Working more on the Plot

Just working stuff out..

Theres a couple different scenes in this plot I haven’t quite worked out yet.

1. The main character (John) arrives in the town, hunting for a man, weird things start happening.
2. John gets a lead at the mining outfit out town and make a trip out there
3. On his way he finds a murdered attendant.
4. In the mining outfit, he starts a row from discovering the murder, leading to men questioning him, and some of the more wild men starting fights with him.
5. On his way back, he gets ambushed and shot, and falls into a crevasse and gets knocked out
6. Crevasse/ambush escape
7. Drags himself back into town, just one more peice of information is needed
8. Killer reveal
9. Final Battle

I think I have to start with building the killer character before I know the details around his crime, and information leading to figuring out the bounty. Once I have the killer, and his occupation, tendencies, etc, I can work backwards to find out the rest of the story.

To make something like this unique, I’ll introduce a new occupation that the reader doesn’t know understand, so they can associate the character with usefulness novelty, which I think helps them not think the killer is the guy I want it to be.

He has to seem useful to John, with a couple key little details that seem normal at the time of reading it, but when something is emphasized in the future, for the final reveal, they will be like wait, I know who it is as soon as John realizes.

He’s going to be the secret sadistic type, outwardly he’s very performatively enthusiastic. The town doesn’t look up to him as a person, but they do look up to the Seers’ as an occupation.

So I’ve been thinking about the occupation of the killer this past week, and I’ve cooked up something cool. In each town, there will be a guild of Seers. There are at least one in every outfit, and at least two competing guilds in each town. Seers are constantly monitoring and testing the ice around the towns, monitoring glacial movements, predicting and preventing anything from happening to the towns and the surrounding roads and settlements. Towns often see the Seer’s guild symbolically as a parental protector, and intellectual thought leader, because the glacial movements are so common, predicting them is crucial for any surviving town to thrive.

This settlement is in northern Alberta, so the meltwater and underground river movements aren’t as crazy as down south when Summer months can get near 32F. There are still glacial movements to worry about, and a town like Fairview typically has two Seer guilds. This killer is average at his job, seemingly intelligent, but a secondary to the other Guild in town.

I want to spend some more time building his secret life. These happen overtime, lies building on lies, and with the help of townspeople turning a blind eye, overtime he becomes more and more bold. John is following a trail of murders, and he really has no way of proving the killer is in Fairview, but he’s just using a process of elimination.

In his conversation with the killer, he will be mentioning his trip to the mining camp, where he is travelling on a different lead, and to seek more information. He will get multiple peices of information, all of which should be used on his route there. On the way back though, there will be one peice of information that the killer added in that diverts Johns path to the ambush site. John doesn’t have a way of knowing that he didn’t need to take the slight diversion, until a other clues lead him to suspect the Seer. Once he starts to suspect the Seer, he will realize that key peice of information from the killer was the reason he went a slightly different route, and was then ambushed.

The continued writing this week will be relating to the fighting inside the mining camp specifically. A little bit of a chronological jump from where I left off, but John starts in the bar assuming this is after visiting the sheriff.