Guess What I’m Up To Next

Probably you guys are not going to guess what I have coming up next this year so I’m not going to make you guys guess at all.  I’m going to share with you what I’m up to instead because sometimes telling is way more fun than guessing.

Sometime in April, I’m going to be kicking off a new series:  The Missy Barrett Detective Series.

In case you’re wondering what kind of detective books they’re going to be, I thought I would share this teaser blurb I’ve been working on so you know exactly what kind of detective books they’re going to be.

This is the city: Sevierville, Tennessee. I live here. I’m a kid.

It was Wednesday in the middle of the week like always. I arrived home from school fifteen minutes earlier, and was enjoying a snack of cheese and crackers with a glass of cold milk when I started thinking about the plaque I saw outside Sweet Fanny Adams Theatre in Gatlinburg last time my family and I were there to see one of their shows.

My name is Missy Barrett, and when I grow up, I’m going to be a undercover private eye supersleuth detective. Until then, I’m a kid.  A kid who likes to solve mysteries.  Mysteries like ‘The Case of the Vanishing Valise.’

Just like with all my other books, people and places that are real are going to be in my books.  Sometimes it’s a good idea to ask people that are your family and friends and fans and followers to help you find people and places that are real to be in a book, so that’s how come I’m posting about this today.

All you have to do is share the link to this blog and ask people you know to look at it and maybe even share it with their friends.  That way, everybody’s going to see it and lots of people that are from around where I live can let me know if they want to be in a Missy Barrett book.  Here’s the poster I made up so people know what I’m looking for.

Maybe you know somebody that sounds like Question #1 or #2 or #3 and fits what I’m looking for.  Maybe your mom or dad or aunt or uncle or grandma or grandpa is that kind of person.  Maybe YOU are that person.

Anyway, that’s just a little tiny part of what’s up next in my life. Stick around to find out what else is going on.  Like I always say:  Come for the fun and stay for the excitement!

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Welcome to 2019 Everybody!

My New Year’s resolution for 2019 is to pay way more better attention to my blog.  I kind of slipped a bit in December and that’s mostly because I was superly crazy busy this year with all kinds of neat Christmas stuff including volunteering at places to make Christmas bright for everybody, not just me and my family members.

Something I like to do is to let people know I appreciate them and what they do, so one of the things I did this year was to give a great big humongous Missy Barrett style thank you to three superly special people at the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce that do so much for a lot of people, and not just for Chamber members.  They’re the kind of people that are just loving people and if you ask them a question, they do their hugest best to give you the right answer.  If they don’t know the right answer, they find out who probably for sure has the right answer, and then they either phone them and ask the question, or they tell you who to call to get the right answer.

Now the people I’m talking about are people that hardly ever get too much recognition and that’s because they’re kind of quiet about what they do.  I don’t mean what they do is a secret.  I mean they just don’t make a big deal about what they do when they’re busy doing their jobs, so most people pretty much don’t get how much work they do.  It’s a whole bunch and I know because when I go in there, nobody’s just sitting around doing nothing.  They’re always working but they are not so busy that they don’t stop and say hi to me when I come over there with my mom, and they are not so busy they don’t stop and listen to my questions and work at finding out the right answer for me.

Anyway, my mom and both my grandmas say that things that come from the heart make the best surprises, and I wanted to surprise these people I’m talking about.   My one grandma is a amazing baking grandma, and she knows how to make so many things I never heard of before it’s crazy.  She even knows how to make things from Canada (because my grandpa is from Canada and plus he’s a Mohawk) like fry bread and bannock and Nanaimo bars and butter tarts and other yummy stuff like that.  Someday I want to know how to make everything she knows how to make, so she’s teaching me how to make some of those things already.

So, I spent time in the kitchen with my grandma making delicious treats for people I wanted to surprise, and one of those people were three people at the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce.  I didn’t want their surprises to get wrecked when they took them home from work, so my mom helped me pack them with tissue paper in the kind of boxes you can put desserts inside of and not have to worry the box is going to bust open and everything falls out (because that would be superly sad if that happened).

Maybe you can guess the three people at the Chamber that got surprise Christmas treat boxes from me, but if you cannot, here’s a picture of them.

That’s Ms. Emily Murgolo (she’s the Administrative Coordinator) and Phil Word (he’s the Information Specialist) and David Stanfill (he’s the Membership Coordinator).

One thing my mom taught me is that sometimes people are working so hard for everyone else that other people kind of don’t really think of what they do every day to help them, but not me because I’m a kid and I know what it’s like when all your hard work gets missed by grown-ups.  I even know what it’s like when grown-ups say what you do isn’t really important and make you feel stupid for thinking you did something they should know about.

So this year, my other New Year’s resolution is to keep on recognizing the good things people do because you never know when that recognition is going to make their day.  Maybe even their whole entire week!

P.S.  If you want to know what the yummy surprises in the Christmas boxes were, you need to go to the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce (they’re at 110 Gary Wade Boulevard, where City Hall is and the Civic Center and not so far away from the police station) and ask them.

P.P.S.  If you have a business and you are not a member, you need to ask them for a information package about being a Chamber member.  My mom is a member (for a long time already now) and I’m a member because I plan on being a undercover supersleuth private eye detective when I grow up and I’m already working on solving not-so-big crimes.  If you’re interested in hiring me, you need to talk to my mom first because she makes those kinds of decisions for me.

P.P.P.S.  Watch for the first book in my Detective series coming out in April.  It’s called “The Case of the Vanishing Valise.”