“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― A Confession
The duality of murder
I must confess that this story, A Killer’s Confession, was something that was going to be incredibly dark. But the original writing gave me enough pause that I had to redo it. There’s a delicate balance between light and darkness that has to be maintained in my theme of duality. This story was no different from the others but the process was a bit more difficult than the rest.
Writing this story was a process that took over a week for me to complete; it was the longest I’ve ever spent on a story. I already had it in my mind that I wanted to revisit the letter format because it was a wonderful narrative device for me. If you remember, the first time, I did it was with my 26th short story, The Silver Plague, and it was marvelous. Of course, I didn’t want to repeat the whole thing. Instead, I decided to create two stories in one as I did with The Burden of Parenthood.
Still, with all that being said, I had to work really hard to find a balance between light and dark because I always want my readers to start up a conversation with each other. Sure, there’s a clear protagonist and antagonist but that doesn’t mean it all black and white. Not everything in this world is black and white, especially when it comes down to crime and punishment. So, I took the murder route because…well…honest…it just made sense at the time.
Now, only the protagonist is LGBTQ though I never made it clear which tribe he belongs to. The reader just knows that he isn’t straight…and that he’s in prison. However, for the letter, I didn’t want to mirror the protagonist’s predicament. See, one killed because he didn’t see any other options at that moment while the other one killed purely out of grieving rage. But I’m not going to spoil the story for you. I will say that I might expand the short story into another medium when I get the chance because I didn’t think it was going to be that fun. Truthfully, I was getting very annoyed by the writing because I couldn’t keep the balance for the longest time. I was half tempted to scrap the story entirely until I realize that it did have the potential to be a good story.
Glad I stuck with it, though. I’ve been told that the story was pretty good. Still dark but pretty good which was music to my ears. I was even told that I was stressing over nothing but (a) there was no real way to balance the light and dark when it comes down to murder (fair point) and (b) a conversation was able to be had so I saw that as a “Mission Accomplished”. I hope you all think the same way. And, with that, I hope you enjoy the story.
You can buy the book on Amazon. The link is here.
You can also learn about it on Goodreads. The link for it is here.
