No, this post isn't about hens, although raising chicks might be appropriate for the day after Mothers Day. This post is about building a story layer by layer, much like we build composite images in Photoshop.
You start with a blank page:
You choose a locale.
[OK, this is where imagination comes in, since blogger won't cooperate. Imagine the scene without the person shown below. Has anybody else been having computer problems lately? Mine keeps going kerflooey and now it won't upload images that I uploaded last night and that disappeared. Now it thinks that there's "an error on the page." What page?]
You insert your protagonist, a character you know well:
And, if it's a cozy, her cat.
You inject something menacing.
And then you begin to write:
See, wasn't that easy?
