What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? Murder in the Marsh began as a long short story quite a few years ago, then morphed into a novel over time. I’d say I’ve had this piece in novel form for over five years (in different iterations.) I had a central plot (a cop shoots an attacker in the marsh and the body disappears) but I wanted more, so it took a while to create a parallel story (with jumps in time) to exist side by side with the main plot.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I write everywhere, at home, in my office at school, and especially in coffee shops.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I drink tea all day long and I always type on my laptop (my handwriting is terrible). Once I have a draft of something I will read it out loud at home and mark it up, then I retype it with the changes, and so on and so on. The same process for most things I write. Usually many drafts. As for times of day, it’s really when I can fit it in. It’s never a consistent schedule.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
Chapter One
Summer – 1981
Just outside of Boston, in the city of Revere, a three-mile, two-lane highway split the thousand acres of Rumney Marsh in two. The road, lined with tall cattails and switch grass, passed by a junkyard tucked into the wild weeds and on the north end, the tiny neighborhood of Oak Island. Sometimes the kids raced cars on the road in the summer, yelling into the marsh, but it was mostly a quiet, desolate stretch, only meant to get you to and from the beach as quickly as possible.
Eddie Devlin pulled his car over not far from Oak Island just as the sun was rising. He walked into the marsh alone, white high-cut sneakers, faded jeans, and a gray Celtics tee shirt he bought last spring after their fourteenth title — 1981 NBA Champs. He was tall and a little hunched, his curly brown hair, flecked with gray now since he turned forty a few years ago, was moist from the humidity.
The swamp in front of him ran off to Route One, cars coming and going in all four lanes. At his back, across more marshland, pockets of two-story buildings and flat roof restaurants lined the three-mile beach boulevard in the shadow of the Boston Skyline.
This place always reminded Eddie of a Creature Feature that the movie house used to run on Saturday afternoons on Broadway when he was a kid. It might have begun with a quiet nature scene, the white egrets in ankle-deep puddles feasting on a fly-filled sandbar, but before long the beast hiding beneath the muddy water would find his way to the surface, and even though you knew what was coming, it still scared the shit out of you.
Looking at the sway of yellow swamp grass, he imagined the bodies slipping along the mud floor beneath him— wise guys gone straight, gamblers, poor slobs who got too desperate or too stupid and ended up trunk cargo. They almost always got dumped into the marsh. Word around Revere Beach was that this place had enough body parts to make a football team of Frankenstein monsters. At one time Eddie thought that was funny, Frankenstein monsters playing football.
But, like all the other mornings he came here, he thought about the murder a year ago and the curse he had inherited. His mother used to say, “You’re always in the shit, Eddie.” She’d laugh and crush her cigarette into a big glass bowl of crooked dead butts.
She died three weeks after he got his patrolman stripes. “Someday you’ll be sorry,” she said on her deathbed, “chasing scum with a gun for a living.”
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Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? I wanted to set the stage for regret, which has a large presence in the novel. Who of us is haunted by the regrets we harbor? I’ve never had the experience my protagonist (Eddie Devlin) has had, but a know a little something about regret. I could feel his regret through these pages, even though it didn’t resemble my own, exactly.
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Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. I don’t have one specifically, but I can tell you that this story was re-written so many times it’d be hard to recognize it outside of the setting (Revere, Massachusetts in the 80’s) and the ending, which I had from the beginning when it was still a short story. Back then I felt like it cold be more of a horror story, which it still is in some ways. Like the tag line says, “some beasts are human.”
Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html