Sometimes I feel like it's hard to call the writing I do "writing". I'm not that serious about it. It's one of those things - I'd like to be a writer. I would like, even more, to be a published writer. But what I am mostly is a dentist. And a dad and a husband. Believe it or not, those things take up a lot of time! And they usually make me pretty tired! You wouldn't think that doing dentistry all day - fillings, crowns, root canals, and tons and tons of examinations - would wear you out, but it does. I get home and I'm ready for bed. My eyes are tired from evaluating things that really can't be seen well without magnification. My brain is tired from dealing with patients, from coming up with treatment recommendations on the fly (a lot of times) and from trying to keep a handle on everything business-related at the office. Then, when I get home early enough to see the kids, it's time to read to them or with them, play with them, listen to them...kids seem to have boundless energy, until they don't. At that point they just shut down. I, on the other hand, get to worry about stuff.

Anyway, I like to write, and I occasionally come up with something that seems like a good idea to me. But then it doesn't seem to go anywhere.

I did have one notable exception to this rule: A finished mystery, featuring a dentist as the main character, called tentatively, THE WHOLE TOOTH. Do I love that title? Not at all, but I haven't come up with anything better yet.

Trouble with the novel is, it's just too short. As near as I can figure it, using the word counter in version 8 of Word Perfect, it is about 45K words, give or take a few thousand words. And I can't figure out how to "expand" it. It does not seem to cry out for additional scenes, though there are two subplots that maybe could get more attention. In my view, however, expanding those subplots, while shedding some more light on the realities of being a dentist (something I actually know a lot about), may distract from the meat of the mystery.

Another thing that struck me while writing this: It's really HARD to believably get a character (other than a cop or private detective) involved in the solution of a crime. It's easier if the incident directly involves the sleuth, like someone being killed and the main character either knowing the person really well or being suspected of the murder. Harder if the sleuth is on the periphery, as my dentist character is. But I think I managed that okay. How to do it a second time? That one I'm not sure of.

I know that some stories just aren't novels. They are novellas, or short stories, or whatever, but this feels to me like a novel. It doesn't feel short. I don't know how to explain it better than that.

Well, I'll just keep plugging at that one, or maybe at the horror novel I've got going, or maybe the pseudo-sf story, or maybe the other horror novel about the cave that I started, or...

Maybe I'll start something else new. :-)