You’re on a cross-country trip at night in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly you’re out of gas or you get a flat. Do you sit and wait for someone to come by? Do you get out and walk back to the last place you passed, or walk forward in the hope that there’s something close ahead?
And what do you do when you know there’s someone or something lurking around in the dark outside your car windows?
WHITEOUT was my fifth published novel. I put this one out through Amazon instead of pursuing a brick-and-mortar publisher because it’s a bit shorter than usual at only 60,000 words, and I thought it would be a harder sell to traditional publishing houses.
It’s a tense story that takes place within a span of a few hours, focusing on three people trapped in an empty mountain village one freezing winter night. Like most of my stories, it started with one image in my head – and I won’t tell you what that is here. I kept that image with me for over a year, trying to find the best way to build a story around it.
I think I succeeded.
Why keep it at only 60,000 words? Because that’s what it took to tell the tale and flesh out the characters. I’m known to be a tad wordy and descriptive in my writing, but I don’t believe in padding a story just for the sake of length. When I write I just relate the story the characters feed through me. Whether it ends up at 60,000 or 120,000 words is unimportant if the story is good and feels complete when you close the cover or switch off your reader..
Author Jay Gould 