But onto the real news of the day: I've been working on a story! For those of you who don't know, I actually dabble in writing. I'm not terrible at it, or at least that's what I've been told. I even have one check and a whole lot of increasingly nasty correspondence from a publisher to prove that someone would...or at least used to be willing to pay for it. I won't go into details, but that whole experience honestly turned me off to writing anything more than silly blurbs and shorts for a while. But now I'm back and twice as badass!!!
So, by the end of the week (maybe tonight if I'm lucky), I'll be twenty pages in. Twenty pages is a pretty important benchmark for me; it's when I actually start buckling down and writing as much as humanly possible. Anything that I've ever written that's over twenty pages has been finished to completion. I've never not finished a story that has passed this mark.
Anyways, if you're interested, just drop me a line. I'm always interested in feedback and whatnot. I think that it's helpful to have someone read a story as I write it. It allows me to gauge reactions and fix problems before they get out of control (something that I learned a little too late in one case.) As a little treat/tease, here's the first few paragraphs in my story. Hope you enjoy!
THE VAMPIRE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN, read the headline of the Washington Post. Someone had left a copy on Detective Gwen Paternie's desk. When she finally walked into the office after a long night in the field, she glanced down at the newspaper and softly cursed under her breath. This night could not get any worse, she thought. A U.S senator had been found dead, probably killed by the same murderer she had been chasing for weeks. Since the body had been found at 1 AM by a park ranger, Gwen had spent four hours drudging through mud and litter searching for evidence and three hours in a cold, dark medical examiner's office watching two coroners dissect the corpse. Gwen picked up the newspaper and loudly threw it in the trash. She was not about to read about what a total and complete failure her investigation had been up to this point. She knew this already. As she silently fumed at her desk, the other detectives in her squad quietly looked up and smirked. They knew that the hotshot rookie detective everyone hated was about to enter a world of hurt for her inability to crack the case before a US Senator ended up dead.
The debacle was not Gwen's fault. Gwen was a smart detective, a competent detective and she usually had a little bit of an edge when it came to solving cases. Gwen had a few things working for her that made her an excellent detective. She had a keen eye and a knack for seeing things that no one else saw. Gwen could also hear people's thoughts, a little fact that she kept to herself to keep her from being totally alienated from her coworkers. She didn't know why or how she could do it, but listening to people's thoughts was like being able to hear a whisper. With a little bit of concentration, she could hear whatever was on a person's mind. However, while being able to hear people's thoughts usually came in handy in her line of work, it was proving to be useless working on this case. While being able to hear thoughts was great for getting the truth, it unfortunately did not work on dead bodies, which was about all she was turning up in her current case.
Gwen had been on the case for almost three weeks, and in that time five dead bodies had sprung up in the Metro area, each one with a broken neck and a distinctive bite-like mark on their necks. The first four had been homeless people, bums and vagrants who no one would miss. There were no links that connected them to each other, besides the fact that they were all homeless and all had no family or friends that reported them missing. Each had been found in a different part of town, killed sometime the night before and left dead in a ditch or a stream. The only thing Gwen had to go on was the unusual punctures in the neck. The coroner had determined the marks to be made postmortem, judging mainly from the lack of blood in the wounds. The crime lab, meanwhile, determined that the marks were artificially made, as there was no human or animal who could have possibly caused them with their teeth. However, the marks did look like the bite of a vampire, and so the Vampire Killer name stuck with the media, leading the entire investigation to be surrounded by a perpetual media circus. Every single day, Gwen fielded at least a dozen calls about the case from different media outlets, asking if she had any leads, if she had any witnesses, and if she believed the killings to be based on the recent infatuation that teenage girls were having with vampires. And to each question, Gwen refused to give an answer.
