course? Well… more characters, to my mind, mean a longer story. And I’ve also kind of resisted the Watson thing, either in first-person or third. It seems cliche to me, and if I feel like I’m writing a cliche, I won’t want to finish it. But in this case I’ve talked myself into needing this character for other reasons, and so I might as well make use of it. (What do you think, are Watsons annoying?)