At nine years old, Daisy meets Caleb Garcia, a boy who makes her believe in the possibility of friendship and happiness. But that same night, she stumbles upon her father dismembering a woman in their basement and becomes his unwilling apprentice, sworn to keep his monstrous secrets. When the victim’s ghost appears in Daisy’s room, she's bound to a haunting legacy. To endure, Daisy weaves a web of lies, clinging to the light of Caleb’s friendship while slipping deeper into the darkness of her father’s shadow.
More than two decades later, following the arrival of the mysterious letter, someone close to Daisy is brutally murdered in an all-too-familiar fashion. Forced to confront the truth about her family and herself, Daisy must decide whether to let the darkness consume her—or to fight for love and redemption, even if it means revealing everything she’s tried to bury.
S.L. Woeppel stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the book:
Remember To Clear Your Browsing History: The Research of Writing.
While writing my novel, The Butcher and The Liar, I ended up with YouTube and social media feeds full of instructional videos on how to dismember an animal carcass; a clear sign to the algorithms that I was likely a danger to society, or maybe just a writer.
These videos and sites I stalked for a time belonged mostly to butchers showcasing their craft while explaining each step of the process. They discussed each part of the cow, what kind of cut comes from which section of the body and why you would cut it one way or the other. They discussed everything, and I ate it up (pun intended).
I watched their movements, how they maneuvered their knives through the meat. I noted their clothing and tools, their hair restraints and their mannerisms. I tried to gleam vocabulary and snippets of advice I could use in my characters. I was surprised to see the variety of presentation styles. Some were very scientific, noting exact specifications, using measuring devises, cutting each time with replicated precision. Then there were others who approached it more artfully, without the use of precision tools, discussing the feel and color and density of the meat; knowledge which could only be gained through many years of experience.
I watched interviews with Temple Grandin and read excerpts of her books. I looked at pictures of old cattle auction houses and got guided on-line tours. While I’m sure a butcher will find inaccuracies in my presentation of the occupation, I spent a lot of time doing my best to get it as close to right as possible.
In The Butcher and The Liar, Daisy (our protagonist) learns the art of the trade from her father, a well-respected butcher in their small town. He also happens to kill people on this side, forcing Daisy to keep his grisly secrets and into the position of accomplice to his crimes. For these characters, the occupation of the butcher isn’t one that lingers in the background, a snippet here and there to let the reader know that the character is, in fact, employed. No, this occupation is the link between Daisy and her father. While the act of butchering is rarely the primary focus of the story - it’s always there, always pushing in from the background, her father’s legacy to her. Ever present – it seeps into her as any learned trait of one’s parent does. And as an adult, that same occupation is her father’s constant presence in her life, dictating her actions, filling up her identity. It was vastly important for me delve into as much of the grit of the trade as possible in order to present the characters with any level of authenticity.
As a child in small town Nebraska, I lived a few blocks from a cattle auction - the sounds, smells and organized chaos of which seeped into my subconscious. Much later, I moved to Chicago’s Fulton Market neighborhood while it was still a meatpacking district, through quickly evolving into something else. This story was inspired by the confluence of these settings and the thread that connects them – the business of cattle. So, while the book is complete fiction, it was important for me to present these settings more realistically. My own father passed away in 2022 and I went back to that hometown where he was buried, having not been there in many years. I stopped by that old cattle auction, closed seven years by then. It still stood, dilapidated, the catwalks cordoned off and falling apart, all right in the center of town. And I thought about how things change, how something with so much life would simply degrade into rubble, how things in the past, whether good or evil, fade. The notion was both sad and comforting at the same time. I took a few pictures without being able to get too close. They didn’t quite capture what I remembered, but looking at the image now, I still see the bustle of it, the colors and smells. I hear the sound of boots on a steel catwalk and see that magnificent Nebraska sunset that can light up the entire sky. Sometimes research is reconnecting with something from the past, something essential to the tone and sensory experience of the story. Research can be, and often is, as simple as that.
The big topic research pieces, like learning about a new occupation, are important, but so are the little details. Writing a novel is a constant back and forth with google, everything from looking for accurate spelling to ensuring dates are correctly referenced. In this story, Daisy is a solitary kid with generally absent parents, basically raised by 80’s and 90’s television. She tends to reference it a lot. As such, connecting timelines of when a show aired and at what point a particular reference would match up, was more of an ordeal than I would have anticipated. Then the question comes, if I’m off a bit, is that okay? Will anyone remember the precise year Rosanne premiered. I went with, yes. Someone always remembers these things.
I have a day job in finance, so it sticks out to me when fiction authors use language that isn’t particularly true to life – usually in a scene where they are just getting off a work phone call before returning to the real story. I don’t let it bother me too much, but it does stick out, takes me out of the story for just a moment.
Whether it’s something big that feels essential, or something little that’s also essential, it’s important to strive for that authenticity. Whether it’s in digging deep with a whole new occupation, checking the details, or even recalling our own memories for the minutiae that serves to transport the reader, you’ll know you’ve done your job when you’re your social media feeds and internet ads consist entirely of butchery training programs and ads for Omaha Steaks.
