If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know I’ve been threatening to write a Christmas themed Detective Mo story for some time now, which I have dubbed Detective Mo and the Christmas Conundrum.

Well, I finally finished the first proper draft of it yesterday. I haven’t done any illustrations yet (unless you count a few vague attempts at drawing Santa Claus), but I got the bare bones of the story mostly written out and I immediately began to wonder whether or not I was making a faux pas by making Mrs Claus the villain in the story, to such an extent that I even asked social media for their opinions and got a fairly mixed response.

So, I read it to my wife and daughter (my daughter being my exact target audience), and as I read I realised something that I hadn’t when I had been first writing it.

Although I hadn’t meant it quite like this and the overall feel of the story remained playful and innocent, Mrs. Claus does technically spike Santa’s drink in the story. The effect is comical rather than harmful to Santa, and I didn’t use those exact words but still… Mrs. Claus put something other than tea in Santa’s tea. Okay, so it was magic carrots rather than drugs but still… That’s not cool. That’s not cool at all.

It’s a firm reminder to us all to check for these things in our own writing and to get other people to check our work too, because the ideas that seem innocent in our heads don’t always read that way when written down. I’m slightly ashamed to have ever come up with it to be honest. It hadn’t been my original idea to have Mrs. Claus behaving in this way, but little by little as I made small changes here and little tweaks there, that’s what it turned into.

Anyway, my wife agreed it was just a bit too dark for a kids story, despite my efforts to write something fun and innocent, so today I going to begin writing Detective Mo and the Christmas Conundrum completely from scratch. It will be a brand new mystery altogether (though still Christmas-themed). I only hope I haven’t lost too much time with all this, as I really hoped to get this book out in time for Christmas this year. I’m not sure how realistic that is now 😭.

If, however, you are a sick minded individual who thinks Mrs Claus should drug Santa then fear not. I have been vaguely working on another collection of flash fictions/short stories and am vaguely contemplating including a version of it in there, just for us grown-ups.

Goodness knows when that will be though. Maybe I’ll do it in a blog post one day.