Black Holes and Resolutions

Well, I suppose I should inform the general readership of this site as to an important detail that I have neglected to mention for the last three months.  While I am aware that the general readership consists of basically friends of the Warden and people to whom I do not wish to associate myself with anymore, nonetheless I figured that I may as well make an announcement regarding the progress of the novel.  You see, I told myself that if I was incapable of finishing the first draft by new years eve I’d give up this foolish quest to drag myself out of poverty via literary accomplishment and accept the fact that I’ll be working horrible jobs that I hate till I finally die in my bathtub by drowning in two inches of water as a feeble crazy old man.  Sometime in November I realized I was going to actually hit my goal, by mid December I finished it.

What I did was power through the book like a man possessed.  When I reached the end I went back and read what I had.  Then I read it again and again.  I’ve read it 10 times in draft form and it was on New Year’s eve that I tinkered with the ending a little and came up with a tidy resolution that leaves questions unanswered but puts a nice bow around the main plot line.  I hadn’t posted these later chapters on the site because I knew as I was writing them, and even when I was writing the ones I DID post, that this draft version was going to be drastically different from the final edit.  Since no one comments on this site, well my articles, other than Jeen and the aforementioned people whom I am not interested in the opinions of, I didn’t think anyone would really notice or particularly care one way or another.

I left Adamus staring out a broken frame of glass that used to be a massive bay window at the top of the highest skyscraper uncertain about what will happen next but satisfied in his vengeance.  No.  I left Adamus standing on the train station to Hamburg to meet a friend he thought was long-dead.  No.  Adamus and Serra left the city and went to the ruins of the old world and rebuilt a small independent society knowing that in the end the peace they create will not last long.  No.  It could have been any of those three I suppose but it’s not.   The past three months have been a major re-tuning of the framework I created last year in the big push, because I realized something after I had finished.

There was definitely something missing from the narrative.  It seemed, to put it mildly, disingenuous; but I couldn’t place my finger on why exactly that was the case until a conversation with a friend of mine that broached the subject of the book’s progress.  He looked at me deadpan and said, “this character sounds like he has a lot in common with you.”  That’s when it dawned on me.  I had been writing this book as though the main character and I were the same person, and therefore his narrative is really my narrative.  How I would react to these situations, or at least how I’d like to think I’d react.  The problem with the finished draft was the narritive style, it was all wrong for the character and who he was.   So this re-tooling has been interesting because now I’m trying to say it like another person would.

So the main character’s a little more cowardly, a little more conflicted, and a little more confused about his role in everything.  Outside threats become more ominous, confrontations inspire more dread.  Serra’s different too, not just my idealized version of what loyalty should be, she’s more ambiguous now in her motives and plays off Adamus like a fearful element because she’s leading him, in his perspective, to do dangerous and unnecessary things.  He’s less connected.  Less in control.  In other words, more interesting because the situation in the newer version I’m working away at feels like it may have hit the right chord.

Another thing I wasn’t wholly satisfied with was my original idea to kind of have a kinda classic/progressive rock soundtrack to it.  Each chapter named after a song, each book named after an album.  Which made me try to capture the mood of each song in each chapter, giving the narration a manic and uneven feeling.  It’s not layers of plot building up to a final conflict, but many little things adding up to an abrupt end.  This version lacks that, chapters aren’t dictated by an invisible soundtrack.

So basically what I have right now is a skeleton I’m applying muscle and organs to in the hopes of zapping it like Frankenstien’s monster thus unleashing it upon the literary public to screams of horror and rage.   That’s how I roll, yo.

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