(author’s foreword)
Welcome, friends, family and fellow Prosers.
This story, it's cast and many of its scenes, has been with me for a while now. It began as a response to a photo prompt in a Facebook genre-writing group, during a week in which we were exploring Tragedy. The image was one of a couple, presumably dead and floating in a a shallow pool. Their body positions reminded me of a pair of dancing marionettes, and the rest, as they say, was history.
That flash story was the birth of Detective Howard Stegner, and his nemesis, the Puppeteer. Over the next several months, many more of the flash prompts I encountered became different aspects of this story, and I finally took the hint and compiled them into one project.
The strongest supporter of the tale was one of my fellow admins. She has since become my business partner in a small publishing house (@RhetoricAskew here on Prose), and is a fellow Proser herself. Take a bow @MandyMelanson. We have never gotten to shake hands, but I still consider her one of my very best friends, and in many ways, this story owes its existence to her enthusiasm and support. A very special thank you must also go out to @RubyPond, whose six-part prompt was the poke-in-the-rear that I needed to pull this tale out and begin working on it in earnest. Without her, it might very well still be simmering on very low, somewhere at the back of my brain.
I have decided, in all my strangeness, to do something I have never seen done by a novelist. I am sharing the creation of this story as I write it. Each of the parts is between 300 and 500 words long, with some scenes existing in a single part, and others spanning many. I have made a commitment to myself, to write at least 300 words on the story, each and every day until it is done.
I have received some great feedback from some of you already, but I am officially inviting those of you who are interested to come along with me, as I write this first draft. Keep in mind that it IS a first draft, so will be re-written and edited heavily before it gets anywhere near publishable form. It is bound to have some plot holes, some character lapses, and sadly (for the editor in me) probably some grammatical errors as well.
Please feel free to leave any feedback you think might help. Those of you who decide to do this "on-the-fly" beta read will all get a nod in the final book.
If I have tagged you, and you don't care to be tagged any further, please let me know. All of you have, at one time or another, LIKED something I have written, but I know not everyone cares to be tagged in these types of posts, nor does everyone want to read an ongoing story in this fashion. (I will still be writing and posting classic-style poetry and other challenge-response flashes, but this story is going to stay front-burnered).
Okay - I know I tend to be long-winded when I write in a journaling fashion--you should see my rough-draft blog posts, oy vay!--so I will close this one with a link to the book itself, where you will find the parts, listed in order. Once again feel free to comment and/or critique as you read.
Thanks, Dusty
dustygrein, author of The Puppeteer, found here: