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

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Blood On the Snow

When I began writing this story, I was faced with a problem. I wanted to set it outside of the northeast US. But I have lived a good chunk of my life there. And I don't have the funds to go somewhere else for a few months to soak up local color.

So I began to make everything up. That meant that I had to start making a map in order to make sure that, as the story progresses, I could keep the geography consistent. It's a bit more work to create a reality than I had thought. When you deal with a real place, you can at least buy a map to it.

Anyway, I think I'm going to stop posting chapters here, for the reason I had a fictional newspaper publisher explain here. What you have been able to read will end up being somewhere between 20 to 25% of the story and that should be enough for a free sample. There are others who disagree and who post entire first drafts, but I don't know how you can persuade a potential reader to cough up for a revised version when they can go read the first draft. Sure, it's probably nowhere near as good, but the price is right.-- free. And I don't see how one can hope to persuade a publisher to print a book where there is a free version floating around the Internet.

So that's it, folks.

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