A Family Affair, Updated

The 2011 story, where you will learn about a Pittsburgh subway station that resembles a butter dish.

(Original post)

A Family Affair

I am not a professional writer, in that I don't sell my writings directly to make a living. The closest thing to a professional writer in my family is my sister, Ann. She's a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The PG has a feature called the Saturday Diary. Among the entries that Ann has written there, she has an ongoing tale about the Christmas village that she builds on top of the fireplace mantle each year. These are her columns about it for `08, `09 and `10. I've been told that one is in the pipeline for this season, as well.

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.

I, Monster

(Flash fiction)

Hi, Doctor. Thanks for seeing me. I only need this one session. I’ll sit in a chair, thanks.

Don’t worry about my name. You can call me Mr. Monster. I don’t mind. It’s how I think of myself.

Oh, you wouldn’t know I’m a monster, not if you passed me on the street. But I am.

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.

When Writing a Story, Names Matter

Click on the image to enlarge

(Pearls Before Swine, of course)