30M2DW III - Afterthoughts

So, last Saturday I woke up, rushed downstairs, flipped open my laptop so as to link up my post to the link thingy over on We Work For Cheese and… Wait a minute. There's no post. What? Oh, yeah the 28th day of the 28 day writing challenge was the day before. It was March 1 and the challenge was over. Sigh. Old habits die hard.

So at the end of the week, Nicky and Mike (pictured above) slunk quietly away behind a huge brick of cheese as their 30 Minus 2 Days of Writing III challenge came to an end. A prompt a day for 28 days. We started out with somewhere around 20 bloggers participating. Over the duration of the challenge bloggers cam and went but for some of them the challenge was too much and as we neared the final days that number was pretty much halved.

But so what. I had a great time. I enjoyed visiting participants' blogs, reading their posts and leaving comments. And I enjoyed them visiting me and commenting here and responding to them. To you guys  - and to those of you who didn't participate but visited throughout the month - I want to extend an appreciative thanks, not to mention to Nicky and Mike. We complain about this challenge and point accusing fingers at them but it's all in good fun and I appreciate the work they do in coordinating this epic challenge.

And for the first time in the three successive challenges (ah, yes - silly me - I've participated in all the  challenges to date) I wrote a continuing story. It featured Inspector Jack Gouda. It was a cheesy little detective tale that I like to think of as humour noir.

Have you been watching True Detective on HBO? Great, isn't it. Well, my little story was about as far away from True Detective as you could get.

I really enjoyed writing it, though. And if you dropped by on a regular basis you learned of my penchant for terrible puns and Bob Dylan song lyrics.

I also got the chance to mention some of my favourite detective characters and to pretend to be a noir crime author, paying homage to the authors who have influenced me.

What you may not have noticed is what I did for those four weeks in my left-hand column. Where I highlight books I'm reading, music I'm listening to and videos I'm watching I changed "Watching" to "Watching the Detectives" and each week I changed the video. How about that? They're among some of my comedic influences, you might say.

If you missed them, here they are in all their glory…

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

 And finally, Week Four

Classics all. And now, of course, so is Jack Gouda.

Oh brie-have yourself.

This was quite the month for all things detective. Not only did I spend the month writing about one and finding and running "classic" humorous TV and movie clips but I also spent the entire month reading a little something called "The Complete Sherlock Holmes". It ran over 4500 pages on my iPad and comprised four novels and fifty-six short stories. And after all this I still found time to watch the Olympics, cheer on Canada's winning men's and women's hockey teams and take Mrs Dufus out for dinner on Valentine's..

That's a lot of detecting. I may not read another noir crime novel for some time. Or participate in a 28 day writing challenge perhaps.