SECOND DRAFTS: YOU GOTTA HATE 'EM
The process of writing second drafts is going to be my undoing. But with a good swift kick from my writers' group, I'm madly writing the second draft of "MUD." Yeah, crazy title, but when it's finished, y'all will understand. Don't have much of a pitch at this point, but the following gives a thumbnail sketch of the plot.
Battling alcoholism, terrifying nocturnal visits from the one they call The Mudder, and worst of all, a gnawing doubt of her brother's innocence, Charlie (Charlotte) vows to remain in his house for as long as it takes to prove he is not a family annihilator, a label applied to him at the Coroner's Inquest.
After Charlie discovers her twin brother Elliott swinging from the chandelier in his storm-darkened house, his wife and two small children smothered in their beds, she moves into the pre-Civil-War house, intent on proving Elliott was a victim, not a perpretator of these heinous crimes, this despite The Crime Lab's conclusion that every door, every window was securely locked from the inside the night of the crime.
Charlies's only allies are her neighbors, Rob who befriends her the night of the murders and Irene, an elderly woman two doors down who dies from a mysterious fall six weeks after Charlie moves in and semi-retired Detective Keenan who continues to investigate the Mudder's bizarre break-ins and begrudgingly agrees the two cases might be related. Fortified by her nightly bottle of wine, Charlie ignores growing evidence of her brother's instability in the year leading up to his death and pushes on despite a police department who considers her a drunk whack-job just like her brother when she seeks to convince them someone is getting into the house at night, hovering bedside to watch her sleep, waiting for an opportunity to finish the job.
