Greetings Again!
Before I begin documenting my progress as it develops, I feel it is important to write this entry as a “catch up” to what I have done so far. I also think it is important to give you an idea of where the idea and inspiration to write this book came from!
The idea for the book Dead Reckoning came from a conversation between a former classmate and myself after we had went and watched a movie. It was an action movie, and we discussed the various subplots, scenes and events that had occurred in the movie, and we talked about how the action movie genera had changed over the years.
After we had parted our ways and went home, my mind wandered back to our conversation. I began to roughly develop a character in my mind. I knew wanted him to be tough, but I wanted him to be different. I didn’t want the squeaky clean action hero of the past, he needed to have faults. I also didn’t want the “root for the bad guy” kind of character that Mel Gibson portrayed in the movie Payback. I wanted to create someone kind of in the middle of these two poles in the hope that the idea I generated would be different.
Once this main character developed, I knew he needed two things. A group of other characters to interact with, and something that made him dynamic. In other words something that made him bitter and angry, a real reason or reasons that would justify his feelings and attitude. Once I developed a “back story” that explained all that, some of the characters that I needed to create were determined for me.
The second key idea I had was a setting for this book. I had recently watched the movie “20 Days of Night” which is a horror flick about vampires going to Alaska during the time of year when it is dark 24 hours a day. I used to read a lot of Jack London, who loved writing about Alaska, and I always marvelled about the way that he could make the Alaskan wilderness come to life in his books, almost as if it were a character of its own. That is why I wanted to set my story in a small Alaskan bush town. A few minutes of research on the internet later I had a town name, and an approximate location.
The next step I took was to write down all my characters and all their “bios”. This was the first time I realized I had crossed over from the realm of simply imagining to the actually task of doing. I was really going to create this book. I sat down and first I figured out general titles for each character. I gave them names originally such as “Landlord” or “waitress at the diner”. From there I filled in their back story. Who they were and where they had come from. Finally, I sat down and thought up names for all the people, which I hoped seemed original yet fitting.
Next, I started to work in earnest on a story board for the book. I had already tentatively decided on the name Dead Reckoning. It seemed to sum up the theme of the book pretty well. I also had brain stormed how I wanted to introduce the character to the reader, which would hopefully give an early insight into the nature of his personality. I simply started out by writing a blurb about the information that I wanted to convey in each chapter. It only took a few minutes, and I had brainstormed up through about chapter 7. I also wrote a blurb about the general direction I wanted the book to go after chapter 7, but I was eager to begin writing. Hence I went back and named each chapter, and started actually writing the book with chapter 1.
The first two chapters were introductory in nature and were only about 3 pages. I had concerns that my intended novel would only be a short story because the length might be too short. I did some research on the internet and discovered that a type written double spaced page was roughly equal to one page in a book. Using this model, I went on to the third chapter which came out to around 22 pages.
After this, I stopped worrying too much about length. I decided the chapters would be written until the ideas I wanted to convey were in them, and they would be as long as they were. I blazed on and wrote the book out through chapter 7.
Chapter 7 is the first major action sequence of the book. I decided that this would be the point where I would stop, and get some folks to actually take a look at what I had been writing. I decided that I would pick a diverse group in terms of interest to read it. I would pick some hard core action fans. If figured that if I had no appeal amongst them then I was probably wasting my time. I also looked at some folks that leaned into the sci-fi realm and even a couple of females who liked to read romance books. I told each of them to be brutally honest with me, if the book was no good I didn’t want to continue to waste my time in the pursuit of writing it. After a few anxious nights of waiting, I started receiving feedback from the book. Some of it was criticism or questions, but on the whole the review was positive. I couldn’t believe it, people actually LIKED what I had written.
My next move was to edit the first 7 chapters based on the feedback I had recieved from my readers. I fixed the back stories of a couple of characters and worked on some wording issues to lessen some confusion. Once this task was complete I pushed my story board on out to chapter 13.
At this point I figured out that my book was basically going to work in 3 phases. The first 7 chapters comprised the first phase of the book where the characters were introduced along with the centeral conflict. Chapters 8 through 13 were the middle or “transitional” phase of the book, which would set the stage for the run up to the end. Therefore I have now story boarded up through chapter 13. I have currently written chapters 8,9, and 10. I have also written the first 3 pages of chapter 13. Once chapter 13 is written, I will go back and write chapters 11 and 12. These chapters are going to basically mirror images of each other, only they will be through the prospective of two separate characters.
This is where my progress is today, and I hope to update you with more of it soon. I look forward to your comments and suggetions,
L.D. Holtner
