"Sister, Butcher, Sister"

KD Aldyn lives everywhere and nowhere (home is where the Wi-Fi is). She most often wears black (and sometimes red) and sometimes dances like Elaine from Seinfeld.

Aldyn applied the Page 69 Test to Sister, Butcher, Sister,her debut, with the following results:

On page 69 of Sister, Butcher, Sister, you’ll be in the company of Kate, the eldest of three sisters, as she shows her little sister and nephew around the garden of the house she has recently purchased. What memories bubble beneath the surface?

From page 69:

Bo inspected the furry tan buds on the Michelia.

“Just wait until you see them in bloom, Bo. They are glorious.” Kate turned and placed her arm around Peggy’s shoulders. Do you remember little Peg?”

Yes, she remembered. The sweet perfume of those precious white flowers was not something easily forgotten. The two sisters stood back and watched Bo seeing this garden for the first time. Peggy stared at the deep green of the rhododendron leaves and the bright pink splashes of color painted by a few early blooms, …

The Page 69 Test might lead the reader into a false sense of security! I mean, we are talking about a female serial killer, guilty of the most heinous crimes.

Yet, it does show something of the dynamic between two of the sisters. It also shows the importance of the house which, in the writing, became almost a character itself, holding as it does the divergent memories of all three sisters.

* * *

I’d like to share with you something unusual that came to light after I wrote the manuscript. In real life, I spent much of my youth living with my grandparents and I loved their house.

The house that Kate purchases for her thirtieth birthday is modelled on my grandparents’ home. It was number 30.

After completing the manuscript, which turned out to be even more gruesome than I initially imagined, it occurred to me that people who knew me might think that something terrible had happened there (it had not), so I set about changing the house number in the book from 30 to 36.

Not quite so simple as it sounds but I got the job done.

Fast forward a year or so and I decided to take a trip down memory lane, only to discover that the land around my grandparents’ home had been subdivided and the house numbers reassigned.

You’ve probably guessed it …

The house that was number 30 is now number 36.

So, all my hard work in rewriting was to no avail. The house won.

I never did change it back.

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--Marshal Zeringue