Killing to Know was my first try and National Write a Novel month, and also the book I have decided to publish first. The story had it's genesis in my obsession with film noir and an idea that I had to shoot a short single shot movie, another thing I hadn't been able to get out of my head since I saw Children of Men.
The plot of the movie was a killer walking up to an apartment and waiting for an un-named guy to come home, he then shots him and leaves. We were going to do this whole thing as a single take, but that never came though. But the man coming up to an apartment was burned into my brain, I know that was how the story started, I just didn't yet know it was a book and not some kind of shitty short movie.
So I spent a bunch of days writing little bits of scenes and I wasn't sure how they all fit in with each other. I knew that the new MacGuffin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin) would be a mob boss's will. At that point I still didn't know why it was important, and didn't till about halfway though writing the book. I had the principal characters of Calvin Hobbs - named after the comic duo, but don't let him know that - The Stranger, and Jacki Deverox.
That script came toghter into a relativly short 29 pages which wasn't horrible but also was not a very good movie and wouldn't have been somthing that I could have pulled off well. Black and white is harder to shoot in then I would have thought. By July of 2010 I knew that Killing to Know was a book, that I was calling Will Call at the time. Also in July I knew that I wanted to do National Write and Novel Month, and was deep into editing The Long Night (another post for another time,) so I slipped the idea away and let it mull in my head so that it would be a good vintage when I opened the bottle in November.
Come November I started witting, and for most of the time it went really well. The story started in first person, but then halfway though chapter two I switched to third person without realizing it for another two chapters because that is just what came naturally. So by that point I just decided to let it slide and go fix that first chapter in editing. I finished the book with a few days to spare, and sat it aside till this spring when the task of working through The Long Night got to me.
Then I decided that it would be a good toe in the water for self publishing because it wasn't horribly long, was a solid story, and at the time wasn't something I was so attached to that I could live with seeing it crash and burn. I mean it would hurt but wouldn't destroy my spirit to write ever again.
Synopsis:
Privet Eye Calvin Hobbs is hired to take a few pictures of a mob boss's Will. What he doesn't know is that this single job will pull him into a web of treachery and death, as multiple forces fight over the document. As he struggles to put the peaces together Hobbs learns that when a secret is as valuable as the one he has anybody will end up killing to know it.
I hope to show you the cover soon, and as always here again is the sample chapter, a draft version of Chapter 1. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qe86ue_eLyJM2pQ3Ahp5V8V26B2GGLzjGyUwP8nKlG0/edit?hl=en_US
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