Day 34

Spoiler Alert! May contain planning-stage plot/character details or other spoilers!

08 Oct 2015

Yes! Three day stretch!

Celebrating small victories, lol. Gets later by almost an hour every day, but…

So the second protagonist made his debut yesterday without me planning it. Pretty mysterious, gives a whole different spin on the world, setting, plot, intent… suddenly, it’s not a story about Cole finding herself and maybe escaping the tower, it’s a hero tale.

My inner feminist is worried about where this is going. I don’t want him to be a total pushover or a distraction, so he needs to have a strong personality and a valuable part to play, but at the same time, if he does everything for Cole, she loses agency and becomes an object that men control (well, there’s a woman at the top of it all, so there’s that…)

He’s turning out more fallible, less perfect and saviour-like than I had imagined already… a side effect of getting inside his head, I guess, and letting him be human. (maybe he could be an angel or something? solve that problem right off the bat!)

I’ve been switching perspectives with at least some consciousness of the effect - Cole exists in first person present, dreamers exist in first person present (until they expire), everyone else is in a third-person past-tense, more traditional storytelling mode.

Worried this might be jarring in effect, and it’s going to be a lot of work to change if I need to, but it feels right to me.

I wonder if there’s something I can do with Cole’s character/language here? As she reconciles with her past and inner self (Cadence), the language could shift? But since it’s going to be gradual, that would be hard to pull off and not have it just seem like an error.

As it is, her language shift from empirical, experience-based, in-the-moment short declaratives to expressiveness, emotion, imagination, even just vocabulary and sophistication of grammar that develops… that should be a little easier to script (although in first-person, that really limits descriptive options early on.)

Also, I’m sure there’s some emotional impact to introducing (yet another) set of players in the form of the street people (plus, they’re an integral plot point if we ever get back to the plot I laid out in the beginning… tbd), but they don’t lend themselves to the male protag’s voice, and there’s already a worrying amount of dangling threads (the whole cyber-punk implants reference in the care ward scene, for one!)

OK. Quick edits to the last two chapters, and then it’s time for another dream death… either supervisor, street or partier…

Let’s go with street, to establish the increasing violence and the male protag’s role outside of Cole’s partner. Then it can escalate to supervisor or partier to push Cole a little bit more…

Thursday

Start Time: 12:15 pm

Location: couch/living room

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