Evens are Odds: January 2016

I’ve been wanting to write a surly, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Private Eye character pretty much as long as I’ve been putting pen to paper, but never really could find a plot that would satisfactorily stick. Enter my “Happy Place” drawings: A little strategy I’ve developed whenever I have a crit I’m particularly sleep deprived for, or feeling less than confident about, they basically amount to fun little doodles of whatever ridiculous scene strikes my brain as the escapist pick-me-up I need at the time. Usually it’s just a lot of beaches and the like, but (seeing as it’s my brain) some are a little bit *less intuitive.* Like, for instance, this little number below. Suddenly, everything just fell into place...

When Sanjay Mann got into the business 3 years ago, he never really expected it to actually succeed as a sustainable venture: As far as he saw it at the time, striking out as a P.I. basically just constituted a relatively painless way to continue ignoring the perilously impending call of real life for another couple of months. At least so far, though, he’s always managed to sneak that one last job just when it seems he’s on the brink, contenting himself with the usual P.I. fodder a limited pool of competition affords him, and the fact that, at least most days, the work is as tolerable as any job. And while he may concede that the cavalier over-specificity of his self-appointed title as the “Dinosaur Detective,” a nod to his first case and his idea of a bad joke, sees him his fair share of curious drunk college students, he’s also found it has the benefit of peaking potential clients’ interest enough to push them through the door.

When Officer Sofia Fortuna comes knocking one brisk autumn evening with a cagey mystery of an assignment, though, it might also get him a lot more than he bargained for...

Also, bit of a rating to this one: STRONG language throughout, so you probably know better than I if that's something you should be reading or not...