New Mystery in the Works…
Hi all! Reviews for my latest collection ‘Starting Over’ are coming in. Planned publishing date is still November 30th. This is the longest break from writing I’ve taken in a very long time, but I found a way to keep myself busy.
I finally completed the first draft of the second mystery story, and now I’m working on a third mystery story. As I mentioned before, creating mystery stories is difficult for me. There are so many twists I have to keep in mind. During the last half of September and all of October, I was able to create a mystery story from a single line: “Stephen lives in Bisbee, AZ.” From that, I added characters, events, and situations. From those 5 words, I was able to develop a complete synopsis of almost 4000 words. I still think I can add more twists, so I’m letting it simmer. Besides, I have a lot more work to do.
Marketing my collection has also occupied my time. I also decided that I needed to expand my story’s reach by placing select books at Wattpad and Inkitt. I’ll use these two alternative marketing strategies along with the others.
After watching ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ on Netflix, I’m starting to miss my supernatural stories. Periodically, I’ve been trying to develop my own lore for my stories. Stories handed down over the decades, or centuries, that wreak havoc on people today seem to be the key to developing scary stories. I’ve developed my own lore in many of my stories without realizing it. Without context, developing lore is very difficult, e.g., a speaker emits a voice from an old recording. Just thought that up while looking at one of my speakers. The story behind the voice and the speaker, their lore, needs to be explained. That’s where I run into trouble. Why is the voice present in the recording? Is the speaker the only object affected? Questions like these allow me to develop the lore around the event. BTW, I think I just gave myself an idea for another story! Take care!