This blog post's going to be largely about writing, but before I go on to do that, a quick note on why there's no mention of boats. The second hand boat market remains steady. There's no real changes over my thoughts and plans on boats, basically what I said last time. There's no point in me going in to it much further until I get some idea of exactly what I'm dealing with and how much dosh I have to play with. Soooo... On to:
When I started writing this novella, the idea was to get all the description and geography out of the way early and then just get on with the action - basically a romp from start to finish. I rapidly realised that this made the rest of the story too two-dimensional so I went back and allowed myself to delve a little more deeply in to the characters. I added a few additional details to set each scene, but as the book is basically a chase with a twist, past ensuring that the reader understood a few details of the locale of each scene, there wasn't a huge lot to do so the whole thing chases along nicely with little in the way of distraction, and I like that.
I allowed myself to get a little hooked on the idea of exploring each character and I made a few changes to the over all structure of the book, changing the point of view of each chapter to tell the story from the perspective from several of the major players. In places, this puts the action at one step removed. Chapter four is done in this style and it was very difficult to write, but it was the only way to really introduce our hero's nemesis. To really understand him, you have to see the darkest recesses of his mind, and telling the chapter from his perspective allows me to freely explore his darker thoughts.
Then I hit something of a wall. Certain realities of the upcoming year came home to roost, as did my son. I wasn't happy about the way the novella was progressing - the idea of it being one long chase/ action scene had really appealed to me at the start and as I wrote the first three chapters, I felt that it was progressing nicely and Chapter four's exploration of the top bad-guy's character gave me a sense of achievement and I liked what I'd created, but with chapter five, things were moving back to the chase, fight and action scenes, and I became worried that the story would become flat and a little tedious.
For two weeks I struggled with it and finally just sat down and wrote Chapter five. As you'll have read in my last blog post, I was very pleased with the result and because of the success of the third dimension that developing the characters more fully had given me, I chose to write the chapter from the point of view of one of the book's minor characters. Chapter six moves us away from the action again and fills in more details in another of the main characters. It introduces the final battle-ground and starts to give some clues of exactly why the book is called The Art of Killing and exactly what that means to me, the author.
Chapter seven is back to Proctor and fills in some of the gaps in the story as seen so far from the perspectives of others and explains the reasons for some of the events in the story so far. You start to understand the broader picture and in some ways, the chapter hints that things may not be quite as they seem (did you seriously think they were?). Anyway, I shall say no more about that! Chapter seven is definitely firmly back in to romp mode and sees Proctor take on his most dangerous opponent yet, here's a short quote:
"A form pushed upright, silhouetted by flames. Proctor grabbed an extruded metal I-beam that had once been a lintel from amongst the debris between him and the remains of the building, lined it up with the black form and once again pushed to go as fast as he was able. Power surged through his muscles and was amplified and driven through his augmented bones and the layers of ceramalloy that encased him. He held the I-beam out like a lance and plunged in to the ruins of the building, slamming the end of the beam against the man's armour, hitting just under the base of his chest plate. He drove them through the shattered remains of the thin wall that separated the store room from the shop-front and pushed on until the form in black dropped over the mostly intact counter beyond."
Just a taster...
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