Personal Creative Retrospective: The Beatrice Series
Quick Download: I am finishing the final book in my murder mystery trilogy. After 5 years and 5 different books/projects in the Beatrice universe, I’ve learned a lot, but I’m ready to let my heroes adventure on without me.
The Journey to Beatrice
At the end of 2018, I released a heavy doorstop of a novel called Burn. It is huge, pretentious, and wrestles with the biggest ideas of identity, gayness, and literary tradition that my feeble brain could hold at the time. Its structure consists of poetry, prose, and a screenplay. It has two appendices. I say that not as a humble brag, but to illustrate why I, as a writer, was completely exhausted when I published it six years ago.
Back then, as I edged toward the book’s release, I started to scribble notes for my next project. I wanted to take on a murder mystery that was unpretentious, silly, and fun. There was to be nothing emotionally weighty or overwrought — it was to be an unserious romp with over-the-top characters and an ending with coo-coo bananas twists.
In early 2019 those notes were shaped into a book. In mid-2019 the one book became three. Then, in 2021, the three-book series gained two step-siblings, a novella and a book of poetry.
