Gross Professional Misconduct (Draft 3.8)

Mark the date: It's March 2006, and I finally completed my first limited-public draft of my short crime story, Gross Professional Misconduct. I've been sharing the piece with close friends and colleagues and the reviewers over at Online Writing Workshop, asking for impressions about what's working for them and what's not.

The feedback I've gotten so far has been very instructive, and within the next number of weeks I'll be reviewing that feedback and making a final set of revisions to the story. Then I'll try to submit the piece for publication. And then I'll try to figure out what to do next, career-wise.

Actually, it's probably not such a mystery. Several feasible writing projects abound, and I've also been toying with the idea of starting a copywriter-for-hire business. Ideas I have; a specific direction to move towards, not so much.

Here's the opening to Gross Professional Misconduct. This excerpt is copyright 2006, Dustin LindenSmith. Please direct any movie-optioning requests to dustin at lindensmith.com.

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In September of last year, Jack Robinson received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. After collapsing at work and being taken to hospital, a large mass was discovered at the back of his throat. It was identified as a rare and deadly subtype of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was in its advanced stages, and he was told not to expect to survive longer than several weeks or a couple months.

He learned that no fully effective means of treatment had yet been found for this rare lymphoma; especially for one which had reached such a late stage as his. However, in the odd path of progression that some cancers take, Jack was not yet acutely ill. And so it was that he was released from the hospital the next day with an appointment to see his new cancer specialist the following week.

By the time he got home from the hospital, Jack had made up his mind. Before he became too sick to do it, he was going to kill his boss, Janet Brownlow.

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