A Story So Strange

The original Prologue of A Murder So Strange was a very complex set of alternating themes, which I first thought made sense, but re-reading it through as I begun on my re-write of the story, I knew that I would have to do a different Prologue and I thought about the girl who gets murdered, while the original story does mention it somewhere, I felt that it did not quite capture what I originally wanted it to capture.

And that was the mystery of the murder. Originally the girl just simply got shot in the head and that was it and to my way of thinking, it was not strange enough, sure she was revealed to be actually a boy and that is strange within itself, but to start off with no one knows ant and the gun shot to the head was not mysterious enough.

So, I added the element of her being poisoned and re-work a better scene of the Birthday party and I needed an image of a manor house with a lake, as it was crucial to the whole story and I got lucky, thanks to my trusted image search website. Google Images.

Once I had that, I knew that I had my prologue and I went in search of other images too. Now then, in the original story my main character was 16 years old, this at the time of it’s original posting was acceptable. Of course it is not so currently and it has been that way for some time now.

Anyway, the character was in a children’s home and I knew that I would have to change his age and the type of place that he was living in and I came up with a YMCA facility, which was perfect for what I needed it for. Again I got lucky with getting the bedroom image and more importantly the girl/or possibly a boy wearing that frilly pink dress.

For me, I could easily suggest and make it virtually believable that the person in the image is in fact a boy. The town scene where Carl gets almost ran over by a mysterious biker was in the original story. I kept the original character of Jane, but changed the other girls name to Suzie

In the original Jane and Suzie are part of an international school event which features floats with different themes, this easily was changed to a student international beauty pageant event. Originally the reveal of wo was after carl was a man that had cleverly disguised himself as a woman.

For this re-write, I wanted the murder to be a mystery man and that was a deliberate red herring, to throw you the reader off with the re-write of the original story and for you the reader to think and believe that the mysterious killer to be an actual guy.

I do apologise for misleading you all, but I wanted the reveal that the killer to be an actual woman instead to be a real shocker, if you know what I mean? I did each part of the re-write, mostly in two halves, so it gave me a better chance to imagine the things that I needed to imagine for the story.

Also I did not want to rush it, I let it develop naturally and not force any scene etc. I wanted to make all of the characters better relatable in this re-write of the original story. I hope I have achieved that, as well as kept the mystery of the whole story mysterious and very strange indeed. This re-write has been a joy to write and reimagine.