Leaping into the void

 As usual, recent posts by my fellow Type M'ers contain so much food for thought and inspiration for posts of my own. What a wealth of writing wisdom and experience we have in our group!

One theme that runs through many of the posts is how our writing constantly evolves. We are always striving for excellence and innovation. The same old same old is death to a writer. How soon before readers talk about "phoning it in" and "repeating herself"? Ideas and writing styles that we previously rejected, like omniscient point of view and present tense,  are revisited and add a fresh excitement to our work. I am no exception. I am always searching for new twists and perspectives, particularly for my police procedural series which by its nature has a certain structure and is confined to a specific setting. Inspector Green can't go running off investigating a murder in Botswana, and he's unlikely to get involved in a jewelry heist instead of a murder. Murder is his domain. Whenever readers playfully suggest I take him off to Italy (tax credit!) where he gets himself in the middle of an international theft ring, I've always said the police don't operate that way.

But recently I've been asking myself why not? Why not leap outside the box? I actually did just that when, after a series of standard murder cases set in Ottawa, I decided to throw Inspector Green to the wolves, literally. Green is a city boy who's most comfortable in the dusty back alleys of the teeming inner city, so I sent him up into the wilderness of the Northwest Territories to brave the legendary Nahanni River on the trail not of a murderer but of his missing teenage daughter. I had a lot of fun writing THE WHISPER OF LEGENDS, and now I am once again wondering how I can shake things up, not just for Inspector Green but also Amanda Doucette. A certain predictability has crept into the Doucette series as well, even though each story is set in a different place and has a different set of characters and challenges.

My next book, SHIPWRECKED SOULS, is in the final printing stage, and it's time to turn my thoughts to the next project I try to make each book better than the last, but I feel myself at a crossroads, looking for an idea that will take one or both of them in a exciting new direction.

I have an idea, which I'm not yet ready to commit to public view, but I'd love to hear from readers and writers alike about their reaction to well-established series being taken in a new direction. What have you tried? What works? What lands with a thud?