Things are going okay with the Challenge. I’m taking a short break from the world of ‘The Unlikely Detective’ to write a bit about something I just stumbled onto while I was reading the latest news of the ‘Real World’. I put that in quotes because these days I’m feeling like I’ve stepped through the looking glass and am now living in a nightmarish alternate reality filled with ‘alternate facts’.

Anyway, regular readers of this blog may have picked up on my interest in words. Today I found a new one and though its existence didn’t surprise me, when I thought about it, I really hadn’t thought about it until today. The word is ‘Advertorial’. That’s right – Advertorial – and it’s in the online Merriam-Webster, listed in the bottom 20 percent in popularity. It’s formed (obviously?) from the birth of a conjoined advertisement and editorial fetus.

This is not good.

In this new Alternate Reality to which we’ve been transported  I don’t know if we have a Federal Trade Commission and Truth In Advertising laws. Chances are that we don’t. I’d like to get a legal opinion on whether advertorials, as a class of advertisements, are in violation of the Truth laws. The advertorial is a deliberate attempt to mislead the consumers into thinking that they’re reading a factual news article when it’s just another advertisement that might be true and correct.

Well, that’s all for now. Back to the Challenge and the story of Mabel, her cats, her friend Felicity who’s taking up a major role in the unfolding drama of ‘The Body In the Sauna.’ The characters are telling a story that’s a little bit different from the one I had imagined. I have to let them speak. It’s their story and they lived it. I’m only now hearing about it so I have to tell it to you the way they tell it to me.

It’s like I’m their ghost writer. Funny feeling, that.