New Release! "The Beast of Friday Lake"

It’s finally here! I have published six non-fiction books and had a short story published in an anthology in 2023, but nothing beats my first novel. This book has been in production for many years and was not the first book I had intended to publish. It’s been a long journey from developing the characters and plot and certainly rewriting and editing as well as editing and rewriting and then editing some more and then fomatting for release.

My first book idea was about a ghost group in a fictional setting. I developed what I thought was a good story, but the plot fell apart and I got stuck nearly halfway through it. In the book I had created a character that was friends with one of my main characters. His name was Henry Malone and was a motocross rider as well as a cryptozoologist (those who study unknown and undiscovered animals like Bigfoot). My initial idea was to have a character established in this book that could be used in a forthcoming book in a series of the ghost group or even a spinoff idea. Once the original book began to stall, I decided to develop the latter idea.

The ideas flowed very quickly and as I developed other characters, I eventually moved away from Henry being the main character. I really enjoyed creating the plot and while I wanted to keep some suspense, I never intended to mislead my readers. This is a simple and straightforward book that is meant to entertain but also teach the reader a little about cryptozoology along the way.

The setting is the fictional towns of Friday Station and Friday Lake. The lake is a recreational area that used to be a quiet lake just used by locals only with non-motorized boats, kayaks, and canoes. Eventually the lake was developed for recreational use by the general public and the once quiet town slowly became overrun with tourists. There had always been rumors of a large bipedal creature roaming the woods, but the urban legend was just considered a story until one summer.

A series of murders created the startling possibility that maybe the creature was not only real, but it was killing people who had created reports about it. The book focuses on Henry Malone as well as a local sheriff’s deputy, Deputy Lynne Garcia, who together try to piece together clues to help figure out if a creature or a person is responsible for the murders.

The town turns upside down as more murders occur and the area becomes the focus on a swarm of media that camps out and creates even more speculation about what might be happening. Fingers point in many directions and eventually the beast is flushed out and a life and death chase and struggle ensues.

The book can be purchased through Lulu.com and is coming soon to global distribution at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How do I get motivated to write?

Image
H olding your published book in your hands for the first time is like holding your first-born child. OK, maybe not quite, but it's still a fantastic feeling. The first time I held my published work in my hands was a great day and it felt like stumbling across the finish line in a marathon, but even that is an understatement of the process. Receiving your author copy in the mail is more like the halfway point of the marathon if you intend to sell any books. Writing a book sounds like fun and it’s a great feeling to pour your thoughts and creativity into a written piece of work. Many think it’s like carving a statue, picking out the perfect curves, and chiseling pieces to create a masterpiece. Unfortunately, it’s nothing like carving unless you intend to use a quarry for one piece. It might seem like once you get a solid outline of a book or create enough details you should be able to just sit down and crank it out in a few days. If only it were that easy. Don't kid yourself.
Read more

Which is harder to write: fiction or non-fiction?

Image
 I have been fortunate to have published both non-fiction and fiction as well as many articles over the years. My first publishing came with non-fiction as I self-published six books before focusing on writing fiction. I’ve been asked this question a couple of times and I want to get my opinion out there before focusing on specific topics. The big difference between these types of books is that one is based on facts and information and is objective and the other is entirely or almost entirely made up and is subjective. At first thought you might think that being able to write about your own characters and plot and making a story up from scratch sounds easier than adhering to writing about facts and information, but both have their easy and hard aspects. Books in the non-fiction genre tend to be shorter than those in fiction depending upon what type of fiction you are writing.  In writing a non-fiction book (I’ll talk about how to write them in a future blog post) there is more structu
Read more