Back At it?

I finished the first draft of a second Smirnova novel in 2013. I wasn't really satisfied with it, so, after printing it out, I set it aside.

Now, I'm getting back to it. This time around, I'll figure out how to fully format a Kindle book, with chapters and shit like that there.

Sam Hawkins vs. Lena Smirnova

Besides the obvious, writing the two characters has different challenges.

Sam is more of a traditional hard-boiled PI. He takes a job and he does it. He dishes out lumps and takes them as necessary. He's by no means a gorilla, but he keeps what's private out of the story that he is narrating. What you see is what he wants you to see. Essentially, his tale is a long version of his eventual report to his clients.

Lena's character is more complex, in part because she is not the narrator. You never see the narrator (like Chorus). Because Lena does not control the narration, you see a lot more of her life.

I read a lot of the old school detective novels when I was a teenager: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, John D. MacDonald and Mickey Spillane. Of the lot, it's a bit of a shame that Ross MacDonald's work seems to have drifted into obscurity the fastest, though some of them have been reissued in the last few years.

For me, Lena's character is harder to write because of the level of detail and complexity of her life. She has a large multi-generational extended family (I maintain a growing genealogical chart), she does other things besides detective work, and, in the one that I am now working on, she has a love life (such as it is). She is involved in her community. Because Lena lives in a fictional American state, I have had to create maps as I go and imagine a bit of history.

Though, in true hard-boiled tradition, both Lena and Sam are somewhat alike. They are both comfortable in their own skins and in being on their own.

The two characters will meet eventually.

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.

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.

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.)

Blood on the Snow Now Available

Kindle format only, though. If you have a PC or tablet, there are free apps for them.

And Baby Makes Three

The first draft is done!

I like having a printed copy to read and mark up.

With sporadic royalty payments from Amazon, I've maybe made fifty bucks so far on the first book.

I finished the second book, "Blood on the Snow" almost two years ago. I pick up the printed manuscript from time to time; I keep finding typos, bad punctuation and things that need revising. And that was after re-doing the last 10-15% of the first draft.

All of which pretty much means that I can write, I guess, but I can't market for shit.

Blood on the Range- Chapter 2

Lena woke up the next morning to nineteen pounds of purring cat lying on her torso. When she opened her eyes, Bucko’s face was about two inches from her’s. “Off”, she said as she pushed him over.

Bucko jumped down to the floor and stalked out of the room as he said: “Owp. Owp. Owp.” Translated, that meant: “Feed me now.” Lena swung her legs over the edge of the bed, found her slippers and robe, and went downstairs. She started her one-cup coffee-maker brewing before she opened a can of food for the cat. Priorities. For herself, Lena had some nukeable oatmeal with a bit of maple syrup dribbled over it. She had a contact in Vermont who sent her a half-gallon each year, fresh from a sugar house. After she had first tasted it, she swore to thrash the next person who offered her that crappy “maple-flavored” syrup.

After scooping out the cat’s litter box and getting dressed, Lena drove directly to her office. It hadn’t snowed in a few days; the snow alongside the roads was beginning to take on a brownish-black tinge from both road sand and oil leaks. Other than the local airport, there was nothing out her road other than large plots of land with nondescript houses. Some of the properties were working farms, right up until she got almost to downtown Petersburg. Some of the properties were hobby ranches, most had at least one barn that might or might not hold a few horses. More did before the big recession hit.

Blood on the Range

A draft of the first chapter of a work in progress:

Chapter 1

Lena Smirnova went out for lunch that day. She was jonesing for nice greasy burger, which meant a drive to Skipper’s Grill. The general opinion was that Skipper’s Grill was the equivalent of a vampire building. During the day, it was a terrific place for hamburgers, steaks and catfish. At night, it transformed itself into a notorious bucket-o’-blood. More than one sheriff had stationed a cruiser on the other side of the road to try and tamp things down, with little success.

The interior of Skipper’s was pretty dingy at night, or so Lena had been told. She wouldn’t have gone in there in the evening without being accompanied by a Marine reinforced rifle platoon. During the day, however, the interior was brightly lit and almost cheerful. The owners recognized the schizophrenic nature of their customer base, in that the daylight customers were different from the night-time customers. The changeover between the two was almost as well-defined as the shift change in a factory.

Plugging Away

I've been working full-time and, as I'm finding out, it's pretty difficult to get motivated to do any writing. I spend much of my day working on a computer, whether it is writing legal papers or researching them. To come home and look at the same word-processing screen is, well, kind of sucky.

But still. I do some.

What I'm not good at is marketing. The Hidden Witness sells about a copy a month from Amazon. I did a "free promotion day" through Amazon and about a hundred copies were snapped up, but they didn't lead to any increased sales. (All you buggers who took advantage of it and then couldn't be troubled to at least drop a nice review, thanks for nothing.)

I'm into the fourth revision of Blood on the Snow. It's kind of depressing, in a way, to pick it up and find typos and crazy phrasing. But that's why I let it sit for months and then go back to it, so I read with fresh eyes and I see what is there, not what I think is there.

And I've been working on first draft of the sequel to Blood on the Snow. That's probably about 60% finished, maybe more, maybe less. This one has more detail about Lena's life and her surroundings. I've also tried to make it seem that she has an active career/job, in that she's working on several things at the same time. Most lawyers with an active practice have a lot of open cases and matters and I expect that most private investigators do, as well. Whether the extra stuff is fluff or necessary detail, well, I'll leave that up to my readers. If I ever have any for it.

Anywho: Happy New Year!

Seven Sentences

Dan O'Shea posted this on his Facebook page:

The rules: The challenge is to post seven lines from an unpublished work of fiction, and most people choose their present Work in Progress. Specifically, you would:

-Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript
... -Go to line 7
-Post on your blog or Facebook page the next 7 lines, or sentences, as they are – no cheating
-Tag 7 other authors to do the same.

I'm not going to tag seven other authors. I don't have seven friends who are writing books. But here is mine, from a work in progress:

There was an address for service of legal papers, which Lena recognized as a law firm in Grover City which made a specialty out of shielding companies from the embarrassment of process servers.

There were a number of filings. One was for a change of name from Together Brethren, Inc., then one to change the company from a foreign corporation to a domestic one, which meant that they had started out elsewhere. They had been a Nevada corporation, which didn’t mean much, as Nevada was not too far behind Delaware for being a corporate-friendly state. The Nevada listing was with another law firm, so that was a dead end.

An Internet search for the Together Brethren pulled down some interesting results. The group was a religious sect which believed in living apart from those they deemed to be non-believers, which apparently meant the other 6.999999 billion people on the planet.

Blood On the Snow

I showed it to two people. While they each had different comments, they agreed on one thing: The ending sucked.

I reread it and agreed. So I scrapped the ending and took it in a different direction. Seems to be better.

82K words. At one point, I was concerned that I might not be able to have enough material for a novel-length.

Blood On the Snow

And the first draft is done!

I basically wrote 68,000 words in less than five weeks. This last week, I felt as though I was just smoking the keyboard.

Now to let it rest for a few days, then reread and begin editing.

(And some sleep)

Blood On the Snow

I have been trying to write a chapter a day. Most days I've been able to do that. Possibly one or two days a week, I don't. I've passed on a number of flash fiction challenges, as they cut into my production time.

With luck, a first draft will be done by the middle of next month, allowing for non-productive days.

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.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Lena got up about an hour after she first went to bed. She opened her closet door, pushed aside some clothes, then opened her gun safe. After a little thought, she pulled out a Mossberg 20-gauge shotgun. Inside a box next to the safe, she found a mostly full box of No.2 buckshot loads. She slid five shells into the magazine and made sure that the safety was off. the shotgun went next to her bed. If she had to, all she had to do was rack the slide and it was rock-and-roll time. She slept better.

Bucko had her awake at 6:30 the following morning. It was still well before sunrise, but it was twilight. It was windy and snowing, maybe two inches had fallen. Lena cursed. Two inches of snow barely qualified as a “dusting” in these parts, but it would be enough to cover any tracks or other sign from the shooter. Without a hint of where the shooter had been, there was no reasonable way to search for the bullet he had fired. As far as the evidence was concerned, there was nothing to show that anything at all had happened last night. If she didn’t have relatives in the sheriff’s department, the whole episode would probably be filed as a report by a hysterical female with an overactive imagination.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 11

NB: Names used in this chapter will not be consistent with earlier chapters. That'll be fixed in the full-length draft (which will eventually be available as an e-book).
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Chapter 11

Lena waited until the following morning to set up her email program to receive and send emails from the State Police email server, though the first thing she did was, as Betty advised, was to log in through the web-based server and change her password. After doing that, she downloaded the emails. Crap, she thought, there were something like twenty of them. No way could she bill the Johnsons for doing any of this, she’d have to eat the time. Working for free tended to make her cranky.

One of the first emails that she read contained a link to a state software server and a suggestion that she download the encryption program contained on the site. She did that. The software was for a public/private key encryption scheme; it contained a severe warning to not forget one’s password, as the passwords were not recoverable. Lena doubted that, she didn’t believe that any government agency would buy an encryption program that did not have a “back door”. But maybe the state was too cheap to pay for such a feature. She made a mental note not to get too chummy or chatty in any emails on the state’s system.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 10

NB: Early on, it was my intention that the protagonist would be a detective who had been a lawyer. But that ran into a problem, for she lives in a small town that is in a rural area, unlike, say, V. I. Warshawski. Unlike Kate Shugak, our hero does not live in a place where she can eke out a subsistence living if need be.

So she has to have another job, one that allows her the freedom to do detectifying when she needs to. So that is why in the latter chapters, there are details about her practicing law.
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Chapter 10

It was Lena’s intention to sleep in the next morning. That actually happened, Bucko didn’t pester her for food. She had tried to ensure that by leaving food out for him overnight, which she normally did not. Cats being what they are, that trick didn’t always work. It did this time. She skipped her morning exercise, though she felt guilty about it because she hadn’t had the time yesterday. Too bad. She also skipped having breakfast at the diner, opting instead for some yogurt and cold cereal.

Her answering machine was blinking when she made it into her office. It was from Betty McDougall, she left a number and asked Lena to call her back. Lena picked up the phone and called the number.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 9

On the appointed morning, Lena up early. She changed the litter in Bucko’s litter box and left him extra food. He had originally been an indoor-outdoor cat, but there were too many coy-dogs in the area. Lena was not at all interested in them making a meal of her cat, so she kept him inside. That had been a rather rough transition, but he was older now and seemed more interested in the life of ease of an indoor cat.

She was on the road by 7AM. Lena had created a summary of what she knew, which didn’t take up a lot of paper. While she didn’t think that Ed would stick with the ten minutes that she had been given, she couldn’t take the chance otherwise. Between pleasantries and the like, she guessed that she had five minutes at most to make her pitch. She took her digital recorder with her, as she needed to try to dictate a few letters during the drive. The software was maybe 98 to 99% accurate, but that still meant a maddening number of errors. Yet it was better than typing the whole bloody thing out.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 8

NB: I am going back from time to time to review and revise what came before. The chapters that are posted will reflect those revisions of the earlier story line, but I will not be uploading the revisions. So if you read a chapter that doesn't quite hang with the earlier ones posted here, that is why.
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Chapter 8

Lena had created a small spreadsheet so that she could keep track of the FOIS letters she had sent out and the response received. Most of the state and local government agencies had made their peace with the requirements for freedom of information and disclosures and complied. Those that didn’t eventually came around because the statute granted the requesting party the right to have their attorney’s fees paid by the losing government body if the requesting party sued. After the fourth or fifth county found themselves paying a couple hundred thousand dollars for both sets of lawyers, word got around.

Soon, Lena began sending out follow-up letters to the agencies that had not responded. Those letters quoted the FOIS, reminded the agencies of the “you lose, you pay” provision and included a copy of the original letter. That pried responses out of almost every agency left, until the only agency who had not responded was the state forestry service. That told Lena something, but she didn’t know what.