Let's start at the end

I wrote this when I guested on author D.K Krippene's blog way back in 2014, and I loved appearing on his blog. It upped my visibility a great deal. I'd just gotten into writing seriously and had just signed with an agency. Back then I just knew I was going to be the next Anne Rice or J.R. Ward. I was so full of excitement and I remember thinking, this is it. This is the year I break through. Four year later, I'm more realistic in my approach. I've learned so much, but I still have the same process of coming up with s story which some find fascinating , if not a little odd.

“She was worth every penny.”

I have developed a fascination with endings.  I can see the end of a movie without watching any other part to decide if that’s something I want to see. Whenever I buy a new book, I read the last line first it just makes me curious as to what happened before to get to this particular line. What happened to get to this very definitive sentence? It’s also the way I write.   I like to believe that what I write is an amalgam of O’Henry and Flannary O’Connor with a hint of Anne Rice,  confusing but beautifully weird.

“She was worth every penny”, is the last line to my short story Serenity and it came long before the actual story was developed. It was a line spoken by the main character and I began to form this picture in my mind of the man who would speak this line and under what circumstances which would deviate from the obvious.  I never want any of my readers to go into a story knowing what’s going to happen. That simple line could have turned something fantastically freakish into the mundane.

I could have easily made the story into a type of noire honey trap tale about a dame that done him wrong. It could have turned into a hit for higher type of La Femme Nikita saga or even the story of a thoroughbred coming in big for a down on his luck gambler. A line like that could also refer to any number of things that aren’t necessarily human like a car, a boat, hell; even a gun.

But in my mind, I would never know who “she” was until I uncovered who “he”was and why they would come into each other’s orbits.

Over the years, with the internet and twenty-four hour news the depravity of man is so prevalent that I began to wonder about the people trapped by their corruption, their own vices. How would someone with enough money and power purge themselves of their sins?

“He was a constant explorer and that was what brought him to the dingy alley in Chinatown. The smell of old fish and mooshoo pork wafted through the steaming grates in the ground as the late October air, whipped through his expensive Armani trench coat. Being one of the richest men in the country afforded him the luxury of his eccentricities. It also afforded him a degree of anonymity. Never a public figure, media did not hound him, as a matter of fact, not many people knew him as it were. And that’s the way he preferred it.”  This first paragraph is where Max Walters was formed.

The next question was finding a path from that paragraph to the last line, which as it turns out, was an easy question to answer once I explored how an anonymous billionaire would deal with his own self-loathing at the person he had been allowed to become simply due to an endless bank account balance.   How far would he go to rid himself of the perversions and demons that consumed him?

Not only did the story come to light, it also created one of the best WTF!!! moments I have written so far.

Hopefully, my next endeavor will garner the same such excitement as it reaches it WTF climax that I so hope it does.  I have already come up with the beginning and the ending lines.

“My name is Lycia Monglave, I am fourteen cycles old and I am a hunter.”

As for what happens in between… your guess is as good as mine.