Writing
Background details.
I meant to work on chapters today, but I’m not really feeling it, I think I need to big picture plot in place before I perfect some of the smaller details.
Its good to be happy about incremental progress, the only problem with writing like this, is there's so many layers to this story I want to develop, culture, language, expressions, world building, that I trying to get the details right with the chapter seem pointless. Freestyling the plot is going to be a lot more fun than freestyling the chapter. I’m happy with the crevasse scene how it is, but I don’t have the full picture currently on how its fitting into the overall story. So much of the quality in stories like these, is the environment and characters play off eachother, so the outside environment reflects the internal feeling of the characters, and they kind of bounce off eachother in a weird way. I can get the general emotions to show, fear, rage, pain, are all easy, but surprising realization, horror at the events to come, stubborn fury, need the plot details before they start to feel right in the scene description.
Note to self, when I don’t feel like freestyling scenes, then freestyle the plot.
Looking up the past plot work, working out the remaining scenes. I hate to say chapters aren’t going to be finished by the end of the year, we can shoot for the plot, but I just started a SaaS, and a lot of my work and brainpower is going to be going into promoting that. (Not promoting anything on Substack, other platforms are way easier.)
There’s a couple story lines going on that I want to think about this week.
Specifically, the background between John and the evil Seer, who I’m calling Dutch for now, assuming names will change in the editing process. I like the idea of deciding on the name in the editing process. Names are very specific, and the type of person protrayed in the first impression has a lot to do with the name surprisingly. Once the plot is considered complete, I feel I know the characters at that point, and can decide on names for them.
John Halliday is a very generic western cowboy name, using over abstracted names is a good strategy. Dutch is the name of a bad character from a Louis L’Amour book.
What exactly is dutch’s story line? I need the entire backstory for the killings, the settling in Fairview under cover, and the attempting to kill John. Keeping a decent level of obscurity so nothing is well known until after the the killer is revealed, you can suspect the bad guy, but nothing should ever be certain.
The following events are known from the current events in the story:
Physical Killings, I originally said they have no reason, but I think there has to be some underlying reason that ties small details together.
Setting up in Fairview, and living there after the killings.
Background for being a seer
Finding out Halliday is in town, and guessing he is hunting a killer only based on his reputation for hunting people
Deciding to set an ambush for halliday
Ambushing him
Deciding to leave the ambush site as john is coming out.
Method/attempt to kill John when he makes it back to town.