A new direction...oh boy!

No I don't know what happened to draft 2. And hopefully I will finish the book on Draft 3 so that you will e-read or read Draft 4 or 5 in one sitting soon.

“ANY CONCESSION FOR MURDER…”

An Arthur Dixon Novel

By

Michael D. Jansen van Vuuren

Foreward:

I began writing Any Concession back in 1999 during a Mystery Writing course I took at UT with the Indomitable Dr. Manchip-White. He will go down in my book as the best writing professor I ever had. Sorry Dr. Weir- not that you would ever read this commercial pulp- non-literary garbage (as you were wont to describe it) and thus there is the reason that Dr. M-W took the cake.

I initially wrote about 20 pages and then rewrote and rewrote the same 20 pages. In late 2000, I rewrote the initial draft and added another 20 pages and got stuck. Major writers block.

Why one might ask if they are prone to do? Well I will quote Dr. M-W: “Reading is inhaling and writing is exhaling. If you want to write my boy, you must read and read everything!”

I had fully exhaled and had no more breath.

Since then I have down a lot of breathing.

So now 12 years later, I am going to exhale some more.

I want to thank Tony Hillerman, Dana Stabenow, Robert B. Parker and Elmore Leonard for opening the scope of all that I could write about and where.

This leaves me in Knoxville, Tennessee with a Carl Hiassen high and the need to share a story about this crazy town and some of its colorful denizens. Lastly I must pay homage to Steven Womack who took on Nashville and mostly won with a series of fairly ridiculous mysteries that were lots of fun to read. Oh, and if I left out my Mother I would burn forever in Fantasy Book Hell. She got me to read other books (even some that would have Allen Weir jumping for joy) and talk about them with her. She also led me to Hillerman and Stabenow and now to Henning Mankell.

For the next 40 or so pages I will be reposting (reviewing what I have written) and making changes and offering comments on this or that but I will use a different font and brackets like this ][ to indicate them. Call it an work in progress that I am going to share with all of you.