Friday I launched a Kickstarter for A Series of Small, Precise Cuts, a 13,000 word story (that’s novella length!) about a creepy killer, the FBI agent in pursuit, and also linocut printing. You can find the project here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gregstolze/a-series-of-small-precise-cuts.
If you’re familiar with my fiction library, this project works the same way. If I reach my funding goal and get the cash, I put the story up there in some common formats, under a Creative Commons license. Then anyone with internet access can enjoy it, in perpetuity.
This particular story (novella length!) is really about patience. So much media presents serial killers as these twisted geniuses, and the cops or detectives who follow them are equally brilliant (if only slightly less antisocial). But examining factual histories, neither seems correct. Serial killers aren’t all smart, but they have the patience of the obsessed. Similarly, police don’t break cases by leaps of intuition, but by grinding away at the problem, day by day, relentlessly, until it cracks.
The closest thing in my experience to that constant pressure is the process by which I make linocut art, so I thought it would be an interesting slow-burn story to show these superficially dissimilar processes (detection, printmaking, murder prep) moving in tandem… right up to the point where the print gets pulled, literally and metaphorically.
As of this writing, A Series of Small, Precise Cuts is 82% funded, with 12 days to go. I… honestly do not have a bunch of stretch goals and alternate reward tiers lined up to announce. It is only as it appears. Hopefully, that’s enough for both of us.
-G.
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