  Mystery
This week: Secret Doors & Passageways Edited by: Jeff  
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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
-- Carl Sagan
Mystery Trivia of the Week: Before earning success as a mystery writer, Alex Kava worked a variety of jobs including advertising and marketing and starting her own graphic design firm where she created corporate logos and food packaging, brochures, newsletters, a line of greeting cards. She also directed TV and radio commercials and served as a public relations director for her alma mater. She quit that job in 1996 to focus on her writing and spent the next four years doing freelance graphic design, refinancing her house, maxing out her credit cards, and taking on a part-time newspaper delivery route to support herself until her first book was published in 2000.
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Amazon's Price: $ 12.99
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SECRET ROOMS & PASSAGEWAYS
Ever since I was a little kid, I've wanted a secret room or a secret passageway in my house. After a Little League season one year, our coach (a general contractor by trade) had the entire team and their families to his house for a pizza party. I don't remember much from the party, or even how our team performed that season... but I do distinctly remember our teammate, his son, taking us upstairs to show us an unusual feature of his room. The bedroom looked like any other child's bedroom... a bunk bed on one side of the room, a desk and a built-in bookshelf against the other wall. But then he went over to the bookshelf and reached under one of the book-laden shelves. With a barely audible click, the bookshelf swung inward on a pair of hidden hinges, and we got a glimpse of an entire hidden game room that lay beyond.
Most of my teammates immediately ran into the room and marveled over our friend's Nintendo and his television and his VCR. This was years before these things became commonplace in kids' rooms. They were amazed that he had an entire room inside his own room where he could play video games and watch movies and television. But I was more fascinated by the secret bookshelf-door. I marveled at the way the hidden hinges allowed the shelf to close flush with the wall, and how the hidden catch under the shelf released the locking mechanism that held the bookcase closed tight when it wasn't being used.
I was hooked.
A few years later, my parents added on to our house. As my brother and I grew up (we shared a bedroom as young children), they wanted to add a family room, and another bedroom and bathroom. As fate would have it, that new bedroom and bathroom were mine, and the way our house was built required my room to be raised up to the level of the existing (raised) ground floor, with a recessed family room that rested on the actual earth. In simple terms, my new room had a floor that was raised two feet off the actual ground. My parents ended up putting an access panel in the exterior wall of my room, so exterminators and electricians and other people could get under the house. When I realized that a narrow two-foot-by-too-foot crawlspace was directly beneath my closet, I begged my parents to let me put in a trapdoor that would allow me to slip down into the crawlspace and exit the house via the access panel.
Needless to say, my parents were typical responsible parents... and I still haven't forgiven them for that.  
In all the years since, I've never lost my fascination with and love for secret rooms and passages. I devoured stories and that featured these clandestine constructs, and even took quite a few art history, architecture, and other design-related classes throughout my educational journey to learn more about them.
For those who are equally interested in such things, there are actually companies out there that will customize your home with one of these unique features. Whether you want a panic room for security or just the undeniable awesomeness of hiding a game room behind a fireplace, check out this company and some of its products:
It's not exactly cheap (basic hidden doors from this company start at $6,500), but man... are those cool or what? I don't have particularly expensive tastes, and even if I won the lottery I don't think I'd be living in an opulent mansion or driving an exotic sports car. But if I ever have the good fortune of selling a book or making a decent salary, I would love to have something like this in my home. Partially because it's just plain cool. But equally because, someday, I'd like to be coaching my own kid's baseball team, to invite all the kids and their families to the house for an end-of-the-season pizza party, to show them the secret passage... and maybe, just maybe, inspire that same sense of amazement and wonder in someone else that they did for me. 
Until next time,
-- Jeff
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I encourage you to check out the following mystery items:
In many ways one could view me as a lost soul. I am not sure if I really am, but truth and perception do not often share a happy home. They are connected and seem similar, yet they are very different. There is a line that divides them although the line itself is a part of the whole concept of truth and perception.
It was a stormy evening. The winds were very strong. It had been raining continuously for the last 4 hours and there seem to be no end in sight….. A group of 5 friends had decided to go to Pavandong for their vacation. They were in their Land Cruiser , it was stuck in one of the many marshes that were formed due to the heavy rains.
On May 5, 1986 the Department of Social Services received a telephone call from Emily Swenburg. She took in a, seemingly, feral human female of approximately fourteen years. I was dispatched to 137 Treeline Road, Zanesville OH where I met Jane Doe 86-0187, allegedly Melinda Meigs. Although she attempted speach, often excitedly, poor diction distorted her English beyond recognition. After intitial frustration, she grabbed my clipboard and wrote, “Please help. Please protect me,” with flawless penmanship. I asked her to tell me what happened. Her story follows.
Jenna knew that signing that prenuptial agreement would eventually pay off. Of course she had married Howard for his money; anyone with a brain knew that. But she hadn't spent months charming the old geezer just to let a piece of paper interfere with her plans. She had decided to go forth with the wedding and bide her time until the perfect opportunity presented itself. That moment came much faster than she expected.
He walked outside and looked out across the yard. He could see the neighbor’s house over the short fence to the right and the house a few car lengths down, and across the street. The only lights on at either house were the front porch lights. He looked in his yard now and something struck him wrong. something wasn’t right about the yard. He looked at all the landscaping and at the driveway. Something just wasn’t right. It was the bird bath. It was wrong. He needed to fix it.
“Words color the world,” Cassandra said, breaking the momentary silence between them. “What color are your words, Jerry?” Jerry smiled politely and shrugged his stiff shoulders. What does that even mean? But he didn’t want to ask her that. To him she sounded nice, almost demure, with a sultry voice. He certainly didn’t want to come off as rude or uninterested, but the question was beyond him. "The color of my words?” he asked, unable to come up with a lucid answer. What have I gotten myself into?
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Feedback from my last newsletter about the universe:
An apple a day....  writes, "Thanks for the list of good reads. I love a mystery ...Connie"
Thanks for reading!
blue jellybaby  writes,"My thoughts exactly! I can't believe that we're the only planet with some sort of human life on it, there has to be more out there!"
It does seem rather unlikely that we're all alone in the whole wide universe, doesn't it?
Mark Allen Mc Lemore writes, "What a great newsletter (Mystery: A Universe Full of Possibilities), I recently began designing and creating stories for my own paracosm (Fantasy world that many dreamy, imaginative people like to invent, particularly in youth; "Worldplay"; Leads to imaginative adults who can solve more problems since they used to have to solve the problems in an imagined world. -Wired Magazine 2012-) I went out and got a large piece of black poster board and mixed three different "whitish" paints and flecked them on for the stars, then cut out my various planets and their moons from construction paper. I have several stories set in my paracosm. I have a lot of fun retreating to this world. Thanks for this newsletter, it has some inspriration and ideas within I could use for my alternate little world. Mark A. Mc Lemore"
I spent years playing tabletop RPGs where I had the opportunity to design entire game worlds for the characters to explore. Happy to hear that you have some new ideas for yours... best of luck with the world-building!
Zheila writes, "Hi SoCalscribe; My nameis Zheila. I sid enjoy your article about "A Universe Full of Possibilities." We are surrounded by mystery around us. Space is a good example. According to daily galaxy.com, there are "two billion Earth like planets" in our own Milky Way Galaxy, which is our own backyard. We do not have to prove that intelligent extraterrestrial life does exist.I enjoyed article tremendously."
Thank you for the kind words... I'm glad you enjoyed the article!
MrBugSir writes, "I understand you reluctance to give up Pluto as a proper planet. I was completely with you until I actually read the new definition of a planet last year, while arguing about it, of course. The "clearing of the neighborhood" provision is interesting, because "The Earth's mass is 1.7 million times the mass of the other objects in its orbit. Unfortunately, Pluto's mass is only 0.07 times the mass" (http://www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=49). My friend stopped talking to me after I pointed that out, until we found something else to argue about, probably about residential nuclear power plants or how "easy" it is to manufacture gold in fusion reactors. I read somewhere else if Pluto could be considered a planet, we'd have to include all the similar heavenly objects, so we'd have over 50 planets. I don't want to have to memorize all their names in the order of distance from the sun."
Yeah, I'm not sure what the mnemonic device for 50 "planets" would be... 
Nixie🦊  writes, "I had an interesting experience while reading your newsletter. Several chapters into my book, my male protagonist is revealed as someone from another planet. He arrives on one planet and then continues to Earth. I included his inability to breathe the atmosphere and how this affects him. After considering your queries, I wondered, why would he be okay on the first planet he accidentally travels to, galaxies away? It changed the entire pacing of his story, or it will when I get it all nailed down. Don't you find it gloriously odd when one thing leads to another?"
It is a pretty surreal experience the way some things work out.
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Mystery: February 12, 2013 Issue [#5516]
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