Mining Trivia Night for Story Gold by Lucy Burdette

 LUCY BURDETTE: Happy New Year Reds! May it be a great year full of good friends, good health, good food, good books...

Holidays aside, it's been a busy time! I received the copy edits for A DELICIOUS DECEPTION in December, so they took first priority once they landed. This time I learned that I insert "that" into many more sentences than need it. I will try to remember that lesson in the future! Meanwhile I finished two projects, a Key Lime murder mystery for the Friends of the Key West Library, and a short story for the upcoming anthology Key West Noir (which will be part of the Akashic Noir series.)  I find short stories so challenging! The writer has a short time (duh) do everything normally done in a long book—develop characters, present a perfect jewel of a plot, and produce a satisfying conclusion. Plus, the story had to be noir, as in dark. (I tried!)

We had to tell the editors ahead of time what part of Key West we were featuring, so the stories wouldn't overlap too much. I chose Mallory Square and the new Key West cooking school. I wrote it from Nathan Bransford’s point of view in the third person. He's Hayley’s husband and he often gets overshadowed by her and the other characters, especially Miss Gloria. To get the proper background, I convinced six friends to go with me to the Cooking School’s Monday trivia night. We did not win any prizes, but it was tons of fun, and I got good photos and took lots of notes. I’ll show you a few of those and then post a snippet of the story, now called A NOT SO TRIVIAL MURDER. 

they were good sports

isn't it gorgeous?

waiting for snacks, or inspiration?

the tally

Mallory Square, home of the nightly sunset over the Gulf celebration with its patchwork of street performers and purveyors of food and drink, was mostly dark and silent. Across the expanse of stone dotted with palms, he saw a brightly colored umbrella, lit up by the glow of a soft yellow lamp on a card table covered with a deep blue cloth. Lorenzo, a friend of his wife’s, was bent over a spread of tarot cards, explaining something to the client in front of him. Bransford headed in that direction, flashing his Maglite along the walls of the buildings lining the square, greeting a couple of the regular homeless types. Though this square wasn’t a hotbed of crime after sundown, the chief believed that a regular and reasonably friendly police presence functioned as a retaining wall between order and chaos. 

The woman sitting with Lorenzo leaned across his table to squeeze his hands and then got up to leave. Bransford figured he would check in. Though he wasn’t certain the fortune teller had access to a deeper understanding of the universe than most, he was an acute observer of human behavior. If trouble was brewing, Lorenzo would know. He approached the table and waved hello. “You’re working late.”

“I don’t like to rush my clients,” Lorenzo said earnestly. “They come in psychic pain and it’s my job to honor that.” 

Bransford hardly knew what to say, but in some happy twist of fate, his radio crackled before he had to answer. The police department dispatcher, usually unflappable, reported a problem at the Key West cooking school in a breathless voice. “EMTs have been dispatched to the scene. You’d better check in. The bartender was hysterical, so not clear whether someone is dead or dead drunk.” 

Sometimes in this town, it was hard to tell the difference. “I’m on it,” said Bransford. “Have a good night,” he told the tarot card reader and jogged off toward the redbrick building at the far end of the square.

He paused at the entrance to the school, which was located up the only escalator in Old Town on the second floor of the US Coast Guard building, now called the Shops at Mallory Square. The developers had spent a bloody fortune renovating the cooking school space, which he had not yet visited. Despite his own wife’s connection to food and the food world, he was an eat to live guy, not live to eat. Other than investigating a possible crime on the premises, he was not the kind of man who would attend a cooking school or even a single demonstration. Hard pass.

We’ll see how well I did with this—the anthology will be comprised of talented Key West and Key West adjacent writers (including SA Cosby, king of noir!) Of course I had that in my mind the whole time I was writing, which may or may not have helped. By the way, here's a photo of the winners, which became an important plot point.

Reds, do you read and enjoy short stories? Why or why not? How about trivia, want to join a team?