Mystery Rock – Family Tourism Adventure Novel
Mystery, adventure, letterboxing, my love for the beauty of Alabama and the Gulf Coast all ran into each other. I won the 2012 SELTI Short Story Contest and wanted to turn that story into a tourism literature work.
Although I did find a way to expand it into the third book of the Big Springs series, it lost its tourism feel for me. I tried forcing the tourism aspect, but the characters were not cooperating.
That year, I determined to win #NaNoWriMo – which means, I determined to finish the National Novel Writing Month challenge of crafting 50,000 words in the month of November. I had read recently about a boat that was uncovered on the Gulf Coast after a hurricane. It lead me to wonder what else might be uncovered and that is where Mystery Rock was born.
As the story grew and I focused on the locations along the Gulf Coast, I begin to think of ways to could shine the spotlight on the locations. Adding the links to the sites seemed natural. Adding letterboxes to the locations seemed BRILLIANT.
I worked with SELTI and Alabama Tourism to begin making contacts at the different locations. My family began making plans for a trip to the beach – the fact that we needed to go was of little importance. It took time. It took patience. Eventually, the plans came together.
We visited the Gulf Coast and toured some of the sites. The trip had two purposes in my mind – to scout out locations and to determine the validity of the story ideas. We returned home and began the process of finalizing the project.
My family was greatly disappointed when I informed them that we had to make a second trip to the coast. We plotted out our tour. We designed our letterboxes. We even worked with a stamp carver to get special stamps – when they are all four put together they form a single image from the book.
The trip to the Gulf Coast helped to stir the fuel of excitement about “Mystery Rock” for my family and for the locations where we hid the letterboxes. We took pictures of the locations, but sharing them was vetoed by the oldest son. “It’ll make finding them too easy.” We wrote the clues and tried to create the same excitement and challenges that the boys faced in “Mystery Rock.”
“Mystery Rock” shares the adventure of a family in a way that will allow your family to share the adventure. Read the story. Visit the sites. Discover the letterboxes. And in doing all of these, discover a part of Alabama that you may not even know was there.
