A blog where Stephanie M. Belser test-drives her fictional stories.
Expect the occasional
"stall, spin, crash & burn".

Monday, October 28, 2013

Project the Next

While Aluminum Rain is offline for a few hours (Amazon's processing a corrected copy), this is the first chapter in the next work.
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Chapter 1

Lena Smirnova didn’t wake up in a cold sweat during the night. That was a good thing.  The counselor that she saw had mentioned something about her suffering from “post traumatic stress”.  She had thought that the word “disorder” was part of it, but he had explained that for a lot of things that people had experienced, post traumatic stress was a normal reaction. They were more worried about the people who didn’t have a reaction to it than those that did. Or so they told her.

Aluminum Rain and Apple Pie

Aluminum Rain is now available for purchase in the Amazon Kindle store. It's only a buck, less than a cup of coffee from almost anywhere (except here).

If you're a fan of the TV show Justified, you probably remember Mags Bennett and her apple pie moonshine. I had a taste of that last night, but not the stuff that Mags poisoned. It did indeed taste like apple pie and it was about the smoothest booze that I've ever had. I could see where someone could put away several shots of it and end up being drunk on their ass without knowing what hit them.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Gloria Barfed on the Subway

I forgot to mention that Blood on the Snow made a brief appearance on the Amazon best-seller's list. I didn't think of capturing a screen-shot until it was almost too late.

Almost.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Wuffo Aluminum Rain?

As you may have noticed, I have taken down most of Aluminum Rain.

First, that's the title that I've chosen.

Second, what I had posted was the first draft. The story has changed a bit since then. I've revised it a few times and now I have it out to some "beta readers".

After they've read it, I'll offer it for sale in the Kindle store for a buck. I think that's a fair price for a novella of about 22,000 words. It's almost a "flash fiction" novella, as the first draft took a little over two weeks to write.

I have to take another look at the draft of Blood on the Range, as there is something about it that just doesn't feel right.

(And I have to gear up for court today.)

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Aluminum Rain, Pt. II

My client was an elderly gent named James Bell.  He was related to Alexander Graham Bell, his father had been either a cousin or grand-nephew of the inventor.  James Bell was wealthy, not just rich.  He had money managers who looked after his investments.  This Bell was a patron of the musical arts and, in his youth, had been both a musician of some note and had helped jazz cross over into a higher level of society.  More to my concern, he was a great-uncle of Loftus.  I went to see him the day after I talked to Dr. Durden.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Aluminum Rain; Sam Hawkins Returns

I am working on a new Sam Hawkins story.  This one will be set around 1992.  I don't know if it'll work out to be a novel, a novella, or a short, but here is the first chapter:
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It didn’t look like much of an airplane, just bits of twisted and blackened metal.  The fragments had been laid out inside the outline of an airplane.  There probably had been an odor at one time, but the wreckage was old enough for any smell to have faded away.