Time to start another one.
At the conclusion of Deep Mist, I vowed that it would be the last one I wrote strictly for fun. From here on out I’m working a combination of personal pleasure and market potential. With that in mind, Deadly Light will be much longer (perhaps three times the length) of anything that could be written during National Novel Writing Month.
The new project will be composed of three parts, following a set of characters as they grow from children to adults in a small town with some terrible secrets.
Part one will be an adaptation of a novella I’ve drafted at least twice already. It’s called “The Spanking Machine,” based on the childhood belief that schools possessed disciplinary devices – spanking machines – for punishing bad kids. The characters begin the tale in the springtime of their fifth grade year.
Part two – “Childish Things” – follows the characters to high school. The foursome of friends grows apart only to be thrust back together when the darkness that first found them as children returns for them on the edge of adulthood.
Part three – “Homecoming” – reunites three for the funeral of the fourth and a final showdown with the deadly light.
And yeah, I’ve got some idea of what happens in the first part and pretty much no idea at all about the second and third. Even the first needs to be around three times the length of the last draft, which means it needs a big bunch of extra character development and subplots. But as I learned last month, sometimes not having a plan is a good thing.
With that in mind, I’ve begun with character sketching. And that was the activity for today, the official commencement of this big new step.
No comments:
Post a Comment