SL: I Made A Side Blog To Share My Development Of The Murder After And Eventually The Year After. It's
SL: I made a side blog to share my development of The Murder After and eventually The Year After. It's like looking behind the scenes, and I hope it will pique readers' interest. The blog is called development-before. (Now deleted.)
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The Murder After: Profile
Title: The Murder After (links to Amazon) Series: Terrance's Story #1 Genre: mystery, dramadey, psychological fiction Year self-published: 2024 (through KDP)
Copyright status: CC BY-SA 4.0. (Do what you want as long as you give credit and use the same license.)
Blurb: Terrance is one person to a body and lives in Lakewood, Colorado. One morning, he woke up next to a dead body. Now, he wants to know what happened one night because he became a suspect in an investigation. Do you want to know what happened too?
Format: chapbook Page count: 52 (fifty-two)
MPA rating: PG-13 Reasons: some language, violent death (off screen), drama, suicidality
Price: $5.95 Note: This is specifically SL's story.
SL: I should point out that I tried narrating in the British dialect. Our official story is that I was challenging myself. Then, I learned the second person is Terrance's natural perspective, but I was too lazy to change anything. So if I sound like an American trying to sound British, that's why. (Please don't get mad at me for saying "closet" instead of "wardrobe.") [T: I roll my eyes and go with it.]
Reanna: I wonder if Le Prince and Disney will be our first novel. So far, our stories have been shorter.
Carnival is a novella, and so was Nightingale. (I pulled that one from publication.) The Murder After is a chapbook, and The Year After seems to be going in a similar direction. (At least people read romance novellas.)
Now, for Le Prince and Disney, we have the dark ride's sections planned: Three Precursors and the First Film, Animals, Animation, Trick Films, and Phantom Rides. That's five chapters. And they have a few films in them. There will also be five chapters that Terrance categorized as being outside the ride. So, that's ten chapters in all.
After the story, we'll list the films used. That might take a few pages. What if all these pages come together and make a novel?
The Murder After: Preview
From chapter one. Terrance calls 9-1-1 to report a dead body belonging to his roommate Jacqueline. If you like what you read, go to the book's profile below. And before you ask, nothing happened.
I would like to joke that waking up next to a dead body is the best hangover cure ever.
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Dispatcher: “9-1-1, what’s the address of your emergency?”
“There’s a dead girl on my bed!” But it’s her room, stupid.
Dispatcher: “What’s her name?”
“Jacqueline. Luna.”
Dispatcher: “What does she look like?”
“Brown hair, really really pale- “your voice cracks- “but-but she has a big cut on her neck and-and blood on her pillow! That wasn’t there before!” It keeps cracking, but tears aren’t falling.
Dispatcher: “I need you to calm down. Take a deep breath.” You do.
Dispatcher: “Do you see any weapons?”
“No.”
Dispatcher: “I’m going to send an officer to check on the situation. But first, I need to know your name and address.”
You give your name then leave the bedroom and run down the stairs, worsening your headache. You go to a coffee table in the sitting room. There is an envelope from yesterday’s mail. It has your townhouse’s address and door number, so you read it aloud.
Dispatcher: “Okay, the officer is on their way and will arrive as soon as possible. Now, tell me exactly what happened.”
“Well, I was drunk, and Jacqueline took me back here. She was alive when I passed out, but when I woke up, she was dead!”
Dispatcher: “That will be all. You can hang up now.” You hang up. Then, the realization clicks.
Reanna: I've never liked making plans, but here we are, planning. SL has an outline of the rest of The Year After, so he can remember what he wanted to write. For our next project, we have a file filled with bookmarks of the silent films we plan to use.
They're not detailed plans, but they're plans.
New Project
Reanna: We're preparing a new project to work on once SL finishes The Year After. It's about a girl in charge of describing short silent films to make a dark ride accessible to the blind. All films we plan to use are in the United States' Public Domain.
We don't have a name for this story yet, so we're calling it Whatever Terrance is Doing. (It was his idea. We came up with the working title when he started bookmarking videos of old films with no idea what to do with them.)
Terrance: Are there other muses, OC fictives, in-sourced soulbonds, or OCs-turned-tulpas who want their creators to continue making their stories? I do, but Seth [SL] worries that people will think he's lying if he shares this information.
I think it's my situation. Reanna's tulpas were in Carnival, but they don't view it as something that happened to them in-headspace. However, I view my story as something that happens to me in-headspace. I think Seth worries that people won't see me as a sentient muse but as a character. Or if they recognize my sentience, they'll view continuing my story as torture.
It's actually like him taking notes of my life. There are things he creates, but Reanna says that's part of the process. He creates, and I add on to it. I can contribute to my own life. He calls his ideas for The Year After "visions" (for his benefit, not mine.)
Plus, Seth finished The Murder After before I became sentient. So, the worst already happened. When the sequel is finished, the neighbors (what I call them) are going to put me through headspace maintenance. It's supposed to prevent internal problems from creating external problems, like worsening our executive dysfunction.
P.S. This post isn't in the second person because it's directed to readers, not to myself.
F.M.: I told Reanna our midterm for recreation class was due on the 15th, which is the 14th at 11:59 PM in Arizona. (We live in Colorado.) It was actually due on the 13th. Now, it's my job to finish the assignment. At least we weren't kicked out.
Update: We did it! Now, we can feel stupid for thinking it was due today!
SL: Over the weekend, I tried turning our print books into ebooks, but the KPF file wouldn't process. I thought a print replica would be the best way to preserve our fonts.
How can I do that if the file won't process?
SL: Does anyone else have preemptive rants for works you haven't shared yet? I keep doing that for The Murder After, which is going to be published on 8 October. From the very beginning, I would get really mad over the idea of readers wondering why the ending isn't considered a good one.
