Sunday At The Salvage Yard

Brief Update, With Picture

Dear Subscribers,

This is a picture of me and Steven taken at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Ripton, Vermont in the summer of 1985. Though we look a lot older now, inside we're still basically the same people. I've been thinking that maybe, a few months down the road, we might publish three or four brief excerpts from each of our new Three Investigators novels on Substack—starting with The Mystery of the Abecedarian Academy.

If we do an excerpt a week, the process might take long enough so that at the end of it, the first book in the new series could be on the verge of being published in its entirety. All twenty-six of the new books are finally actually done, and Steven and I are now working with an excellent independent producer who seems to have just the right skill-set to move both the publishing and the streaming series ends of this forward.

My dream is to publish a book a month for twenty-six consecutive months, and at the end of those months, to move as soon as possible into four streaming seasons, each consisting of six ninety-minute episodes, with a final two-hour special based upon the last two books—The Mystery of the Yeatsian Yearbook and The Mystery of the Zoroastrian Zodiac.

My real dream is to get the new Three Investigators novels into the hands of lots of young readers. Each new novel is a complete mystery and arrives at a satisfactory conclusion, but as a reader moves forward through the series, and the world of The Three Investigators becomes ever more crowded with people and detail and color, it begins to become a kind of parallel reality to the one in which we really live.

Not a fantasy, nothing jokey or ironic, and not an escape, but the world as it might be—and maybe would be—if it had never started down its current destructive path.

In addition, there is something about twenty-six books that proceed from a beginning and get to an end that I think will impart a rare—and non-commercial—pleasure to the reader. There's nothing like a genuine narrative arc to make a reader feel satisfied, and it's been a long, long time now since The Three Investigators series was in the hands of a single writer who had the power to stay true to a single vision.

In fact, I think that the current situation is really almost unheard of in the modern world. A lot of publishers long ago sold out to purely commercial interests and have recently demonstrated with their actions that they care about nothing but money and power, and will follow the latest fads in the Land of the Politically Correct. And a lot of the heirs of once-beloved franchises originally based on a single writer's vision have permitted publishers or media companies to distort or pervert characters and stories that once delighted people in cultures all around the world.

That hasn't happened in this case, and I feel blessed that I was able to have a long life pursuing my own passions as a writer while still having time to get this other job done. I never either intended to or expected to, but that's what life, at its best, can be like sometimes. Both Steven and I have been ill and injured repeatedly during the last four-and-a-half years, but we both believed so strongly in what we were doing that we were able to push through.

We're both readers first and foremost, and I myself am a writer who can’t imagine not having been one; the greatest gift my father ever gave me was the gift of his writing-related genes. My father and I also share a libertarian cast of mind, but mine is much more ferocious than his was—and therefore well suited to protect what he accomplished in an earlier era with a push-back forceful enough for the unnerving current times.  

Once again, my apologies to those of you who were enjoying reading my father's short stories. In case you haven't yet read it, below is the link to the last story I posted—"The Book and The Beast," first published in Weird Tales. I highly recommend it.

For those of you who arrived late to this Substack, I also recommend the overview of the new Three Investigators series pinned to the top of the Salvage Yard home page.

Best wishes,

Elizabeth Arthur

https://elizabetharthur.substack.com/p/sunday-at-the-salvage-yard-the-book