A Brief History of Winter Kills

from Winter Kills by T.F. Torrey

Winter Kills has a rather interesting and extended history. It began as the most fleeting of ideas scratched into a notebook, about an anonymous vigilante who hopes that, by punishing bad guys outside the law, he can dissuade other bad guys from doing bad things. It wasn't much of an idea, and it languished as nothing more than a line in a notebook for twenty years.

In 2005, however, the idea resurfaced when I decided to write a serial for a website called KeepItComing.net. I proposed a series based the idea, with the vigilante character and a bad guy briefly sketched, and to my surprise it was accepted. The Crusader series was born. This, immediately, proved to be a ton of work. The series featured Victor Storm living in his world and chasing bad guys, but for the story to work I needed to know where Victor came from, and how he came to do what he was doing. Developing this backstory generated a lot of material that was interesting, but had no real place in the series.

Later in 2005, I found an outlet for some of that material when I entered the 3-day novel contest. I had the characters, I had the plot, so away I went. After three days of intense writing, I had Winter Kills. It had a solid, compact narrative and interesting characters. Unfortunately, it did not win the contest. By the end of 2005, too, KeepItComing.net had gone under, leaving all my work with no outlet.

Now, the Crusader series has evolved into a series of novels. Winter Kills is the first of these novels. The original series will become a novel called Summer Storms, and a book bridging the two, called Spring Rains, will tell how Victor went from simple vigilante to true crusader. From there, the future is wide open.